Startrek

• RO: As a teenager I discovered The Next Generation. That was one of my favorite shows. I used to love The Equalizer. Who didn't love The A-Team and Knight Rider? I loved L.A. Law.
  
  AK: Three's Company was another one. The Six Million Dollar Man. The Incredible Hulk was really big too. Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley… I had all the same touch points as Bob, minus The Next Generation. When I met Bob, he was deeply into The Next Generation – in fact when I met him, he had an Enterprise phone that would play the red alert from the Bridge when it rang. I'd actually watched the original series as a kid, and really liked it, but by the time I was watching it, it was on heavy repeats, because it had obviously been off the air for a while.

  I think part of why we connected was that we had so many of the same touch points growing up. Oddly, we lived very far away from each other, but there was an immediate connection to all the things that we loved, and that's how we became drawn to each other and writing so quickly.

• Many of those series are currently the subjects of revivals. What do you think it was about those shows that grabbed the audience where current stuff doesn't as much?

• RO: I think it was more escapist than a lot of stuff that's on right now. I think genre used to be on prime time, and you used to be able to do these strange shows on prime time. Then it suddenly became doctors and lawyers and cops for a long time. I think there's an appetite to see that escapism again on a bigger scale than was ever possible on television.

• Bob, you're well known as a major Trekker. How much Trek did you watch in the years before you got this gig?

• RO: I'd watch it when it was on, but after The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, I really got into the books. I remember passing a couple of them over to Alex just to verify that I wasn't completely insane. I think the ones I sent over to you, Kurtzman, you loved too: there was Prime Directive and Spock's World…
  AK: And also Best Destiny.

  RO: I got into reading the books because I couldn't get enough out of what had already been done. You could take a book and read it for weeks.

• What do you think the show's attraction was for its contemporary audience?

• RO: It was the perfect blend of what was truly happening in the 1960s: you've got Kennedy, the Beatles, the mod movement, all these amazing social things. Star Trek took on all those things: Kirk as Kennedy, Uhura and the way she dressed, the civil rights movement, normalizing relations with the Soviet Union. All those issues were subliminally tackled on an extremely fun escapist show. I think you can often get away with discussing current events a lot more when you are disguising it in something like science fiction than you can if you do a straight-up current events social issues show.

  And then of course Kennedy saying, “Let's go to the moon!” was a major part of the 1960s. To have a show come on that extrapolated infinitely further than something that hadn't even happened yet, according to Kennedy's vision, was so forward thinking, and yet so of its time. It was the perfect blend.

• There's a sense of wonder about Star Trek…

• RO: Absolutely – it's right in the tagline, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”: the idea of truly discovering this stuff. By the 1960s it certainly felt like the entire planet had been mapped and we knew everything we were going to know. Since the 1940s physicists had been saying that physics was over and science was figured out – of course they were wrong. But to then have a show that said, “We don't know everything at all, not even a little bit. There's a gigantic universe out there. Who knows what's out there?” It was unbelievably exciting.

• And you've worked those elements into the story you're telling?

• RO: No, ours takes place completely in a basement!

  AK: The other thing the show was about was a family. There was a great hybrid of everything Bob's just described and the emotional value of how this family functions together in the face of these problems that they face every week. Each character had a very specific relationship with every other character in the show. That was something you could live in for – obviously – 40 years. I think it was a big part of the draw, and I maintain it's still a big part of the draw.

• So how did you get involved with the new version?

• RO: [Paramount production executive] Marc Evans was the first to call us about it, maybe even a year before we did Mission: Impossible III with J.J.
  AK: I was having dinner with Evans – we have a mutual friend - and he said, “What do you think about Star Trek?” I didn't know how to respond. I called Bob right away.

  RO: We just didn't believe it. They were saying they were going to maybe reinvigorate it with a new team. “Yeah sure, call us if you're ever serious!” We thought that our chance to ever play with Star Trek had passed. We thought that was never going to be a possibility. Time went on and we talked to Evans a couple of times, shoved some ideas around, then we did Mission: Impossible III with J.J., and obviously he'd done Lost with Damon. When everyone saw how effectively we all worked together and how we were all intending to work together, someone, probably Evans, said, “Why don't you guys, all as a team jump on to it? How would that be?” We thought that would be great. We all landed on it at the same time, right around the time that Mission Impossible was coming out.

