Press Interview with Duncan Jones, March 22nd 2011

The following is the entire transcript of an interview conducted with director Duncan Jones during his press tour for the film Source Code.  The interview does contain spoilers, so beware!  The sections with spoilers will be clearly marked with warnings for those of you who have yet to see the film and don’t want anything ruined for you.  Enjoy!

Question: I was at your screening last night and you mentioned that you chose Jake G. because you had seen him in some things…?

Duncan Jones: Actually it was the other way around.  I’m sorry if I mislead you, Jake actually chose me.  I met up with Jake because I was a big fan of his. He had seen Moon, and I’d obviously seen a lot of his films and felt that he was obviously a very talented actor but also a very brave actor too if you just look at the films he chose.  And he’s one of those guys, like Sam Rockwell to me, who’s just very empathetic and a natural leading man, someone that the audience can immediately bond with, I feel.  And we met up trying to find a project to work on together, I had an idea, a suggestion I wanted him to look at, and he came right out and said “I think you should read this script, Source Code”. So that was the start of it for me, that’s how I became introduced to the script.

Q: Is that unusual, for an actor?

DJ: I don’t know, I don’t think it’s that unusual for actors of a certain level. I think they can do that, they can get away with that. [laughs]

Q: When you came in to talk when Moon played here, we had talked about how there are these great looking shots with lunar landscape and it was all done on a small budget. You must have had a much bigger budget for this one, does that make a difference, does it just add more problems?

DJ:  You know, it was the same problems because absolutely it was a bigger budget but at the same time as far as our ambition, what we were trying to do with the film, it was exactly the same deal – we had a whole film where we had so many ideas and not enough money to do them all and you had to choose your moments.  One big difference was obviously that we weren’t going the whole miniatures route, we were going with CG for a lot of it, and that’s a different approach because there’s a lot more cost involved.  But I was working with a very talented BFX supervisor from Montreal, guy named Louis Moran who is a beautiful blend of technician and artis, so I think between the two of us we wer able to choose our moments and kind of go to town where we could in those moments. But it’s still the same old problem – you’ve got more ideas in your head than you can put on the screen.

Q: You’ve done two films now that have a science fiction theme – do you find that you gravitate  to those themes, particularly?

DJ: I do, and it will be three science fiction films in a row after I’m done my third film.

Q:  Can I ask quickly what that is?

DJ: [laughs] We haven’t announced it yet, but that’s what I’m actually writing now, it’s gonna be what I hope will be my third film.  But yeah, I’m a big fan of science fiction and I love “what ifs”.  When I was a kid I read a lot of science fiction, I read a lot of JG Ballad who was one of my favorite authors, and the idea of sort of taking the world as we know it and then just tweaking it a little bit.  Like the old weird science comic books, you know? All these great what if scenarios, and I enjoy that.  It’s good fun.  I won’t do that exclusively for my career, but I think it’s a good starting point and it just seems to be something I’m having fun with right now.

Q: And this is interesting in that it’s an element – its not a huge science fiction thing.  It’s the idea of those 8 minutes…

DJ: It’s a conceit – there’s this science fiction technology which allows the story to take place.  But we’ve set it in a contemporary setting, and I think there’s a lot more to it than just the technology and the conceit.  There’s a romance, we try to inject it with some humor, there’s a thriller aspect of it.  There’s quite a traditional thriller underneath, which is why we were trying to make allusions where we could to Hitchcock, because it felt realy classic, you know it felt like an old-fashion thriller.

Q: It’s like Strangers on a Train times a hundred.

DJ: Yeah, with a little bit of sci-fi that’s kind of making it all messed up [laughs]

[BEGIN SPOILER SECTION]

Q:  I was wondering why the Jake Gyllenhaal character didn’t end up in a luxurious room instead of a Matrix kind of-scary room that would frighten him.

