nicole_powers

If the new film Moon puts you in mind of David Bowie's lyrical, space-is-a-lonely-place ballad, "Space Oddity," that's probably not a total coincidence - it was directed by his 38 year-old son, Duncan Jones, who formerly went under the much less conservative name, Zowie Bowie. After years of directing commercials and trying to move on from what he describes as a youth marked by isolation and periods of self-discovery, Jones has emerged with a new identity as a respected indie filmmaker.

His feature debut, Moon, which wowed crowds at Sundance, is a haunting, poetic, science-fiction drama about a solitary astronaut who operates a mining station on the far side of the moon, roughly ten years in the future. Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is days away from completing a three-year rotation and returning to his wife and child when bizarre happenings begin to occur on the lunar station, including power glitches and strange behavior on the part of his robot companion, Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey), culminating in the shocking arrival of another human being at the base - himself.

SuicideGirls recently sat down with Duncan Jones to talk about Moon and the possibilities of space travel. Please note that this interview contains massive, unavoidable spoilers for Moon.

Ryan Stewart: Are you planning to buy a ticket on a Virgin Galactic flight when they become available?

Duncan Jones: One of the producers on the film is a guy called Trevor Beattie, who used to be my boss back in the UK when I worked in advertising. He is one of the first passengers scheduled to be on a Virgin Galactic flight. He's had a space thing his whole life. He's one of those guys who pays to sit in a MiG. I'm not a good flyer as it is! [laughs] I feel like I've got so much I want to do in my life that I don't want to put myself in such a precarious situation. It must be an amazing experience, though, and I can't wait for Trevor to tell me all about it. I'll be a rapt audience. Maybe when I'm in my mid-90s, and there's not a lot left to do, I might take a shot at it.

RS: Who do you think is keeping moon exploration alive as a goal these days? Is it these space hobbyists?

DJ: Yeah, anyone who is willing to pay $200,000 a ticket for four minutes of weightlessness -- that's an interesting market. There are people willing to pay that much for that experience, and that means entrepreneurs like Richard Branson will pave the way to make that experience happen. But I think that is limited, though. It may be incremental. Maybe from these little flights we will eventually start to get space hotels, things like that, but personally I think there's a huge difference between what Virgin Galactic could do and setting up a space hotel. I can't remember what altitudes Virgin Galactic reaches, but to do that is much easier than actually reaching low-Earth orbit, or actually lifting the cargo into low-Earth orbit that you'd need to set up a space hotel or something. I don't think private enterprise is going to bridge that gap. I think it's going to need to be either a national effort or an international effort, to really start colonizing space. I read a book by a guy named Robert Zubrin called Entering Space, and the idea of setting up a moon base for Helium-3 mining was a good argument, from this non-fiction book, as to why you would set up a base. It would pay for itself, it's a profitable enterprise. As soon as you get a profit motive in there, things happen. They find ways to make it happen.

RS: I understand you screened the film recently for some NASA folks?

DJ: Yeah, we did a screening at the NASA Space Center in Houston and the beauty of it was that it wasn't a PR stunt, we didn't organize it. There's a professor at the Space Center who does a lecture series and he asked me if I wanted to show the film. He'd been reading online that we'd done this film about Helium-3 mining and that's something that people at NASA are working on. We went down there and we did the screening, it was a fantastic experience, and we did a Q&A afterward. They asked me why the base looked so sturdy, like a bunker, and not like the kind of stuff they are designing that they are going to transport with them. I said "Well, in the future I assume you won't want to continue carrying everything with you, you'll want to use the resources on the moon to build things" and a woman in the audience raised her hand and said, "I'm actually working on something called Mooncrete, which is concrete that mixes lunar regolith and ice water from the moon's polar caps." So, it was great - they basically started talking amongst each other and I just sat back and watched them. It was truly an amazing experience.

RS: It's interesting that you chose to make your protagonist, Sam Bell, a very blue-collar guy instead of a scientist or traditional astronaut.

