Influence & homage

Darren Aronofsky

like that, a rotary phone, to sort of create this timeless space. We were sort of inspired by Terry Gilliam's Brazil of taking old technology and reinventing it for the present. We didn't have anywhere near his production value, but we tried to learn from a master. That's Joanne Gordon, who is my mom's best friend, helped raise me, and was actually craft services on the film, playing the mean landlady.

5:04 · jump to transcript →

Darren Aronofsky

Sean is really deep in it here. I mean, the amazing work he's doing here. You can't pay for a look like that. You gotta work for it. The whole phone in the background is, for any of you film buffs out there, is a lift or an homage to Sergio Leone in Once Upon a Time in America.

58:13 · jump to transcript →

Kat Ellinger

Things like Last House on the Left, for example, which was inspired by Bergman's A Virgin Spring. The male family member or the boyfriend or the husband or the father wanting to take back that honour as if it's a family thing. You know, it dresses that. That's what sends Manu over the edge. And then with Nadine, it's the constant criticism. It's the showdown between the flatmate. Now, this is exaggerated.

20:33 · jump to transcript →

Kat Ellinger

that punk period, or was coming of age in that punk period, and pay homage to that. Certain aspects of that are played down in Besmois, but the music is still there, played down compared to the book. But it is still a really huge part of Virginie Dupont and her work, her writing, and her film work.

55:16 · jump to transcript →

I admit, arguing to keep this in. Music up. But it's really, to me, this is almost, this is my homage to Hong Kong cinema right here. Forget the martial arts stuff. But it was fun to go full throttle on this kind of thing. As I said, very operatic.

1:07:57 · jump to transcript →

We talked before about tradition. And there's this one, obviously the wonderful, the homage that's being made here is that wonderful sequence in King Hu, I assume in King Hu, Touch of Zen, which had that great, great fight sequence in the bamboo forest. Of course, they were always on the ground in the bamboo forest. In the middle section sometimes. A little bit. Well, he used to use those trampolines. He would position trampolines just outside of frame.

1:35:27 · jump to transcript →

which was sort of influenced by stories that we'd heard about, particularly like stuff you read about Rwanda and places like that with corpses ending up in churches and things like that. And we thought it'd just be a dumping house for corpses, some kind of mortuary or makeshift cemetery for the corpses. And it gave us the next kind of... It felt like the film was evolving then out of the circumstances and that he was understanding as he went along in the way that

14:20 · jump to transcript →

the clear, the digital house, we'd paint them out, the neon lights. So they're actually self-lit by the lights in the supermarket store. So we didn't have to do any lighting, but they just took it all out in post and we tried to avoid it as much as possible. That was a little Homer Simpson homage there. And in a way, the whole scene is a respectful nod towards George Romero's Dawn of the Dead set in a shopping mall, which is...

47:53 · jump to transcript →

Tom Tykwer

but still to me as i'm considering myself something like a spiritual agnostic this is not a religious movie it is a movie that is heavily influenced by spiritual knowledge that of course recurs to to religion and to theology and of course there's a many theology

1:10:56 · jump to transcript →

Tom Tykwer

But they don't go into the confession booth. They don't follow the rituals. They just are inspired by them, which is a small but important difference to me. We've just seen that scene with the shaving of the heads, which is a rather shocking element when you read a screenplay. You know you have an idea of an actress, because I was very early thinking of Kate to play Filippa.

1:11:50 · jump to transcript →

And the interior of this location was inspired by a fencing facility that we location scouted that was adjacent to the Olympic Stadium from the 1930s. But we weren't able to shoot in that location, but we did replicate it in CGI and on the stages at the Babelsberg Studios, which have quite a history. Mm-hmm.

9:40 · jump to transcript →

It would be impossible to do that. And I thought that Enzo Angeleri, who designed and cut this hair, thought that he did such a great, it was such a great throwback and homage to the original and yet something that we could work with. I just thought he did such a brilliant job. And it was also one of the first things that Peter Chung said when he came to the set was that he loved the hair, which was really great.

40:29 · jump to transcript →

John Cameron Mitchell

Some of James' film we shot before principal photography, like his face in the water and the band-aids and all kinds of little bits and pieces. I remember me biting my nails and letting them bleed. How much was inspired by Jonathan Coet's Tarnation? Well, you know, Paul documents his life also with photography over the years, and there was a little bit of that and a little bit of Jonathan...

51:17 · jump to transcript →

John Cameron Mitchell

was perfect. You're doing an homage there. That was a filmic reference. I didn't want to tell you because I didn't want to make you self-conscious about laying, but it happened anyway. Remember, it just fell out of your panties. Look at how gorgeous Justin looks. This is not a shot of Justin. That's Justin. That's Kurt and Bart. I have to say, yes, thank you, Kurt and Bart. They did a good job on making me these fantastic costumes. I was so jet-lagged and tired and

54:03 · jump to transcript →

influenced by the Blair Witch Project for this sequence. And I think one of the key ideas was that the actors in that film were really horrified in all of those sequences. They weren't the hero that were going up against the villain, you know, with courage. But here we have Will petrified, and you just never see that. And I think we are just living in this world in his shoes, and if he's petrified, we have to be petrified. Remember we had a version of this sequence years ago that was in the U.N.?