DJ:  Well, I guess the idea was that he is manifesting a reality at those points when he is not on the train.  When he’s on the train it’s basically being dictated because it’s the experience of short ventures that he’s going through.  But when he’s in this sort of holding pen, he has nothing, he has no sensory information being sent to him other than his own experience and the very minimal amount of sense experience that, as we discover later on, his half corpse is getting from that box that he’s in.  So he starts off by taking what he knows –he’s a helicopter pilot, he’s obviously crashed recently, so he’s incorporating something which feels and looks a little bit like a helicopter cockpit, and that’s where he starts off.  And then over the course of the film, that’s morphing and changing into something bigger and a more complete understanding of what he really is in.  And he ends up in this thing that almost looks and feels like a prison cell.  Obviously its got the same kind of look and color and its made up of the same sort of panels, but its still him manifesting an idea of what’s going on around him.  He goes through a phase where he gets really cold and that’s basically in the box, there’s a physiological problem going on and he’s incorporating that into the manifestation.  And then there’s this big window that starts off in front of him in the cockpit and ends up as a big window at the top of the capsule.  That’s the glass window that his corpse is facing that we see at the very end of the movie in the very last shot of the film – we see his face through that glass window.  So it’s always about him trying to make sense of his reality

[END OF SPOILER SECTION]

Q:  I loved how you kept our attention, that you could keep going back kind of like a science fiction Honeymooners.

DJ: Right! [laughs] Yeah.

Q: It was compelling, it was great that you kept our attention, kept going back in but it was always different.

DJ: Well, that was the trick.  I mean that was the real scary thing for me as a director, reading that script the second time.  The first time I was able to read it just as an audience member.  The second time I was looking at it – “how do I make this work?” And that repetition became a real burden to work out how to deal with that in a way where the audience wouldn’t feel it was repetitive and by the end of the film they did feel like they had been seeing something fresh the whole way through.

Q:  It worked, yeah.  Plus when the scenes start to repeat themselves it’s fun to watch how things change with each revisit.

DJ:  Well as long as you set up that very first moment, just to establish “and we’re back again” then you’ve got the butterfly effect working on your side.  So, as long as something subtle changes, then all of a sudden you can go off in any direction you want.  And because Colter is the acting agent, he can do that, he can say something different, he can get up and go somewhere else, and all of a sudden you’re on a completely different version of events.

Q: How did you decide on Vera?

DJ:  I had seen her in Up in the Air and we had already cast Michelle M. and Vera was someone, looking at that, we kind of knew she’d be dealing with that for most of the film.  And Vera is a tremendous actress who knows where the camera is and is able to perform in nuance so she’s really able to give a performance knowing that, like a news presenter, they’re going to have to do everything in this.  That’s a real challenge.  You need someone who has that ability to be subtle and do that.

Q: It’s interesting when for the first time she kind of breaks the military fascade where he asks a question and she’s like, lost, and she becomes our connection between the two of them too.  I just love her performance and it’s just interesting to see you’ve taken all that talent and condensed it, but it works!

DJ: [laughs] I actually felt so guilty about it, that we did change it.  In the original script more of it was in that frame, so we decided that we just had to give her the opportunity to break out and walk around a little bit [laughs]

Q: For a contemporary setting, I’m intrigued that you chose Chicago, how did that come about?

DJ: Originally the script was based in New York, but sensitivity issues – terrorism, things like that – the producers thought it was important that we move it to a different city.  We started looking around at other cities in the U.S, obviously Chicago being somewhere between east and west, with something that they liked the sound of.  For me I was a huge fan of both the city of Chicago and also the sculpture, that mirrored thing.  It’s a metallic sculpture that was built in the city fairly recently and it’s becoming more established now as a Chicago landmark.  I think it’s called The Cloud Gate Sculpture, at least that’s the formal name, but I think locally it’s just known as “The Bean” [laughs].  And visually it’s just this amazing thing and it really to me fit with the themes of the film – [SPOILER ALERT, SKIP AHEAD] reflections and distorted reflections of reality, and the fact that if we started off really close on it, it already sort of morphed and created these nightmarish images that could be his flashbacks, so that over the course of the film as we pull futher and further away from it, it reveals itself for what it is, which is this place in Chicago where he finds himself at the end of the movie.  So I loved that aspect of it, I thought it really just fit perfectly for the movie. [END OF SPOILER]

Q: Within the train itself, I thought maybe because that particular type of train has a lot of space, being that it’s sort of an open two floor car, where you have a couple of terrific tracking shots that go in and out of the train.  But how do you get a Dunkin Donuts in the train?!  That doesn’t exist!

DJ: [Laughs] No, it doesn’t exist.  It should exist though!

Q: I grew up riding this train a lot and there was never a Dunkin Donuts in it, man.

DJ: [Laughs] Okay then, well lets be sticklers for authenticity, there was never a train that looks that modern on the Chicago line, they’re all from the 1950s – they haven’t been updated.  So the train that we built, because it was fabricated, we did it in Montreal, that train interior had to be updated, otherwise the film would have really looked like a time travel movie.  It would have looked like he was going back to the 1950s.

