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“Rogue Trooper,” Duncan Jones’ hellzapoppin’ animated sci-fi war movie, just had its North American premiere as part of the Toronto International Film Festival after debuting at the Annecy International Film Festival over the summer.
No matter what you think about the movie, you can appreciate “Rogue Trooper” as an incredible achievement – an independent animated feature that looks as good as any Hollywood blockbuster, and marks the return of one of our most exciting filmmakers.
And it only took 25 years.
In 2001, Jones got a meeting with Jason and Chris Kingsley.
The Kingsleys run Rebellion Developments, a successful videogame development company headquartered in Oxford, England. Rebellion had just purchased “2000 A.D.,” a hugely influential British sci-fi comic magazine that began in 1971 and is most famous for introducing the world to Judge Dredd, a character who has been the subject of two very different adaptations (first in 1995, with Sylvester Stallone wearing a costume designed by Jean-Paul Gautier, and again in 2012 with a much more taciturn Karl Urban).
For the meeting, Jones shaved his head in the style of the titular character – a blue, genetically engineered grunt fighting an endless war on a poisonous planet, originally created in the early 1980s by Gerry Finley-Day and future “Watchmen” illustrator Dave Gibbons.
That’s right – going into the meeting, Jones wore a comic book-accurate mohawk.
“I go in and I say, ‘I want to make a Rogue Trooper movie.’ Their first question is, ‘Have you ever made a movie?’ I say, ‘No,’” Duncan recalled. Their second question was “Well, do you want to play Rogue Trooper?” He was sporting that sick mohawk.
“I got so embarrassed I didn’t come back for 20 years,” Jones joked.
In the 20 years between meetings with Rebellion, things had happened for Jones and for “Rogue Trooper.” Jones became one of the most exciting genre filmmakers around, with thoughtful, thought-provoking movies like “Moon,” “Source Code” and “Warcraft,” an ambitious, technologically complex adaptation of the long-running videogame franchise.
And in the same period of time, many “Rogue Trooper” adaptations had been attempted by others, including British writer Grant Morrison, one of our era’s most celebrated comic book writers, who did a run of stories in “2000 A.D.” earlier in his career. None of them got off the ground.
It was like the property and the filmmaker were waiting for each other.
“I was a genuine ‘2000 AD’ fan. I loved the tone of that comic book, it’s always been very satirical and acerbic and punk and political, but funny. I don’t think people realize how funny ‘Judge Dredd’ is in the comic books. I wanted to do it. And Rogue Trooper as a character lent itself to the things that I was interested in,” Jones said.
He had even borrowed elements from “Rogue Trooper” for his debut feature “Moon,” about a lonely grunt on a lunar base who learns that he is perpetually cloned. Jones also loved the “whole guys-on-the-road, friendship-and-honor road movie” element of “Rogue Trooper,” with Rogue Trooper (Aneurin Barnard) on a dangerous mission with his squad and each time one of them gets killed, their consciousness is transferred into part of his equipment. One of the odder sensations of watching “Rogue Trooper” is being riveted by a movie where a supporting character is a talking backpack.
Jones said that he didn’t look at any of the material generated by earlier attempts at “Rogue Trooper,” but instead found the speedbumps himself.
When Jones was making “Mute,” his 2018 sci-fi noir for Netflix, he did some tests to see if it could be done in animation. The technology wasn’t there yet but afterwards, when he was thinking about “Rogue Trooper,” he was reminded of those tests.
“That’s when we started thinking about, oh, where is the technology at that we were playing around with ‘Mute,’ and it had advanced to the point we felt confident that we could probably go that way,” Jones said.
This wouldn’t be a typical big budget animated feature but would instead use what he had learned on “Warcraft,” albeit applied to a smaller, more nimble production. Rebellion had felt uneasy after the response to the two “Judge Dredd” adaptations and wanted the project to be more filmmaker-driven. Between Jones’ company and Rebellion, they figured out a budget and “basically worked backwards from that budget.” It would be tight, but Jones felt good.
“We thought we had a path of how we could make it as an independent movie,” said Jones.
