Why did peter jackson choose south africa for the setting of District 9?

District 9 was based on a South African story that was set in Johannesburg. The story was written by the South African director of the movie.

The movie is a direct reference to District Six, an actual area during the apartheid in South Africa where blacks and whites were segregated, much like the aliens and humans in the movie.

Like buckyboy said, it is a reference to District Six, a designated whites-only area during the apartheid.

You might find this very interesting

I loved that movie, but Moon was better.

Without knowing the background of the movie or who wrote it, I would have said that it was due to South Africa’s experience with apartheid.

I’m glad somebody brought this movie up. I HATED the movie! I was disappointed and bored. I felt, although it was a move of a science fiction genre, it really was an allegory, not a science fiction.

Allegory a representation of an abstract or spiritual meaning through concrete or material forms; figurative treatment of one subject under the guise of another.-why not science fiction? An allegory can be in any genre.

I have only seen the TV ads but the landscape seems to be integral to the story.

I think the selection of Johannesburg gave them two plot values:

The connection between the treatment of the Prawns and the treatment of the blacks in South Africa is an easy one to make.

An African location made it easier the have the third force in the story, the Nigerian gangs, which added an unpredictability of power and an additional refuge for the hero.

District Nine is based on a shorter (15 minutes) movie by the same (South African) director called “Alive in Joburg,” concerning the reaction to and mistreatment of a group of, well, homeless and also listless aliens who had take up residence, along with their ship.

It, like D9, is documentary-esque, though “Alive” was actually crafted by taking real people of various ethnic and racial backgrounds in South Africa and asking them their thoughts on Apartheid, other ethnicitys, etc.

Those responses were then carefully edited around so that the lead questions were “what do you think of these extraterrestrials” rather than “how do you feel about the Afrikaners?” District Nine is just a larger expansion upon these earlier themes of remixed-documentary-alien-racism.

As such, all of the vitrol, hate, and strangeness in D9 is, in some sense, directly based on the tense feelings of various groups in South Africa around the handling of race, class, etc.

Allegory a representation of an abstract or spiritual meaning through concrete or material forms; figurative treatment of one subject under the guise of another.-why not science fiction? An allegory can be in any genre.

maybe he doesn’t think it’s a bad allegory maybe he doesn’t like it in spite of the fact that it’s an allegory and the fact that it is or isn’t sci-fi has nothing to do with it. Just because I ‘get it’ doesn’t mean I like it.

District 9 is based on the area designated to a certain group of people during the Apartheid called ‘District 6’. So, I’m guessing that they were trying to make some correlation between the humans and Aliens as apposed to different races? Clever idea, I thought.