Trouble is brewing at the sci-fi convention, where three members of the Sith
and two Stormtroopers surround a Dalek with menacing intent. Watching with
detached bemusement, Duncan Jones stands out in the sea of colourfully clad
characters from fantasy films, games and comics. He is almost the only
person wearing jeans and a T-shirt. But he has a ready quip when asked which
superhero he is representing. He looks down at his sandalled feet: “I’ve
come as Birkenstalker.”
The 38-year-old British film-maker and self-confessed sci-fi geek is at the
MCM Expo, in London’s Docklands, to promote his first feature, a low-budget,
indie sci-fi film called Moon. And he’s a little nervous. “I’ve never been
to one of these events before,” he confides. “I knew they had them in
America and Japan, but I didn’t realise how popular they were.” Indeed they
are; there are more than 20,000 people here, most of them under 25, and
virtually every one of them dressed up to represent their favourite
character. Outside, on the river terrace, they are acting out scenes. None
is yet mimicking Sam Rockwell, the lonely astronaut from Moon, though his
endearingly retro robot friend, Gerty, is on display for geeks to inspect.
Made on a modest £2.5m budget, raised from a handful of British investors,
Moon is a tense drama about a solitary spaceman slowly unravelling as he
approaches the end of a three-year solo stint on a moon base. Sam Bell
(Rockwell) is a high-tech janitor in the near future, supervising an
automated mining operation in which the moon’s rich resources of Helium-3 —
a real source of clean energy found on the moon — are being exploited to
solve the earth’s energy crisis. Aside from the pre-programmed responses of
his talking robot (voiced by Kevin Spacey), Sam’s sole contact with the
outside world comes via recorded instructions from his bosses and
time-delayed video messages from his faraway wife and young child. But
things are not what they seem, and, after a moon-rover accident, the
increasingly mentally fragile Sam ends up having to confront himself,
metaphorically and literally.
The film, which garnered acclaim at the Sundance and Tribeca festivals, and
has just won the Michael Powell award for best British debut at Edinburgh,
is in the spirit of the sci-fi classics Jones grew up on: films like Silent
Running, Outland, Blade Runner and 2001: A Space Odyssey, whose talking
computer, Hal, bears more than a passing resemblance to Moon’s Gerty. Film
geeks will find plenty of subtle (and not so subtle) references to amuse
them. Moon is a deliberate backlash against today’s high-budget sci-fi
extravaganzas, strewn with special effects, though it does have 450
low-budget effects — most notably involving Rockwell acting with “himself”.
It’s also a nod back to the kind of sci-fi Jones was brought up on, when he
was an avid reader of 2000AD, Dan Dare in The Eagle and John Wyndham’s Day
of the Triffids. And with its existential angst, and its depiction of the
loneliness of the long-distance space traveller, it’s almost a mirror image
of The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which David Bowie played the reverse of
Rockwell — an alien stranded on earth while searching for the natural
resources (water, in that film) that will save his own planet, and desperate
to return home to his family. It’s a comparison Jones is loath to
acknowledge, saying he barely has any memory of Nic Roeg’s film, which he
saw only as a child.
This may be because Bowie is his father. Jones has spent his entire life
trying to avoid comparisons. So far, he has succeeded, by steering
scrupulously clear of music or any form of celebrity activity. It also helps
that he is no longer called Zowie Bowie, the name he was given by his
parents back in those zany early1970s. After shortening it to Joe, at the
age of 19 he reverted to his passport name, Duncan Jones.
The son of Bowie and his then wife Angie, Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones grew up
in Bromley, Kent. Although his parents did not officially divorce until he
was nine, he says he cannot remember a time when they were together, and he
stopped seeing his mother completely when he was 13. He explains
cryptically: “Let’s just say that even someone as open-minded, and with the
life experience I had had as a child, felt it was not an appropriate place
to be brought up.” Unusually, his father was given custody, and Zowie/Duncan
spent his formative years travelling the world, either on tour or flitting
between homes in Berlin, New York and Vevey, near Geneva. “I can remember
being pushed around on top of flight cases backstage at gigs, having races
with the roadies,” he recalls fondly.
From an early age, he decided he was not going to follow his father into a
musical career. “My dad tried to support an interest in me learning a
musical instrument. When I was seven or eight, we went through the whole
orchestra from saxophone to guitar to drums to piano, but nothing took. I
had absolutely no interest.” He remembers the excruciating experience of his
father playing him his latest album at home. “It was always very awkward.
I’d sit there... and he’d sit there. Massively embarrassing.”
It was not so much the fear of fame as the fear of failure by association that
drove him into a different career. “It is hard to be judged on your merits
if you do anything creative where you are depending on public acknowledgment
of what you do,” he reasons, sensibly. “I would say, from my limited
experience of hearing about what other kids of people who are successful go
through, like Julian Lennon, that there are not that many clear examples of
kids doing a good job of putting themselves out there and coming up with the
goods.” He racks his brain for exceptions. “I think Stella McCartney has
done a pretty good job. And Michael Douglas seems to have managed it...”
