Joseph Kosiniski Interview – Five Things About TRON: Legacy

A couple of weeks back, director Joseph Kosinski and I sat down for a nice, meaty chat about his debut feature, TRON: Legacy. Here are Five Things he told me about the film and his approach to the material. Enjoy.

Developing the Story

When in first talked to Sean Bailey three years ago, [screenwriters] Adam and Eddie were on board. The two concepts they had were “Son goes in search of his father” and “Once inside, finds his father’s avatar”. That’s what we had when I signed on and it has obviously evolved forward and become much more layered and complicated and detailed from that point, but that was the crux of it.

It would be hard to imagine the guys, Adam and Eddie, writing this script on their own without any sort of feedback from a director as to the world, what it looked and felt like, so while I was working on the visuals, the world, the look, the tone, the feel of this universe, they were writing in parallel. They needed something to feed off of, so it was a parallel kind of process, which I think makes sense for movies like this.

I started concepts in November 2007, and they were working in parallel to that. Then I went and shot that test piece for the studio, and they were working on it all through that.

I wasn’t interested in making a movie about the Internet. I didn’t want there to be a Twitter attack or a Google something or other. I didn’t want that kind of terminology in this film because I felt like it would instantly date it. I was also fascinated with this idea of treating the server like the Galapagos Islands. It has its roots in the 1980s and it’s evolved on its own for thousands of years so that you have this world that was rooted in the look and aesthetic of the original film but it has evolved forward. For me, that was an interesting challenge.

There are certain things that we knew we had to have in there. The gladiatorial games had to be updated, and while I was developing how they would have evolved forward, they served as placeholders in an outline. We knew that Sam would have to go through them. Disc Wars, Lightcycles, the gladiatorial games were important. But then the most important thing for me was continuing the story of Kevin Flynn, so getting Jeff on board was the first thing I did. That was huge.

Ambitious Choices

I remember as an 8 year old kid seeing the original Tron and it looked and sounded like nothing else out there so for me, that was my main goal – to make sure I was always being ambitious in terms of the choices to do something unique and different, whether that’s getting Daft Punk or building a design team from outside of the film industry. At the same time, I knew it was important not only to put my own spin on all the kind of old classic things, but to bring a couple new concepts of my own. For example, there’s a couple of new vehicles at the end of the film.

I think we kind of looked at the filmmaking techniques that were out there and tried to evolve them forward at every step. For example, the 3D, we looked at the Fusion camera system that Cameron and Vince Pace developed for Avatar and we built our own next generation version – new lenses, new cameras and customised it for our movie which had very specific requirements in terms of light and the types of lenses I wanted to use, the wide angle lenses.

The suits in the first film had to be hand tinted to look they were illuminating light, but for this film I wanted to capture as much in camera as possible so we had to develop an all new technology, this flexible light fabric, which we had to develop from scratch. And finally for Clu, I was aware of what David Fincher was doing on Benjamin Button so we took that technology and advanced that forward so now we were able to capture Jeff’s performance on stage with other actors, rather than having to do it later like the had on Benjamin Button.

I think my comments on Clu were taken a little out of context. I’ve learned doing all this press that there are these kind of trick questions. Someone asks you if your film is perfect and if you say yes the line is “Director thinks his film is perfect” and if you say no it’s “Director thinks his film isn’t perfect”. The truth is, I couldn’t be more proud of all of the work on the film and all of the work of such talented artists doing something that is the hardest thing there is to do in all of visual effects: creating a digital human to play with other actors. Obviously, I’ve said from the beginning, it’s our biggest challenge in some shots he’s better than others but overall, I’m very pleased with what we were able to do on this movie.

Working With Daft Punk

It was really a kind of organic process. We started very early. Again, we started three years ago with the music. Started with a long conversation about our favourite film scores, about our desire for this to be a blend of orchestral and electronic music, which hadn’t been done before, and a blend of sound design and music, blurring the lines between both. Me giving them a lot of references of music that I loved, them giving me stuff and eventually we came up with 24 demo tracks that I went through one-by-one and assigned each to a character or a scene and then those evolved forward. I had pre-viz and storyboards and boardomatics and then I was shooting the movie and I was playing the movie on set and then I was cutting the movie and playing the music in editorial so I never had to put any temp music in this film. The music and the visuals were really developed together. It was a really unique process, but this was kind of the way I worked in commercials and my own short films. It seems obvious that you’d develop the visuals and music together but most films are scored after they’re cut and most people work with temp cues all the way through. I never had to do that. We had a studio for Daft Punk in Hollywood and it was a very close, collaborative process.

The Cinematography

I tried to build as much as possible. We built a lot more than people would expect in a movie like this. My goal was to make the line blurred and hopefully an audience isn’t able to perceive what’s real and what isn’t. I wanted the light to be as practical as possible, and I wanted characters when they got close to one another to be able to light one another’s faces. There’s a scene in which Sam and Quorra are in a dark Hallway talking to each other and they’re fully illuminated just by one another’s suits and that kind of interaction was really important to me. It’s all about The Grid, the power of The Grid, the source of all energy in this world. It’s a predominately uplit movie, all the lighting comes from the ground up in almost every scene. To me this is what fundamentally makes it Tron. Actors aren’t used to being lit that way and we’re not used to looking at people lit that way. We have more lit glass floors in this film, probably, than any other.

We shot this as a 3D film. Because I was working in 3D the whole time I saw the screen as a portal into another world but I wanted to keep the world behind the screen. Then, at certain points, I’d accent shots, dramatic moments, by bringing things out. So you’ll notice there’s few instances in which stuff actually pops out of the screen but when it does, you’ll notice it, particularly in some big moments at the end of the movie. It was always mean to work in both formats. I didn’t want to make a 3D film that when you’re watching it in 2D you think “Obviously there’s something supposed to be popping out here”. I had to be conscious of both, just like I had to be conscious of two different formats when shooting a scope. I also had to be conscious of the 16:9 version that’s going to be out on HBO in a couple years.

The Dillinger Legacy… And the TRON: Legacy… Er… Legacy

This answer reveals a surprise cameo so stop reading this very second if you don’t want to know who it is. Come back in about 6 lines or so.

Cillian [Murphy] and I had just been talking for a while, looking for a role for him in this movie, but based on schedules and him doing other things, we just weren’t able to line up with out shoot. So he and I had a dialogue going about this movie for a while. We had this one kind of minor role, which is really just to continue the mythology of Dillinger from the original film. It’s a quick scene but I thought he’d be great for the role and he was excited to do it so, for a day, we had him pop in play Ed Dillinger Jr. which is really more for fans of the original to know that the Dillinger legacy continues just as the Flynn legacy does. It’s part of the Tron mythology, part of that universe, and there’s a lot of potential there. If we were ever to come back there’s some great places to key into again.

Tron is a movie that is only truly appreciated now, looking back, how far forward Stephen Libserger was thinking. I think our film tries to tackle some pretty interesting issues, this relationship between humans and technology, and the benefits and dangers of that are something that we’ll continue to struggle with as human beings for the next couple of decades. I think our film brings up some pretty interesting questions, but who knows what the legacy of our film will be.

TRON: Legacy is out now.