Thirty five years ago, give or take, I was an undergraduate at NYU, and a friend of mine was at Manhattan's Hunter College. For a short while, my friend worked part-time at a Upper Eastside pre-school called 'AlphabetLand,' and one day she told me that David Bowie's
daughter, Zowie Bowie, had just been enrolled. I said, "No, Nina, Bowie has a
son--Zowie Bowie is a boy."
My friend, who knew nothing of music, and certainly knew little about David Bowie, was at first quite sceptical.
"Well," she finally said, "Zowie wears a dress."
Welcome, Mr. Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones. I'm very, very interested in seeing your movie!
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/movies/07itzk.html?ref=movies?8dpcSon of Major Tom, at Ground Control Sam Rockwell in “Moon,” the first feature film directed by Duncan Jones, son of the singer David Bowie.
The film sums up Mr. Jones’s influences and marks his stepping out of his father’s long shadow.
By DAVE ITZKOFF
Published: June 3, 2009 It was inevitable that
Duncan Jones’s first movie would be a science-fiction film. While he was growing up, Mr. Jones, the British director, said, his father made sure he read at least two hours a night, and turned him on to the speculative fiction of authors like
George Orwell when he was as young as 8 or 9. Later, as a lonely adolescent, he was irresistibly drawn to the alternate realities presented in the novels of
Philip K. Dick and
J. G. Ballard. “My upbringing was pretty weird, anyway,” Mr. Jones, said recently, “so it was maybe less of a jump for me.”
If his name and his stately, Americanized accent do not immediately ring a bell, Mr. Jones is — for the moment — better known as the son of
David Bowie, the glam rock star who populated his own parallel worlds with sci-fi alter egos like Ziggy Stardust and Halloween Jack, and who raised his son under the otherworldly name
Zowie Bowie.
The director Duncan Jones (above, on the set of his film
“Moon” ) acquired a love of movies from his dad, David Bowie.
Having reverted to his birth name some 20 years ago, Mr. Jones, now 38, and the only child of Mr. Bowie and his first wife,
Angela, is making his feature directing debut with
“Moon,” a futuristic thriller that opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday. For him the film is both a summation of his many youthful influences and a signal that he’s ready to step out of his father’s slender but estimable shadow.
“I’m glad I’ve waited until now, to be honest,” Mr. Jones said. “I was a bit of a delicate flower growing up, and I think it could have damaged me if I tried to do it any younger.”
A muscular man with a youthful face and a scruffy beard, Mr. Jones acquired his love of movies from his father. When Mr. Jones was a child, Mr. Bowie collaborated with him on homemade stop-motion animations and took him to the sets of his films like
“Labyrinth” and
“Absolute Beginners.” Mr. Jones also was almost certainly the first kid on his block to have a copy of
“Star Wars” on Sony U-matic video. (For that reason, he said, “I was like the coolest kid in school.”)
As an adult Mr. Jones pursued a Ph.D. in philosophy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville but dropped out to study moviemaking at the London Film School (then known as the London International Film School). After completing that program he slowly worked his way up the industry ladder, doing camerawork for
Tony Scott on a television version of
“The Hunger” and directing music video and commercials, including a risqué spot for the clothing maker
French Connection UK. (The ad, called
“Fashion v. Style,” depicted two women in a brutal fight, then kissing and making up.)
A couple of years ago Mr. Jones approached the actor
Sam Rockwell with
“Mute,” a science-fiction script that he hoped to direct as his first feature. At the time Mr. Rockwell wasn’t interested in playing another villain, as the screenplay called for, but discovered that he shared Mr. Jones’s tastes in unsettling visions of the near future.
“We talked about the
John Cassavetes realism of the acting in
‘Alien,’ ” Mr. Rockwell recalled in a telephone interview. “When that monster is introduced in the movie, you’re already pulled in by the performances. It’s so loosey-goosey and improvisational and very kitchen-sink real.”
Mr. Jones and a writing partner,
Nathan Parker, went back and wrote a new script with Mr. Rockwell in mind. Called
“Moon,” it told the story of a blue-collar worker in a distant decade, laboring in solitude at a base on the dark side of the lunar surface. Cut off from regular communications with Earth, he begins to unravel — a situation that is not improved when a younger duplicate of himself shows up at the base.
This time Mr. Rockwell signed on, and Mr. Jones received financing and distribution for the $5 million project from
Sony Pictures Classics and
Liberty Films, as well as some emergency funds from
Xingu Films, the production company run by
Trudie Styler (
“Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” ).
Like Mr. Jones, Ms. Styler has her own rock ’n’ roll bona fides; her husband is the musician
Sting. But she said she was drawn to Mr. Jones not because of his pedigree but because of the quality of his work.
“He’s not as green as grass, Duncan,” Ms. Styler said in a telephone interview. “He comes from the world of promos and videos and made a very good living doing that, as
Guy Ritchie did. So that tells me they both know what they’re doing with a camera.”
(Additionally, Ms. Styler acknowledged, she had a soft spot for sci-fi movies. “Sting did
‘Dune’ all those years ago,” she said, “and I think that was a very underrated and brilliant film.”)
Shot in just over a month in early 2008 at Shepperton Studios in Britain (where
Ridley Scott, Tony Scott’s brother, made
“Alien” ),
“Moon” evokes a palpable mood of isolation and paranoia that its creators say was not too difficult to conjure up. The production, which took place during the Hollywood writers’ strike, became increasingly secluded as other projects at the studio were temporarily shut down, and its elaborate Moon base design required that cast and crew be sealed into the set each day during filming. For long stretches of the movie Mr. Rockwell is the only person seen or heard from on screen (aside from
Kevin Spacey, who provides the voice of the base’s affectless computer). Also, both Mr. Jones and Mr. Rockwell were struggling with long-distance relationships, which, Mr. Rockwell said, made it “pretty easy to get that
‘Taxi Driver’ feeling.”
With its aspirations to scientific accuracy and its modest outer-space locales,
“Moon” bears the obvious influences of
Stanley Kubrick’s
“2001: A Space Odyssey.” But Mr. Jones said the film had come by those influences secondhand, and was more directly inspired by post
-“2001” movies like
“Outland,” “Silent Running” and
“Blade Runner.” Like those films
“Moon” was also at its heart “trying to tell a very human story,” Mr. Jones said. “It just happened to be in a science-fiction setting.”
As he prepares to take his first voluntary steps into the public eye, Mr. Jones knows that at first he will be an object of curiosity largely because of his father. “Eventually I’m going to be judged purely on my own merits, and I’m confident that will happen eventually,” he said. “It will take a film or two.”
In the meantime Mr. Jones had no hesitation acknowledging the role that Mr. Bowie continues to play in shaping his life and his work. “Everything I am is a result of the experiences I had growing up, so of course he’s important,” Mr. Jones said.
He added: “I’m sleeping in the spare room right now, so he’s very important, because he gives me a place to stay when I’m in New York.”