Filmmaker Duncan Jones' dark side of the 'Moon'

Duncan Jones, the 37-year-old son of rock icon David Bowie and an up-and-coming film director, admits that his indie, sci-fi flick “Moon,” hitting theaters on Friday, June 19, is a bit of an oxymoron.

“There’s a reason why ‘indie’ and ‘science fiction’ are rarely seen in the same sentence,” he says during a recent visit to Boston’s Liberty Hotel. “Sci-fi by its very nature often demands the biggest productions values, and, as you can imagine, that’s the hardest thing to achieve with an indie budget.”

In the film, astronaut Sam Bell (played by Sam Rockwell) is living on the far side of the moon, completing a three-year contract with Lunar Industries to mine Earth’s primary source of energy, Helium-3. With only a few weeks left of his stint, Ball is looking forward to leaving the isolation of the moon base “Sarang” and reconnect with his wife and daughter back home.

After a near-fatal accident on a moon rover, Bell wakes up by the base’s well-intentioned computer “Gerty” (Kevin Spacey) and a younger, angrier version of himself, who claims to be there to fulfill the same three-year contract Bell started all of those years ago.

Jones, formerly known as Zowie Bowie, chats to Loaded Gun Boston about the complexities of making “Moon,” the pitfalls of his celebrity lineage and why there’s no place like Boston.

LOADED GUN: How difficult was it creating a sci-fi flick on an indie budget?
JONES: Massively difficult. We knew ahead of time that we wanted to make something that didn’t look like an indie flick. Because of background doing commercials in the UK, I wanted to use many of techniques I used in commercials, especially the most cost-effective ones, and make something that didn’t look like an indie film. The budget for the film was around $5 million and you consider a film like “Sunshine” was made for $50 million, it gives you a sense of scale.

LOADED GUN: How important was science when crafting this film?
JONES: We tried not to bog the film down with science, but there’s some truth behind it. There’s a book by Robert Zubrin called ‘Entering Space’ about how humans may be able to expand across the solar system and colonize the moon and Mars and do it in way with some fiscal viability. One of the ways he says that would make colonizing the moon viable is Helium-3 mining. His idea is that it could be used as fuel for cold-fusion in the future.

LOADED GUN: Sam Rockwell was imperative from a casting perspective. How important was it to cast Kevin Spacey as the voice of ‘Gertie’ in the film?
JONES: With ‘Gertie,’ there’s an obvious homage to HAL (‘2001: A Space Odyssey’), but I wanted to take it in an entirely different direction. What I loved about Kevin Spacey and his voice in particular is that you get this sort of slickness and almost malevolence to it, but with what we do with the character, it doesn’t necessarily go in a direction you would expect it to.

LOADED GUN: As a filmmaker who happens to be David Bowie’s son, do you try to distance yourself from your celebrity lineage?
JONES: With my name, there are things I could have gotten away with and shortcuts I could have taken, but I’m glad I didn’t. When you’re a teenage boy and you know you could get away with things if you wanted to, it’s hard to stick to it especially if you see others doing so with a similar background. There was definitely a frustration when I was a teenager, but I got through it and I’m glad I didn’t take those shortcuts.

LOADED GUN: Any plans to shoot a film in Boston?
JONES: I literally have been here a day (laughs). But, I was walking down the street to the park and was surprised by how little I recognized from film. If I lived here, I would be shooting here all the time. Boston has so many things to show and it has all of the things I love about New York and London--the architecture, the little winding streets and the pubs. It’s a fantastic city.

--Photos of Duncan Jones by Sam Baltrusis