Duncan Jones

First time director Duncan Jones won’t thank anyone for saying it, but from the outside it looks like he’s led a charmed life. The son of David Bowie, he grew up around film sets, getting early instruction from the likes of the Scott brothers Tony and Ridley. He went to film school and after graduation moved smoothly into the world of advertising, cranking out a series of brilliant girl-on-girl ads for FCUK. Having learned the trade, he embarked on an insanely ambitious debut feature project, a low-budget independent sci-fi movie set on, and called, the Moon. He spoke exclusively to LWLies as the film celebrates its DVD and Blu-ray release today.

LWLies: Moon has attracted a lot of praise and your riffing on influences like Outland and Alien has gone down well with audiences.

Jones: We haven’t hidden it, we’ve worn our homages pretty much on our sleeve. In fact we’re doing a double feature of Outland and Moon at the Prince Charles cinema which should be good fun; I haven’t actually seen that film on a big screen before, I’ve only ever seen it on DVDs and tapes

LWLies: There were some parts of Moon where the use of lighting in the exterior shots have the starkness you get in Outland. Was that design-led or just a good way to make the effects work on a budget? The light obscures as much as it reveals a lot of the time.

Jones: There were two very different writing strategies for the film. There were the interiors of the moon base itself where we built a lot of the lighting practically, into the set, and that was really just for speed of shooting. We had a small lighting kit we would move around with, but on the whole most of the environmental lighting was done by the inbuilt practical lighting. The exteriors were very much inspired by the work of a photographer, a guy called Michael Light, who had put together a beautiful coffee table book called Full Moon in which he’d cleaned up and presented all of the 70mm Apollo mission lunar photography, and that was our visual bible for the exteriors.

LWLies: Was it important to you to get as close as possible to that very realistic look?

Jones: It was only important in that when you look at Michael Light’s book it does look so amazing and I felt like I hadn’t seen that version of the moon on film. Everything looked like it was shot in black and white – although it wasn’t – so if you had an astronaut standing with a piece of gold foil you’d get this amazing flash of bright colour in the middle of what looks like a completely monochromatic image. We were steering towards creating something that had that kind of contrast, where shadows would be absolutely black.

LWLies: You grew up in the ’70s, when astronauts and space missions filled kids’ imaginations.

Jones: Yeah, we grew up in the tail end of that. It started in the late ’60s, so our time was really the fall-off of interest in the whole lunar era. I mean, the whole reason the lunar missions stopped is because there was a lack of interest, which is kind of weird to consider.

LWLies: It indicates a stunning lack of imagination.

Jones: Yeah, absolutely, the fact that NASA couldn’t get people to be bothered so they started all these gimmicks like sending guys with a set of golf clubs and having them do doughnuts in the lunar buggies – all these things to get people interested, who were just, ‘Nnh, there’s nothing to see up there…’

LWLies: Was there any element of wish-fulfillment in the process of making the movie, that you could create some of that experience for yourself?

Jones: I’m not a lunar junkie, but to me the moon was a great location for a human story that I wanted to tell. The fact that this is a science-fiction film is almost secondary. I mean you could set Moon in Antarctica or in a desert or a mining facility out in some other austere wilderness and it would still work as a story. Really it was a about the character of Sam and what he goes through, so the location was sort of secondary in that respect. But it was important in that it’s a location that everyone can relate to: everyone has seen the moon, everyone has certain ideas about what the moon is but there’s always that mystery of what is actually up there, even though we may have been there before. It was such a long time ago now.

LWLies: In a way the film is a castaway story in a tradition that goes back to Robinson Crusoe and beyond – about what happens to the mind in that situation, about the fragility of the psyche…

Jones: Yes – it’s a lighthouse keeper really…

LWLies: Were you aware of working in that tradition of fiction when you first had the idea for Moon?

Jones: I don’t think too consciously. There were some more obvious reference points, like just being aware that Tom Hanks’ Cast Away had been made and that they’d been able to successfully make a whole feature film that just stayed on one character, and wondering what else we could do that was novel. But really it was much more personal than that. I had spent a long time on my own at periods of my life growing up, and it does have a profound effect on you, so I think there were certain personal experiences of loneliness and isolation that I thought would contribute to an interesting piece of drama. And then with the introduction this second character that Sam Rockwell plays you get all of a sudden a conflict and a really interesting character study, but also an interesting thought experiment in what it would be like to meet yourself. So there were quite a lot of very personal issues, and very human issues, that I wanted to explore.

