Rerun: Tron- He Fights For the Users

is still with the company. He just produces other stuff. Now. Uh, I thought I would revisit this episode I did back in two thousand seventeen, November twenty second, two seventeen to

be precise, called Tron. He fights for the users. And the reason this came to mind to me is because over at Walt Disney World, over in the Magic Kingdom, one of the things that they the company is busily building out is a Tron light cycle amusement park ride, a ride that is already in a Disney park in Asia, but this will be the first North American version, and I eagerly anticipate the opening of that ride because it

looks like it's going to be incredible. And I've always loved the aesthetic of Tron, so the idea of being able to inhabit that world, even for just a short duration of a roller coaster ride really appeals to me. So I thought we could dip back into this episode from and listen to an interview I did regarding the film Tron. Let's listen. In you have a hero who rises up against a tyrant of a villain and helps

a group of resistance fighters overcome oppression. Now, that story has been told in numerous ways before and since, but this particular version had some really interesting quirks to it. The film was called Tron. Tron follows the story of a character named Flynn, who is a video game designer and hacker who once was the employee of a corporation called InCom. One of Flynn's co workers named Dillinger, stole Flynn's work and arranged Flynn's removal from the company and

covered it all up. Flynn plans a daring computer raid on the company with the help of two of his former co workers. His big goal is to uncover the actual evidence that in fact, Dillinger stole Flynn's work, and his big opponent in this raid is an artificial intelligent construct. It's a piece of code, it's some software. It's called the Master Control Program or m c P. Now, originally that started out as a chess game, but it had started to assimilate other programs into its own code and

systematically growing more powerful as a result. Old so imagine sort of like the borg absorbing other entities to gain more strength as kind of what the m c P is doing. It gets more and more capability as it absorbs other programs. So, while Flynn is trying to break into Incom's systems, the m c P detects him and uses a laser to convert Flynn into digital information and

essentially upload him to the computer. That pulls Flynn into the computer world and their Flynn encounters programs and in the world of the computer simulation or the computer environment, these programs have the appearances of humans in this universe. They also resemble their creators, whoever programmed them. One of

those programs is Tron. The name is short for Electronic Tron is a security program and is designed to keep an eye on the m c P. But he also acts kind of like a gladiator in various games that the m c P forces programs to participate in, and and as some people mentioned within the context of the film, he fights for the users. It's one of my favorite quotes from Tron. Users in the Tron universe are sort

of seen as like gods. They are the creators, and the programs look to users for guidance and for approval, and they have had all communication cut off by the m c P, so they wonder if the users are still out there. There's this whole existential crisis going on in the world of Tron, and that's an interesting piece of the mythology of the movie. Flynn eventually, of course, helps bring down the m c P and he escapes

the computer world. He's also able to prove that Dillinger stole his work, and he ends up becoming the new head of Income as a result. Now, the film was not a big success at the box office, but it did find itself a cult following and also had a

profound impact on the way people would visualize cyberspace. I would even say that you could see elements of the design from Tron find its way into early implementations of virtual reality, and the production of the film itself relied heavily on some really innovative work from numerous people in order for the film to actually come into being. So Ramsey the Wonder producer arranged for me to have an interview with the writer and director of Tron, Stephen Liszburger.

What follows is our conversation about the technology he used to create the movie, as well as his philosophy about technology and stuff in general, really the things that informed the creation of Tron. I hope you enjoy Stephen Lisztburger. It is a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you for joining Tech Stuff my pleasure. Now before we jump into Tron, and I've got a lot of

things to ask about for Tron. Uh, maybe my listeners would probably appreciate understanding a little bit about your background leading up to Tron. You had a background in animation

leading up to that. I come from the East Coast, it's more to New York, and went to college in Boston at TOPS and went to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, where I studied film for five years, including animation, and I had my own company in Boston that did some live action but primarily animation, and uh, we eventually ended up with a studio on the East

Coast and went on the West Coast. We're and our biggest job was doing Animal Olympics for the NBC Television network, and during that we developed Tron and then tried to do it independently, but we couldn't pull it off. So we were fortunate enough to get in business with Disney. Yeah. I imagine a project with the scope of Tron would have been extremely challenging to pull off without some some pretty major hell. And I also imagine that Disney's background

in animation. Uh lad to some some aid when you guys were working on Tron, because I don't know that people who have seen the film are really aware how much actual hand drawn animation techniques were incorporated. This was an era before computer graphics had reached that digital age where you do everything you know digitally on a computer and then you can just export to a video file. This is way before all of that, So I imagine Disney's involvement was somewhat helpful because that was a studio

