Top 45 Duncan Jones Quotes

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.

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?’

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.

I love games, and I feel they’ve been sold short shrift in films so far.

‘Warcraft’ by its very nature is epic in scale.

I guess, as a director, you sort of take the script, and you find ways to interpret it.

I thought ‘The Social Network’ was fantastic.

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.

I’ve been very strategic in how I’ve approached the jobs I want to do.

The feeling that makes ‘Warcraft’ work as a game is that feeling that heroism can come out of anything or anyone.

I’m a natural puzzle solver.

I’d love to do a Western.

I’m a gamer at heart and always have been. I’m also a filmmaker.

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 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.

I know my dad’s proud that I’ve done it on my own, and I’m happy with that.

Games have always presented an opportunity to escape. But they are also an opportunity to go somewhere that you come to know well.

I personally prefer projecting digitally. I guess I’m of that generation where I like that clarity.

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.

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.

Eventually, I’m going to be judged purely on my own merits.

I love the ‘what if’ nature of sci-fi.

I do have a somewhat unique upbringing.

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.

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.

You could make a film out of just about anything so long as there is a clear vision about the story.

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.’

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’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.

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.

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.

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.

Bowie is my dad’s stage name, so I was never, ever called Zowie Bowie. The tabloids liked that because it rhymed.

I love incredibly imaginative, speculative sci-fi.

I was angry and frustrated when I was younger and didn’t know my place in the world.

I’m kind of transatlantic Eurotrash.

You only get one shot to do a first feature.

I’ve certainly never used my father’s name as a way of getting a meeting. And fortunately, I’ve never needed to.

I am absolutely of the videogames generation, starting on the Atari and Commodore 64 and the Amiga.