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Alternate Ending - Space - Biker Sams' Tiny Package
One thing that tends to come up a bit when people talk about Moon is the ending. As we were doing everything on minimal resources we didn't have much extra footage to work with in the edit but there were a couple of small sections that got cut out and one of those happened to be the very end. In the shooting script, we had a scene right at the end, after the return vehicle hits the atmosphere, where we see a front door and Sam dressed like a biker trotting up, leaving a small, wrapped present, ringing the doorbell and running off.
We then see Eve Bell answer the door, find the parcel, take it inside and open it. Whereupon it's a small scale model of her house.
The idea behind this is that it's a resolution of Sam working on his model town and him making this last model sort of ties it all together somehow and him giving the present to Eve lets her know she's okay. Thing is, there's actually loads of problems with this and so we cut it from the film and a good thing too. There's just so much wrong with it. How would Eve know he was carving a little wooden Fairfield and "get it"? As she doesn't know anything about the clones of her father working in slavery on the Moon she's not going to care if he's okay or not. Also, presumably this is the house that the original Sam Bell also lives in as when Sam 2 calls from the Moon we hear his voice momentarily from across the room. What if he was mowing the lawn when Space-clone Sam comes trotting up the driveway? Actually, thinking about it now, we should have filmed that. It could have gone completely mental. Imagine little Eve hearing the kerfuffle and coming outside to see what was going on? On a random Sunday morning? She'd have had an excellent story to tell all her mates at school about what happened over the weekend. "Daddy had one of his space-clones return from the moon to try and give me a present of a little house which was a bit weird and they ended up fighting in the garden and then the police came and didn't know who to arrest because they were genetically identical. I think Daddy might be going to jail".
We didn't really have the resources to be able to do this properly and we were trying to get an establishing shot of this nice house to set the scene and show how nice and rich the original Sam has become from selling his DNA into slavery. We had an idea of the kind of place we wanted but had no resources to shoot anything. I almost made up a VFX shot for this myself but the shot Duncan wanted would have taken me a week or so to get looking good working by myself and we just didn't have the time so we had to poo-pah that. I hate not getting things done but sometimes you have to suck it up and just realize that there's just no way and get over it. I also never got to use one of my designs for a cool hover-bike for Sam in this scene, hopefully I'll get to use it for another project sometime in the future.
It seems a bit strange when I think of it that the first thing we cut from the edit was the actual ending of the film, but I guess it just goes to show that when you're making films you shouldn't be afraid to cut stuff out if your guts are telling you it'll be for the best.
After making this cut, the ending we were left with was the shot of the return vehicle entering the atmosphere which sort of felt a bit flat. Fortunately, Duncan had the idea of the radio broadcast voice-over which really helped sell the final shot and give us a sense of closure on everything with the reveal that Sam did, indeed, return to earth. In keeping with our lack of resources, that last bit of radio broadcast where he's on about being a "Whacko and a nutjob" is actually Duncan. See what happens to your voice when you move out to LA?