that actually understood animation. Yeah, all of that is true. And just to unpack that, Um, if we had tried to do it independently, I think it would have we wouldn't have made it. Eventually. We would have had to either go under or bring in someone else because we were somewhat naive. We had an idea how we would do it, but we in retrospect the scale of it was something that none of us had experienced with. On paper, we thought we could work it all out. It added

up and made sense. But when we got into it at Disney, many times I thought, I'm really glad we're here and not in any other studio because, as you said, we we had We had hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pieces of artwork, um put any into just the frame blow ups. Every individual frame of the electronic world blown up shot in seventy moment are blown up. They were when they were stacked up. They filled two entire

moving vans. I mean it was tons and tons and tons of images and it it didn't freak Disney out because they said, yeah, we're used to handling millions of pieces of artwork. And in the end, that was totally the strength production wise of the project because we all of us working on it were familiar with animation. Even the live action people had quite a bit of experience and animation, so we sort of took the best from live action and then we turned the whole live action

movie into an animated movie. And once it was at that level. You could treat it like mass production. You could just keep multiplying the number of teams working on the individual scenes. And and there was a system there. We weren't reinventing the wheel. That system existed. People knew how to do, you know, animated effects, and how to work with these numbers of probably it had to be

over a million pieces in the end. And the funny thing about it is how efficient it was, because we ended up doing all of the special effects in Tron one in half the time that it took to do them in Tron too well, and and correct me if I got this, get any of this wrong. I want to see if I can kind of lay out for my listeners sort of a general approach to the electronic world sequences which took up more almost an entire hour

of Tron. I think about somewhere around the realm of fifty three to fifty five minutes something like that of a footage in this electronic world. So the thing is, there was an underlying template that I had in mind, which is, you know, a sort of live action short at the beginning, then followed by an animated movie is

what Disney used to make. And you know, they always did that with their live action films and animated and live or live and animated, and so that combination is what I was going for, or you know, it's sort of a it's it's kind of an animated feature in terms of that length of about seventy minutes with the live action being kind of a short at the beginning. So and the way that would work out, like you said,

you shot on seventy millimeter in large each frame. Because to remind my listeners, some of whom are are too young to really remember the days of film that you're shooting. It's really funny, you know, once time moves on and people forget about how difficult it was in the past. It's a little bit like the next generation doesn't really

care how difficult it was before. And you know, there was no way to composite film if you that was efficient, if you did effects and you had characters and you had a fantasy background, there really was no good way to put all of this together. Blue screen existed, but shot blue screen. And you know, if if you had at the time, if you had twenty or fifty blue

screen shots in the film, that was a lot. Well, we had nine hundred composite shots that we had to do, nine shots that had you and beings in worlds that didn't exist, plus their costumes who were supposed to be glowing. And there was no digital compositing. You couldn't even run computer animation consecutively. We only had enough computing power. We had total two megabytes, and we only had enough memory to render one frame at a time period, so you

could never look at the light cycles moving. You could only look at this individual frame. Then you had to wait forty five minutes and render the next frame and look at that one. And the only time we ever saw the stuff put together is after we set up a film camera and clicked like an animated movie, one frame at a time off of this computer animation, and then people would all go into the screening room and

sit there. Even the guys that did all the computer work had never seen it moving, and we saw it for the very first time when we filmed it one frame at a time and then ran it back. And so to put all of this together, to composite it, the only way we could do it was to do blow up every frame and make it into an animated movie. And what we did to combine it with the computer animation.

Was to try to find a sort of middle ground where the live action would look like it had been rendered by a computer and the computer animation wasn't too attempting to look too real because we couldn't do real. Many of the looks in the computer aspects of Tron look the way they look because not because we sat there and said, oh, wouldn't this look great in wire frame instead of fully rendered? No, no, no, it was wire frame because that's all we could do, and it's

phenomenal to to give a sense of scale. You're talking about twenty four frames a second with film, every single one of those frames being for the electronic world being blown up so that animators can go in and and hand draw elements onto those frames, each of those frames having to go through multiple exposures depending upon how many colors you had, because each time you added a different color you had to do another level, You had to

photograph everything all over again. Uh, you're you're talking frames. If you start doing the math, if you're thinking fifty three minutes more than because I don't want to do the mass that right now, but I think, well, the thing is, it's um if it goes through the math, you say, this can't be done. Because just doing the colors on each frame, the average number of exposures was I think eighteen. Some of the frames in Tron were

exposed thirty six times. And because everything had to be held in focus so that the blow ups were sharp and the blow ups are about the size of place Matt, there was no depth of field. At seventy millimeter had those light levels, So it wasn't those cameras. Those seventy millimeter cameras were used by David Lean to shoot Lawrence of Arabia, and afterwards I really understood why, because in

