Quotes from Duncan Jones

I love games, and I feel they've been sold short shrift in films so far.

I'm a natural puzzle solver.

My stepmom's from Somalia, my baby sister is African American, my dad was always English, I'm a white man... You may have noticed.

I've certainly never used my father's name as a way of getting a meeting. And fortunately, I've never needed to.

I think if you're young and you're being compared with a successful family member, it's really hard to maintain any sense of self-worth and credibility.

There's a depth to the look that you get with models that you just can't get with CGI. It's about the detail that you just wouldn't think to put in.

I don't know why, but for whatever reason, that side of life - the celebrity and the spectacle - has never interested me.

I love incredibly imaginative, speculative sci-fi.

Film directing is really undermined if you attempt to do it by committee because there has to be a single vision as to how to tell a story. It's like if you were at a campfire, and everyone is taking turns to give one sentence in telling a horror story. It would be a mess - it's not going to make sense.

I love my work, but I don't like being in the spotlight. I was never going to be an actor, that's for sure.

I think I was brought up with games and I don't think that they're just Pac-Man or Space Invaders. I think we've moved on, I think that there are stories being told and worlds being explored.

It's always nerve-racking, showing your parents things you've been working on.

I thought 'The Social Network' was fantastic.

Jeron Lanier and 'Lawnmower Man.' That was VR. And there was the VFX1, that big giant VR prototype unit, and I was like, 'I am going to save my money and get one of those.' And then VR just sort of drifted away.

I do have a somewhat unique upbringing.

When I was at graduate school, you wouldn't have recognised me. I was so different - and not a nice person: a grumpy, surly, upset, confused, lost person.

I think my sensibilities about storytelling and character just automatically come into play when I'm trying to work on any kind of narrative. For me, it doesn't really matter what the source of the narrative is. I will be looking for ways to make it into an intriguing story with empathetic characters.

I've been very strategic in how I've approached the jobs I want to do.

Growing up, I was on film sets occasionally, when my dad was acting, so I got to run around and do odd jobs on films like 'Labyrinth' and others... I seemed destined to make films.

One of the things my dad always said is that it's O.K. to do one for you and one for them. He taught me a lot of things, but that's certainly one of the many that I took to heart.

It felt very fresh to me, and it feels very contemporary - this idea that conflict's not being about good and evil and not necessarily being black and white. If you dig deep enough, you'll often find that people do things because they feel that they have to as opposed to because they are evil.

After 'The Fellowship of the Ring,' the films that followed it, instead of having their own unique aesthetic, they all wanted to be 'Lord of the Rings' as opposed to learning from 'Lord of the Rings.'

I guess sci-fi was like my candy growing up. My dad always thought it was important for me to read an hour or two every night. And if I got stuck or didn't want to read, sci-fi was sort of the thing you'd give me to spur me on to read that evening.

That's what I wanted to do... I wanted to make a great film that just happened to be based on a video game.