District 9 director Neill Blomkamp still keen on Halo movie - but only if given control
"I would really like to do that film."
District 9 director Neill Blomkamp is still keen on making a movie based on Halo - but only if given control over it.
Blomkamp, currently out promoting his new movie Elysium, had signed on to direct a Halo movie with Peter Jackson, of The Lord of the Rings fame, producing, but the project collapsed in late 2007 and the film rights returned to Microsoft. Blomkamp went on to make sci-fi movie District 9 instead.
It had been thought that the experience of working on the Halo movie for months before its collapse had put Blomkamp off the idea forever. But he told IGN he'd love to make it - under certain circumstances.
"I still really love the world and the universe and the mythology of Halo," he said. "If I was given control, I would really like to do that film.
"But that's the problem. When something pre-exists, there's this idea of my own interpretation versus 150 other people involved with the film's interpretation of the same intellectual property. Then the entire filmgoing audience has their interpretation."
He added: "You can really live up to or fail in their eyes. That part isn't appealing to me, but the original pieces are appealing."
The on-again off-again Halo movie has been thought dead for some time now, although Microsoft executives have stressed it's something they'd like to happen one day.
It's had an interesting history, too. Hollywood scribe (and occasional Ninja Theory collaborator) Alex Garland wrote the first script, which was pitched to studios by couriers dressed as Master Chief.
Halo IP owner Microsoft supposedly asked for unreasonable terms from Hollywood before 20th Century Fox and Universal Studios partnered to produce the film and Garland's script was reworked.
Since then, Steven Spielberg has been said to have expressed interest in making Master Chief a movie star, but so far nothing's come of it.
We'll have to make do, then, with Halo: Landfall, a series of short Halo films directed by Blomkamp to promote Halo 3. They're collected in the video below.
