My priority is having the ability to be creative and to come up with the right decisions and not be fettered. If there are a lot of people involved in decision making, it can become frustrating.
— Duncan Jones
Terry Gilliam, he's a really interesting and amazing film maker, and when he gets it right, it's really powerful stuff.
I was such a big 'Dirty Dozen,' 'Where Eagles Dare,' 'A Bridge Too Far' - all those kinds of movies I loved.
I view myself still as a director. That's what I do.
I love incredibly imaginative, speculative sci-fi.
I personally prefer projecting digitally. I guess I'm of that generation where I like that clarity.
I was the only kids to have Sony Umatic tapes of the old 'Star Wars.' It was such an old technology; you needed two or three tapes to show one movie, so the kids used to come over to my house, and we would watch 'Star Wars.'
I do have a somewhat unique upbringing.
I was angry and frustrated when I was younger and didn't know my place in the world.
I think if you're young and you're being compared with a successful family member, it's really hard to maintain any sense of self-worth and credibility.
I've been very strategic in how I've approached the jobs I want to do.
I was a 'Warcraft' player myself, and when I pitched my take on the film, they said right away, 'That is a player. That is the game.' So I've had their support from the very beginning.
I'd done a bachelor's degree, which I'd enjoyed, but I didn't know what to do with my life at the time. I was conflicted, and, being a hopeless romantic, I followed my girlfriend at the time to Vanderbilt, where, obviously, we broke up a couple of months later.
I went to college and graduate school, studying philosophy. I really did think I was going to wind up being a lecturer or professor of some sort.
I guess, as a director, you sort of take the script, and you find ways to interpret it.
I think everything you do, whether it's low budget things when you're first starting out or full feature films or when you're working with Hollywood, you're always learning, all the time.
Basically, if you want to have a computer system that could pass the Turing test, it as a machine is going to have to be able to self-reference and use its own experience and the sense data that it's taking in to basically create its own understanding of the world and use that as a reference point for all new sense data that's coming in to it.
I thought 'The Social Network' was fantastic.
I was a big fan of Luc Besson and obviously Ridley Scott.
I think, visually, 'Moon' probably owes more to the first half of 'Alien' and 'Outland' than it does to '2001.' The character of Gerty is obviously a straight rip-and-riff on HAL.
J. G. Ballard is just an example of the writers I like. Philip K. Dick is obviously one of them. I'm a big fan of William Gibson as well. He started cyberpunk with 'Neuromancer.' I've come to know him a little bit over Twitter, of all places, and I was always a huge fan of his. It's very cool to know he even knows I exist.
I love the 'what if' nature of sci-fi.
I watched the German version of 'Baron Munchasen' and Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis' at a young age. 'Star Wars' was also a huge thing when I was a kid.
My stepmom's from Somalia, my baby sister is African American, my dad was always English, I'm a white man... You may have noticed.
I'm kind of transatlantic Eurotrash.
Eventually, I'm going to be judged purely on my own merits.
Film directing is really undermined if you attempt to do it by committee because there has to be a single vision as to how to tell a story. It's like if you were at a campfire, and everyone is taking turns to give one sentence in telling a horror story. It would be a mess - it's not going to make sense.
Even before 'Moon,' I did a short film called 'Whistle,' and it had a lot of the things that I thought I would need to be able to do on a feature film: I shot on location, there was special FX work, there was stunt work, we used squibs, I shot on 35 mm film.
Jeron Lanier and 'Lawnmower Man.' That was VR. And there was the VFX1, that big giant VR prototype unit, and I was like, 'I am going to save my money and get one of those.' And then VR just sort of drifted away.
I know my dad's proud that I've done it on my own, and I'm happy with that.
I think one of the biggest jobs of being a director is getting the casting right.
My job is really to... everyone is reading the script, and my job is to make sure we all interpret it in as much the same way as possible. And then I give them the freedom to sort of - to get their performance across and then make suggestions where things are not working and accentuate and push things where they really are working.
It seems like the reason that I miss the science fiction from the late '70s and '80s is that at that period, they really were doing interesting, introspective human stories that just happened to take place in science fiction settings.
When you're in college, everything seems much more important than it really is.
I'm not the guy who does slo-mo, or I'm not the guy who does splashing rain or doves flying or anything; that's not me. Every film, I try and make it the way I see it in my head, and it really just depends on the script and the people I'm working with or whatever interests me at that particular time.
I'd love to do a Western.
I have a sense of humor, and sometimes it gets me into trouble.
I love J. G. Ballard. I love authors who take the world as we know it and just tweak one thing and say, 'What if the world were like this?'
I'm a film maker who started on the Atari and then went onto the Commodore 64 and the Amiga. So I possibly have a different sensibility to people who didn't play games growing up.
I guess sci-fi was like my candy growing up. My dad always thought it was important for me to read an hour or two every night. And if I got stuck or didn't want to read, sci-fi was sort of the thing you'd give me to spur me on to read that evening.
My family is very international.
I've lived all over Europe, spent a lot of time in London, went to school in Scotland, college in America, so I do think I have sort of a sensibility on a fairly global level.
Girls seem to get me in trouble a lot of times.
In the past, a lot of films based on video games think that the audience wants to experience what it's like to play the game, and that's absolutely not the case.
The feeling that makes 'Warcraft' work as a game is that feeling that heroism can come out of anything or anyone.
There's a depth to the look that you get with models that you just can't get with CGI. It's about the detail that you just wouldn't think to put in.
I was in my 30s when I finally went to film school. It was kind of always going to happen, but I did try to keep it suppressed for awhile.
I'm a natural puzzle solver.
My sense of humor often gets me in trouble.
The beauty of science fiction is that it takes the audience's guard down; they're much more willing to open themselves up and allow themselves to be questioned and have their values questioned when they don't think we're talking about their world or them and what they're used to.
