Duncan Jones
LARRY BUSACCA / GETTY IMAGES
Duncan Jones uses emoticons. You might have expected the eldest child of David Bowie to have inherited some of that glacial, androgynous cool, but Jones’ default setting seems to be an excited grin – if he’s fashioning a smile with a keyboard, his face is probably similarly adorned.
He’s also keen to share that enthusiasm. In October, Jones took the time to chat to a group of aspiring Melbourne filmmakers via Skype. This may seem unusual for the director of two critically acclaimed films, but Jones knows what it is like to start a climb from the lowest rung.
“I love what I do and I like talking to other people about filmmaking, and particularly about starting up as a filmmaker,” he says, explaining that it took eight years from entering film school to the time he made his first feature.
“It was very frustrating – some people would slam the door in your face and some were very giving of their time and their experience. The person who was most giving to me was (director and Monty Python alumnus) Terry Gilliam, so I’ve always thought that if people look at my movies the way I look at Mr Gilliam’s, I’d be just as responsive and willing to be as out there as he is.”
Jones is 40, but you’d do well to guess it. He most commonly wears a spiky beard under spikier hair over an array of T-shirts. His accent is still English, despite an itinerant childhood that saw him follow his father’s trail of stardust around Europe and across the Atlantic.
At the age of 11, Jones was on the set of The Hunger, a brooding, Tony Scott-directed vampire film that had Bowie locking fangs with Catherine Deneuve; he still recalls being “freaked out” by his father in old-age make-up.
Almost two decades later, Scott was working on a television series of the same name. Jones attended the shoot upon his father’s suggestion, and ended up with two things: Scott as a mentor, and a decision to abandon a PhD in favour of film school, thereby ensuring that Harrison Ford would remain cinema’s pre-eminent Dr Jones.
A polite request to ask questions about his father earns an even more polite reply: “Sure, but I might not answer.” But Jones is happy to discuss the role Bowie played in nurturing his interests – while he might have been absent much of the time, his support was not.
“He was probably more aware that I was likely to be interested in film than I was. He didn’t push me into anything, but I think he was always aware that that was where my heart lies,” Jones says.
There are charming stories of father and son making movies using Star Wars and Smurfs figurines. When this is brought up, Jones giggles a little, then fishes around for a cute photograph of him installed under a table, surrounded by action figures, concentration etched into his young brow as he makes one-stop pictures with an eight-millimetre camera.
Inevitably, it was the movies that tied these plot threads into a metaphorical bow at the 2009 premiere of Jones’ first feature, Moon. As far as Jones knew, his father was unable to attend – so when Bowie showed up unannounced, it was an event worthy of celluloid. The delight remains fresh.
“It was fantastic,” Jones says. “I was really not sure if he was going to be able to make it. That Sundance screening was definitely the biggest thing that had ever happened to me in my life, and to have him there and to be able to just show him that I had found a passion for something – I really felt like I had found what I wanted to do with my life.”
Seldom do personal epiphanies receive acclaim as widespread as Moon. It snagged awards, including a BAFTA and a Hugo; journalists swiftly connected the extraterrestrial predilections of father and son; and Jones was suddenly in the running for projects with profiles in the stratosphere, including the Christopher Nolan-led reboot of Superman.
Jones didn’t get that gig, but he remains proud of his debut – so much so that even in the era of the director’s cut, with endless new versions of sci-fi staples such as Blade Runner and Star Wars, he rules out taking another trip to Moon.
“No. Absolutely not,” he says. “Everyone that was involved was pushing as hard as they could with the resources that we had. Anything that we would go back and do would undermine just how much of ourselves we gave to make that movie.”
Moon was made with a meagre $5 million budget, meaning that most of its props had to be sold to help with costs. There’s a robot in the film, in the grand tradition of 2001’s HAL 9000 – and Jones has spent the last little while trying to hunt him down: “I don’t know where he is! GERTY was one of the things that was sold, and we never found out where. There’s a story in that, the lost robot!”
Part of the film’s appeal – and the reason it looks and feels timeless – is its practical design philosophy, a preference for models over digital trickery. Moon’s science fiction also has a healthy dose of fact, inspired by Robert Zubrin’s Entering Space, a book Jones describes as a “very practical guide to space exploration”. Even NASA was sufficiently intrigued to request a screening.
