BoxOffice® Pro - November 2010

TRON: LEGACY
COME HERE OFTEN?
Olivia Wilde, Joseph Kosinski and
Jeff Bridges on the set of Tron:
Legacy
the movie, but I remembered my impression of it as a child, and
that’s a good and powerful thing. And I wanted Tron: Legacy to give
audiences the same feeling today.
Tell me about a moment working on the film where you were
struck by what you’d put together?
Every day—even now as a new shot comes in—it’s so fulfilling to finally
see something I’ve been describing for three years. On a movie
like this, so much of it at the beginning is trying to explain, trying
to portray, trying to sway. To describe to the audience and the actors
this world and this mood. It’s so nice now that the movie is nearing
completion to be able to show people what I’ve been promising for
such a long time. For me, some of the most profound moments I can
think of while shooting were when I walked on to the set of the Safe
House for the first time. That’s the house where Kevin Flynn lives
in a cave outside the city, and that’s a room that I sketched out on a
notepad a couple years ago for the VFX test. To be able to build that
room in its entirety and walk on the set with Jeff Bridges and show
him Kevin Flynn’s home and spend some time with him in there
before we started rolling was amazing. We literally walked into
something I had thought up years before and had only seen pictures
of in a computer. It was a Tron-like experience to walk onto a full set
like that—it felt like you were in that world.
You came onto the scene by directing ad campaigns for Gears
of War and Halo. Is the line between video games and movies
getting thinner?
I think the sophistication of video games over the last few years
has made them more cinematic and more photo-realistic. I’ve had
the opportunity to work on a couple great video game spots that
are more about telling a story than showing off great features. I approached
them as if I was making a tiny film. However, for a while
people kept talking about this idea that video games will replace
movies, and I just don’t think that’s ever going to happen. There’s no
replacement for seeing something through the eyes of a director. I
love going to the movies and sitting back and seeing their vision as
opposed to navigating it myself. I don’t feel like one will ever replace
the other, but they’ll continue to push each other to win audiences
and I think that’s a good thing.
The original Tron prophesied our world of computers decades
before it existed. This Tron is for audiences who are living in
that world. But if you had to make a movie that foretold our
future, where do you think the relationship between humans
and computers is headed?
It’s hard to imagine how you could create a movie now that was so
ahead of its time. Tron’s concept was clearly 15 years ahead of the
world. E.T. was a big hit, but we’ve never met an alien. Blade Runner
was a critical hit, yet we’re not dealing with cyborgs. However, the
world of Tron came true: everyone’s a User now. That’s a profound
thing to see how true Steven Lisberger’s [creator and director of
the 1982 film] vision has become. I think now, all we can do in our
film is talk about the idea that technology can be a very good thing
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