Daniel Etherington

The director talks about getting his debut feature made, being interrogated by real astronauts and the influence of his father, David Bowie. By Daniel Etherington

The remarkably down-to-earth Duncan Jones – formerly Zowie Bowie – makes his feature debut with Moon. In the film Sam Rockwell’s lone astronaut mans a lunar base, supervising the mechanised harvesting of Helium-3, a fuel for nuclear fusion energy generation back on Earth. Working with a tiny budget and inspired by 1970s and 1980s films such as Silent Running, Alienand Outland, Jones turned to old-fashioned model miniatures techniques to create the barren satellite and relied on Sam Rockwell to populate it – with multiple versions of himself.

Film4: People don’t usually talk about budgets, but you made Moon for $5 million? Or was it £5 million? I’ve read both.
Duncan Jones: No, it was $5 million.

Daniel Etherington: People don’t usually talk about budgets, but you made Moon for $5 million? Or was it £5 million? I’ve read both.
Duncan Jones: No, it was $5 million.

DE: When someone has $250 million on a movie, considering what you’ve achieved on yours, what do they spend it all on?
DJ: Catering? That’s what I’d do!

DE: Is CGI really that expensive?
DJ: It depends what you do with it. There are certain things that are very expensive and time-intensive. It’s about the amount of detail and for CG in particular the amount of geometry and texturing and other elements that you need to build into a 3D model. So you saw the harvesters that were travelling across the lunar landscape [extracting Helium-3], those were model miniatures.
DE: So when you started thinking about the film, as an homage to that great era of science fiction that produced films like Silent Running, Alien and Outland, was it an obvious decision that you didn’t even want to do CG?
DJ: It was synchronicity really. We investigated all of the options. Some of them were quite complicated. I’d done a commercial before, a Carling robots one, where we sort of had a hybrid of live-action bits and then CG built on to that. And that can look fantastic. We talked at one point about doing the lunar rover with model miniature wheels and then a CG body, but that was like: is that going to be beneficial, is that going to pay for itself, is that going to look good? And then we said, No, let’s just build the whole model.

DE: CG still can’t really get that physicality you get in Silent Running, Alien…
DJ: Absolutely. I’ve got to put my cards on the table here though. Yes we did a huge amount of model miniatures, but there’s still work that we did on top of that. But it does have a unique look, that hybrid.

DE: You worked with some of the veterans from that classic era like Bill Pearson.
DJ: Bill Pearson is amazing. He’s a Glaswegian fella who built the ‘Nostromo’ model from the original Alien. He worked on Outland. So right on the sweet spot of the films that we wanted to replicate and mirror. One of the model miniatures guys worked on R2D2. Funny really, he’s a little fellow, looks a little like R2D2.

DE: Of all those films Moon’s paying homage too, Silent Running is the most thematically comparable, as you’ve got a similar mood of elegy, but also the story of a guy, a blue collar guy, just doing his job.
DJ: Yeah, definitely. I think for Sam [Rockwell] in particular, that Bruce Dern’s character was the one that he really was drawn to. When we were talking about the kind of film that we wanted to make, before we’d even written it, Silent Running, Outland and the first half of Alien, were the three films – two-and-a-half films – we were really thinking about. We were thinking, blue collar guy, working in space, what’s that like to have to actually survive in such an alien environment when he’s just a normal, working person.
DE: So, are you mates with Sam Rockwell?
DJ: We are now, but to be honest, I’d met him once before we did the film. We’re very similar guys, roughly the same age, both only children, both having slightly unusual upbringings. We just got on really well, and we both love this period of science fiction.

DE: I think it’s probably hard-wired into our generation. How do you find other audiences – aside from science fiction fans – have got on with the film?
DJ: The audiences who have been coming to see it, a lot of them have not been science fiction fans. A lot of women have come to see the film who aren’t science fiction fans, and they all really love it. And it’s not just to see Sam Rockwell’s ass! They see the humanity, I think, in the story. I think that’s the thing we’ve been trying to let people know about: this is a very human story. Sam does a spectacular job of really getting that across.
DE: Sam Rockwell’s brilliant. How involved was he with the development of the story.
DJ: He wasn’t really. Like I said, I had this initial meeting with him, we talked about science fiction films, and the ones that we both loved; we talked about blue collar characters, and then I went off and said I’m going to write something for you and came back with Moon about nine months later.

