Moon [Sundance 09]

[NEON MERCURY]

as everyones mentionede-thi dlooks phenomenal!  im ready for another brilliant sci fi film to stand beside the hilgly underrrated solaris (soderb) and sunshine

[SiliasRuby]

I loved Both of those as well....we are kindrid spirits PM

[NEON MERCURY]

I loved Both of those as well....we are kindrid spirits PM

it s atements like these that i wish we had the oft rumored xixax out door grill party at RK's house and chill w/each other, i think hes in texas and thats a good central meeting spot

[SiliasRuby]

I loved Both of those as well....we are kindrid spirits PM

it s atements like these that i wish we had the oft rumored xixax out door grill party at RK's house and chill w/each other, i think hes in texas and thats a good central meeting spot

I'd totally be down. But also Like I have said before if you are ever in LA, for the little one to see universal Studios or disneyland, let me know, I can show you the sights and sounds of the real los angeles.

[pete]

fucking brilliant movie.  hoooly shit.  I saw this and the entire time I kept on thinking, don't let the ending suck.  and it didn't suck.  I saw a japanese movie called departures yesterday, also at the SF international film festival, and this today, and you know what?  sometimes we forget how much we love movies!

[Kal]

pete, my film is playing these days over there. you planning to see it? i'm not able to come up but the director is there.

[pete]

kal, I really wanna see you and have some fun with you live and show you my movie after watching your movie.  I work on Tuesday so I don't think I can make it to the remaining screening.  I thought my week was going to be free but turned out to be really crazy.  I kissed a supertall girl last night but then found out today she was a man...nah found out she has a man, but it was still a fun afternoon spent, but had I known maybe I woulda gone to see your movie instead this afternoon.  Sorry dude I'm sleep deprived and I probably should be sending this via the PM...unless this is PM and I just can't tell anymore.

about the movie. has anyone else seen it?  I have a question that's kinda a spoiler.  hook me up.

[MacGuffin]

Jones dives from 'Moon' into 'Deep'
Submarine drama based on true story
Source: Variety

"Moon" helmer Duncan Jones is swapping outer space for the underwater with "Escape from the Deep."

Project is an adaptation of Alex Kershaw's book about the real-life WW2 story of the U.S. Navy submarine USS Tang, which was hit by one of its own torpedoes and sunk to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The crew members then had to escape from their iron coffin while enemy depth charges were being dropped from above and swim 180 feet to the surface.

Kershaw is penning the screenplay, which Jones will direct. U.K.-based shingle Brilliant Films' Joe Abrams and Rory Gilmartin will produce. Brilliant is funding the project's development from its in-house fund.

"Having been fascinated by submarine films like 'Das Boot' and 'Crimson Tide,' it's a really unique opportunity to tell an amazing story like this that is actually true," Duncan Jones told Variety.

Project is set to go into production sometime next year.

Jones is also looking to start work on his next project "Mute," which is described as the flip side to the Sam Rockwell starrer "Moon," about a lonely astronaut nearing the end of a three-year stint spent mining helium.

"This is a bigger, more commercial film than 'Moon,' although it is another science fiction project," commented Jones. "It's a thriller set in Berlin in the future."

Jones is currently out to cast on "Mute," which he also scripted.

[Stefen]

I really can't wait to see this. I hope it opens semi-wide and plays near me.

[MacGuffin]

How David Bowie's son wound up making an indie movie about the Moon
Source: SciFi Wire

Duncan Jones, director of the upcoming sci-fi drama Moon, told SCI FI Wire that he welcomed the challenge of directing the ambitious film on its very modest $5 million budget and revealed some of the old-school tricks he employed to pull it off.

Moon stars Sam Rockwell (Galaxy Quest) as Sam Bell, who's approaching the end of his three-year contract to mine the power source Helium-3 on the moon. He's lived and worked alone on a lunar base there, with only the computer Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey) keeping him company. Now, just as he's preparing for a return home to his wife and daughter on Earth, Bell begins to fall apart, physically and emotionally. And then he meets another Sam Bell, who's angry, younger and in far better shape.

SCI FI Wire spoke to Jones—the 38-year-old son of David Bowie—by telephone last week. Moon opens in a platform release starting on June 12, and the following are edited excerpts from our exclusive interview with Jones. (Possible spoilers ahead!)

You shot Moon on a budget of just $5 million. What were some of the tricks you used to stretch your bucks?

Jones: Up front, we decided that we weren't going to go on any location shoots. We wanted to have completely controlled shooting environments, so we did everything on soundstages. We basically had two soundstages, one which was for the interior of the moon base, which we built in its entirety and which was another attempt to create a believable location space and also to save us some space, since a lot of our lighting was pre-existing within the set build. So our cinematographer only had a very small lighting kit that he had to carry around with him around the base. Most of the lighting was actually built into the base.

And for the exteriors?

Jones: For the exteriors, we built this chunk of lunar terrain, about 30 foot by 40 foot, and were pulling around model miniatures. So we went with a very retro technique for doing those effects. Obviously, we had the benefit of having the backup of a post-production company like Cinesite, who sort of beautified and fixed all the obvious problems, like being able to see fishing line when we were pulling trucks across the lunar landscape and digitally expanding the landscape. But we tried to capture as much as possible in-camera in order to save ourselves money and to give the film a different, hybrid look that just felt more real.

If someone had walked in the door a few weeks before filming commenced and doubled your budget, how different might Moon look?

Jones: That money would have been spent on giving me more time, I think, during the actual shoot. I would have taken a few extra days to build the actual interior of the lunar base. I would have put more detail in that. I would have maybe spent a little more money on a couple of effects shots. But, really, the majority of it would have been spent on giving me and the crew and Sam more to have more camera coverage and more takes. So it wouldn't have been a hugely different film, I don't think. The story was largely contained anyway. There wasn't a natural way to expand it just by throwing money at it. It was what it was. More money just would have given more time.

Sam Rockwell acts opposite himself for much of the movie. How did he pull off the technical aspects of that without losing the humanity of either version of Sam?

Jones: It was an incredibly hard thing for Sam, because he's trained in this acting technique called Meisner, which is very much a reactionary form of acting where you use the actors you're working with to spur you to do improv back at them. It's a very collaborative way of working, which, obviously, completely had no bearing on what we were doing.

As an independent [film], we were very fortunate in that my producer was able to put aside enough money for me to spend a week doing rehearsals with Sam in New York. Sam brought along a friend of his, Yul Vasquez, who's another actor, and we basically broke down the script and worked through it. So Sam had the opportunity to try things out in that week's rehearsals and build up differentiations between the various versions of Sam that appear in the film. So we got a good 80 percent of the way there just in rehearsals.

How did that carry over to the set?

Jones: When it got to the actual shoot, and it became very, very technical, at least we had that [rehearsal period] to rely on, to give Sam some sense that, as an actor, he was still given the opportunity to put his spin on it. And it was very technical when we were shooting, but we made some discoveries along the way about how we could do things in such a way that Sam could be fairly improvisational at times. So it was a balance between what Sam needed and what I needed in order to feel like he could be organic with the process of acting.

Your father has been a public figure for many years and is an entertainment legend as well. What do you think, directly and indirectly, his influence on you has been?

Jones: My parents divorced when I was very young, and, unusually for that period of time, I was actually in the custody of my father. So I grew up around all the same things that were influencing him. If he was interested in music and playing it in the living room, I was hearing it. If he was watching movies that were giving him ideas, I was probably watching them, too. So there's that. I shared those experiences. And my father was tremendous at being able to recommend things to me while I was growing up that seemed just right for the age that I was at, that were appropriate and gave me food for thought. So I was reading George Orwell and John Wyndham and J.G. Ballard and other authors, Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, as I was growing up. It was always giving me interesting, challenging things to think about.

[MacGuffin]

Exclusive: Moon director Duncan Jones on his sci-fi inspirations and how he fudged science
Source: SciFi Wire

Duncan Jones, writer-director of the indie sci-fi psychological thriller movie Moon, told SCI FI Wire that he wanted to create a film that was based in hard science, but knew he would have to fudge a few details in order to tell a better story. "There were certain things stylistically we had to make choices on," Jones said in an exclusive interview last week in Los Angeles.

