Once upon a time, Duncan Jones intended Mute to be his feature film debut. An unorthodox mystery set in a future Berlin, the film follows Leo (Alexander Skarsgård), a mute bartender who tears through the city's criminal underbelly like a silent wrecking ball after the woman he loves goes missing. Of course, Mute didn't end up being Jones' first film, far from it, and in the fifteen-plus years he spent trying to get the project off the ground, the film evolved, became connected to the filmmaker's sci-fi masterpiece Moon, and ultimately landed at Netflix when the streaming giant gave the Jones the freedom and the funds to finally make his dream project happen.

With Mute now available on Netflix, I recently hopped on the phone for a chat with Jones to talk about his long journey to getting the film made and why it was such a personal project. We discussed why he wanted to do a film with a mute lead in the first place, coming up with his pair of unorthodox villains (played by Justin Theroux and Paul Rudd in wonderfully against-type performances), how Mute uses color, designing a futurist noir without looking like Blade Runner, and more.  

Please be aware there are spoilers.  

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Image via Netflix

Why was it that you wanted to do a movie about a mute character? Was that the seed of the idea for you?  

JONES: It was certainly one of the seeds, yes. No, I think it was the seed. I wrote it with Mike Johnson, my writing partner, almost 16 years ago. Really, originally it was set as a challenge to see if I could have a lead, a protagonist, who didn't have any dialogue. I had just written another film, which was a courtroom drama that was all dialogue, and it was driving me crazy how non-cinematic that was. I wanted to try and swing the other way and do something where we didn't rely on dialogue as a crutch. The more I worked on it, the more I kind of started to think okay, I don't know if I want to do a whole film with this guy who doesn't talk, so let's split it between Leo's investigation and these two other guys, Cactus and Duck, who have a lot to say for themselves.  

That is some fantastic against-type casting with those two. How did you end up with them as your pair of unorthodox villains?  

JONES: I was, I am still a huge fan of Robert Altman's film MASH, and Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould's portrayal of Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John from that movie. The interesting thing about MASH, the original movie, not the TV series, is that those guys, as funny and engaging as they are, they're also kind of mean. I always thought if these guys were in any other film or were even slightly meaner than they already are, they'd be villains in this film. That was kind of my taking-off point for Cactus and Duck, was what would those two guys be as villains?  

You said that it was a challenge for you at first, but when you finally wrote it, and then coming to film it, how did it help you understand your lead, that he can't talk and has to express himself other ways?  

JONES: I guess the whole project itself, just over such a long period of time, over a decade and a half, it takes on a life of its own, really. Real life kind of impacts what you're trying to create. I had the chance to make three other movies before I made Mute. Originally it was going to be my first film. I can't even imagine how different the original film would have been from what it's become.   

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Image via Netflix

Also, I think some of the subtext of what Mute is and what it's about has really come to the forefront. It was always there, this idea of parenthood and what makes a good parent and what parents do to you, how they impact you. In this case, for Leo, he's someone who doesn't have a voice because his mother was incredibly religious and had basically told him and instructed him not to have surgery to be able to speak, because that was against her beliefs. Now, I think he lived his whole life and his whole life was impacted because of that decision. Obviously, Cactus as a parent is coming from a very different place of living this lifestyle, which is totally not in keeping with being a parent, but somehow trying to make it work because he's trying to look after his daughter.   

I think the parent side of Mute was always there but never as big a focus as it is for me now, now that my parents have died and I've had kids of my own.  

Well, also something I wanted to talk about in the parent aspect, I was curious how you used color story to explore that. I noticed that Leo's world is saturated in blue, and with Paul Rudd's character it was a lot of reds, and the daughter is mostly in purple. Can you talk about that element of creating the look of the film and how that ties into the story?  

JONES: That's interesting. Gary Shaw was the cinematographer that I did this film with, and Gary and I did Moon together. One of the things that I had been mentioning throughout the process was how I wanted to associate Leo with water, whether it was what happened to him when he was originally a kid and how he lost his voice and his regime of swimming to try and face his fears, and drinking the pint glass of water he does as kind of a, almost like a meditative thing, and obviously how the film ends with him in water and how he defeats Duck. That was kind of, that lends itself to why we would be going for more of a blue look, I think, for that character.  

It's interesting, you're picking up on some things which I probably will recognize over time but probably are more subconscious than conscious at this point. But it certainly makes sense that with Cactus, beyond just being a fiery character, we have the scene with him in the fireplace, and he, that element of him, of being more a fire spirit as opposed to a water one, that kind of makes sense that the reds and the warms, and also the seediness of the red-light district, all of that comes into play with Cactus' character.  

You’ve been with this project for over 15 years now, and you mentioned that it's changed. Did the story itself specifically evolve a lot, or more of the thematic elements?  

