Like every parent, David Bowie told his son to put down the console and play outside. But that young gamer has grown into the director of the first World of Warcraft movie. Duncan Jones on tackling a $100m fantasy epic

When he was a child growing up in the 1980s, Duncan Jones would often stay up through the night, drawing maps on graph paper of places he’d only ever visited inside a computer screen. His father, David Bowie viewed his son’s arcane video game obsession with suspicion. “Like any parent he would say, ‘Why won’t you just get out of the house and play outside?’” Jones recalls.

Zowie, as he was known at the time, spent much of his early life on tour with his father. A peripatetic child, even one cushioned by the comforts of a rock star lifestyle, has to find home somewhere. For Jones, it was the video game worlds into which he disappeared each day. “Games have always presented an opportunity to escape,” he says. “But they are also an opportunity to go somewhere that you come to know well.”

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So when, in 2013, Legendary Pictures approached Jones with the offer to direct Warcraft: The Beginning, a film based on World of Warcraft, one of the highest-grossing (and, until recently, most popular) online video games, it was a straightforward decision. “Here was a unique opportunity to take a game that I knew well and loved and try to craft something that would invite an audience to see what all the fuss was about. I wanted to give people a sense of why so many people play and care about the game.”

Launched in 2004, the title popularised the so-called massively multiplayer online role-playing game, where players quest together across the internet, fighting monsters and, in many cases, forging enduring friendships with other players that spill into the world on the other side of the screen. Jones’s film will focus on two sides of a sprawling interspecies conflict, inspired by the game, and the story of Garona Halforcen, played by Paula Patton, a woman whose loyalties are split between the two sides.

A licensed blockbuster with a multitude of anxious stakeholders who hope that it will grow into a trilogy franchise is an entirely new proposition for the 44-year-old director of indie award-winner Moon and time-shanking thriller Source Code. Jones is undeterred by the challenge, and by the low regard in which most video game movie adaptations are held.

“I love games and I feel they’ve been sold short shrift in films so far,” he says. “It’s my generation’s opportunity to right that wrong.” Jones points out that in recent years comic book movies have enjoyed a “renaissance” of commercial and critical success. “There is no reason why video game-based movies shouldn’t be able to do the same thing.”

Jones has some personal experience of video game design. In 1999, David Bowie contributed to the story and soundtrack of sci-fi adventure The Nomad Soul, and made two cameo appearances. Bowie asked his son for feedback. “It was an interesting game,” says Jones, “but, you know, it’s always a little awkward when you’re playing a video game and then a giant version of your dad comes along.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Paula Patton plays the warrior Garona Halforcen in Warcraft: The Beginning. Photograph: NBC Universal Inc.

After graduating from film school in his 20s, Jones struggled to establish himself as a film director and spent 18 months at a London-based game studio where he worked as an assistant designer for Demis Hassabis, the artificial intelligence maven who now works on Google’s clandestine brain project. It was during that time he became a regular visitor to Azeroth, World of Warcraft’s fictional universe.

It is a decade since the film of the game was originally announced, with Sam Raimi as director. World of Warcraft was close to its most populous; in 2008 it accounted for 62% of the global subscription-based video game market. 12 million players paid a monthly subscription to reside in Azeroth (more than live in Greece, Portugal or Belgium.) There has, however, been something of an exodus in recent years as players have moved on to new pastures such as Guild Wars 2 and League of Legends. Last week World of Warcraft’s publisher, Blizzard, announced that only 5.5 million remain in the game today (a population that is still comparable to Finland).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Duncan’s world … one challenge is to create a landscape distinct from the ones familiar to fans of Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones Photograph: NBC Universal Inc.

Jones, who replaced Raimi as the film’s director in 2012, is not worried about the drop-off in the game’s audience. Nor is he concerned that the fantasy quest that underpins its narrative is one with which every Tolkien fan is wearily familiar. Rather than telling a straightforward tale of good versus evil, Jones has instead opted to find heroes on each side of the conflict. “The protagonists on each side are noble and empathetic,” he says. “They have reasons for doing what they’re doing that we understand. Both the humans and the orcs present rich cultures in their own right, with people you care about and people who are obnoxious.”

Stylistically, the film also distinguishes itself from, say, Lord of the Rings’s New Zealand mountain ranges, or Game of Thrones’s Northern Ireland vistas, with a far smaller world. “In the game you travel from one area to another fairly quickly,” says Jones. “You move from fields of wheat to lush forests and the shift is immediate. We wanted to get across the idea that space is limited.”

Before Warcraft comes out, Jones is trying to squeeze in a pet project called Mute, an indie science fiction movie about a speechless bartender searching for his missing partner in a cyberpunk city. This may be Jones’s last opportunity to do such work for a while – if Warcraft: The Beginning is successful, two more will follow. Jones shows no regret at the prospect of being creatively tied up for the foreseeable future.

“You could make a film out of just about anything so long as there is a clear vision about the story. Be it a video game, comic book or cheque book, the question always is: what story do you have to tell?”