Speaker 1: Technology with tex Stuff from hat dot com. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tex Stuff. I am your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer at how Stuff Works. I'm really
Speaker 1: excited to bring you this episode today. In nine d two,
Speaker 1: Disney released a film unlike any other in the company's history,
Speaker 1: And if you boil the story down to its basic themes,
Speaker 1: it's really not that unusual. Right. You have a hero
Speaker 1: who rises up against a tyrant of a villain and
Speaker 1: helps a group of resistance fighters overcome oppression. Now, that
Speaker 1: story has been told in numerous ways before and since,
Speaker 1: but 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. So imagine sort
Speaker 1: of like the borg absorbing other entities to gain more strength.
Speaker 1: That's kind of what the m c P is doing.
Speaker 1: It gets more and more capability as it absorbs their programs.
Speaker 1: So while Flynn is trying to break into Income's systems,
Speaker 1: the m c P detects him and uses a laser
Speaker 1: to convert Flynn into digital information and essentially upload him
Speaker 1: to the computer. That pulls Flynn into the computer world
Speaker 1: and their Flynn encounters programs and in the world of
Speaker 1: the computer simulation or the computer environment. These programs have
Speaker 1: the appearances of humans in this universe. They also resemble
Speaker 1: their creators, whoever programmed them. One of those programs is Tron.
Speaker 1: The name is short for Electronic. Tron is a security
Speaker 1: program and is designed to keep an eye on the
Speaker 1: m c P, but he also acts kind of like
Speaker 1: a gladiator in various games that the m c P
Speaker 1: forces programs to participate in, and as some people mentioned
Speaker 1: within the context of the film, he fights for the users.
Speaker 1: It's one of my favorite quotes from Tron. Users in
Speaker 1: the Tron universe are sort of seen as like gods.
Speaker 1: They are the creators, and the programs look to users
Speaker 1: for guidance and for approval, and they have had all
Speaker 1: communication cut off by the m c P, so they
Speaker 1: wonder if the users are still out there. There's this
Speaker 1: whole existential crisis going on in the world of Tron,
Speaker 1: and that's an interesting piece of the mythology of the movie.
Speaker 1: Flynn eventually, of course, helps bring down the m c
Speaker 1: P and he escapes the computer world. He's also able
Speaker 1: to prove that Dillinger stole his work, and he ends
Speaker 1: up becoming the new head of Income as a result. Now,
Speaker 1: the film was not a big success at the box office,
Speaker 1: but it did find itself a cult following and also
Speaker 1: had a profound impact on the way people would visualize cyberspace.
Speaker 1: I would even say that you could see elements of
Speaker 1: the design from Tron find its way into early implementations
Speaker 1: of virtual reality. And the production of the film itself
Speaker 1: relied heavily on some really innovative work from numerous people
Speaker 1: in order for the film to actually come into being.
Speaker 1: So Ramsey, the under producer, arranged for me to have
Speaker 1: an 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 Listburger.
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: I was born in New York and went to college
Speaker 1: in Boston at TOPS and went to the School of
Speaker 1: the Museum of Fine Arts, where I studied film for
Speaker 1: five years, including animation, and I had my own company
Speaker 1: in Boston that did some live action, but primarily animation,
Speaker 1: and uh, we eventually ended up with a studio on
Speaker 1: the East Coast and went on the West coast. We're
Speaker 1: and our biggest job was doing Animal Olympics for the
Speaker 1: NBC television network, and during that we developed Tron and
Speaker 1: then tried to do it independently, but we couldn't pull
Speaker 1: it off, So we were fortunate enough to get in
Speaker 1: business with Disney. Yeah. I imagine a project with the
Speaker 1: scope of Tron would have been extremely challenging to pull
Speaker 1: off without some some pretty major help. And I also
Speaker 1: imagine that Disney's background in animation uh led to some
Speaker 1: some aid when you guys were working on Tron, because
Speaker 1: I don't know that people who have seen the film
Speaker 1: are really aware how much actual hand drawn animation techniques
Speaker 1: were incorporated. This was an era before computer graphics had
Speaker 1: reached that digital age where you do everything you know
Speaker 1: digitally on a computer and then you can just export
Speaker 1: to a video file. This is way before all of that,
Speaker 1: So I imagine Disney's involvement was somewhat helpful because that
Speaker 1: was a studio that actually understood animation. Yeah, all of
Speaker 1: that is true, And just to unpack that, um, if
Speaker 1: we had tried to do it independently, I think it
Speaker 1: would have we wouldn't have made it eventually. We would
Speaker 1: have had to either go under or bring in someone
Speaker 1: else because we were somewhat naive. We had an idea
Speaker 1: how we would do it, but we in retrospect the
Speaker 1: scale of it was something that none of us had
Speaker 1: experienced with. On paper, we thought we could work it
Speaker 1: all out. It added up and made sense. But when
Speaker 1: we got into it at Disney, many times I thought,
Speaker 1: I'm really glad we're here and not in any other
Speaker 1: studio because, as you said, we we had. We had
Speaker 1: hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pieces of artwork, um
Speaker 1: put any into just the frame blow ups. Every individual
Speaker 1: frame of the electronic World blown up shot in seventy
Speaker 1: moment are blown up. They were when they were stacked up,
Speaker 1: they filled two entire moving vans. I mean it was
Speaker 1: tons and tons and tons of images and it it
Speaker 1: didn't freak Disney out because they said, yeah, we're used
Speaker 1: to handling millions of pieces of artwork. And in the end,
Speaker 1: that was totally the strength production wise of the project
Speaker 1: because we all of us working on it were familiar
Speaker 1: with animation. Even the live action people had quite a
Speaker 1: bit of experience and animation, so we sort of took
Speaker 1: the best from live action, and then we turned the
Speaker 1: whole live action movie into an animated movie. And once
Speaker 1: it was at that level, you could treat it like
Speaker 1: mass production. You could just keep multiplying the number of
Speaker 1: teams working on the individual scenes, and and there was
Speaker 1: a system there. We weren't reinventing the wheel. That system existed.
