Everhip

Moon is director Duncan Jones first feature length film and it’s brilliant. Sam Rockwell stars as “Sam Bell”, an astronaut stationed on the moon for the past three years who is very anxious to get home. But, with only two weeks to go, Sam is starting to notice some strange happenings around the base and when he starts to investigate, his life will be changed forever.  (Editors note: this inteview may contain some small spoilers)

Q- How did you come up with the idea for this and how did you achieve such a great looking film on a five million dollar budget?

I came up with it because I wanted to work with Sam Rockwell. I met up with him three years ago and we talked about another project which was too ambitious for a first feature film and part of the problem was that I gave the script to Sam to play a role and he wanted to play a different role and we couldn’t convince him,. But, it was good because it wasn’t the right film anyway.  I’m a huge fan of his and thought he was an amazing actor, and meeting him in person and seeing what a clearly cool guy he was as a human being, I just knew that he was the person I wanted to work with on my first film.

So, we talked a little bit about the kind of acting roles that he wanted to do in his career and types of films that we both loved, and there was this period of science fiction films from the late seventies and early eighties like “Outland” and “Silent Running” that we ended up paying homage to in “Moon”…we really wanted to make a film that felt like it fit in that canon of films.  “Moon’ was something that I immediately started thinking about after we got back to New York

Q- This film is good on the science and the science fiction. How much did you anguish over the science fiction aspect? 

You’re very kind. We tried to stick to the science in certain aspects. As far as helium-3 mining goes, there was a book by Robert Zubrin called “Mining In Space” that I read quite a few years ago,  which is an amazing book.  It’s non-fiction and it’s by a guy who used to advise NASA,  and it’s all about how we would go about colonizing the solar system, and doing it in a way that is financially viable.  One of the problems with exploration in space is that we don’t have a Cold War to motivate us to spend millions and trillions dollars and we don’t really have the technology yet to have it done by private enterprise.  So,  Robert Zubrin’s book talks about going to the moon, settling up bases there to mine this resource, helium-3. Which doesn’t have a huge amount of value right now, but when we get fusion power working back here on Earth, which they’re hypothesizing is maybe ten or twenty years away, all of a sudden,  helium-3 becomes an incredibly valuable resource.  It’s the main burning fuel for fusion power.

Q- Is NASA keeping up with the film?  Yeah! In fact, more than keep up with it.  After SXSW,  I actually got invited to do a screening of the film at NASA.  So, I went to Houston and did a screening where about eighty percent of the audience were NASA  employees and astronauts, Tom Jones was there, and I showed the film, did a Q&A afterwards… it started out with them asking me three or four questions and I was asking them questions.  One of the NASA people asked me why the space station in the film looked like it did, heavy and made of concrete, and I said “I understand that you guys like to keep things lightweight and bring things with you, but I’m extrapolating that in the future, you’re going to want to use the resources on the moon and build something a bit more sturdy to protect you from radiation and micrometeorites.”  Well, I suggested that, and one of the women in the audience raised her hand and said, “I work for NASA and I’m working on something called “mooncrete”, which is basically exactly that.  It’s concrete using lunar materials and ice water from the lunar holes to create a concrete substitute. Then basically the audience started discussing things amongst themselves and I just kind of sat back.

Q- What influenced your costumes? And was there anything you had to have in the film?  Well, you have to have a spacesuit and it’s so expensive and so hard to do.  We were looking for other designs for spacesuits from other science fiction films…“Event Horizon” had some of the best looking suits, but ridiculously and extravagantly expensive.  We only had five hundred or a thousand dollars to spend on ours.  Actually, “Alien” had a really great suit at the end of the first film, and that suit was kind of a starting point for us because it was so simple.  The texture of our suit is kind of ribbed and has all of these shapes on it.  And the inside of the base has the same kind of ribbed, padded cell feel to it that we’d gone for.  I had this amazing concept artist, Gavin Rothery who I’d worked with and he and I have know each other for years. We worked in commercials together and the computer games industry, so we have a very good rapport and understanding of each others taste.  And, we’d been looking at the work of guys like Rob Cobb, and Sid Mead and Douglas Trumbull and Ridley Scott films and Stanley Kubrick as well, and there were all of these looks that we tried to incorporate. Then obviously,  we had a costume designer called Jane Petrie who had worked on 28 Weeks Later, and she had done some amazing work on that.  Basically, all of the key crew people were well known in the industry for doing amazing things with no money.  So, that’s kind of how we chose the people that got involved.  Even our production designer, an old timer who had worked with Ridley and Tony Scott in the commercials industry, was known as “the production designer who can do stuff with no money.”  So, that’s kind of how we got a lot of our heads of department. And, Jane Petrie was fantastic.

Q- And, you had these space age riffs on infomercial products ( a Snuggie, a Flowbee, etc) What’s the story? Is this product placement?

