Author Topic: NYT: Duncan Jones, Bowie’s Son, on Making ‘Warcraft’ and Facing His Own Battles  (Read 8112 times)

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Rxoz13Bthc[/youtube]
Warcraft - Official Trailer (HD)
Published on Nov 6, 2015
In Theaters, June 10, 2016 http://www.warcraftmovie.com
Legendary
















http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/movies/duncan-jones-bowies-son-on-making-warcraft-and-facing-his-own-battles.html


MOVIES
Duncan Jones,
David Bowie’s Son,
on Making ‘Warcraft’ and
Facing His Own Battles

By DAVE ITZKOFF
MAY 24, 2016


Duncan Jones, the director of “Warcraft.”
Credit Jake Michaels for The New York Times


SAN FRANCISCO — You could see “Warcraft” as just one more entry in the arms race of summer movies. Adapted from the popular video game series, the film (which Universal will release on June 10) depicts the conflict on a mythical world called Azeroth, as humanity defends itself from a horde of invading orcs. With its intricate visual effects, immense battle sequences and a reported budget of $100 million, it is a movie that its creators dearly hope will provide the foundation for a blockbuster franchise.

Yet “Warcraft” is an intensely personal undertaking for its director, Duncan Jones. It is a supersize project that this filmmaker and dedicated gamer (who turns 45 on May 30) passionately campaigned to make, with just two previous movies on his résumé.

It is also a film whose yearslong creation circumscribed a period of upheaval and tragedy in Mr. Jones’s life. When he started work on “Warcraft” in 2012, he had just married his wife, Rodene, after she was given a diagnosis of breast cancer and had a double mastectomy. Then, as the movie was nearing completion, Mr. Jones’s father, the rock star David Bowie, died of cancer in January.

“My film started and ended with cancer,” Mr. Jones said during a recent interview.

Now, with “Warcraft” about to enter theaters and Ms. Jones preparing to give birth to the couple’s first child at roughly the same time, Mr. Jones cannot help but regard the film — with its subplots of fathers and sons, and an orc couple preparing for their first baby — as a distillation of some of the very best and very worst experiences he has had.

“‘Warcraft’ is going to be a period of my life I treasure and loathe at the same time,” he said.

On this May afternoon, Mr. Jones was sitting in a conference room at Industrial Light & Magic, the effects company that helped create the medieval settings and motion-capture orcs for “Warcraft.”

Surrounded by whiteboards filled with “Star Wars” doodles and math equations, Mr. Jones was wearing a bushy beard, a broad smile and a custom T-shirt with an orc recreating Mr. Bowie’s famous mug-shot photo for a 1976 marijuana arrest.







Setting aside the celebrity lineage of Mr. Jones (who is the son of Mr. Bowie and his first wife, Angela), he has become an accomplished director in his own right. His 2009 debut feature, “Moon,” was a well-reviewed Kubrick-style suspense film that starred Sam Rockwell as an astronaut working in solitude on a lunar base.

Mr. Jones’s second movie, “Source Code,” a science-fiction thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal, was a commercial hit in 2011.

But Mr. Jones said he struggled to put together a planned third film, and the only projects that studios offered were sequels to other directors’ movies.

“I don’t want to build on someone else’s legacy,” he said. “I wanted to establish my own thing.”

That opportunity presented itself with “Warcraft,” which the video game publisher Blizzard Entertainment had spent years trying to get made. When the director Sam Raimi left the project, Mr. Jones pounced, only to be disappointed by the screenplay.

“It was the stale fantasy trope of, humans are the good guys, monsters are the bad guys,” Mr. Jones said. “It just didn’t capture in my gut what made Warcraft, the idea of heroes being on both sides.”

Chris Metzen, who is Blizzard’s senior vice president for story and franchise development and has worked on its Warcraft and World of Warcraft games for more than 20 years, said his company was also looking for a more balanced story that found “a common humanity” in both sets of characters.

“We were told audiences just aren’t going to sit for that,” Mr. Metzen said. “And Duncan comes in, and almost the first thing out of his mouth was, like: ‘Here’s how I see it. It’s 50-50.’ And we just about jumped out of our chairs in joy.”