Initially, they used Unreal Engine, a graphics engine originally developed for videogames but has since been employed by things like the Volume (the wraparound LED screen utilized for “The Mandalorian” and other projects) and for theme park attractions like Disney’s Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run, one of the marquee attractions of its “Star Wars”-themed land Galaxy’s Edge. Two-and-a-half years into the process of using the Unreal Engine to make an animated movie, though, Jones hit a snag.
“We were like, This isn’t going to look right, this is not going to work. We actually had to find a way to extract ourselves from Unreal for a while, go into Maya, go into some other tools, and then we came back for a final render at the end,” Jones explained. “It wasn’t the tight straight pipeline that we thought it was going to be, which is why it took like just over four years to make the movie.”
He employed other lessons he learned on “Warcraft” for “Rogue Trooper” – chiefly separating facial capture from performance capture and making them two separate units, which seems counterintuitive but actually helps move things along.
“That would mean that we could churn through pages with our more expensive actors much quicker. Our shoot with our named cast and with all of the comedians who were coming in every few days, that took 10 days. We were doing 16 pages a day,” Jones said, referring to a cast that includes Hayley Atwell, Sean Bean, Matt Berry, Jermaine Clement, Jack Lowden and Peter Serafinowicz.
“It was basically like a theatrical black box, and they didn’t have to worry about camera setup, we just had witness cameras and then they will wear the facial capture masks. We were recording audio but that’s all we were recording. We did that over 10 days,” Jones said. The physical performance capture, he said, took months and months, using actors and stunt performers. (Sometimes the animators would “slip into a motion capture suit,” Jones said, if they needed a specific bit that was missing.)
There was also hand animation that was utilized to bring the characters to life. Jones estimates that five or six different performers were ultimately used for the Rogue Trooper performance.
“It’s still way less than I think any other theatrical animated movie that I’m aware of would have would have come in at. I think we should be okay, but it is nerve-racking. That’s the thing with any independent film, is you make the film and then you hope you can find an audience for it,” Jones said. He said that when he made “Moon” he thought that it might wind up going straight-to-DVD.
Making “Rogue Trooper,” Jones was inspired by classic war movie archetypes – he rattles off references like “Where Eagles Dare,” “A Bridge Too Far” and “The Dirty Dozen.” “Those are the kind of movies that I was watching,” Jones said. He even instructed his composer, the great Bear McCreary, “Let’s really lean into that generation of guys who had come back from the war and then they made these gung-ho war movies. Let’s try and capture that.” They did.
The premiere at Annecy, Jones said, was the final bit of audience research. They wanted to make sure that the movie, which is incredibly British and occasionally hard to follow, would work for an international audience. (Judging by the response from the screening, it did.) Not that Jones would have continued to tweak it. “I’m not changing anything,” he said with a laugh.
But “Rogue Trooper” still doesn’t have theatrical distribution – something that Jones is very keen on, at least for a little bit, before it heads to streaming. He’s just hoping its singular oddness is seen as a feature and not a bug.
“I’m not making a studio movie. I’m hoping that they will take confidence from the fact the audience liked it, and people are giving it good reviews,” said Jones.
He said that he has no interest in making another studio movie.
“If I can enjoy making movies this way, why not?” said Jones. “Why not aspire to the Terry Gilliam, David Lynch careers, right? If that’s my choice, or being a studio guy, I’d rather do that, because someone’s got to do it.”
As for what he learned from the process of making “Rogue Trooper,” all four years of it, Jones said: “I feel like I could do it much more efficiently now. It was a huge learning process. We made a lot of mistakes along the way, met a lot of dead ends along the way. I’ve got a lot of eggs in this basket. I want it to work.”
The hope is that with the success of “Rogue Trooper,” other filmmakers could adapt other characters from the “2000 A.D.” library, maybe in the same forward-thinking way that Jones made his movie but perhaps in more traditional ways too.
And given the opening and closing credits for “Rogue Trooper,” where you see pages from the comic book which promise even bigger threats and adventures than what the movie provides, and the fact that the character has had new installments, more or less, since 1981, there is plenty still left that Jones wants to explore. But he stops before he says too much about future movies.
“I’m not getting ahead of myself. I did that before on ‘Warcraft.’ I’m not going to do it again,” Jones said.
Another lesson, learned on the fields of battle.