• How did you think Star Trek was regarded at that point? Do you think it was a show that just played to a niche audience?

• RO: It had become that, because it required so much foreknowledge of what had happened previously to understand what you were watching. For all of us fans that is fantastic but for a more general audience, not so much. I think it had become very much a continuation of a highly serialized world.

• So why did you decide to go back to the iconic characters of the original series? Did you ever consider taking things on a generation in the same way that Gene did when he created Star Trek: The Next Generation?

• RO: We all had to agree what area would interest us, and we're all fans of varying degrees. Everyone could agree that the original series was something that we all loved dearly. Also there seemed to be the fact that Roddenberry had done exactly as you described, so it would have been doing it again. Thirdly, there seemed to be a genuine gap in what we knew about these characters' origins. It wasn't just remaking an origin story, it was telling it for the first time. There seemed to be unexplored territory. We couldn't believe it when we sat down to really think about it.

  AK: It was shocking that after 40 years that there was still a story to tell about the characters that started it all. That alone was a reason to do it.

  RO: Creatively that was a reason to do it and on the other side of it, we wanted to introduce Star Trek again to a new generation and the people who had been around who felt that they were never able to jump onto the bandwagon because they felt they'd missed too much. The idea of making an introduction that anyone can come into, and find out what it is that all of us love about Star Trek, without having to know anything about Star Trek, was something we just couldn't pass up. The two of those together made it inescapable.

• Do you think the greenlight for the project was helped by the success of Casino Royale and Batman Begins?

• RO: I think so. It must have definitely been in the minds of the studio when we went in and pitched them what we wanted to do. It definitely made it easier for us to not be seen as crazy people for wanting to do this.

• You've said that Leonard Nimoy's involvement was crucial…

• RO: For Alex and I, that was literally our starting point. We started with him in mind and extrapolated from there. He was still alive in continuity – if you're going to go back to the original characters and the original Mr. Spock is someone you can get to, well… He's always been one of our favorite characters, and to our minds somehow the moral center of the show. Paradoxically he's the logical one. Logic is often associated with cruelty and cold hard fact, yet he is the moral center of the show.

  We also knew we were going to face a great deal of skepticism from fans. “Who are these slackers coming in to mess with our Star Trek?” We hoped that if we could generate a story that Nimoy was crucial to telling, and if we could then convince him to appear in it, that would go a long way towards establishing that the spirit of Trek was in good hands. We counted on Nimoy to be our barometer as to whether or not we were going in the right direction and his blessing is a dream come true.

• He seems to be actively proselytizing for the film…

• RO:  It's unbelievable. Alex and I have to Vulcan pinch each other every day! It was such a long shot too, and we didn't particularly have a back up plan!

• What would you have done if  Nimoy had said no?

• RO: I don't know!
  
  AK: The thing is, before we started writing the movie, we had the concept. We had a

  compass for where we knew we wanted to go that obviously Leonard was a critical part of. We sat down with him, all of us together, and talked him through the story. It was one of the most, if not the most, amazing meetings we've ever had in our lives. Here you are, pitching Star Trek to Leonard Nimoy, and you're talking about not only reinvolving a character that he has not played in a long time, but creating a new iteration of that character, and asking him to hand it off. That's like the scene in Unforgiven, where Munny is asked to slip his spurs and his guns back on and go back out. The thing that was really amazing for us was that he seemed to respond very emotionally to the ideas we were pitching to him. Part of it was the story, but part of it was that he knew he was talking to people who were going to lay down and die to protect everything that is good about Star Trek.

  RO: We told him point blank in the room, “We can't do this without you.” When he left that meeting he had not yet committed but all of us afterwards had a debrief and thought we'd got him. If we could deliver what we promised him, we thought we had him. We had a little bit of an inkling that we were heading in the right direction.