Though Mr. Jones had never made a film as big as “Warcraft,” Mr. Metzen said, “He was obviously just a geek like us — a PC gamer who had spent an inordinate number of hours within World of Warcraft, specifically, and just got it.”

There was plenty of practical experience still to come for Mr. Jones, who wrote the “Warcraft” screenplay with Charles Leavitt.

Developing the motion-capture technology to create the film’s gargantuan, tusk-mouthed orcs took many months for Industrial Light & Magic. Mr. Jones said he did not see the first finished shot of an orc until about two weeks into filming, at which point, he said, “There was a huge sigh of relief.”

While shooting proceeded on hangar-size stages in Vancouver, Legendary Entertainment, the media company that produced the film with Atlas Entertainment, moved from Warner Bros. to Universal and was sold to the Dailan Wanda Group, a Chinese conglomerate.

The movie could have faced trouble at these junctures, and Mr. Jones said: “I worried my pants off that I’d just wasted a year, two years, three years of my life. But I’m very, very grateful to say they did not affect us.”

“Warcraft,” which carries a costly price tag and faces steep competition at the summer box office, has been flagged as one of the summer’s riskiest releases by trade publications like The Hollywood Reporter.

But Mr. Jones earned praise from his cast members for never being overwhelmed by the scope of the film, which required a lot of on-set imagination to fill in characters and settings that were added months later.




Toby Kebbell as the orc Durotan in “Warcraft.” Credit Universal Pictures



“There’s times where we’re all lined up and you have to ask him, ‘Where are we, and where are we going?’” said Travis Fimmel (a star of TV’s “Vikings” and the film “Maggie’s Plan”), who plays the film’s human hero, Anduin Lothar. “You just have no idea. Duncan just had every answer. He’d spent so long preparing that he had the whole film in his head already.”

Toby Kebbell, who plays the orc Durotan, a tribal leader and father to be, said he was surprised to find that Mr. Jones, beneath a pleasantly rumpled exterior, has the desire to be a director on the scale of James Cameron or Peter Jackson.

“Anyone who comes into that category is absolutely a lion,” Mr. Kebbell said. “The ambition is something to respect. I think it’s wonderful that someone we all thought was going to be lo-fi has actually got the ability to take a genre piece, make it fun, keep it entertaining and choke you up.”

Mr. Jones was understandably wary about discussing his father, and cautioned at one point, “I don’t want to give you too much of an in to ask me about my dad.”

But while he might wish for more time to mourn his father in private, Mr. Jones said he recognized that with a costly new movie needing promotional support, he had to put himself out there, however tentatively.

“The timing isn’t ideal,” he said. “I would rather not have had to do all of this. But in any other circumstances, I’d want to do this. That’s how I’m approaching it.”

Mr. Jones said that his father, an avid fan of fantasy and science fiction (and a star of films like “Labyrinth”) had been encouraging of “Warcraft.”

“I showed him an early, early cut of the film,” Mr. Jones said, “and he was very excited for me, and was pretty amazed about how we achieved some of the visuals. I took him through how we did some things.

“It’s always nerve-racking, showing your parents things you’ve been working on,” he added. “But he loved ‘Moon,’ and he loved ‘Source Code.’
“He’s always been incredibly supportive,” Mr. Jones said, using the present tense.

Mr. Jones said he and Mr. Metzen had discussed a possible three-film “Warcraft” arc if the first movie were to prove successful. But Mr. Jones has already decided that he will next direct “Mute,” a science-fiction film that he has wanted to make for many years, and which he said was “way back down on the lower end of the budget.”

That desire to balance mass entertainments with smaller, personal expressions came directly from Mr. Bowie.

“One of the things my dad always said is that it’s O.K. to do one for you and one for them,” Mr. Jones said. “He taught me a lot of things, but that’s certainly one of the many that I took to heart.”

The strange symmetry of becoming a father at a time when themes of fatherhood pervade his life was not lost on Mr. Jones.

“Listen, my dad had me when he was 25,” he said. “I’ve wanted to have kids since then. I was living vicariously through these characters, and fortunately, it’s happening for real now.”

Looking back to the start of “Warcraft,” Mr. Jones said that his wife was “finishing off her chemotherapy and radiation and double mastectomy and all of that.”