DJ: That definitely came out of the conversations that Sam Rockwell and I had when we first met up. We met for another project that didn't happen, because it was a little too ambitious for a first film. I desperately wanted to work with him, and meeting him in person only reinforced that because he was such a nice guy and he didn't have a big ego. He wasn't a prima donna, just someone that I could relate to very well. We're of a similar age and we have similar interests and a similar background, and I thought that I needed to do my first film with him, even if this film isn't right - the one I was pitching him at the time - even if that wasn't right, I knew I needed to put that aside and just come up with something entirely new, in order to work with him. And that's pretty much what happened, I started writing a project for Sam Rockwell.

So, we started talking about the kind of science-fiction films that we both liked and the kind of roles that he liked to play. We talked about films like Outlander, Silent Running, and Ridley Scott's Alien, which seemed to concentrate on these blue-collar people, working within these really harsh, desolate, alien science-fiction environments. The story became: how does this human being survive or maintain their humanity, or how is that humanity chipped away at by these settings? That became the story we wanted to tell, and that's why the focus became to tell the story of a blue-collar guy, just doing his work on the far side of the moon.

RS: What emerged as the biggest challenge, in terms of the actor-director relationship? What needed work?

DJ: I think the thing we had to work on the most was just differentiating the two Sams. How does this guy, who is essentially one person, develop these two very different personalities, and why did that happen? What happens when you throw these two guys into conflict with each other and how do they resolve that? So, that's kind of what we worked on the most. Sam would ask me questions like "Why is Sam 2 so different from Sam 1?" and I would explain that Sam 1 has been on his own, on this base, for three years. He's been trying to work on his faults, because he wants to go back to his family, he misses his family. He's managed to resolve his issues and sort them out with his wife, and he just wants to see his daughter. Whereas, Sam 2, who has just been woken up and believes he's at the start of his three-year contract, is a very, very different guy. He's an angry man who has accepted a job and is now faced with this ridiculous, mindfuck of a scenario, and he's stuck here with his own clone, and he himself is a clone! So, he's got a lot of issues to deal with. That immediately makes these two guys very different, and obviously the conflict is that they both hate seeing each other, because they're a constant reminder of the fact that neither of them are the original Sam. They have a reason to hate each other, but they also realize that they're kind of stuck that way and they're ultimately on the same side, and they become friends. That's where the resolution comes in.

RS: There's a recurring theme of the negative effects of long-term isolation. Did you have any experience with that?

DJ: Quite a lot, I was at boarding school! [laughs] And then later on, more directly, I went to graduate school. It's no coincidence that Sam's three-year contract is the same as the amount of time I spent in Nashville, Tennessee, in graduate school. I was in the middle of Nashville and I'd only gone to Nashville because I'd followed my girlfriend who'd gotten into graduate school. Within a couple of months of being there, we broke up, and then I was stuck in Nashville. I felt too guilty to just give up on graduate school because I'd broken up with my girlfriend, so I stuck it out for three years and it was miserable. But I wouldn't change it, because it made me the person I am and it gave me a story. It gave me an experience I could draw on, and I think it comes out in the film.

RS: If you met another Duncan Jones, how do you think you'd react?

DJ: I think it would depend on if I met me now, or the me who was in graduate school or younger. It actually took me a really long time to feel comfortable in my own skin. I was quite angry, I had low self-esteem, I didn't know where I fit in in the world. I didn't know what to do with my life. I was a very, very frustrated young man. So, I think that the me now, meeting that me, I would be fine with him but I know he'd be pissed off. I think what I'd want to do would be to put a hand on "my" shoulder and say, "You know what? You just need to chill out and enjoy life a little bit and have a bit more faith in yourself, and things will turn out okay." That was definitely in my mind when I was writing this film, the idea of being able to go back and talk to yourself right now. What are you like to deal with, for other people? If you met yourself in person, would you see only faults? Would you appreciate the good things about yourself? What is the thing that you would immediately react to? I think that's a really interesting thought experiment.

RS: Sounds like a lot of high-concept ideas went into the mix for this film.

DJ: [laughs] Yeah, I've used them all up now, like the Wachowskis with The Matrix. I think I've got some other things that I want to talk about, though. I think one of the benefits of not making a film until now - I just turned 38 last week - is that I do have a lot of life experiences of varying sorts, experiences that everyone goes through at some point in their lives and you can approach these topics from different angles, so I don't think I'm going to run out of things to talk about.

