Looking at the newly released production photos from Tron Legacy, it's hard not to be struck by how much of the film was shot on real sets. And it turns out the film's director, Joseph Kosinski, went to architecture school.


Talking to HitFix on the film's set, Jeff Bridges praised Kosinski's ability to plan different constructs and film them three-dimensionally for this new 3-D film:

It's interesting different filmmakers where they come from and what they bring to the film and [Kosinski's] an architect and so the film has a very, you know, heightened design feel to it. And he hired this wonderful production designer, Darren Gilford. And he is out of car design so it adds another thing. It's not somebody, you know, who is an interior decorator.


With the demands of 3-D and CG movie-making, plus the need for real-life spaces that look like they could be the inside of a computer, it's easy to see why Kosinski's architecture background could come in handy. (And it's interesting that Tron Legacy's production designer, like the designers of Avatar, is drawing on car design.)

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Here's Kosinski, at a recent conference, talking about the intersection between "architecture, film and graphics":



Says Kosinski:

I decided that architecture would be the kind of ultimate combination of the creative interests I had and the technical interests I had, so... Columbia was one of the first institutions that was giving architecture students the tools that automotive designers and visual effects facilities down in Los Angeles were using in feature films...


It's pretty interesting to hear him talk about starting a small firm after school where he and his partner wanted to blend architecture, design and film, and people thought he was crazy to think an architect could be a film director — and that it might be a waste of a good architecture degree. The whole video's well worth watching.

More pics at the link. [Hitfix]