Speaker 1: People knew how to do, you know, animated effects, and
Speaker 1: how to work with these numbers of probably it had
Speaker 1: to be over a million pieces in the end. And
Speaker 1: the funny thing about it is how efficient it was,
Speaker 1: because we ended up doing all of the special effects
Speaker 1: in Tron one in half the time that it took
Speaker 1: to do them in Tron too well, and and correct
Speaker 1: me if I got this, get any of this wrong.
Speaker 1: I want to see if I can kind of lay
Speaker 1: out for my listeners sort of a general approach to
Speaker 1: the electronic world sequences, which took up more almost an
Speaker 1: entire hour of Toronto. I think about somewhere around the
Speaker 1: realm of fifty three to fifty five minutes something like
Speaker 1: that of a footage in this electronic world. So the
Speaker 1: thing is there was an underlying template that I had
Speaker 1: in mind, which is, you know, a sort of live
Speaker 1: action short at the beginning then followed by an animated
Speaker 1: movie is what Disney used to make. And you know
Speaker 1: they always did that with their live action films and
Speaker 1: animated and live or live and animated, and so that
Speaker 1: combination is what I was going for. You know, it's
Speaker 1: sort of a it's it's kind of an animated feature
Speaker 1: in terms of that length of about seventy minutes, with
Speaker 1: the 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, it's really funny,
Speaker 1: you know, once time moves on and people forget about
Speaker 1: how difficult it was in the past. It's a little
Speaker 1: bit like the next generation doesn't really care how difficult
Speaker 1: it was before. And you know, there was no way
Speaker 1: to composite film if you that was efficient, if you
Speaker 1: did effects and you had characters and you had a
Speaker 1: fantasy background, there really was no good way to put
Speaker 1: all of this together. Blue screen existed, but I've shot
Speaker 1: blue screen, and you know, if if you had at
Speaker 1: the time, if you had twenty or fifty blue screen
Speaker 1: shots in the film, that was a lot. Well, we
Speaker 1: had nine composite shots that we had to do, nine
Speaker 1: shots that had you and beings in worlds that didn't exist,
Speaker 1: plus their costumes who were supposed to be glowing. And
Speaker 1: there was no digital compositing. You couldn't even run computer
Speaker 1: animation consecutively. We only had enough computing power. We had
Speaker 1: total two megabytes, and we only had enough memory to
Speaker 1: render one frame at a time period, so you could
Speaker 1: never look at the light cycles moving. You could only
Speaker 1: look at this individual frame. Then you had to wait
Speaker 1: forty five minutes and rendered the next frame and look
Speaker 1: at that one. And the only time we ever saw
Speaker 1: the stuff put together is after we set up a
Speaker 1: film camera and clicked like in 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
Speaker 1: animation was to try to find a sort of middle
Speaker 1: ground where the live action would look like it had
Speaker 1: been rendered by a computer and the computer animation wasn't
Speaker 1: too 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 was great? And 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 color,
Speaker 1: you had to do another level. You had to photograph
Speaker 1: everything all over again. Uh, you're you're talking frames. If
Speaker 1: you start doing the math. If you're thinking fifty three
Speaker 1: minutes that because well, I don't want to do the
Speaker 1: math right now, but I think, well, this thing is
Speaker 1: it's um if it goes through the math. Do you
Speaker 1: say this can't be done? Because just doing the colors
Speaker 1: on each frame, the average number of exposures was I
Speaker 1: think eighteen. Some of the frames in Tron were exposed
Speaker 1: thirty six times. And because everything had to be held
Speaker 1: in focus so that the blow ups were sharp, and
Speaker 1: 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
Speaker 1: frame and then I bring in Jeff and he'd say
Speaker 1: his lines, and I chewed them separately, each one held
Speaker 1: in focus, and then they were put together. But yeah,
Speaker 1: that the in animation, there's a thing called an exposure sheet,
Speaker 1: and it's showed. It tells the animation cameraman what levels
Speaker 1: are photographed and what order, and there there's about, I
Speaker 1: don't know, three seconds of animation per exposure sheet. And
Speaker 1: so what we did was we took those exposure sheets
Speaker 1: and instead of that sheet being filled in for three seconds,
Speaker 1: which 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 blocked, so not one 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 there,
Speaker 1: unaltered tron suits on all black stage and then I
Speaker 1: had no computer animation yet because that wasn't done. So
Speaker 1: when I locked the movie and said this is the
Speaker 1: movie I'm making, there were no effects in it. There
Speaker 1: were no colors in it. It was black and 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 brains that
Speaker 1: said effect goes here a solar sailor. And at that
Speaker 1: point I had to say, okay, I signed 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.
