AN DIEGO Matt Damon found himself covered in fecal matter while filming Elysiums action scenes at the worlds second-largest garbage dump in Mexico City, but hes not complaining. The actor simply wanted to satisfy the in-your-face realism demanded by sci-fi auteur Neill Blomkamp.
I knew what I was signing up for, Damon told the audience Friday in Hall H at Comic-Con International, speaking of his role as a renegade badass in Blomkamps futuristic feature Elysium.
As in his Oscar-nominated 2009 feature debut District 9, Blomkamp envisioned Elysium as a jolting convergence of techno-fantasy with life on Earth as we know it.
This time, instead of using anti-extraterrestrial sentiment as a metaphor for racism, Blomkamp is throwing a subversive left hook at the one-percenters. After unspooling seven previously unseen minutes of harrowing Elysium footage Friday in which Damon dons a mecha suit to blast his way through a fascist hellscape while trying to dodge robots, spaceships and doomsday armaments, Blomkamp said the movie sprang from the idea of a space station that had taken the wealth of Earth and left this impoverished planet behind. The theme is about wealth discrepancy between rich and poor, but in a science fiction setting. That subtext is important and pretty apparent, but layered on top of that is a lot of explosions.
Set in 2159, Elysium shows two classes of people that unhappily co-exist: Wealthy ones live a life of luxury on the spotless space station called Elysium. Everybody else is stuck on a resource-depleted Earth. Damon plays tough guy Max who only has five days left to live unless he can trade his lethal talents for a chance to fight his way to the deluxe Elysium to save his life. District 9 star Sharlto Copley plays a shaggy villain while Jodie Foster portrays control freak Secretary Delacourt, charged with keeping Elysium free of earthling riff-raff.
Blomkamp snagged Damon for Elysium after showing him a trove of detailed background material.
There was this graphic novel that Neill had done on his computer with this entire world he had built, Damon said. Id never seen anything like it. Then there was a corresponding book of weaponry, and a whole other book of vehicles. Normally, you make an educated guess about if a movie is going to work, but for Elysium I had so much information, I decided theres no way Im going to let this one get away.
As seen in the preview footage, Earth is not a pretty place four decades hence. But the post-apocalyptic visuals are entirely contemporary and required no set dressing or CGI effects, because Blomkamp filmed in and around the slums of Mexico City.
The morning we drove into a garbage dump for the first day of photography, the sewage smell started coming up and I thought, I dont know if you can do this, Blomkamp recalled. But you just have to wear your respirator and do it.
Damon described the challenge of performing a chase scene while covered in toxic filth. The helicopter would kick up all this dust, which they told us was mostly fecal matter, he said. After the helicopter came through, at the end of the scene we were black with dust. Sharlto and I are looking at each other going, This is fecal matter. Then Neill came up and said, I promise you, the photography looks great.
Given that her character operated at a safe remove from the garbage dump sequences, Foster said she appreciated the way Blomkamps story operated on multiple levels. Its interesting to see somebody like Neill who can marry intellectual, big ideas with beautiful, primal, gut-wrenching explosions and death and all that other good stuff, she said.
Elysium opens March 1, 2013.
