Gary Thompson:

SOME 30 years ago, you could have gotten Duncan Jones' attention by using his childhood name - Zowie Bowie.

Jones is singer David Bowie's son, and while he loves his dad, he's worked hard to distance himself professionally from the family name, to make it on his own as a movie director. (David Bowie's real last name is Jones; he changed it to avoid confusion with Davy Jones of The Monkees.)

So Duncan is justly proud that his gig directing Jake Gyllenhaal in "Source Code" has nothing to do with Spiders from Mars, and everything to do with "Moon."

That was Jones' first feature as a director, and the movie that made Gyllenhaal flip when he saw it.

Gyllenhaal was looking for somebody to direct "Source Code," a sci-fi thriller about a lonely individual slowly coming to grips with a highly disturbing reality - roughly the same setup at work in the well-reviewed, little-seen "Moon."

"Moon," though, was a mega-downer, and Jones, funny and bright in person, didn't want to repeat himself.

"My big pitch to Jake was I wanted to lighten the tone, and inject just a little bit of humor. And I think we ended up doing that. This movie is much less like 'Moon,' much more like a Hitchcock movie, a thriller with an everyman who finds himself in mysterious circumstances, with a dame sitting across from him."

On set, Jones found that his ideas for "Source Code" initially alarmed his powerful star.

"There were some concerns during the first week of shooting. Jake wanted to know what kind of movie I was making - something like 'Moon' or something else. I think he was anticipating it was going to be more arthouse than it is. My argument was there were ways to get the balance right, we can honor the script while still making a movie that people will line up to see."

Any director, he said, even an untested one on his first big-time job, has to stand up for himself and his principles.

"It's kind of like this Hollywood hazing. You go through it once, and hopefully you prove yourself and you don't have to worry about it again," Jones said.

Jones said he doesn't mind ticking off people on set, but he was deferential to Gyllenhaal.

"I don't really worry too much about what most people are saying, as long as they let me get on with the job. With Jake, though, I really wanted him to be comfortable. Not only is he an actor, like any actor, who needs to feel confident, he was the guy who brought me on board. I really felt a responsibility to make him feel that what we were doing was the right thing, that we were making the film in the right way."

So far so good - the movie is pulling nearly 80 percent on rottentomatoes.com, and, among the favorables, has earned reviews that run from positive to ecstatic.

For Jones, it means that he's almost there. "There's a very well-known English producer, who'll remain nameless, but he's a very experienced guy. He said to me, 'Look, you've got to make three really good films. They can be critically acclaimed films, or they can be three moneymakers. But you have to do those as your first three films, or you don't have a career.' "

Two down, one to go.

Read more from this interview at www.philly.com/DuncanJones.