DUNCAN JONES

I was a sensitive boy.

My family is very international.

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.

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 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?'

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.

I think everything you do, whether it's low budget things when you're first starting out or full feature films or when you're working with Hollywood, you're always learning, all the time.

I'm not the guy who does slo-mo, or I'm not the guy who does splashing rain or doves flying or anything; that's not me. Every film, I try and make it the way I see it in my head, and it really just depends on the script and the people I'm working with or whatever interests me at that particular time.

It took a generation of filmmakers who loved and were raised on comic books to make movies that you actually cared about and felt something for. I think that's absolutely the same with what's going on with videogame movies.

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.

You only get one shot to do a first feature.

Eventually, I'm going to be judged purely on my own merits.

I love the 'what if' nature of sci-fi.

Science-fiction cities in general, I think, are so hard to get right, because it's so easy to just play some cheesy music or do something that takes you right out of it, but 'Blade Runner' got it right, and I love that about the film.

I thought 'The Social Network' was fantastic.

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 was in my 30s when I finally went to film school. It was kind of always going to happen, but I did try to keep it suppressed for awhile.

I view myself still as a director. That's what I do.

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 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.

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

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.

I was a big fan of Luc Besson and obviously Ridley Scott.

Fantasy films tend to skew towards what Tolkien fantasy was, which is that the humans, the Hobbits, and the cute creatures are the good guys, and everything that's ugly are the bad guys.