Speaker 1: It's um Yeah, in retrospect it was insane, but at
Speaker 1: the time it's compared to working on dron to Drown Legacy,
Speaker 1: where everything was compositied in real time, where you could
Speaker 1: just put the you know, computer animation together with the background,
Speaker 1: together with the actors, and you know, you could make
Speaker 1: changes up until like I don't know, a couple of
Speaker 1: weeks before the movie was in theaters. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: a time where you can't even you can't even review
Speaker 1: the footage immediately afterward obviously because you've got the filt
Speaker 1: you have to process everything. So oh yeah, of course
Speaker 1: there's no video tap. I mean, you know, you shoot
Speaker 1: it and it goes off to the lab and then
Speaker 1: you 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 reduce 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 we say, okay, there's a mistake. How can we
Speaker 1: incorporate this mistake into the visuals or into the story,
Speaker 1: and uh, we just went with it. So yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I imagine that meant that you had a lot of
Speaker 1: story boarding that was very precise from the very get go,
Speaker 1: so that you could you could well, the team of
Speaker 1: talented people I had was unbelievable, once in a lifetime.
Speaker 1: I it was one of the great joys of making
Speaker 1: the film. And uh yeah, incredible. I mean the team
Speaker 1: I had from Listener Studios, my guys, some of whom
Speaker 1: came from Disney originally and then left Disney and worked
Speaker 1: at Listburger Studios and then ironically they found themselves back
Speaker 1: at Disney. But we storyboarded the whole film before we
Speaker 1: ever got to Disney, and we did all this artwork
Speaker 1: for all the different thing you know, aspects the m
Speaker 1: c P and all solar Sailor and the life cycles.
Speaker 1: That was all done, but it was done by us
Speaker 1: in house, and it was it was interesting that then
Speaker 1: when I got to Disney and they said, well, you know,
Speaker 1: if you wanted, if you could have a dream, what
Speaker 1: would it be. And I would say, well, I'd like
Speaker 1: Mobius to go over these storyboards, and then I'd like
Speaker 1: sit Me to go over our vehicle designs, and both
Speaker 1: of them to go are my costume designs, and I
Speaker 1: like Peter Lloyd to go over production paintings. And so
Speaker 1: what what worked out great is that we never approached
Speaker 1: these great artists and said to him, we just have
Speaker 1: a blank piece of paper and now I'm going to
Speaker 1: explain to you what I'm trying to get to. It
Speaker 1: was it was so much better that we said, look,
Speaker 1: this is as good as we can get this, and
Speaker 1: we're pretty confident that you know, there's more room to
Speaker 1: improve this, and they never let us down. And I
Speaker 1: think they really like that, you know, because they look
Speaker 1: at our artwork and they go, yeah, this is really nice,
Speaker 1: but this or why didn't you do that? Or why
Speaker 1: didn't you do this? And Mobius would say, you know,
Speaker 1: you could shoot this this way, but if you shot
Speaker 1: it from this angle and if you showed this, then
Speaker 1: the audience would know that. And uh, yeah, it was
Speaker 1: amazing that it's awesome and it's great that you already had,
Speaker 1: you know, a nice idea to go in with and
Speaker 1: not have to run the risk of asking an artist
Speaker 1: to contribute and then say, oh, but that doesn't really
Speaker 1: fit in what I was you know, and said that.
