Space. Once film's final frontier, over the years sci-fi has sometimes been the domain of cliche and inferior riffs on past glories. All the more surprising, then, to discover a new film that doesn't just pay lip service to the classics, but rather captures the spirit of its predecessors to create a refreshing angle on the genre. Such is Duncan Jones' Moon, the directorial debut for the British filmmaker that also ranks among 2009's best films. Set in the near future on Earth's lunar satellite, Moon explores the strange plight of a lone mining station caretaker -- Sam Rockwell, giving the year's most impressively frayed performance -- a man who's either made a puzzling discovery about his existence or... is completely losing his mind.

For Jones, who had an eclectic upbringing before graduating film school in London and moving into special effects and commercials directing, Moon represents a confident debut that announces a talent to watch. His proposed next project, Mute, is set to be a future-Berlin noir which he suggests will cultivate a Blade Runner-like atmosphere.

And yes, Jones' dad -- the star of The Man Who Fell To Earth, for anyone who's been off moonage daydreaming -- also had a thing for sci-fi. Perhaps it's in the genes. Or maybe, as we discovered, it has a little to do with a shared passion for Smurfs...

Okay, on a slightly off-topic note -- there's this mash-up that someone's done of the Moon trailer with the Ren and Stimpy episode "Space Madness"---

[laughing]

Have you seen it?

[still laughing] I did see that. I absolutely love Ren and Stimpy as well, so that was a real pleasure. And before you ask -- no, I did not rip off that Ren and Stimpy episode [laughs].

Well we're out of questions then! Do you feel that you've pretty much said everything there is to say already about the film?

Well I'm trying to do everything, you know. [laughs] There's a limited number of people who can actually do press for this film, because there's Sam, who's the main cast, and then there's me, the director, and other than that there's Kevin Spacey, who did a voice and who's obviously a very busy man. Sam's been doing Iron Man 2 and a number of other films, so he's been able to do a little bit of press, but really it's been up to me to do as much as I can to promote the film -- because if I'm not willing to do it, who will be?

And now you have to do it all over again.

Oh god, I'm sorry you're gonna hear all the stuff that you've heard before then... [laughs]

Well, we could just talk about The Naked Gun 2 1/2 for the next 10 minutes...

Absolutely! Maybe for my next film I'll just do a vehicle for Leslie Nielsen.

Is that an exclusive -- Leslie Nielsen is the star of Mute?

[laughs] Absolutely. How old is he now? He must be in his 80s.

But with the heart of a child... Okay, we should talk about Moon.

[laughs] Okay.

Take us back to the original idea. You'd first written another film for Sam -- which turns out to be your next one, Mute -- but it was too expensive at the time?

Yeah, it was a funny one. Sam absolutely loved the script. I absolutely loved Sam. But I had sent Sam the script asking him to read for a particular role in the film, and he read the script and wanted to play a different role to the one I'd wanted. He suggested that we meet up in New York and have a conversation about it, and I think he was hoping he could convince me, and I was hoping I could convince him. And it didn't work out. Basically, we both got on really well and we both loved my script, but we just couldn't convince each other as to what role he should play. I kind of wanted him to play a villain and I think he'd done enough of that; he didn't want to be pigeonholed in these roles. So it was totally understandable.

But we got on well. We're roughly the same age and had a lot of similar interests and similar upbringing, and we just started talking about, you know, what kind of films we liked and what kind of characters Sam would want to play as an actor. Sam was talking about wanting play a real kind of blue-collar, working class person, and we started talking about this period of science fiction films in the late '70s and early '80s and how all the protagonists were those types of characters. We then started talking about all the characters and films that eventually started inspiring Moon. So we talked about Sean Connery in Outland and Bruce Dern in Silent Running , and how you had this crew of blue collar working people in the beginning of Alien , before it turned into a horror film -- and how you got this real, believable sense of what it would be like to work in space, if you were just a normal working Joe. That's really how it all kicked off.