28:06 · jump to transcript →

Or are you excited to see somebody? And what's funny is it all informs the behavior in the scene, but then it all landed exactly back to the way that it was written, Wishes. It now exists again in its simplest form, yet the performances are now influenced by all of that play and workshopping, and I really enjoy that. And it's a scene that I'm really proud of just because I think it's entirely accurate.

1:07:18 · jump to transcript →

Patrick Tatopoulos

We went for, like, one... One big transformation that I really like is the one where, you know... ...when Lucian regresses. We often see transformation one way, from a man to wolf. This time, it was like from the creature to the man. I was really pleased with that. Michael again gave us the whole choreography there. Beautiful shot. And Dan built us so many corridors. This is all like... I mean, we had a big chunk of corridors. We kept playing, turning around corners. lt was actually quite a big set. It was huge. lt was a three-storey set... ...basically all the way up to the ceiling of the thing. And with short ceiling on the lower floor... ...and then in the dungeon chamber, two storeys. And again, that's the big set. - The courtyard set. And this next action sequence too is an example... ...of just really squeezing everything out of what you've got... ...to make a sequence. I think we had, at the time... ...maybe two practical arrows that came in and maybe two hallways. And one real firing arrow, and just... We were able to be creative and make a whole sequence out of it. Well, this was one of the sequences that benefited the most... ... from Clint coming back with more money. I'm so glad we did that shot of the man in the face too. It was... - Excellent. Again, only one crossbow actually fires. Everything else was, you know, just editorial. You know, there's a huge culture of the weaponry... . like the machine gun in Underworld 7 and 2... ... that when you do a period, you just have bows and thing. lt was important that we have big bad-ass crossbow. They were more like machine guns than anything else. Just because I'm sure the audience liked what you had... ...with the guns, and the rifle and the other one. And that sort of like replaces it in some ways. The very powerful... We played with sound a lot there. So they look like when they shoot, they're really massively powerful. Same arrows. - Same arrows, yup. And who did the CG for the actual men that are getting pierced? We did extensive post vis with a company called Proof. And they had never done final VFX shots. Oh, Proof did that. - They came in and did the finals. They did a great, tremendous job. - Yeah, they're great. No! My lord. I wanted to do that shot so it feels like how big the corridor. I think it's kind of cool to see them walking across. It's a bit of an homage to Jacques Tati. Some things he's done, we see people walking for two hours before they... It's risky, but it sort of worked well with Bill in the foreground.

43:56 · jump to transcript →

Patrick Tatopoulos

That, if anybody is interested... I called that on the day when I saw that bloody scar. That was actually the same one that Guy used for Singe. For Singe. When he gets busted by... - Exactly. When Viktor punches him in the crypt in number one. You see, if you never said that, nobody would have known. Now they... Hey, cost-effective. - That's right. There's a lot of recycling like this in makeup effect. If you're clever, you know... - Of course. I love this scene between them. - Yeah. And just the tension and, you know. And the next time you see them together... ...when they go in that room is one of my favourite moments. That one was like the little homage I wanted to make... ...at Murnau's Nosferatu. You know that creature that comes into that room. It feels like you don't know if he's gonna strike at him or stuff. And then we were really worried about this whole daylight. Forest daylight. Not Knowing what colour to get. We'd never gone outside before in the Underworld series at all. It just popped out and felt kind of, we had our... ...Xena conversations and worries. You know, with the combination of just... The costumes could only be but so different, you know. These guys are supposed to break out of prison and grab what they can... ...from the other soldiers. And then putting them in the forest. You know, Lucy Lawless comes in and it's all over. So we finally got, like a... Went with a bit more of a green stylized than normal daylight. That's the shot. What's funny is that Steven and Bill were actually very, very close friends. And they had dinner every night together... ...and in between takes they'd be sitting there talking to each other. And then get time to get back on the set. And then Bill would be bullying... I need to make a-- Oh, yeah, here. Just to make a little note, we haven't talked about the music here. Paul Haslinger was just... That was a challenging one. You don't wanna be too over-the-top with the music. Yet you wanna create a little suspense. And I think... He did the first Underworld as well. He did the first one as well. - Yeah. I love that. That was a... It's a perfect display of what Viktor is about and what he's like. And then Tannis' reaction to that I really loved. This was another shot that was vastly improved... ... after Clint fattened the visual-effects budget. Before it was like three guys standing around. It was seven guys. Don't be... - There was smoke, no flame. And no fire. It was nothing. The whole mountain behind Michael was CG.

47:34 · jump to transcript →

real hand, but just, you know, putting another layer of skin and putting that LCD underneath. Pulling that nasty piece out there. This was also, you know, for those of you who have seen the original, I don't think it's that hard to make the connection of this as a bit of a twist on, you know, an homage to the pulling that device out of Arnold's nose. That always creeped me out when I was, what, 15?