Q: Could you talk about the score a little bit?  The score in Moon played a huge part in the movie so I was wondering how much it factored into Source Code.  Was it similar to Moon?

DJ: It was a huge deal, and obviously my first go to port of call was Clint Mansell.  The thing is that Source Code came together incredibly fast and the speed that we sort of had to work in meant that when I started talking to Clint it became clear that there really wasn’t time to allow him to work the way that he wanted to work.  And I didn’t want to rush him, you know?  There’s no point asking to get somebody of that style and caliber and then force them to work in circumstances where they can’t do what they’re good at.  So that didn’t work out.

Paul Hirsh, who was my editor, who is amazing and a real legend in the industry – The Empire Strikes Back, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, won and Oscar for Ray, he did the first Mission Impossible film and the one that’s coming out now – he was the one who suggested I talk to Chris Bacon because he’d just worked with him on a film previously.  And Chris came in, one day after his wife had just given birth, he looked like a zombie, and we said “look, we really need some music for this film, these are our ideas” we played him the movie, a bit of the temp score, we talked to him a little bit about Hitchcock, and how we had seeded that influence into the film where we could, and about 4 days later he came back with the opening title music.  And that is what we ended up with, it was actually that piece of music that we went with.  So, he was a fantastic find, and I have to give all credit to Paul Hirsh for finding him and to him for doing such an amazing job.

Q:  Did Jake just drink a lot of Red Bull?

DJ: [laughs]

Q:  I just kept thinking that it had to be so demanding on him to not only be that high energy but it’s the same scene.  You know everyone else tweaks there’s a little but his is that high energy that just keeps building.  So was it training?  What was it?

DJ: Jake is first of all a fantastic actor and he takes if very seriously.  He’d also just come off of Prince of Persia at the time, so he was in ridiculously awesome shape, he really was.  So he was literally able to keep up that energy level the whole time.  And he had some great little tricks.  He had some cool things that he was doing to sort of help him along.  In any of the transitions when he first appears on the train or first appears in the pod, he would hold his breath for as long as he could, literally, before each take so that each time it was literally [makes gasping noise] you know, like a gasp to get going.  So that was a great thing that he used.  He’s just a terrific actor.

Q: And the camera loves him.

DJ: Oh yeah. He’s not hard on the eyes [laughs].  Even for a straight man [laughs harder].

Q: When he jumps off the train in that particularly crazy stunt, you think it’s really him! but it must be CGI.

DJ: That was so much fun for me.  That was one of those moments where we went to town on the effects and I really pushed for it.  It was something I wanted to do and I knew it was something that hadn’t been done before.  And we did, we had the train on set, we had crash pads outside of it, Jake jumps onto the pads, literally the moment his toe touches the ground we morph into what’s called a “virtual stuntman.”  But the technology has never been at a level where this was possible before.  It literally caught up with us just as we were doing the shot, where you can have a virtual stuntman that close to camera.  So as his toe hits the mat, we switch to a virtual stuntman who collapses, starts the roll, starts to have all of the bruising and cutting, and then about a roll and a half before he comes to a stop, we morph back to Jake on the platform who has all of the makeup done and all the cuts and bruises on him and completes the roll.  And no cuts, obviously no cuts in the whole sequence.

Q:  They put the face of one actor on another in The Social Network, so that’s –

DJ:  Yeah, well there was no person involved at all.  From the moment he hits the ground to about two and a half rolls in, it’s CGI.  But I love it.  I know there are people who don’t like CG, but I think at the right moment, when it’s used properly, I would say that it allows you to do things which really gives you a visceral reaction.  Like that, where you can actually be there, watching an A-list star tumble and hurt himself in a way that you just wouldn’t be able to see any other way.

Q:  After the screening we were arguing about the ending.  We all had different opinions of where it could’ve ended.

[SPOILER ALERT, SKIP AHEAD]

DJ: Oh okay, right. Of course.

Q: And there’s that great shot where everyone freezes.  And a lot of guys were saying it should’ve ended there.  We don’t want to know.

DJ: [laughs]

Q: But I was just more fascinated with that shot.  Technically, was that difficult?  I mean, it’s beautiful but it’s also like “how’d they do that?”

