I'm a bit of a geek, actually. So I always wanted my first film to be science fiction.
— Duncan Jones
I saw the drawbacks of fame as a kid. It wasn't for me.
Growing up, I was on film sets occasionally, when my dad was acting, so I got to run around and do odd jobs on films like 'Labyrinth' and others... I seemed destined to make films.
I was always bit of a jock.
I was a little geeky kid anyway. If I wasn't shooting little stop-animation films, then I was playing computer games or Dungeons & Dragons.
I was christened Duncan Zowie Jones.
Science-fiction cities in general, I think, are so hard to get right, because it's so easy to just play some cheesy music or do something that takes you right out of it, but 'Blade Runner' got it right, and I love that about the film.
Trying to make a movie like 'Warcraft,' and trying to do it in a unique way... you get killed by a death of 1,000 cuts.
I have to work with the team at Blizzard and the producers on the film and convince them that, as a fan, I have a unique and hopefully entertaining way of taking people through the first contact story, which is really what sets up 'Warcraft' for everyone else.
I'm a gamer at heart and always have been. I'm also a filmmaker.
Be it a video game, comic book, or cheque book, the question always is, 'What story do you have to tell?'
Games have always presented an opportunity to escape. But they are also an opportunity to go somewhere that you come to know well.
It felt very fresh to me, and it feels very contemporary - this idea that conflict's not being about good and evil and not necessarily being black and white. If you dig deep enough, you'll often find that people do things because they feel that they have to as opposed to because they are evil.
After 'The Fellowship of the Ring,' the films that followed it, instead of having their own unique aesthetic, they all wanted to be 'Lord of the Rings' as opposed to learning from 'Lord of the Rings.'
It's always nerve-racking, showing your parents things you've been working on.
I love my work, but I don't like being in the spotlight. I was never going to be an actor, that's for sure.
I don't know if subconsciously there was some reaction going on, if there was something in me that didn't want to learn an instrument - because I couldn't have been that incompetent!
You only get one shot to do a first feature.
I took an incredibly roundabout route getting into feature films.
My dad and I used to shoot little one-stop animations on an old 8mm film camera when I was no more than 7 or 8, and when he was away at work, I would keep shooting nonsensical, short animated films using 'Star Wars' figures or Smurfs - depended what the narrative was.
You would never have seen me on any party scene, which is probably what made me able to disappear, in a way, because the tabloids had nothing to follow.
My parents did call me Zowie now and then, but then, realising that it drew too much attention, they called me 'Joe'. Then, later, I sort-of co-opted my own name back.
Sometimes you see films, not just science fiction films, where you get the sense that if the camera were to pan just to the left or the right, all of a sudden you'd be seeing light stands and crew standing around. But with 'Blade Runner,' the beauty of it is that it felt like a real, breathing city.
For me, 'Blade Runner' is the best science-fiction film ever made.
One of the things I think is unique and signature about Blizzard is that whenever they do their games, and with 'Warcraft' in particular, they take the things they love and put a twist on it. They showed that heroes can come from the most unexpected places, and as a player, you can play as a hero, on all sides.
I played lots of games, and I was a fan of gaming, so I was always looking for new games. I was also a science fiction and fantasy fan, growing up, in games and books and movies.
I am absolutely of the videogames generation, starting on the Atari and Commodore 64 and the Amiga.
You could make a film out of just about anything so long as there is a clear vision about the story.
'Warcraft' has always had a far higher percentage of women players than a lot of other games. It has always been a very welcoming environment for women.
'Warcraft' by its very nature is epic in scale.
Treat the audience with respect and maturity, and have a certain faith in them to catch up.
I don't want to build on someone else's legacy. I wanted to establish my own thing.
I don't know why, but for whatever reason, that side of life - the celebrity and the spectacle - has never interested me.
Motion capture has become very specialized but also still just a tool of filmmaking.
Hopefully, by the second or the third film, who my father is won't be a story anyone's interested in. They'll either like the films or they won't, and if they don't like them, I won't be making them any more.
I got some funky scholarships to play soccer and did well in my SATs, so I went off to college and then grad school but found that that wasn't me. My family, relieved I seemed to have come to my senses, were happy to let me go to film school.
When I was at graduate school, you wouldn't have recognised me. I was so different - and not a nice person: a grumpy, surly, upset, confused, lost person.
I was a sensitive boy.
Bowie is my dad's stage name, so I was never, ever called Zowie Bowie. The tabloids liked that because it rhymed.
Toshiro Mifune was such an elegant hero, and there's something really empathetic about him.
As a filmmaker, the only way that I understand how to make a film is holistically.
Fantasy films tend to skew towards what Tolkien fantasy was, which is that the humans, the Hobbits, and the cute creatures are the good guys, and everything that's ugly are the bad guys.
I think my sensibilities about storytelling and character just automatically come into play when I'm trying to work on any kind of narrative. For me, it doesn't really matter what the source of the narrative is. I will be looking for ways to make it into an intriguing story with empathetic characters.
It took a generation of filmmakers who loved and were raised on comic books to make movies that you actually cared about and felt something for. I think that's absolutely the same with what's going on with videogame movies.
I love games, and I feel they've been sold short shrift in films so far.
When Peter Jackson made the 'Lord of the Rings' movies, I remember there was a concern that people who didn't read Tolkien wouldn't go see the first one. But the films were so good in their own right that the audience grew beyond the readership of the book.
That's what I wanted to do... I wanted to make a great film that just happened to be based on a video game.
One of the things my dad always said is that it's O.K. to do one for you and one for them. He taught me a lot of things, but that's certainly one of the many that I took to heart.
'Warcraft' is going to be a period of my life I treasure and loathe at the same time.
I've certainly never used my father's name as a way of getting a meeting. And fortunately, I've never needed to.
