Before Garrett Hedlund was cast as Sam Flynn, other actors considered included Chris Pine, Ryan Gosling and Michael Stahl-David.
Shooting the film lasted only 64 days. Post-production, due to the heavy special effects, required 68 weeks.
The wardrobe budget for this film was $13 million. One custom suit alone for the racers cost $60,000.
As seen in the theatrical trailer, Sam’s childhood bedroom features an original 1980′s Macintosh computer, toys from the original TRON (1982), and a poster for The Black Hole (1979) (another film from the same era as TRON, and a similar Disney foray into science fiction with cutting-edge [at the time] special effects, including computer animation [see trivia for The Black Hole]). Director ‘Joseph Kosinski”s next project is a remake of The Black Hole for Disney.
To play the computer program CLU, Jeff Bridges’ face was “de-aged” with the same technology used on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) to “age” Brad Pitt. Thus, in his role as Flynn, Bridges appears to be his actual age of 61, but as CLU (a program written back in the 1980s) he looks like he’s in his 30s – programs don’t age.
In an interview, Jeff Bridges noted that as he was being scanned by laser into a computer (for CGI effects), he realized the same thing happened to him (fictionally) in the original TRON (1982).
Director Joseph Kosinski, making an ambitious directorial debut, was only 8-years-old when he first saw the original TRON (1982).
Neither Olivia Wilde (Quorra) nor ‘Garrett Hedlund’ (Sam Flynn) were born when the original TRON (1982) was first released.
The skintight “electric” suits worn were actually fitted with embedded light strips, thus eliminating the need for any such effects modifications in post production.
Unlike most of its contemporaries, this movie was filmed from the outset in 3D format, as opposed to being later converted in post production. The camera equipment used was also a generational step beyond the 3D technology used in Avatar (2009).
In order to retro-age Jeff Bridges to a 35-year-old, the actor had to wear a special helmet fitted with 4 strategically placed cameras enabling every textural nuance of his facial expressions to be recorded for precision synthesis during digital processing.
In addition to the soundtrack, Daft Punk are spinning the tunes in Zeus’s bar.
Olivia Wilde’s futuristic gear was so effective that when she showed up on the set one day as “herself” after 2 month’s work, she was stopped by a security official who demanded to see ID.
The building featured as Flynn’s Arcade in TRON (1982) was in reality the historic Hull Building in Culver City, CA. As of 2009, when this sequel was made, the location looked very different from its appearance in the original film. So, the movie makers opted to painstakingly recreate the original interior and a portion of the exterior in Vancouver instead, with the rest of the location filled in with CGI. The exterior even includes the “Space Paranoids” billboard on the roof, but with the addition of the “TRON” logo – in-universe, TRON is an arcade game that Flynn created after the events of the first movie.
