Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland,
Speaker 1: your beloved host, and I love all things tech. But
Speaker 1: I am a little under the weather today, So to
Speaker 1: lean a bit upon past Jonathan who worked ever so hard,
Speaker 1: as well as former Tech Stuff producer Ramsey who who
Speaker 1: is still with the company. He just produces other stuff. Now. Uh,
Speaker 1: I thought I would revisit this episode I did back
Speaker 1: in two thousand seventeen, November twenty second, two seventeen to
Speaker 1: be precise, called Tron. He fights for the users. And
Speaker 1: the reason this came to mind to me is because
Speaker 1: over at Walt Disney World, over in the Magic Kingdom,
Speaker 1: one of the things that they the company is busily
Speaker 1: building out is a Tron light cycle amusement park ride,
Speaker 1: a ride that is already in a Disney park in Asia,
Speaker 1: but this will be the first North American version, and
Speaker 1: I eagerly anticipate the opening of that ride because it
Speaker 1: looks like it's going to be incredible. And I've always
Speaker 1: loved the aesthetic of Tron, so the idea of being
Speaker 1: able to inhabit that world, even for just a short
Speaker 1: duration of a roller coaster ride really appeals to me.
Speaker 1: So I thought we could dip back into this episode
Speaker 1: from and listen to an interview I did regarding the
Speaker 1: film Tron. Let's listen. In you have a hero who
Speaker 1: rises up against a tyrant of a villain and helps
Speaker 1: a group of resistance fighters overcome oppression. Now, that story
Speaker 1: has been told in numerous ways before and since, but
Speaker 1: this particular version had some really interesting quirks to it.
Speaker 1: The film was called Tron. Tron follows the story of
Speaker 1: a character named Flynn, who is a video game designer
Speaker 1: and hacker who once was the employee of a corporation
Speaker 1: called InCom. One of Flynn's co workers named Dillinger, stole
Speaker 1: Flynn's work and arranged Flynn's removal from the company and
Speaker 1: covered it all up. Flynn plans a daring computer raid
Speaker 1: on the company with the help of two of his
Speaker 1: former co workers. His big goal is to uncover the
Speaker 1: actual evidence that in fact, Dillinger stole Flynn's work, and
Speaker 1: his big opponent in this raid is an artificial intelligent construct.
Speaker 1: It's a piece of code, it's some software. It's called
Speaker 1: the Master Control Program or m c P. Now, originally
Speaker 1: that started out as a chess game, but it had
Speaker 1: started to assimilate other programs into its own code and
Speaker 1: systematically growing more powerful as a result. Old so imagine
Speaker 1: sort of like the borg absorbing other entities to gain
Speaker 1: more strength as kind of what the m c P
Speaker 1: is doing. It gets more and more capability as it
Speaker 1: absorbs other programs. So, while Flynn is trying to break
Speaker 1: into Incom's systems, the m c P detects him and
Speaker 1: uses a laser to convert Flynn into digital information and
Speaker 1: essentially upload him to the computer. That pulls Flynn into
Speaker 1: the computer world and their Flynn encounters programs and in
Speaker 1: the world of the computer simulation or the computer environment,
Speaker 1: these programs have the appearances of humans in this universe.
Speaker 1: They also resemble their creators, whoever programmed them. One of
Speaker 1: those programs is Tron. The name is short for Electronic
Speaker 1: Tron is a security program and is designed to keep
Speaker 1: an eye on the m c P. But he also
Speaker 1: acts kind of like a gladiator in various games that
Speaker 1: the m c P forces programs to participate in, and
Speaker 1: and as some people mentioned within the context of the film,
Speaker 1: he fights for the users. It's one of my favorite
Speaker 1: quotes from Tron. Users in the Tron universe are sort
Speaker 1: of seen as like gods. They are the creators, and
Speaker 1: the programs look to users for guidance and for approval,
Speaker 1: and they have had all communication cut off by the
Speaker 1: m c P, so they wonder if the users are
Speaker 1: still out there. There's this whole existential crisis going on
Speaker 1: in the world of Tron, and that's an interesting piece
Speaker 1: of the mythology of the movie. Flynn eventually, of course,
Speaker 1: helps bring down the m c P and he escapes
Speaker 1: the computer world. He's also able to prove that Dillinger
Speaker 1: stole his work, and he ends up becoming the new
Speaker 1: head of Income as a result. Now, the film was
Speaker 1: not a big success at the box office, but it
Speaker 1: did find itself a cult following and also had a
Speaker 1: profound impact on the way people would visualize cyberspace. I
Speaker 1: would even say that you could see elements of the
Speaker 1: design from Tron find its way into early implementations of
Speaker 1: virtual reality, and the production of the film itself relied
Speaker 1: heavily on some really innovative work from numerous people in
Speaker 1: order for the film to actually come into being. So
Speaker 1: Ramsey the Wonder producer arranged for me to have an
Speaker 1: interview with the writer and director of Tron, Stephen Liszburger.
Speaker 1: What follows is our conversation about the technology he used
Speaker 1: to create the movie, as well as his philosophy about
Speaker 1: technology and stuff in general, really the things that informed
Speaker 1: the creation of Tron. I hope you enjoy Stephen Lisztburger.
Speaker 1: It is a pleasure to have you on the show.
Speaker 1: Thank you for joining Tech Stuff my pleasure. Now before
Speaker 1: we jump into Tron, and I've got a lot of
Speaker 1: things to ask about for Tron. Uh, maybe my listeners
Speaker 1: would probably appreciate understanding a little bit about your background
Speaker 1: leading up to Tron. You had a background in animation
Speaker 1: leading up to that. I come from the East Coast,
Speaker 1: it's more to New York, and went to college in
Speaker 1: Boston at TOPS and went to the School of the
Speaker 1: Museum of Fine Arts, where I studied film for five years,
Speaker 1: including animation, and I had my own company in Boston
Speaker 1: that did some live action but primarily animation, and uh,
Speaker 1: we eventually ended up with a studio on the East
Speaker 1: Coast and went on the West Coast. We're and our
Speaker 1: biggest job was doing Animal Olympics for the NBC Television network,
Speaker 1: and during that we developed Tron and then tried to
Speaker 1: do it independently, but we couldn't pull it off. So
Speaker 1: we were fortunate enough to get in business with Disney. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I imagine a project with the scope of Tron would
Speaker 1: have been extremely challenging to pull off without some some
Speaker 1: pretty major hell. And I also imagine that Disney's background
Speaker 1: in animation. Uh lad to some some aid when you
Speaker 1: guys were working on Tron, because I don't know that
Speaker 1: people who have seen the film are really aware how
Speaker 1: much actual hand drawn animation techniques were incorporated. This was
Speaker 1: an era before computer graphics had reached that digital age
Speaker 1: where you do everything you know digitally on a computer
Speaker 1: and then you can just export to a video file.