  AK: That was a great moment, because it gave us the confidence to feel that we could do it. I'm not sure we would have had the confidence if he hadn't blessed us. Then we wrote the script without his commitment. We wrote the script based on the meeting. Then came the absolute terror moment of him actually reading the script. If he read it and thought it was terrible then we would have been really bummed.

• How much has the story adapted during the preproduction process?

• RO: The essential basic story has never changed. Details have gotten better and better, little vignettes here and there. The essential thing that we pitched Nimoy has not changed that much.

• Has the resolution of the writers strike allowed you to do tweaks and reshoots?

• that is generally where you see the most changes. As you get into the body of the rest of the movie, you find little things that you want to make pay off at the end. We've been lucky that we've been able to address the part of the movie that you typically want to address in production anyway, because it's the part that's most in the future when you start.

• You've got an incredible cast – as Simon Pegg told us, it's a “Who's Who of Who's Next…”

• RO: It's amazing, our cast is unbelievable…

• Have you seen new aspects of the characters emerging through the way the cast are playing the parts that you hadn't seen before?

• RO: Yes, and that's across the board – absolutely. They're all bringing something of themselves and their own experiences of talking to the original cast members themselves, and of doing their own research in their own way. Some of them did not want to see much before they took the role, some did. Most have been very gracious in saying that everything they needed to know was in the script itself. That's nice. They're all bringing their own flavor to it, and I think as, God willing, the series progresses, they will continue to add their flavor to it, and recreate these characters in their own images.
  
  AK: I would say too that it's a little bit like how we approached the script: you have to be 100% true to what's come before you, and you can't violate that, yet you have to bring a unique spin that is fresh and is ours. If the actors went into these parts and said “We're going to do imitations of the people who'd come before,” it would have not felt genuine. I think we would have run a huge risk of everyone saying that they were just imitating. Because we have this new territory to explore, I think it allowed us to be consistent, yet we were showing sides of these characters that people hadn't seen.

  RO: We told the actors that these are Shakespearean characters – they're so engrained in the culture, and they're so elemental that they don't belong to any one person per se. A different performer can come in with a different aspect and they can still be Shakespeare. Star Trek to us is the same: these characters are engrained in our subconscious, but there are a lot of levels too that can be found by different performers.

• The novels which characterize the leads by simply parodying the actors' performances never work…

• AK: You just used the perfect word – we would have risked parody, and that's the last thing that we  wanted to do. It is about bringing something new to the table.

• The only footage that the general public has seen is the teaser, which wasn't at all what people had been expecting. What was the logic behind that?

• RO: Many people in the general audience, or those who don't know Star Trek, think that it is some parallel universe, or some fantasy land that is not connected to our world. One of the main goals was to say, “No, Star Trek, the idea of an intergalactic Federation, the idea of getting out there, could be just round the corner for us. The future is not nearly as far away as it used to be in the 1960s when the show first premiered.” The idea was to truly connect it and ground it to the reality of where we are, and say this is our possible future. I don't think that's been connected in a lot of people's minds before – and I think that led to the idea of “Let's see it actually being constructed before our eyes with Kennedy's words ringing over it:” truly an extrapolation of where this all started in the 1960s with the space program. Then obviously the cleverness of “Under Construction”, the idea that we're still making it.

• The idea of the Enterprise being built on Earth surprised many – the belief has always been that the Enterprise was, if not built, certainly assembled in space…

• RO: Nothing in that teaser precludes it being assembled in space. This is a debate that we got into online: a lot of people thought that there was no way that it could sustain itself in Earth's gravity. Yet if you read your Physics of Star Trek, you know that gravity is essentially a warping of space itself, so warp speed must be extreme gravity. For the ship to survive that, it can certainly survive one Earth's atmosphere of gravity.

• Despite the aura of secrecy about the production, you've been chatting with the fans online. How do those things fit together?

• RO: What we've always said is that we're open about the process. We want people to understand the thinking behind things. We're open about how we put together surprise parties, we just don't want to tell you when your surprise party is going to be and who's going to be there! We're very open about how we're going to buy the balloons and the kind of food we have…
  
  AK: It actually goes back to our first job on Hercules and Xena – that was the beginning of online communication. I remember we were doing webchats right at the very start.

