In a situation very appropriate for the Tron films, Garrett Hedlund appeared at the Tron Legacy junket via skype. He was on location filming On the Road in
CraveOnline: When we see Sam all grown up, he really shows what’s gone on in the real world since 1982. What did it mean to you to represent the real world of what’s gone on since Tron?
Garrett Hedlund: You know, there’s a lot of pressure there. No, I don't know. My approach to it was really sort of you’ve got a guy that his father left 20 years ago. He lived with the grandparents and the grandparents passed away. There’s a lot of abandonment issues and yeah, maybe in our world, there’s a lot of abandonment. Maybe that’s where I kind of brought it from. It’s a teeter totter between forgiving and forgetting. You’ve got to forget and forgive, forgive and forget, whichever order and go on with your life. This is right at the brink of where even if you reminded me of my father, I wouldn’t have made a single effort to go find him but this is right at the brink where there’s still a little bit of hope mixed with curiosity, peppered with curiosity and that’s the emotion of that there. In terms of the world now, I think you see he’s got this cool storage home, man. I wanted to walk away with that but he’s more of a secluded individual, an adventurous technologically driven but also independent and in an independent state. That’s that. In terms of Encom and the real world, Sam had turned his back on all that stuff. I think you come in as a person who’d turned his back on the today world and sort of became much more independent.
CraveOnline: When you’re working in a wonderful fantastic world, how seriously do you take it?
Garrett Hedlund: I guess I always take them pretty serious. Me and Olivia [Wilde] would watch the original Tron in the trailer between scenes sometimes and realize how fun that one still was, how fun they made that world of unbelievability. It makes you want to be there so we had to kind of remind ourselves to keep that with us in this one. Days would get long but you owe it to everyone to add this, to add this sort of humor and you kind of want to make people jealous of where you are so you can’t be miserable. I was going to say in terms of what we see on the blue screen, the laser pointer might have been an understatement. Joe was always so 10 steps ahead of us. We had the pre-vis to look at as well. That had been accumulated before filming to pre-visualize the whole film but Joe [Kosinski] was always so far ahead. He explained everything so we would step onto that, you could already see it. We didn’t have to really work very hard after his explanation of what we were looking at to see it. We could see it in our heads. I see it. Joe’s the reason we were able to see what wasn’t there.
CraveOnline: How does it feel to throw a disc?
Garrett Hedlund: Well, it feels like it feels to throw a disc. These ones are just a little heavier. They had all these lights and all the mechanics that went into making them. They weren’t the lightest discs in the world and if you got hit by one of these things, you probably would de-res, man. There was one take during the disc games where the video village, where the director, DP and producers are all over there by the screens. They set up this netting for me that was the size of the barn. Just the camera right in the center down low, I’d dance around it and we’d have a go with improvising. The prop guy would toss you a disc and you’d react and then you’d do this so they can add one, maybe do a shoulder roll and throw one. I ended up throwing my last disc and the thing wouldn’t let go of my finger. It went off this way and my whole tent is right here, video village over there and it starts going straight towards the video village. I’m yelling and I’ve got this visor on so it’s like I’m wearing glasses without the prescription so I’m a little cross-eyed. They can’t see. They’ve got their glasses on and they’re watching the monitor and I’m like, “Joe, look out! Claudio, Claudio!” The disc comes and Joe probably looked like this, ducked down and Justin Springer, the producer is on his laptop right here, took the disc right to the head. It was take 37 Apple. They were just watching the screen and they were just like oh wow, this is real 3D. It’s coming right at them. So we had little things like that that kept everybody’s energy/fear up.
