Today’s conversation was a hugely thrilling and exciting occasion for me, because the man I spoke to is a true pioneer and a legend of sci-fi cinema, and the movie which he’s most famous for is one which really resonated with me when I first saw it as a teenager, and it’s continued to hold that fascination throughout the years. I’ve had the immense pleasure of talking to Steven Lisberger, the writer and director of TRON, an immensely influential 1982 movie in which Jeff Bridges travels into the virtual world inside the computer, which to a young kid interested in technology and filmmaking back then was definitely a heady and inspiring journey.
But Steven has done much more. And so the film I wanted to discuss with Steven is a different sci-fi film he made, one which hasn’t been talked about as widely as TRON – it’s a film called SLIPSTREAM, released in 1989, starring Bill Paxton and Mark Hamill, and produced by Gary Kurtz, who produced AMERICAN GRAFFITI and the first two STAR WARS movies. It’s set in a dystopian world after a climate collapse where people travel by little airplanes, using the massive winds which have made a lot of the Earth’s surface barren. Hamill is a bounty hunter who has arrested a man for murder, and Paxton is a rogue who steals the prisoner in order to collect the money himself – and then it turns out that the man is actually an android, an artificial intelligence who has turned against his master. SLIPSTREAM is not a perfect film – there were problems during the production, and it was barely released when it was finished – but it’s also a film which offers not only a lot of pleasures, but also a lot of food for thought, with literary references, political satire, and an interesting examination of our relationship to technology.
So, in our conversation, Steven talks about the circumstances under which the film came together, and we dive deep into the ideas and philosophies of the film and their connections to modern-day discussions about artificial intelligence, for example. He also discusses the difference between making a film like TRON, which was very much influenced by his background in animation, and live-action filmmaking, he talks about one of his unmade projects about the Wright brothers, we touch upon his recently released sci-fi novel TOPEKA, and much more.
My interview with Steven Lisberger was conducted in connection with our German-language podcast Lichtspielplatz, so if you speak German, please check out episode #80, which features an in-depth discussion of SLIPSTREAM.
If you enjoy my interviews here on Talking Pictures, please consider heading over to patreon.com/TalkingPicturesPodcast to support the production of new episodes.
So without any further ado, here’s Steven Lisberger, discussing how he became to SLIPSTREAM!
The mp3 file can be downloaded HERE.
Photo courtesy of Steven Lisberger
Editing: Christoph Schwarz
Music: Clark Kent
