IN TRON: ARES, THE PROGRAMS BREAK OUT OF THE COMPUTER AND ONTO THE STREETS. WE GO ON SET TO SEE HOW THE PIONEERING SCI-FI FRANCHISE IS GETTING REAL

WORDS ALEX GODFREY

THE FUTURE IS NOW.

Forget Light Cycles, Jeff Bridges wants to talk about driverless cars.

“Have you ridden in a Waymo yet?” A what now? “Driverless car!” he exclaims, with Bridgian exuberance, eyes lit up. “They have those in the States now. I just drove in one a little while ago. It’s the wildest thing. It made me think about my great grandchildren, if I live that long, saying to me, ‘Wait a minute, you mean you could actually drive your own little missile, you could control it?!’ Because I’m thinking, 20 years from now, everybody may be moving around via Waymo.”

We’re 15 minutes into our conversation about Tron: Ares, the third film in a sporadic franchise that, because of the generational divide between each one, speaks to different times, and different tech. And it’s got Bridges marvelling at where we are right now, let alone in two decades. Cars without drivers are, he reasons, safer. Aren’t the Tron films cautionary tales, though? Are driverless cars not scary? We’re putting our lives in the hands — as it were — of computers.

“And that’s kind of frightening, man!” he agrees, synapses tingling. “Or are we, in fact, the computer? Is the computer, you know, an extension of us? Have you heard of ‘emergent behaviour’?”

What follows is a lengthy monologue — far too lengthy to print here but, rest assured, it is glorious — about super-organisms, bird murmurations, “the very seed of humanity”, presidents, kings, willpower, DNA and, finally circling back to our question, fear. “You can be not afraid, and be hit by a drunk driver. We’re all afraid, man, aren’t you afraid? I’m filled with fear these days, you know, making the right choice. You know, what are we going to do?”

There’s always been a lot of Kevin Flynn in Jeff Bridges. Or vice versa. And Tron, kicking off with Steven Lisberger’s 1982 film, has always been about boundaries blurring. Worlds colliding. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. There, Flynn was an idealistic young computer programmer who, having been literally sucked into a computer, took digitisation in his stride, battling his way through the Grid with wide-eyed, anti-authoritarian glee while thwarting real-life corporate thieves. In 2010’s Tron: Legacy, the character leaned into the more mature, zen-like philosopher-dude that the older Bridges had become. (“We were jamming, man,” a nostalgic Flynn tells his son Sam (Garrett Hedlund) of years he spent on the Grid. “Building utopia.”)

Now, 43 years after Flynn’s first appearance, he’s back, ready to blow a new generation’s minds all over. And this time, Tron is taking to the streets.

When people talk about the first film being ahead of its time, I say, ‘Actually, it’s as if we were on time and the rest of the world was late,” says Lisberger, who dreamt up this whole universe. His light-bulb moment arrived in the late 1970s while his company, Lisberger Studios, was producing animated shorts and commercials: playing early videogame Pong, he started thinking about neon warriors in gladiatorial arenas. He shopped his film idea and test-reels, which mixed live-action drama with computer graphics and back-lit animation, around an uninterested Hollywood until Disney bit, making his dreams a reality, Light Cycles, pixellated psychedelics and all. Tron didn’t overwhelm the box office, eventually bringing home $50 million, and the Academy didn’t get it: the film wasn’t deemed worthy of a Best Visual Effects nomination, as its newfangled computer animation was frowned upon. But Tron changed the world, immeasurably inspiring its acolytes and blowing open the doors for the future of CGI.