As he explains it, the challenge was to continue the franchise in the post-Matrix age.
“My take,” he explains, “was, ‘Let’s not try to outdo The Matrix, let’s embrace Tron for what it was. Let’s make this thing feel like Tron.’ I wasn’t interested in making an Internet movie, that the world of Tron now extends to the Internet or there’s a Twitter attack or whatever terrible version I’m sure it could have been. I was interested in setting the world of Tron off in the 1980s on an isolated server away from the Internet, so it evolved on its own like the Galapagos Islands. It became more like a Western in that way – I liked the idea that inside the world of Tron if you wanted to deliver a message you had to get on your light cycle and go tell someone something. There’s no radio communication. Trying to really keep the analogy intact, and to set up the rules of the world, make it physical with momentum and weather and gravity, but at the same time it’s all rooted in the DNA of the original film. So this film seemed to evolve out of it. It’s set in its own world, and that was really important to me. It’s in a galaxy far, far away, it just happens to be inside this server in the basement of Flynn’s Arcade.”
Meeting Steven Lisberger, writer/director of the original Tron, early in the process, Kosisnki suggested that they take a look at all of the concept art that Syd Mead had done for the original, as well as the material done by Moebius. In particular he was interested in exploring the designs for things that for one reason or another simply couldn’t be pulled off back in the day.
“I remember in the meeting with Steve he showed me the first sketch of the light cycle that Syd did, with this rider on the outside and not covered by the glass canopy,” Koskinski says. “He remembers the guys from the computer imaging company saying, ‘We just can’t render the bike that way; we don’t have the computer power to do an external rider. We’re going to have to smooth it over with a canopy.’ That was one example, and I said, ‘Let’s design an open cockpit light cycle; let’s go back to the way it was intended to be, where the rider becomes part of the bike form. It was really making sure that our movie grew out of the seeds of those initial ideas, and then to bring some of my elements as well. This movie was shot inside that world, so I wanted to make it feel photographic. I love the Tron aesthetic, and this was taking that minimalist Tron aesthetic and making it physical, making it feel material. Real sets, real illuminated suits, a physicality was really important to me.”