Jones’ next film was strictly high concept – a twisty thriller called Source Code, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Monaghan. Like Moon, too much discussion will give away the plot, especially the conclusion – but it’s a finale that Jones feels strongly enough about to explain via Twitter and at public screenings.
The Joneses: Director Duncan Jones with his father, musician David Bowie.
JIM SPELLMAN / WIREIMAGE / GETTYIMAGES
“I fought for Source Code not to have a Hollywood ending. And then for a few people to think that that was kind of a happy Hollywood ending, I was like, ‘No it’s not! You completely misunderstand the point’,” he says.
“I get a little bit defensive on those kind of things. You hope that your film will stand up in its own right and that you won’t need to talk about it, but I would rather have people discuss a film after they watch it instead of completely forgetting about it as they leave the theatre.”
His films prompt debate because they are thematically rich – among their shared premises are individuals rebelling against authority, and the exploitations that big business or big government wreak on ordinary people. Jones breaks in as this point is made, his voice as dry as a Martian canal. “In science fiction those things never happen,” he intones.
There is laughter.
Jones denies being aware of the global appetite for revolution when he was making either film – indeed, when he isn’t providing inadvertent social commentary, he spends much of his time in other worlds.
He says “big gamer” is an accurate description, went on record to express his jealousy that Sam Raimi would be directing a film version of the role-playing game World of Warcraft, and has most recently sunk hour upon countless hour into another computer role-playing game, Skyrim. Does this cut into his scriptwriting time?
“I’m sure my girlfriend would say it does, but I think it’s a good balance. I really enjoy films and books and games where you’re thrown into entirely realised and different worlds,” Jones says.
“No matter how I experience it, being shown just how complete those worlds can be in those different media gives me an excitement and an enthusiasm to do it myself. I’ll bounce back and forth between writing and watching and playing games, and my excitement for other people’s work is what helps galvanise my enthusiasm for my own.”
Jones has some experience making games, and is well aware of the medium’s ability to deliver a narrative – and to earn as much as a theatrical release. Nevertheless, he thinks his chosen medium was the correct one.
“I worked in the (game) industry for about a year and a half, and I had an education in the layers of bureaucracy and how games get made,” Jones says.
“It’s difficult to be a film auteur these days, but I think you have a better chance of doing that than of being a games auteur.” After a moment he adds: “Also, I can’t program to save my life.”
Speaking of fully realised worlds, has the post-9/11 resurgence of high-concept fantasy and science fiction (consider the success of the Lord of the Rings films, as well as successful reboots of decades-old properties such as Star Trek and potentially risky ventures such as Inception) primed audiences to accept fare that may have been thought to be too complicated in the past? Jones certainly thinks so.
“As a writer and/or director you have a certain responsibility to give the audience enough information for them to wrap their head around an idea without giving them a lecture,” he says.
“The real danger in science fiction is that you end up explaining things instead of telling a story. With both Moon and Source Code we were playing in that grey area. I think we’ve gotten the balance right in those films – I’ll definitely be pushing the boundary again on my new film so we’ll see how it goes.”
Ah, the new film! Jones is being terribly secretive about this. He says this new project is the film he’s always wanted to make. This isn’t his long-gestating project with a silent protagonist, called Mute; that’s been turned into a graphic novel. (When pressed for more details, Jones does a passable impression of the title.)
Nor will it have an extra dimension: “Nothing has convinced me that 3D is worth the limitations that it imposes upon you as a filmmaker. I think it takes you a step out of the movie instead of putting you into it.” What is certain, however, is that Jones will be moving away from the claustrophobic feel that characterised his first two features.
“Those films worked as steps in a career to making a certain type of movie, but I don’t want to make tight, limited-environment films for the rest of my life. If you have a big idea and a small budget, keeping the environment small lets you keep the production values on screen,” he says.
“(The new film) is a script I’ve written; it’s a story I’ve come up with. It’s got some big science-fiction ideas and it’s got a richly realised science-fiction world. And it looks like we’re going to have the budget to do it the way I want to.”
This is probably a good time to tell you Jones’ Skype status: “Film #3 is a doozy!” And it doesn’t take an emoticon to picture Jones perched over a keyboard, grinning as he writes.
» Props from Moon are on display at the Star Voyager: Exploring Space on Screen exhibition at ACMI, Federation Square, 10am-6pm until January 29.
www.acmi.net.au/starvoyager.asp
» And no, GERTY isn’t in Melbourne. We checked.