the desert there's enough light. But for any of the situations we were in, I had to shoot characters when they were speaking to each other and over the shoulder shots. They had to be shot on separate passes. So I would have Bruce in the foreground with no Jeff that he was talking to looking at, and I get him in focus, and then I get him out of the frame, and then I bring in Jeff and he'd say his lines and I chewed them separately, each one held in focus,

and then they were put together. But yeah, the the in animation. There's a thing called an exposure sheet, and it's showed. It tells the animation cameraman what levels are photographed and what order, and there there's about, I don't know,

three seconds of animation per exposure sheet. And so what we did was we took those exposure sheets and instead of that sheet being filled then for three seconds, which is seventy two frames, it was one frame in tron, one exposure sheet per whole sheet, three seconds of animation per individual frame. But again it was only possible to put all of this together through animation. We were under an extreme deadline, I heard all. I never was given a real good reason by Disney why we were in

such a rush, but we were. And I've heard various theories over the years that there was, you know, some competition in the marketplace that summer, and so that's why they wanted us to come out then. But sometimes I wonder what would have happened if we had come out the following winter, which made more sense, and that would have given us six more months. I mean, it was the deadline was so severe that UM we took only one day off every fourteen days. That was the legal limit.

So UM we would work thirteen days and then we get one day off, and then we worked thirteen days in it one day off, and to complete the rephotography of all these blown up frames. Um at the end, I think we had twelve this division animation stands going twenty four hours a day, three shifts on each and the strain on the film in terms of getting it done. From a director standpoint, that was kind of crazy. But because I was new to this, you know, I just

accepted it. But the picture was after I shot all the live action that the film had to be completed in three weeks locked, so not on frame of the movie could be changed. Frames could be taken out and removed, but I couldn't change or add anything. So, you know, now directors get three or four months to live with their movie in the editing room. I had three weeks after that it was locked. And the thing that's interesting is what I had to lock was actors in their

unaltered tron suits on an all black stage. And then I had no computer animation yet because that wasn't done. So when I locked the movie and said this is the movie I'm making, there were no effects in it. There were no colors, in it it was black or white. Many of the scenes just had individual actors because you know, it was one or the other, like I said, and there was just storyboards are a little little frames that said effect goes here a solar sailor. And at that

point I had to say, okay, I sign off. This is the movie we're going to release. From there on, we just did nine months of filling it all in. It's. Um. Yeah, in retrospect it was insane, But at the time it's compared to working on Tron to Drown Legacy, where everything was composited in real time, where you could just put the you know, computer animation together with the backgrounds, together with the actors, and you know, you could make changes up until like I don't know, a couple of weeks

before the movie was in theaters. Yeah, this is a time where you can't even you can't even review the footage immediately afterward, obviously because you've got the filt you have to process everything. So oh yeah, of course there's no video tap. I mean, you know, you shoot it and it goes off to the lab and then you see it the next day in dailies at lunchtime. Um, there was also no time to do reshoots or reduce um.

I mean it was standard procedure on Tron legacy that when affects shots or shots were composited, that there would be multiple redus on each shot, every frame. It was none of that. I mean we were flying blind and then we had to commit um. Once in a while, when something was really screwed up, I would get to redo it or reshoot a recomposite. But often what we did say Okay, there's a mistake. How can we incorporate this mistake into the visuals or into the story, and uh,

we just went with it. So yeah, yeah, I imagine that meant that you had a lot of story boarding was very precise from the very get go, so that you could you could the team of talented people I had was unbelievable, once in a lifetime. I it was one of the great joys of making the film. And

uh yeah, incredible. I mean the team I had from Listener Studios, my guys, some of whom came from Disney originally and then left Disney and worked at list of Studios and then ironically they found themselves back at Disney. But we storyboarded the whole film before we ever got to Disney, and we did all this artwork for all the different thing you know, aspects the m C P

and Solar Sailor and on the life cycles. That was all done, but it was done by us in house, and it was it was interesting that then when I got to Disney and they said, well, you know, if you if you could have a dream, what would it be. And I would say, well, I'd like Mobius to go over these storyboards, and then I'd like sit Me to go over our vehicle designs, and both of them to go over my costume designs, and I like Peter Lloyd

to go over production paintings. And so what what worked out great is that we never approached these great artists and said to him, we just have a blank piece of paper and now I'm going to explain to you what I'm trying to get to. It was it was so much better that we said, look, this is as good as we can get this, and we're pretty confident that, you know, there's more room to improve this. And they

