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Duncan Jones [1971-0] English

Rank: 102
Director, Film director

Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones is an English film director, film producer, and screenwriter. He is best known for directing the science fiction film Moon, winning the BAFTA Award for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer, Source Code and Warcraft.

Humor, Romantic

Quote	Tags	Rank
Motion capture has become very specialized but also still just a tool of filmmaking.		101
I don't know if subconsciously there was some reaction going on, if there was something in me that didn't want to learn an instrument - because I couldn't have been that incompetent!		102
I've certainly never used my father's name as a way of getting a meeting. And fortunately, I've never needed to.		103
I don't know why, but for whatever reason, that side of life - the celebrity and the spectacle - has never interested me.		104
I love my work, but I don't like being in the spotlight. I was never going to be an actor, that's for sure.		105
'Warcraft' is going to be a period of my life I treasure and loathe at the same time.		106
I don't want to build on someone else's legacy. I wanted to establish my own thing.		107
It's always nerve-racking, showing your parents things you've been working on.		108
One of the things my dad always said is that it's O.K. to do one for you and one for them. He taught me a lot of things, but that's certainly one of the many that I took to heart.		109
Treat the audience with respect and maturity, and have a certain faith in them to catch up.		110
After 'The Fellowship of the Ring,' the films that followed it, instead of having their own unique aesthetic, they all wanted to be 'Lord of the Rings' as opposed to learning from 'Lord of the Rings.'		111
That's what I wanted to do... I wanted to make a great film that just happened to be based on a video game.		112
'Warcraft' by its very nature is epic in scale.		113
It felt very fresh to me, and it feels very contemporary - this idea that conflict's not being about good and evil and not necessarily being black and white. If you dig deep enough, you'll often find that people do things because they feel that they have to as opposed to because they are evil.		114
When Peter Jackson made the 'Lord of the Rings' movies, I remember there was a concern that people who didn't read Tolkien wouldn't go see the first one. But the films were so good in their own right that the audience grew beyond the readership of the book.		115
'Warcraft' has always had a far higher percentage of women players than a lot of other games. It has always been a very welcoming environment for women.		116
Games have always presented an opportunity to escape. But they are also an opportunity to go somewhere that you come to know well.		117
I love games, and I feel they've been sold short shrift in films so far.		118
You could make a film out of just about anything so long as there is a clear vision about the story.		119
Be it a video game, comic book, or cheque book, the question always is, 'What story do you have to tell?'		120
It took a generation of filmmakers who loved and were raised on comic books to make movies that you actually cared about and felt something for. I think that's absolutely the same with what's going on with videogame movies.		121
I am absolutely of the videogames generation, starting on the Atari and Commodore 64 and the Amiga.		122
I'm a gamer at heart and always have been. I'm also a filmmaker.		123
I think my sensibilities about storytelling and character just automatically come into play when I'm trying to work on any kind of narrative. For me, it doesn't really matter what the source of the narrative is. I will be looking for ways to make it into an intriguing story with empathetic characters.		124
I played lots of games, and I was a fan of gaming, so I was always looking for new games. I was also a science fiction and fantasy fan, growing up, in games and books and movies.		125
I have to work with the team at Blizzard and the producers on the film and convince them that, as a fan, I have a unique and hopefully entertaining way of taking people through the first contact story, which is really what sets up 'Warcraft' for everyone else.		126
Fantasy films tend to skew towards what Tolkien fantasy was, which is that the humans, the Hobbits, and the cute creatures are the good guys, and everything that's ugly are the bad guys.		201
One of the things I think is unique and signature about Blizzard is that whenever they do their games, and with 'Warcraft' in particular, they take the things they love and put a twist on it. They showed that heroes can come from the most unexpected places, and as a player, you can play as a hero, on all sides.		202
Trying to make a movie like 'Warcraft,' and trying to do it in a unique way... you get killed by a death of 1,000 cuts.		203
As a filmmaker, the only way that I understand how to make a film is holistically.		204
For me, 'Blade Runner' is the best science-fiction film ever made.		205
