For Duncan Jones, the platform theatrical release of his debut feature film Moon couldn’t have got here fast enough. “It feels like it’s taken forever,” he admits candidly. “It’s exciting, though. Scary, too, however. I mean, we showed the movie for the first time at Sundance in January so that’s been awhile. At least it feels like it has been a while. Maybe that’s perfectly normal.”
Sam Rockwell and Duncan Jones on the set of Sony Pictures Classics' Moon
We laugh for a moment at that sentiment, the two of us sitting at the downtown Seattle W Hotel chatting about his experiences making the film as he prepared to show it to a sold-out Seattle International Film Festival audience. Easygoing and obviously excited about the movie’s prospects, talking to the writer-director wasn’t exactly what I would call a chore.
Moon is an inventive and engaging piece of fiction revolving around an astronaut, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), at the end of a three-year contract working at a mining facility on the moon with only a slow-moving robot named GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey) as his lone companion. After a series of strange events Sam discovers he has a visitor who walks and talks a lot like himself and who could very well be a figment of his imagination, so much time spent in relative isolation causing him to question his own sanity.
“It’s been very strange steps all the way through [production],” Jones comments. “To be honest, the main problem was people telling us we were not spending enough money, and we kept saying that, no, we could make this work on a [smaller] budget. For us, $5-million was really the limit, and we didn’t want to go over that.”
“I mean, there’s no point trying to dive in there on your first feature with like $20-million and looking like a schmuck afterwards. This just seemed like a sensible way to go. Fortunately, with my background in commercials I had a lot of experience working on tight budgets shooting effects-heavy work, so I was able to show people what I had done in the past and how I approached the material.”
The process was relying upon a bunch of now considered retro and passé techniques, skill sets directors like Stanley Kubrick and Douglas Trumball needed to employ to make pictures like 2001 and Silent Running click. For Jones, production design and camerawork were key, the use of both integral to give Moon the size and scope he knew it needed in order to succeed.
“It is about the look of things, it is about the style of it, but it also about the characters,” he responds. “With this, it all started with the character. Moon came out of this conversation I was having with Sam [Rockwell] about three years ago, and there was this script we were thinking of doing together that just wasn’t going to work out.”
“But Sam and I got along really well and we started talking about the films that we both loved and the science fiction that we both loved because we’re both into the [genre] and how about there were these films in the 1970’s and 1980’s where you had these blue collar characters in these incredibly bizarre, unusual and alien environments. That was where the science fiction came into play. It wasn’t about the special effects, it was about what is this place doing to this person. How is this person affected by all of this?”
From there it was just putting the pieces together and coming up with a storyline. The conversations led to the idea of the lonely astronaut toiling away on the surface of the moon for a faceless corporation he hasn’t spoken to personally in years. But what sounded like complete inspiration was in fact born out of something very different, the filmmaker wanting to make sure an infuse his blue collar hero with qualities he could intimately relate to.
The two faces of Rockwell in Sony Pictures Classics' Moon
“There were lots of personal experiences that I had that I wanted find a way to incorporate,” explained Duncan with a slight laugh. “It’s no coincidence that the three-year contract that Sam’s got is the same amount of time I spent in grad school in Nashville, TN. The idea of being on the far side of the moon wasn’t too far from the truth.”
As I was watching Moon, I almost couldn’t help but try to pick out all the influences that potentially inspired it. Along with two already mentioned I could swear I could see bit pieces of Gattaca, Blade Runner, Logan’s Run and even Star Wars lurking inside of it. But the most surprising, to me at least, were references to Peter Hymas’ 1981 Sean Connery thriller Outland, and I could swear ideas from it were some of the central to themes in Duncan’s picture.
“You’re absolutely right,” he answered. “Outland was definitely in there. That one was basically a remake of High Noon, but there are lots of elements I just thought were fascinating. Elements like the big clock and all those kind of things that we tried to weave into our story. Ours really was a loving homage to these sorts of films, and we were trying to take elements from here or there and make something original out of those pieces, but still do it in such a way that people could see the references but at the same time be engaged by something that [hopefully] felt new. That was the idea. We wanted to create a film that felt like a lost piece of the cannon of films from that period.”
All to the well and good, but all of that would be talk with no purpose if not for a central character worth caring for. More, considering that said character must be played twice, both of them at two distinct periods of their lifetime, yet still inhabit the same scenes and converse with one another as if they’re strangers, it would take an exemplary actor to portray him. Enter Sam Rockwell.
