Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rciqpxdCc9Y
the jurogan experience well when you make films like elysium you know these dystopian films about potential futures it's got to have like sort of sparked these thoughts in your mind like the how many of these possibilities could we encounter in our lifetime well elysium was i mean elysium and district 9 are both kind of cut from the same cloth in the sense that i do think a lot of that had to do with growing up in south africa and just being affected by i'm very naturally interested in how society seemed to stratify and how wealth inequality you know again this is biological programming right like i think i think that people hang on to resources that they have as much as they can and so you end up with you end up with with billionaires um because it's it's an understandable thing right it makes total sense you're just hoarding food in your cave to look through the winter you know right right and keep your family safe so but but elysium really if if district 9 was the was the sort of racial part of growing up in south africa and just being very aware of the environment that i was in then elysium is the kind of wealth discrepancy part of it you know where south africa and brazil and india would be would be in first place when it comes to that and you just see very you see imagery that's extremely striking um in that country that leaves an indelible mark on you i think actually you know the inspiration for elysium entire in the the the whole thing actually for me was i was shooting commercials in um it was i was it was 2005 and i was i was i had started directing commercials and i was doing a commercial for nike and i was in uh san diego and the line producer that i was working with really wanted to go to tijuana and and i was like sick i didn't want to go and he's like we gotta get in the car and we gotta go to tijuana like now we gotta go down there and get get a beer or something and i was like i really don't want to do this and he's like let's just go it'll be fine so i i went we went through the the
border into mexico as the sun was going down and we got there and got onto you know we were on some street corner and i we bought beers and then we were walking around in tijuana with the beers and these federalists saw us doing it and we got arrested like kind of relatively violently where we were you know it was a shakedown for money obviously but it was like we we are cuffed and thrown in the back of a police car and then they started driving out of tijuana in the darkness and um and the producer that i was with kept putting like hundred dollar bills through the graded thing to the to the front seats and then once there was enough money that had gone through they just kind of opened the doors and let us out and we had to walk back to where the car was and how far was the walk i don't remember how long we were walking for it was it felt long it felt like 40 or like an hour maybe 40 minutes somewhere in there but the thing that was crazy about it was was i could see u.s blackhawks flying the border with like lights on them and and floodlights on the far on the u.s side and we were walking through basically favelas with dogs barking and like they had dropped us in places that like tourists from the us would never go so we were walking in basically what felt like a south african shanty town in mexico uh with feral animals and just like this but to see this country that you know is was was this the sort of global hyperpower that everyone from mexico was moving into um was trying to get into uh was incredibly striking like it was just crazy i mean it is crazy if you think about that that level of poverty up against the us border and then and i think elysium really was was the sort of subconscious part of it was south africa but the conscious part was that i at in that moment i was like i really want to find a way to turn that experience into
into visuals that represent these two worlds that live on one another's doorstep like this so you were as you were walking by you could see the planes that were flying over the u.s side not the planes it was border patrol there were black hawks there were oh helicopters they were yeah they were flying the border and um and just flood lights there were floodlights like along the along the fence along the perimeter like i guess they driven us kind of like you know east of of where we were it was weird it was it was it was very impactful though like it had a huge effect on me watch the entire episode for free only on spotify