Duncan Jones

“I love J. G. Ballard. I love authors who take the world as we know it and just tweak one thing and say, 'What if the world were like this?'”

“I think one of the biggest jobs of being a director is getting the casting right.”

“In the past, a lot of films based on video games think that the audience wants to experience what it's like to play the game, and that's absolutely not the case.”

“Be it a video game, comic book, or cheque book, the question always is, 'What story do you have to tell?'”

“I'm a gamer at heart and always have been. I'm also a filmmaker.”

“My priority is having the ability to be creative and to come up with the right decisions and not be fettered. If there are a lot of people involved in decision making, it can become frustrating.”

“When Peter Jackson made the 'Lord of the Rings' movies, I remember there was a concern that people who didn't read Tolkien wouldn't go see the first one. But the films were so good in their own right that the audience grew beyond the readership of the book.”

“It seems like the reason that I miss the science fiction from the late '70s and '80s is that at that period, they really were doing interesting, introspective human stories that just happened to take place in science fiction settings.”

“'Warcraft' has always had a far higher percentage of women players than a lot of other games. It has always been a very welcoming environment for women.”

“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.”

“My sense of humor often gets me in trouble.”

“My family is very international.”

“'Warcraft' is going to be a period of my life I treasure and loathe at the same time.”

“I'd done a bachelor's degree, which I'd enjoyed, but I didn't know what to do with my life at the time. I was conflicted, and, being a hopeless romantic, I followed my girlfriend at the time to Vanderbilt, where, obviously, we broke up a couple of months later.”

“I was a 'Warcraft' player myself, and when I pitched my take on the film, they said right away, 'That is a player. That is the game.' So I've had their support from the very beginning.”

“I played lots of games, and I was a fan of gaming, so I was always looking for new games. I was also a science fiction and fantasy fan, growing up, in games and books and movies.”

“When you're in college, everything seems much more important than it really is.”

“Bowie is my dad's stage name, so I was never, ever called Zowie Bowie. The tabloids liked that because it rhymed.”

“You only get one shot to do a first feature.”