Duncan Jones' first film Moon made my top-10 best list in 2009.

It’s a brilliant and inexpensively made piece of science fiction that proves you don’t need millions to make a great movie. What's needed are energy and vision.

Jones has both.

He is also a blast to interview. Jones is upbeat, focused and lively. Many of the writers, actors and directors I talk to do press interviews because it’s a duty that must be done to promote their movie.

Jones obviously loves the dialoguing and the interaction and seemed to become energized when we talked about the Mr. Movie I-can’t-wait-to-talk-about-it ending for his new movie Source Code.

Jones is the son of rock and roll legend David Bowie. Where his father is one of music’s great innovators, Duncan — with two movies — has shined in a venue that few master, which is the art of telling a story on film.

Source Code is about a man with a unique skill. He can travel back in time for short periods of time and access events that have already happened. The film has him going to a Chicago commuter train to identify a bomber who has already blown up the train and wants to now set one off in the city.

The man he becomes is already dead.

He has eight minutes to find the bomber and is sent back over and over again in an attempt to solve the mystery. Time is of the essence because in the present people are rushing out of Chicago in a desperate attempt to escape the much-larger bomb.

Gary Wolcott: You got the script for Source Code from Jake Gyllenhaal.

Duncan Jones: We met, talked about wanting to work together and things we might do together in the future. He brought up this script and said, “Why don’t you take a look at this? I think this is something we might do together.” I read the script and thought, 'Yeah, I might be able to get my teeth into this.' I called up Jake and said, 'Yes, I love the script, I love the heart of it and this is my interpretation.' I told him what I would do with it, and he liked the sound of it.

GW: You said you liked the heart of it. Does that tell me you made some changes?

DJ: There were a few little things. I felt it took itself quite seriously, almost like an episode of [TV’s] 24 with sci-fi trappings. I made the suggestion that we lighten the tone of the film so we could inject some humor into it and help make the whole idea of it much more accessible. Fortunately, Jake agreed with me.

GW: The way you sent him back to the train over and over again, the various shots of the train and then one you kept going back to — the one where the goose flies out of the lake — is brilliant. Is that how you envisioned it when you first read the script?

DJ: You have this repeated event with the worst possible result, and you don’t want the audience to get bored. My plan of attack was to break it down like a military operation as to how we could revisit these same eight minutes and keep it distinct and different every time. We needed to make sure there were new relationships and new characters at each visit to every one of those eight-minute segments. So even though we send the audience back to the same eight minutes, it never really feels like the same thing.

GW: That’s very much like Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day only more serious.

DJ: Yeah. That was a terrific film. Whether Ben Ripley — when he wrote the script — consciously or unconsciously did it, he tapped into things that really worked both in that film and in other pieces of science fiction. I felt there was a little bit of [TV’s] Quantum Leap in there.

Ben created this interesting cohesion of ideas and created a script that is incredibly tasty.

GW: Both of your films have been science fiction. Moon which ended up on my top-10 best list in 2009 and this. Why?

DJ: I love the idea of being able to tell stories about hypotheticals; things that may or may not exist or may or may not be true. I was a big science-fiction fan growing up. There was this old comic book from before I was born called Weird Science — from the 1950s or 60s. They would take reality and give it a kind of a twist and said, “What if this was different or that?”

GW: You wrote Moon. You didn’t write this. Is doing something you didn’t write a bigger challenge?

DJ: When you’re doing someone else’s material, it is much easier to be objective about it than your own work. You can make changes or hard decisions on the fly. When you’re working with your own material it’s very easy to slip into becoming very precious about it and thinking that there can be no wrong.

The advantage of doing your own material is that you have a fully realized idea of what the movie should be. There is more of a learning curve with someone else’s material and finding a way to put your own interpretation on it.

GW: Moon was set in a limited number of locations. So was Source Code, that, too, has its challenges.

DJ: (laughs) Tell me about it. I liked the speed of Source Code as a story, but you are right. I had to be careful that people didn’t feel too claustrophobic or locked in one place. The train did give us five very different locations to be in and the pod that Jake’s character was in in between missions kept changing, too, and kind of morphs through the course of the film.

For the lab we kept moving the camera in a clockwise direction to give you a different view of the lab through the course of the film so the audience could discover different things along the way.

GW: And it worked. I came out of Source Code speechless. I felt the same way about Moon. You have exceptional storytelling skills. Both of your movies are very short stories, but you have managed to fill them up.

DJ: Thank you very much. I can’t take all the credit. The majority of the heavy-lifting is being done by the actors. In both films I have worked with extraordinarily talented actors. Sam Rockwell made Moon.

I would say the same thing for Source Code. Jake Gyllenhaal is no slouch as an actor. Michelle Monaghan is incredibly charismatic. She’s funny, and the chemistry worked between her and Jake. Vera Farmiga is one of America’s great actresses. I love her ability to communicate in nuance, especially in a role where so much of the time she’s just on screen and not saying anything. She can communicate so much with just the smallest movement of her eye or other parts of the face. And Jeffrey Wright is a terrific actor, too.