Because it was a little independent British film, nobody would take us seriously. We did actually approach the guys about the yellow suit. That yellow suit is called a Selk bag and we did approach the guys with a “Do a little bit of investment in a science fiction film from Britain?”  Yeah so, no we didn’t really get any product placement help.

Q- How did you come up with the idea of Sam’s three year contract? I spent my own three years feeling very isolated and alone at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, so it’s no coincidence that Sam’s three year contract is the same as my three years at graduate school.

Q-   So, Kevin Spacey was never on the set. Did you feel like an actor yourself giving someone for Sam to play off of?

I did.  I don’t know what Sam thinks about that, but there was some method directing going on there.  In the whole period of making the film, I had this horrible, heartbreaking long distance relationship I was going through, and I actually let it keep going just because I wanted to feel that way.  And, that really helped me while I was making the film with Sam and Sam was also going through a long distance relationship with his girlfriend.  I kind of tried to look like him…like when he had the long bushy beard. I thought it was useful.  His character was called Sam. When he read the script, he was faced with Sam all the time. When he was talking to me he was faced with someone who was going through similar stuff, so I think that helped. And, he had no other actors to deal with or to talk to or to just relax with, so he was very isolated. 

The set itself was this three hundred and sixty degree set with a roof on it, so when we went into the set and they closed the doors, we were on location. There wasn’t a “third wall”. He couldn’t see past the camera and see the studio. He was in the set, he was there all day and it was a small crew as well.  We built a lot of the lighting into the set as well and my cinematographer had a small lighting rig that he ran around with, so we were a fast moving crew. So, I think all of this helped.

Q- What were the qualities about Sam as an actor that made you feel you had to work with him?    

From seeing him in films like “Charlie’s Angels” to “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind”, the guy just oozes charisma.  And, he’s so interesting and quirky. But, even if he’s quirky, he’s not a caricature…there’s an  empathy there.  You can  feel and see the human being behind it and that’s what I love about Sam Rockwell. You know, there’s not a lot of guys that you could put in Moon because you have to watch him for the entire film.  And you can’t afford to get bored of him or annoyed by him, and I think that that’s what Sam Rockwell does. That’s why I love him so much.  Whenever you’re watching him in a film,  you can’t wait to see what he’s going to do next, because there is that unexpectedness about him.   I think the improvisational nature in which he approaches acting helps with that.  There is that real sense of…you don’t know what he’s going to do next and that keeps you engaged.  He’s an amazing performer. I love him. I want to work with him the rest of my life.

Q-   The film takes place ‘in the near future”. Can you give us a sense of how near you think that is?  I don’t know. I just wanted to make it amorphous and make it this “non-time”.

The next film I’m going to do… hoping to do, is “Mute”, which is this other science fiction film… a future based city film in Berlin, that film is supposed to take place within the same timeline as Moon, so maybe there will be by force of necessity, a narrowing down of the period a bit.   It’s kind of going to have real “Blade Runner” feel to it, if that helps.

I co-wrote “Mute” with Mike Johnson who wrote “Sherlock Holmes”… the Guy Ritchie film being made with Robert Downey, Jr.  We went to film school together, so before we had careers, Mike and I were writing scripts together.

Q-  How did you select Kevin Spacey to do the voice of “Gerty” the robot? The thing was, if you’re going to put a robot with a voice in a science fiction film, people will think HAL.  And,  we do pay homage to a lot of other science fiction films and that is kind of our 2001 homage.  But, there’s no point recreating the same character.  Otherwise, you really are just ripping them off.  So what I wanted to do, is for science fiction people to allow their expectations to be set up at the beginning of the film… let them make those connections to HAL and think “ Oh yeah. Gerty is like a machine with the same kind of honeyed voice with a slightly malevolent tone that HAL had”.  It’s this weird, creepy voice… the thing is, it’s not creepy, it’s really just a voice, but over the course of film history, we’ve learned to associate that voice with a moral ambiguity.  HAL’s got it, and Kevin Spacey’s got it.  And, I wanted that because I wanted the audience to get the wrong idea up front and to assume that Gerty was going to be another evil machine, because, Gerty ends up being very, very different from HAL.  That’s why Kevin Spacey was perfect.

 Q- How did you film the moon’s surface?

We went very traditional. We used model miniatures. We built a 30×40 foot lunar landscape in a soundstage in Sheffton, next door to where our base was.  And, we had these beautiful, little models….kind of like Tonka trucks, being pulled along with fishing line over the landscape.  We had an amazing cinematographer who came in just for the miniatures shoot, a guy called Peter Talbot.  He does model miniatures for things like James Bond and he works on big films.  He came up with this equation which would give us the exactly correct frames per second that we needed to make the models seem like they were life size but also taking into consideration lunar gravity. And that’s kind of how we shot it.  But, not being from the late seventies or early eighties, we had modern post-production techniques that we were able to use on top of the model miniatures… a kind of two layer process which gave it the very uniqe hybrid look that we ended up with.

Moon opens on Friday. Click here to see exactly where it’s playing near you.  Enjoy the trailer below.