Another South African director makes headlines in Hollywood...

WIKUS van der Merwe is an unlikely name for a character in a Hollywood blockbuster.

But — played by South African actor Sharlto Copley — he is the main character in the film District9, which was shot in Soweto and the Johannesburg inner city, and bagged the No1 spot in the US box-office rankings this weekend.

District 9, made on a budget of 30-million (R245-million), made $37-million (R301-million) in its opening weekend — thrashing GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra, which cost $175-million (R1.4-billion) to make, and earned $22.5-million (R179-million) during its opening weekend.

Now District 9 director Neil Blomkamp — who is a protege of Lord of the Rings trilogy mastermind Peter Jackson — has beco me one of the few South African filmmakers to hit the Hollywood big league.

Copley, who is also a film director and Blomkamp’s friend, seems set for a career in Hollywood.

He told Vanity Fair magazine that he loved playing roles in which he has a “bit of room to improvise on the character” .

“Just seeing the response to the film really turns your reality upside down. And seeing the kind of support that a studio, Sony for example, is giving … it’s quite awe-inspiring ,” he said.

District 9 production company Sony Pictures conducted a clever outdoor marketing campaign for the film, erecting posters instructing citizens to report all “non- humans”. Signs on bus benches said that the seats were for “humans only”.

The company’s head of distribution, Rory Bruer, said this resulted from the sci-fi film’s apartheid-inspired premise, adding that “people were curious what the film was about”.

“Everybody was saying, ‘What is this?’ … It really piqued their interest and drove them to try to discover what’s going on,” he said.

The sci-fi flick opens in local cinemas next week.

It deals with humans, in South Africa, waiting anxiously for an alien attack.

The aliens are, in fact, refugees who survived their home planet’s destruction and have been dumped in District 9 as earth nations argue about what to do with them.

Tension erupts as Copley’s character, a law-enforcement officer, contracts a mysterious virus that begins changing his DNA.