We chatted with Joseph Kosinski, the director of the highly anticipated TRON: LEGACY, which opens today from Disney.
Bill Desowitz: Do you have any perspective yet on the film?
Joseph Kosinski: No, no perspective yet. It's been an insane around the world kind of tour since I finished. I think six months from now I might start to have some perspective.
BD: But what was it like to play in this digital sandbox in making your first feature?
JK: I approached it like any of my other projects, so the animation-style approach to live-action filmmaking was something I had always done, so, for me, it felt very natural to… begin post on the first day of production.
BD: And the demands of 3-D?
JK: It was important for me that this be a 3-D film from the start. We planned to shoot it in 3-D. In fact, that test that I did for the studio was shot on 3-D cameras. But if you're gonna do a true 3-D film, it's gonna take some challenges, gonna slow you down, take more money, but I feel like in the end we provided the best possible 3-D experience. We did not cut any corner. We had to be equally as ambitious as the first TRON with all our choices.
BD: What was it like collaborating with Digital Domain?
JK: It was great: I had 15 commercials with DD prior to this and so I knew how they worked, I knew their culture and the level of quality that they were capable of. It was a great experience and we're a big family now.
BD: How difficult was the Clu character?
JK: There is probably not a more challenging thing to do in the world of visual effects, as you well know. Pulling off a human being, especially if he's going to be in scenes with real humans. And you're gonna do it in 3-D and with someone famous that everyone knows what he looked like at that age. It was probably our most difficult and ambitious challenge. I'm so proud of the work that Digital Domain did and I genuinely feel like we pushed that technology further and it'll be fun to see who takes it to the next step.
BD: What can you tell us about THE BLACK HOLE and OBLIVION?
JK: THE BLACK HOLE is being written by Travis Beacham right now, and OBLIVION is being written by Bill Monahan. It's essentially a love story set against this classic backdrop. It's very different from TRON; mostly an in-camera science fiction film. So I'm very excited about that. And BLACK HOLE, the only thing I feel married to is the fundamental concept, what it would be like to take a deep space journey to a black hole knowing what we know about them today and the incredible phenomena of the warping of space and time around them and it's gonna be a pretty fascinating trip.