Duncan Jones on Why It’s ‘Harder Than Ever’ to Make His Kind of Movies (and Why He Refused to Use AI for His Newest One)

Duncan Jones wants you to know that no AI was used in the making of his new animated film, “Rogue Trooper.” He is adamant about this. We will get back to that, but, first, somehow, it’s been eight years since Duncan Jones made his last film, 2018’s “Mute.” This is something I had to recheck a few times because that didn’t seem possible. Jones made four films in his first nine years as a filmmaker — “Moon,” “Source Code,” “Warcraft,” “Mute” — and since then, yes he’s certainly around on social media (particularly Bluesky), but we haven’t had any Duncan Jones movies. It’s interesting that the same year “Mute” came out, Jones announced he was working on “Rogue Trooper,” an animated film based on the popular comic series owned by 2000 AD, who also owns the character Judge Dredd. It was the box office performance of the film “Dredd,” unfortunately, that made getting “Rogue Trooper” so difficult to make. But here we are and, eight years later, Jones finally premiered “Rogue Trooper” at the Toronto International Film Festival. “Rogue Troope,” follows a soldier named 19 (voiced by Aneurin Barnard) who is joined by three of his fellow troopers who have all been killed in action. But their brains have all been downloaded onto computer chips that are inserted into 19’s equipment so that he can still communicate with them as they make their way through a whole cast of unsavory, eclectic characters in search of a traitor. (Yes, this is very much a Duncan Jones film.) Ahead, Jones tells us what he’s been doing for the past eight years and why “Rogue Trooper,” which was independently financed, became such a passion project for him. Also, yes, he very much wants you to know that he did not use any AI on this film and has many thoughts about that practice. And Jones talks about the current studio and streaming system and why it doesn’t always line up these days with what “A Duncan Jones” movie should be. The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length. IndieWire: You started working on “Rogue Trooper” back in 2018, is this correct? Duncan Jones: That is true. That is true. So this took eight years? I mean, I made an announcement — the actual making of the film was four years, but the actual getting the things in place to make the film was eight years. But my first meeting with the guys, Jason and Chris Kingsley, who owned 2000 AD, was 25 years ago. So that gives you some sense of my patience. The movie shows “Rogue Trooper” comic covers that feature Judge Dredd… Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Though I guess it was “Dredd” with Karl Urban in it, which is awesome by the way, but I guess it just didn’t do very well and that hurt the production of” Rogue Trooper.” Is that accurate? Yeah, absolutely. It hurt everything, because 2000 AD has so many amazing fun characters and I know a lot of directors, British and beyond, who really want to do 2000 AD movies. But there’s the track record just with those two films, with the Stallone “Judge Dredd” movie and then the Karl Urban “Dredd” movie, which I agree is great. ‘Dredd’Dna/Kobal/Shutterstock It is really good. I was shocked when it didn’t do well. And it didn’t do well enough and they just have never been able to get the traction to get things going. Hopefully “Rogue Trooper” will do well enough that there’ll be some confidence, but it’s been a hard road for them. I like DC! I like Marvel! But I’m British and I grew up on 2000 AD. And seeing all those films get made — not all of them great, but there have been some great stuff, too — but so many of them have been made and 2000 AD’s just had two shots at it. And I think that they’re worth it. They’ve got great stuff. They’ve got “Strontium Dog,” they’ve got “Slaine,” they’ve got so many really good things. The fact “Dredd” is good probably hurts even more… That’s all you can do. Right. You can’t write it off as, “Well, it was bad, so of course it didn’t do well.” So after that, how do you still convince people to make “Rogue Trooper”? Well, we did not do that. We did not do it because we’re an independent movie… Well, I know that, but you still had get money. You still had to convince people to… We had to convince people, we didn’t have to convince studios. Right. So that’s the difference. Right, but you still had to convince investors to give you money. I think we correctly banged the patriotic drum that this was going to be a British film with lots of British stars shot in Britain based on a British IP. Let’s really try and do something that’s going to make some waves. So that was how we approached it and that’s what allowed us to get the film made, I think in some ways. And we’re proud of it. We got a pretty stellar cast and some very funny British comedians in the film as well. And it’s a bit of a romp. I think visually as well, there is something unique about the look of this film that hopefully, again, it makes it a little bit different. Maybe that’s a little bit weird for people, but hopefully, I have to believe that people want to see new things. So the pitch was basically, “the Yanks keep getting to do their stuff.” [Laughs] Yeah. It’s time for the UK to make an animated movie. And then I hope the French do one, too, because they have an amazing history of comic book storytelling and I’d love to see some more French movies being made based on their comic books. I probably already know the answer to this because it’s probably “money,” but why is it so much more difficult to get an animated independent film off the ground than it is just any other independent film? Yeah, it’s money. This is a unique moment in time where I think a few technologies had finally reached a level of maturity, where we were able to pull off the scale in a way that we would never have been able to do before. We were developing the look as we were going as well. So at the start of those four years, we really didn’t know where we were going to land. And it got nerve-wracking about two years in and we were like, “This is