Sam Rockwell in "Moon," Sony Pictures Classics, 2009

Because of your dad and his Ziggy Stardust persona, was science fiction something you grew up around? Is that partially where your interest in the genre came from?

I think you've found the specifics there. When I was growing up, the things that interested my dad were around me as well. Whether it was films, watching Kubrick or "Star Wars" or "Blade Runner," or books that my dad recommended I read at a young age, like John Wyndham, George Orwell and then later, J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick and William Gibson and authors that meant a lot to me. I grew up with my dad and a lot of the time, he would want to show me things, and recommend things to me, and get me to see movies, whether it was James Cagney and Errol Flynn movies, or these science fiction films. So yeah, that had a huge influence on my upbringing. But I think that's just a natural product of the environment I grew up in, as opposed to me saying, "I want to do the same thing that my dad did."

Again, it's like the trailers. You can make assumptions based on limited information. But if you really look at what "Moon"'s about, it is a very personal film. There's a lot of me in it. And by that being the case, it also makes it very obvious that it's not something my dad would do. It's a very different perspective.

How did the story come about?

I met up with Sam about another project, and he loved that script but wanted to play the lead role. I wanted him to play the villain, which was kind of unfair because he was playing so many villains, and he didn't want to do that. But we met here in New York and tried to convince each other and it didn't work out. Still, we got on very well, and we're very similar guys -- we both love science fiction, we're both roughly the same age, we were both only kids brought up in arty, unusual backgrounds. I really wanted to work with him on my first film, so I told him I'd write something for him, and that's kind of how "Moon" originated.

As far as the inspirations for the story, there were things I wanted to do on behalf of Sam. I needed to write a role that would really challenge him and make him want to do it. The cloning idea was something that would give Sam a challenge, and at the same time, it maximized what I could get out of a single cast member, because I wasn't going to be able to afford a huge cast. And on a personal level, I was going through a very, very painful and long-distance relationship at the time. My girlfriend lived on the far side of the world, and I wanted to write about how that made me feel, and the paranoia and things that you go through when trying to maintain a long-distance relationship.

And, lastly, from my philosophy background, there was this question I just thought was really interesting: What would you do if you met yourself? Would you necessarily like yourself? Or would you only see the faults? How long would it take before you started to appreciate the good things about yourself? Or vice versa, would you only see the good things? I thought that was a really interesting question. It was kind of all of those things, just finding a way to make all of that come together in a coherent story.

Well, that was the idea. We thought we'd give Sam a week of rehearsals to really find in his head what we were going to do, and then we would stick to it when we got to the shoot. But what we found when we got onto the shoot was that there were ways to incorporate some of his improv. A bit of advice that Spike Jonze gave me to before we shot the film, because he'd done "Adaptation" with Nicolas Cage, was that if I could read a scene, work out which of the characters was driving the scene, and shoot that one first, then that first character could pretty much improv as much as they wanted to. Once you locked that down, the discipline had to come into play, because at that point, when you shoot the other side of the scene, the other Sam has to stick to the timing and the beats and the eye-lines.

Again, though, it's kind of like jazz, [the second Sam] can do what he wants in-between those beats, as long as he's maintaining his eye-lines and he's not talking at the same time as the other guy's talking. I think it was a really interesting exercise for Sam, and something incredibly challenging for him. But once we discovered there was still an opportunity for him to riff, I think he got very excited about it, because all of a sudden he realized, "Oh my god, I can set jokes up, I can set things up for myself, and then I can be my own straight man." So it was a really unique situation and challenge for him.

Do you have future sci-fi plans?

I'm not consciously trying to stay in the genre. It does look like my next project will also be science fiction, just because there's something about sci-fi that I haven't done yet with "Moon." "Moon" is very intimate and isolated, and has a very small cast, and I want to do a big-city future film. That's the other side of it, and that's hopefully what the next film's going to be. I've been working on it for ages anyway, so I know it back to front and I've just got to make it, because if I don't make it, it's going to drive me crazy. But once that's out of the way...I can't wait to see Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds," because the idea of doing a WWII "Dirty Dozen" ensemble piece, or...there are all sorts of genre films I'd like to try my hand at. But I want to see what's being done, and what's about to be done, and whether the ideas I have are still going to be unique enough.

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don ronson

can't wait to see this one

Eric

Just saw 'Moon' and loved it! It's amazing that in the same month we've seen one the of the worst, most anti-humanity sci-fi films ever (Revenge of the Fallen), and one of the best most heartfelt (Moon)