Total Eclipse of the Art

Some of you may recall a minor scandal some years back caused by an FCUK commercial entitled “Fashion vs. Style”. The film featured two female models in aggressive kung fu combat, tearing at each other’s clothes before engaging in a passionate kiss. Its notoriety brought to attention its director, Duncan Jones. Not only was he a genuine talent unafraid of controversy, but he was also the son of some singer who sold a few records in the seventies called David Bowie.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the artist formerly known as Zowie Bowie, now making his feature film debut with Moon, a mystery (and the less you know going in the better) set, coincidentally, in the outer reaches of space. “It’s been predictable but also fascinating to see how different elements of the press would talk about the film and that aspect of my family life. The number of pun headlines is astounding!”. This refreshing lack of pretension and arrogance is typical of the director, frequently joking and laughing, and giving detailed and thoughtful answers to even the most banal of questions. In other words, he’s a top bloke. It’s no wonder Sam Rockwell wanted to work with him. “I’d actually sent him a script for a completely different film. He loved it but I wanted him to play one of the villains and he wanted to play the lead. It didn’t work out but we got on incredibly well and he started telling me about the kind of roles that interested him as an actor, and this started a conversation about this period of science fiction films in the late 70s and early 80s where you had these blue collar people working in space and how that was so different to the kind of lantern-jawed, heroic archetypes you get in science fiction films today”. Jones then began writing a script for Rockwell, their discussions about character, genre and budget becoming “a cascade of ideas which came from how one thing was going to affect another”.

The central conceit, however, came from somewhere more specific: “I’d read this book quite a few years ago called Entering Space by Robert Zubrin, and that book was all about how you’d go about colonising the solar system, doing it in a financially viable way because you don’t have the Cold War anymore to spur the costs of space exploration on. One of the early chapters in his book was about setting up a mining base on the moon in order to mine Helium 3, which he was theorizing would become incredibly valuable once we got fusion power working back here on earth”.

Many directors with a commercials background move directly into big budget features, but the appealingly humble Jones recognised his limits and lack of experience. “On a technical level they prepare you, but with a commercial, you only have to shoot thirty seconds! With feature films you shoot just about what you need and then you move. I could live with it but there were times when I had to stop Sam after the third take because, even though I loved what he was doing, we just had to move on. On commercials you don’t really work with actors, as cruel as that sounds. That’s the biggest difference”. Shot over 33 days (with 8 days of model miniature photography), Moon was made for £2.5 million on just two sound stages (“I wanted a controlled shooting environment, I didn’t want problems with weather, travelling between locations, all those kinds of things”) at the world-renowned Shepperton Studios. “The catalyst for me going to film school was working with Tony Scott briefly. He and Ridley once ran Shepperton, so he gave me some great contacts there, so from that point onwards I’d always had this great relationship with the place. Once I was getting bigger commercials, I took them to Shepperton, so they told me I’d be more than welcome once I decided to do a feature”.

Moon has received the kind of reception many veteran directors would die for, but is there an increasing pressure on first time filmmakers to deliver the goods or risk being discarded? “I only began to feel that pressure as we were making the film, when the budget rose to being expensive for a first time British independent film. But I think if you make a film for under a million you can still work your way up from that. The most important thing is always a good script”.