The Writer of ‘Tron: Ares’ Talks about the Need to Keep Coming up with Ideas

For more than forty years, Tron has been a part of the cultural zeitgeist, pushing the boundaries of technology in cinema, both in front of and behind the camera. The release of Tron: Ares gives us a third installment of the saga and continues the tradition of pushing those boundaries forward, asking questions about the future of technology and all of the moral and ethical implications involved. To write this third installment, producers tapped writer and producer Jesse Wigutow.

Wigutow is a teacher of screenwriting at AFI and has worked on a number of high profile screenplays in his decades long career. He sold a spec screenplay right out of film school to David Fincher and Brad Pitt’s production company and he’s made contributions for movies ranging from Curtis Hanson’s 8 Mile and the second film in the Tron series, Legacy. He also worked as a producer and wrote two episodes of the critically acclaimed show Daredevil: Born Again, and is working on the next season as a writer and producer as well.

We had the chance to speak to him about the process of writing Tron: Ares, the latest in the world of Tron, a film that took quite a long time to make it to the screen.

SCRIPT Magazine: I know you've been working on this for a while and I'm curious what unlocked this particular version of the story to get it made?

Jesse Wigutow: It's been been a journey in terms of development. I came into the franchise, so to speak, on Tron: Legacy. I've been kind of in the creative family at Disney and they brought me on to do a little production work, and I became familiar with the people involved, but also the characters and the mythology and the language around it and the aesthetics and so forth.

I was off doing other stuff and they had decided to go forward with another chapter of the movie that was a more specific continuation of the mythology and the characters out of Legacy. That was called Tron: Ascension. I was brought back at a certain point to do some work on that script. That was a different movie, a different concept, but it did have this character in a different role and a different scope named Ares in it. And, at a certain point, whims of Hollywood, winds changing, climate shifting, they came back to me—this was Jared Leto involved and his producing partner and some of the producers at this point—and said, “Hey, what if we just built a movie around the character of Ares as a security program who has an awakening of sorts and becomes the protagonist?”

And that's really where this movie comes from. That was a new day, a new conversation from the ground up.

SCRIPT Magazine: As you're spitballing with them, building a story around that and still trying to incorporate the other elements, what's your writerly approach to build that out and actually construct a screenplay that's going to get made? What are the expectations around this movie?

Jesse: Wigutow: For me, there was an opportunity, somewhat naively at the time anyways, that, we were going to get to do a slightly smaller in scope, more grounded, more character-based version of a Tron movie. For me, in the vein of almost Jason Bourne or Starman at the time was actually a big reference that we talked about a lot, an homage to Jeff Bridges in a way, but also just to like a guy on the run who has something special about him.

I didn't quite recognize at the time that if this gets made, if this actually happens, it's gonna have to grow.

It's such a big thing.

It's got to have more scope to it, and ultimately that is what happened.

Act three kind of evolved in a way, but there still remains this core story about a character who has an awakening and goes on the run.

SCRIPT Magazine: I was actually going to ask about your influences to it.

Watching it, there's this relentless pace to it. It's got this Raiders of the Lost Ark feel where every ten minutes, there's this new problem, and it takes things in a different direction that Lawrence Kasdan, Spielberg, and Lucas really nailed. But also that Edge of Tomorrow sort of thing where you hit a certain point have to start over, video game vibe, with Athena and Ares. I'm always fascinated with where writers draw fuel from.

Jesse Wigutow: I think it’s interesting you mentioned Raiders and Edge of Tomorrow. From the get go, Bourne and Starman were very much a kind of North Star for me.

And then at a certain point pace became a priority.

And it was always meant to be a ride. Speed had a place in my head in terms of how we’re not going to take our foot off the gas. It's a little complicated for a writer when, I think, I am at heart and maybe everyone would say this, a character writer. So you have limited real estate to really build out character to really develop relationships. There are these little moments that hopefully add up to something meaningful.

That’s ultimately going to be the eye of the beholder and the audience member.

In terms of the video game reincarnation, how many lives you get, Edge of Tomorrow, that is very much part of the design. I don't know if I thought of Edge of Tomorrow, but it's a great thought and a great reference point.

As I was thinking, Ares has been killed off or de-rezzed 219,000 times or whatever the number is, and each time brings with it that sense of visceral pain and fear. So part of the primal design to get out of that cycle is what's driving the movie.