DJ:  It’s a stupid trick [laughs].  It’s a stupid trick, with some enhancement and some help.  Basically we did a little test, before we started shooting the film.  We laid out some chairs as if we were on a train, we laid down some track right down the middle, and then we told all the crew to stare and look as if they were having a good time and just stay completely still.  And we rolled the camera at 50 frames per second and pulled it back, and it looked pretty good!  And we were like right, well if we just paint the track out and we add some details, add a couple of little light hits and some little flecks of dust frozen in the air, maybe a little bit of spilled coffee in the air, and obviously what’s outside of the windows of the train so we have a frozen train and a frozen highway, then that’s the shot.

Q:  But otherwise it’s a game of freeze tag.

DJ:  But it’s everyone playing freeze, yeah.  I mean I think if you just did it with a camera it wouldn’t work.  So I think it is that enhancement on top of it that makes it work, because there are some slight moves with it that you have to correct.  You know, if somebody blinks you have to paint that out.

Q:  Dare I ask, does this movie lend itself to a sequel?

DJ:  Well, you brought up the ending and that was never considered as a possible ending.  There was another possible ending, which was when they were at The Bean, a romantic ending.  What I would call “the producer’s ending,” where they were talking about having a sort of romantic happy ending, end credits, end of film.  And first of all I just find that way too saccharine for my taste.  It’s just too clean and sweet.  And I felt that there was a really major hanging piece of logic about “what were the repercussions of this?”  If we’re talking about parallel realities, then the fact that Colter has gone into this parallel reality and stopped the bomb going off on the train, that has repercussions.  And I don’t think you can just have a happy ending there and not explain in some way what those repercussions are.  And that’s why I felt that it was really important to come up with the ending that we have, which is a little bit more Twilight Zone.  Where you realize a little bit, and not even in full detail, but you realize what some of those implications are.

Q:  I mean, you want to leave the audience talking about it, thinking about it.  You don’t want them leaving and thinking “Awww..”

DJ: Yeah, “Aww…  Where should we go for dinner?” [laughs]

Q: Exactly! *Eh, I don’t mind that…*

DJ: [laughs]

Q:  We were standing right outside the theatre, arguing about it.  Not saying whether it was a good movie or a bad movie, we were just so wrapped up in it, we were discussing what, you know..

DJ:  Well I don’t know if you heard my little diatribe last night at the Q&A, but what I really enjoy about the ending is the dark side, the ethical implications of what he’s done.  Because basically by Colter ending up in the parallel reality at the end there, he’s killed Sean Fentris.  Because Sean Fentris would only have died if the bomb went off.  He stopped the bomb going off and now he’s inhabiting Sean Fentris’ body for the rest of his life, so Sean Fentris is dead.  So that’s the first victim.  Secondly, now that he’s in this parallel reality, he’s created a new reality where another Colter Stevens exists – at the facility where Goodwin works – who was never sent on a mission, because the bomb doesn’t go off.  So now he has to sort of tell Goodwin, “you need to save this other version of me,” who has never been sent on a mission.  Also, when you think about it, for each time he’s been sent on a source code mission, he’s created a new reality where a train has blown up, and he’s created even more casualties.  So I like the fact that, if you think about it, there’s a lot more to the obvious happy ending.

[END OF SPOILER SECTION]

Q:  Jeffrey Wright is fascinating in the film.  He’s a scientist, so maybe his character doesn’t really have an affinity for the human race and he doesn’t care so much about Jake surviving?  Or what do you think?

DJ: He has two agendas.  He is a scientist, he has his personal reasons for wanting to make sure that the program is successful.  But on a very realistic level – you know, this is one soldier who has been asked to perform a mission that will save peoples’ lives.  He may not like it, and maybe you can argue the state of whether he is actually dead or not, but as a soldier he’s being asked to sacrifice himself for a greater good.  So from that point of view, it’s an argument that can be made, I guess is what I’m saying.  That to save other people’s lives, we’re going to pull back on some of the rights of this military helicopter pilot.  So I don’t consider him the bad guy.  I think obviously he has a very different perspective than Colter does, who’s sort of looking out for himself.  But he’s looking out for the people of Chicago because he’s trying to stop Chicago from getting blown up.

Q: Right, I just was coming from the angle that he’s so concerned about the science element that it effects the human element.  Would you say that makes him, not a bad guy, but the films antagonist.  He’s just playing a cold hard line.