not working. What are we going to do?” And fortunately, more technologies came through. What wasn’t working? No AI! ‘Rogue Trooper’ I know. You’ve been adamant about that and I was going to get to that in a second. But what wasn’t working? It was just the way that things were getting rendered out and animated. It was looking too much like game material because, originally, we started working just on the Unreal Engine. And then we brought in a VFX supervisor, Marty Waters, who worked on “Mute” with me. And he came in with some supplementary technologies that allowed us to go back basically to some more traditional ways of doing things. But because we already had these really nicely derived assets and things that we’d worked out of the Unreal Engine, there was more possibility to do it at a much, much lower cost than traditional animated movie. So you mentioned AI. Do you get frustrated when you see people taking that shortcut after all the shit you had to go through to get this made? No. Look, I know people who are using AI. It’s not something that I choose to do. It’s hard because if you’re a jobbing, working person in the arts, it’s already really hard to get work. And if you have the opportunity to get work and you need to pay your bills, I understand. I understand why you feel like you have to do that. And I know people who are making that choice. I’m not down with this. The latest example of blowback is Danny Boyle’s “Ink.” I’ve seen it, it’s like 20 seconds of a two-hour movie… I haven’t seen it yet. But that’s why I don’t understand why people use it because it creates such negativity right out of the gate. I mean, the technologies in filmmaking are rapidly changing anyway, all the time, even without AI. I mean, back when “Gladiator” was made and they started using the MASSIVE engine to do large crowds in the background. Those are not real people, but it was a technology using animation that was generated from motion capture, and then you were able to populate in deep, far away crowds, and it looks terrific. It worked for that. And again, there’s just solutions, there’s technological solutions for hard problems coming up all the time. AI to me is a troubling one though, because it’s difficult to explain the use of AI in film as anything other than theft or being developed through the use of other people’s material, which was not paid for. So I find that troubling and I just want to stay away from it. If I can stay away from it, I will. You made four movies in nine years, your first four movies, and you’ve only made “Rogue Trooper” since, in about the same amount of time. What have you been doing? I mean, family life is definitely a part of it. We had that little break with COVID, which took a little bit of time, and that’s when I did a graphic novel with Alex de Campi that I was really happy with, and we worked on that through that period. I had a couple of other scripts that I wrote, and some of them were based on things that people know about, and it was just … they weren’t going to work out. But “Rogue Trooper” was always the one that I felt like if we can find a way to make this film independently, I think it would be really worth our time, worth doing. So I’m glad that we finally found a way to get that one off the ground. It’s hard, man. Making films independently, I’m kind of a curmudgeon. I have an agent and they come to me with projects from studios and I’m like, “No, I don’t want to do that.” Well, here’s the thing I’ve always thought about your movies. A great example is “Mute,” it feels like a movie that you didn’t compromise on… I didn’t. And I’m sure you got notes like, “Well, that part’s unpleasant.” It was the sweet spot. Oh my God, I hit the sweet spot because Netflix at that time was like, “We just want directors to come here and do what they want to do.” I was like, “Yes, I’ll do that then.” It was a moment in time because that doesn’t happen anymore. ‘Mute’Netflix So that’s what I’m wondering: Does the style of a Duncan Jones movie, in which you don’t compromise your vision, are you working right now in a system that doesn’t match up with you well? Is that part of the reason we haven’t seen a Duncan Jones movie in awhile? Look, please understand, I’m not putting myself on the same category as these people, but when you see David Lynch movies or you see Terry Gilliam movies or you see films by people who enjoy being themselves, I think it’s harder now than ever. Unless you’re working at a super low budget and you’re just doing it yourself. I think it’s hard to work in that way these days. It’s not conducive to it. The whole independent and middle ground of theatrical releases is very hard these days. I don’t think “Source Code” comes out today. International sales as a way to finance a movie doesn’t work the way it did when “Source Code” came out. I think you’re probably right. It would be hard to get that movie off the ground. Yeah, it’s tricky. I mean, I hope audiences are getting what they want. I worry that maybe they don’t know what they’re missing out on as far as the kind of independent movies that could be getting made. But I don’t have a solution though for how that thing changed, how the system changes in order to open back up those lower middle budget movies. It’s hard to see it happening because I mean the studios are collapsing in on themselves… And it’s about to get worse. And it’s about to get worse, and I’m not really sure where the streamers are going or what they want to do and the movies they want to make. I don’t think they know for sure either. I mean, the problem is the algorithm, they might be deciding what project to make, it’s just going to eat itself because if they’re only showing a limited number of kinds of movies and their algorithm is saying, “Yes, this is popular. This is popular. This is popular.” It’s just going to get smaller and smaller until you’re only making one kind of movie with two or three actors in it. I don’t know where they go from that unless they find a way to break out of that. “Rogue Trooper” premiered at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.