Duncan Jones interview (Moon)

The man outstretching his arm to greet Filmstar doesn't look much like the famous father who sired him 38 years ago. And there's no clue in the name - Duncan Jones - either. The only genetic tip-off is in the artistic preoccupations of this warmly wired and fuzz-faced first-time director. David Bowie's musical space flights, from Space Oddity through Starman to Hello Spaceboy and his love affair with Berlin appears to have been passed down to his first-born. Jones (christened "Zowie Bowie" until he deedpolled himself the less eyeball-rolling "Duncan Jones") has just completed his first feature, a downbeat, '70s-influenced space opera and is prepping his second, a future Berlin-set dystopian drama in the vein of Blade Runner.

"I'm very much a product of my home environment," reflects Jones, sitting down with a mineral water, "and obviously my father was very interested in sci-fi. It was always there, growing up."

It's been a long time coming for Jones, the opportunity to direct his first feature film. An unabashed genre geek, he'd been working on what he calls "cheap music videos" and commercials before he put pen to paper to write Moon. But the movie's genesis came from another, unmade script he'd presented to actor Sam Rockwell, a long-time fave of Jones'. Rockwell wasn't much interested, but the pair hit it off and began shooting the breeze about the kind of films they dug. Discovering a mutual love of movies like Silent Running and Outland, pre-Star Wars SF with what Jones describes as "human stories in a future environment", the two began bouncing ideas for a joint project.

"Sam said he was interested in blue collar guys and you don't see many of those in science fiction anymore," Jones says. "You used to, in Alien and Outland and Silent Running, those kinds of films. So I said, give me some time and I can write something for you. That's how Moon started."

It's an unusual and potentially nerve-shredding move, to launch yourself into the perils of on-screen science fiction with your first, bitty-budget feature. There are too few examples of the indie sci-fi movie. Even a film like Danny Boyle's Sunshine came in at $50 million and the potential budget-guzzling realities of modern SF put off most first-timers. But because Jones's SF touchstones were from a quieter era of cinematic spacejinks, this wasn't going to be an sci-fi film where the focus was on pyrotechnics and eye-massaging future visuals. Jones wrote Moon with its eventual £5 million budget very much in mind.

"I was doing a few commercials that were special effects heavy so I became quite good at being aware of where the more costly effects were and how you can cut down on costs. So it sort of became a tool I could bring to a first feature film where I could bring some extra added value. We had an idea of how we could approach it and how we could keep it very contained. We had a shopping list of things we needed to achieve on this first feature. We had a rough idea of what budget we'd be able to get."

What Jones has achieved on such a meagre budget is worthy of a clap and a slap on the back. Moon is a tightly focused tale, set entirely onboard on a one-manned moonbase and making a virtue of its tiny moneybank origins. Sam Bell (Rockwell) is there to oversee the mining of Helium 3, a gas extracted from the moon's rock, which is seen as the solution to Earth's energy crisis. It's an SF-draped psychodrama, which pits one Sam Bell against another Sam Bell. One is sick and paranoid through three years worth of solitary mining, the other, strong, cynical and angry. They both answer to the same name and share the same memories, only one is nearing the end of his term on the base and the other is just beginning. The only other humans seen in Moon are glimpsed on monitors, days old recordings from Earth, and the only other character is GERTY, a silkily-voiced on-base computer, voiced by Kevin Spacey and with not a little 2001 HAL oil in its metal veins.

Sam Rockwell is Moon's major selling point. Always a rogueishly charismatic supporting bod, Rockwell seems to have found leading roles hard to come by these past few years. And then, like the proverbial bus, along comes Jones with two. At the same time. Given that this is Rockwell's two-man show, Jones says it was important that the actor felt some authorship over the part and so the two decamped to New York for seven days of rehearsal.

"We wrote it for Sam, but what makes him so great is his improvisational skills and the things he likes to throw in there," says Jones, "but because it's such a technical film, there are so many special effects where he had to be so disciplined and it was totally antithetical to the way he normally works. I think we just needed him to improv as much as he could during the rehearsals so we felt like he'd done everything he wanted to do. We could take the best of that, and we wrote those back into the script."

It does seem that made Jones unnecessarily hard for himself with his first film.

"Science fiction by its very nature is production cost heavy,” he says. “That's one of the things you try to avoid when you're doing a first feature film. But we had an idea of how we could approach it and how we could keep it very contained. We had a shopping list of things we needed to achieve on this first feature. We had a rough idea of what budget we'd be able to get. We knew obviously it was gonna be for Sam, so it had to appeal to him as an actor. We knew that there were certain special effects because Sam's playing multiple parts, so we knew how we could approach that effect and make it something we could do throughout the film but not be too expensive. There's the opportunity to use a body double for certain shots, there's standard split screen and there's then there's the more expensive, more complicated motion control split screens where we could have one character passing in front of the other. It was working out how we would spread those effects over the course of the film so that as an audience you don't feel as though you're being short changed."

One of Moon's visual charms is its defiantly lo-fi special effects. With its reliance on 70s-style model miniatures and its retro-futurist design ethic, it looks like an escapee from a long-gone era.

"Yeah," nods Jones enthusiastically. "With the exteriors we went for a real retro look and we had a bit of lunar landscape, Capricorn One-style, and we were pulling the models across with a bit of fishing line! After Jurassic Park came out and everyone started using CG all of a sudden, there was a specialisation in CGI and all those old geek talents in special effects went into computer graphics. But there was a high point for practical effects just before Jurassic Park came out and that is when Alien and Outland were coming out so there's not many of those guys left, those real craftsmen. We were able to get hold of a few of them, people like Bill Pearson, who built the Nostromo for Alien! As for the sets, we wanted it to be something that felt industrial and felt functional and felt as though it was a working mining facility. So although it's got this Kubrick vibe, this kind of white interior, we still wanted it to look like a working facility. It's dirty and the edges are worn. It's been around for a while. As has Sam."

