As a young boy in the early 1980s, Duncan Jones, the son of David and Angie Bowie, would take refuge in comic books. His parents divorced in 1980 and his father was awarded custody, but was often away.
“I travelled around a lot at that point and was kind of all over the place,” said Jones, 55.
“The woman who looked after me a lot when Dad was away was Marion Skene, who was basically my mum at that time. She lived in Aberdeen, so I spent a lot of time there.”
Skene, who died in 2017, was Jones’s nanny while Bowie was hopping between his New Romantic phase, including the 1980 album Scary Monsters, and his poppy era epitomised by Under Pressure, his No 1 duet with Queen in 1981.
With Skene’s help, Bowie, who died in 2016, was trying to give his son as normal a life as possible — despite calling him Zowie, a name Jones rejected in his teens.
“There was a traditional old corner shop near where Marion lived and I would go there and buy a bag of chocolate buttons and some comics,” Jones said. “It was around then I discovered 2000AD. I would sit down with it and my chocolate, and for me that was just pure escapism.”
45 years later, that escapism has turned into the latest big screen project for Jones, the film-maker behind the sci-fi movie Moon, the virtual-reality thriller Source Code and the video game adaptation Warcraft.
Jones has adapted Rogue Trooper, one of the most popular strips from the British comic 2000AD (which next year celebrates its 50th anniversary), into an animated feature using the latest motion capture and CGI technology.
“But without AI,” Jones added. “This is an all-human crafted movie made by people. There’s no artificial intelligence at all.”
2000AD is also the home of Judge Dredd, the hardline future lawman who has had two big-screen outings with Sylvester Stallone and Karl Urban respectively. Rogue Trooper is less well known, but fascinated Jones from the first time he saw him.
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Created by writer Gerry Finley-Day and artist Dave Gibbons in 1981 (Gibbons would later go on to co-create Watchmen with Alan Moore), Rogue Trooper is about an endless war being fought on the distant planet of Nu Earth between the opposing forces of the Norts (Germanic bad guys) and the Southers.
Rogue Trooper and his comrades are genetic infantrymen – blue-skinned genetically modified clones able to breathe the poisonous atmosphere of Nu Earth. They can also have their consciousness downloaded into computer chips at the time of death, allowing for re-installation in a freshly cloned body.
But when their first mission goes wrong due to a traitor, Rogue has to put the chips of his dead comrades into his gun, backpack and helmet, and seek justice on a war-torn planet.
It was a comic strip that spoke to Jones immediately. “The whole idea of the clones and the endless war… it just appealed to me. So about 25 years ago, when the company Rebellion took over publishing 2000AD, I went to see [Rebellion founders] Jason and Chris Kingsley and told them I wanted to make a Rogue Trooper film.
“They said, have you ever made a film before? I said, no. I was still in film school. They said I should probably make some more films first. The worst thing was, I shaved my head into a mohawk just like Rogue Trooper’s and they asked me if I was hoping to play the lead character as well. I was so embarrassed I didn’t go back to them for 20 years.”
Five years ago he did return and the movie received its premier — and rave reviews — at the Annecy International Animation Festival last week.
‘It was around then I discovered 2000AD. I would sit down with it and my chocolate, and for me that was just pure escapism’
‘It was around then I discovered 2000AD. I would sit down with it and my chocolate, and for me that was just pure escapism’
Duncan Jones, director
Jones is confident that it will satisfy old fans of the strip and newcomers. “When you strip away the alien planet and the blue skin and the chips, it’s basically a story about the horrors of endless war,” he said. “And that’s sadly never been more topical than it is right now.”
The voice cast is a who’s who of British acting and comedy talent – Diane Morgan and Sean Bean riffing off each other as superior officers, Hayley Atwell as female GI Venus Bluegenes, Matt Berry and Jemaine Clement as Nu Earth scavengers Brass and Bland, with Dunkirk and Peaky Blinders’ Aneurin Barnard as Rogue himself. Rogue’s dead sidekicks are voiced by Inside No 9’s Reece Shearsmith (Bagman), Jack Lowden (Gunnar) and Daryl McCormack (Helm).
Bowie lived to see Jones begin filming Warcraft, released in 2016. The singer was a comics fan himself, and Jones recalls shelves of graphic novels “laid out like a bookstore. He was into a strip called The Trigan Empire [a space epic from Look and Learn magazine in the 1960s] and the work of French cartoonist Moebius, so he was really into more arty stuff than me.
“But I think he’d like Rogue Trooper. His dad served in the Eighth Army in Egypt and Dad grew up in the aftermath of the war, so he’d appreciate the war story we’re telling. Yeah, he’d be proud of me for this.”
Rogue Trooper is a wholly independent production created and financed by Jones’s Liberty Films production company and Rebellion. It’s now looking for a distributor to put it on general release.
If it’s a success, would he like to do another? Or perhaps tackle another beloved 2000AD character? “I would but I don’t want to be greedy,” he said. “What I would like to see is other British and Commonwealth directors take on the wealth of characters that 2000AD has published over the years. It would be great to see a rise in interest in our home-grown characters, perhaps challenge the Marvel and DC superhero movies. You know, if you’ve had enough of superheroes, come and see something a bit different from British comics.”
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Photographs by Richard Bord/Getty Images; Ron Burton/Mirrorpix/Getty Images, and Liberty Films/Rebellion