Duncan Jones on Why It’s ‘Harder Than Ever’ to Make His Kind of Movies (and Why He Refused to Use AI for His Newest One) — SkimNews
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- Duncan Jones premiered his independently financed animated film "Rogue Trooper" at the Toronto International Film Festival after eight years of development, with four years of actual production work
- Jones is adamant that no AI was used in "Rogue Trooper," calling the practice troubling because AI is "developed through the use of other people's material, which was not paid for"
- "Rogue Trooper" is based on the 2000 AD comic series, and Jones first met owners Jason and Chris Kingsley about adapting the property 25 years ago
- The underperformance of the 2012 film "Dredd" starring Karl Urban damaged 2000 AD's track record for screen adaptations, making it hard to greenlight further projects from the British publisher despite a strong pitch centered on British IP
- The animation pipeline initially ran on Unreal Engine before VFX supervisor Marty Waters (who worked with Jones on "Mute") introduced supplementary technologies that brought costs below traditional animated-film budgets
- Jones released four films in his first nine years as a director ("Moon," "Source Code," "Warcraft," "Mute") but went eight years without a new release before "Rogue Trooper," citing family life, COVID, and scripts that did not work out
Why it matters: Jones's eight-year odyssey to mount "Rogue Trooper" independently illustrates how mid-budget, director-driven genre films have been pushed outside the studio system, with British comic-to-screen adaptations still haunted by the 2012 "Dredd" box office. His public refusal of AI — framed as ethical opposition to unpaid-for source material — puts him among the higher-profile directors drawing a line as generative tools reshape animation pipelines.
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