Terri Tatchell seems to defy the notion that film is a tough business to break into, especially for female filmmakers.

The Vancouver screenwriter locked an Oscar nomination for adapted screenplay alongside writer/director and husband Neill Blomkamp for District 9 – her first feature film since graduating from Vancouver Film School in 2001.

‘Not in my wildest dreams did I think it could happen that quickly,’ she exclaims, brushing off disappointment over going home empty-handed. (The Oscar went to fellow first-timer Geoffrey Fletcher for Precious.)

‘When I was a little girl, instead of talking about boys, I was doing movie reviews. I’ve already won my trophy as far as I’m concerned,’ Tatchell says, still sounding genuinely surprised at the nomination.

The Oscars capped a winning year for the South Africa-shot District 9 – based on Blomkamp’s short Alive in Joburg – which went from obscurity to Oscar nominee six months after its premiere at San Diego’s Comic-Con. (The film was also up for best picture, editing and visual effects at the Academy Awards.)

Yet at the outset, Tatchell was not tapped to pen the screenplay, about ghettoized and refugee aliens in a futuristic South Africa with strong parallels to the system of apartheid.

The bubbly writer and South African-born Blomkamp, who met through mutual friends at Vancouver’s Rainmaker, informally began collaborating on scripts in 2006, when he was approached by Peter Jackson to direct a big-budget adaptation of the video game Halo. (Until then, Blomkamp had primarily worked on music videos and commercials.)

‘I’d been teaching Neill about screenwriting and structure, and so when he was hired to direct Halo, I would work with him secretly on the stories,’ recalls Tatchell, who also has a degree in psychology from Simon Fraser University.

When studio backing for Halo fell through, Jackson (The Lord of the Rings trilogy), partner Fran Walsh, and frequent collaborator Philippa Boyens (The Lovely Bones) offered to expand Blomkamp’s Alive in Joburg into a feature film screenplay.

The director asked if Tatchell could sit in on the story meetings.

‘After a month of meetings, they liked our ideas, and handed [District 9] off to us, saying that they would check our drafts, but that we should go ahead and write it,’ Tatchell says, adding that it took them a year to complete the script.

The pair had very different approaches to the story, the reason Tatchell believes the script worked so well.

‘Neill is global… he looks at the big picture, whereas I tend to look more at the individual in the story,’ she explains, citing the inclusion of the little alien boy in the story as an example. Tatchell felt that for her to write the script there needed to be something in it that she could relate to, though Blomkamp was dead set against adding the computer-generated Little C.J.

‘I fought tooth and nail to keep him. I needed that character to empathize with these creatures and see myself in them,’ she recalls.

The co-writing duo also had contrary perspectives on how the story should end, with Tatchell describing a need for a definitive conclusion for District 9.

‘For me it was like, ‘What’s the answer?’ I needed to come up with some sort of answer and it was really disheartening for a while [because] there is no answer,’ she says, pointing out that Blomkamp never meant for there to be any big statement about the movie, in that he didn’t want to take himself too seriously on his first feature.

‘My solution was that the person next to you… you [should] treat them with humanity,’ says Tatchell, who spent time in the township of Soweto and Johannesburg’s Apartheid Museum to develop an understanding of oppression and the complexities of South African politics.

District 9’s whirlwind success came as a surprise to the creators, who didn’t know if audiences were going to love or hate the film, as there were no test screenings prior its debut at Comic-Con, according to Tatchell. The sci-fi became a critical and box-office hit last summer, ringing in US$115 million in North America. It was also nominated for BAFTAs, People’s Choice and Golden Globe awards.

In spite of her success in sci-fi, Tatchell, who is currently working on a feature film adaptation of the fantasy short Terminus by Trevor Cawood, says she’s not sure if she’ll stay in the genre, expressing a passion for writing novels, especially children’s literature. (She became a mom just prior to attending Vancouver Film School.)

‘I would love to write a family film,’ she adds.