38:22 · jump to transcript →

but it would be, you know, you guys are more the judge. I'm too, you know, I'm so close to it that, of course, it all makes perfect sense to me. So I'm going to have to ask you to step through the scanner again, please. This was a definite homage to the original. I wanted to switch it up and, you know, lead it up and tee it up as the red-headed lady that we're a bit familiar with and do a switch on that idea. How long is your stay? Three days.

45:19 · jump to transcript →

Now, speaking of best idea wins, this little montage that you just saw was completely packaged, not written into the script. We did want a character who was a bit numb from suburban life, from being a dad, and working a steady and difficult job, kind of hiding out in the suburbs, this fellow. So we wanted to start there. But we really just wanted to start with this sequence where there's a break-in in his suburban house, which is the part of this story, one part of this story, that comes from my real life. I have had two break-ins in my house, with people in my house, one of which, I won't go into the details, but was extremely traumatic for my family, and remains that way and will for the rest of our lives. So I had that inside me, and the feelings of... The complicated and difficult feelings that it conjured up inside me are still with me, and were some of the inspiration for even creating this story in the first place. Although, again, I have to give credit for the story to Derek Kolstad. I did share with Derek when we met that I wanted to do an action movie, and I shared that I felt that my time on Better Call Saul, a TV show, had set me up for a potential audience around the world who understood me as an earnest character who was a Striver, maybe willing to reach above his talents and able to get knocked down and get back up. And so this starts with a simple home break-in, and we can see these two criminals are very nervous and seem to be out of their element as well, but also can't quite tell what they're up to. But this character says no to them taking the wedding ring. So there's something more to him. Do you remember the wedding, if I may interject? Yes. - That it was only the watch... I think it was on set that once we put a light, the flashlight onto the ring, it was kind of like, "Wait a minute." Yes. They were just gonna take the watch, which he says "means something to me." But then I think it was Kelly who said, "What about the ring?" I mean, it's gold and it's gleaming in the flashlight. You have to say something about it. And then for the character to push back on that while he's got a gun in his face tells you there's maybe more to this guy besides for the fact that he wants his marriage to work and has committed his full life to being honest and stay married. It tells you maybe there's more to him than he looks like. What the fuck, Dad? The son rejects him for not fighting back when he could have. And, boy, oh, boy. - Perfect opportunity... There's a lot of feelings in here for me personally, as I shared with you, having had a break-in or two. It's not a good situation to be in. You don't quite know what to do and you wish you'd done more. You always wish you'd done more. But you also want to keep the damage to a minimum, as the character says here in the movie in a few minutes. Yeah. - And the golf club? I also have experienced this moment where the policeman sort of says, "I would have done something." And you're like, "Really? "I thought I was supposed to keep things cool." Anyway... Well, yeah, 'cause society teaches you not to get violent. I mean, you'd think a policeman, of all people, would say, "Thank you for not pulling a gun "and making a bloody mess for us to show up to." Instead, I've had the experience of... Not all the police who showed up, but one of them saying, you know, "That's not what I would have done." Which is an absolutely useless comment and all it did was... I mean, look, it's not a useless comment because all these things... It's great that you were able to take a traumatic experience and have that as a Starting point for this film. At least you got something good out of... -/ agree. -... what must have been pretty terrible. And I have not always been a person who believes that films or games, video games, are places where people get their rage out. I can see, too, where movies and video games sort of engender anger and rage.

3:18 · jump to transcript →

I love what goes on here. He gets home. If you remember the criminals from the night before, this frightened, scared, nervous couple, they grabbed the coins and whatever garbage is in that little bowl, and every family's got a bowl or a countertop like that, where they drop their keys, they drop their change, and maybe the little girl's kitty-cat bracelet would go there if it was on the floor or if that's where she left it 'cause she washed her hands or something, and everyone can relate to that. And he finds out they may have taken her kitty-cat bracelet, and that's really all it took for him to go, "Here we go." It's the excuse. As we were talking about, the sort of... Some of the more unique elements of the action genre we did here, what always really attracted me to the script was that a lot of it is driven by Hutch's inner conflict... Yes. ... father than bad guys going, coming in and, you know, doing something bad to him. It's not a revenge film. - Yeah. It's all about Hutch, you know, for 20 years, which we make quite clear in the speech later on, in the basement, that you make, is that he overcorrected. He became a regular dude, and he's just very unhappy, and all the violence stems from being unhappy because the first time Hutch smiles... You know, part of the inspiration for this journey, emotional journey, and the character, as I shared with everyone, was my personal experience and the feelings of frustration that don't go away. And the questioning you do as a dad if you have a break-in. And if it's traumatic, a feeling of "What else could I have done?" You can't help going over those moments and thinking about other things you could've done. Here he's looking for a tattoo. Tattoos are a big deal in this movie. They're the symbol that unlocks a lot of doors. In this case, obviously, I'm looking for the tattoo that was on the wrist of the woman who broke in as part of the couple. But here Hutch's tattoo will send a signal to this guy. Here he wants a fight. He just wants a fight. Yeah, well, you probably shouldn't flash cheese like that around here, bro. There are three types of people... But part of the inspiration I wanted to share here is an interesting one. Years ago, when I was in college, this would have been about 1983, I saw a speech by someone named Abbie Hoffman. Do you know who Abbie Hoffman was, Ilya? I'm drawing a blank. Yes. And you know a lot of history. Ilya, by the way, is Russian. If you didn't know.

