Comic-Con Day 1: 'District 9' Special Screening, New Pics & Peter Jackson Q&A

The secret screening of producer Peter Jackson's upcoming District 9 took place Thursday night, and while we've been sworn to secrecy as far as posting any sort of pseudo review, we can tell you a few things about it. It went over like gangbusters for the Comic-Con crowd-a mix of Internet fanboy press like Harry Knowles and Devin Faraci as well as a lot of lucky fanboys (and girls). If you're a hardcore fan of Alien Nation, Aliens, The Fly, E.T., Transformers (if that movie was an indie and good), Dead Alive or Star Wars...well, mix 'em all in a blender, hit puree, and the result might be something like this gritty little allegorical action horror sci-fi suspense film. Below are a few new Comic-Con stills from the film. What's the story? Watch the trailer...that's about all we can give away...

After the screening (which took place only a few blocks away from the masses of humanity standing in line for the cast-intro'd screenings of Twilight), a few privileged media sat down with Mr. Jackson for a comfy q&a. The Academy Award winner provided more details on District 9, as well as a few nuggets on his other high-profile projects as the director of The Lovely Bones, and the producer of a small project you might have heard of called The Hobbit.

First off, Jackson said District 9 was born out of a failed attempt to create a big-screen version of the video game Halo, which involved eventual District 9 director Neil Blomkamp. When that project didn't get off the ground, Blomkamp presented his own original idea, an aliens trapped on earth (er, Johannesburg) story that in some ways reflected Blomkamp's own South African upbringing and the country's struggles with apartheid.

The end result--while mirroring a few real-world conflicts--gets the job done first as a visceral, graphic, hard-R, action-packed roller coaster. Jackson revealed the final budget as $30 million, but trust us, it looks a lot more expensive than that.

Jackson also gave us an update on The Hobbit, saying they're currently about three weeks away from turning in a complete script to the studio. Jackson and his co-writers (Phillipa Boyens, Fran Walsh and Hobbit director Guillermo del Toro) have mused about a few casting ideas (which he wouldn't divulge). No, they haven't approached anyone. The script's not done yet, no budget has been approved yet, so no actors have been approached ...yet...

We also saw a 4+ minute clip of The Lovely Bones - Jackson's movie version of Alice Sebold's book about a murdered girl whose spirit returns to watch over her family and the man who killed her. He admitted that this was "more like the Heavenly Creatures experience" than his big budget LOTR trilogy, and the video he showed - a combination of fantastical dream-like sequences of the afterlife, alongside strong acting from Saoirse Ronan as the girl and Stanley Tucci as her murderer - suggest a smaller-scale character piece akin to the earlier project.

The final few clips he shared actually had nothing to do with his big screen projects at all, but were short films he'd created mostly for museums, all having in one way or another to do with World War I planes. Apparently, Jackson's hobby is creating real, lifesize, working planes from scratch, and then using the aircraft to test out new cameras. That's right. When he's not working, he's building airplanes, and shooting dogfights for fun. In case you want to check out some (smaller) versions for sale, see Jackson's own wingnutwings.com...who knew?