Wowie Zowie

It seems only fitting that the kid once known to the world as Zowie Bowie would grow up to make a genuine Space Oddity. Moon, the feature film debut from 38 year-old Duncan Jones, is a sci-fi cult classic in waiting. This gorgeously Spartan picture – which sees Sam Rockwell’s lonely lunar spaceman victimised by unseen corporate forces – has already received rapturous responses from Sundance, Tribeca and Edinburgh, where it landed the Michael Powell award for best British debut.

What is about the Bowie family and lonely spacemen, I ask the young hotshot filmmaker.
“Well, there have times in my life when I’ve struggled with it,” laughs Mr. Jones. “But I am my father’s son. I was brought up by him and I was surrounded by the things that he loved. We bonded over literature and movies. We watched films together all the time. I genuinely wasn’t conscious of it when we were making the film. It’s just there.”

The son of David Bowie and classic rock chick Angie, Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones grew up in Kent. From an early age, dad had sole custody and young master Zowie Bowie was raised in a whirlwind of gigs, liberal education and homes in New York, Geneva and Berlin. He was once kicked out of school for sleeping in during his A levels, but otherwise he is a most disappointing rock brat: like Stella McCartney, he has worked throughout his adult life for and with everyone from Tony Scott to Jim Henson’s Creature Workshop.

At 38, Mr. Jones has finally settled into the grand old medium of film having spent years in the commercials sector. Before that, he thought about wrestling, studied in Ohio’s College of Wooster on an academic and soccer scholarship and worked as a councillor for kids with special needs.

“I took an awfully long time trying to work out what I wanted to do,” he tells me. “And film is the sort of profession you look at and think ‘I love film but how on earth do you go about getting a job in film?’ It seemed impossible.”

Moon comes after years of film school and toiling his way up the greasy pole. The film was made for less than the latte budget of Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen – around $3 – and with no assistance from dad.

“There are people who are happy to define themselves through someone else,” says Mr. Jones. “But I’m not one of them. There are big, real world ideas here – ideas about ditching fossil fuels for Helium-3, ideas about corporate responsibility, but these details are deftly left in the ether without any preaching from the altar.

“I didn’t want the film to be political in anyway,” says the director. “There’s no corporate villain. It’s more of an unpleasant situation. It’s a story about being human.”

He is, nonetheless, confident enough in his scientific predictions to have recently taken questions from the floor at a screening of the film in NASA Huston operation.

“Depends which part of the movie you’re talking about,” laughs the director... “All the stuff about mining Helium 3 on the moon is pretty well thought through. Not by me, of course. It’s mainly from a non-fiction book by Robert Zubrin called entering space. The machines are inspired by another book by Jack Schmitt. So I had a lot of re-reading to do before I went to Huston.”

Formally, tonally, Moon recalls the second wave of sci-fi, that giddy era in the ‘70s and early ‘80s that gave us Outlander, Solaris, Alien and Bladerunner.

“Sam Rockwell and I first met about this years ago,” recalls Mr. Jones. “And that was the kernel of the film. We wanted to get back to those classic sci-fi movies like Outlander or Alien where you have blue collar guys in space and the film is about what it’s like for those guys to adapt to that environment. We wanted the film to feel almost like a lost gem from that era.”

Like those classic titles, one can’t quite decide whether Moon offers a utopian or dystopian version of the future. We will, however, be given further opportunities to decide. Happily, Mr. Jones has decided to extend the film’s universe; his next film, set in a Berlin of the future, a Mooniverse future.

“It’s funny that you ask about utopias,” says Mr. Jones. It makes me think about Ridley Scott talking about Bladerunner. Whenever he is asked if the film is dystopian he says ‘no’. It’s just one story in a busy, thriving city. I think of our film like that. There’s a lot of positives in there. And I love the idea of keeping that world going. Sam will pop up again in a cameo.”

And Berlin?

“I know,” he says. “Everyone will say it’s a Bowie thing. But I do have reasons of my own for liking Berlin!”