19:26 · jump to transcript →

Tim Burton

when I should have been doing something else, thinking of those and, you know, asking people, how would you or not like, how would you not like to die? All that kind of stuff. And one of the first characters I decided was I wanted to do the winner or loser of a hot dog eating contest because I was inspired by Joey Chestnut in his annual 4th of July hot dog eating contest wins. 75 hot dogs or 76 in 10 minutes, I think is, I don't know, but it's up there. So, and I actually wanted to get him to play that character

19:31 · jump to transcript →

Tim Burton

I need a hard target search for two suspects. It's like a dead version of Chips or Adam-12. This is Wolf, you know, sort of inspired by those kind of cop shows or Hawaii Five-O and Adam-12 or Chips. Leave no gravestone unturned. Help sift through the sands of Titan if you have to. Men, this is what you've been training your entire deaths for. And remember,

1:10:10 · jump to transcript →

And it's only recently, I guess, relatively recently, that we can now see it and enjoy it. And obviously with this set, we can actually enjoy it even more. Yes. And here's some high-quality Wondria. It's been said that Charles Adams was slightly influenced by the look of Luna in creating Morticia. And that wouldn't surprise me at all. Yeah, I think that...

44:57 · jump to transcript →

And that was partly his infatuation with Lillian Gish, but he was inspired by D.W. Griffith in so many ways, and he wanted it to be a kind of post-Griffith film, but using a lot of that. Now, the underscore here is a waltz, and this becomes the theme for Shelley Winters.

27:56 · jump to transcript →

Alan K. Rode

Gangs smoothed Hayden's testimony with the committee so the actor came out looking like a hero. This is actor Sol Gorse that Hayden slugs and escapes. Hayden was also influenced by a man named Phil Cohen who was a psychoanalyst for many Hollywood left-wingers and party members.

1:09:23 · jump to transcript →

The sound man is right at Warren's feet there, you know. Right. With the mic, directional mic. So, you know, he's crouched underneath the overhang of the dashboard. And I'm there somewhere. I'm in that car. Coming up is my homage to Hitchcock, which is the kind of, you know, foreboding...

1:30:47 · jump to transcript →

And of course that was much more strongly influenced by the last Tango by Bertolucci than by Nachbottier.

50:36 · jump to transcript →

which is a 19th century mansion that sort of overlooks the Hudson in a neighborhood called Riverdale. Probably the inspiration for Riverdale on the Archie Comics universe. But yeah, they used Wave Hill as the interiors for Gracie Mansion, which I didn't know, and I was very surprised. But Riverdale is a neighborhood in the north...

39:25 · jump to transcript →

He takes his time. He does some thinking. This scene I also like very much. This odd hallway in Pernstejn Castle. It is very unusual to see black on black in the darkness like this. The networks would not accept something like that anymore. The movie lives through the interaction of light and darkness. For this, the scene by Murnau was recreated identically. For example, the way the vampire holds his hands was copied almost exactly. There are some very clear references to Murnau where I quote him directly. And that is the case here? I don't remember exactly. I would not call this a remake but an homage to Murnau. For me he was much more important than Fritz Lang.

45:16 · jump to transcript →

This next sequence coming up, which we called the Space Gate or Stargate Room at the time, it was kind of an homage of mine to one of my favorite pictures, of course, which was 2001. Me too. It was a great picture and probably what got me into filmmaking. And I always wanted to duplicate that effect of the glowing walls. And so...

1:10:13 · jump to transcript →

Yeah. Wow. Now I have to say this, ending shots that we have of the sort of closing up is like vastly influenced by the end of Mean Streets. Really? Yeah, because the very end is sort of after all the shooting and after all the aggravation and all the whole crazy stories happen, it's just sort of the neighborhood closing down. The Venetian blinds going down, the lights going off, the, you know, just like...

