WHEN IS A VIDEO-GAME ADAPTATION NOT A VIDEO-GAME ADAPTATION? WHEN IT’S REAL-LIFE RACING DRAMA GRAN TURISMO, FOR WHICH DIRECTOR NEILL BLOMKAMP PUTS HIS PEDAL TO THE METAL. ON YOUR MARKS…

WORDS AL HORNER

In racing, they call it switching gears. “I know, I know,” smiles Neill Blomkamp, welcoming Empire into his edit suite on a sunny morning in Los Angeles. “Everything I’ve done ’til now has been a bit sci-fi, a bit twisted. And this is evidently not that.” It’s mid-March, and the filmmaker is deep in post-production on Gran Turismo, his first big studio film in eight years (2021 micro-budget horror Demonic was a lockdown indie endeavour).

Wait a second: that Neill Blomkamp? The architect of techno-anarchic dystopian dramas like District 9 and Elysium, Neill Blomkamp? The chap behind Chappie, for crying out loud, Neill Blomkamp? What is that crafter of futurist worlds, whose movies haven’t had a lot of great things to say about capitalism, doing making a movie based on a PlayStation racing-game franchise — one without a storyline, without characters, and without an obvious reason to exist beyond Sony brand synergy?

The director had the same response when the project was first pitched to him. “I thought, ‘Why would I do something that’s part of a giant corporate machine?’ Then I read the script and all that cynicism washed away. This film is really not what you’d expect,” he says, describing a video-game adaptation that’s apparently not a video-game adaptation at all.

Empire meets Blomkamp in a place with its own supply of historic vehicles — LA’s Sony studio lot. On a lawn outside, there is the original Ghostbusters car, yards away from Breaking Bad’s bullet-hole-ridden camper van. And Blomkamp is now contributing some extra wheels to Sony history.

Gran Turismo tells the true-life tale of Jann Mardenborough — aCardiff car enthusiast who went from playing the driving simulator in his bedroom to racing professionally via a competition called the GT Academy. “The script gave me this feeling of movies I remember seeing as a kid, where I would leave the cinema in Johannesburg feeling so pumped up — films like The Karate Kid,” Blomkamp reveals. “My natural tendency is to go dark because I view humanity in a very negative way. But when I read this, I was struck by how I’d really like to participate in making films with an uplifting message. Gran Turismo fulfils that ambition.”