It might not be out until December, but Disney are certainly on the case hyping up the release of Tron: Legacy, with MTV sitting down to talk to director Joseph Kosinski, and also releasing the rather cool image of a yellow lightcycle you can see above.
Although Kosinski didn’t let every details slip on the film, he did say we can expect the finidhed film to be similar to, but go far beyond, the test footage that was shown at Comic Con last year. Kosinski says that after that footage was created, “We were able to refine the design of the light cycles, the characters, the world and kind of flesh it out to a much higher level of detail than we were able to do for the test. What we’re going to see in the film will feel a lot more photorealistic.”
He’s also promising a slightly unusual take on 3D, saying “Our approach is not like Avatar, which I think is 3D from the first shot to the last. Ours is sort of a Wizard of Oz approach. Ninety-eight percent of the 3D is in the world of Tron. The 3D really starts once we get into the Tron world.” Which is kind of a neat idea.
He also confirmed that Jeff Bridges will be playing two character in the film, “He’s playing Kevin Flynn, the character from the original film, and he’s playing Clu, the avatar that Kevin Flynn created in the 1980s. I’d say he’s Clu 2. There was a Clu in the first film who looked like Jeff but was very simple in terms of his abilities. He’s very stiff. Clu 2 is a second incarnation of Kevin’s avatar. He doesn’t only look like Jeff, but he can think like him too. So it’s a whole new level of artificial intelligence.”
Kosinski also promises it’ll be PG or PG-13 rated and that, “The focus was always to serve the story we are telling… We’ve taken the events of the first movie as historical facts. In our story, Kevin Flynn emerged from his first experience as CEO of ENCOM and actually released the Tron video game based on his experiences in the first movie. ENCOM has become the most innovative, most successful, most forward-thinking digital company in the world as of 1989. There are fun references to parts of the first film. Sam Flynn [Garrett Hedlund], in searching for his father, has to retrace his steps and comes upon clues and places that we visited in the first film, like Flynn’s Arcade. Even in the world of Tron itself, a lot of vehicles and sequences have evolved. We’ll get to see how the disc game has changed, how the light cycle battle has changed. We get to see the new version of these iconic sequences. Things have gotten bigger and a bit out of control.”
It all sounds rather cool and I’m sure we’ll see a lot more about Tron legacy in the coming months.
Head over to MTV for the full interview.