In the past two years, Duncan Jones has faced the loss of his father, music legend David Bowie, and his childhood nanny, Marion Skene, whom he thought of as a second mother. Around the time of Skene’s death, he was promoting Warcraft, a big studio effort that left him “beaten and bruised”—even before the film was trashed by critics. Then, as he prepared to start shooting his fourth feature—a science-fiction film 16 years in the making—his first child was born.

The emotional whirlwind left Jones sensitive and raw, he tells Vanity Fair—and led him to create his most personal film to date.

Mute, starring Big Little Lies Emmy winner Alexander Skarsgård, takes place in 2052 Berlin, a city Jones visited when his dad famously recorded there in the 70s. When his girlfriend goes missing, Leo (Skarsgård), a mute bartender, goes on a violent odyssey across this futuristic landscape filled with gangsters, underground surgeons (Paul Rudd and Justin Theroux), and neon lights. Dedicated to both Bowie and Skene, Mute is the second of what Jones hopes will be a trilogy of anthological films set in the same universe, which began with his first feature, 2009’s Moon. Here, the director walks us through the laborious process of getting Mute made, and how his toughest years enriched the film, which premieres on Netflix on February 23.

Vanity Fair: You’ve been trying to make Mute for a very long time now. What has it been, 14 years at this point?

Duncan Jones: Sixteen. Yeah, Mike [Robert Johnson] and I wrote the original script 16 years ago.

How did you feel the first day of shooting?

The very first things we shot were in Leo’s apartment, which was a set we built at Studio Babelsberg in Berlin. Gary Shaw, this amazing cinematographer, had this amazing light show going on outside the window, and I just felt, yeah, this is it. This is that blend of the real world and a Berlin that I recognize, this strange contrast between Leo and his Luddite existence and the science-fiction world around him. This really encapsulates what the film is all about.

You’ve mentioned before that you spent time in Berlin with your father. What do you think it was about the city that had such an impact on you?

Even as a very young kid, I could sense that we were in a place that felt apart from anywhere else. It was an island of Western culture and civilization in a sea of the Soviet Union at the time, and it felt like an island—like you were completely cut off from the rest of the world. And even though those things have fallen away, with the fall of the wall and the re-incorporation of East Germany into Germany proper, Berliners themselves still feel really independent from the rest of Germany, and always seem to be looking to the future. They’re always about what’s on the horizon, and that’s what makes Berlin such a great location for science fiction.

You gave a general outline of this project’s development when you first announced the premiere date on Netflix. I’m curious: at what point did Netflix come into the mix?

We tried all sorts of avenues to make the film over the decade and a half that we’ve been working on it. There are two things that came up against us. One of them is the subject matter, as you’ve seen, is not obviously commercial. And the second issue is that studios don’t make films like this anymore. They don’t have independent arms to make original movies. They’re very much focused on opening weekends; four-quad movies; films which are either franchises, sequels, reboots, based on something that the audience is already very familiar with in the hopes that they can make most of their budget back in the one- or two-week window—two weeks being the most that they’re really gonna get before the next big-studio film comes out. That’s how the theaters work these days. So in order to make smaller original movies, it’s been an absolute godsend that the streaming sites have come to the rescue—whether it’s Netflix or Amazon or Apple. Now there is an avenue for original movies of a smaller budget to get made.

You’ve mentioned life events that affected the development of this film—the deaths of your father and your nanny. How did those moments impact Mute?

Whatever it was that made now the time I was making this movie, it’s probably all for the best. I was probably at my most sensitive and raw while making it. Warcraft had beaten and bruised me—just the political process of that. My dad had just died. I had just had my son, who was 4 months old when we traveled to Berlin to shoot this film. So I was trying to be the best dad I could while shooting a movie, which was an awful lot like what the subtext of Mute was about—being a parent and trying to do it in difficult circumstances. It was an incredibly personal film, considering how fantastical the subject matter and the setting was.

Is the Mute that you conceived in your head all of those years ago more or less the same Mute we’re going to see this weekend on Netflix?

I genuinely believe that it is a much better film having been made now than it would’ve been back then. I have the experience of having made three other films since I originally wrote it, which has a big impact, and I as a person have grown and matured and experienced a lot more than I had when I originally wrote it.

You’ve mentioned that Mute was meant to be the second entry in a trilogy. Do you still plan on making that third installment?

There is a third film, which I would love to make, and if I can find a way to make it, I will. None of these films are dependent upon the stories of the previous films; in fact, someone I was just talking to said that, in a sense, it’s more of an anthology than sequels or side-quels. They’re independent stories that happen to take place within the same world, but thematically I think there is a connection between them. It’s really about people finding themselves in a world where they realize they were not meant to fit. They’re gonna find a way to make it fit them. I like this term that it’s an anthology—that, if it were a book, this would be a number of independent short stories that all take place within the same time frame.