Chappie is the third feature film from South African-born director Neill Blomkamp, and the second to be co-written with his wife Terri Tatchell. Blomkamp, who got his start in special effects, is known for his obsessively detailed futuristic visuals, but Tatchell is more focused on the characters. She thinks Chappie, about a police robot who becomes self-aware and childlike, benefits from her perspective as a mother and her research into developmental psychology. She also thinks the film is less about hardware and more about magic and wonder.
“Neill is the science fiction guy and I am more the fairy tale person,” Tatchell says in Episode 140 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “Neill and I disagree on this horribly, but to me it’s an R-rated fairy tale. It’s an inanimate object that’s being given a soul.”
Those sorts of creative differences among husband and wife can easily lead to an unhappy home, something the pair discovered while working together on District 9 . Afterward they swore off collaboration, and Blomkamp worked solo on his next film, Elysium . But when Tatchell heard the pitch for Chappie, she knew she wanted in. So in order to maintain a happy marriage, the pair agreed on a strict separation between home life and work.
“We didn’t ever talk face-to-face about the script,” Tatchell says. “We’d only email back and forth.”
That script, which is full of robots, gangs, and gun battles, might not seem like your average fairy tale, but for Tatchell the story harkens back to a time before Disney.
“The R-rated side of it dates back to the original fairy tales, where you get to be brutal and violent and terrifying with it,” she says.
Tatchell describes herself as relentlessly positive, and says she’s optimistic that sentient robots will be friendly toward humanity, but she also feels that darker themes often make for a more dramatic story. The darker side of Chappie was influenced by one of her favorite films, The Iron Giant , in which a friendly, childlike robot is hunted by a fearful military.
“I like the darkness,” she says. “There is darkness in life and there is light in life, and I think the darkness, the tragedy in life, makes the bright moments all the brighter.”
Listen to our complete interview with Terri Tatchell in Episode 140 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above), and check out some highlights from the discussion below.
Terri Tatchell on robots:
“We were just in Berlin, and there are lap-dancing robots in Berlin. There are three lap-dancing robots, and so of course I had to search them out and see, and I don’t know about the AI, but what robots are capable of is a lot more advanced than I thought it was. And we’re just seeing what’s out there, so who knows what’s being done behind closed doors. … I know the flavor of the month is to be dreading this, and thinking that it’s terrifying, but I tend to run around with rose-colored glasses on, and if they are that smart—I mean, the whole thing with Chappie to me is how humane he is, despite the fact that he isn’t human, and I would like to believe that if there is this superior intelligence, that behaving humanely would be a more intelligent way to be.”
Terri Tatchell on rappers Ninja and Yo-Landi:
“We wrote [the characters] as them, right from the get-go. When Neill first pitched me the idea, it was Ninja and Yo-Landi. So it’s always been them. … The first time I met Ninja and Yo-Landi was when they were playing in Vancouver at the Commodore, and we watched the show, and then we went backstage to meet them, and I’d heard that they had ‘D9′ [for District 9] tattooed in their lips, and I saw that, yeah, they did have D9 in their lips. But someone told me since then that if you get a tattoo in your lip, it’s not forever, that the tissue in your lip pushes the ink out—or whatever a tattoo is—so whether it’s still there or not I’m not sure. But Yo-Landi did get a ‘Chappie’ tattoo on her arm before the film was greenlit, and that added a little bit of pressure.”
Terri Tatchell on Neill Blomkamp:
“He’s an avid reader of anything science-based. He’s one of those guys that you can ask him about anything, and he knows the latest stats and the latest research. My daughter and I play a game of trying to find topics that we can throw at him where he won’t know something about the latest facts on it, and it’s tough. We’ll go to some female places to try to come up with some topics, and that’s about the only place we can win. … I think we got him with ovulation, something about ovulation.”
Terri Tatchell on swearing in her movies:
“Both my grandmas went to [District 9]. One of my grandmas is kind of deaf, so it was OK, she didn’t really know, but the other grandma was like, ‘Why did you have to have all that swearing in it?’ I was like, ‘That was Sharlto, grandma. He [improvised] all the swear words.’ But there’s a lot of swearing in this film too, and also Ninja and Yo-Landi decorated their own lair, and Ninja drew penises everywhere. So there’s penises all over their lair, and I’m just waiting for—my other grandma’s passed away, but the one that’s kind of deaf, she’s going to see those penises, so I’m not looking forward to that conversation at all.”
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