LWLies: Do those feed only generally into the themes that underpin the film, or are there scenes or pieces of dialogue in there that make you think, ‘This really comes from my own experience’?

Jones: There’s a lot that’s personal in there. I’m not sure if I’m willing to point fingers at specific scenes, but the whole idea of long-distance relationships… I was going through a long distance relationship with my girlfriend at the time who was on the other side of the world and you do get an awful lot of paranoia, concern and stress when you’re thinking, ‘Why aren’t you picking up my calls?’ and, ‘You’re leaving me messages but I’m not able to talk to you on the phone’, all those things that you go through. And that’s very obviously talked about in the film in the way Sam’s dealing with his wife when he’s unable to talk to her directly and he can only do it through these video messages. It’s funny because I’ve gone and done it to myself again, and I now have a girlfriend, a wonderful girl that I love very much, and it’s again a long-distance relationship right now. The difference is that we use Skype all the time, so now I’m in almost constant contact to the point where we’re keeping each other awake! That’s so different, and technology has made a big change in that respect.

LWLies: You’re quite mistrustful of technology in the film, where technology can be bent to nefarious purposes and more importantly – and worse it seems – can simply be uncaring.

Jones: Yes, I suppose so. But I’m not a Luddite, I appreciate and am a beneficiary of my laptop and my iPhone and my new camera and all the bits of kits that I constantly have around me, so I’m certainly not trying to make a case for technology being an evil. I’m a big supporter of science and the progress of science.

LWLies: In fact, the Helium-3 in the movie is the real deal isn’t it?

Jones: Yeah, there was a book I read by a guy called Robert Zubrin who used to work – I think he still does work – as an advisor with NASA. This was many years before I made Moon. It’s called Entering Space and his ‘cause’ is to progress the colonisation of the Solar System by humanity; that’s what he’s pushing NASA to try and do. And he makes the argument that one of the first things you could do is go to the moon and set up a Helium-3 mining facility, Helium-3 being a potential fuel for fusion power stations, a technology which we haven’t perfected yet. But when we need Helium-3 it is in plentiful supply on the moon, a couple of hundred years worth of fuel is there that’s very difficult to acquire here on earth. It’s weird that the one fuel we really need is available in plentiful supply on our most local satellite and not available here on earth – I’m not a ‘mystic’ in any kind of way, but there is something interesting there.

LWLies: The industrial aspect of the film works wonderfully, I can see the influence of Alien and Dan O’Bannon’s ideas on that – that you may be in space but you’ve still got to go to work.

Jones: Yeah, it’s an industrial facility. It’s dusty and gritty, it’s big boots and dirt everywhere. Rust. Rust and coffee stains!

LWLies: Those influences stem from ’70s/early ’80s films but so also does the mistrust of ‘The Corporation’. You would have written Moon before the 2008 stock market crash – today it has a certain resonance.

Jones: Yeah, I guess we were kind of, er, ‘lucky’ on that! It was kind of harking back to that era of ’70s distrust and paranoia. Sam as a character has his own paranoia because of his wife but there’s also this other level of paranoia for the audience as to what’s going on. One of the things we thought when we’re planning the film was, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we made a film that could have been a lost gem from that era?’ and I guess that’s aesthetically and thematically how we approached it – ‘Let’s make a film that looks like maybe you just missed it…’

LWLies: That you discovered it on a video store’s ex-rental shelf?

Jones: Yeah, that some young Tarantino working down at the video store could have pulled out this gem for you from the ’70s or ’80s.

LWLies: And how close is the finished film to what you had in mind when you started?

Jones: Pretty different, I have to be honest. We made the film for just under $5m and the nature of making a science-fiction film with near enough 450 effects shots for that much money was that every day my job was batting around how we were going to do things we didn’t have enough time or money for. It was constantly negotiating with the special effects people, compromising on how we were going to shoot things, coming up with new ways to do things, even re-writing where necessary. So it ended up being a very organic process.

