Duncan Jones has worked hard to escape his father's thin white shadow. And yet once you delve into the content of his first feature film, Moon, it turns out to have some strikingly autobiographical elements.

The writer-director was born Duncan Zowie Heywood Jones 39 years ago to quiet newlyweds David and Angela Bowie. Before long, the parents split their makeup kits and the youngster remained with his father (born David Jones) and grew up in Berlin, Switzerland, and the U.K. Understandably, the rugby-minded lad rebelled at his eccentric moniker at an early age, which he explained to the Georgia Straight in a call from his London office.

Despite some resistance to such an obvious topic as his rock-star roots, Jones warmed to the subject when it related to his creative life. “Well, it really is a problem when your parents call you Zowie,” he recalls with a laugh, “because heads certainly turn.” (Tell that to Moon Unit Zappa.) Since Zowie rhymed with Joey, he went by the latter name, or Joe, until leaving home to take a degree in philosophy on a sports scholarship at the College of Wooster in Ohio, later doing postgraduate studies even farther afield, at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.

He was happy to discuss Moon, which stars Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, a mining engineer slowly going nuts at the lunar space station he's been running alone for three years—but he's not so alone when his own clones start dropping by for tea. (The film opens in Vancouver on Friday [July 3].) Bell's only ongoing relationship is with his ubiquitous onboard computer, voiced by Kevin Spacey at his most disturbingly obsequious. (Think Phil Hartman with a touch of Hitler.) Though written with fellow first-timer Nathan Parker, the film obviously reflects the director's jones for postmodern identity queries. The movie deals with reflections of selfhood, the effects of isolation, and corporate patenting ethics, among other high-flown concepts—although there's precious little about having Iman as a stepmother.

“The three-year thing is no accident,” he insists. “That was exactly how long I stayed at Vanderbilt. I think my dad could see that I was having a hard time sticking it out, but for some reason I had this thought that I had to make it in the academic world. But I was miserable, with no friends, not even a roommate to talk to.”

In short, the sandy-haired Brit was struggling with warp-factor isolation that challenged his core beliefs.

“I was never interested in music, but I started with movies very early. And one thing we used to do as a sort of father-son hobby was to shoot these little stop-action films on an old 8-mm camera, and we would edit them together as well. I was also on sets a lot of the time when he was in movies, so I got used to the whole backlot thing. Being a little kid on the set of Labyrinth is obviously going to open your eyes in interesting ways.”

His father's connections, in fact, finally yanked him off the PhD track, during the 1997 shoot of a TV-series spinoff of The Hunger, and plunked him on the moviemaking path.

“He was working on something for Tony Scott up in Montreal, and said why don't I come up there for a few weeks on the set? So I worked there as a camera operator, and Tony was just incredibly supportive and generous. He talked to me about maybe going back to the U.K. and doing some commercials.”

That's exactly what happened, with high-profile adverts, followed by rock videos and fashion shoots until Jones made a science-fiction short called “Whistle”, which showed the money types he was ready to make a bona fide movie.

“I think the ads proved I knew how to get the most out of a buck, and I really am very proud of what we managed to do here. It was a tiny budget for a science-fiction film: five million U.S. dollars. And I feel it looks like it was made for a lot more. We shot it all on two soundstages at Shepperton Studios, one of which was the same that Ridley Scott used for Alien.”

Jones has another sci-fi card up his sleeve.

“This would take place in the same sort of time line as Moon. But it's a completely different story, set on Earth in a future Berlin. I'm trying to figure out where the overlaps are, philosophically. But I do know that Sam Rockwell is going to come back and have a cameo in one scene.”

Ah, but which Sam Rockwell will it be?