1:25:57 · jump to transcript →

When we came to make a decision about what film format to use for Tron, we felt very strongly that we needed to shoot it on a larger negative than traditionally done. And it came down to a choice between 65 millimeter and VistaVision for the whole show. But the availability of 65-millimeter cameras was far better than the availability of VistaVision cameras, so we made the decision to shoot the entire show in 65 millimeter. And to keep a certain consistency, and as long as we had rented the cameras, we felt that we might as well go ahead and shoot the real world in 65 millimeter and not in 35 millimeter. It was kind of one of those nice to have things, and nobody objected strenuously to it, and also it would be the first time since Ryan's Daughter that a film had been shot entirely in 65 millimeter. And I think you can see the results. I mean, it looks wonderful. In the monitors in Lawrence Livermore, one of the things that Triple-/ had to do was create lots of imagery that appeared on monitors, and that imagery had to be shot and created long before we got to production. So, there was a lot of planning in creating all of the monitor imagery, and Triple-I did a great job on that. Spent a Iot of time on this shot. To accomplish the effect, what we did was get a 4-by-5 still camera and photograph Jeff Bridges in his position after he's been zapped, and then immediately moved him out and took another photograph, which was the background by itself. So, as you pull away chunks of Jeff, you see the background behind him, and then to put the laser and the grid and all that on top of him was basically the effects animation of John Van Vliet. When Flynn is de-rezzed and pulled into the computer, we go through one of the most interesting sequences in Tron, which is the real world to electronic world transition. This sequence was created by Robert Abel & Associates, primarily under the direction of Kenny Merman. It was a sequence which I had designed, knowing that the way that Robert Abel & Associates was making these computer graphic images with the Evans & Sutherland computers, and, really, using vector graphics to create this particular look, would give us a look that would be unique just for this transition. The three-space transition, the movement through all these binary bit patterns and this polygonal landscape, was done by making multiple passes through a traditional animation camera that was pointed at a high-resolution, vector graphic, Evans & Sutherland computer screen, and making multiple passes, frame by frame, using different colored filters, coming back, making multiple passes of rewinding other filters, until you finally end up with this, which seems to be solid objects. But it's really made out of lots of tiny, tiny lines put together to make solid blocks of color or objects. Oh, man, this isn't happening. It only thinks it's happening. When Flynn says, "This isn't happening, it just thinks it's happening," it's a key line, because it means that the reality that he finds himself in now, not even he can fully believe exists. And if anyone should appreciate and understand this alternate reality, it's him, and now he finds himself trapped in it. All right, now we see Sark standing on the bridge, and all of a sudden, he is enclosed with these shrouds of light as he begins to have his conversation with the MCP. The database for the MCP was a human figure that we had created at Triple-/ called Adam Powers and was originally on the Information International sample reel. And if you look at that sample reel, you'll see a juggler character who was juggling balls. Well, that face of that character is the face of the MCP. So, the first time that you see him, he is a polygonal drawing of a face. And that's basically the underlying database of the face. So, it's made of polygons. And those polygons, we play them out on the Triple-I computers as the line-drawing polygons, and made 12-and-a-half by 20-inch stills, high-con stills of those. But we created the mouth positions for the vowels and the syllables so that you could take these interchangeable transparencies and lay them down and make him Say, by whatever order you put them in, whatever you wanted him to say. 'Cause he was voicing a lot of different dialogue. Then those were backlit, and then we applied an effect to those line drawings of putting a steel mesh screen over the taking camera, and it made it have that much more, kind of, complex look. And then we also animated the exposure occasionally. Early on in the film when I started working with Steven, we did a lot of experiments to work out how these characters were created. The thing that we finally decided was that the characters needed to have this energy inside themselves. They are obviously in this electronic world. Now, these costumes were unlike any costumes anyone had ever created for a picture before, in that they were costumes designed to have effects treatments done to them. They were white with black drawing or black lines over them. All of the black elements on the costume were turned into circuitry which could be backlit and light could be pushed through there. We originally shot a 65-millimeter image of these people, live-action photography of them on these black sets. Then from that 65-millimeter film, we created some photo-rotoscope machines, which basically could project the 65-millimeter film down to large pieces of film, which were pre-punched with animation punches. This film was created by Kodak for us, and we would project down with these photo-rotoscope machines, which would hold this film into a vacuum frame and make a continuous tone positive print of each frame of the film. Then these continuous tone prints were taken to a light table, it was a vacuum light table, where they were contact printed to high-con film to make a number of high-con positive and negative images. So that you basically have for every character a large cel and you have high-con positives, negatives, and a continuous tone positive. Then these high-con elements were hand-inked and painted to isolate the circuits on the body, the whites of the eyes, the whites of the teeth and any other circuits that we wanted to treat as a separate exposure. The characters are more often than not... The live-action characters are shot on an all black stage. When there is a set, the set is also black, but is measured out to conform with what we're seeing in this artwork. So that if a character appears elevated in a shot, like this shot, there was an elevated platform for him to walk on, but it didn't look at all like the set. Then we would composite these actors over paintings, transparencies, and once that was done, we would add the light and the color separately. And to simplify it, you can describe it as a sort of perfect blend between live action and animation in that we took live-action film, photographed it in a way that we could break it down to individual frames, then blow up those frames into large slides or transparencies. And we had 75,000 of these, which seems like an appallingly large number, but it really isn't if you compare it to an animation film. And because we were at Disney, they were not