Moon's themes of alienation and isolation came, Jones says, from very personal experiences, it appears.

"There were two things that were going on for me that I wanted to incorporate into the film," Jones reveals. "One was, when I was younger I was very frustrated, very angry and very unsure about where I fitted in the world and by the time I was writing Moon I was a helluva lot more comfortable with myself and what I was doing. That's one of those human experiences of wanting to talk to yourself when you were younger and sort of slap yourself a bit. That was partly what I wanted to get in there. The other thing was that I had this long distance relationship going on with a girl who was on the other side of the world and the whole paranoia thing that you go through, like why haven't they called me today. They're both very human elements and going back to those old 70s and 80s science fiction films, they're all about human beings and that's what we wanted to do.

"Moon is a homage to Silent Running, Outland and Alien," he continues. "From my perspective that's what it's related to, other people say 2001, Solaris... For me, those films are the inspiration for the guys who we're inspired by!"

Moon shot for 33 days in January and February 2008, with Jones nabbing the same Shepperton Studios space as his beloved Alien ("our set was slightly bigger," he grins). Jones grimaces at the memories of a shoot tortured by lack of time, money and luck.

"The producer and I went right to the edge as far as the financing was concerned. The Writers Strike was going on, and we had this really small pocket of time at Shepperton Studios where, if we were going to make the film, we had to be shooting then. We started building when we didn't have all our finances in place, which is obviously nuts, but we felt like we had to do it. It's something I'd ever do again!"

How stressful did it get, working 18-hour days for two months? Did he ever find himself getting snappy on set?

"No," he smiles, and for once it's easy to believe. "I wasn't snapping at people, I was pretty good that way. But the weight of responsibility on us was really incredible. We'd reached a certain budget level, which was about two a half million pounds so for that you have to be bonded, which is like an insurance policy, and when you're bonded doing a film all of a sudden all of the power goes out of your hands and into the hands of the bond and they can basically decide you have to use these people in your crew and if you're fucking up we can pull you out. When you're working on such an edge as far as what you're able to achieve with a budget, it was very stressful."

Moon's lifesaver was in the unlikely shape of Mrs Sting, Trudie Styler. An old friend of Jones's, she's credited as producer on Moon, a credit she also earned for Lock, Stock 10 years ago.

Suddenly, Jones had access to Styler's immense contacts book, and top of their wish list was Kevin Spacey whom Jones wanted to lend his larynx for the base's computer, GERTY. But the British-based Spacey was reluctant to sign on initially, unconvinced Jones would be able to pull off the movie on such a meagre budget.

"He read it, liked it a lot, loved the fact that Sam Rockwell was doing it, but was absolutely unconvinced we could pull it off for the budget. So he very sensibly said, this is a voice-over, I don't need to be involved during the shoot, why don't you go and make the film, show it to me after it's done, make sure it doesn't look like it's been made out of shoeboxes and he would get involved at that point. So we went ahead with no guarantee that he'd be involved and basically whoever was available on set at the time and had their hands free would be reading GERTY to poor Sam so he was getting all these different versions. But we showed Kevin Spacey the film and he loved it and was knocked out by Sam's performance and so agreed to do it."

You'd think that by milking every last drop of a £5 million any director would be loathed to throw stuff away in the editing process. For all of Moon's meditative pace and relaxed 70s stylings, Jones says there was a lot which he was ruthless in cutting out to get it to its 97 minute running time. It's not something that, unlike some protective directors, he seems unduly upset by.

"It's easy for me," he shrugs. "I know a lot of people have problems with it, and I totally understand where they're coming from. It's that phrase you always hear about killing your babies, and it's absolutely true. But I got a good lesson in that in commercials land because you do spend a lot of time setting something up and really loving that shot and that effect and then it doesn't actually do the job it's supposed to do within the context. Sometimes you absolutely have to get rid of it. You've gotta be quite harsh about it."

Since its premier at this year's Sundance, Moon has been wowing critics. It may not have the commercial muscle power to make much of a dent in the moviegoing top ten, but when Jones says, "I want people who love movies to say, 'That was pretty damn good, I wonder what those guys are going to do next,' it's worked. So, Duncan Jones, what **are** you going to do next?

"Well," he says, excitedly, "It's my spiritual sequel to Blade Runner. I'm such a big fan of Blade Runner. It's certainly my favourite science fiction film but also one of my favourite films. There are films that have tried to capture the Blade Runner feel and I've just never been satisfied that anyone's really gotten anywhere near the completeness and believability of that world. Everything else seems too stylised and not quite right and Blade Runner felt legitimate, it felt like a real place. My concept artist Gavin Rothery and I were talking for years about what it is about that film that does that, and I think we know what it is and that's one of the reasons why I really want to make Mute, the next film, which is set in a future Berlin. Storywise, it's totally different than Blade Runner but I really believe that we know how to capture something that will make it feel like a sibling of Blade Runner."

And where are things at the moment with this Berlin-set Blade Runner brother?

Jones smiles. "Stuart, my producer, has just got back from Cannes, so we're starting to explore how we're gonna finance it cos it is gonna be a step up in budget a little bit. With any luck, February or March next year we'll be in Berlin and shooting over there."

And what about Sam Rockwell? Will he be involved?

"Oh yeah," says Jones with a glint in his eye. "I think I can sort him out a cameo!"