CGA: How did you approach the design and the visual treatments of the film to support the story? What was your underlying theme there and approach?
Joe Kosinski: Well, I started with looking at the aesthetic of the first film and looked at a lot of the original sketches done by Syd Mead and Moebius, a lot of work they’d done that just never made it into the first movie. So that kind of started the inspirational touch point, looking at the original stuff, and then in my own mind just kind of extrapolating it forward 28 years to imagine how this world of the first film would look like today – the materiality and the photorealism of the world.
I just wanted it to feel more real. I wanted it to feel like we took motion picture cameras and went into the world of Tron and shot it from the inside, and I wanted it to be a world where the materials felt like materials we would recognize – glass and steel and concrete. But at the same time the design had to clearly be Tron, so you needed those minimalistic surfaces and those ribbons of light that kind of wrapped everything together. So it started with the first film but then I got to extrapolate forward just based on my own interests.