never let us down. And I think they really like that, you know, because they look at our artwork and they go, yeah, this is really nice. But this, or why didn't you

do that? Or why didn't you do this? And Mobius would say, you know, you could shoot this this way, but if you shot it from this angle and if you showed this, then the audience would know that, and uh, yeah, it was amazing that it's awesome, and it's great that you already had, you know, a nice idea to go in with and not have to run the risk of asking an artist to contribute and then say, oh, but that doesn't really fit in what I was you know, it says that. And the thing is I wasn't used

to this part of it either. The team that you know, my guys at Listener Studios, we would throw stuff out all the time and we would say, well, you know that looked good last week, but why don't we try this light cycle design this week? And it was a learning curve for me to work with you know, Sid and Mobius, and they would say, no, this is it. There are changes, there's no revisions. I'm not doing this again.

That was amazing. It would be at a little bit like walking up to Da Vincian singing, yeah, it doesn't go that way, could you put some of the life cycle and he hands it to you, you don't say to me? He said, what about this? We do that? You know, you know how about mud flaps. And it's like, now I don't think so. Thing that happened with the LFE cycles I will interject this and it never bothered. Said, is that we sent the life cycles to Madgi, which

was still Middleman's company UM in New York. We had three computer companies. One was in New York State and that's where Chris Wedge used to work, who went on to Great Blue Sky Studios and do ice age. And then we had a company out here called Triple I, where Richard Taylor was. And then we also used Robert Abeles company, who was in Hollywood. But when I sent the first LFE cycle drawing that SID did to uh Magi, they said, we can't do this. The curves are too complex,

we can't render this. We don't have enough you know power, it won't work. And I knew that, you know, it was an incredible design. We all loved it, and so I thought about it this I remember this was over a weekend, some Sunday, and so then I said, how do I keep the integrity of Sid's designed but simplify it for the computer, and already you gotta imagine, it was already really simple in terms of color and shading.

And then I, I don't know how where I got this idea, but I got the idea of what if you took the bike which was very three D and squeezed parts of it between two pieces of glass. To imagine that squeezing it between two pieces of glass. So if you look at it from the side, what I did was I kept that faring in the front from the way Sid designed it, but I flattened everything else that was also full of all these compound curves, just like I was pressing a piece of glass against it,

and that did it. We got enough of the complexity out of it so that the computer guys could do it. And by the way, I want to say one thing about Magi that it was pretty funny, which is that one of the main reasons their tanks in the first Tron movie is because when I first went to Magi, which was really early on, I was keeping track of their capabilities, Like years before we ever made Tron. Their first major contract was with the military to do tank simulations.

This was all the way back in the mid seventies. This was totally like far out crazy stuff, you know, darkst stuff and mag I was doing. You know, it looked like very crude video games, but it was tank oriented. So then I at some point came to them and said, if you know, if these chase vehicles are tanks, you're going to be able to, you know, do a lot of this pretty effectively because of your tank experience. And they said, yeah, so that's why, you know, the tanks

worked out so well. Jonathan from one here just breaking in to say, we're going to take a quick break and be right back. Well, I'm I'm curious now kind of stepping back from the the meta tech of how the movie came to be and kind of diving into

the the actual content of the home itself. This is a really big treat for me because not only do I get to talk about filmmaking approaches and technology that I totally geek out about, but I can I can also talk about the mythology of Tron, which is incredible. It's very prescient in a lot of ways that I'm not even certain that that you guys were aware of at the time, Like things that that to me became really big conversation points a decade or more further out

from when the film came out. Oh yeah, I mean, I'll tell you something that will boil your mind. Sure. I had a revelation about the mythology of trona the first movie two days ago. I'm serious because in discussions about Tron two and discussions about, you know, theoretical discussions about what at Tron three would be, all of a sudden, it sheds light all the way back to the first film, and I realized, oh, this is why we doing that.

And I never really understood that that clearly until you know, so, yeah, it's that aspect of it. It's funny because I like to talk about the technical achievement of Tron and the incredible work and all the talented people that worked on it, and I mean talked about unsung heroes, you know, Richard with Richard Taylor and Bill Kroyer did and and there the teams and all the three companies. I could go on all day about how great that whole group was.

But then people go, see listener, he's such a geek. You know, he doesn't love story or characters. And that's not true at all. I mean, what what actually got Tron. Gave me the energy to make Tron was not the geeky energy of computer graphics. What what motivated me for years and made me put everything on the line were the characters. And it was that story in particular. And then I got so excited because I saw that there was a chance we could actually do it with this technology.