DJ: Yeah, absolutely.  I think the design of the film is that we tell the story from Colter Steven’s perspective.  So obviously from Colter’s point of view, Rutledge is the problem.  If you were to tell the film Source Code from Rutledge’s perspective, that would be kind of interesting.  Because I imagine from that perspective, you have this arrogant little pain in the butt who’s not doing his job, and you’ve got the clock ticking and you’re trying to save the people of Chicago.  [pauses] I would actually kind of be interesting in seeing what happened with that.

[SPOILER ALERT, SKIP AHEAD]

Q: Can I ask a paradox question?  When Colter makes a call from the train to his father, does his father exist?

DJ:  Oh yeah, absolutely, but it’s in the parallel reality that he’s been sent to.  So in a world where Colter Stevens inhabits the body of Sean Fentris, in that parallel reality, there exists a version of Colter Stevens’ father whose son recently died in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan.

Q:  I won’t say the name, but everyone seemed thrilled when you used that actor for his father.

DJ: Oh yeah [laughs].  Well it’s fun because I think it was a little bit nerve-wracking until we recorded it.  Then when we recorded it and we knew that “said person” gave a great performance… We all know who we’re talking about, Scott Bakula [laughs].  He would give a performance that really fit that moment.  And I think it is kind of an emotional moment and I do think it works.  And both Jake and Scott did a great job with that.

A lot of people I know that should have picked up on that didn’t because they were feeling the emotion of the moment.  And then you tell them “you did notice that he said ‘oh boy’ in the middle of that conversation, as he did at the end of every episode of Quantum Leap”

Q: I didn’t notice that!

DJ: [laughs] You see, you don’t notice because it felt right for the scene.

Q: And he was your first choice for that role?

DJ: Yeah, absolutely [laughs].  Right from the first reading of the script, I realized there were so many allusions to different films and TV shows.  As I was reading it, the moment he looks in the mirror and sees someone else I’m like “hey, it’s Quantum Leap!” [laughs].

And I think it would be wrong to pretend that those things don’t exist and that Ben Ripley wrote the script and came up with this idea in a complete vacuum.  It’s just not fair to everything else that’s come before it.  So, I couldn’t put in every reference that he may have drawn from, but to me that one was such a clear one and it was a great opportunity with Jake’s dad’s voice.  It seemed appropriate.

[END OF SPOILER SECTION]

Q:  So, the production office – were there just charts everywhere? “There are 26 universes and we’re in this one today!”

DJ: [laughs] There were some charts but we shot chronologically as much as we could, especially the stuff on the train.  That was really the trickiest bit, the stuff on the train, because of all the repetition.  And our production staff made sure we were able to shoot that – other than where stunts were and threw things off – all the of the things between Jake and Michelle on the train, we were able to shoot that chronologically and that helped them a lot I think.

Q:  You know, there’s so much going on that you almost overlook Michelle and her performance.

DJ: Yeah, and it’s a massive acting challenge when you think about it.  She has a character arc which has to last the entire feature film and yet it has to be broken down into eight minute segments, each of which starts in exactly the same place.  So it always starts in the same place and then it ends somewhere, and then it starts in the same place again and you have to end somewhere else.  And over the course of the film, you have to feel like there’s an evolution from the first one to the end one.  I mean, that’s hard work.  Again, that’s why we had to shoot it chronologically – because she couldn’t be bouncing back and forth.  She had to sort of, feel comfortable that there was going to be a progression over the course of it.

Q: And she has to make us understand that he’s coming back for her more than just because she’s beautiful.  We have to realize that he really wants to save her because he’s fallen in love with her.

DJ: And you also have to feel comfortable that him falling in love with her over eight minutes is justified.  He had the whole movie to fall in love with her.  As far as she’s concerned, he’s only got eight minutes to fall in love with her.  So that’s the trick.

Q:  Not much room for romance there.

DJ: Not in eight minutes [laughs].  But that’s why it was important, I think, that Ben {and the guys that worked on the script before I became involved,} made a choice – which I think was the right one – which was that those two characters knew each other.  So you felt that there was at least some backstory that kind of justified the fact that they already had some kind of friendship at least.  It wasn’t like they were two complete strangers and in eight minutes they were kissing.

Q: You know what’s also intriguing, and he actually, one would think he could keep going back and going back and going back, but the time constraint outside the pod actually leads to a limited number of these eight minute opportunities.

DJ: So there is a ticking clock.

Q:  So he really can only fine tune it so much.  And the lesser of these objectives from outside the pod would be him getting together with Michelle Monahan.  So there is that time element, and I think that’s one of the hardest things to play with in film.  Especially since you’ve established all these relationships on the train and then you have to edit the time sequencing together.  It was done really well.

DJ: Thank you.

Q:  How much research did you do on the science, if any?

DJ:  I am a fan of science fiction so the basic ideas I felt comfortable with.  I didn’t do a great deal of research beyond what I already felt I had an understanding of.  I know Ben Ripley did quite a lot – in fact, I know some of his earlier drafts had much more explanation and exposition in it.  And he and the producers he was working with pulled a lot of it out and when I became involved I pulled out the last few bits that allowed us to just have the bare bones of it.  Because I think there are some kinds of science fiction films where you really need and want to spend time listening to the mechanics of the science.  But I think there’s so many other things going on in this film.  My approach was the lightness of tone.  Let’s get the rules set up early on, hopefully the audience will feel a familiarity and understand what the rules are, and then they’ll take that leap of faith and just go for the ride.  Because it’s not about explaining how time travel works, and I didn’t want it to become that.

Q:  Also, because you set up the rules so well, that’s what you bring back and are thinking about later.  You start picking it apart, but again in a good way like “no this couldn’t happen, because this that and the other thing!”  So we all …. I understand how it works.

DJ: [laughs] Good, because we don’t.

[SPOILER ALERT, SKIP AHEAD]

Q: I think Wright’s character does explain to Colter that it’s not time travel, but how is it set up?  It’s just an alternate reality?

DJ: Well that’s where Colter brings in his experience and says “actually you guys have got this wrong,” at the end.  They believe what they’re doing is they’re allowing him to re-experience the last eight minutes of Sean Fentris’ life and by doing that hunt for clues that will give them an idea of who blew up a train, an event which happened in the past, and allow them to track down and find this guy Derek Frost, who he eventually finds for them.  Now what he is saying is that, “you’re not actually just making me re-experience something recorded, you are sending me into the body of someone in a parallel reality.  So you may think that I’m just reliving eight minutes of someone else’s life, but you’re not.  You’re putting me in the past, in a parallel reality.  And I’m actually creating a whole new reality where anything can happen.  The train will blow up or it won’t blow up depending on what I do.”

Q:  In a way, it’s like information extraction as opposed to time travel.

[END OF SPOILER SECTION]

DJ:  In a funny way, I think the film is much more complicated than the producers who made it realized.  There’s an awful lot more meat to it than they probably understood.  Or at least it is because that’s how I saw it.  I tried to think through the logic of it, and that’s how I understood it.  Because my job was not to create a film where I explain time travel – it was about the characters and the relationships and the humor and the thriller and the mystery and the romance and all these other things that we’re trying to juggle – I wasn’t trying to get that deep into it.  But I had to understand it, and that’s my interpretation.  So hopefully where there are hints as to how it worked, that was my understanding of it, so the hints will always reflect that understanding of how the thing works.

Q:  You know, I’m wondering if that can be summed up with The Bean, you know?  Reflected in The Bean, the warping and the bending of realities.  Which you know, is a very interesting shot, and I’m also wondering how you were able to get rid of the camera crew in filming something like that.  But that’s a whole other conversation.

Q: Moon was really successful, critically –

DJ:  [laughing] Oh, I was going to say – critically!  Maybe not as much financially…

Q:  [Laughing] well, did you feel a lot of pressure coming off of that going into Source Code?  Because you had a bigger budget, and Sam is a great actor but probably not as well known as Jake, so working with a bigger name actor – did you feel a lot of pressure going into it and even still do you feel pressure now?

DJ:  I mean, you’re right in the respect that when I went to South by Southwest the first time, there were absolutely no expectations.  People came along to a small British independent science fiction film and left going “Hey this is really interesting, I didn’t expect that.”  But the second time I came to South by Southwest there were lots Moon fans, you know?

Q:  Yeah, I saw photos of a guy who was dressed up in that yellow space suit from the movie.

DJ: [laughs] Yeah, so  I mean, I don’t know if I’m going to have the same career path as Chris Nolan, but I did kind of look at his career.  You see a film like Memento and then you see a film like Insomnia – he starts off with a little independent film that he did with a lesser known actor at the time, Guy Pierce.  And then he does Insomnia where he’s working on a bigger budget with a studio, with well known actors – Robin Williams and Al Pacino – and then you kind of see how he’s showing what he’s capable of.  And I wanted to try to do the same, so – Source Code: bigger budget, working with the studio, bigger name actors, same kind of deal.

Q:  Great, thank you for your time!