For me, 'Blade Runner' is the best science-fiction film ever made.

Science-fiction cities in general, I think, are so hard to get right, because it's so easy to just play some cheesy music or do something that takes you right out of it, but 'Blade Runner' got it right, and I love that about the film.

Toshiro Mifune was such an elegant hero, and there's something really empathetic about him.

Sometimes you see films, not just science fiction films, where you get the sense that if the camera were to pan just to the left or the right, all of a sudden you'd be seeing light stands and crew standing around. But with 'Blade Runner,' the beauty of it is that it felt like a real, breathing city.

I was christened Duncan Zowie Jones.

Bowie is my dad's stage name, so I was never, ever called Zowie Bowie. The tabloids liked that because it rhymed.

My parents did call me Zowie now and then, but then, realising that it drew too much attention, they called me 'Joe'. Then, later, I sort-of co-opted my own name back.

I was a little geeky kid anyway. If I wasn't shooting little stop-animation films, then I was playing computer games or Dungeons & Dragons.

I was a sensitive boy.

You would never have seen me on any party scene, which is probably what made me able to disappear, in a way, because the tabloids had nothing to follow.

I was always bit of a jock.

When I was at graduate school, you wouldn't have recognised me. I was so different - and not a nice person: a grumpy, surly, upset, confused, lost person.

My dad and I used to shoot little one-stop animations on an old 8mm film camera when I was no more than 7 or 8, and when he was away at work, I would keep shooting nonsensical, short animated films using 'Star Wars' figures or Smurfs - depended what the narrative was.

Growing up, I was on film sets occasionally, when my dad was acting, so I got to run around and do odd jobs on films like 'Labyrinth' and others... I seemed destined to make films.

I got some funky scholarships to play soccer and did well in my SATs, so I went off to college and then grad school but found that that wasn't me. My family, relieved I seemed to have come to my senses, were happy to let me go to film school.

I took an incredibly roundabout route getting into feature films.

I saw the drawbacks of fame as a kid. It wasn't for me.

Hopefully, by the second or the third film, who my father is won't be a story anyone's interested in. They'll either like the films or they won't, and if they don't like them, I won't be making them any more.

You only get one shot to do a first feature.

When you're in college, everything seems much more important than it really is.

Basically, if you want to have a computer system that could pass the Turing test, it as a machine is going to have to be able to self-reference and use its own experience and the sense data that it's taking in to basically create its own understanding of the world and use that as a reference point for all new sense data that's coming in to it.

The beauty of science fiction is that it takes the audience's guard down; they're much more willing to open themselves up and allow themselves to be questioned and have their values questioned when they don't think we're talking about their world or them and what they're used to.

It seems like the reason that I miss the science fiction from the late '70s and '80s is that at that period, they really were doing interesting, introspective human stories that just happened to take place in science fiction settings.

I think everything you do, whether it's low budget things when you're first starting out or full feature films or when you're working with Hollywood, you're always learning, all the time.

My sense of humor often gets me in trouble.

My job is really to... everyone is reading the script, and my job is to make sure we all interpret it in as much the same way as possible. And then I give them the freedom to sort of - to get their performance across and then make suggestions where things are not working and accentuate and push things where they really are working.

I guess, as a director, you sort of take the script, and you find ways to interpret it.

I'm a natural puzzle solver.

I think one of the biggest jobs of being a director is getting the casting right.

I went to college and graduate school, studying philosophy. I really did think I was going to wind up being a lecturer or professor of some sort.

I was in my 30s when I finally went to film school. It was kind of always going to happen, but I did try to keep it suppressed for awhile.

I know my dad's proud that I've done it on my own, and I'm happy with that.

I'd done a bachelor's degree, which I'd enjoyed, but I didn't know what to do with my life at the time. I was conflicted, and, being a hopeless romantic, I followed my girlfriend at the time to Vanderbilt, where, obviously, we broke up a couple of months later.

There's a depth to the look that you get with models that you just can't get with CGI. It's about the detail that you just wouldn't think to put in.

Jeron Lanier and 'Lawnmower Man.' That was VR. And there was the VFX1, that big giant VR prototype unit, and I was like, 'I am going to save my money and get one of those.' And then VR just sort of drifted away.

I was a 'Warcraft' player myself, and when I pitched my take on the film, they said right away, 'That is a player. That is the game.' So I've had their support from the very beginning.

The feeling that makes 'Warcraft' work as a game is that feeling that heroism can come out of anything or anyone.

I've been very strategic in how I've approached the jobs I want to do.

In the past, a lot of films based on video games think that the audience wants to experience what it's like to play the game, and that's absolutely not the case.

Film directing is really undermined if you attempt to do it by committee because there has to be a single vision as to how to tell a story. It's like if you were at a campfire, and everyone is taking turns to give one sentence in telling a horror story. It would be a mess - it's not going to make sense.

Girls seem to get me in trouble a lot of times.

Eventually, I'm going to be judged purely on my own merits.

I was angry and frustrated when I was younger and didn't know my place in the world.

I've lived all over Europe, spent a lot of time in London, went to school in Scotland, college in America, so I do think I have sort of a sensibility on a fairly global level.

I'm kind of transatlantic Eurotrash.

I do have a somewhat unique upbringing.

My family is very international.

I guess sci-fi was like my candy growing up. My dad always thought it was important for me to read an hour or two every night. And if I got stuck or didn't want to read, sci-fi was sort of the thing you'd give me to spur me on to read that evening.

I watched the German version of 'Baron Munchasen' and Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis' at a young age. 'Star Wars' was also a huge thing when I was a kid.

I personally prefer projecting digitally. I guess I'm of that generation where I like that clarity.