Still gunning for glory
Tom Cruise is all about enthusiasm, says Oblivion director,
Filmmaker Joseph Kosinski would never let a little thing like collaborating with big star Tom Cruise bother him.
In fact, Kosinski has already experienced the anxiety of great expectations and the fear of failure that comes with the situation.
Incredibly, he made his major motion picture directorial debut with Tron: Legacy, which was the reshaping of the 1982 cult classic Tron with Jeff Bridges.
That 2009 Kosinski epic introduction went on to earn Oscar honours, more than $400 million at the box office and eventually a job working with Cruise on Oblivion.
“I was lucky to work with Jeff Bridges who is another kind of icon, so I was thrilled to work with Tom (Cruise) but I admit it was a little surreal at times,” Kosinski said. “His film history includes so many of the films I grew up watching.”
The post-apocalyptic scifi film Oblivion is based on Kosinski’s graphic novel and features Cruise as tech operator Jack Harper. He’s stationed on the nearly abandoned Earth, which is suffering from the decimating aftermath of an alien attack six decades earlier.
When a space ship crashes near his station one day, Jack realizes one of the inhabitants of the ship, Julia (Olga Kurylenko), is a familiar face from the past and might have an unnerving connection to his unsettling dreams.
Soon enough, Jack becomes embroiled with Julia and Malcolm Beech (Morgan Freeman), the leader of the human resistance fighters, hiding out underground while they wait for the opportunity to reclaim their planet.
Jack’s boss Sally (Melissa Leo) and his communications officer and girlfriend Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) have other ideas as the conflict escalates between the separate forces.
Of course, Cruise is no stranger in a strange land when it comes to acting in sci-fi flicks. He starred in the 2002 Steven Spielberg version of the Philip K. Dick short story Minority Report, and he was the headliner in Spielberg’s 2005 remake of The War of the Worlds.
But there must have been pressure on Oblivion for the director’s sophomore outing?
“There is always pressure,” Kosinski said. “No director walks into a movie thinking it’s going to be a cakewalk.”
In times of frustration, he could always turns to Cruise.
“Everybody always says the same, but it’s true,” the director said. “He is all about energy and enthusiasm for filmmaking, and ups the game of everybody on set.”
Kosinski shot most of the exteriors for the movie last summer in Iceland, using the volcanic landscapes as “primordial backdrops” for some sequences and the nearly 24 hours of daily light to film long stretches at a time.
“I always wanted to shoot the movie there from the time I wrote the treatment eight years ago,” he said.
And if Oblivion has a retro feel, Kosinski said he has been successful in his subtle approach. Many of his favourite sci-fi adventures became popular during the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, including The Omega Man, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner and The Twilight Zone.
“For me it’s a little bit of homage,” Kosinski said. “I thought I would do a ’70s kind of film but with all the modern filmmaking tools.”
Oblivion also contains the classic philosophical tone. It’s sort of a man-versus-his-nature idea.
“There is a difference between those who ignore the truth and put their blinders on,” said Kosinski of his movie’s plot, “and the people who decide to take the truth head on, regardless of how hard it is to face what it means.”
Kosinski is hardly a film school elitist, though. He has a master’s degree in architecture and only made the transition into TV commercials as an expert in digital recreation to fulfil a creative void.
After a few awards for his inventive ads, he was given the Tron: Legacy job, to the surprise of many in the film industry.
Currently, Kosinski is directing the TV pilot Ballistic City, a futuristic cop drama for the cable network AMC. “I am looking forward to it,” he said. “You can explore characters in more depth in a series.”