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
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Duncan Jones premiered the animated film "Rogue Trooper" at the Toronto International Film Festival, eight years after his last feature, 2018's "Mute," after a four-year production that itself followed eight years of pre-production.
- The film is based on a 2000 AD comic series and was independently financed; Jones pitched it to investors as a British-made project with British stars and British IP, contrasting it with American comic-book adaptations.
- Jones explicitly refused to use AI on the production, telling IndieWire AI in filmmaking is "troubling" because it is "developed through the use of other people's material, which was not paid for," while acknowledging he understands why working artists use it to pay bills.
- The 2012 film "Dredd" starring Karl Urban underperforming at the box office hurt the track record for 2000 AD adaptations, complicating Jones's efforts to get "Rogue Trooper" made; he first met 2000 AD owners Jason and Chris Kingsley 25 years ago.
- "Rogue Trooper" follows a soldier named 19, voiced by Aneurin Barnard, who carries the brains of his dead fellow troopers downloaded onto computer chips in his equipment as he hunts for a traitor.
- Jones made four films in his first nine years ("Moon," "Source Code," "Warcraft," "Mute") and attributes his long gap to family life, COVID, scripts that didn't work out, and his curmudgeonly refusal of studio pitches that don't align with his sensibility.
Why it matters: Jones's eight-year path to "Rogue Trooper" illustrates the gap between current studio offerings and his auteur-driven genre sensibility, which he resolved by going independent; his public refusal of AI — framed as opposition to uncompensated training data — gives a high-profile filmmaker's voice to growing creator concerns over generative tools in production.
Ask SkimNews