RS: The similarities between Moon and 2001: A Space Odyssey are quite significant - you seem to invite that comparison, especially with Gerty.

DJ: There was no question in my mind when we were writing the script that people were going to make the association with Hal 9000. There were two ways I could have gone with that. I could have just pretended that no one was going to make that assumption, or we could have done what we ended up doing, which was to let the audience make that assumption and then play around with those expectations. The audience will set themselves up: they're thinking HAL, we've let them think HAL, and then Gerty ends up being a very different character, and that's the way we decided to play it. It worked well for us, letting the audience make their assumptions, because it becomes a surprise as Gerty's story unfolds.

RS: Did you come up with those creepy smiley-face emotions that Gerty uses for expressions?

DJ: I came up with those, and I actually had to fight for that. Everyone was very concerned, both when I suggested it, and when we started putting it in there. They were concerned that it would look silly, that it would look cheap, that it wouldn't sell - meaning you wouldn't believe that it would be designed to look like that. But I really pushed for it. I said, "This is the way it's got to be." And my justification was that Gerty is built to look after Sam. The rest of the facility is industrial space and Gerty is one of the few things that was built to interface with a person, but this company is also dealing with what they view as a disposable, non-human being in Sam, and it's a very patronizing way that they deal with him. So, the emoticons, I thought, were a really good way of subconsciously getting that idea across. Here's a machine that this clone is going to have to deal with, and just to keep it simple because he's such a blue-collar guy, we'll have these little emoticons, these little faces in order for him to get an idea of the tone of what Gerty is saying to him. The whole idea of emoticons is something I use all the time, because of Twitter, and because I use all of those social networking tools and send e-mails. I'm always second-guessing myself in terms of what people might think I'm saying, what the intention is. So I use emoticons all the time.

RS: Did you ever see Moon as a perils-of-cloning story? Was that secondary?

DJ: That was definitely secondary. It was always supposed to be about the human situation that Sam Bell finds himself in, and about how he deals with it. As far as the company and what their intentions are, this was certainly an A-political film. I'm not making any judgments. It's actually very tongue-in-cheek that Lunar Industries is a green energy company. This is not Shell or Exxon, it's all green energy, but the fact that they are a company that's run for profit means they are going to cut corners wherever they can. One of those corners is Sam.

RS: Do you want to revisit this world at some point? I've heard you want all of your films to exist in the same Duncan Jonesiverse.

DJ: They will be in the same universe. Also, Sam has agreed to do a little cameo in the next film, which will be an epilogue of what happens to Sam Bell when he returns to Earth. So that will be really good fun, but yeah, the next film does take place in the same timeline and the same universe. And then I'm gonna go off and do some non-science fiction films afterwards, I hope, but there is a third film in the far-distant future. I don't mean it takes place in the far-distant future, I mean in terms of my career. [laughs] After the next few films down the line that I want to do, there will be that third film, a kind of third act in this world. It's all going to happen slowly over the years.

RS: Is there another big science-fiction topic that interests you?

DJ: Well, I think this will read better on film than just me saying it, but yeah, the idea of corporate government. The idea of no longer having nation states, but corporate states, I think that's a very interesting idea. That's the third film, that's going to be an aspect of it. Not like Gattaca, but the idea of a way of life being run by companies as opposed to being run by indigenous cultures that have formed into nation states. Instead of patriotism, there would be a corporate patriotism.

RS: Considering all the issues we have on this planet, do you think getting to the moon and beyond should be a top priority?

DJ: No. I think the absolutely essential thing is for us to get off of fossil fuels. I think we need to come up with a system that allows us to have a large amount of renewable energy, an energy source that is plentiful. If you think about it, almost all of the world's problems are bound up in petroleum. If we had a plentiful energy source, we could desalinate - we could start desalination planets all over the planet. There was a documentary in the UK that explained all of the slightly science-fiction technologies that you could use to cool the planet down, and one of them were these automated, robot ships that you could send out to ionize the water they're in and spray it into the air, to create ionized water vapor. If you had enough of these ships doing this - I think you would need a couple hundred - over time it would slowly start to cool the Earth. And you could stop it whenever you wanted. There are all these things you can do, if only you have a controlled and plentiful energy source.

Moon opens in select cities on June 12.