Speaker 1: And the thing is I wasn't used to this part
Speaker 1: of it either. The team that, you know, my guys
Speaker 1: at List for Studios, we would throw stuff out all
Speaker 1: the time and we would say, well, you know, that
Speaker 1: looked good last week, but why don't we try this
Speaker 1: LFE cycle design this week. And it was a learning
Speaker 1: curve for me to work with, you know, Sid and
Speaker 1: Mobius and they would say, no, this is it. There
Speaker 1: 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 saying yeah, but yeah,
Speaker 1: it go that way. Could you put some of the
Speaker 1: life cycle an he hands it to you, you don't
Speaker 1: say to him, he said, what about this? We do that?
Speaker 1: You know, you know how about mud flaps. And it's like, now,
Speaker 1: I don't think so at of thing that happened with
Speaker 1: the LFE cycles. I will interject this and it never bothered. Said,
Speaker 1: is that we sent the life cycles to MAGI, which
Speaker 1: was Phil 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 drawings that said 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. You 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: they're One of the main reasons their tanks in the
Speaker 1: first Tron movie is because when I first went to MATCHI,
Speaker 1: which was really early on. I was keeping track of
Speaker 1: their capabilities, like years before we ever Matron. Their first
Speaker 1: 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: darker 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 me and said,
Speaker 1: if you know, if these chas 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. 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 film 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 also talk
Speaker 1: about the mythology of Tron, which is incredible. It's very
Speaker 1: prescient in a lot of ways that I'm not even
Speaker 1: certain that that you guys were aware of at the time,
Speaker 1: like things that that to me became really big conversation
Speaker 1: points a decade or more further out from when the
Speaker 1: film came out. Oh yeah, I mean, I'll tell you
Speaker 1: something that will bloil your mind. I had a revelation
Speaker 1: about the mythology of Tron the first movie two days ago.
Speaker 1: I'm serious, because in discussions about Tron two and discussions about,
Speaker 1: you know, theoretical discussions about what the Tron three would be,
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, it sheds light all the way
Speaker 1: back to the first film, and I realized, oh, this
Speaker 1: is why I was doing that. And I never really
Speaker 1: understood that that clearly until you know, so, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: that aspect of it. It's funny because I like to
Speaker 1: talk about the technical achievement of Tron and the incredible
Speaker 1: 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 Listenerger, 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
Speaker 1: Tron gave me the energy to make Tron was not
Speaker 1: the geeky energy of computer graphics. What what motivated me
Speaker 1: for years and made me put everything on the line
Speaker 1: were the characters. And it was that story in particular.
Speaker 1: And then I got so excited because I saw that
Speaker 1: there was a chance we could actually do it with
Speaker 1: this technology. But looking back at it, um, I have
Speaker 1: to say that, you know, I is I was inspired
Speaker 1: by the experiences of my own life up to that point,
Speaker 1: even though I was young, and the story works on
Speaker 1: many levels for me personally. Um so, yeah, I care
Speaker 1: about that pretty deeply. I would say, well, it's the
Speaker 1: effects of the film are phenomenal and I love them.
Speaker 1: But as people have pointed out numerous times over the years,
Speaker 1: effects don't make a story. And if you rely too
Speaker 1: heavily upon the the bedazzle of effects and you sacrifice
Speaker 1: the story, then you know, I don't find myself talking
Speaker 1: about those films later on, right, I don't know, there's
Speaker 1: nothing but nothing to hang on. Yeah, I know, well,
Speaker 1: they don't resonate past to the you know, the moment.
Speaker 1: The the thing that I've been thinking about and the
Speaker 1: revelation I just had recently is that if you look
Speaker 1: at if you look at a movie like Star Wars
Speaker 1: or Um or an Avatar or Um Wonder Woman or
Speaker 1: four Thoris 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 films 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 his epic, a tie
Speaker 1: it as you could ever come up with. But then
Speaker 1: you know, Luke is kind of a goofy farm boy
Speaker 1: with his you know and his robot friends are you know,
Speaker 1: pretty funny. So you know, that's how we relate to
Speaker 1: the epic. And the what I'm getting at where this
Speaker 1: connects with Tron is that Tron has is kind of
Speaker 1: the opposite formula if you think about it, because when
Speaker 1: we did Tron one, all there was was you know,
Speaker 1: pong games, and no one looks at a palm game
Speaker 1: and says this is epic. You know, people stand out
Speaker 1: at night and look at the stars and say this
Speaker 1: is epic, but they don't stand in front of a
Speaker 1: palm game in a bar and you know, look at
Speaker 1: the the pong bar table and say this is epic.
Speaker 1: So what we did was we kind of with the
Speaker 1: character of Flynn, we added it's kind of an epic character,
Speaker 1: you a non ethic world. And I think that for
Speaker 1: the people that struggled with Tron, and some people still
Speaker 1: do and say, you know, I don't get that movie.
Speaker 1: Why are people excited about it? I think what what
Speaker 1: they struggle with, even though they wouldn't necessarily say it,
Speaker 1: is they struggle with the idea that something epic can
Speaker 1: come and significant or grand can come out of something
Speaker 1: that isn't well. And and to kind of continue your
Speaker 1: your point, uh, you know, if you look at it
Speaker 1: on the scale of something like Star Wars or thor,
Speaker 1: you're talking about this cosmological scale, and when you're talking
Speaker 1: about Tron, you're talking about diving into a virtual space
Speaker 1: that's confined within a very you know, limited physical space.
Speaker 1: It's within a computer. It's almost like you're literally going
Speaker 1: as small scale as you can get. We're talking about information,
Speaker 1: not even a physical thing at this point, right, Well,
Speaker 1: that's that's I think one of the reasons people are
Speaker 1: drawn to take sort of sanctuary in the digital world,
Speaker 1: and we do it all the time, is because we
Speaker 1: control it. It's finite. You know, even though it's gotten
Speaker 1: as complex as it is compared to the universe, it
Speaker 1: still feels like it's ours. We can manage it, we
Speaker 1: put it together, we can alter it. But you know,
Speaker 1: the universe, we're getting really bad at dealing with the universe.
Speaker 1: And so I think, well, it's also this is all
Speaker 1: very generational because my generation traditionally, and certainly people older
Speaker 1: than me just I can't tell you. I don't know
Speaker 1: how old you are, but I'm sure you're younger than me.
Speaker 1: People were terror fight of computers, just terrified, and Disney
Speaker 1: was terrified, every you know, everybody was. And it's like
Speaker 1: young people come along and they say, well, this scares
Speaker 1: the hell out of my parents. What power is actually
Speaker 1: here that does that? A little bit? Like, yeah, if
Speaker 1: dad has a problem understanding this and it freaks them out.
Speaker 1: I got to learn what this is about. And so
Speaker 1: the idea that something significant was going to come out
Speaker 1: of these you know, these limited worlds with this you know,
Speaker 1: information storage and 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 against me. I'm gonna lose my privacy. And
Speaker 1: who could have predicted that they would take all our
Speaker 1: personal data but they wouldn't have to battle us for it.
Speaker 1: We would line up to hand it over. It's called Facebook, okay,
Speaker 1: it's called you know everything else that you know wants
Speaker 1: our credit card number, and so that has been you
Speaker 1: know about no one anticipated that, no one back then,
Speaker 1: and Tom didn't anticipate that either that. You know, I
Speaker 1: talked to some of the heaviest people in the field
Speaker 1: of computers back then, and you know, they would give
Speaker 1: me notes and some of them would give me story suggestions,
Speaker 1: but no one ever gave me a note that said,
Speaker 1: you know, we're going to hand. It's not that we're
Speaker 1: going to fear it and battle it. We're gonna run
Speaker 1: towards it as fast as we can. And it's and
Speaker 1: I've spent a lot of time thinking about how that
Speaker 1: really happened or on what that really means, what are
Speaker 1: the repercussions of that, And what I came away with
Speaker 1: on that is that that computers put us, put the
Speaker 1: users in a situation where they said, look, we'll take
Speaker 1: care of the cognitive problems, so you're liberated from that,
Speaker 1: and what what you can do with your extra time
Speaker 1: is indulge your feelings. And you know, because that's what
Speaker 1: we like to do. You know, we we get adding
Speaker 1: machines so we don't have to do the math, so
Speaker 1: then we can you know, go to the movies instead
Speaker 1: of doing the math, and we can enjoy our emotions
Speaker 1: 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 of you know, you can think that it's
Speaker 1: worth you know, dying one moment for something. You know,
Speaker 1: if I don't get invited to the problem, I should
Speaker 1: you be better off dead, and then a month later
Speaker 1: you could forget that you ever felt that way. And
Speaker 1: so now we're we're kind of living in the age
Speaker 1: of Trump where I'm digressing, I know, but we're living
Speaker 1: in the age of Trump. We're it's all about these
Speaker 1: feelings every day, and we have we have the way
Speaker 1: of of expressing those feelings to a larger audience than
Speaker 1: ever before, instantaneously as soon as we feel you know.
Speaker 1: So the cognitive power of computers has ironically completely liberated
Speaker 1: our emotional feely side. Touchy feely side gets to stand
Speaker 1: out every thought in his head because of Twitter whenever whenever,
Speaker 1: whenever a disgruntled employee of Twitter isn't deleting his account. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so weird relationship we've developed with technology. And I go
Speaker 1: all the way back to you know, the early Toron days,
Speaker 1: and I can see what we thought then, and I
Speaker 1: can you know, I've experienced the arc you know, from
Speaker 1: there to hear it's it's really interesting. Well, what's fascinating
Speaker 1: to me is that you know, you talked about this
Speaker 1: this thing about computers that were very scary to one
Speaker 1: generation and very promising to the next. Uh. My background
Speaker 1: is 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 us, 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 inflorance 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. That's one of the wonderful things into how
Speaker 1: what a relationship was with all of those things, the
Speaker 1: things of the moment and eternal things at that moment
Speaker 1: in time. M hm, you know. I mean, I'll tell
Speaker 1: you another sort of past and future mechanism that I
Speaker 1: thought about primarily after I made Tron, which is that,
Speaker 1: you know, the character of Flynn is kind of you know, afterwards,
Speaker 1: I did quite a bit of study about the archetype
Speaker 1: of the shaman character and what it what does the
Speaker 1: shaman character do traditionally, And traditionally he he heals a
Speaker 1: person who has lost their spirit because their spirit has
Speaker 1: gone into you know, the nether world, the spirit world,
Speaker 1: and that is why the person here is sick. And
Speaker 1: the shaman has the power and the crossover into the
Speaker 1: spirit world. And then because he has powers there, he
Speaker 1: can retrieve the spirit of his friend, bring it back
Speaker 1: to this world, and then put the two together. And
Speaker 1: I'm reading about this, like, you know, specifics about this
Speaker 1: twenty years later, and and then I'm thinking about what
Speaker 1: Flynn did in the first movie, Alan and you know,
Speaker 1: Laura come to him and they're sick. Why because they've
Speaker 1: lost their spirit, they've lost their programs, and it's making
Speaker 1: them sick. And he has lost information too. And then
Speaker 1: he ends up crossing over into the digital realm and
Speaker 1: you know what does he do there? He freeze them
Speaker 1: up so that they can now get in touch the
Speaker 1: you know, the information that is the Tron program can
Speaker 1: get in touch with the user can get in touch
Speaker 1: with it, and you know, and then he comes back
Speaker 1: to this world. And I thought, you know, this is
Speaker 1: this is pretty crazy that it's the role of the shaman,
Speaker 1: but in a in a digital environment. And I wasn't
Speaker 1: really thinking about that when I came up with it.
Speaker 1: And not only that, but a role of a shaman,
Speaker 1: 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 yeah, it's
Speaker 1: pretty funny that when at the end of Tron where
Speaker 1: she says, you know, Flynn really did it, and Tron
Speaker 1: doesn't know that, you know, he managed to overcome the
Speaker 1: m c P because of what Flynn did. That that
Speaker 1: happened on a whole, whole dimensional level above his head literally,
Speaker 1: and he looks at her and he goes, oh, okay,
Speaker 1: I really know what to do with that information. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, and I just I this thought popped into
Speaker 1: my head, which is that, according to this definition of
Speaker 1: what a shaman is, you could almost say that, um,
Speaker 1: Wizard of Oz is a shaman story that Judy Garland's
Speaker 1: character she crosses over to the other world and what
Speaker 1: does she do. She helps her friends become whole. She
Speaker 1: gets them a hard brain. It's a very similar mechanism. Absolutely. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a interesting I had not even thought of that,
Speaker 1: but that is a very a very apt uh comparison,
Speaker 1: especially since Dorothy again is going into a world completely
Speaker 1: unlike our own that has its own rules. As some history.
Speaker 1: I never thought of Dorothy as a shaman, but she is. Yeah. 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 the one of the great
Speaker 1: villains of science fiction. What what what was? Did you
Speaker 1: have any specific inspirations for m c P, perhaps with
Speaker 1: any other organizations that might have three letters in their
Speaker 1: name or anything along those lines. Or from the beginning,
Speaker 1: he was always machine like and when I want to
Speaker 1: and there was a sort of Wizard of Oz component
Speaker 1: to him too, speaking Wizard of Oz, because you know,
Speaker 1: he was smoking mirrors and in the end he was that,
Speaker 1: you know a little. It all started with that little
Speaker 1: chess player. But um, when I went to Triple I,
Speaker 1: they had one of the three computer companies. They had
Speaker 1: created a juggling human character wearing a top hat who
Speaker 1: um looked very human. He barely moved. He just stood
Speaker 1: in one position and his arms moved and he juggled
Speaker 1: a bunch of balls and but he didn't speak or
Speaker 1: anything like that. And I don't think he ever moved
Speaker 1: his speed either. And then I saw that we I
Speaker 1: saw this, this image popped into my head that like
Speaker 1: the Wizard of Oz, we could have his face on
Speaker 1: this machine like exterior that we had been creating for
Speaker 1: the m c P and uh. But then we couldn't
Speaker 1: render it in flesh tones and have it speak because
Speaker 1: we just didn't have enough computing power. So the only
Speaker 1: way we could actually we do it was in wire France.