Now, he said, “she’s great, she’s healthy, she’s full of baby.”

To have grappled with loss during the film, Mr. Jones said, was “tragic, but at the same time, the fact that we’ve got a baby coming it all just feels —— ”

He paused to consider the right words. “Well, that’s the circle of life, unfortunately,” he said. “You go through hardships, and you lose people, and new people come into your life. That’s what life is.”

For him, Mr. Jones said, “Warcraft” will “definitely be one of those bookmarks in life.” With a laugh, he added, “For most people, it’s just going to be a movie.”
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Front-Ranger

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It's wonderful following the career of Duncan Jones. I was blown away by his first movie "Moon" and bought it right away. I also loved "Source Code". I can't wait for his works; they are a must-see! Thank you, John, for posting this.  :-*
"chewing gum and duct tape"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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It's wonderful following the career of Duncan Jones. I was blown away by his first movie "Moon" and bought it right away. I also loved "Source Code". I can't wait for his works; they are a must-see! Thank you, John, for posting this.  :-*


Me too, Lee (re Moon and Source Code).

I just can't believe, though, that he turns 45 in 5 days. Almost exactly 40 years ago, a long-ago friend was serving cookies and milk to 'Zowie' at pre-school.

Aack!! I am OLD!!!

 :o ::) :laugh:
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

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"Moon" actually reminds me a lot of Frankenstein, the way it addresses the question of what is humanity? Everyone should see it.

Will "Warcraft" be Jones's "The Hulk"?
"chewing gum and duct tape"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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"Moon" actually reminds me a lot of Frankenstein, the way it addresses the question of what is humanity? Everyone should see it.

Will "Warcraft" be Jones's "The Hulk"?


In a way, Moon was much crueler than Mary Shelley's work. Victor Frankenstein and his Creature came to hate and fear each other, with terrible consequences. Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), as a copy, was utterly disposable, and he didn't even know it. Horrible.
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/may/30/duncan-jones-warcraft-the-beginning-moon-david-bowie-source-code


Movies
Duncan Jones
on Warcraft:

'If you get it wrong, people
are going to be upset'

The director son of David Bowie
on his £100m franchise movie
and the downside of geek culture

By Paul MacInnes
Monday 30 May 2016 04.00 EDT




Duncan Jones, director of  in Warcraft. Photograph: Publicity image / Michael Muller / © 2016 Universal Pictures International All Rights Reserved



You’ll believe an orc can cry. There are many difficult things Duncan Jones’s new $100m movie is trying to pull off – from launching a fresh Hollywood franchise to making that rarest of things, a half-decent computer game movie – but getting an audience of both kids and adults to empathise with massive green monsters is up there. Massive green monsters with tartar-covered tusks and computer-generated nasal hair to boot.

Such is the world of Warcraft. A war between orcs and humans on the world of Azeroth, complete with enormous battle scenes, feathered griffins and lots of magical incantation, is the cinematic manifestation of a gaming phenomenon. Over the course of its 22-year life, Warcraft has gone from role-playing strategy game to an online world that, at the end of 2015, had 5.5 million active subscribers (down from a high of 12 million in 2010).

Gamers don’t so much play World Of Warcraft as live there, building characters and leading them to combat, be they humans or orcs or dwarves or a panda in a bamboo hat (they’re called Pandaren). It’s not a surprise that Hollywood eventually stuck its nose in. A Warcraft project has been stuck in development for years, however, as creating a film that can win over both ardent fans and casual cinemagoers is difficult. Bringing these audiences together also happens to be the holy grail in 21st-century Hollywood.

“If you get it wrong, people are going to be very upset,” says Jones when we meet. “The thing you have to remember with Warcraft, probably more than with any other computer game, ever, is that people spend more time in this place than in the places they live. It actually is like their home town. So if you get that wrong it’s a bit like the people in Notting Hill, who are still recovering from the Notting Hill movie.”