But looking back at it, um, I have to say that, you know, I was. I was inspired by the experiences of my own life up to that point, even though I was young, and the story works on many levels for me personally. UM so, yeah, I care about that pretty deeply. I would say, well, it's the effects of the film are phenomenal and I love them. But as people have pointed out numerous times over the years, effects

don't make a story. And if you rely too heavily upon the the azzle of effects and you sacrifice the story, then you know, I don't find myself talking about those films later on, right, I don't, I know what you mean,

there's nothing, nothing to hang on. Yeah, I know, well, they don't resonate past to the you know, the moment, the thing that I've been thinking about and the revelation I just had recently is that if you look at if you look at a movie like Star Wars or Um or an Avatar or Um Wonder Woman or four thor is of an example, the worlds of those films are epic. I mean, there's nothing more epic than Nordic mythology and spaces as epic as it gets, and it's infinity,

it's everything. So what happens in those elms is that Star Wars or a thor what happens is that you get to have comedic characters because that they make the epic grandeur of the setting relatable. So you know, it's called Star Wars, which is about as epic a title as you could ever come up with. But then you know, Luke is kind of a goofy farm boy with his you know, and his robot friends are you know, pretty funny. So you know, that's how we relate to the epic.

And the what I'm getting at where this connects with Tron is that Tron has is kind of the opposite formula if you think about it, because when we did Tron one, all there was was you know, pong games, and no one looks at a pawn game and says this is epic. You know, people stand out at night and look at the stars and say this is epic. But they don't stand in front of a pong game in a bar and you know, look at the the

pong bar table and say this is epic. So what we did was we kind of with the character of Flynn, we add it's kind of an epic character two a non epic world. And I think that for the people that struggled with Tron, and some people still do and say, you know, I don't get that movie. Why are people

excited about it? I think what what they struggle with, even though they wouldn't necessarily say it, is they struggle with the idea that something epic can come and significant or grand can come out of something that isn't well.

And and to kind of continue your your point, uh, you know, if you look at it on the scale of something like Star Wars or thor you're talking about this cause malogical scale, and when you're talking about Tron, you're talking about diving into a virtual space that's confined within a very you know, limited physical space. It's within

a computer. It's almost like you're literally going as small scale as you can get we're talking about information, not even a physical thing at this point, right, Well, that's that's I think one of the reasons people are drawn to take sort of sanctuary in the digital world, and we do it all the time, is because we control it. It's finite. You know, even though it's gotten as complex as it is compared to the universe, it still feels like it's ours. We can manage it, we put it together,

we can alter it. But you know, the universe, we're getting really bad at dealing with the universe. And um so I think, well, it's also this is all very generational because my generation traditionally, and certainly people older than me just I can't tell you. I don't know how old you are, but I'm sure you're younger than me. People were terrified of computers, just terrified. And Disney was terrified,

every you know, everybody was. And it's like young people come along and they say, well, this scares the hell out of my parents. What power is actually here that does that? A little bit like, yeah, if dad has a problem understanding this and it freaks them out, I

got to learn what this is about. And so the idea that something significant was going to come out of these you know, these limited worlds with this you know, information storage manipulation that was embraced by the next generation, but it was you know, none of something that older people wanted to accept, and they created this weird schism over the years with tron. I mean, you know, some people said, oh my god, you know how this is

terrible if things go in this direction. And then twenty years later they were doing ads for Apple computers and I've I've seen that arc and people don't change. Generations change, and um. The other thing, as long as I'm thinking down this avenue is that I think the fundamental change with the threat of computers. At the time, you know, everybody was worried about, oh, you know, the computers are going to take my personal data and they're going to use it. Ag asked me, I'm gonna lose my privacy.

And who could have predicted that they would take all our personal data but they wouldn't have to battle us for it. We would line up to hand it over. It's called Facebook, okay, it's called you know everything else that you know wants our credit card number. And so that has been you know about no one anticipated that, No one back then and Torom didn't anticipate that either. That.

You know, I talked to some of the heaviest people in the field of computers back then, and you know, they would give me notes, and some of them would give me story suggestions, but no one ever gave me a note that said, you know, we're going to hand. It's not that we're gonna fear it and battle it. We're gonna run towards it as fast as we can.