Speaker 1: This is way before all of that, So I imagine
Speaker 1: Disney's involvement was somewhat helpful because that was a studio
Speaker 1: that actually understood animation. Yeah, all of that is true.
Speaker 1: And just to unpack that, Um, if we had tried
Speaker 1: to do it independently, I think it would have we
Speaker 1: wouldn't have made it. Eventually. We would have had to
Speaker 1: either go under or bring in someone else because we
Speaker 1: were somewhat naive. We had an idea how we would
Speaker 1: do it, but we in retrospect the scale of it
Speaker 1: was something that none of us had experienced with. On paper,
Speaker 1: we thought we could work it all out. It added
Speaker 1: up and made sense. But when we got into it
Speaker 1: at Disney, many times I thought, I'm really glad we're
Speaker 1: here and not in any other studio because, as you said,
Speaker 1: we we had We had hundreds and hundreds of thousands
Speaker 1: of pieces of artwork, um put any into just the
Speaker 1: frame blow ups. Every individual frame of the electronic world
Speaker 1: blown up shot in seventy moment are blown up. They
Speaker 1: were when they were stacked up. They filled two entire
Speaker 1: moving vans. I mean it was tons and tons and
Speaker 1: tons of images and it it didn't freak Disney out
Speaker 1: because they said, yeah, we're used to handling millions of
Speaker 1: pieces of artwork. And in the end, that was totally
Speaker 1: the strength production wise of the project because we all
Speaker 1: of us working on it were familiar with animation. Even
Speaker 1: the live action people had quite a bit of experience
Speaker 1: and animation, so we sort of took the best from
Speaker 1: live action and then we turned the whole live action
Speaker 1: movie into an animated movie. And once it was at
Speaker 1: that level. You could treat it like mass production. You
Speaker 1: could just keep multiplying the number of teams working on
Speaker 1: the individual scenes. And and there was a system there.
Speaker 1: We weren't reinventing the wheel. That system existed. People knew
Speaker 1: how to do, you know, animated effects, and how to
Speaker 1: work with these numbers of probably it had to be
Speaker 1: over a million pieces in the end. And the funny
Speaker 1: thing about it is how efficient it was, because we
Speaker 1: ended up doing all of the special effects in Tron
Speaker 1: one in half the time that it took to do
Speaker 1: them in Tron too well, and and correct me if
Speaker 1: I got this, get any of this wrong. I want
Speaker 1: to see if I can kind of lay out for
Speaker 1: my listeners sort of a general approach to the electronic
Speaker 1: world sequences which took up more almost an entire hour
Speaker 1: of Tron. I think about somewhere around the realm of
Speaker 1: fifty three to fifty five minutes something like that of
Speaker 1: a footage in this electronic world. So the thing is,
Speaker 1: there was an underlying template that I had in mind,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, a sort of live action short
Speaker 1: at the beginning, then followed by an animated movie is
Speaker 1: what Disney used to make. And you know, they always
Speaker 1: did that with their live action films and animated and
Speaker 1: live or live and animated, and so that combination is
Speaker 1: what I was going for, or you know, it's sort
Speaker 1: of a it's it's kind of an animated feature in
Speaker 1: terms of that length of about seventy minutes with the
Speaker 1: live action being kind of a short at the beginning.
Speaker 1: So and the way that would work out, like you said,
Speaker 1: you shot on seventy millimeter in large each frame. Because
Speaker 1: to remind my listeners, some of whom are are too
Speaker 1: young to really remember the days of film that you're shooting.
Speaker 1: It's really funny, you know, once time moves on and
Speaker 1: people forget about how difficult it was in the past.
Speaker 1: It's a little bit like the next generation doesn't really
Speaker 1: care how difficult it was before. And you know, there
Speaker 1: was no way to composite film if you that was efficient,
Speaker 1: if you did effects and you had characters and you
Speaker 1: had a fantasy background, there really was no good way
Speaker 1: to put all of this together. Blue screen existed, but
Speaker 1: shot blue screen. And you know, if if you had
Speaker 1: at the time, if you had twenty or fifty blue
Speaker 1: screen shots in the film, that was a lot. Well,
Speaker 1: we had nine hundred composite shots that we had to do,
Speaker 1: nine shots that had you and beings in worlds that
Speaker 1: didn't exist, plus their costumes who were supposed to be glowing.
Speaker 1: And there was no digital compositing. You couldn't even run
Speaker 1: computer animation consecutively. We only had enough computing power. We
Speaker 1: had total two megabytes, and we only had enough memory
Speaker 1: to render one frame at a time period, so you
Speaker 1: could never look at the light cycles moving. You could
Speaker 1: only look at this individual frame. Then you had to
Speaker 1: wait forty five minutes and render the next frame and
Speaker 1: look at that one. And the only time we ever
Speaker 1: saw the stuff put together is after we set up
Speaker 1: a film camera and clicked like an animated movie, one
Speaker 1: frame at a time off of this computer animation, and
Speaker 1: then people would all go into the screening room and
Speaker 1: sit there. Even the guys that did all the computer
Speaker 1: work had never seen it moving, and we saw it
Speaker 1: for the very first time when we filmed it one
Speaker 1: frame at a time and then ran it back. And
Speaker 1: so to put all of this together, to composite it,
Speaker 1: the only way we could do it was to do
Speaker 1: blow up every frame and make it into an animated movie.
Speaker 1: And what we did to combine it with the computer animation.
Speaker 1: Was to try to find a sort of middle ground
Speaker 1: where the live action would look like it had been
Speaker 1: rendered by a computer and the computer animation wasn't too
Speaker 1: attempting to look too real because we couldn't do real.
Speaker 1: Many of the looks in the computer aspects of Tron
Speaker 1: look the way they look because not because we sat
Speaker 1: there and said, oh, wouldn't this look great in wire
Speaker 1: frame instead of fully rendered? No, no, no, it was
Speaker 1: wire frame because that's all we could do, and it's
Speaker 1: phenomenal to to give a sense of scale. You're talking
Speaker 1: about twenty four frames a second with film, every single
Speaker 1: one of those frames being for the electronic world being
Speaker 1: blown up so that animators can go in and and
Speaker 1: hand draw elements onto those frames, each of those frames
Speaker 1: having to go through multiple exposures depending upon how many
Speaker 1: colors you had, because each time you added a different
Speaker 1: color you had to do another level, You had to
Speaker 1: photograph everything all over again. Uh, you're you're talking frames.
Speaker 1: If you start doing the math, if you're thinking fifty
Speaker 1: three minutes more than because I don't want to do
Speaker 1: the mass that right now, but I think, well, the
Speaker 1: thing is, it's um if it goes through the math,
Speaker 1: you say, this can't be done. Because just doing the
Speaker 1: colors on each frame, the average number of exposures was
Speaker 1: I think eighteen. Some of the frames in Tron were
Speaker 1: exposed thirty six times. And because everything had to be
Speaker 1: held in focus so that the blow ups were sharp
Speaker 1: and the blow ups are about the size of place Matt,
Speaker 1: there was no depth of field. At seventy millimeter had
Speaker 1: those light levels, So it wasn't those cameras. Those seventy
Speaker 1: millimeter cameras were used by David Lean to shoot Lawrence
Speaker 1: of Arabia, and afterwards I really understood why, because in
Speaker 1: the desert there's enough light. But for any of the
Speaker 1: situations we were in, I had to shoot characters when
Speaker 1: they were speaking to each other and over the shoulder shots.
Speaker 1: They had to be shot on separate passes. So I
Speaker 1: would have Bruce in the foreground with no Jeff that
Speaker 1: he was talking to looking at, and I get him
Speaker 1: in focus, and then I get him out of the frame,
Speaker 1: and then I bring in Jeff and he'd say his
Speaker 1: lines and I chewed them separately, each one held in focus,
Speaker 1: and then they were put together. But yeah, the the
Speaker 1: in animation. There's a thing called an exposure sheet, and
Speaker 1: it's showed. It tells the animation cameraman what levels are
Speaker 1: photographed and what order, and there there's about, I don't know,
Speaker 1: three seconds of animation per exposure sheet. And so what
Speaker 1: we did was we took those exposure sheets and instead
Speaker 1: of that sheet being filled then for three seconds, which
Speaker 1: is seventy two frames, it was one frame in tron,
Speaker 1: one exposure sheet per whole sheet, three seconds of animation
Speaker 1: per individual frame. But again it was only possible to
Speaker 1: put all of this together through animation. We were under
Speaker 1: an extreme deadline, I heard all. I never was given
Speaker 1: a real good reason by Disney why we were in
Speaker 1: such a rush, but we were. And I've heard various
Speaker 1: theories over the years that there was, you know, some
Speaker 1: competition in the marketplace that summer, and so that's why
Speaker 1: they wanted us to come out then. But sometimes I
Speaker 1: wonder what would have happened if we had come out
Speaker 1: the following winter, which made more sense, and that would
Speaker 1: have given us six more months. I mean, it was
Speaker 1: the deadline was so severe that UM we took only
Speaker 1: one day off every fourteen days. That was the legal limit.
Speaker 1: So UM we would work thirteen days and then we
Speaker 1: get one day off, and then we worked thirteen days
Speaker 1: in it one day off, and to complete the rephotography
Speaker 1: of all these blown up frames. Um at the end,
Speaker 1: I think we had twelve this division animation stands going
Speaker 1: twenty four hours a day, three shifts on each and
Speaker 1: the strain on the film in terms of getting it done.
Speaker 1: From a director standpoint, that was kind of crazy. But
Speaker 1: because I was new to this, you know, I just
Speaker 1: accepted it. But the picture was after I shot all
Speaker 1: the live action that the film had to be completed
Speaker 1: in three weeks locked, so not on frame of the
Speaker 1: movie could be changed. Frames could be taken out and removed,
Speaker 1: but I couldn't change or add anything. So, you know,
Speaker 1: now directors get three or four months to live with
Speaker 1: their movie in the editing room. I had three weeks
Speaker 1: after that it was locked. And the thing that's interesting
Speaker 1: is what I had to lock was actors in their
Speaker 1: unaltered tron suits on an all black stage. And then
Speaker 1: I had no computer animation yet because that wasn't done.
Speaker 1: So when I locked the movie and said this is
Speaker 1: the movie I'm making, there were no effects in it.
Speaker 1: There were no colors, in it it was black or white.
Speaker 1: Many of the scenes just had individual actors because you know,
Speaker 1: it was one or the other, like I said, and
Speaker 1: there was just storyboards are a little little frames that
Speaker 1: said effect goes here a solar sailor. And at that
Speaker 1: point I had to say, okay, I sign off. This
Speaker 1: is the movie we're going to release. From there on,
Speaker 1: we just did nine months of filling it all in. It's. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in retrospect it was insane, But at the time it's
Speaker 1: compared to working on Tron to Drown Legacy, where everything
Speaker 1: was composited in real time, where you could just put
Speaker 1: the you know, computer animation together with the backgrounds, together
Speaker 1: with the actors, and you know, you could make changes
Speaker 1: up until like I don't know, a couple of weeks
Speaker 1: before the movie was in theaters. Yeah, this is a
Speaker 1: time where you can't even you can't even review the
Speaker 1: footage immediately afterward, obviously because you've got the filt you
Speaker 1: have to process everything. So oh yeah, of course there's
Speaker 1: no video tap. I mean, you know, you shoot it
Speaker 1: and it goes off to the lab and then you
Speaker 1: see it the next day in dailies at lunchtime. Um,
Speaker 1: there was also no time to do reshoots or reduce um.
Speaker 1: I mean it was standard procedure on Tron legacy that
Speaker 1: when affects shots or shots were composited, that there would
Speaker 1: be multiple redus on each shot, every frame. It was
Speaker 1: none of that. I mean we were flying blind and
Speaker 1: then we had to commit um. Once in a while,
Speaker 1: when something was really screwed up, I would get to
Speaker 1: redo it or reshoot a recomposite. But often what we
Speaker 1: did say Okay, there's a mistake. How can we incorporate
Speaker 1: this mistake into the visuals or into the story, and uh,
Speaker 1: we just went with it. So yeah, yeah, I imagine
Speaker 1: that meant that you had a lot of story boarding
Speaker 1: was very precise from the very get go, so that
Speaker 1: you could you could the team of talented people I
Speaker 1: had was unbelievable, once in a lifetime. I it was
Speaker 1: one of the great joys of making the film. And
Speaker 1: uh yeah, incredible. I mean the team I had from
Speaker 1: Listener Studios, my guys, some of whom came from Disney
Speaker 1: originally and then left Disney and worked at list of
Speaker 1: Studios and then ironically they found themselves back at Disney.
Speaker 1: But we storyboarded the whole film before we ever got
Speaker 1: to Disney, and we did all this artwork for all
Speaker 1: the different thing you know, aspects the m C P
Speaker 1: and Solar Sailor and on the life cycles. That was
Speaker 1: all done, but it was done by us in house,
Speaker 1: and it was it was interesting that then when I
Speaker 1: got to Disney and they said, well, you know, if
Speaker 1: you if you could have a dream, what would it be.
Speaker 1: And I would say, well, I'd like Mobius to go
Speaker 1: over these storyboards, and then I'd like sit Me to
Speaker 1: go over our vehicle designs, and both of them to
Speaker 1: go over my costume designs, and I like Peter Lloyd
Speaker 1: to go over production paintings. And so what what worked
Speaker 1: out great is that we never approached these great artists
Speaker 1: and said to him, we just have a blank piece
Speaker 1: of paper and now I'm going to explain to you
Speaker 1: what I'm trying to get to. It was it was
Speaker 1: so much better that we said, look, this is as
Speaker 1: good as we can get this, and we're pretty confident that,
Speaker 1: you know, there's more room to improve this. And they
Speaker 1: never let us down. And I think they really like that,
Speaker 1: you know, because they look at our artwork and they go, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is really nice. But this, or why didn't you
Speaker 1: do that? Or why didn't you do this? And Mobius
Speaker 1: would say, you know, you could shoot this this way,
Speaker 1: but if you shot it from this angle and if
Speaker 1: you showed this, then the audience would know that, and uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was amazing that it's awesome, and it's great that
Speaker 1: you already had, you know, a nice idea to go
Speaker 1: in with and not have to run the risk of
Speaker 1: asking an artist to contribute and then say, oh, but
Speaker 1: that doesn't really fit in what I was you know,
Speaker 1: it says that. And the thing is I wasn't used
Speaker 1: to this part of it either. The team that you know,
Speaker 1: my guys at Listener Studios, we would throw stuff out
Speaker 1: all the time and we would say, well, you know
Speaker 1: that looked good last week, but why don't we try
Speaker 1: this light cycle design this week? And it was a
Speaker 1: learning curve for me to work with you know, Sid
Speaker 1: and Mobius, and they would say, no, this is it.
Speaker 1: There are changes, there's no revisions. I'm not doing this again.
Speaker 1: That was amazing. It would be at a little bit
Speaker 1: like walking up to Da Vincian singing, yeah, it doesn't
Speaker 1: go that way, could you put some of the life
Speaker 1: cycle and he hands it to you, you don't say
Speaker 1: to me? He said, what about this? We do that?
Speaker 1: You know, you know how about mud flaps. And it's like,
Speaker 1: now I don't think so. Thing that happened with the
Speaker 1: LFE cycles I will interject this and it never bothered. Said,
Speaker 1: is that we sent the life cycles to Madgi, which
Speaker 1: was still Middleman's company UM in New York. We had
Speaker 1: three computer companies. One was in New York State and
Speaker 1: that's where Chris Wedge used to work, who went on
Speaker 1: to Great Blue Sky Studios and do ice age. And
Speaker 1: then we had a company out here called Triple I,
Speaker 1: where Richard Taylor was. And then we also used Robert
Speaker 1: Abeles company, who was in Hollywood. But when I sent
Speaker 1: the first LFE cycle drawing that SID did to uh Magi,
Speaker 1: they said, we can't do this. The curves are too complex,
Speaker 1: we can't render this. We don't have enough you know power,
Speaker 1: it won't work. And I knew that, you know, it
Speaker 1: was an incredible design. We all loved it, and so
Speaker 1: I thought about it this I remember this was over
Speaker 1: a weekend, some Sunday, and so then I said, how
Speaker 1: do I keep the integrity of Sid's designed but simplify
Speaker 1: it for the computer, and already you gotta imagine, it
Speaker 1: was already really simple in terms of color and shading.
Speaker 1: And then I, I don't know how where I got
Speaker 1: this idea, but I got the idea of what if
Speaker 1: you took the bike which was very three D and
Speaker 1: squeezed parts of it between two pieces of glass. To
Speaker 1: imagine that squeezing it between two pieces of glass. So
Speaker 1: if you look at it from the side, what I
Speaker 1: did was I kept that faring in the front from
Speaker 1: the way Sid designed it, but I flattened everything else
Speaker 1: that was also full of all these compound curves, just
Speaker 1: like I was pressing a piece of glass against it,
Speaker 1: and that did it. We got enough of the complexity
Speaker 1: out of it so that the computer guys could do it.
Speaker 1: And by the way, I want to say one thing
Speaker 1: about Magi that it was pretty funny, which is that
Speaker 1: one of the main reasons their tanks in the first
Speaker 1: Tron movie is because when I first went to Magi,
Speaker 1: which was really early on, I was keeping track of
Speaker 1: their capabilities, Like years before we ever made Tron. Their
Speaker 1: first major contract was with the military to do tank simulations.
Speaker 1: This was all the way back in the mid seventies.
Speaker 1: This was totally like far out crazy stuff, you know,
Speaker 1: darkst stuff and mag I was doing. You know, it
Speaker 1: looked like very crude video games, but it was tank oriented.
Speaker 1: So then I at some point came to them and said,
Speaker 1: if you know, if these chase vehicles are tanks, you're
Speaker 1: going to be able to, you know, do a lot
Speaker 1: of this pretty effectively because of your tank experience. And
Speaker 1: they said, yeah, so that's why, you know, the tanks
Speaker 1: worked out so well. Jonathan from one here just breaking
Speaker 1: in to say, we're going to take a quick break
Speaker 1: and be right back. Well, I'm I'm curious now kind
Speaker 1: of stepping back from the the meta tech of how
Speaker 1: the movie came to be and kind of diving into
Speaker 1: the the actual content of the home itself. This is
Speaker 1: a really big treat for me because not only do
Speaker 1: I get to talk about filmmaking approaches and technology that
Speaker 1: I totally geek out about, but I can I can
Speaker 1: also talk about the mythology of Tron, which is incredible.
Speaker 1: It's very prescient in a lot of ways that I'm
Speaker 1: not even certain that that you guys were aware of
Speaker 1: at the time, Like things that that to me became
Speaker 1: really big conversation points a decade or more further out
Speaker 1: from when the film came out. Oh yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you something that will boil your mind. Sure.
Speaker 1: I had a revelation about the mythology of trona the
Speaker 1: first movie two days ago. I'm serious because in discussions
Speaker 1: about Tron two and discussions about, you know, theoretical discussions
Speaker 1: about what at Tron three would be, all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: it sheds light all the way back to the first film,
Speaker 1: and I realized, oh, this is why we doing that.
Speaker 1: And I never really understood that that clearly until you know, so, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's that aspect of it. It's funny because I like
Speaker 1: to talk about the technical achievement of Tron and the
Speaker 1: incredible work and all the talented people that worked on it,
Speaker 1: and I mean talked about unsung heroes, you know, Richard
Speaker 1: with Richard Taylor and Bill Kroyer did and and there
Speaker 1: the teams and all the three companies. I could go
Speaker 1: on all day about how great that whole group was.
Speaker 1: But then people go, see listener, he's such a geek.
Speaker 1: You know, he doesn't love story or characters. And that's
Speaker 1: not true at all. I mean, what what actually got Tron.
Speaker 1: Gave me the energy to make Tron was not the
Speaker 1: geeky energy of computer graphics. What what motivated me for
Speaker 1: years and made me put everything on the line were
Speaker 1: the characters. And it was that story in particular. And
Speaker 1: then I got so excited because I saw that there
Speaker 1: was a chance we could actually do it with this technology.
Speaker 1: But looking back at it, um, I have to say that,
Speaker 1: you know, I was. I was inspired by the experiences
Speaker 1: of my own life up to that point, even though
Speaker 1: I was young, and the story works on many levels
Speaker 1: for me personally. UM so, yeah, I care about that
Speaker 1: pretty deeply. I would say, well, it's the effects of
Speaker 1: the film are phenomenal and I love them. But as
Speaker 1: people have pointed out numerous times over the years, effects
Speaker 1: don't make a story. And if you rely too heavily
Speaker 1: upon the the azzle of effects and you sacrifice the story,
Speaker 1: then you know, I don't find myself talking about those
Speaker 1: films later on, right, I don't, I know what you mean,
Speaker 1: there's nothing, nothing to hang on. Yeah, I know, well,
Speaker 1: they don't resonate past to the you know, the moment,
Speaker 1: the thing that I've been thinking about and the revelation
Speaker 1: I just had recently is that if you look at
Speaker 1: if you look at a movie like Star Wars or
Speaker 1: Um or an Avatar or Um Wonder Woman or four
Speaker 1: thor is of an example, the worlds of those films
Speaker 1: are epic. I mean, there's nothing more epic than Nordic
Speaker 1: mythology and spaces as epic as it gets, and it's infinity,
Speaker 1: it's everything. So what happens in those elms is that
Speaker 1: Star Wars or a thor what happens is that you
Speaker 1: get to have comedic characters because that they make the
Speaker 1: epic grandeur of the setting relatable. So you know, it's
Speaker 1: called Star Wars, which is about as epic a title
Speaker 1: as you could ever come up with. But then you know,
Speaker 1: Luke is kind of a goofy farm boy with his
Speaker 1: you know, and his robot friends are you know, pretty funny.
Speaker 1: So you know, that's how we relate to the epic.
Speaker 1: And the what I'm getting at where this connects with
Speaker 1: Tron is that Tron has is kind of the opposite
Speaker 1: formula if you think about it, because when we did
Speaker 1: Tron one, all there was was you know, pong games,
Speaker 1: and no one looks at a pawn game and says
Speaker 1: this is epic. You know, people stand out at night
Speaker 1: and look at the stars and say this is epic.
Speaker 1: But they don't stand in front of a pong game
Speaker 1: in a bar and you know, look at the the
Speaker 1: pong bar table and say this is epic. So what
Speaker 1: we did was we kind of with the character of Flynn,
Speaker 1: we add it's kind of an epic character two a
Speaker 1: non epic world. And I think that for the people
Speaker 1: that struggled with Tron, and some people still do and say,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't get that movie. Why are people
Speaker 1: excited about it? I think what what they struggle with,
Speaker 1: even though they wouldn't necessarily say it, is they struggle
Speaker 1: with the idea that something epic can come and significant
Speaker 1: or grand can come out of something that isn't well.
Speaker 1: And and to kind of continue your your point, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, if you look at it on the scale
Speaker 1: of something like Star Wars or thor you're talking about
Speaker 1: this cause malogical scale, and when you're talking about Tron,
Speaker 1: you're talking about diving into a virtual space that's confined
Speaker 1: within a very you know, limited physical space. It's within
Speaker 1: a computer. It's almost like you're literally going as small
Speaker 1: scale as you can get we're talking about information, not
Speaker 1: even a physical thing at this point, right, Well, that's
Speaker 1: that's I think one of the reasons people are drawn
Speaker 1: to take sort of sanctuary in the digital world, and
Speaker 1: we do it all the time, is because we control it.
Speaker 1: It's finite. You know, even though it's gotten as complex
Speaker 1: as it is compared to the universe, it still feels
Speaker 1: like it's ours. We can manage it, we put it together,
Speaker 1: we can alter it. But you know, the universe, we're
Speaker 1: getting really bad at dealing with the universe. And um
Speaker 1: so I think, well, it's also this is all very
Speaker 1: generational because my generation traditionally, and certainly people older than
Speaker 1: me just I can't tell you. I don't know how
Speaker 1: old you are, but I'm sure you're younger than me.
Speaker 1: People were terrified of computers, just terrified. And Disney was terrified,
Speaker 1: every you know, everybody was. And it's like young people
Speaker 1: come along and they say, well, this scares the hell
Speaker 1: out of my parents. What power is actually here that
Speaker 1: does that? A little bit like, yeah, if dad has
Speaker 1: a problem understanding this and it freaks them out, I
Speaker 1: got to learn what this is about. And so the
Speaker 1: idea that something significant was going to come out of
Speaker 1: these you know, these limited worlds with this you know,
Speaker 1: information storage manipulation that was embraced by the next generation,
Speaker 1: but it was you know, none of something that older
Speaker 1: people wanted to accept, and they created this weird schism
Speaker 1: over the years with tron. I mean, you know, some
Speaker 1: people said, oh my god, you know how this is
Speaker 1: terrible if things go in this direction. And then twenty
Speaker 1: years later they were doing ads for Apple computers and
Speaker 1: I've I've seen that arc and people don't change. Generations change,
Speaker 1: and um. The other thing, as long as I'm thinking
Speaker 1: down this avenue is that I think the fundamental change
Speaker 1: with the threat of computers. At the time, you know,
Speaker 1: everybody was worried about, oh, you know, the computers are
Speaker 1: going to take my personal data and they're going to
Speaker 1: use it. Ag asked me, I'm gonna lose my privacy.
Speaker 1: And who could have predicted that they would take all
Speaker 1: our personal data but they wouldn't have to battle us
Speaker 1: for it. We would line up to hand it over.
Speaker 1: It's called Facebook, okay, it's called you know everything else
Speaker 1: that you know wants our credit card number. And so
Speaker 1: that has been you know about no one anticipated that,
Speaker 1: No one back then and Torom didn't anticipate that either. That.
Speaker 1: You know, I talked to some of the heaviest people
Speaker 1: in the field of computers back then, and you know,
Speaker 1: they would give me notes, and some of them would
Speaker 1: give me story suggestions, but no one ever gave me
Speaker 1: a note that said, you know, we're going to hand.
Speaker 1: It's not that we're gonna fear it and battle it.
Speaker 1: We're gonna run towards it as fast as we can.
Speaker 1: And it's and I've spent a lot of time thinking
Speaker 1: about how that really happened or on what that really means,
Speaker 1: what are the repercussions of that, And what I came
Speaker 1: away with on that is that that computers put us,
Speaker 1: put the users in a situation where they said, look,
Speaker 1: we'll take care of the cognitive problems, so you're liberated
Speaker 1: from that, and what what you can do with your
Speaker 1: extra time is indulge your feelings. And you know, because
Speaker 1: that's what we like to do. You know, we we
Speaker 1: get adding machines so we don't have to do the math.
Speaker 1: So then we can, you know, go to the movies
Speaker 1: instead of doing the math, and we can enjoy our
Speaker 1: emotions and feelings. And that has continued to advance. You know,
Speaker 1: it used to be like, okay, I'm not going to
Speaker 1: learn too much math because I have an adding machine
Speaker 1: and you know, now I have spell check, well, you know,
Speaker 1: and then it's like, well I don't. Pretty soon I'm
Speaker 1: not even gonna have to drive my car drive itself.
Speaker 1: And so all these cognitive things are being you know,
Speaker 1: we're so called being liberated from and then we're just
Speaker 1: all about our feelings. And you know, we wanted that
Speaker 1: for a long time. But in the past people humanity
Speaker 1: dreamt about it the other way. You know, for hundreds
Speaker 1: of years people philosophers dreamt of a world that was
Speaker 1: guided by reason because it was too much about people's feelings.
Speaker 1: And you know, science and philosophy advanced so we could
Speaker 1: get to this point where reason sort of determined our
Speaker 1: our fate because reason is connected to underlying truth that endures.
Speaker 1: That's why, that's what reason is. But emotions don't work
Speaker 1: that way. You know, you can think that it's worth
Speaker 1: you know, dying one moment for something. You know, if
Speaker 1: I don't get invited to the prom I should you
Speaker 1: be better off dead, And then a month later you
Speaker 1: could forget that you ever felt that way. And so
Speaker 1: now we're we're kind of living in the age of Trump,
Speaker 1: where I'm digressing, I know, but we're living in the
Speaker 1: age of Trump. We're it's all about these feelings every day,
Speaker 1: and we have we have the way of of expressing
Speaker 1: those feelings to a larger audience than ever before, instantaneously,
Speaker 1: as you know, So the cognitive power of computers has
Speaker 1: ironically completely liberated our emotional feely side, touchy feely side.
Speaker 1: It gets to stand out every thought in his head
Speaker 1: because of Twitter. Whenever whenever, whenever a disgruntled employee of
Speaker 1: Twitter isn't deleting his account. Yeah, so this this weird
Speaker 1: relationship we've developed with technology. And I go all the
Speaker 1: way back to you know, the early torn days, and
Speaker 1: I can see what we thought then, and I can
Speaker 1: you know, I've experienced the arc you know, from there
Speaker 1: to hear it's it's really interesting. Well, what's fascinating to
Speaker 1: me is that, you know, you talked about this this
Speaker 1: thing about computers that were very scary to one generation
Speaker 1: and very promising to the next. Uh. My background is,
Speaker 1: interestingly for me anyway, not not in technology. My background,
Speaker 1: my scholarly background was in medieval literature. And history. And
Speaker 1: the funny thing is you see the exact same story
Speaker 1: play out upon the invention of the Guttenberg Press, because
Speaker 1: it was taking taking books away from monks, you know exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Instead of instead of it being the church that was
Speaker 1: completely in charge of creating manuscripts and books, it now
Speaker 1: became the domain of printers who could produce them much
Speaker 1: more quickly, which meant that people could actually own books
Speaker 1: for the first time because they weren't prohibitively expensive, and
Speaker 1: that transformed the Renaissance. Really, you could argue that was
Speaker 1: an enormous employ on it, just as computers have been
Speaker 1: granted a much more accelerated, but a similar transformative element
Speaker 1: in our own society. So this kind of knowing this
Speaker 1: sort of stuff, I mean, granted, a lot of this
Speaker 1: stuff kind of evolved over the years since Tron has
Speaker 1: come out and in some ways can change the way
Speaker 1: we view Tron, which I actually I think that's great
Speaker 1: for any piece of art, right that you can revisit
Speaker 1: that piece of art and it means something new to
Speaker 1: you based upon your experiences and the way the world
Speaker 1: has changed things. A window into how what a relationship
Speaker 1: was with all of those things, the things of the
Speaker 1: moment and eternal things at that moment in times, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'll tell you another sort of past and
Speaker 1: future mechanism that I thought about primarily after I made Tron,
Speaker 1: which is that, you know, the character of Flynn is
Speaker 1: kind of you know. Afterwards, I did quite a bit
Speaker 1: of study about the archetype of the shaman character and
Speaker 1: what it what does the shaman character do traditionally And
Speaker 1: traditionally he he heals a person who has lost their
Speaker 1: spirit because their spirit has gone into you know, the
Speaker 1: another world, the spirit world, and that is why the
Speaker 1: person here is sick. And the shaman has the power
Speaker 1: to crossover into the spirit world. And then because he
Speaker 1: has powers there, he can retrieve the spirit of his friend,
Speaker 1: bring it back to this world, and then put the
Speaker 1: two together. And I'm reading about this, like, you know,
Speaker 1: specifics about this twenty years later, and and then I'm
Speaker 1: thinking about what Flynn did in the first movie. Alan
Speaker 1: and you know, Laura come to him and they're sick.
Speaker 1: Why because they've lost their spirit, They've lost their programs
Speaker 1: and it's making them sick. And he has lost information too,
Speaker 1: and then he ends up crossing over into the digital realm,
Speaker 1: and you know what does he do there? He freeze
Speaker 1: them up so that they can now get in touch
Speaker 1: the you know, the information that is the Tron program
Speaker 1: can get in touch with the user can get in
Speaker 1: touch with it, and you know, and then he comes
Speaker 1: back to this world. And I thought, you know, this
Speaker 1: is this is pretty crazy that it's the role of
Speaker 1: the shaman, but in a in a digital environment. And
Speaker 1: I wasn't really thinking about that when I came up
Speaker 1: with it. And not only that, but a role of
Speaker 1: a shaman, a shaman taking the role of essentially our protagonist, uh,
Speaker 1: the hero of the story, the one who makes the
Speaker 1: who defeats the bad guy at the end. You know,
Speaker 1: we have Tron, but we follow Flynn. Obviously, that makes
Speaker 1: sense because Flynn is from our world, so we're seeing
Speaker 1: the world of Tron through his eyes. That's very necessary
Speaker 1: for the grounding of that for the audience. But it
Speaker 1: is also interesting that that in a traditional narrative, we
Speaker 1: would be following the story of Tron right you start,
Speaker 1: you follow the story of the guy who slays the
Speaker 1: dragon at the end. Uh. And so instead we're following
Speaker 1: the character that enables that to happen and one level up.
Speaker 1: It's pretty funny that moment when at the end of
Speaker 1: Tron where she says, you know, Flynn really did it,
Speaker 1: and Tron doesn't know that, you know, he managed to
Speaker 1: overcome the m c P because of what Flynn did.
Speaker 1: That that happened on a whole, whole dimensional level above
Speaker 1: his head literally, and he looks at her and he goes, oh, okay,
Speaker 1: I don't really know what to do with that information. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, and I just this thought popped into my head,
Speaker 1: which is that according to this definition of what a
Speaker 1: shaman is, you could almost say that, um Wizard of
Speaker 1: Oz is a shaman story that Judy Garland's character she
Speaker 1: crosses over to the other world and what does she do.
Speaker 1: She helps her friend and become whole brain. It's a
Speaker 1: very similar mechanism. Absolutely. Yeah, it's uh interesting. I had
Speaker 1: not even thought of that, but that is a very
Speaker 1: a very apt, uh comparison, especially since Dorothy again is
Speaker 1: going into a world completely unlike our own, that has
Speaker 1: its own rules, has its own history. Doth Yeah, back again.
Speaker 1: Just wanted to say, we're going to take another quick break,
Speaker 1: but we'll be right back for the rest of this interview. Well,
Speaker 1: I have another question for you. This is one that
Speaker 1: that not only I need to know, but my producer
Speaker 1: Ramsey needs to know, and that is Master Control Program
Speaker 1: m c P, one of one of the great villains
Speaker 1: of science fiction. What what what was? Did you have
Speaker 1: any specif inspirations for MCP, perhaps with any other organizations
Speaker 1: that might have three letters in their name or anything
Speaker 1: along those lines. Or from the beginning, he was always
Speaker 1: machine like. And when I went to and there was
Speaker 1: a sort of Wizard of Oz component to him too,
Speaker 1: speaking a Wizard of Oz, because you know, he was
Speaker 1: smoking mirrors and in the end he was that, you know,
Speaker 1: a little It all started with that little chess player.
Speaker 1: But um, when I went to Triple I, they had
Speaker 1: one of the three computer companies, they had created a
Speaker 1: juggling human character wearing a top hat who um looked
Speaker 1: very human. He barely moved. He just stood in one
Speaker 1: position and his arms moved, and he juggled a bunch
Speaker 1: of balls. And but he didn't speak or anything like that.
Speaker 1: And I think you ever moved his speed either. And
Speaker 1: then I saw that I saw this, this image popped
Speaker 1: into my head that like the Wizard of Oz, we
Speaker 1: could have his face on this machine like exterior that
Speaker 1: we had been creating for the m c P and uh,
Speaker 1: but then we couldn't render it in flesh tones and
Speaker 1: have it speak because we just didn't have enough computing power.
Speaker 1: So the only way we could actually do it was
Speaker 1: in wire France. So you know, we we recorded David
Speaker 1: Warner's voice doing it, and then we altered his voice,
Speaker 1: and then we you know, did what animators have always
Speaker 1: done is sync up the images, you know, the face
Speaker 1: with the soundtrack and the MCP is really I guess
Speaker 1: the first talking had the first c G character that
Speaker 1: ever was. And I always liked the idea that you
Speaker 1: can be outside of him or you can be inside
Speaker 1: of him. The scene where Sark is actually you know,
Speaker 1: at the pedestal and the m c P surround him.
Speaker 1: I like that that. You know, it's that's a relationship
Speaker 1: with the technology. We can be objective to it or
Speaker 1: we can be subjected to being inside the technology and
Speaker 1: it's completely surrounds us. I always pictured him as kind
Speaker 1: of a it's funny processor, like a food processor, because
Speaker 1: he's kind of like a juicer you think about it.
Speaker 1: You know, he brings in these programs and he these
Speaker 1: entities and then he juices them to extract their information.
Speaker 1: And I'll tell you a little funny um story about
Speaker 1: the EP and Flynn, which is that I didn't know
Speaker 1: that Jeff who's contribution. I can't stop bragging about how,
Speaker 1: you know, great he is in that role, but um,
Speaker 1: and I cast him, so the uh, that was my contribution.
Speaker 1: He did the rest, but he UM, I didn't know
Speaker 1: he was going to do this clue persona. And so
Speaker 1: we started filming the tank scene and he was doing
Speaker 1: it and it was really cool and it was a
Speaker 1: daring move on his part. But then the MC et
Speaker 1: the recognizers common they capture Clue and then they put
Speaker 1: him in the m c P and uh, he starts
Speaker 1: getting d rez and then he starts screaming for his
Speaker 1: life and Jeff delivers this great, you know, heartfelt moment
Speaker 1: of like, you know, I'm not giving into you, m
Speaker 1: c P. But he doesn't do it in the clue voice.
Speaker 1: He does it as in his real voice, and neither
Speaker 1: of us caught that. No one caught that inconsistency that,
Speaker 1: if you think about it, that should have been in
Speaker 1: the Clue program voice. But and you know, but it
Speaker 1: isn't and it's a little bit like it's kind of
Speaker 1: freaky because it's a little bit like Clue was dying
Speaker 1: and then the last thing he did was act like,
Speaker 1: you know, a user just before the end. So that's
Speaker 1: you know, it was kind of a happy accident. But
Speaker 1: anyway that the m c P was was like, you know,
Speaker 1: a food processor with people or characters. And that design
Speaker 1: actually did not change all that much. I mean it
Speaker 1: was it was worked over brilliantly by sid Meade and
Speaker 1: improved a lot, but that the through line went back years. Well,
Speaker 1: I guess, uh, you know, to me just seeing that
Speaker 1: that image, uh, that that enormous head, that booming voice
Speaker 1: it's consuming the the information uh from from other programs.
Speaker 1: To me today, like when I think of the Internet voice,
Speaker 1: that's the voice that's in my head, it's the voice
Speaker 1: of m c P as it's as it's consuming. And
Speaker 1: you know, talking again about pressions, like there's so much
Speaker 1: here about the merging of what it is to be
Speaker 1: human and the technology that we create. It really really
Speaker 1: seems like the singularity, like that concept of the singularity
Speaker 1: of of humans elevating themselves to the next level. Perhaps
Speaker 1: merging with machines or incorporating machines in some way. Sometimes
Speaker 1: it doesn't involve that, but but a lot of the
Speaker 1: versions of the Singularity do. This seems like, uh, it
Speaker 1: was very much in that that sort of vein, like
Speaker 1: this idea of yeah, well is it. You know, there
Speaker 1: were no we didn't use the term user before Tron,
Speaker 1: and people didn't know what the word meant, and people
Speaker 1: didn't have computers. I mean, there were no really you know, handful,
Speaker 1: but people were and they were crude at best. So, um,
Speaker 1: this whole idea of your sort of your alter ego,
Speaker 1: your avatar being you know, in there in the form
Speaker 1: of your information, that just keeps building every year, so
Speaker 1: that you know, it's it's getting to the point where
Speaker 1: we really are creating, as much as possible, a double
Speaker 1: ganger of ourselves digitally. And I mean, I think what's
Speaker 1: interesting is that Nintendo, i've heard, has done studies on
Speaker 1: how people picture themselves in their mind's eye, and they've
Speaker 1: come to the conclusion that we imagine ourselves is somewhat
Speaker 1: a cartoon version of ourselves. And I think that's one
Speaker 1: of the reasons that Nintendo video games as successful and
Speaker 1: brilliant as they are. I mean, part of that success
Speaker 1: I think comes from working with that theory that you know,
Speaker 1: they're not realistic, and I think that the idea of
Speaker 1: a realistic double Ganger a sort of copy of ourselves.
Speaker 1: I think that that's a in some ways maybe more challenging,
Speaker 1: and I think that's part of the challenge that we're
Speaker 1: actually facing that, you know, it's it's a little bit
Speaker 1: like not only we're creating a double Gang or Earth
Speaker 1: and a digital one. And like I said earlier, I
Speaker 1: think we feel good about that because it doesn't confound
Speaker 1: us like the universe. You know, it has problems like
Speaker 1: hackers and trolls. But yeah, we can deal with that,
Speaker 1: you know, because ultimately those are people, those are those
Speaker 1: ineffable forces. We don't understand. Its CEO too. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: Jonathan from One again, just breaking in to say we're
Speaker 1: going to take another quick break and be right back
Speaker 1: with the interview Stephen Lisberger. This has been a huge
Speaker 1: thrill for me to to talk to the writer and
Speaker 1: director of a film that, you know what played a
Speaker 1: big part in my childhood and I watch it frequently,
Speaker 1: so I have in fact, I want to take this
Speaker 1: opportunity to thank you for your quarters. Oh there have
Speaker 1: been an I didn't even get into the arcades section
Speaker 1: of this because I mean, you know, I just had
Speaker 1: to had one footnote because I can't resist, which is
Speaker 1: you know people always talking about, well, the first Tron,
Speaker 1: you know, it didn't make enough money. It wasn't e
Speaker 1: t Well the movie paid for itself as a movie,
Speaker 1: but the video game paid for the entire movie. Too
Speaker 1: many a week's allowance went into disks of Tron For me,
Speaker 1: I remember the full console, like the one you would
Speaker 1: step in and play and uh and yeah, I played
Speaker 1: a lot of that game. Yeah. Do you know about
Speaker 1: the Tron ride in Shanghai. I have heard about this.
Speaker 1: I have not made my way to Asia yet and
Speaker 1: second out on YouTube Tron Shanghai and um, it's pretty amazing.
Speaker 1: They worked on that ride for over fifteen years. Actually happened. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've heard of I've heard about a new one coming
Speaker 1: to to do it in Florida now. So I'm really
Speaker 1: excited about that because you know, the thing is, like
Speaker 1: you said earlier, people think of Tron and you know
Speaker 1: it's sometimes too literally like oh, you know, it's a
Speaker 1: small world in there. You know, it's a small world
Speaker 1: after all. And but it's funny because with the Tron ride,
Speaker 1: the world of Tron is immense. You're small and you
Speaker 1: get on the ride, and in some ways that's the
Speaker 1: whole you know, that's the most thrilling part to be
Speaker 1: small and have that recognizer looming over your head, for instance,
Speaker 1: to make that leak to realize, oh, you know, this
Speaker 1: world is not small. And so yeah, it's really cool
Speaker 1: the ride. But anyway, yeah, the game and the ride.
Speaker 1: I mean, I can't wait to experience the ride. I really,
Speaker 1: I really am looking forward to that. The game remains
Speaker 1: one of my favorites. I'm a I'm a child of
Speaker 1: the seventies and eighties, so the Arcade experience was really
Speaker 1: an important one for me growing up. Also, Tron obviously
Speaker 1: being in that realm of for a lot of people,
Speaker 1: it was kind of their introduction to this concept of
Speaker 1: taking taking a very abstract idea in the form of
Speaker 1: computer program and really turning it into something relatable. I mean,
Speaker 1: to have a computer program that could technically just be oh, well,
Speaker 1: this is just a spreadsheet program, but no, in this
Speaker 1: world that is a an anthropomorphic creation that can fight
Speaker 1: for you. That's uh pretty amazing concept. Uh, I this
Speaker 1: was a huge thrill for me. Uh, thank you so much. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you get a chance to get a word in,
Speaker 1: I mean, I'll totally be an extra in Tron three.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm happy to be. Yeah, just sitting at sitting
Speaker 1: off at the side. I'm perfectly fine. I just want
Speaker 1: to I want to be in the room where it
Speaker 1: happens as they say, thank you for joining me again. Okay,
Speaker 1: you too. Bye. I hope you enjoyed that discussion with
Speaker 1: Mr Lisburger. I could have easily kept talking for another
Speaker 1: hour or two with him, and I get the feeling
Speaker 1: he would have indulged me for as long as he
Speaker 1: had the time to do so. I've always had an
Speaker 1: appreciation for Tron I've always enjoyed that movie ever since
Speaker 1: it first came out, But now that appreciation is even
Speaker 1: more profound knowing the challenges that the team faced in
Speaker 1: order to produce this movie at the time that it
Speaker 1: was made, going to the point where you would swear
Speaker 1: that this was computer generated imagery, and then knowing that
Speaker 1: it was hand animated, hand drawn on top of actual
Speaker 1: individual cells of film. It's incredible to think of how
Speaker 1: much work and care and love went into this film
Speaker 1: and created that distinctive look and feel. And also, I
Speaker 1: really do hope I can show up in Tron three
Speaker 1: The Balls in your Court Disney call me well. I
Speaker 1: hope you enjoyed this interview from two thousand seventeen. It
Speaker 1: was a real pleasure to get to do it. It
Speaker 1: was something I had not even anticipated. Ramsey really came
Speaker 1: through and landed that interview for me, which was incredible,
Speaker 1: and thought that maybe you, if you hadn't had chance
Speaker 1: to hear it, you might be interested to learn more
Speaker 1: about what went into the creation of a really, I
Speaker 1: think a really influential film. Not a perfect film by
Speaker 1: any stretch of the imagination, but one that I think
Speaker 1: influenced a lot of other filmmakers as well as people
Speaker 1: who were getting into computer animation or computer games. Um.
Speaker 1: It really had an impact, and obviously Tron legacy when
Speaker 1: that came out extended that further. Um and we got
Speaker 1: the amazing Daft punk soundtrack. So there's a lot about
Speaker 1: Tron that I think is cool, and some of it
Speaker 1: are the ripple effects from the movie, not just the
Speaker 1: movie itself. If you have suggestions for topics I should
Speaker 1: cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, Please reach out
Speaker 1: to me. The best way to do that is over
Speaker 1: on Twitter. The handle we use for the show is
Speaker 1: text stuff H s W and I'll talk to you
Speaker 1: again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production.
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Speaker 1: Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.