Moon, Pre-Production and Production

Moon was director, Duncan James' first feature length film. The film was produced by Trudie Snyder who has also produced films like Snatch, Lock Stock and Liberty Films (Duncan Jones' own production company). At first, Jones offered a script to Sam Rockwell, but after a long discussion and lots of rewriting they finally came up with Moon. Before filming they had one week to reherse. Jones wanted to get Kevin Spacey involved in the film; however, he only did so after the film was finished and he was only used for half a day because that's how long he could be afforded for.

Stage 6 Films were one of the studios behind the film. These are known for producing films that go straight to DVD, and making the cost less then $10 million. After the film has been made, Sony then decodes whether the film should been shown in thr cinema or go straight onto DVD. In moons case, in went into the cinema.
Moon had a budget of $5 million. Jones did quite a few ideas to try and get the cost of production down, these included: having a small cast and filming in a studio. It was produced and filmed in Shepperton Studios in England in 33 days. He preferred to use models instead of digital animation. For example, he worked with Bill Pearson to create a full 360-degree set of the moon. The visual effects were provided by Cinesite which are known for their cheaper costs for independant films. To add some of the other special effects they used CGI. This was used during the ping pong scene; after they recorded Rockwell miming the sound of the ping pong so he could play against himself, they added the ball after.

The budget was so tight on the film that Sony refused to send copies to the Oscar panel judges as they thought it might cost too much.

Overall, the film took $1,813,302 in the UK for a total of $9,747,108 at the box office ($5,010,163 US + $4,736,945 worldwide). Jones has since stated "The crazy thing is the business side of things. Moon is out in Germany now, Switzerland, and has maybe a couple of other smaller territories to be released in. It has earned nearly $9.5M so far, worldwide… it cost just under $5M to make… and yet we are STILL trying to pay back our initial investors. That was always one of the biggest priorities for me and it has been the most frustrating part about our apparent success. The lesson of the film business they don’t tell you in film school is this; if you make back everything you spent on making your movie, you’re still barely half-way to going into profit. That certainly educated the hell out of me!"