And it's and I've spent a lot of time thinking about how that really happened or on what that really means, what are the repercussions of that, And what I came away with on that is that that computers put us, put the users in a situation where they said, look, we'll take care of the cognitive problems, so you're liberated from that, and what what you can do with your extra time is indulge your feelings. And you know, because

that's what we like to do. You know, we we get adding machines so we don't have to do the math. So then we can, you know, go to the movies instead of doing the math, and we can enjoy our emotions and feelings. And that has continued to advance. You know, it used to be like, okay, I'm not going to learn too much math because I have an adding machine and you know, now I have spell check, well, you know,

and then it's like, well I don't. Pretty soon I'm not even gonna have to drive my car drive itself. And so all these cognitive things are being you know, we're so called being liberated from and then we're just all about our feelings. And you know, we wanted that for a long time. But in the past people humanity dreamt about it the other way. You know, for hundreds of years people philosophers dreamt of a world that was guided by reason because it was too much about people's feelings.

And you know, science and philosophy advanced so we could get to this point where reason sort of determined our our fate because reason is connected to underlying truth that endures. That's why, that's what reason is. But emotions don't work that way. You know, you can think that it's worth you know, dying one moment for something. You know, if I don't get invited to the prom I should you be better off dead, And then a month later you

could forget that you ever felt that way. And so now we're we're kind of living in the age of Trump, where I'm digressing, I know, but we're living in the age of Trump. We're it's all about these feelings every day, and we have we have the way of of expressing those feelings to a larger audience than ever before, instantaneously, as you know, So the cognitive power of computers has ironically completely liberated our emotional feely side, touchy feely side.

It gets to stand out every thought in his head because of Twitter. Whenever whenever, whenever a disgruntled employee of Twitter isn't deleting his account. Yeah, so this this weird relationship we've developed with technology. And I go all the way back to you know, the early torn days, and I can see what we thought then, and I can you know, I've experienced the arc you know, from there

to hear it's it's really interesting. Well, what's fascinating to me is that, you know, you talked about this this thing about computers that were very scary to one generation and very promising to the next. Uh. My background is, interestingly for me anyway, not not in technology. My background, my scholarly background was in medieval literature. And history. And the funny thing is you see the exact same story play out upon the invention of the Guttenberg Press, because

it was taking taking books away from monks, you know exactly. Yeah. Instead of instead of it being the church that was completely in charge of creating manuscripts and books, it now became the domain of printers who could produce them much more quickly, which meant that people could actually own books for the first time because they weren't prohibitively expensive, and

that transformed the Renaissance. Really, you could argue that was an enormous employ on it, just as computers have been granted a much more accelerated, but a similar transformative element

in our own society. So this kind of knowing this sort of stuff, I mean, granted, a lot of this stuff kind of evolved over the years since Tron has come out and in some ways can change the way we view Tron, which I actually I think that's great for any piece of art, right that you can revisit that piece of art and it means something new to you based upon your experiences and the way the world

has changed things. A window into how what a relationship was with all of those things, the things of the moment and eternal things at that moment in times, you know. I mean, I'll tell you another sort of past and future mechanism that I thought about primarily after I made Tron, which is that, you know, the character of Flynn is

kind of you know. Afterwards, I did quite a bit of study about the archetype of the shaman character and what it what does the shaman character do traditionally And traditionally he he heals a person who has lost their spirit because their spirit has gone into you know, the another world, the spirit world, and that is why the person here is sick. And the shaman has the power

to crossover into the spirit world. And then because he has powers there, he can retrieve the spirit of his friend, bring it back to this world, and then put the two together. And I'm reading about this, like, you know, specifics about this twenty years later, and and then I'm thinking about what Flynn did in the first movie. Alan and you know, Laura come to him and they're sick. Why because they've lost their spirit, They've lost their programs

and it's making them sick. And he has lost information too, and then he ends up crossing over into the digital realm, and you know what does he do there? He freeze them up so that they can now get in touch the you know, the information that is the Tron program can get in touch with the user can get in touch with it, and you know, and then he comes back to this world. And I thought, you know, this is this is pretty crazy that it's the role of

the shaman, but in a in a digital environment. And I wasn't really thinking about that when I came up with it. And not only that, but a role of a shaman, a shaman taking the role of essentially our protagonist, uh, the hero of the story, the one who makes the who defeats the bad guy at the end. You know, we have Tron, but we follow Flynn. Obviously, that makes sense because Flynn is from our world, so we're seeing the world of Tron through his eyes. That's very necessary

for the grounding of that for the audience. But it is also interesting that that in a traditional narrative, we would be following the story of Tron right you start, you follow the story of the guy who slays the dragon at the end. Uh. And so instead we're following the character that enables that to happen and one level up.

