"It’s almost impossible to be both a father and a filmmaker": Norwegian director Joachim Rønning on the making of 'Tron: Ares'

It is back to reality for Joachim Rønning. The Norwegian director is drinking his morning coffee in his house in Los Angeles, dealing with plumbing issues over the phone with a plumber in London. Apparently, there is a leak in the family home in the English capital across the Atlantic, and even though his latest Disney film, Tron: Ares, has its big release day all over the world today, he needs to deal with the practicalities.

“It's so funny how life just seeps in, you know. Pun intended,” he says with a big smile on his face. “Today's the launch of Tron: Ares and I hear it’s on like 30,000 screens and millions of people are going to watch it, and I'm on the phone with a plumber.”

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But flashback to a few days ago, Rønning was in a kind of elevated Hollywood world. The premiere of Tron: Ares was a highly spectacular affair, where Hollywood Boulevard was transformed into one big red carpet from Highland Avenue to Orange Drive, which is approximately a stretch of 200 metres. Excited fans dressed in neon-decorated Tron-costumes were having their photos taken in front of huge billboards of the star Jared Leto, and fans could sit on one of the sleek motorcycles that are computer-generated vehicles that race through the electronic grid in the film. A stage was set up for Nine Inch Nails to perform the soundtrack at the after-party, and eager crowds – including Rønning’s own family – were anticipating the third instalment of the Tron-saga inside the legendary Chinese Theatre.

But initially, Rønning was incapable of enjoying the event. “The most nerve-racking thing I know is public speaking,” he says about having to stand in front of a crowd in the Chinese Theatre with the Tron: Ares cast next to him. “But afterwards, it is the best feeling in the world. It is like after you have had a root canal. You are like you are high on something. You are high on endorphins, and the night was amazing after that.”

Among the cast on stage was Greta Lee, who plays the CEO of a major tech company locked in a race for a groundbreaking innovation against a rival CEO, portrayed by Evan Peters. Leto, both star and producer of the film, was also present – he’s the one who brought Rønning on board. Meanwhile, Jeff Bridges received a standing ovation as he spoke about reprising his iconic role as Kevin Flynn – the visionary programmer who first entered the digital grid he created back in the 1980s.

Bridges originally played Flynn in Steven Lisberger’s 1982 Tron and its 2010 sequel, Tron: Legacy, directed by Joseph Kosinski. Now, under Rønning’s direction, Tron: Ares pushes the concept even further. Whereas the earlier films confined their action to the digital grids within computers, this new chapter sees the avatars of their human creators break free – escaping the computer and stepping into the real world.

“I became a fan later on,” says Rønning of the first Tron film, which he watched at home in Sandefjord, Norway. He was around 10 when it came out. “My dad had a record store, and he also rented out VHS tapes. Nobody had a VHS player back then, so the movies were just collecting dust on the shelves. But my brother and I had a VCR at home, so we got to watch them all – and we wore out those cassettes. One of them was Tron. A perk was that my dad had merchandise in the store, so I got a Tron poster. I had it up in my room. In this movie, I’ve included an homage to that poster from my childhood home – there’s a shot of Jared when he’s being beamed up that nods to it.”

When we last spoke to Rønning, it was about his latest Disney film, Young Woman and the Sea. At the time, he was driving between his short-term rental apartment in Vancouver and Bridge Studios in nearby Burnaby, where he was filming Tron: Ares. As the director of major Hollywood productions, including Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017) and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019), Rønning spends long stretches away from home and family. He has two daughters, aged 18 and 20, from a previous relationship, who live in Norway, and two young sons with his wife, American activist and socialite Amanda Hearst. Everyone was at the premiere, he notes, “apart from the baby.”

“It’s really horrible,” he admits about being away during long shoots. “That’s what it is. It’s almost impossible to be both a father and a filmmaker. So it's like a roller coaster. That's how I see my parenting. I’m not present, but when I am, I’m very present. I just feel lucky that somehow we’ve managed to land on our feet. Maybe I didn’t deserve that, but this house is so full of love. My first children love my new children. I don’t quite know how to describe it, but it’s really big for me that we’re such an amazing gang.”

Tonight, that gang is set to watch Tron: Ares again, this time at a movie theatre at Universal Studios. “I’m actually going to go buy our tickets,” he says. “I’m just happy we’re all here now and that we're going to go to Universal and have fun, and then tomorrow we will be going back to Europe and deal with the plumbing, you know.”