Duncan Jones, Director of "Moon"

Popular Mechanics interviews Moon director
Duncan Jones

Erin McCarthy

"Duncan Jones, the movie's director, wanted to make the kind of gritty sci-fi film that he feels is no longer being made. The writer and director walks PM's Digital Hollywood through DIY FX on a budget, answering to astronauts at NASA and the difference between artificial intelligence and anthropomorphized computers. Plus, check out the Moon trailer HERE."

"I read a book by Robert Zubrin, Entering Space. It was all about how we could financially justify colonizing the solar system; there was a chapter on colonizing the moon and using helium-3 as a source for fusion power. It did seem to be a very logical argument about why you would have a reason to set up a moon base. I think one of the things that is limiting about NASA leading the space race is that everything they do is researched, but it doesn't have any direct relevance to how it affects our lives. But with helium-3, there is a very direct link to how we could use that as a resource here on Earth and why it would be profitable."

Jones, after receiving favorable from private screenings for cinematic legends Terry Gilliam and Neil Gaiman, says he now anxiously awaits a review from Ridley Scott. His next project, though not a squeal, takes up where the world portrayed in Scott's 1982 classic Blade Runner leaves off, in not-to-distant future Berlin.

Read the Popular Mechanics interview HERE.

"The Moon" gets a premier date

It won't matter to me that the lonely Helium-3 "miner," played by Sam Rockwell, in the Sundance Film Festival sleeper Sci-Fi hit "The Moon" is stationed, for obvious dramatic effect, on the Moon's Far Side. Never mind that our best science indicates that vast amount of available Helium-3 is probably located in Near Side seas Mare Tranquillitatis and Oceanus Procellarum.

It's just great to see Helium-3, which in the case of The Moon is really only the thing that Alfred Hitchcock called a "McGuffin," or "the thing the spies are looking for that doesn't really matter to the story or the audience" finally become a part of the popular culture, or at least "the noise level," for what its worth.

Enough has been written elsewhere about this film and its story, and how it received a distribution deal after its Festival premier. Nevertheless, it would be lax to neglect joining others in announcing The Moon will be generally released June 12, immediately after the peak of the Summer Blockbuster release season, which already features the hyper-hyped and anticipated Star Trek in May.

And the launch of LRO/LCROSS, if all goes well, on May 27.

MOON: Premiers at Sundance

Featuring the voice of Kevin Spacey and starring Sam Rockwell, a new popularized vision of 3Helium mining on the Moon premiers at the Sundance Independent Movie Festival.

Read the REVIEW HERE.