'Source Code' director Duncan Jones messes with time, reality and Jake Gyllenhaal

Jake Gyllenhaal had seen Moon, Duncan Jones' 2009 debut feature - an eerie sci-fi study about a man alone in a lunar mining station - and called the first-time director. The actor had a script, Source Code, that he thought Jones would be right for.

"I was excited about what was so different about it compared to Moon," says Jones of the tricky, time-warping screenplay. "Here was an opportunity to do something that wasn't about one guy on his own in space - like every other script I was being offered!"

It wasn't until Jones was in the thick of production with Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, and Jeffrey Wright that the filmmaker realized that for all its differences, Source Code addressed many of the same themes and issues Moon had.

"I'm sure that Jake and the people he was working with were thinking about the similarities, and saying, 'Duncan would be a great fit.' But it took me awhile before I started seriously realizing what the similarities were - identity, perceptions of reality, corporations taking advantage of individuals.. . . I was so deep into the forest that I didn't see the trees."

In Source Code, which opens today - and which represents a major step forward in budget ($35 million), scale, and casting for Jones - Gyllenhaal plays a guy who tries to thwart a bombing on a Chicago commuter train. And thanks to a pivotal bit of space-time continuum business, he gets to try over and over again, in 8-minute increments.

"Certainly, it's very easy when you see the film to think of Groundhog Day and [TV's] Quantum Leap, and things like that," Jones acknowledges. (Some other films to think of: Avatar, Memento, Deja Vu.)

For Jones, 39, the opportunity to call the shots on a major Hollywood production is a dream come true. The son of rock icon David Bowie (and his first wife, Mary Angela Barnett), Jones has vivid memories of tagging along with Dad on the film sets of the mid-'80s endeavors Labyrinth (Bowie as a goblin king) and Absolute Beginners (Bowie as capitalist creep).

"I was young enough to really appreciate it, and also old enough to understand how cool it was," he recalls. "I had the chance to experience an amazing feat of imagination like Labyrinth - to actually be on that set, with the Jim Henson creatures. And Absolute Beginners, while not a great film, was an incredible film set. They actually built three square blocks of London in the 1950s inside a soundstage. That creation-of-worlds thing I just find fascinating."

So, Jones, just a young teenager then, "got the bug." (Ironically, given his father's status in the world of pop and rock, Jones had no interest - and still has little - in music.) Upon finishing boarding school, however, Jones took "a long detour away from film in order to fulfill what I believed were my academic obligations." That would be attending the College of Wooster in Ohio, and spending two-plus years pursuing a doctorate in philosophy at Vanderbilt.

"Eventually, I realized that I was empty of any kind of enjoyment in academia, and really wanted to get back to what I wanted to do," he says. And so he enrolled in film school in London. And then went to work making commercials and music videos, based in the U.K.

It's no coincidence that Jones' first two films are works of science fiction. His Ph.D. studies centered on contemporary sci-fi scribes such as Daniel Dennett, and Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer. "I was focusing on how one might apply ethics to machines, should they ever become sentient, or function in a way where one should treat them as if they were sentient."

Little surprise then that Jones is already at work on a third film project, one he hopes to write and direct. "Yup, it's science fiction all right," he confirms. And he's itching to get started.