“I think Jake Gyllenhaal and everyone else in Hollywood were very jealous of Sam Rockwell, and what he managed to do in Moon. I think everyone was hoping they’d get the next chance to do the same thing.”
British-born Duncan Jones explains how, on only his second big-screen outing, he ended up at the helm of sci-fi blockbuster Source Code, directing Hollywood heavyweight Jake Gyllenhaal and even altering the tone of the film to his liking:
“Jake very much liked Moon, which was why he wanted to meet me.
"I loved the script but it did take itself very seriously, like an episode of 24. My pitch to Jake was that there was a way to inject a lightness of tone which didn’t obviously come out on the page, and I think that was one of the reasons he wanted to work with me.”
Of course, it helped that Jones, fresh to Hollywood, had in his back pocket the surprise takings of 2009 surprise word-of-mouth sci-fi hit Moon, not to mention a BAFTA for Outstanding Debut, something the film’s writer-director happily acknowledges:
“It was fantastic, it’s a unique situation and I am very proud of Moon, and incredibly privileged to have had the chance to work with Sam Rockwell, and everything kind of came together.
“We had a crazy experience. There was a great possibility that the film was going to go straight to DVD, and we thought it was better than that, so we took it to Sundance, and screened it in front of 1000 people. Based on the reaction to that screening, we managed to go theatrical. It was a very tense moment, like a movie in itself with a grand finale.”
And now he’s working with bigger names and more money, but some very similar themes.
“I think in some ways Jake is actually responsible for that,” explains Jones.
“I got excited thinking about all the things I could do differently, but Jake thought Source Code would be a good match with similarities between the two films.
“I think it’s too early to tell what is me and what just happens to coincide between those two films, by the third film we’ll be able to tell."
Jones is a self-professed science-fiction aficionado, something he has previously credited to hoovering up literature and film as a child, under the privileged cultural mentoring of his father, David Bowie.
His showbusiness blue-blood is not something Jones trades on, and when he offers an explanation of the appeal of sci-fi, it is easily apparent that his ideas are rich, well thought through and, above all, his own.
“One of the beauties of sci-fi is that an audience immediately feels that there is some of distance between themselves and what they’re seeing on screen,” he enthuses.
“So they open themselves up in a way that, if you take your film seriously and talk about subject matter that is very human, it sneaks under the skin and affects people in a way that maybe they weren’t expecting.
“When you hit those human emotions in a weepy or a kitchen-sink drama, you know what’s expected of you as an audience, I think there’s a brutality to that directness that you can avoid in science fiction, where instead, things slip through in a way that they don’t when the audience has got its defences up. I think that’s the beauty of science fiction.
Jones’ hours of cinematic homework are also evident in Source Code, with its evident allusion to Hitchcock’s enduring influence, from the outset.
“It just made sense because the script just reminded me of North by Northwest. I thought it would be fun to play around with that, ask what if Hitchcock made science fiction movies?
“So there several allusions to Hitchcock, the opening title sequence, the beautiful score which is certainly influenced by some of Hitchcock’s scores, even the way Jake is dressed, a little bit out of period... there’s a lot of things we tried to slip in there.
With the success of Moon and now Source Code, Jones has enjoyed watching his own name open doors in Hollywood (he was recently shortlisted for the rebooted Superman franchise), which means resisting the temptation to take everything on offer:
“I feel like I’ve been fairly brave, I’ve turned down a handful of big studio films over the last six months, which makes me very nervous, because you never know when you’re going to be hot. Right now I’m getting all the offers and I’m saying no. Hopefully, I’m making the right choice. The career I want is as a writer-director, so I’m holding out for that.
His oft-discussed dream project, Mute (similar to Bladerunner, set in his father’s beloved city of Berlin) will now be made into a graphic novel so, as he puts it, “at least the fans will see what was originally intended”, and Jones is hard at work on his next project with another writer (watch this space).
The careers he admires and wishes to emulate are those of similarly skilled types, the likes of Tarantino and the Coen Brothers, but his off-screen passions sound less quirky, more existential:
“I am a bit of a geek for technology, on line an awful lot, and fascinated by how things change. Clean energy is one of my obsessions, and how those things given the opportunity, could change the world.
“In a way, I am constantly having thought experiments about how technology could change the world, so in that sense, science fiction is always going on in my head.”
As Hollywood increasingly relies on the offerings of off-beat scientific visionaries to fuel its blockbusters, Duncan Jones’ position in its creative pecking order can only go higher. From this source of eclectic curiosity which has already given us two intelligent and quirky big-screen features, there is obviously plenty more to come.
Source Code is released on DVD and Blu-Ray from this Monday 15 August: