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. – Duncan Jones
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! – Duncan Jones
Games have always presented an opportunity to escape. But they are also an opportunity to go somewhere that you come to know well. – Duncan Jones
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. – Duncan Jones
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. – Duncan Jones
Film directing is really undermined if you attempt to do it by committee because there has to be a single vision as to how to tell a story. It’s like if you were at a campfire, and everyone is taking turns to give one sentence in telling a horror story. It would be a mess – it’s not going to make sense. – Duncan Jones
I am absolutely of the videogames generation, starting on the Atari and Commodore 64 and the Amiga. – Duncan Jones
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. – Duncan Jones
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. – Duncan Jones
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. – Duncan Jones
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. – Duncan Jones
I played lots of games, and I was a fan of gaming, so I was always looking for new games. I was also a science fiction and fantasy fan, growing up, in games and books and movies. – Duncan Jones
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. – Duncan Jones
I’ve certainly never used my father’s name as a way of getting a meeting. And fortunately, I’ve never needed to. – Duncan Jones
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. – Duncan Jones
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. – Duncan Jones
I don’t know why, but for whatever reason, that side of life – the celebrity and the spectacle – has never interested me. – Duncan Jones
When Peter Jackson made the ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies, I remember there was a concern that people who didn’t read Tolkien wouldn’t go see the first one. But the films were so good in their own right that the audience grew beyond the readership of the book. – Duncan Jones
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. – Duncan Jones
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. – Duncan Jones
I guess, as a director, you sort of take the script, and you find ways to interpret it. – Duncan Jones
I’m a bit of a geek, actually. So I always wanted my first film to be science fiction. – Duncan Jones
That’s what I wanted to do… I wanted to make a great film that just happened to be based on a video game. – Duncan Jones
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. – Duncan Jones