overly swamped. That's an actual Frisbee, by the way, and those are actual Frisbees on their backs. We had a excellent Frisbee coach, Sam Schaiz. I like the fact that the deadliest weapon in Tron is a Frisbee. A Iot of effects animation in this sequence and in the film. And that is the animation that makes the glows, and as the Frisbee gets brighter, and you see the reflections of it on their costumes, all that has to be done frame by frame. This is hand-drawn animation that, although it is drawn, a negative is made of that, and it is placed over a light source and then re-photographed, and the ability of the effects animators was such that we were never waiting on the effects animation on the show. They always performed very well. It was never a problem. They did very few redos, and that's because they had had experience doing this beforehand, whereas everything else that we were doing, outside of the effects animation, was the first time through. So, that had a much tougher and steeper learning curve. In the holding cells for the game grid, those are backgrounds that are entirely hand-drawn by the background department, again using Rapidographs and line drawing and airbrushing and then turning those into high-cons. But those drawings are all drawn to match the actual physical sets, which were built so that when someone passes behind something, or leans on something, those are actual physical sets that were built. But again, the sets were just black on black. They're as if they were made of black velvet. Part of the interesting thing as a cinemagraphic problem that was presented to Bruce Logan was that he had to shoot, unlike anybody had ever shot before, sets that were entirely black with white line drawings and white characters running around on these sets. Bruce Logan's job in photographing these people was very difficult because, unlike most photography for most films, you try and get as much chiaroscuro in the picture as you can. You let there be a lot of dark and you create shadows and you create this moodiness, which a cinematographer takes great pride in. In this film, during the sequences in the electronic world, basically, he had to light them so that we could see as much of the costume as possible with as little shading as possible because all of the shading and all of that were done by hand by making different masks and airbrush elements that were used under these costumes in post. The ring game was an interesting technical exercise. The set itself, again, was black flock paper with the rings drawn on this paper with tape. The actors had to realize which rings were there and which ones were not as they acted out the sequence, imagining that they were hundreds of feet above the ground. One of the inspirations of Tron is the movie Spartacus. And there's quite a few similarities to the persecuted people who had to fight in the gladiatorial games. This game, of course, was inspired by Pong and jai alai. I think one of the interesting parts of Tron was the synthesis of new games that were created. The design, for example, of the glove that's being worn here, we took a traditional jai alai glove and then rebuilt it and made it out of foam, added other elements to it to give it a more technological quality, and then again, I put the designs over the outside of that to make it blend with the rest of the costumes. Shooting in 65 millimeter, from a director's standpoint, is a lot of trouble. The cameras are huge and bulky. The format requires an enormous amount of light to fill that negative, so if you are shooting Lawrence of Arabia or Doctor Zhivago and you've got lots of snow and big exteriors, it's fine, but in low-light-level situations, it's very troublesome. The depth of field is sometimes as little as a half an inch, and you find your cameraman is asking you, "Now, which part of the eye do you want in focus? "Do you want the front of the eye or the back of the eye in focus?" Or if the head of the actor is not square to the camera, they ask you the really insane question of, "Which eye do you want in focus? "I can give you the front eye in focus or the back, "but the other one's gonna be blurry." Now a lot of these shots where you see actors talking to each other and we're doing over-the-shoulders, the camera couldn't hold focus for the blow-ups to be made, and I had to shoot the actors on separate passes. So, in a shot like this, where you see all three actors talking to each other, it wasnt filmed that way. I filmed them separately and they were composited. And there's quite a few shots like this. Whenever you see them walking around and they're separated by more than a couple feet, those are all separate shots, and then the actors are composited. So, it's very difficult for the actors because not only do they not see the environment they're in when we're filming, all they see is an all black stage, but they don't even see the actor they're talking to. Forming of the Lightcycles, again, is almost entirely done by hand-done animation done by the effects animation department in creating the way that these cycles form around these characters. We built an object that the actor could sit upon, and it was literally a mechanical shape that was the seat and the handlebars, so he could sit down and it would thrust his arms forward and pull him down into that locked position. So that everything that he sits upon and touches, it was, again, drawn by the animation department, and not until you see the final completed cycle, which is actually a CG/ rendering of the cycle, is any of it done by computer. The Lightcycle sequence was done by MAGI. Their way of creating an object were to take basic geometric shapes, cones, cubes, spheres, cylinders, and make an object by collaging those particular pieces together and creating an object. And that's how the Lightcycle was created. All wide shots that you see are computer-simulated. All of the shots, other than the very tight shots of the figures inside the canopies, are computer-simulated. The shots inside the canopies are actually hand-drawn artwork of parts of the Lightcycles, and the animation that's happening over the Lightcycle windshields is hand-done animation to give them a sense of speed. But virtually every scene that you see of the Lightcycles is entirely computer-generated. And there's not even effects animation in those scenes. If there's an explosion when a Lightcycle hits the wall and a tire bounces across, I think those were basically all CGI. Syd Mead worked really hard on designing these motorcycles so that they would incorporate the characters. But if you look closely at them, you'll see that the second half of the bike is flattened and sort of two-dimensional, and that was done because the computers couldn't handle too many compound curved surfaces. So, we restricted those curves to the wheels and the windscreens, and then the rest of the bike was simplified. The ability to move the camera through 3D space with these computer-graphic-looking landscapes is just great. The Recognizers are a sort of King Kong. There's a little head on top of that gate structure... Suggestion of a face, but it, sort of, got lost. The Recognizers were created by MAGI-Synthavision. As