'Tron Legacy' Director Joseph Kosinski Explains The Film's Reshoots

There's a great deal of Tron Legacy information hitting the web this week, because over the weekend Disney showed a chunk of the film to some editors at a press day in Los Angeles. Most of the film's creative talent was on hand, too. So now we've got some new comments from director Joseph Kosinski, with some of the most interesting being in answer to questions about the film's recent reshoots.

Collider asked Mr. Kosinski about the additional and reshot footage, and he gave a detailed answer.

I like to call it additional photography because it really was additional photography. We added about five or six minutes to the movie, most of it in the first 20 minutes. Most of the shooting was done to set up Sam a little bit better and to give him a little more context. A couple scenes were done to bring to the surface some of the themes of the movie and to show the relationship of Sam and his father a little more clearly. Some of it was just picking up visual effects plates and inserts that we just were never able to get when we first shot.

Now, obviously the director of a film isn't going to come out and say that he did rewrites and additional shooting for any negative reason, but until seeing the film we'll take this as honesty rather than spin.

The director also talked in a general way about the film's challenges, and reading his summation it isn't difficult to be interested in how the final cut will turn out.

Every day on set, there was another unique challenge, and a lot of that resulted from trying to push the envelope technically, in so many different areas, simultaneously. We shot in true stereo with real 3D cameras. We decided to build fully illuminated suits rather than painting them in afterward. We decided to create a photo-realistic digital human being as one of our main characters in the movie, played by an actor who's also one of your other characters in the film, and we had to try to figure out how to shoot scenes where he plays against himself.

It's been a three-year process to get the film made, and there are still a couple months left. Expect the production to be actively tweaking right down to the wire. Usually, huge effects films are finished with a lot less time than they'd like to have. This is a rare exception where there has actually been more than enough time, as explained here:

It was nice to be able to have a whole cut of the movie to analyze. That's one of the benefits of having 18 months of post on this movie. We got to sit down and actually watch it and still have nine months left to say, "All right, let's go tweak this, this and this, and remove this," and it helped.