Jones makes a zowie debut

Duncan Jones got a great introduction to the world of filmmaking: Running amok on the set of Jim Henson's "Labyrinth," starring his father, David Bowie. (Jones was called Zowie Bowie by his parents before reclaiming his family name.)

"I was 7 or 8," he recalled "There was a whole goblin town that was built and I remember running around that. It was fascinating and exciting because when you're on a set like that it's like living in Jim Henson's imagination. It's like being in a different world. That had a huge impact on me."

Jones' writing-directing debut, "Moon," transports us to a dark sector of his own imagination. The story takes on ambitious themes of humanity and morality -- Jones has a master's degree in philosophy -- grounding them in believable human emotions of loneliness and isolation in a realistic moonbase environment. When he screened "Moon" for a NASA audience, one technician said he liked the sense of the mundane things you have to do in space. "The look is industrial and matter-of-fact," Jones said. "It's designed by engineers, not people designing iPods."

The visuals of the $5 million film echo "2001: A Space Odyssey," but the emphasis on character and story over special effects comes from a later generation of science fiction. "I appreciate '2001,' but that film actually influenced the films that influenced me," Jones said. "It was really that next batch of films from the '70s and '80s I was trying to capture, 'Outland' and 'Silent Running.' Human beings were the focus of those films. Science was more of a backdrop."

Jones, 38, said that the high-tech genre was perfect camouflage for a story that reflected many of his personal concerns. In adolescence, he said, he was an angry, alienated kid unsure of where he fit it. Like the main character in his film, he was "trying to maintain a long-distance relationship with a woman on the other side of the world, and it was really painful." He filled the script with ideas that fascinated him ("If you met yourself in person would you like yourself or would you only see the faults?") and questions that piqued his interest as a philosophy student ("What's your moral obligation to a thinking machine?").

In several sequences Rockwell interacts with himself, which presented huge technical and performing challenges. He favors improvisational techniques, so Jones recorded half his dialogue and played it to Rockwell through an earpiece, enabling the actor to banter with himself. Computer-controlled cameras shot multiple takes of each scene so Rockwell's characters would appear to physically relate to each other.

But Jones hopes the photorealistic effects are only a fraction of the film's appeal. "Sam's magnetic to watch. It's visually beautiful, I think. A lot of women like it because there's a real emotional heart to this story. At the same time guys go to see it and enjoy the geeky elements to it."

Jones' next film, a mystery called "Mute," will be "a 'Blade Runner' homage set in a future Berlin. I've been working on the script a long time, and it has, I hope, some interesting ideas about society, the world we might live in. Some of it is just silly, ideas about how we'll communicate, what we'll use in place of mobile phones. I can't wait to build a world that doesn't exist."