How Halo film's failure inspired District 9 director's career

The cancellation of the Halo motion picture turned out to be one of the luckiest moments in District 9 director Neill Blomkamp's professional career, he said in a new interview with The Los Angeles Times.

Blomkamp was hired by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson and partner Fran Walsh to make the Halo movie. When it fell apart in 2006, the pair agreed to produce and help find funding for District 9, the Oscar-nominated movie that would help bring Blomkamp to prominence.

"The luck is the fact that Peter and Fran let me make [District 9] out of the ruins that were Halo," Blomkamp said. "What happened out of that was learning to trust my ideas. If Halo had come out and succeeded or failed, I wouldn't have learned that."

Blomkamp was recently quoted saying he is still interested in directing a Halo film, but only if he was given creative control.

"But that's the problem," he said in April. "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. You can really live up to or fail in their eyes. That part isn't appealing to me, but the original pieces are appealing."

Blomkamp's latest film, Elysium, releases in theaters this Friday starring Matt Damon an Jodie Foster.

Though a Halo movie may not be on the immediate horizon, an all-new Halo TV series produced by Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List director Steven Spielberg is on the way.