I mentioned, there are graphic vector lines, red lines outlining all of these objects, the same way with the tank. The tank was another unique design of Syd Mead, who is a futurist, a fabulous designer. Once Ram, Tron and Flynn have escaped the Lightcycle grid and are off through the canyons being pursued by the tanks, we cut inside the tanks and see another example of a Syd Mead set that was built as a three-dimensional set, again with black background, and all of the elements on there graphically put on so they could later be treated. So the camera, you can see, is moving through scenes in ways that no physical camera or no model shot could possibly do. The animators that I worked with to create the choreography for all of the CG/ sequences were Bill Kroyer and Jerry Rees. But to communicate all this information to the computer technologists, the people that are sitting at monitors at that time, took a new language which we had to create. So, what we did was, first of all, we had to think of each sequence as a real physical reality. Not only would they draw the point of view that they saw as an animator that we would work out together, that was the story point that Steven wanted to make, and also the point of view that we wanted to take. But after we would draw the original storyboards in a traditional, kind of, storyboard manner, we would have to go back and draw a top view, side view and front view of the objects, where they were in time, where the camera was in time, and what the camera's point of view was. So, we really had to define everything to the CG/ technologist in a three-world, three-dimensional space. And that was the first time that that had ever been done. They must've gone right past us. We made it...this far. Now, all of this, this revolt, it's all being led by the user who's gone in the system, Flynn. The Tron character and Ram character, they would have toed the line and gone through the software the way they're supposed to. We'd better, Null Unit. Null Unit. Get the computer dictionary out. Look up "Null Unit." What does that mean? In this sequence, you can really see some of the flaws. I don't really mean the flaws, but the imperfections in the cels, little bits of dirt that pop on and off. Yeah, but they're few and far between considering. Yeah. Come on, you little bugger. Come on. Look at that. A lot of pops and a lot of glitches in there that we would always Say, "Well, that's what happens in an electronic world." When we started there were going to be no differentiations between the flesh tones and the rest of their uniform. But at a certain point they looked, well, not very good. So as a result, that added, approximately, 120,000 extra frames, extra elements to the shot, so it did grow in many aspects. The cave sequence where Flynn, Tron and Ram finally re-energize their selves with this liquid energy was a very interesting technical problem to solve here. In the sequence in the cave when the water is being handled by the actors, literally, frame per frame, rotoscope animation is isolating the water from the body so that it can be treated with a different filter and a different exposure. And again, this is an example of how light is used to portray motion or energy, as Tron drinks and you see his circuits light up and they become energized. The set itself was a complex geometric shape, which was designed by Peter Lloyd, and we built into this set, basically, water channels, and the water itself was reflecting light sources that we put in angle so they would reflect to the camera, and the water was in black tanks so that all we're really seeing are the highlights on the water. Yeah, but the biggest problem at that time was do we fill this with colored water or clear water? Had to do tests, you know. - Right. That was your problem. Do we put milk in there and make it purple? I think that what Flynn is surprised now, ironically, to see that there's parts of this mirror world that are more alive than he anticipated. So, it's not just the harsh computer reality, there's something living about it. It's a very complex shot, again, with all the elements. Probably about 30 different elements, 30 different separate exposures for each frame. Normally in a special effects movie, you get a very bad bottleneck effect in that all these things have to be composited through one or two optical printers. Now we have digital compositing machines. But by putting it into a manufacturing system like this, where it became like an animated film, we could use 14 or 15 animation stands, and we could use a slew of effects animators and ink and paint people to do all of this work simultaneously. As far as I know, we still have more shots with human beings composited into an artificial environment than any other movie. I believe there's 1,100 special effect shots in the film and 900 of which have human beings composited in them. And that number is just very, very large. Just the organizational task alone was monumental, not even considering the creative side of it. For every frame you would have an additional five to 15 cels that isolated the different colors and the different... We had body mattes, we had face masks, continuous tones. You made print backs on top of print backs. So, those 75,000 original cels grew to over half a million. I think we ended up with something like 600,000 cels, all of which had to be kept in order. We had to pull trailers, literally these large house trailers, kind of, industrial trailers onto the lot. We ran out of space and we ended up with 10 trailers that would house all these cels and had to be organized and sent over... 80% of them were sent overseas and had to be numbered and then painted and kept in order. At one point we thought if we had 1,000 scenes, and this was around Christmas time, the film was going to come out later that summer, and we had no idea of how we were going to get it all done in that short a period of time. And we thought, "Well, it's summer vacation. We have two weeks. "We'll get college students, 500 college students in a room." We really believed this might happen. We discussed this for about an hour and we Said, "You'd have 500 students in a room. "We'll teach them how to do inking and painting and rotoscoping, "and they only have to do two scenes each. "And so they do one scene a week. "At the end of that time, we'll be done, "and we'll just go and shoot them on the animation stands." It didn't work out. So, we brought on Arnie Wong, who was an animator. We put him in charge of supervising Cuckoo's Nest, which is a ink and paint service that was in Taiwan. Approximately 80-some employees in a single room. And what we did is we went through and we made a videotape of every situation and what to do in that situation. So that if an inker over there, who didn't even have to understand English to do this, could go to a TV monitor, roll to this particular problem and see exactly what you'd do in that situation. And then he was there to answer questions that were unusual. And the most interesting thing, and one of the things that I'm particularly proud of with this technique is that in spite of what a pyramid it was to build, we managed to get all of this post-production