  It altered with Transformers, which has a very sizeable fan base. There were all these rumors swirling around about choices that had been made, and talk online that people were angry that the core of Transformers was somehow being violated. It was met initially with the same sort of paranoid “Let's just keep them out of it and hopefully they'll like the movie” attitude, but we went, “Wait a minute. We've got nothing to hide. All the choices that we're making are entirely consistent. You're talking to two fans here – it's not like we're suddenly picking this up for the first time and ruining it. We've got nothing to hide. Let's get out online and talk to people and tell them why we're making these choices. We don't have to reveal plot points.” In the same way, it's now being confirmed that Star Trek is about the original bridge crew, we went out and we confirmed, “Here are the robots you are going to see in Transformers.” That doesn't really give away anything about the movie except you get to look forward to seeing how we're going to do it.

  Once we did that and started engaging with fans on line, everyone understood that it was a process that we were giving a tremendous amount of thought to. I think that's the most important thing: everyone would have an absolute right to be furious with us if we were just going into it blithely without thinking about context or history.

  RO: By engaging with the fans, we get to hear specifically what they want. Their influence is therefore felt. They don't need to know what we're doing to be able to tell us what they want and what they expect, and what they think is important. That's really where the fan interaction comes in because we do hear it and do read it.

• Surely there's danger of a vocal minority skewing the way things are approached?

• RO: That's how we keep balance. Alex does not particularly sample those things. I get to be the dork who says, “I don't know… us vocal fans think this” and Alex gets to go, “Shut up! That's 3% of you on one site.” I think there's balance: if we were all getting on there every minute of the day, it would be a problem.

  On both cases, we did not open ourselves to the process of listening in until we knew what we wanted to do. We were halfway through both scripts before we intended to engage anybody. It can affect a little bit – a flavor, certain things – but we have to know what we want to do first. We don't go on the internet to find out what we should do: we go to see what the mood is, and find out about our fans and include them in the process as much as we can.

• How much have you got down on set?

• RO: As much as we can, all the time.

• What was your reaction when you saw the Enterprise bridge for the first time?

• RO: It's insane. It's out of body. It's truly like stepping into a dream.

• Did you have photos taken of yourselves in Kirk's chair?

• RO: No, we thought that was a bit sacrilegious, although I know others did. We felt that that chair is for Kirk.

  AK: The other thing that was amazing was not just going on the bridge, having reinvented it, but to go on the bridge with former cast members who lived there for so many years of their lives. As great as it was to feel responsible for creating it, it was twice as amazing to look at the faces of these people and seeing through their eyes both their own history and the future. That was really emotional for everybody.

• What's the situation regarding William Shatner's involvement? You've said that you wanted to find a way to involve him in a way that makes sense. Do you think it's likely?

• RO: Don't think it's likely. But never say never. We went through the same process that we went through with Nimoy: we pitched him what we were thinking early on before we wrote it, and got his blessing as well, which was amazing. We talked in the meeting about the fact that Star Trek had killed Kirk and that that was going to be a big stumbling block to an organic reintroduction of the character, but that we would do our best. Subsequently he said he would require a slightly larger part than maybe the movie could sustain, so we've kept him in the back of our minds, and now with another year to go, who knows?

• Are any other original cast members in the film?

• RO: (silence then) Who knows, really? Who can say?

• What was your reaction to the change in release date?

• AK: We're actually sort of thrilled about it, frankly, because we get to spend more time in post. It's tough to finish a movie that you've been scrambling to complete and then scramble to get it out in time without enough time to live in it and breathe in it – show it to people, get feedback, and that's really important.

  RO: We want the effects to be as good as they can be. Simultaneously for me, it felt like being told that I'm actually going to be pregnant another six months – it was “oh no!” But we took them at their word that it was because they wanted to have a bigger splash with it, and they felt that that date reflected that ability. We're not going to argue. We didn't believe it fully. We were waiting for the next day to see if we were going to get a call to say we were going to reshoot everything – and then we didn't get that call! They like the movie!

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