The Man Behind Moon: An Interview with Duncan Jones

Brainy British writer-director Duncan Jones, 38, has made an impressive feature debut, the indie sci-fi thriller Moon, which opens in New York and L.A. on June 12. Smart, suspenseful, and artfully crafted on a modest budget of $5 million, it stars Sam Rockwell, often a supporting actor, but here carrying the entire film in two roles.

As Sam Bell, the lone moon-based employee of an energy company harvesting the lunar surface for its reserves of Helium-3, he’s become delusional toward the end of his three-year contract. After a near-fatal accident, he’s revived by the moon station’s robot Gerty, only to meet a genetically identical version of himself (albeit buffer and angrier). In a director’s statement, Jones said he was inspired by two books: “Full Moon” by Michael Light, a photographic essay on NASA’s lunar expeditions, and “Entering Space” by Robert Zubrin, who makes a plausible case for interplanetary colonization. I tracked down copies and brought them with me to my interview with Jones, in Chicago on a recent promo tour. He pounced on them with the delight of greeting old friends again.

DJ: You can see where the visual references came from. There’s a terrific one later on in the book [thumbing through “Full Moon” until he comes to a photo of Apollo 17 commander Eugene Cernan covered in grime inside the mission’s lunar module]. We based the interior of the rover [on that shot]. I love that picture! He even looks a little bit like Sam! My initial desire was to replicate that shot, but on our budget we weren’t quite able to get there.

AG: Close enough! In your movie Sam Rockwell’s character—although a very intelligent, capable, responsible engineer—lacks an astronaut’s glamour. He’s really a maintenance guy, a custodian.

DJ: Again, look at these pictures: these are guys with grubby jobs. Every day is not about doing incredible science; it’s basically being the guy who can keep all this equipment running. We were invited to screen at the NASA space center, just after SXSW; they’d heard on the Internet that the film had a large segment about Helium-3 mining. And about 80% attending were NASA employees, and astronaut Tom Jones was there as well.

We did a Q&A afterwards; it started off with them asking me a few questions, but most of it was me asking them questions: “Did I get this right? Can you extrapolate and see bases looking like this in the future?” There was a woman in the audience who said, “We’re working on moon bases, and a lot of our NASA designs right now are lightweight, things that we would bring with us. This looks like something that you built there. What are your reasons for that?”

And I made my suggestions that using the lunar regolith [soil content] and this potential frozen ice water that’s at the poles, you’d be able to create some kind of concrete. And another woman raised her hand, saying, “I’m working at NASA on something called ‘mooncrete.’” And they just started discussing amongst themselves the science behind building a base that looked like our base. It was incredibly cool—very, very exciting.

AG: The great thing about Zubrin’s book is that not only does he couch the science in comprehensible terms, he also speculates how profit might be made from moon colonization.

DJ: That’s the key. Right now, the space program is being pushed fastest in the private sector by guys like Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic—you know, space tourism--because there’s money to be made there. What Zubrin says about Helium-3 mining is that it’s a potential market dependent on nuclear fusion power becoming viable. But once we’ve got fusion power working, all of a sudden the moon becomes a huge resource of energy, a strip mine with a surface landmass the size of Africa.

AG: You’ve said that this screenplay was written especially for Sam, after you had initially approached him about a different project that fell through. What was that?

DJ: That was a film that I’m hoping to do next, called Mute, which is also science fiction, but which was a bit ambitious, a bit too big for a first feature film. I’d sent the script to Sam through his agent, and Sam had loved it, and wanted to play the lead role. But unfortunately in my mind the lead role was always this big, hulking guy, and Sam, as fantastically talented as he is, is not a physically huge man.

But we got on incredibly well, and just started talking about the films we both loved, and that period of science fiction, from the late Seventies and early Eighties—films like Outland and Silent Running and Alien. A lot of the time those movies were about blue-collar guys, and how they’re affected by the alien environments; the focus was on the people, instead of going from one action set piece to the next, which is what a lot of science fiction now tends to be.

AG: The special effects in Moon are interwoven so seamlessly they don’t break the illusion the way FX sometimes do in big-budget films.

DJ: There are certain scenes in the film where our most complicated special effects are our most invisible ones. There are some things that we did, technically, that no one’s really ever done before. And yet, because what’s going on between the characters is really quite emotional, for a lot of the audience, they’re not even going to notice.

AG: Could you give an example?

DJ: There are scenes where Sam is having a conversation with himself. [Late in the film] one of the Sams is feeling quite down, and the other Sam is trying to be supportive, and he has his hand on his shoulder, and he’s helping him put his hat on. There’s this physical interaction going on between these two characters played by one actor in a two-shot. That’s where we’re pushing the envelope a bit.

AG: There’s another film you reference in Moon, although indirectly. Because of the tremendous impact of 2001: A Space Odyssey, we’ve seen countless lifts, homages, and parodies of that movie’s villain, the spacecraft computer HAL. But your guardian robot, Gerty—voiced by Kevin Spacey—plays on audience expectations that he might not be acting in his charges’ best interests.

DJ: That was the intention. I would have been a fool to think that people weren’t going to make a comparison to HAL from 2001. The idea was to let the audience make those assumptions up front, so that over the course of the film as Gerty proves to be something very different from HAL, the audience is surprised, because they’ve already made this investment that Gerty is just like HAL. That’s why it was so exciting for me--and necessary--to have a voice like Kevin’s. He came in for half a day for a sound recording session, tried a couple of different versions, and just got it. And he’s such a gifted mimic; he threw in a couple of impressions of Christopher Walken doing Gerty’s lines.

AG: I hope those will appear on the DVD version.

DJ: [Laughing] I’ll have to check whether I can do that!

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