LWLies: So budget very much determined the outcome?

Jones: Budget and time, yes. We knew that upfront, and we’d designed the project to fit those limitations but when you actually get on the shoot there will always be things that happen that you’re not going to expect or that you can’t deal with the way you’d planned to – you have to be fast on your feet

LWLies: Your work in commercials must have set you up pretty well for those occurrences?

Jones: Absolutely – thank god I actually did wait to make this film until I’d built up a level of experience where I could deal with those unexpected eventualities. Throwing yourself straight out of film school into a feature film is one thing, but to go into something this technical would have been too much

LWLies: You had a good deal of independence as well.

Jones: A lot of independence. We raised abut half of our money independently upfront for the budget of the film, and Sony Worldwide came in and bought all of the English language territories upfront and because it was such a small investment for them they were more than willing to let us get on with it. I don’t think anyone would have known how to go about making a film with the money that we had, as ambitious as we planned to make it. Anything that they would have suggested would have automatically cost millions of dollars more so I think they just felt if you think you can do it, you get on with it. So we were just left to do it.

LWLies: You wrote the film with Sam Rockwell in mind, what made him so vital to the project?

Jones: I’ve been a massive fan of his…um, I’m embarrassed to say…since Charlie’s Angels. But obviously after I saw that I started looking for him in other things and I saw Lawn Dogs and Green Mile and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and the more you watch him the more you realise just how talented he is. And there’s this quirkiness that people kind of latch onto, and so he got put into this ‘character actor’ niche. But beyond that he’s this very empathetic and believable actor, and you really care about him, you really believe him when he performs. Watch Frost/Nixon and his performance is great, you really believe that this guy is wound up and angry and it’s more than just being a good actor – he’s got a natural charisma that allows him to pull that off.

LWLies: In a lot of his films he hasn’t been the lead, though in something like Jesse James he steals every scene he’s in. Moon comes along, and he’s the absolute focus of the movie. Did he have any concerns about that?

Jones: Oh yeah! When we had our first meeting to discuss working together I delivered him the Moon script and from that point it took him three months to decide whether he was going to do the film which was, you know, a fair amount of time for a lead role. And it was because he realised how much responsibility was going to be on his shoulders and just how technically challenging it was going to be. I think he talked to a lot to his actor friends and read it through with quite a few other people, and discussed it with his agent and all of the things you do when you’re an actor and you don’t want to end up in a really bad film! So he took time to work through whether this was the right move for him but I will be grateful to him for the rest of my life – that he was willing to take it on – because there are very few actors in the world who I believe could have pulled off this performance. I’m coming to the end of my campaigning for Moon, for the theatrical and the DVD and now the Blu-ray which I’ve been trying to push since Sundance; now I want to start pushing Sam Rockwell for an Oscar nomination because I really believe his performance merits that. That’s what I’m going to be doing for the next few months.

LWLies: So lots of time in LA shaking hands with academy members?

Jones: I’ve been told that that’s a lot of what’s involved, because the actor nomination particularly is decided on by a contingent of Academy voters who are older, who may not have heard of Sam Rockwell and probably haven’t seen Moon. So we’re going to do some screenings in New York and Los Angeles and here in London and make sure they see the ‘feature-packed’ Blu-ray.

LWLies: Is there anything that’s on this new Blu-ray release that you would have liked to get into the theatrical version that wasn’t there?

Jones: We shot to such a tight budget and in such a tight time frame there are some scenes that are not in the film that we shot, but I wouldn’t be comfortable with them being extras features because they were either not good enough or some of them seem good on the page and then when you shoot them they simply don’t work. For instance we had an epilogue scene where Sam Rockwell is back on earth and drops off a present for his daughter – without giving too much away. Actually that’s giving loads away, but that scene was so out of character with the rest of the film, that all takes place on the moon, that to have this one scene at the end back on earth just didn’t work. Which is why we ended up with the ending we did go with, which is more an audio cue as opposed to a visual one.

LWLies: And might that unused scene end up in the ‘Untitled Berlin Project’ [Jones’ next film is to be a science fiction movie set in a future Berlin]?

Jones: That scene won’t, but the character that Sam plays is going to come back and do a cameo. Hopefully. No, he will. I talked to him. And he said yes.