Speaker 1: So you know, we we recorded David Warner's voice doing it,
Speaker 1: and then we altered his voice and then we you know,
Speaker 1: did what animators have always done is sync up the images,
Speaker 1: you know, the face with the soundtrack and the MCP
Speaker 1: is really I guess the first talking had the first
Speaker 1: c G character that ever was. And I always liked
Speaker 1: the idea that you can be outside of him or
Speaker 1: you can be inside of him. The scene where Sark
Speaker 1: is actually you know, at the pedestal and the m
Speaker 1: CP surround him. I like that that. You know, it's
Speaker 1: that's a relationship with the technology. We can be objective
Speaker 1: to it or we can be subjected to being inside
Speaker 1: the technology and it's completely surround this. I always pictured
Speaker 1: him as kind of a it's funny processor, like a
Speaker 1: food processor, because he's kind of like a juicer. You
Speaker 1: think about it. You know, he brings in these programs
Speaker 1: and he these entities and then he juices them to
Speaker 1: extract their information. And I'll tell you a little funny
Speaker 1: um story about the m c P and Flynn, which
Speaker 1: is that I didn't know that Jeff who's contribution. I
Speaker 1: can't stop bragging about how you know, great he is
Speaker 1: in that role, but um, and I cast him, so
Speaker 1: the h that was my contribution. He did the rest,
Speaker 1: but he Um, I didn't know he was going to
Speaker 1: do this clue persona. And so we started filming the
Speaker 1: tank scene and he was doing it and it was
Speaker 1: really cool and it was a daring move on his part.
Speaker 1: But then the m c P the recognizers come and
Speaker 1: they capture Clue and then they put him in the
Speaker 1: m c P and uh, he starts getting d rez
Speaker 1: and then he starts screaming for his life and Jeff
Speaker 1: delivers this great, you know, heartfelt moment of like, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not giving into you, MCP. But he doesn't do
Speaker 1: it in the clue voice. He does it as in
Speaker 1: his real voice, and neither of us caught that. No
Speaker 1: one caught that inconsistency that if you think about it,
Speaker 1: that should have been in the Clue program voice but
Speaker 1: and you know, but it isn't. And it's a little
Speaker 1: bit like it's kind of freaky because it's a little
Speaker 1: bit like Clue was dying. And then the last thing
Speaker 1: he did was act like you know, a user just
Speaker 1: before the end. So that's you know, was kind of
Speaker 1: a happy accident. But anyway, the the m c P
Speaker 1: was was like, you know, a food processor with people
Speaker 1: or characters. And that design actually did not change all
Speaker 1: that much. I mean it was it was worked over
Speaker 1: brilliantly by sid Mead and improved a lot, but that
Speaker 1: the through line went back years. Well, I guess, uh
Speaker 1: you know, to me just seeing that that image, uh,
Speaker 1: that that enormous had that booming voice, it's consuming the
Speaker 1: the information uh from from other programs. To me today,
Speaker 1: like when I think of the Internet voice, that's the
Speaker 1: voice that's in my head. It's the voice of m
Speaker 1: c P as it's consuming and you know, talking again
Speaker 1: about pressions, like there's so much here about the merging
Speaker 1: of what it is to be human and the technology
Speaker 1: that we created. It really really seems like the singularity,
Speaker 1: like that concept of the singularity of of humans elevating
Speaker 1: themselves to the next level, perhaps merging with machines or
Speaker 1: incorporating machines in some way. Sometimes it doesn't involve that,
Speaker 1: but but a lot of the versions of the Singularity do.
Speaker 1: This seems like, uh, it was very much in that
Speaker 1: that sort of vein, like this idea of you know,
Speaker 1: there were no we didn't use the term user before
Speaker 1: Tron and people didn't know what the word meant, and
Speaker 1: people didn't have computers. I mean, there were no really
Speaker 1: you know, handful, but people were and they were crude
Speaker 1: at best. So, um, this whole idea of your sort
Speaker 1: of your alter ego, your avatar, the you know in
Speaker 1: there in the form of your information that just keeps
Speaker 1: building every year, so that you know, it's it's getting
Speaker 1: to the point where we really are creating, as much
Speaker 1: as possible, a double ganger of ourselves digitally. And I mean,
Speaker 1: I think what's interesting is that Nintendo, I've heard, has
Speaker 1: done studies on how people texture themselves in their mind's eye,
Speaker 1: and they've come to the conclusion that we imagine ourselves
Speaker 1: is somewhat a cartoon version of ourselves. And I think
Speaker 1: that's one of the reasons that Nintendo video games as
Speaker 1: successful and brilliant as they are. I mean, part of
Speaker 1: that success I think comes from working with that theory
Speaker 1: that you know, they're not realistic, and I say think
Speaker 1: that the idea of a realistic double Ganger a sort
Speaker 1: of copy of ourselves. I think that that's a in
Speaker 1: some ways maybe more challenging, and I think that's part
Speaker 1: of the challenge that we're actually facing that you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's a little bit like not only we're creating
Speaker 1: a double Gang or Earth and a digital one. And
Speaker 1: like I said earlier, I think we feel good about
Speaker 1: that because it doesn't confound us like the universe. You know,
Speaker 1: it has problems like hackers and trolls. But yeah, we
Speaker 1: can deal with that. But you know, because ultimately those
Speaker 1: are people are and we don't understand its CEO two. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know. I uh, well, Stephen Listberger, this has been
Speaker 1: a huge thrill for me to to talk to the
Speaker 1: writer and director of a film that, you know what
Speaker 1: played a big part in my childhood and I watch
Speaker 1: it frequently, so I have inc I want to take
Speaker 1: this opportunity to thank you for your quarters. Oh there
Speaker 1: have been an I didn't even get into the arcades
Speaker 1: section of this, because I mean, you know, I just
Speaker 1: had 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 eat well.
