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.
Duncan Jones
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.
My sense of humor often gets me in trouble.
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.
Games have always presented an opportunity to escape. But they are also an opportunity to go somewhere that you come to know well.
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.
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.
I love games, and I feel they've been sold short shrift in films so far.
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.
Bowie is my dad's stage name, so I was never, ever called Zowie Bowie. The tabloids liked that because it rhymed.
I saw the drawbacks of fame as a kid. It wasn't for me.
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.
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.
That's what I wanted to do... I wanted to make a great film that just happened to be based on a video game.
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.
I do have a somewhat unique upbringing.
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.
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.
I was always bit of a jock.
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.
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.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
When you're in college, everything seems much more important than it really is.
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.
I guess, as a director, you sort of take the script, and you find ways to interpret it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know why, but for whatever reason, that side of life - the celebrity and the spectacle - has never interested me.
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.
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.
I'm a natural puzzle solver.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Motion capture has become very specialized but also still just a tool of filmmaking.
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!
I've certainly never used my father's name as a way of getting a meeting. And fortunately, I've never needed to.
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.
'Warcraft' is going to be a period of my life I treasure and loathe at the same time.
I don't want to build on someone else's legacy. I wanted to establish my own thing.
It's always nerve-racking, showing your parents things you've been working on.
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.
