Duncan Jones On Moon

The director tells us about getting his debut feature made, being interrogated by real astronauts and the influence of his father, David Bowie

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Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell in Moon

The remarkably down-to-earth Duncan Jones - formerly Zowie Bowie - makes his feature debut with Moon. In the film Sam Rockwell's lone astronaut mans a lunar base, supervising the mechanised harvesting of Helium-3, a fuel for nuclear fusion energy generation back on Earth. Working with a tiny budget and inspired by 1970s and 1980s films such as Silent Running, Alienand Outland, Jones turned to old-fashioned model miniatures techniques to create the barren satellite and relied on Sam Rockwell to populate it - with multiple versions of himself.

Film4: People don't usually talk about budgets, but you made Moon for $5 million? Or was it £5 million? I've read both.
Duncan Jones: No, it was $5 million.

F4: When someone has $250 million on a movie, considering what you've achieved on yours, what do they spend it all on?
DJ: Catering? That's what I'd do!

F4: Is CGI really that expensive?
DJ: It depends what you do with it. There are certain things that are very expensive and time-intensive. It's about the amount of detail and for CG in particular the amount of geometry and texturing and other elements that you need to build into a 3D model. So you saw the harvesters that were travelling across the lunar landscape [extracting Helium-3], those were model miniatures.

F4: So when you started thinking about the film, as an homage to that great era of science fiction that produced films like Silent Running, Alien and Outland, was it an obvious decision that you didn't even want to do CG?
DJ: It was synchronicity really. We investigated all of the options. Some of them were quite complicated. I'd done a commercial before, a Carling robots one, where we sort of had a hybrid of live-action bits and then CG built on to that. And that can look fantastic. We talked at one point about doing the lunar rover with model miniature wheels and then a CG body, but that was like: is that going to be beneficial, is that going to pay for itself, is that going to look good? And then we said, No, let's just build the whole model.

F4: CG still can't really get that physicality you get in Silent Running, Alien...
DJ: Absolutely. I've got to put my cards on the table here though. Yes we did a huge amount of model miniatures, but there's still work that we did on top of that. But it does have a unique look, that hybrid.

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