GW: And Kevin Spacey who did the voice of the computer in Moon. He was incredible and helped make it a great film.

DJ: How could I forget Kevin Spacey? He brought so much to that role for just one afternoon of sound recording.

GW: Your dad is rock legend David Bowie. Why movies and not music? Are you musical?

DJ: No, not at all. That’s why I do movies. I would not want to put myself in the same arena as my dad. He is a serious music legend. I never had an urge to be in music. When I was a kid, my poor dad tried to get me to learn some musical instruments, and I just wasn’t interested. It wouldn’t take.

What we ended up doing as a hobby was shooting short films — 8mm animations. That’s how I got my start. My dad showed me how to edit and splice together film using tape.

GW: He was a kind of a pioneer in rock music videos and, as I remember, some of them were very good.

DJ: That was a hobby of his, and that was a hobby I could get into. If music wasn’t going to bond us together, then film is what did it.

GW: I’m a drummer and play in two bands. One of my bands does one of your dad’s songs — Fame — and from time to time we mess around with Space Oddity. I love a lot of your dad’s music. But back to movies. Do you have favorite science fiction movies?

DJ: No. 1 for me has always been Blade Runner, and I don’t think that will ever change. It had a huge impact on me growing up. The performances were extraordinary. And what makes it aspirational for me as a filmmaker is if the camera were to pan left or right off the actors, you would still be in that world and you’d be able to follow anybody on the street and probably have an extraordinary story.

It’s the most fully realized universe I’ve ever seen in a film. And, like I said, I aspire someday to make a film that is that believable.

GW: Being a sci-fi fan myself, when it works, nothing in movies is more fun. Blade Runner worked for me, too. What else? Even flicks that aren’t sci-fi?

DJ: There are too many science fiction films to choose from. When I was a kid, most of the time I was watching films from much earlier than those from my generation. I used to watch a lot of Errol Flynn movies. James Cagney movies. My dad introduced me to an awful lot of them when I was growing up.

GW: What are you doing now?

DJ: I’m writing a script right now. (Laughs) It is unsurprisingly another science fiction film. I think it may well be my last science fiction film for awhile. After this next one, I’ll hopefully have the opportunity to do what I have been aspiring to do for awhile -- and that is to make a film that is mine, my own idea but that is done on a bigger scale with a bigger budget.

I’ll definitely take a sabbatical from science fiction because there are some other kinds of films that I’d like to take a shot at.

GW: But you don’t have to have a big budget to make a great movie. Your two films have been low-budget and they’re terrific. Moon couldn’t have cost very much at all and is proof to me that imagination — as it always has — can trump dollars.

DJ: I agree with you. We made Moon for about $5 million but everything about Moon had to be thought through and designed for that budget. It made it absolutely possible but also made it absolutely limiting. It is a wonderful exercise to go through, and if you can do it, you should do it.

But I have ideas that I think will make tremendous movies that I know cannot be done for $5 million. So it is about finding the balance between how the money gets spent and having the freedom and opportunity to make films out of slightly more expensive ideas.

GW: You are obviously a big fan of movies. Have you seen any lately that rock your world?

DJ: I get screeners now, which is a godsend or I wouldn’t get to see many movies. I absolutely loved The Social Network. I have been a big fan of David Fincher ever since I can remember.

GW: Who do you want to work with?

DJ: I have always been a huge fan of George Clooney. There’s something about Jake Gyllenhaal and Sam Rockwell that sort of ties them together. They’re both incredibly good actors that are able to do lighter things like comedy. They maintain a sort of integrity where you still care about them, and they are very empathetic.

George Clooney is sort of the pinnacle of that. He’s handsome, he’s charismatic, he’s funny, he’s a very good actor. I’d like to work with him one day.

GW: I agree with you about Sam Rockwell. He’s the best kept acting secret in the universe. I like Jake Gyllenhaal, too, but Rockwell is in a class by himself. He chooses great roles.

DJ: He’s an incredibly lovely man as well. I hope to work with him again. There are a lot of filmmakers trying to find a way to work with Sam.

GW: Do you have a favorite director?

DJ: I have a group of them. It’s the guy who can do both sides of the job that I admire. They can work with actors but also have the vision to tell a story. Those are the people I most admire.

Obviously because of my feeling about Blade Runner, Ridley Scott. David Fincher as I said. The French director Luc Beeson, who did La Femme Nikita and The Professional. Terry Gilliam, who I met when I was younger. Akira Kurosawa. He has a great sense of humor and is amazing visually and also gets great performances from his actors. Kurosawa also understands that humor is a powerful tool in the arsenal of a director because you can use it to help the audience bond with people.

GW: I’ve always subscribed to the theory that humor helps sell horror and science fiction. This is most true for horror. You have a great sense of humor.

DJ: I think it comes out in my movies, and it does get me into trouble in the real world. I’m a glass-full kind of guy. That’s my tone. I take things pretty lightly.

GW: That comes out in your movies, and that’s why you are good.