Every time you want to reset your set and pull walls out and reset the lighting, you're burning up half an hour to an hour, and when you're trying to keep to a schedule, you're constantly having to reassess what's worth it and what you're going to have to give up in order to keep on schedule.
Duncan JonesOne of the biggest changes for me on a practical level of shooting the film was having a second unit.
Duncan JonesI had a real comfort with being on a set and in particular working with special effects and because of that background, it became much easier for me to base a first time feature film on a low budget cause I was sort of already knew how to do that.
Duncan JonesWhen I said that something was going to cost a certain amount of money, I actually knew what I was talking about. The biggest problem that we were having on the financing front was people with lots of money saying "you need more money to make this film [Moon]," and us saying "no this is the first feature film we want to do it at a budget where we sort of prove ourselves at the starting end of making feature films; we can do this for $5 million." That is where the convincing part between me and Stuart came, we had to convince people with money that we could do it for that budget.
Duncan JonesI was doing the promotion for Moon in LA at the same time that Tony Scott was there with [The Taking of] Pelham 123. But obviously he was so concentrating on his own film that he didn't even know I was doing a feature film.
Duncan JonesThe films that I loved growing up were the science fiction films from the late seventies and early eighties [films], which were more about the people and how they are affected by the environments that they are in. Whether they are sort of futuristic or alien of whatever they are; that was the science fiction that I loved. So that is what we tried to make, the sort of film that felt like those old films.
Duncan JonesWhen Peter Jackson did The Lord of the Rings trilogy with Fellowship of the Ring, not everyone had read Tolkien, and yet somehow with that scope and the spectacle of that fantasy, people were willing to give it a shot. And when they watched the first one, the characters drew them in and they started understanding the story. And then, all of a sudden, they were The Lord of the Rings fans, even if they never read Tolkien.
Duncan Jones