9 Bizarre Early Drafts That Nearly Destroyed Your Favourite Films

8. The Aliens In District 9 Were Supposed To Look Like Homeless People

District 9 €“ a promise of greatness that Neill Blomkamp has yet to live up to. Nevertheless, the film itself is something of a masterpiece, a relatively low-budget sci-fi that exploded into the mainstream in 2009, capturing the imagination of film fans around the world. Easily the most significant (and difficult) part of the film to get right is the depiction of the stranded aliens who inhabit Johannesburg. These aliens are simultaneously perceived as threatening and yet deeply sympathetic, and much of the success of their depiction has to do with their imposing physicality yet deep, soulful eyes. All of this is to say that changing the appearance of the aliens probably would have been disastrous. In The Art Of District 9 (a 2010 book that contains huge amounts of concept art from the making of the film) we see that in an earlier draft, the aliens are depicted as homeless in a much more human sense. For a start, they were supposed to be puppets, not CGI (despite the CGI being one of the most praised aspects of the film). The homeless aliens were supposed to wear everything from straw hats to lampshades to tea towels, decked out in t-shirts, plaid shirts and dungarees. You might think this is a relatively small change, but shifting the tone from threatening to humorous likely would have had disastrous results on the overall film, especially given the serious nature of the subject matter.