Interview: 'Tron: Legacy' Producer Talks About The Sequel

We sat down with Sean Bailey, the producer working on Tron: Legacy at Disney's D23. We couldn't get him to spill the beans entirely, but he does give up a few details. They still have more than a year's worth of work to do in post-production on this movie, so really this interview is only going to serve to get you very excited for a movie that you're going to have to wait on for quite awhile.

Luckily, it still sounds exciting. Thankfully, they aren't making the internet the focus this time around, which would have been disastrous. Just imagine Tron standing on the edge of a glowing neon valley and uttering the words "information superhighway." If they'd made this movie back in early 1990s, that's what you might have had. In Legacy, the system from the first movie is separate from all things online, so you won't have to worry about rogue programs running loose in HTML.

Slip on your patience hats, pop the original Tron into your DVD player, and read the full interview just after the break. There's a few secrets waiting on you.



Cinematical: So we know that Jeff Bridges is back as Kevin Flynn and as a second character you aren't talking about. What about other characters like Lori/Yoni and Dillinger?

Sean Bailey: We had to make some tough choices about what characters we could explore and revisit and which ones we couldn't ...

Because of time?

Well, we had a lot of stuff we wanted to say in this movie. We wanted to explore this father/son story of Kevin and his son Sam. We had this new important character named Cora played by Olivia Wild. We had to tell her story. If we could have made a four hour movie, we probably would have.

What about Bruce Boxleitner? It would be hard to make a Tron sequel without Tron himself in it. Is he in the film a lot?

He's in the film. The story is really about what happened to Kevin Flynn and his son's search for him, but Alan Bradley is in there as well, and we explore what's happened to him as well.

In the video game Tron 2.0 back in 2003, it was about Jet Bradley getting digitzed into the system. Are you all considering any of that to be canon?

No, we're just continuing on from the 1982 film and expanding on that. We've created a whole new history for Kevin Flynn and the system.

Will there be a new video game with this movie?

We really hope there will be. We've been talking to some people about that. That was such a big part of the original movie.

Are there any iconic throwbacks to the original movie? Do we see Encom's laser bay again? The place with the giant door?

Oh, you mean where Jeff Bridges said, "Now that's a big door!"? Yes, there are a lot of those little Easter eggs like that. I think that people that know the first movie really well will appreciate them. When you get the guys who write Lost, it is just in their blood.

They can pick up all that small stuff.

It is just in their blood to do it.

Do you explore moments from the first film that weren't expanded on? Like grid bugs?

We reference a lot of things in the movie. I think there are a couple things you see in kind of that great, hopefully distant mountains kind of way. You see something down an alley or a street or kind of a Tron business, and you go, "What is that?" And I don't know exactly, but I think the stuff that really matters, we follow through and pay off.

Did you guys return to Syd Mead or anyone for the new designs?

We took, obviously, a lot of their inspiration. Steven gave us a lot of the original artwork. And obviously Steven is the producer of this movie as well. We brought Syd over one afternoon and walked him through. But Joe [Kosinski - director] really looked at that design, respected that design, but really said at the very beginning, "Who are Syd Mead and Moebius today?" So from Neville Page to Daniel Simon, David Levy .. Ed Natividad is another design superstar. I, in my experience, it was the most amazing design team I have seen.

Neville Page is great. His work on Cloverfield was amazing. That is great that you guys are drawing from so many sources. So, back to the nerd in me. Is Bit back?

I don't want to talk about if Bit is back. Sorry.

So there's a villain in this ... is it Kevin Flynn?

There is a villain.

[laughter] There is a villain?

There is a villain. In the story, Kevin Flynn took what he learned from the experience in 1982 and built upon it and started to expand his research in his thinking and ideas based upon the experiences of '82. And so the system kind of evolved under his stewardship for a while, and then something happened and it started to evolve on its own. And so that is where we end up finding ourselves in Tron: Legacy.

So, the internet exists in this world ... but this movie isn't about the web? Is it not connected to the system?

That's right. The system is a separate thing, it's not the world wide web. We had a lot of conversations about that, but in the end it just wouldn't make sense to go out and make that movie, where the game grid and everything has become the internet as we know it.

Based on the test footage, it looks like Kevin Flynn is in the system some point after 1982, and he doesn't look like a program. Has he found a way to enter the system and not look like a program?

Well it is interesting. If you look at the outtakes, there is a love scene in the DVD reissue, and they are in very kind of flowing cloth like clothes in the system. And so one thing we talked a lot about is Tron suits are a critical part of the DNA of this, but we also want to explore ... it has evolved, and we thought Flynn was probably really interested in other environments and other materials. I think this movie, with the evolution of technology and how we were able to make it with the evolution of what we think is a natural evolution of story, like for instance the light cycles in our tests no longer do 90 degree turns ...

Yeah, I noticed that. They are flowing.

...and they are no longer straight up and down. They bend and they move...

Are their trails still persistent, at least for a period of time?

Yes, but there are physics, and there is weight, and there is gravity. So the system evolved in getting a lot more tactile and real. It is a world of impact, velocity, and different materials. We break it up. We break it up a fair amount.

So that test footage we saw, or the Tron 2 ... Tr2n, teaser as people are calling it ... that won't appear in the movie?

That's right. That was really just our test and it was something we wanted to show to people at Comic-Con to see what the reaction was. That's really a testament to the fans. That footage was so much more popular than we ever thought it would be. It definitely helped with the development of the movie.

Some of the concept photos make the world of the system look a lot more organic. There is rain in one piece we saw today.

There is a lot of atmosphere. There are a lot of different environments. There are a lot of different materials. We wanted it to feel ... even though it is a digital universe in a digital world, Joe really wanted it to feel like, even though we create a lot of these digitally, we built a lot of them too, and part of the reason is Joe said, "I want these people to feel like I took a camera and shot it. I don't want it to feel like...I think that computer...the world, the digital world is getting so real, we need to make it feel like it is just as real as this room you and I are sitting in right now." And so yeah, we definitely made a big, big concerted push to make it feel more tactile and more physical.

What about Daft Punk's soundtrack? Will it contain a riff on the original Tron theme?

That's a good question. And honestly, we don't know yet. They're still working on it. They have all of the original stems, so we'll have to see what they come up with.

What do you think is going to surprise people the most about this movie?

Well I think there are two things. Number one, I hope that the story has some great surprises, twists and turns, and emotion that is maybe new to folks. And then just think that, in terms of the kind of wow factor, I think Joe's sense of design and action, I think we are dealing with a really serious new filmmaker on the scene. So I can't wait to show people more and more of that vision. It has been tremendously exciting for me and for Steven, and I am just really eager for folks to see what Joe is kind of all about. He is serious business.

You may not know, but is Disney planning a Blu-ray release for the original?

I don't know about that for the original. I don't know.

Are you all planning on an eventual Blu-ray yourselves?

Yeah. We are working on a lot of extra stuff and trying to figure out what else we can be doing. But yeah, it should be a pretty enhanced DVD/Blu-ray set when it comes out. It should be cool.

Great. Awesome. Thank you for your time.

Thank you for yours, we're glad you could come out.