The cheery, scruffy Jones is talking in a lot crammed full of Warcraft props and paraphernalia within Los Angeles’s Universal Studios. Once known as Zowie Bowie, he is David’s only son, and calls California home. The 44-year-old made his name with two small but highly imaginative sci-fi films: Moon and Source Code. In Moon, Sam Rockwell’s astronaut tries to escape from a deserted lunar base. In Source Code, Jake Gyllenhaal has to live the same eight minutes again and again until he can find a bomber loose on a train. With these films Jones proved his ability to create genre pieces with emotional resonance. On Warcraft he has to do that again, and make it big.

“How can I make a fantasy film with engaging characters, with a storyline that really brings you along, but at the same time there’s an entirely different film there if you’re watching as a fan?” is how Jones describes the challenge. “Even though all my films so far have been quite genre – I say all my films, my three films – I want to try and put in as much humanity and truth, things that everyone experiences, as possible.”




Travis Fimmel and Paula Pattons in Warcraft: The Beginning. Photograph: Allstar/Universal Pictures



The key to unlocking the challenge, Jones decided, was in making fantasy creatures that were empathetic. One of the key features in World Of Warcraft is that you can play as whatever kind of creature you like, making a hero of an orc or a human. In early versions of the film’s story, however, orcs were simply the enemy. Jones rewrote the script – or, in his words, gave it an aggressive polish – to make the orcs as heroic as the humans. The orc chieftain, Durotan, for example, became a new father who wanted to preserve the traditions of his race even as their homeland dies around them.

Conceiving of such a character only presented Jones with another test, a technical one. How do you make these characters convincing on screen? He decided that, as much as possible, he wanted to film in live action. He built huge sets, including a castle, a woodland glade and a battlefield with its own hillock. Rather than creating CG characters he cast human actors, and rather than covering them in prosthetics that would limit their expressiveness, he dressed them in motion-capture suits, digitally capturing their every movement then mapping them on to an animated avatar.

Increasingly, films such as Warcraft are changing the role of the director. When shooting, not only are they working with their cast, they’re consulting a second screen, watching rudimentary versions of the actors’ digital characters playing the same action. And once filming is complete, the director shifts from working with actors to animators and visual effects specialists.




Robert Kazinsky in Warcraft: The Beginning. Photograph: Allstar/Universal Pictures



“Every film goes through various revisions,” says Jones, “Whether it’s the original writing, the shooting or the editing. [In Warcraft] there were just extra steps along the way. There was the interpretation of what this world was going to look like when we made it a reality. Then there were the visual effects. As they started to be delivered, you would see things that worked and things that didn’t, as well as opportunities to improve things. It really does become a whole new creative process.”

Jones’s Warcraft applies that process and, largely, meets the challenge. The orcs are relatable and funny and, most of all, colourfully violent. By comparison the humans are a bit bloodless but the film succeeds on its own terms of bringing back the family fantasy movie (more than anything else, it reminded me of the 80s classic Clash Of The Titans).

Whether the online horde of Warcraft aficionados will agree, however, remains to be seen. Jones defines himself as a geek but struggles to identify with the zeal of modern fandom. “I loved Star Wars but I wasn’t rabid about it as some people are. I think we’ve reached a level now where that is culture. I miss there being more of a mix of new ideas.”




Travis Fimmel and Duncan Jones in the set of Warcraft: The Beginning. Photograph: Allstar/Universal Pictures



I’ve been requested not to ask Jones about his personal life, given the recent passing of his father, but I wondered what he made of Bowie’s remarks, given in a 2000 interview with Jeremy Paxman, in which he described the potential of the internet as exhilarating and terrifying, and “an alien life form”. They seem ever more pertinent in the age of social media and digital fandoms.

“I don’t know if my dad would have realised at the time just the noise factor of the internet,” he says. “How much it just drowns everything out, the ability to discover things. I don’t think he, maybe he didn’t … I would have liked to have to talked to him about that actually but ...

“I know that he treasured his record collection. I remember him talking about finding things that really excited him. Finding records, finding books, finding movies. Just the ability to be someone that knows about something that few people do and introduce it to a wider audience. That is so immediate now that it means nothing. I think that’s a loss. That’s not a benefit of the internet. I feel that we’ve lost the ability to obsess, to be an otaku, to specialise [in] something, in a way that no one else really knows. It’s too easy to just look something up on Google. Everything just feels cheap and easy. Oh, and go see Warcraft, everybody!”

Warcraft: The Beginning is out now
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"