The science fiction film Moon premiered at select theaters around the country on Friday. I sat down with the movie's director, Duncan Jones, in March to talk about filmmaking, artificial intelligence, philosophy, theory of mind, science fiction, and his childhood. A condensed rendering of the interview appears in the current issue of Psychology Today. Here's a more complete version. Spoiler alert.
Matthew Hutson: What would happen if you were stuck on a moon base with yourself?
Duncan Jones: Pretty much [what happened in the movie], because there was a lot of of me in it. A lot of me and Sam [Rockwell, the lead actor]. I grew up as an only child, as did Sam. That's one of the things that we shared that gave us a good starting point for discussing how we were going to do the film. But I think the film kind of asks the question, What would it be like if you met yourself? And over time, I think, I've become pretty okay about myself. But it did take a long time. I'm 38 now so when I was younger I used to have a lot of concerns and I didn't really know my place in the world and it took me a long time to feel comfortable in my own skin.
MH: Do you think that the outcome would have been very different if you met a younger version of yourself in the movie?
DJ: Yeah, definitely. I think so. It might have been more like Sam 2 when he first turns up on the scene. He was a bit more aggressive and a bit more impatient. If there were two of them, I think it would have been a very different story. As opposed to having one guy who had three years to mellow out a bit and feel a bit more comfortable with himself.
MH: You wrote the film specifically for Sam.
DJ: I did, yeah. We met up in New York a couple of years ago to discuss a different script and he loved that script but he wanted to play a different role than the one that I was interested in him playing, so we met up in New York and tried to convince each other and that didn't happen. But we got on really well and we both had a love of science fiction and I really really wanted to work with him on my first feature. So I told him I would write something for him and that's what Moon was.
MT: What is it about his personality—or anyone's personality—that makes you curious about what would happen if you put two of that person in a room together?
DJ: Well, as a performer, every time I've ever seen Sam, he just takes over the scene. There's a real passion and an authenticity in everything he does. You always believe what he's doing and what he's trying to communicate. But also, there's a real empathy there and you really feel on the emotional side what that character's state is, whether you like him or don't like him in any given moment. I'm not going to say that anyone is going to feel bad for the character he plays in Green Mile, but at the same time you can really get a sense of who that character is and why he's doing the things that he's doing. I think it's just because he's so honest and believable and I just really wanted to give him the opportunity to take on a real challenge, which I think this role was, to play multiple parts. I was quite excited to see what he'd do with that. And I tried to give him the differentiation between the two characters and see how the conflict occurs and how it resolves itself.
MH: What was the original kernel of an idea for the movie?
DJ: It was a strange one, because, like I said, it was written for him. There was already this growing list of things that I knew we needed to do. It was a bit ass-backwards in some ways because we knew what the budget had to be before we knew what the film was going to be. Because it was going to be our first feature. And I had a background of doing commercials in the UK and the kind of commercials I tended to make were kind of live action, computer graphics hybrid commercials so they were quite effects-heavy and I had a pretty good understanding of what effects would be the most cost-effective to to. So it was basically this list [of criteria]: We knew we would have about five million dollars we should be able to raise for the film. We knew it was going to star Sam Rockwell. We knew that we wanted to keep the cast as small as possible, and then we also knew that we also wanted a controlled shooting environment so that meant we would want to shoot everything in studio if we could. So that kind of gave me an initial starting point of what the story should be. And then also my own life. I was going through a long-distance relationship at the time which actually kept on going right through the shoot. And that was having a pretty profound impact on me emotionally and it kind of gave me a lot of ammunition, as to real feelings that I wanted to communicate in the film. So all of those things sort of came together. And then the idea of cloning and it being based on the moon was almost secondary in some ways.
MH: The idea of cloning has come up in other science fiction movies in the past but you take it to a higher level and explore it more. Are there other ideas you've seen in other movies that other directors haven't taken far enough and that you would want to explore?
DJ: Cloning I'm not so sure about but having one actor playing multiple parts, that was obviously something we were very interested in researching and seeing what other actors had done. There was Cronenberg's Dead Ringers with Jeremy Irons. We had the Criterion Editon of the DVD of that and there was a whole making-of section on that which was incredibly educational just on the technical side of how to do it, but also I think for Sam it was really useful to see what Jeremy Irons was doing as an actor to differentiate between the two characters. So that was a good all-around education. There was also Spike Jonze's film Adaptation where Nicolas Cage plays twins, which for me was really interesting just on a technical level because they did a few things in that film which visually were great and I actually was very fortunate to have the opportunity to talk to Spike about that and how he did it. He gave me some really good advice about how you work out which Sam is driving the scene and you film that first. As far as cloning. Are there any particular films that you would be thinking of?
MH: Have you seen Multiplicity?
DJ: Multiplicity is a film that we consciously avoided.
MH: It was slightly different in that the charactes in Multiplicity have slightly different personalities.
DJ: It was almost like a photocopy and each time the character got dumber and dumber, from what I remember. But in the buildup to making Moon we stayed away from Multiplicity mainly because it was a comedy and it was quite a broad comedy and Sam and I both wanted to make sure that our clones were fully rounded human characters.
MH: Why is the question "would you like yourself" important?
DJ: I think it should be important to everyone. I think that to me what makes it a really good starting point for a science fiction film, is that it's a very human question and a very important question. We all have relationships in the world but there is no relationship more important than having to deal with yourself and being aware of what you're like as a person to deal with and I think that's something that not everyone really does, not everyone takes the time to think about, what am I actually like and would I like myself if I had to deal with me. So I think it's an important question, so if in any way the film gives people pause to have that little conversation or investigation with themselves, that would be really exciting.
MH: It's not such a far out thing. People have internal dialogues all the time so in some ways it's a social experience just to be by yourself.
DJ: I think you're absolutely right. I don't think our film is that far out. I don't think it even had to be a science fiction film in many ways. The location on the far side of the moon gives you isolation, and the science of the cloning gives you this unusual situation but really it could be a stage play. It's a psychological and philosophical question really.
MH: You studied philosophy in college?
DJ: I did, I was at college in Ohio doing philosophy and then I went on to graduate school at Vanderbilt in Nashville. It was general moral philosophy, but also I was trying to make some arguments for how you might possibly apply ethics to sentient machines when we get to that stage. It was a little premature.