"Basically there's a star field that you can see from when we're on the lunar surface," Jones said. "Obviously, the Apollo missions showed that you wouldn't actually see the stars, but we tried it without, and it just doesn't look right. It makes everything look like a model miniature, so even though it may be scientifically inaccurate—although you could say that with a certain kind of camera you might be able to capture an exposure which gave you the stars as well—but it was just one of those things where style had to take precedence over accuracy."

The film stars Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, who's approaching the end of his three-year contract to mine the power source Helium-3 on the moon.

He's lived and worked alone on a lunar base there, with only the computer Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey) keeping him company. Now, just as he's preparing for a return home to his wife and daughter on Earth, Bell begins to fall apart, physically and emotionally.

Jones spoke exclusively to SCI FI Wire in Los Angeles. The following is an edited version of our interview. Moon opens in limited release on June 12. (Possible BIG spoilers ahead!)

One of the things that I liked most about Moon is that it shares stylistic company with movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Gattaca and Contact, movies that have a sort of "science-fact" basis. Was that sort of a mandate when you were conceiving this?

Jones: Hard science, yeah. I'm seriously into my sci-fi, so for me I wouldn't feel comfortable trying to do a soft sci-fi film. I don't feel any great deal of connection to that kind of material. We put Moon together based on some personal stories and ideas, but also on the work of a scientist, a guy called Robert Zubrin, who wrote a book called Entering Space, which was about colonizing the solar system and doing it in a fiscally viable way.

One of the early chapters in that was going to the moon, mining Helium-3 and using it as a natural resource and as a raw material and fuel for fusion power. So all of that is kind of scientific backing of the story, which is quite a lot; that really justifies setting up the base, what the base does, what Sam's job is. [BIG spoiler ahead: Skip to the next question if you don't want to see it.]

So it does a lot of the work there, and then on the cloning side, to be honest, the real stretching of the truth element is not so much the science but what the company decides to do with the science. That's where you're kind of stretching credibility.

Where do you make the decision as a filmmaker to fictionalize certain elements simply because that will make for a better story? For example, inside the moon base, there's normal gravity.

Jones: That was an early call. We very briefly played around with the idea of "Right—how are we going to do one-sixth gravity? Do we use wire work?" On an independent film budget, it's just impossible. There's no way we were going to be able to do it, not to mention there's no way to hide the wire rigs if you want to have a claustrophobic shape of the base that we had built. That just wasn't going to work, and it wasn't appropriate for an indie film, so we made some compromises. But we screened the film at the NASA Space Center, and none of the NASA employees or astronaut Tom Jones had any problems, so obviously if it passed their test, we kind of felt comfortable that people would just kind of accept that. ...

Many of the movies that this film shares company with, such as 2001, have a great wealth of reference material you can drawn on for technical information, much less artistic inspiration. Did you look at the making of those films at all for any guidance?

Jones: Not really, not those science fiction films. Dead Ringers was important to us, because of the work we do with Sam and having him play multiple parts. Dead Ringers and [director David] Cronenberg, there was a Criterion version of that DVD that was very important to us, because there was a whole making-of section on that, and it's actually so good that it's actually got raw rushes from the shoot on there.

So we were really studying that as a starting point for what we wanted to do. And then I had the chance to talk to Spike Jonze, who'd done Adaptation, where they had Nicolas Cage playing multiple parts. That was really useful, and he gave me some great advice as well. Those were the two films that really informed on the technical side.

On the aesthetic side, absolutely—I mean, Outland in particular was a big one for me. The habitation zone in Alien of the Nostromo, that was another huge one. Those were basically the two main ones, sort of the work of guys like Ron Cobb and Douglas Trumbull and Peter Hyams. There was a group of people that we were very much referencing and looking at as well for the look of things, myself and my concept artist, Gavin Rothery.

[pete]

that interview contained some spoilers.


SERIOUSLY just go see the movie without knowing anything about it.  The Sundance links had GIANT GAPING spoilers and the interview some small ones.

[Stefen]

lock the thread!

[Kal]

that interview contained some spoilers.


SERIOUSLY just go see the movie without knowing anything about it.  The Sundance links had GIANT GAPING spoilers and the interview some small ones.

YES. When I saw it I had zero idea of what the hell I was going to see, and it made a world of difference.

[pete]

dear majority of xixax

fucking stop wasting your time with all them summer movies then complaining about them afterwards and go see Moon.
and departures.

seriously.