SCRIPT Magazine: When you're approaching characters—especially characters that are programs like Ares and Athena—in a big spectacle how does that differ from when you're working on something that does feel a little bit more known for being grounded like Daredevil: Born Again?

Jesse Wigutow: One of the ways I tend to approach storytelling and particularly characters is how do I locate this person in the real world?

Who is this person in my life? That's the guy that's always got his dog in the vet, who always has a problem with his dog or whatever it is. I find that that, for me anyways, is a helpful tool in terms of making somebody relatable and universal but also specific. It's really hard when you're talking about a security program who comes out of the grid. There is literally no way to do that. There is no location to find this character in.

I think one of the gifts of the last ten years in a way has been the explosive evolution of technology and the understanding of AI, the capability of AI. When we started this conversation, AI was not in the public sphere in a way that it is today. I mean, obviously it was a thing. It was research and development, but it was really more of a corporate endeavor. And now people will have an intimate relationship with ChatGPT out there.

A part of what I'm getting at is that my understanding of the character ten years ago was much more binary and almost kind of Terminator-like literal, in terms of hearing something and regurgitating it. Or processing like rain being the process of evaporation, et cetera. Whereas now, the ability to reason and have critical thinking gave the potential for a lot more depth and exponential growth in a short amount of screen time, which allows for the character to be more dynamic.

SCRIPT Magazine: When Tron came out in the early ‘80s, it felt very science fiction and so ahead of its time. Not just with the technology that it was looking at, though it feels very quaint now, looking back, but cinematically as well. Tron: Ares feels very much on the cutting edge of that. As you sit down in the theater and we're 3D printing war machines and soldiers, Ares has that iterative cutting edge to it. You've been developing this for 12 years. What were you doing as a writer to bring that sci-fi edge to this and keep it relevant through your process?

Jesse Wigutow: What we were doing was chasing. When we started working on this, 3D printing was exploding. AI, wasn’t as much in the zeitgeist and public sphere as it is today, but this idea of what if you could just 3D print out a hyper-advanced war tank? That was always at the core of it.

And then the question, and narratively this has always been there and it lives on in the movie, what if you could build the soldier? What if you could print the soldier that operates that vehicle? At the time, that felt super sci-fi in a fun way and worth exploring and continuing to develop. In the years since the beginning of this development conversation, I’m not going to say it's not sci-fi, that you could 3D print the soldier that operates that vehicle, but it certainly feels more relatable and less 70 years into the future and more like 3 to 5 minutes.

SCRIPT Magazine: It's interesting looking back the 40-plus years at Tron and looking at living in the grid, now you can get a VR helmet and a chat program and it's pretty close.

Jesse Wigutow: Yeah, I mean, if you look, for example, at the premiere the other night. I think Elon Musk had had offered or donated or whatever you want to call it, an Optimus robot that was on the red carpet with us. You can imagine that robot in multiple iterations down the road, maybe not even that far, being 3D printed and having a more humanistic visage and and being a real-life iteration of Ares.

SCRIPT Magazine: You've done a lot of writing that hasn't necessarily hit the screen yet. You've put in a lot of hours working on high profile stuff that hasn't made it to production. What advice for screenwriters do you have that are crossing that finish line, even if it’s not necessarily crossing the ultimate finish line of production?

Jesse Wigutow: That's a ultimately an existential question and a hard one to answer. In a way, and I think this applies to multiple pursuits in life. If you can afford to, if you enjoy it enough, you just got to keep putting one foot in front of another.

In a lot of ways, I've been super lucky. I've had a career from day one out of film school. I've made a living, I've supported a family. I've also had a lot of poor luck and some things have fallen apart, gone away, some of it's probably on my own trajectory as a writer, and there's certain projects I look back and I'm like, “I wish I knew what I knew today as a writer. I would have done that differently.” And maybe the outcome of the project would have been different. But that's all part of the process.

This sounds super trite, but Hollywood is a game of survival. You just gotta keep keep working, keep writing, keep creating story. And if nothing else happens, you are getting better at it over time.

SCRIPT Magazine: What is it that you feel you put into the screenplay for Tron: Ares that is uniquely you that you felt helped bring it over the finish line for this project?