There is also the fact that Jones is not really a performer by nature. At 13,
he was sent to the austere Scottish boarding school Gordonstoun, where he
was, by his own admission, a solitary child, more interested in sport and
computer games than in academia. “I did really badly there. But it wasn’t
because I wasn’t able, it was because I felt really uncomfortable and didn’t
enjoy it.” Eventually, he was expelled. “I was asked to leave for sleeping
through my A-levels, I was so stressed out by it all.” With no
qualifications, he moved to London “to find myself” and spent six months
working at Jim Henson’s Creature Shop in Camden Town, thanks to contacts
made on the set of Labyrinth, in which his father starred. He then returned
to Switzerland to counsel children with learning disabilities at a new
school set up by one of his former teachers. On the teacher’s advice, he
took American college entrance exams and, in stark contrast to his
experiences at school, won an academic and soccer scholarship. Three years
later, he graduated with a philosophy degree from the College of Wooster, in
rural Ohio — “deep in Amish country, surrounded by horse-drawn buggies and
guys with long beards” — writing a thesis with the Ballard-like title of
“How to kill your computer friend: An investigation of the mind/ body
problem and how it relates to the hypothetical creation of a thinking
machine”. He then followed his girlfriend to Nashville to do a PhD at
Vanderbilt University, but when the romance ended, he decided instead to
enrol at the London International Film School. “I had always liked film, and
it was something I knew I wanted to do. But I wasn’t really ready or sure
how to go about it,” he says. “And I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to get
involved in anything where people know about me and know what I do. It took
a long time to make that decision.”
Managing to maintain his anonymity throughout film school, he graduated as a
director and went to work on the television series of The Hunger, hosted by
Bowie, with Tony Scott, who advised him to follow in his own footsteps by
building up a career in commercials before branching out into feature films.
Following a short stint at MTV, Jones hooked up with the advertising guru
Trevor Beattie to direct ads for French Connection, Carling, Heinz ketchup
and McCain oven chips — the last of these involving an elaborate,
tabloid-fuelled “time capsule” hoax with Valerie Singleton. He then wrote
and directed a 26-minute short called Whistle, about a hit man who
assassinates his targets by remote control, using a computer in his home in
the Swiss Alps.
Moon, which was scripted by Nathan Parker, son of the director Alan Parker,
was inspired by Jones’s reading of Entering Space, a book by a former Nasa
scientist, Robert Zubrin, that examines the prospects of colonising space
and floats the idea of solving the earth’s energy crisis by exploiting the
moon’s rich resources of Helium-3, a real isotope that could provide
clean-burning fuel for fusion power. Jones, who was recently invited to
screen the film for Nasa scientists at the Johnson Space Center, in Houston,
Texas, firmly believes it is not science fiction, but science fact.
“Absolutely 100 per cent,” he declares, with the zeal of a scientist. “And
it will happen within the next 10 or 20 years. That’s what scientists are
working on all over the world. Anyone who’s talking about a moon programme
is doing it because their intention is to start mining Helium-3, which is a
rare isotope on earth, but is quite plentiful there. And that’s the only
financially viable reason to go to the moon.”
Earlier this year, Jones was thrilled to be given a tour of Nasa, seeing
equipment that has actually been to the moon, and watching a shuttle launch
from Mission Control. He was even more excited to learn, at the
post-screening Q&A session, that his vision of a near-future moon base
was realistic enough to pass muster with the scientists. They were
particularly impressed with the sturdy look of his concrete-bunker-like moon
base — a far cry from the spindly contraptions used in today’s space
exploration — which Jones had envisaged being made from the moon’s natural
resources. “A woman put her hand up and said she was actually working at
Nasa on something called ‘Mooncrete’, which was made out of what you can
find on the moon.”
Back at the sci-fi convention, Jones and his visual-effects director, Gavin
Rothery, are telling their crowd of geeks and freaks how they shot Moon in
33 days at Shepperton Studios during the writers’ strike early last year,
and how the ultra-realistic scenes of mining vehicles traversing the moon’s
crater-ridden surface were shot with models on a set that was essentially “a
piece of dirt with models on it”.
Nobody asks about David Bowie. They may not even know the connection. Indeed,
friends of Jones, who shares a flat in Chelsea with “a bunch of people”, say
you could know him for a long time before having a clue who his father is.
How has he maintained his anonymity for so long? “Because this image of me
being nerdy and geeky is who I really am,” he laughs. “I am not cool. I
don’t really drink, I’ve never taken drugs, I don’t get into fights and I
don’t have celebrity friends.” Not that he’s entirely averse to the idea.
“If Oliver Reed was around, I’d have a drink with him,” he enthuses. “He was
a force of nature. We need another actor like that.”
Moon opens in the UK on July 17
