Credit: David Shankbone

Duncan Jones picks his five favourite films

Sun 2 April 2023 9:00, UK

The son of David Bowie and Angie Bowie, Duncan Jones grew up in London, Berlin and Switzerland. After graduating from the London Film School in 2001, he directed campaigns for fashion brands before releasing his debut feature, Moon, in 2009. Starring Sam Rockwell in one of his finest roles, the film was nominated for seven British Independent Film Awards and won two, establishing Jones as one of British film’s hottest emerging directors. Since then, he’s directed three more features, 2011’s Source Code, the 2016 fantasy Warcraft and the 2018 neo-noir Mute, starring Alexander Skarsgård and Paul Rudd. Here, Jones selects his five favourite films.

Considering he’s the son of Ziggy Stardust, it doesn’t come as a surprise to learn that Duncan Jones is a bit of a sci-fi nut. Sitting down with Rotten Tomatoes shortly before the release of Moon in 2009, the director was asked to name five of his favourite movies. “For me, Blade Runner is the best science-fiction film ever made,” he replied. “Blade Runner, for me, was the most fully realised world. Sometimes you see films, not just science fiction films, where you get the sense that if the camera were to pan just to the left or the right, all of a sudden, you’d be seeing light stands and crew standing around. But with Blade Runner, the beauty of it is that it felt like a real, breathing city.”

Jones also mentioned his affection for the works of British director Terry Gilliam, specifically his 1995 time-travelling thriller Twelve Monkeys, starring a young Brad Pitt as an insane asylum inmate and Bruce Willis as a convict who travels back in time to trace the origins of an apocalyptic viral outbreak. The source? Monkeys. “There are lots of his films that I love, but Twelve Monkeys, in particular, I thought was fantastic,” Jones said. “I think it’s the best thing Bruce Willis has ever done, and also the best thing Brad Pitt has ever done as well. It’s just really intense, exciting and weird, and everything that I love about Terry Gilliam, so that’s up there.”

Brad Pitt is also the star of Jones’ third pick: Fight Club. “It’s not the best film ever, but it is beautifully done,” he says. “It’s visceral, and it’s beautifully made. I like David Fincher, I love his films anyway, but that film is, to me, the best of Fincher and what he really does well. It’s stylised, but it’s smart. Even though it’s stylised, you feel that there’s a real character to it, it’s something very individual, and features another great Brad Pitt role. That and Twelve Monkeys are his best bits ever. Seven is fantastic as well, although I should stop clumping films together.”

As a film school graduate, Jones could hardly fail to mention the great Akira Kurosawa. “I don’t want to go for Seven Samurai,” he began, “so I’ll go for Yojimbo or Sanjuro, those ones that all the spaghetti westerns were based on. I know it’s not fair, but that clump of Japanese samurai films were just beautiful films. Toshiro Mifune was such an elegant hero, and there’s something really empathetic about him. There’s this lovely thing with his face where you really can just tell everything that he’s thinking. He doesn’t have to do much at all; you can just sense what’s going on with him. So I love those films, anything with Mifune in actually, but that period, in particular, he was the best hero ever.”

Those of you who prefer classic comedy will prefer Jones’ final pick, the impossibly moving M*A*S*H, which he called “one of the great comedies. It’s incredibly dark, and on a character side, Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould, their characters are just so believable, and I think it’s the first bromance film, I just love it. I love the relationship between those two guys.”

Check out Duncan Jones’ full selection below: