J.J. Abrams, executive producer of "Lost" and "Fringe," has a newly finished project coming out this summer, and it's surrounded by much buzz. "Star Trek," one of 2009's biggest summer blockbusters, has been rejuvenated by Abrams and his team, who spiced it up with a young cast, big-time special effects and an in-depth storyline that delves into the origins of the classic characters. Abrams graciously answered the questions of college students from all over the country, letting them into his mind, which some consider to be the mind of a genius.
Q: How was your relationship with the studio, who gave you a huge budget to bring an old franchise back to life, when it came to creative control over the project? JA: My guess is that any studio is bottom line driven and any studio looks to exploit the properties they own and take advantage of what they've already got and maximize the potential that they have. None of what I just described has a creative bone in it, meaning the drive to make money is one thing and the desire and passion to create something creatively worthwhile is another. Of course, in the best of all worlds, they go together and they become one incredibly powerful idea. Case in point, Christopher Nolan and the Batman films. Warner Brothers wanted to take their comic book franchises, especially Batman, and maximize that and make a ton of money. What they were brilliant enough to do was enlist Christopher Nolan whose passion for Batman is unrivaled. So his skill and filmmaking prowess combined with Warner Brothers' desire to do it right and to make a buck [created] this sort of perfect combination of both filmmaking passion and business desire. Paramount knew they were going to do "Star Trek," that they couldn't do it on the cheap, and they knew...they had to do it and just blow it up and do something brand new. If I had gone to them and asked to do it, I don't know if I would have gotten that kind of support. But they came to me, asked me if I wanted to produce a new version of "Star Trek," and as someone who was not a fan of it to begin with I felt like I was probably the wrong guy to do it. I don't have that passion for it but I'm very interested in the idea of creating a version of "Star Trek" that does appeal to me. So I called the writers that I have worked with before, both of which are fans of "Star Trek," and I called my producing partners and we just started working on the story together. And I found myself falling in love with it. And by the time we had a script and I read it, I just thought "Holy shit, this movie is everything I love about movies." It's passionate, it's funny, it's exciting, it's got great action, it's intimate, it's emotional, it's got huge spectacle, it's optimistic. And I thought, "Maybe if I want non-fans of 'Star Trek' to see the movie maybe a non-fan of 'Star Trek' should direct it." And my love for it was about the script, about these characters, and that was something that the studio supported and they gave us the budget to do it. Of course, it's less money than we had for "MI3" and it's about 10 times more ambitious of a shoot, so we had to use every trick and technique that I had learned in doing television to bring this thing to the screen. It was all about sort of clever corner-cutting, you know, putting everything on the screen. Q: What aspects of the chemistry of the cast of the original series did you seek to recreate in this film? JA: To me it was important to take the spirit of "Star Trek" which, again, I never really got into when I was a kid, it never really worked for me. But I've come to understand it and appreciate it and see what the fuss is about. And I think that the key element is the characters. There are these terrific characters at the core. And [I didn't want] the actors to do impersonations of the original actors but to bring their own stuff to it. But that was the beginning. Secondly, I love the optimism of the world that Gene Rodenberry created. For people who don't know about "Star Trek" or for fans who do, the idea that it's a vision of our future in which we're alive, we're collaborating across racial lines, political lines, religious lines, that there is this inherent optimism for this world that I think some would say is naive. I think it's actually incredibly refreshing. Finally, I think that the sense of humor and adventure that the original promised were always limited in resources, so they were never able to deliver the kind of adventure that the show often discussed. And because discussion was cheap, there was a lot of discussion in the early shows. This version of "Star Trek" is a very different animal. It's much faster paced, sexier, I think even funnier and more adventure-delivering than what they were allowed to do in the past.
Q: The film looks into the origins of the characters. Do you think longtime fans will appreciate this added dimension to the characters that they have come to know and love? How do you think they will react to it? JA:Yeah, it does. One of the things that I knew that we needed to avoid was the prequel dilemma. For example, with the "Star Wars" movies, I don't care how exciting and suspenseful and dangerous seeming that sequence is. I know that Ewan McGregor lives because I've seen Alec Guiness play the same part later. That's true of any prequel. We came up with a story device that eliminated that problem, but essentially we have our own unique timeline. I think that the fans of the show are going to and, have in my experience, been thrilled not only to see their characters live again but to see how and why these characters came together in a way that I think is incredibly fun and entertaining. If you've never seen "Star Trek" it's a perfect point of entry because you don't need to have known anything, seen anything, heard anything to get on board. The tightrope we knew we had to walk was to take that incredibly vocal, passionate but ultimately minority of moviegoers fan base and honor them. These are people who for however many years, in some cases 43, have loved this story and these characters, so we could not slap them in the face. We had to honor them, respect them and show our gratitude. On the other hand, it's a small group of people and we want to make a movie for the rest of us. The idea was tell a story that from the ground up is accessible to the audience, relatable, fun, sexy, entertaining, hopefully a thrill ride, and if you're already a fan then you get tons of rewards in references, in scenes and things that you always wanted to see, never got to see, things you get to see again. Our ambition was to work for both fans of "Star Trek" and people like myself who are not.
Q: A lot of the cast members, especially John Cho, Simon Pegg and Tyler Perry, are really known for their comedic roles in past films. Is "Star Trek" going to have a comedic side to it? JA: Star Trek has been parodied so many times, so I knew if we did not have a sense of humor built into this movie then we were going to get laughed at. The people would find a way to sort of take a serious version and just disregard it. The key for me was in casting the movie to make sure that we had actors with a great sense of humor. Simon Pegg was a no-brainer because I had worked with him before and just adore him. But Zachary Quinto is insanely funny. Chris Pine has a huge sense of humor. John Cho is obviously off the charts funny. Eric Bana, who plays a bad guy, used to be a standup comic in Australia before he got into movies. Bruce Greenwood who plays Pike is kind of the dad, you know, the sort of father figure in the movie. There is no one more absurdly funny than that man. It was just a wonderful thing to allow the natural spark, that sense of humor to, kind of through osmosis, seep into the movie, but even tangibly in text be part of the script.
Q: How do these kind of "out there" ideas for television shows develop in your head to become concrete? JA: Essentially everything develops in a different way and with "Lost," it started with that idea of plane crash survivors and I thought the version that would be interesting to me would be if where they landed wasn't just an island and that what you would discover was that there was a hatch and there was a whole history to the island and this place. And what it meant to the characters was not what you would expect. "Fringe" came out of discussing with Alex Kurtzman and Bob Orci what would be a show we would love to watch. And we were all influenced by things like the "Twilight Zone," "X-Files," "Night Stalker," the Kronenberg movies, "Altered States." There were certain things that we loved and you just kind of think what's the thing that you want to see, and that to me is the key to developing any story as well as you can.
Q: How involved are you with "Lost"? JA: My involvement in "Lost" is practically nonexistent. During the first season I left "Lost" to go do "Mission Impossible" and then "Cloverfield" and "Fringe" and "Star Trek." So I've been busy with other projects while Damon Lindelof, with whom I created the series, has stayed with Carlton Cuse and Jack Bender who's the directing producer. They've basically been writing the show like, crazy brilliantly. So I watch the show now almost more like a viewer than a producer because their involvement is complete and my involvement is basically zero. In terms of the end game, one of the genius decisions that Damon had was to basically coerce ABC into giving us an end date so that he would know how fast to run. Damon basically convinced ABC to say okay, six years and you're out, which allowed them to start to kind of reverse engineer the storytelling to know where and how the show was going to end. They have a great ending, it's a spectacular end, I'm sure things will adjust as they go.
