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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW > DUNCAN JONES<br />
ry about a general in the Middle East who<br />
was using his Psy Ops team to convince<br />
American senators when they went to the<br />
Middle East to vote in order to finance his<br />
Psy Ops requirements. There’s this whole<br />
story going on which is really interesting<br />
and it kind of falls in the same ballpark of<br />
what we’re doing in Source Code. The military<br />
is both an incredibly important aspect<br />
of protecting the American way of life, but<br />
it’s also a business. That contradiction and<br />
those two very divergent responsibilities to<br />
both protect the American people and run<br />
at a profit while keeping enough money<br />
within the company that it can keep growing,<br />
that’s interesting. We touch a little bit<br />
on it, but not in too big of a way. Our focus<br />
is really on the dilemma of Colton, the character<br />
that Jake plays.<br />
Did you see The Men Who Stare at Goats?<br />
Yes, I did! Kevin Spacey and George Clooney—that<br />
was a great film.<br />
And it was based on a non-fiction book<br />
by UK Guardian writer Jon Ronson<br />
about the US Military’s crazy secret<br />
projects, but what was funny in the<br />
reactions to the movie is that the true<br />
stuff was so wild, no one believed it was<br />
real.<br />
It had a real, goofball, strange sense of humor,<br />
which I think did detract in some ways<br />
from being based on a true story.<br />
True. All the reviews said it was overthe-top—they<br />
didn’t believe that a lab<br />
where men tried to kill goats with their<br />
minds actually existed, which is almost<br />
a tragedy.<br />
Stranger than fiction!<br />
There’s this very funny line that Jeffrey<br />
Wright nails—he plays the designer of<br />
this military technology. He’s asked to<br />
explain how Source Code works and he<br />
waves his hand and says, “It’s quantum<br />
mechanics—you wouldn’t understand<br />
it.” Such a toss-away explanation!<br />
It’s just a MacGuffin! [Laughs] Ben Ripley<br />
who wrote the script did do a fair amount<br />
of research on his own behalf before I even<br />
became involved in order to craft this film<br />
and this story and this world. There are definitely<br />
some enticing, intangible facts as to<br />
how this could work. But for me, as a sci-fi<br />
junkie, how have hard sci-fi and soft sci-fi.<br />
Hard sci-fi is more like Moon, where you can<br />
see how the world we live in today could<br />
evolve into the world in the movie. Soft scifi<br />
is a lot more fantastical and you don’t necessarily<br />
see how the two worlds would have<br />
to relate. Source Code, for me, is between the<br />
two in a gray area, mainly because of time<br />
travel. For me, time travel is an idea—there<br />
are some interesting theories about how it<br />
could work, but I’ve never been completely<br />
convinced about how we actually get to<br />
that point where we have any control over<br />
time travel. I kind of felt like I was treading<br />
on two different territories here: trying<br />
to stay true to the script and make sure<br />
that the audience could take the leap and<br />
go with the story, but not trying to get too<br />
bogged down in the technology of how<br />
Source Code works because I still think that<br />
time travel is one of those things that is yet<br />
to be proven.<br />
Scott Bakula of Quantum Leap plays the<br />
voice of Jake Gyllenhaal’s dad. Did you<br />
ask him to explain?<br />
(continued on next page)<br />
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APRIL <strong>2011</strong> BOXOFFICE PRO 49
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