“I was writing this for Sam, so there was never a doubt in my mind he was the one who was going to play the character,” says Duncan. “He’s the loveliest guy, which is one of the reasons I wanted to work with him so much. I am sure there is going to be a point in my career where I am going to have to work with an asshole, I’m sure, but on this [film] I was so fortunate that both the cast and crew I had such lovely people to work with.”
“But Sam is phenomenally talented, phenomenally underrated. Additionally, he’s got so much charisma. How many people can you watch for an entire feature film and not be bored with them by the end of it? I don’t think I’m the only person who feels this way, but everyone who has seen the film, everyone who worked on it, all are engaged by Sam. He’s always got something interesting going on, you always empathize with him. He is someone you want to care about.”
While there were no disagreements on my part, I still couldn’t help but wonder what the process was like for him and for the director in bringing Sam Bell to life. No matter how you slice it, this could not have been an easy task. In virtually 98-percent of the scenes, many times playing against himself, the actor elevates his game to a level I hadn’t seem ascend to before, and considering just how much I adore some of his performances that is saying something.
Rockwell in front of the ticking clock in Sony Pictures Classics' Moon
“It’s two guys at two different stages of their life,” Duncan explains, “they just both happen to be the same person is all, that’s what it is. For an independent film, we were fortunate to get a week of rehearsal but we absolutely had to have it because there was just no way we could read the script and then just throw ourselves into that technical nightmare.”
“Sam and I met up in New York with a good actor friend of his, Yul Vazquez, and we basically just broke down the script and worked out who these two different guys are and what it was that made them so. And it really was that three years, that time in isolation on your own dealing with your own issues and that sort of coming to terms with your own anger that was it. There were the things I went through when I was younger that I wanted to write about and I think they are things that end up making the two characters work.”
“I mean, you have this immediate conflict between this young guy who thinks he is just supposed to be starting his three year contract and he’s still angry about everything from back home and then he suddenly comes face-to-face with this old hippy. That’s kind of what that conflict was and Sam understood that so we were able to get at the root of it all pretty early on.”
From the sound of things, the feeling is certainly there that Jones and Rockwell made a real connection while filming Moon, bonding a bit more than is usually typical for director and actor. “There was such a close connection between me and him,” the filmmaker freely admits. “We’re roughly the same age, we have roughly the same background and we’re both the children of highly eccentric parents [Duncan’s father is none other than rocker David Bowie]. We both had long distance relationships with our girlfriends at the same time we were shooting; there was just an awful lot to draw upon from our own experiences that helped make our [friendship] work.”
I find it interesting that he brings up his relationship in regards to working on the picture, because one of the film’s strengths is how easily it seems to be able to tap into its central emotional themes. The story is, in many ways, about how one deals with being alone, and considering one of the loneliest places for someone to be is to be far away from the people or person they love I couldn’t help but wonder if Jones used these experiences to help guide him during shooting.
“Absolutely,” he answers with a chuckle. “I can’t speak for Sam, but I put myself through some stupid emotional hard times making this relationship with this girlfriend that I had last longer while we were so far apart like some sort of weird method directing thing. I wanted to constantly feel that pressure and paranoia and anguish we were going through so I could constantly relate to how Sam’s character would be feeling.”
“That’s probably over the top and I’m not sure I needed to do that. But, for whatever reasons, while I was making the film I just felt like it was worth doing. It was kind of strange, but I also think it was kind of important and I think it was useful. I think it gave me a sensitivity to what it was Sam’s character was going through which made it really easy for him to ask me questions about the character in the instances he was maybe scared or confused because he knew I would have answers for him.”
With time running out, I wonder what the director happens from here. Already a success on the festival circuit, Moon has earned praise from a lot of corners and generated buzz few independent productions are able to manufacture. Yet with the general release so close, and even though the few have seen it already have apparently enjoyed themselves, there has to be at least a small bit of trepidation as to what the theatrical response is going to be.
“No, not really,” he calmly replies. “The film is already exceeding expectations in some ways. Stuart Fenegan, my producer, and I always thought we’d make this film, we’d make it as good as we could and it would be a calling card for future features. That was kind of the starting point.”
The outside world as depicted in Sony Pictures Classics' Moon
Duncan laughs over this for a moment before continuing his thought. “Obviously, we are very, very happy with how things have turned out. We’re incredibly excited about the response we’ve gotten at festivals, and we seem to also have a big internet community of people who have liked the film or who are excited about [it] and that’s great. The next month or two months are really going to give us a final idea as to where we stand and what kind of films we can make next. But the response has already been fantastic. At this point, I’m not sure I can ask for any more.”
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