Science-fiction cities in general, I think, are so hard to get right, because it's so easy to just play some cheesy music or do something that takes you right out of it, but 'Blade Runner' got it right, and I love that about the film.		206
Toshiro Mifune was such an elegant hero, and there's something really empathetic about him.		207
Sometimes you see films, not just science fiction films, where you get the sense that if the camera were to pan just to the left or the right, all of a sudden you'd be seeing light stands and crew standing around. But with 'Blade Runner,' the beauty of it is that it felt like a real, breathing city.		208
I was christened Duncan Zowie Jones.		209
Bowie is my dad's stage name, so I was never, ever called Zowie Bowie. The tabloids liked that because it rhymed.		210
My parents did call me Zowie now and then, but then, realising that it drew too much attention, they called me 'Joe'. Then, later, I sort-of co-opted my own name back.		211
I was a little geeky kid anyway. If I wasn't shooting little stop-animation films, then I was playing computer games or Dungeons & Dragons.		212
I was a sensitive boy.		213
You would never have seen me on any party scene, which is probably what made me able to disappear, in a way, because the tabloids had nothing to follow.		214
I was always bit of a jock.		215
When I was at graduate school, you wouldn't have recognised me. I was so different - and not a nice person: a grumpy, surly, upset, confused, lost person.		216
My dad and I used to shoot little one-stop animations on an old 8mm film camera when I was no more than 7 or 8, and when he was away at work, I would keep shooting nonsensical, short animated films using 'Star Wars' figures or Smurfs - depended what the narrative was.		217
Growing up, I was on film sets occasionally, when my dad was acting, so I got to run around and do odd jobs on films like 'Labyrinth' and others... I seemed destined to make films.		218
I got some funky scholarships to play soccer and did well in my SATs, so I went off to college and then grad school but found that that wasn't me. My family, relieved I seemed to have come to my senses, were happy to let me go to film school.		219
I took an incredibly roundabout route getting into feature films.		220
I saw the drawbacks of fame as a kid. It wasn't for me.		221
Hopefully, by the second or the third film, who my father is won't be a story anyone's interested in. They'll either like the films or they won't, and if they don't like them, I won't be making them any more.		222
You only get one shot to do a first feature.		223
I'm a bit of a geek, actually. So I always wanted my first film to be science fiction.		224
When you're in college, everything seems much more important than it really is.		225
Basically, if you want to have a computer system that could pass the Turing test, it as a machine is going to have to be able to self-reference and use its own experience and the sense data that it's taking in to basically create its own understanding of the world and use that as a reference point for all new sense data that's coming in to it.		226
The beauty of science fiction is that it takes the audience's guard down; they're much more willing to open themselves up and allow themselves to be questioned and have their values questioned when they don't think we're talking about their world or them and what they're used to.		301
It seems like the reason that I miss the science fiction from the late '70s and '80s is that at that period, they really were doing interesting, introspective human stories that just happened to take place in science fiction settings.		302
I think everything you do, whether it's low budget things when you're first starting out or full feature films or when you're working with Hollywood, you're always learning, all the time.		303
My sense of humor often gets me in trouble.	Humor	304
My job is really to... everyone is reading the script, and my job is to make sure we all interpret it in as much the same way as possible. And then I give them the freedom to sort of - to get their performance across and then make suggestions where things are not working and accentuate and push things where they really are working.		305
I guess, as a director, you sort of take the script, and you find ways to interpret it.		306
I'm a natural puzzle solver.		307
I think one of the biggest jobs of being a director is getting the casting right.		308
I went to college and graduate school, studying philosophy. I really did think I was going to wind up being a lecturer or professor of some sort.		309
I was in my 30s when I finally went to film school. It was kind of always going to happen, but I did try to keep it suppressed for awhile.		310
I know my dad's proud that I've done it on my own, and I'm happy with that.		311
I'd done a bachelor's degree, which I'd enjoyed, but I didn't know what to do with my life at the time. I was conflicted, and, being a hopeless romantic, I followed my girlfriend at the time to Vanderbilt, where, obviously, we broke up a couple of months later.	Romantic	312
