Interview: 'Tron' Director & 'Tron: Legacy' Producer Steven Lisberger

It will have been 28 years after the original Tron when Tron: Legacy arrives, but the nearly three-decade gap hasn't dulled Steven Lisberger's enthusiasm for the project. He wrote and directed the first movie, spending much of his own money in the development process, until he and his team finally found a studio to say yes. Even after that, it wasn't easy getting the movie made. People were skeptical about using computers to do special effects, and, in the end, Tron failed to win a special effects Oscar ... because the Academy said they "cheated" by using computers. Oh, the irony.

These days, Lisberger more closely resembles The Dude, Jeff Bridges' character in The Big Lebowski. He has long hair, a bushy goatee, and a very laid-back attitude about life. He doesn't give short, bite-sized, media-ready answers that the internet loves, but instead he takes the time to pause and give thoughtful answers to questions both simple and complicated. Read on after the break for the full interview, where he compares Tron: Legacy to the Wright brothers' flight attempts.



Cinematical: Did you think you would be back here talking about Tron this long after you made the original?

Steven Lisberger: It is an amazing journey. I will say that. 28 years. It is a good thing I was 29 years old when I made Tron. In a way, this is almost ... you couldn't write this scenario because you would be accused of: "Life doesn't work out this way." So it is sort of a fairytale. But when you think about it, this is what happens. The Wright brothers invented the airplane in 1903. But the same year the Pentagon tried to fly. And when they couldn't, they declared flight impossible. So they would never look at the Wright brother's plane. The Wright brothers couldn't get a patent because the government had declared flight impossible. And they sat on their airplane for six years. And then finally the French said, "Well if you have an airplane that can fly, come over here and show it to us."

And the Wright brothers actually flew for the first time in public in 1909 and sold their airplane to the French military. And it took all of that before the government of the United States said, "What? Well we have to have an airplane." So there is a history for this time lag that Tron has gone through. And it is great for me, though, to see people that were 10 when the movie came out say to me, "I saw it five times and it really changed me, and I love that film!" At the time I didn't spend a lot of time talking to 10 year olds, so I didn't know that was really happening. But I think this is what happens if things come true. As I said in there, so much of this has actually come true in such a major way. I mean when we made the first film, Bill Gates had just started Microsoft and Steven Jobs had just gotten graphic user interface. The mouse hadn't been invented yet.

There was no Internet and everybody was just wondering, "Are we going to be under the thumb of the mainframe for the rest of our lives?" That was just such an...there was just a sense that that was going to topple. It was in the air. It was part of the zeitgeist. And in a way, Bill Gates sort of is the Tron character who put his disk into the MCP, which was IBM, and rewrote the code and created the personal computer. All of a sudden the past really feels like the old days crossing the Rockies and going out West.

Does that Wright brothers experience sort of mirror your own? You guys paid for a lot of this yourselves, and then you started shopping it to studios. And you got a lot of nos, and Disney was kind of a lukewarm yes, I would say. I was reading somewhere recently where you guys tried to recruit some people on the Disney animation team to come work, but they weren't coming in droves.

We were literally, for a large faction of people, we were the enemy. We were vampires who were now going to use computers to destroy the world. People had just not realized that it wasn't just a question of whether they were going to embrace this technology. This technology was going to embrace them, so they might as well embrace it first. But there was a strong backlash against it. I was just talking to Dick Cook, head of Disney; the highest head of Disney who was around at the time. He was joking about the fact that people had just struggled to understand the terminology in the first film. People thought this film was complex? It is so obvious; it is pretty basic.

But I think there has been a fundamental shift in American's attitudes towards dual realities. I think that if you look at the history of films that presented dual realties, dualism as a concept, they traditionally have not been embraced warmly when they came out. Duality exists if you are a superhero within a certain context. But if it is literally two universes...and not literal, not like there is a civilization in space and then one here on Earth, but two dimensional realities that are separate. I think for a long time audiences in America just struggled with that. And I think that it had to be bred into the genes; a generation had to grow up with the idea that you can't see cyberspace literally, but as a concept we are all in there, and we have to deal with it and we have to solve things in there, and I have to have access to it.

I think growing up with that changed fundamentally peoples' attitudes of fictional alternate reality. And I think Tron is now sort of the film that told the story of that generational change.

You have had a chance to work closely with these guys on the new film. You have seen the designs. Are you happy with the amount of respect and nostalgia they are treating the original?

I would say that one of the reasons this worked out the way it did, and worked out well, is that had I made the film, I don't think I would have been paid so much homage to it. It turns out that they really ... I was so pleased to see how much the underlying mythology meant to everyone and how they wanted to explore it on their terms. And I think that it has worked out great. They pulled the disc from this stone where it has been for 28 years and it really means something to them, and it represents their struggle to live in a world with two realities. I think that they have expressed certain things that have surprised me. I have learned that certain things that I believed are no longer relevant. And I think it has been a good learning curve for both of us.

You have been around them working on this film. Has this been sort of stirring your own creative juices? You mentioned you were working on something with Jessica Chobot.

Yeah, yeah. Jess and I have been working on a script for a couple of years. She is a great anime freak. She brings a certain unique feminine point of view, which I enjoyed hearing about and talking to her. And out of that grew a storyline that we worked up together. We will see what happens with that. We are still working on that. But it is more of an intimate romantic sci-fi story and I am excited about it. We will see what happens.

Cool. Well Steven it was a pleasure. I was one of those 10 or 11 year olds, by the way.

You were? That's far out. Thanks for coming.