Speaker 1: The movie paid for itself as a movie, but the
Speaker 1: video game paid for the entire movie. Too many a
Speaker 1: week's allowance went into disks of Tron for me. I
Speaker 1: remember the full console, like the one you would step
Speaker 1: in and play and uh and yeah, I played a
Speaker 1: lot of that game. Yeah. Do you know about the
Speaker 1: tron right in Shanghai. I have heard about this, I
Speaker 1: have not made my way to Asia yet and set
Speaker 1: it out on YouTube. Tron Shanghai and it's pretty amazing.
Speaker 1: They worked on that ride for over fifteen years. Actually happened. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've heard. I've heard about a new one to do
Speaker 1: it in Florida now. So I'm really excited about that
Speaker 1: because you know, the thing is, like you said earlier,
Speaker 1: people think of Tron and you know, it's sometimes too
Speaker 1: literally like oh, you know, it's a small world in there.
Speaker 1: You know, it's a small world after all, And but
Speaker 1: it's funny because with the Tron ride, the world of
Speaker 1: Tron is immense. You're small and you get on the ride,
Speaker 1: and in some ways that's the whole you know, that's
Speaker 1: the most thrilling part to be small and have that
Speaker 1: recognizer looming over your head, for instance. Yeah, make that
Speaker 1: lead to realize, oh, you know, this world is not small,
Speaker 1: and so yeah, it's really cool to ride. But anyway, yeah,
Speaker 1: the game and the ride, I mean, I can't wait
Speaker 1: to experience the ride. I really, I really am looking
Speaker 1: forward to that. The game remains one of my favorites.
Speaker 1: I'm a I'm a child of the seventies and eighties,
Speaker 1: so the Arcade experience was really an important one for
Speaker 1: me growing up. Also, Tron obviously being in that realm
Speaker 1: of For a lot of people, it was kind of
Speaker 1: their introduction to this concept of taking taking a very
Speaker 1: abstract idea in the form of computer program and really
Speaker 1: turning it into something relatable. I mean, to have a
Speaker 1: computer program that could technically just be oh, well, this
Speaker 1: is just a spreadsheet program, but no, in this world
Speaker 1: that is a an anthropomorphic creation that can fight for you.
Speaker 1: That's uh pretty amazing concept. I this was a huge
Speaker 1: thrill for me. I thank you so much. Yeah, if
Speaker 1: you get a chance to get a word in. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'll totally be an extra in Tron three. I'm I'm
Speaker 1: happy to be Yeah, just sitting at sitting off at
Speaker 1: the side. I'm perfectly fine. I just want to I
Speaker 1: want to be in the room where it happens as
Speaker 1: they say, thank you for joining me again. Okay, you too. Bye.
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed that discussion with Mr Lisburger. I
Speaker 1: could have easily kept talking for another hour or two
Speaker 1: with him, and I get the feeling he would have
Speaker 1: indulged me for as long as he had the time
Speaker 1: to do so. I've always had an appreciation for Tron
Speaker 1: I've always enjoyed that movie ever since it first came out,
Speaker 1: But now that appreciation is even more profound, knowing the
Speaker 1: challenges that the team faced in order to produce this
Speaker 1: movie at the time that it was made, going to
Speaker 1: the point where you would swear that this was computer
Speaker 1: generated imagery, and then knowing that it was hand animated,
Speaker 1: hand drawn on top of actual individual cells of film.
Speaker 1: It's incredible to think of how much work and care
Speaker 1: and love went into this film and created that distinctive
Speaker 1: look and feel. And also, I really do hope I
Speaker 1: can show up in Rawn three The Balls in Your
Speaker 1: Court Disney call me. That wraps up this episode of
Speaker 1: tech Stuff. If you guys have any suggestions for future
Speaker 1: topics that I could cover on this show, write me.
Speaker 1: Why don't you the email address to use this tech
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