It's pretty funny that moment when at the end of Tron where she says, you know, Flynn really did it, and Tron doesn't know that, you know, he managed to overcome the m c P because of what Flynn did. That that happened on a whole, whole dimensional level above his head literally, and he looks at her and he goes, oh, okay,

I don't really know what to do with that information. Yeah, you know, and I just this thought popped into my head, which is that according to this definition of what a shaman is, you could almost say that, um Wizard of Oz is a shaman story that Judy Garland's character she crosses over to the other world and what does she do. She helps her friend and become whole brain. It's a

very similar mechanism. Absolutely. Yeah, it's uh interesting. I had not even thought of that, but that is a very a very apt, uh comparison, especially since Dorothy again is going into a world completely unlike our own, that has its own rules, has its own history. Doth Yeah, back again. Just wanted to say, we're going to take another quick break, but we'll be right back for the rest of this interview. Well,

I have another question for you. This is one that that not only I need to know, but my producer Ramsey needs to know, and that is Master Control Program m c P, one of one of the great villains of science fiction. What what what was? Did you have any specif inspirations for MCP, perhaps with any other organizations that might have three letters in their name or anything along those lines. Or from the beginning, he was always

machine like. And when I went to and there was a sort of Wizard of Oz component to him too, speaking a Wizard of Oz, because you know, he was smoking mirrors and in the end he was that, you know, a little It all started with that little chess player. But um, when I went to Triple I, they had one of the three computer companies, they had created a juggling human character wearing a top hat who um looked

very human. He barely moved. He just stood in one position and his arms moved, and he juggled a bunch of balls. And but he didn't speak or anything like that.

And I think you ever moved his speed either. And then I saw that I saw this, this image popped into my head that like the Wizard of Oz, we could have his face on this machine like exterior that we had been creating for the m c P and uh, but then we couldn't render it in flesh tones and have it speak because we just didn't have enough computing power. So the only way we could actually do it was

in wire France. So you know, we we recorded David Warner's voice doing it, and then we altered his voice, and then we you know, did what animators have always done is sync up the images, you know, the face with the soundtrack and the MCP is really I guess the first talking had the first c G character that ever was. And I always liked the idea that you can be outside of him or you can be inside of him. The scene where Sark is actually you know, at the pedestal and the m c P surround him.

I like that that. You know, it's that's a relationship with the technology. We can be objective to it or we can be subjected to being inside the technology and it's completely surrounds us. I always pictured him as kind of a it's funny processor, like a food processor, because he's kind of like a juicer you think about it. You know, he brings in these programs and he these entities and then he juices them to extract their information.

And I'll tell you a little funny um story about the EP and Flynn, which is that I didn't know that Jeff who's contribution. I can't stop bragging about how, you know, great he is in that role, but um, and I cast him, so the uh, that was my contribution. He did the rest, but he UM, I didn't know he was going to do this clue persona. And so we started filming the tank scene and he was doing it and it was really cool and it was a

daring move on his part. But then the MC et the recognizers common they capture Clue and then they put him in the m c P and uh, he starts getting d rez and then he starts screaming for his life and Jeff delivers this great, you know, heartfelt moment of like, you know, I'm not giving into you, m c P. But he doesn't do it in the clue voice. He does it as in his real voice, and neither of us caught that. No one caught that inconsistency that, if you think about it, that should have been in

the Clue program voice. But and you know, but it isn't and it's a little bit like it's kind of freaky because it's a little bit like Clue was dying and then the last thing he did was act like, you know, a user just before the end. So that's you know, it was kind of a happy accident. But anyway that the m c P was was like, you know, a food processor with people or characters. And that design actually did not change all that much. I mean it was it was worked over brilliantly by sid Meade and

improved a lot, but that the through line went back years. Well, I guess, uh, you know, to me just seeing that that image, uh, that that enormous head, that booming voice it's consuming the the information uh from from other programs. To me today, like when I think of the Internet voice, that's the voice that's in my head, it's the voice of m c P as it's as it's consuming. And you know, talking again about pressions, like there's so much here about the merging of what it is to be

human and the technology that we create. It really really seems like the singularity, like that concept of the singularity of of humans elevating themselves to the next level. Perhaps merging with machines or incorporating machines in some way. Sometimes it doesn't involve that, but but a lot of the versions of the Singularity do. This seems like, uh, it was very much in that that sort of vein, like

this idea of yeah, well is it. You know, there were no we didn't use the term user before Tron, and people didn't know what the word meant, and people didn't have computers. I mean, there were no really you know, handful,

but people were and they were crude at best. So, um, this whole idea of your sort of your alter ego, your avatar being you know, in there in the form of your information, that just keeps building every year, so that you know, it's it's getting to the point where we really are creating, as much as possible, a double