There's a depth to the look that you get with models that you just can't get with CGI. It's about the detail that you just wouldn't think to put in.		313
Jeron Lanier and 'Lawnmower Man.' That was VR. And there was the VFX1, that big giant VR prototype unit, and I was like, 'I am going to save my money and get one of those.' And then VR just sort of drifted away.		314
I was a 'Warcraft' player myself, and when I pitched my take on the film, they said right away, 'That is a player. That is the game.' So I've had their support from the very beginning.		315
The feeling that makes 'Warcraft' work as a game is that feeling that heroism can come out of anything or anyone.		316
Even before 'Moon,' I did a short film called 'Whistle,' and it had a lot of the things that I thought I would need to be able to do on a feature film: I shot on location, there was special FX work, there was stunt work, we used squibs, I shot on 35 mm film.		317
I've been very strategic in how I've approached the jobs I want to do.		318
In the past, a lot of films based on video games think that the audience wants to experience what it's like to play the game, and that's absolutely not the case.		319
Film directing is really undermined if you attempt to do it by committee because there has to be a single vision as to how to tell a story. It's like if you were at a campfire, and everyone is taking turns to give one sentence in telling a horror story. It would be a mess - it's not going to make sense.		320
I think if you're young and you're being compared with a successful family member, it's really hard to maintain any sense of self-worth and credibility.		321
Girls seem to get me in trouble a lot of times.		322
Eventually, I'm going to be judged purely on my own merits.		323
I was angry and frustrated when I was younger and didn't know my place in the world.		324
I've lived all over Europe, spent a lot of time in London, went to school in Scotland, college in America, so I do think I have sort of a sensibility on a fairly global level.		325
I'm kind of transatlantic Eurotrash.		326
I do have a somewhat unique upbringing.		401
My family is very international.		402
My stepmom's from Somalia, my baby sister is African American, my dad was always English, I'm a white man... You may have noticed.		403
I was the only kids to have Sony Umatic tapes of the old 'Star Wars.' It was such an old technology; you needed two or three tapes to show one movie, so the kids used to come over to my house, and we would watch 'Star Wars.'		404
I guess sci-fi was like my candy growing up. My dad always thought it was important for me to read an hour or two every night. And if I got stuck or didn't want to read, sci-fi was sort of the thing you'd give me to spur me on to read that evening.		405
I watched the German version of 'Baron Munchasen' and Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis' at a young age. 'Star Wars' was also a huge thing when I was a kid.		406
I personally prefer projecting digitally. I guess I'm of that generation where I like that clarity.		407
I'm a film maker who started on the Atari and then went onto the Commodore 64 and the Amiga. So I possibly have a different sensibility to people who didn't play games growing up.		408
I love the 'what if' nature of sci-fi.		409
I love incredibly imaginative, speculative sci-fi.		410
I love J. G. Ballard. I love authors who take the world as we know it and just tweak one thing and say, 'What if the world were like this?'		411
J. G. Ballard is just an example of the writers I like. Philip K. Dick is obviously one of them. I'm a big fan of William Gibson as well. He started cyberpunk with 'Neuromancer.' I've come to know him a little bit over Twitter, of all places, and I was always a huge fan of his. It's very cool to know he even knows I exist.		412
I view myself still as a director. That's what I do.		413
I have a sense of humor, and sometimes it gets me into trouble.	Humor	414
I think, visually, 'Moon' probably owes more to the first half of 'Alien' and 'Outland' than it does to '2001.' The character of Gerty is obviously a straight rip-and-riff on HAL.		415
I was such a big 'Dirty Dozen,' 'Where Eagles Dare,' 'A Bridge Too Far' - all those kinds of movies I loved.		416
I'd love to do a Western.		417
I was a big fan of Luc Besson and obviously Ridley Scott.		418
Terry Gilliam, he's a really interesting and amazing film maker, and when he gets it right, it's really powerful stuff.		419
I'm not the guy who does slo-mo, or I'm not the guy who does splashing rain or doves flying or anything; that's not me. Every film, I try and make it the way I see it in my head, and it really just depends on the script and the people I'm working with or whatever interests me at that particular time.		420
I thought 'The Social Network' was fantastic.		421
My priority is having the ability to be creative and to come up with the right decisions and not be fettered. If there are a lot of people involved in decision making, it can become frustrating.		422

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