done in six to nine months. And that is using a technology that we had developed. It had never been done before and we developed it and used it on this picture and delivered on time. And that was only possible because of this manufacturing technique. It's interesting the computer animation iS the simpler part of the set. - Yes. Ironically, one of the things that was a creative philosophy that we enjoyed and were proud of was that we were taking computer animation and letting it stand on its own. We weren't trying to make computer animation mimic reality. And the job was then to make reality, the actors and the sets, look like the computer animation. We used to say, "Well, if you've got lemons, make lemonade." Everybody else, and certainly since this point, has been going nuts trying to make computer animation mimic reality perfectly. And I found that the limitations of computer graphics at the time were the most exciting thing. If computer graphics... If computer animation is no longer different from reality, maybe we've lost something in that. Certainly you gain special effects technology and you can do certain things, but it's the limitations, I find, to be the creative challenge. I think at the time we were using four computer animation companies... Yes. -... which were probably the only animation companies that existed in the country at the time. Yeah, I had been visiting some of these companies for two years before we started making the movie. Maybe even longer than that. And I used to show up at their doorstep and Say, "One day I'm gonna make this movie. "You know, we're gonna do this and this is gonna be great." And they'd say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." I'd come by every six months and say this is really gonna happen, and I think they were more surprised than anybody else when we really did this movie. And they got to show their stuff. The way the de-rezzing effect was created, for example, when Ram passes away and he's in the cabin of the Recognizer, there's a combination of the original photography of the character, and then that is overdrawn with literally hand-done, line-drawing animation done by the animation department. And between that animation and light exposures, you can make it just, basically, run off, dissipate and fade away. Also, upon viewing this again, for so many years, you tend to kind of lump it all together visually in your memory and we forget, I forget, how much detail, how much layering of texture was put into this film. - Mmm-hmm. Ai! these shots are all completely storyboarded. Even the electronic world and all the simulated shots were all on storyboards. There must have been thousands of storyboards. Yeah, it was very detailed. Because rendering times in computer graphic imagery, the time it takes for the computer to draw each frame, are high. They're even high by today's standards. It takes sometimes as long as an hour or more for each frame of film. Probably the most complicated CGI images that were in Tron were done by Information International. The Solar Sailer hangar, the Solar Sailer, its formation, the walls of that environment, that's all CGI. As far as Cindy Morgan's involvement, she was very brave to get involved because a lot of actresses Said, "What am I going to wear? "You're going to put what on my head? "I've got to have a helmet and headgear "and wear all this spandex?" And that scared a lot of actresses away. Yeah, it was very hard to get anyone to take us seriously. You'd call people up, they'd come in for casting sessions, and Steven would do his best to present the film, and they'd look at you askance, think you were crazy. You'd run some video on them, and they just didn't believe it was going to happen. And as a result, it was very, very difficult. And I think that was one of the last major parts that was cast. Yes, it was two or three days before the first shot or something. Yes. - It was very close. And one of the people we tried was Deborah Harry. Right. We screen-tested Deborah Harry. The Bit was created by Digital Effects Incorporated, and we didn't have the time to choreograph a CGI Bit for every scene. So, what we did was created a series of stills that could be cell flopped, and these transparencies were created by Digital Effects so that the Bit could be rotating and have these different pulses in it, and then when it wanted to express itself, we flipped to the next sequence of stills, which would make it become more spiky or change its shape, and literally those were cell flopped and then flown around by moving the animation camera on the object to give it its motion from left to right or up or down or wherever it moved, we got it closer to you. That was all put in by moves on the animation camera, on these stills that were being cell flopped. These characters were very interesting. I especially liked the one that looked like a vacuum tube. Other programs... - Other programs and... ...in the system. The Recognizer sequence is another set that was built based on designs by Syd Mead. The interior of the Recognizer, as the interior of the tanks, was all a physically complex shape that the actors moved around on with white line-drawing vector material over the surface of it, and isolated animation coming back and colorizing and animating those elements. I think one of the most successful pieces of computer choreography in Tron is the whole Recognizer sequence, when the Recognizer hits a bridge and becomes multiple pieces and Flynn pulls them all back together with his energy and the choreography of the way those parts all fall back into place and tumble. The thing that people don't realize about computer simulation, especially at this time, is there were no programs that imitated the effects of nature on choreography. Every piece and every part of every computer-simulated object had to literally be choreographed frame per frame by an animator. When the Recognizer moves along and bounces off the ground floor and the pieces separate and then come closer together and have that real, elastic, rubber-banding kind of quality to them... Simple things in choreography... I mean, when an object goes around a corner, does it just swing around the corner or does it have back animation? Does it weave left and right? Does it back animate before it moves forward? Those are the things that the animators brought to this and that the computer-simulation people did a terrific job of interpreting.

28:30 · jump to transcript →

And this, of course, was sort of a... It was a total homage to Little House on the Prairie. No, no, no, Walton. I mean the Waltons, yeah. And then there's somebody at the end farts or... I belch. You belch. Supposedly. And I know you wanted to put in some sound effects after all the lights were out. Do you remember? No, I don't remember. Oh, I wanted to...

22:27 · jump to transcript →

The character Masters is certainly inspired by the character in Jerry Petovich's novel. I think I went a lot farther in making him kinkier than Petovich intended. Petovich had written him as kind of a, just a cold criminal. But I was looking for the feminine inside that. To me, once I had cast Willem Dafoe...

1:38:58 · jump to transcript →