Neill Blomkamp embraced the challenge of Gran Turismo

Neill Blomkamp was inspired by the "everyday realism" of 'Gran Turismo'.

The 43-year-old director is helming the upcoming movie based on the PlayStation racing video game series and believes it is a different challenge to the kind of films he usually makes.

Speaking to Total Film magazine, Neill said: "The things that drew me to it were, I'm always doing science-fiction with a heavy amount of some kind of otherworldly, non-real worldbuilding.

"And so one of the things about ('Gran Turismo') was, this is a contemporary, real world, in a way that has this globetrotting, everyday realism about it that I felt, for some weird reason, massively creatively inspired by.

"So, like building real-world sets, and mimicking real-world things. Even just bringing the Tokyo headquarters of Nissan to life in Budapest. How do we create that? It's an interesting, weird challenge I wouldn't normally do."

The movie – which stars Archie Madekwe, David Harbour and Orlando Bloom – is inspired by the true story of 'Gran Turismo' player Jann Mardenborough, whose skills won a series of video game competitions to become an actual professional racing driver and Blomkamp hopes his picture pleases fans of the gaming franchise.

The 'District 9' filmmaker said: "I was trying to think of a way to connect this kid who plays 'Gran Turismo' in his parents' house who, in real life, ended up racing at Le Mans.

"I tried to bring some of the virtual 'Gran Turismo' simulated reality into reality, almost subjectively from his point of view. Like, this is how he remembers it, and how that overlays into the real world. That was one of the ideas that I wanted to inject into the script, and the way that we shoot it. It was like: how do we do that?"