DE: Technically, how did you shoot some of the scenes with two versions of Sam – like him fighting himself or playing table tennis?
DJ: Almost shot by shot, there’s different techniques that we use. We had a very good young body double, who’s an actor in his own right – a guy called Robin Chalk, a young English actor. The free effects you get are when you can shoot over his shoulder. That one’s free, no post-production required. If you do a split-screen, all of a sudden there’s a little bit more money involved. If you do a motion control camera shot, which is where the camera’s moving, that becomes more expensive. The most technically challenging shots are the ones when you probably didn’t even notice, or hopefully you were so involved in the story you didn’t notice, but it’s where you have a two shot, where the two of them are physically interacting.
DE: Where he slaps him on the head.
DJ: Yeah, exactly – he touches him on the head, he helps him up, they do a little high five, all those things. That required some forethought, and that was technically probably the trickiest shot to do. What we ended up having was Sam performing one side of the conversation with his arm tucked behind his back, and then he would go on to the other side of the conversation, and we would have the body double come in and be the arm, and then the post-production guys would literally stick that arm onto Sam’s body. So very, very challenging. Timing-wise really tricky, but we managed to nail it. I think throughout the film, especially with the two Sam effects, we wanted it to be not drawing attention to itself so that you really got taken in by the two characters, as opposed to the special effects.
DE: Just getting away from the science fiction, you were also quite inspired by science fact: potentially using Helium-3 for nuclear fusion. Tell us about that.

DJ: Well, I’d read a book by a gentleman called Robert Zubrin, called ‘Entering Space’. And it was all about how you go about colonising the solar system but doing it in a financially viable way. One of the arguments Zubrin makes is, we don’t have a Cold War anymore so that’s not going to force us to go into space, and as far as private companies go, the scale of finances that are actually need to set up bases and put ships into space – you can’t do that on a venture, you actually have to know that you’re going to make your money back. So, one of the first steps is setting up a base on the moon for mining Helium-3. Now that’s not actually going to be of any use to us right now, but once we get fusion power reactors, creating more energy than you actually have to put into them…

DE: Do you think we will?
DJ: I think we will. They’ve been saying that for decades, but they’re still working on it. I mean, I’m not a specialist, but from what I understand, they are constantly getting closer and closer to this break-even point. And as soon as they hit break-even point, then there will be a real excitement about the possibility of using fusion power for energy production.
DE: You’ve shown the film to people at Nasa, but do you know if any of the lunar astronauts have actually seen it?
DJ: I know Buzz Aldrin was given a copy about a month ago but I haven’t heard whether he’s seen it or not.

DE: What sort of reaction did you get from the people at Nasa?
DJ: The Nasa reaction was fantastic. I was invited to come and do a screening at the Nasa Space Centre. I assumed it would just be like a public open forum, like doing a screening at the Science Museum. But it wasn’t. About 80 per cent of the audience were Nasa employees. There was an active working astronaut in the audience as well. The Q&A afterwards was incredibly intimidating and scary to begin with. But they were very supportive, they loved the film, and they had lots of really good interesting questions. We just started talking about, you know: why the base looked the way it did, how you’d be able to create a concrete substitute on the moon, using the regolith and polar ice water. It was terrific.
DE: Given your dad’s involvement with science fiction, with songs such as ‘Space Oddity’ and ‘Starman’ and films such as The Man Who Fell to Earth, how much of an influence has he been on you?
DJ: Certainly nothing conscious. Maybe I was incredibly naive, but I really wasn’t thinking about anything that he’d done when I was writing Moon or filming it even. It wasn’t till after it was finished that certain people mentioned ‘That’s similar to some of the things your dad was working on’. That was completely subconscious. My parents divorced when I was very young, unusually I was given into the custody of my dad so I was brought up surrounded by all the things that were influencing him. So it’s not surprising there’s a certain similarity in our influences, because I was around being influenced by the same things that were influencing him.

DE: So you’re sticking with science fiction for your next one as well. Mute. How’s that going?
DJ: Well, the script is done and it’s gone out to some actors. Because it’s a slightly bigger budget, it’s about $15 to $20 million, we’re going to need to get some name actors in order to drive the financing. That’s how films are made these days. So assuming we can get the actors we want, hopefully we’ll be shooting the beginning of next year.
DE: And continuing the same themes?
DJ: It’s kind of in the same timeline as Moon, the same universe. And hopefully Sam Rockwell will come back and do a little cameo in the next film.

DE: Are you planning a trilogy?
DJ: Well, in the same timeline, possibly. But this is not a sequel to Moon, it’s a totally separate story. But those are the two films that I’m focussed on now, then I’m going to take a break from science fiction for a little while I think. In the far-distant future, there is a bit London-based science fiction film that I want to do, that will also take place within that same timeline. But I want a few films under my belt before I do that one.