JONES: More the thematic elements. I think why I originally stuck with it is it felt like there was something original about the dynamics between the lead protagonist detective who didn't talk and the two antagonists who were very talkative and very witty and fun, and making them as engaging and appealing as possible at the start of the movie, and then starting to scrape away and to reveal who they really were as we move into the second and the third acts.   

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Image via Netflix

So I think that was kind of always there, but like I was saying before, I think some of the subtext, some of the themes of parenthood and things like that, even though the structure didn't change much, I think my appreciation for that and the emphasis and focus on that definitely grew over time.  

How much did it change after you made Moon and decided to tie these two movies together?  

JONES: I mean, that was the big change, because that was ... Originally, Mute was supposed to be my first feature film, and we had very little money. We were assuming it was going to be a tiny little London-based movie because we didn't have the money to do anything else at the time. At that point, films like Sexy Beast and Layer Cake and all of these little British gangster films were coming out. We though that a contemporary version of it would work in London at that time. It wasn't until after we did Moon that it really sort of started to occur to me that some of the things that the film was about and how it mechanically worked would be actually accentuated, would work better if it took place in a science fiction setting as opposed to a contemporary one. That was fairly early on, but it was a pretty dramatic change from London-based contemporary to Berlin-based science fiction.  

Absolutely. And of course, I have to dig into the Moon connection a little bit because I absolutely adore Moon, and I think your tie-in here is pretty fun. First of all, how soon after Moon is Mute set?  

JONES: I would say it's within months, within months to a year of Sam Bell getting back to Earth.  

So let’s talk about the 156. Where did the idea for that come from to be the sort of hinted-at next chapter of Sam Bell's saga, and making that Sam Rockwell's cameo?  

JONES: Well, I mean, it kind of made sense that if the corporation was going to be this comfortable with running this facility on the far side of the moon with all of these Sams First of all, how many of them are there in the nursery that we see? And secondly, when Sam does get back to Earth and blows the whistle on this, what happens to all the guys who are still asleep? The idea was that there becomes this global campaign. It becomes like a cause celebre of people wanting to help out the Sam Bells. That's this campaign to free the Sams.  

Was there ever a temptation to integrate Sam Bell as a bigger part of this after the success of Moon 

JONES: I don't think so. It always felt like it was going to be a cameo, because it was always supposed to be an intimate and small story, Mute. It was always supposed to be a very localized story. I don't know, I think it could have been made to work, possibly, but I think what made Mute appealing to me is that it felt like one of those '70s kind of noir thrillers where it's just this tiny little microcosm of a story, of a mystery, and allowing the world to be just this big, crazy place around it. I think if I ... My instinct is that if I try to tie Sam Bell too directly into it, it starts to make it more of a global conspiracy film and not this little miniature story that it was supposed to be.  

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Image via Sony Pictures Classic

It’s obvious a lot of love went into this production design, so how do you do something that's clearly influenced by Blade Runner, that futurist tech noir, without it just looking like Blade Runner 

JONES: I think one of the things that we had working in our favor is we really were trying to focus on making a believable future Berlin, somewhere that's not just arbitrary future city. This was as much as possible a future Berlin. The strongest thing working in our favor is that we shot in Berlin, on location around the city, finding locations. We weren't necessarily always looking for let's find this thing and we'll just find what we can in Berlin. A lot of the time it was what is this amazing place we found in Berlin? How can we reset the scene in that place in Berlin? So it was a bit of both, of finding the locations we needed but then also retrofitting scenes into amazing places we found in the city.   

Then it was really just about accentuating and adding little details, whether it was props or a little bit of digital help here and there to try and make this real Berlin, kind of futurize it a little bit. I think that's why it feels, in my opinion, very tangible and believable and like a real city, and obviously gives it its identity. I think because it has an actual identity of Berlin, that's what takes it away, possibly, from Blade Runner.  

How much can people scour the background for Easter eggs? Or how much should they?  

JONES: Easter eggs are all over the place. They come in in silly versions and in personal versions. My dad died just before I made the film, so there's quite a few personal things to him in there. Some of his paintings are actually on the walls of Leo's apartment. I tried to put things throughout the film. Then there's some ridiculous things as well. There's a whole rugby competition called The Six Nations in the real world, but it's become The Eight Nations in Berlin of the future. That's only because I'm a rugby fan, so I just wanted to put that in there.   

But there's Chesney Hawkes, who I always manage to hopefully include, 'The One and Only', his piece of music in the film. That's been in every film I've made. Even though it was cut out of Warcraft, it's in the bonus scenes of Warcraft, and it's in this film as well.   

I know that you have talked about wanting to make a third film in the so-called Mooniverse.  

JONES: Yeah.  

How much track did you lay in this film that sets that up or teases it?  

JONES: There's a few things. There's a few things which are established, some of them which were probably in more detail in the longer version of the cut. But as we kind of squeezed the film down to make it as lean as possible, some of it got lost. But there's a few little details which are still in there that we kind of start to establish what that third film would be, which would be more of an action-based film starring these two women from the north of England.   

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