Jesse Wigutow: I think I had really clear, although maybe the time didn't quite feel as clear, sense of what this character is, who this character is, and the simple blueprint of his journey, and in a way, it was simpler than a lot of the bigger projects I've worked on.

Also, with the luxury of knowing if this gets made, it's not going to be simple. Like, there's going to be a whole lot of fun around it.

So let's just make a core story that works.

SCRIPT Magazine: Were there touchstones from the previous movies? I've read interviews where you've talked about where Tron isn't like Star Wars, where most people aren't expecting Sam Flynn like Luke Skywalker…

Jesse Wigutow: I want to correct the record on that. For some fans, that's not the case. There are some hardcore Tron fans that are really bummed that we're not seeing a Sam Flynn story and I understand that. And I relate in a way. I just think on the largest possible level; the biggest kind of corporate audience that Disney can draw in to see this movie. There's a very significant portion of them that don't know the mythology the same way they would.

SCRIPT Magazine: I explain it to Star Wars fans all the time. The vast majority of the Star Wars fans aren't the ones reading the comic books or the books. You don't make a billion dollars at the box office on the backs of just the hardcore fans. But to my question, what were the touchstones from the legacy of Tron that you felt were important to include in the screenplay as you were working on it to make sure everyone felt serviced, including the hardcore fans?

Jesse Wigutow: It was an evolving question developmentally. If I put my producer hat on for a moment or my studio president hat, such that I could ever put one on. What are the expectations around a movie like this? What do we need to service?

Some of that's just above my pay grade. And there was at a certain point, a desire to do this, to pivot from the mythology and do an Ares, not a spinoff, but a kind of standalone with as much connective tissue as possible.

But I think to answer your question, in the most reductive sense, looking back at the two films that predated Tron: Ares, there is this enduring aesthetic of Tron that lives on in the zeitgeist from 1982.

Whether you know who Sam Flynn is or not, you know what a light line is, what a light cycle looks like, whether you knew where it came from or not.

There was this decision, and I was very supportive of it. to say let's take that Tron aesthetic and reverse the ratio of time spent in grid, time spent in the real world, and bring those assets into our world.

That became, I think, the kind of the most rudimentary distinguishing factor in this movie to the others.

I also think there is some spirit of curiosity and wonderment and a little bit of a new age vibe that Jeff Bridges brought to 1982 that we wanted to carry forward.

And I hope we did on some successful level; questions around technology, the philosophy, the morality, free will versus programming, those are all things that are, I think, part and parcel to a Tron chapter, and get more and more complicated each time out.

SCRIPT Magazine: Watching it with a packed audience the Recognizer and the the old school Grid really felt like the big crowd pleasers, too.

As a writer, where does your writing stop on a project like this?

Jesse Wigutow: It's actually hard to define. I came on and off of this movie so many different times for so many different reasons.

I was on set, then offset, then on set, and maybe five different times on and off and it never stops whether you're there or not there.

There were things happening in post that I was not a part of, but then I came in to watch some of it and had conversations about what if you did it this way or rerecorded it, so that they said this or that.

Maybe it's not quite as official and I hope the guild doesn't get angry about that.

But it's a little amorphous.

I was lucky enough to be more or less on board this aircraft carrier from start to finish, which is not always the case.

SCRIPT Magazine: Is there a last bit of screenwriting advice you’ve been leaning on as sort of your North Star as a writer?

Jesse Wigutow: I also teach screenwriting. I teach at AFI and I've had people come in and speak to my class from different sides of the industry to give students different perspectives when you get out and they tend to be other writers who've had illustrious careers. In this case I had a manager come in and somebody asked the manager what they’re looking for in new clients.

And I thought this was quite helpful, and it's a good reminder, and goes back to something I said earlier.

His answer was essentially, “I'm looking for storytellers. I'm not looking for the writer who comes out of AFI with this one script that's so important to them, the thing that they want to stand on a table and wave at the gods and say this must be made. I'd love to read that, but I'm really interested in the next one and the next one and the next one, like, those are the clients that I'm looking for, as a business person, that have storytelling in their blood and curiosity about story in their blood.

Not just the person with one story to tell.”

So it kind of goes back to can you keep generating content?

Can you keep generating ideas?

Can you keep putting one foot in front of the other?

Tron: Ares is currently in wide theatrical release across the world.

You can learn more about Bryan Young at his website.