Via Fast Company: When Tron Legacy comes out in theaters, it’ll be one of the most expensive movies ever made. But it isn’t being directed by James Cameron or Michael Bay or Peter Jackson. It’ll actually be a first-time feature for Joseph Kosinski–who didn’t train as a film-maker. Instead, he went to grad-school for architecture at Columbia; after that, he founded a Web-design firm, of all things. And that background might be what distinguishes the movie and makes it great: Kosinski knows how to handle 3-D space, and he’s fluent with animation technology in a way totally different from any mainstream director working today.
As you can see in this video, Kosinski has an amazing design background. As an undergrad at Stanford, he took an engineering class with David Kelley–the founder of IDEO–and Kelley urged him to take up design, rather than engineering. That in turn led him to Columbia’s architecture school, which at the time was notable for being on the cutting edge of introducing high-end computer programs into architecture.
That eventually led him to create a Web-design firm while dabbling in short-films made entirely on the computer. At the time, people laughed at him for either wasting his architecture education–or presuming that a trained-architect could ever make a decent movie. After meeting director David Fincher (best-known for Se7en, Fight Club, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), he started working in production, then directing commercials–such as a trailer for the videogame Gears of War–and now, he’s bootstrapped himself up to directing Tron Legacy. We can’t wait!