ganger of ourselves digitally. And I mean, I think what's interesting is that Nintendo, i've heard, has done studies on how people picture themselves in their mind's eye, and they've come to the conclusion that we imagine ourselves is somewhat a cartoon version of ourselves. And I think that's one of the reasons that Nintendo video games as successful and

brilliant as they are. I mean, part of that success I think comes from working with that theory that you know, they're not realistic, and I think that the idea of a realistic double Ganger a sort of copy of ourselves. I think that that's a in some ways maybe more challenging, and I think that's part of the challenge that we're actually facing that, you know, it's it's a little bit like not only we're creating a double Gang or Earth

and a digital one. And like I said earlier, I think we feel good about that because it doesn't confound us like the universe. You know, it has problems like hackers and trolls. But yeah, we can deal with that, you know, because ultimately those are people, those are those ineffable forces. We don't understand. Its CEO too. Yeah, it's Jonathan from One again, just breaking in to say we're going to take another quick break and be right back

with the interview Stephen Lisberger. This has been a huge thrill for me to to talk to the writer and director of a film that, you know what played a big part in my childhood and I watch it frequently, so I have in fact, I want to take this

opportunity to thank you for your quarters. Oh there have been an I didn't even get into the arcades section of this because I mean, you know, I just had to had one footnote because I can't resist, which is you know people always talking about, well, the first Tron, you know, it didn't make enough money. It wasn't e t Well the movie paid for itself as a movie,

but the video game paid for the entire movie. Too many a week's allowance went into disks of Tron For me, I remember the full console, like the one you would step in and play and uh and yeah, I played a lot of that game. Yeah. Do you know about the Tron ride in Shanghai. I have heard about this. I have not made my way to Asia yet and second out on YouTube Tron Shanghai and um, it's pretty amazing.

They worked on that ride for over fifteen years. Actually happened. Yeah, I've heard of I've heard about a new one coming to to do it in Florida now. So I'm really excited about that because you know, the thing is, like you said earlier, people think of Tron and you know it's sometimes too literally like oh, you know, it's a small world in there. You know, it's a small world after all. And but it's funny because with the Tron ride,

the world of Tron is immense. You're small and you get on the ride, and in some ways that's the whole you know, that's the most thrilling part to be small and have that recognizer looming over your head, for instance, to make that leak to realize, oh, you know, this world is not small. And so yeah, it's really cool the ride. But anyway, yeah, the game and the ride. I mean, I can't wait to experience the ride. I really, I really am looking forward to that. The game remains

one of my favorites. I'm a I'm a child of the seventies and eighties, so the Arcade experience was really an important one for me growing up. Also, Tron obviously being in that realm of for a lot of people, it was kind of their introduction to this concept of taking taking a very abstract idea in the form of

computer program and really turning it into something relatable. I mean, to have a computer program that could technically just be oh, well, this is just a spreadsheet program, but no, in this world that is a an anthropomorphic creation that can fight for you. That's uh pretty amazing concept. Uh, I this was a huge thrill for me. Uh, thank you so much. Yeah, if you get a chance to get a word in, I mean, I'll totally be an extra in Tron three. I'm I'm happy to be. Yeah, just sitting at sitting

off at the side. I'm perfectly fine. I just want to I want to be in the room where it happens as they say, thank you for joining me again. Okay, you too. Bye. I hope you enjoyed that discussion with Mr Lisburger. I could have easily kept talking for another hour or two with him, and I get the feeling he would have indulged me for as long as he

had the time to do so. I've always had an appreciation for Tron I've always enjoyed that movie ever since it first came out, But now that appreciation is even more profound knowing the challenges that the team faced in order to produce this movie at the time that it was made, going to the point where you would swear that this was computer generated imagery, and then knowing that it was hand animated, hand drawn on top of actual

individual cells of film. It's incredible to think of how much work and care and love went into this film and created that distinctive look and feel. And also, I really do hope I can show up in Tron three The Balls in your Court Disney call me well. I hope you enjoyed this interview from two thousand seventeen. It was a real pleasure to get to do it. It

was something I had not even anticipated. Ramsey really came through and landed that interview for me, which was incredible, and thought that maybe you, if you hadn't had chance to hear it, you might be interested to learn more about what went into the creation of a really, I think a really influential film. Not a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination, but one that I think influenced a lot of other filmmakers as well as people

who were getting into computer animation or computer games. Um. It really had an impact, and obviously Tron legacy when that came out extended that further. Um and we got the amazing Daft punk soundtrack. So there's a lot about Tron that I think is cool, and some of it are the ripple effects from the movie, not just the movie itself. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, Please reach out to me. The best way to do that is over

on Twitter. The handle we use for the show is text stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.