Hint: He's a trained architect.
Tom Cruise and Joseph Kosinski on the set of Oblivion
Via: David James
Joseph Kosinski looks like he was designed in a computer. His face is all sharp, clean angles; his hair cropped into a perfect part; his tall, lean figure adorned with un-fussy, nondescript attire. Even his speaking voice is kept at a calming, narrowly modulated tone of intelligent assurance. Of course he started his career as an architect.
An alum of Columbia University's architecture program, Kosinski took his fluency with digital design tools and fashioned himself into a filmmaker, first in a series of short films, then as a director of ads for Halo 3 and BMW, and finally making his feature debut with 2010's TRON: Legacy. All of them carry a distinctive Kosinski-ness, a futuristic outlook matched with a sleek, modern aesthetic.
That sensibility has been given a perfect platform (literally and figuratively) in Oblivion, Kosinski's latest sci-fi film (out this weekend). The film follows a pair of humans (played by Tom Cruise and W.E.'s Andrea Riseborough) tasked with overseeing what's left of Earth after a devastating alien war — and they do so from atop a towering home that is arguably the coolest high-rise apartment in the history of American cinema.
Just look at it. Gorgeous.
Via: Universal Pictures
As is usually the case with Kosinski, it all started with an image. "I wrote this short treatment for a film about eight years ago," he tells BuzzFeed. "And when I did that, I created three key images on my own."
Along with the "Bubble Ship" Cruise's character uses to travel the landscape, and an arresting shot of the top of the Empire State Building sticking out of an expanse of black sand, Kosinski drafted what became known as the "Sky Tower."
"I built the initial 3-D sketch models of the Sky Tower," says Koskinski. "A very simple model compared to what ends up in the film, but the basic concept of it was there from the very beginning. That's how it all started."
For the 38-year-old director, noodling around with sophisticated three-dimensional modeling software is just how he shakes his ideas out of his head. "In architecture school, I became very fluent in working that way," he says. "For me, it's almost like a sketchpad. It allows me to actually shade [the structure] and light it. It's not photo-real, but it's enough to see the idea."
