I love watching epic movies: Jeff Bridges

Light cycles and space age tech meets the poignancy of a love story in Jeff Bridges’ latest film, one of the few that has a ‘part two’ in a manner of speaking, after almost thirty years.
An actor as well as a musician, the Academy award-winning Bridges is no stranger to strange roles. Here, he talks about his latest...
What’s it like to approach a character 27 years later?
I never thought of it in those terms, really.I never thought of it as playing the same guy. He hasn’t changed all that much. Well, maybe some of his enthusiasm for technology has been dampened a little bit. After all, he’s trapped inside a computer, so perhaps some of that fondness he had for his technology... maybe reflecting on it, he might think, ‘Perhaps there are some other things in life that I should have been paying attention to.’
With all of that technology, what's the human story of this film?
Bridges: Well, one of the elements of Tron: Legacy is just what we were talking about, technology. It’s so exciting to come to realize all the things that you can do. And what’s happening with technology is that it is developing so fast that we haven’t really developed any ethics to go along with it, or knowledge of what some of the ramifications of this technology will be.
What’s about this project that attracts such attention from the sci-fi world?
Bridges: The fans have been so wonderful, they've really given birth to the new film. Two years ago we showed a small portion of what this film might be, a test reel, and it got such a great reaction from the fans that the people got behind the project. One of the things that I know attracted me to the first Tron and this one as well is that it’s really creating a myth for modern times. Myths can help us to navigate some of our challenges in our life. And as we were talking before, technology is a tremendous challenge, because we're so attracted to things that give us instant gratification.
What's the biggest difference in filming the original Tron?
Bridges: Well, 27 years ago, the original was a very cutting-edge movie. Of course looking back, it looks like an old black-and-white TV show. But at the time we were making the original flick, there was no internet. Our cellphones were these things we carried around in big suitcases. We shot that movie in 70 millimeter black-and-white, and then it was sent to Korea, where a bunch of technicians hand-tinted all the frames to make the suits glow. Now in this film, again it’s cutting-edge technology. We’re the next-generation of 3D cinematography after Avatar. It takes the technology that Jim Cameron came up with to the next level. Now, our suits actually do glow, and they throw light on the other actors, so they’re practical. I think one of the really great things that director Joseph Kosinski, being an architect, brought with him was the ability to marry actual sets with CGI sets. It’s very hard for the audience to tell where one ends and one begins.
Through film technology, you act opposite your younger self. How did that work? As an actor, is that liberating?
Bridges: I love going to movies myself, and whenever I see a big epic film where the character has aged from being a young boy to an old man, traditionally there are different actors playing him in those stages. That’s always a little bump for me as I’m sitting there, when they change from one actor to the next. But now as an actor myself, it’s very gratifying to know that I can play myself or the character that I'm playing at any age, from an infant to an old man. That’s really exciting, especially to be part of this groundbreaking technology.
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