Feature

6 Things We Learnt About Duncan Jones And Mute

Published

8 years ago

February 23, 2018

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Silent But Speaking Volumes?

♦ Duncan Jones’ Mute is on Netflix from today and Vanity Fair spoke to the director this week about this project which has been gestating for many years. Here’s 6 things we gleaned from that chat…

1. When they started shooting Mute, Jones felt like years of planning had come to fruition at last: “The very first things we shot were in Leo’s apartment, which was a set we built at Studio Babelsberg in Berlin. Gary Shaw, this amazing cinematographer, had this amazing light show going on outside the window, and I just felt, yeah, this is it. This is that blend of the real world and a Berlin that I recognize, this strange contrast between Leo and his Luddite existence and the science-fiction world around him.”

2. His father, David Bowie, had a strong connection with Berlin and this created the connection for Jones with the city: “Even as a very young kid, I could sense that we were in a place that felt apart from anywhere else. It was an island of Western culture and civilization in a sea of the Soviet Union at the time, and it felt like an island—like you were completely cut off from the rest of the world.”

3. Mute was originally going to be a conventional cinema film but Jones explains how Netflix got involved: “We tried all sorts of avenues to make the film over the decade and a half that we’ve been working on it. There are two things that came up against us. One of them is the subject matter, as you’ve seen, is not obviously commercial. And the second issue is that studios don’t make films like this anymore. They don’t have independent arms to make original movies. They’re very much focused on opening weekends; four-quad movies; films which are either franchises, sequels, reboots, based on something that the audience is already very familiar with in the hopes that they can make most of their budget back in the one- or two-week window—two weeks being the most that they’re really gonna get before the next big-studio film comes out. That’s how the theaters work these days. So in order to make smaller original movies, it’s been an absolute godsend that the streaming sites have come to the rescue.”

4. Despite the fact that Mute is a science-fiction films, events in Jones’ personal life have influenced making it: “Whatever it was that made now the time I was making this movie, it’s probably all for the best. I was probably at my most sensitive and raw while making it. Warcraft had beaten and bruised me—just the political process of that. My dad had just died. I had just had my son, who was 4 months old when we traveled to Berlin to shoot this film. So I was trying to be the best dad I could while shooting a movie, which was an awful lot like what the subtext of Mute was about—being a parent and trying to do it in difficult circumstances. It was an incredibly personal film.”

5. The film he has made now is a different one to the one he could have made a few years ago and he sees this as a positive thing: “I genuinely believe that it is a much better film having been made now than it would’ve been back then. I have the experience of having made three other films since I originally wrote it, which has a big impact, and I as a person have grown and matured and experienced a lot more than I had when I originally wrote it.”

6. Mute is apparently the second part of a film trilogy and the director reveals that this is still something he would like to pursue:”There is a third film, which I would love to make, and if I can find a way to make it, I will. None of these films are dependent upon the stories of the previous films; in fact, someone I was just talking to said that, in a sense, it’s more of an anthology than sequels or side-quels. They’re independent stories that happen to take place within the same world, but thematically I think there is a connection between them. It’s really about people finding themselves in a world where they realize they were not meant to fit.”

Netflix Mute site