J.J. Abrams is a busy man. In addition to working on his television shows ‘Fringe’ and ‘Lost’ (though he says his involvement ‘is practically non-existent’ nowadays) and guest-editing the latest edition of ‘Wired,’ Abrams has also tackled, oh, only the most adored science fiction franchise of all time with his new movie ‘Star Trek.’ The MUSE chatted with him to make sure he hasn’t yet suffered a nervous breakdown and found out some other cool stuff, too.
The MUSE: How do you develop your ideas to become a working concept?
J.J. Abrams: When I was approached to do a show about people who survive on a plane crash my first thought was, ‘This is going to be weird’ . . . Essentially everything develops in a different way, and with ‘Lost’ it started with that idea of plane crash survivors, and what was interesting to me would be where they landed wasn’t just an island, and you’d discover that there was a hatch and there was a whole history to this island . . . ‘Fringe’ came out of discussing . . . what would be a show we would want to watch. You just kind of think what are the things you want to see, and that’s the key of developing any story as well as you can.
The MUSE: Now you’re promoting ‘Star Trek,’ which is, of course, a prequel to the cult franchise. Did you have any difficulties melding your new and creative ideas with this already beloved canon?
JA: Whenever anyone has said, ‘You can do anything you want,’ I tend to find it much more difficult to respond because there’s no walls to sort of bounce off of . . . Once you have rules, you can kind of go anywhere, do anything. So I know it sounds silly, but the rules of ‘Star Trek,’ which I was not really familiar with because I wasn’t a huge fan to begin with, were actually a wonderful thing because it gave us a kind of playground and once we were in the playground we could do whatever we wanted and go nuts. And I think part of the fun also is taking the established characters and playing with expectations. For example, when you meet Chris Pine, who is this kind of hunky sort of punk, and you know he’s going to be Captain Kirk, but when you meet him, he’s hardly a captain.
MUSE: The movie is essentially an ensemble piece with a huge cast of characters, from Kirk and Spock to Sulu and Chekov. Did you gain an attachment to any of them while working on ‘Star Trek’?
JA: I think that they were all interesting to me by the time we were shooting. At the beginning I was sort of hard pressed to kind of connect with any of them, but now I feel like I love them all. I assume that selfishly I was most looking forward to Scotty because I love Simon Pegg so much and we worked together on ‘Mission: Impossible III’ and I was just excited to work with him again. I knew he was funny and great. Obviously working with Leonard Nimoy was a thrill — even though I wasn’t a fan going in, I appreciated that he was a legend . . . As I worked on the movie, honestly every character. . . each of them had such a distinct voice and each actor who played them I thought did such an extraordinary job.
MUSE: Did you have difficulties reconciling the needs of the studio with your own creative vision?
JA: My guess that any studio is bottom-line driven and any studio looks to exploit the property they own and take advantage of what they’ve already got and maximize the potential that they have. None of what I’ve 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 . . . Paramount knew they were going to do ‘Star Trek’ and they knew they had to do something brand new . . . They came to me asking if I wanted to produce a new version of ‘Star Trek’ but as a was not a fan of it to begin with, I felt like I was probably the wrong guy to do it . . . I called the writers I had worked with before, both of whom were fans of ‘Star Trek’ . . . and by the time we had a script, I read it, I just thought, ‘Holy s–t, this movie is everything I love about movies.’
MUSE: Many of the actors cast in this movie, from Simon Pegg (‘Shaun of the Dead’) to John Cho (‘Harold and Kumar’), are better known for comedy than science fiction. Was that intentional? Is this movie supposed to be funny?
JA: The great thing about this movie for me is that it has all these elements that I love about movies. There’s obviously great action and great spectacle, there’s romance and real emotion’hellip; but one of these things that was key for me was humor, because ‘Star Trek’ has been parodied so many times. And it’s just been mocked to death . . . I knew if we did not have a sense of humor built into this movie . . . then we would get laughed at, then people would find a way to take a self-serious version and just disregard it. It was really important to be funny and the key to me was in casting the movie to get actors with a great sense of humor . . . We had this crazy funny cast and it was just this wonderful thing to kind of allow the natural sense of humor to, through osmosis . . . seep into the movie . . . I think that when you see the movie you’ll see that the stakes are high, the stakes are real, but so is the humor and humanity.
The MUSE: Many of the actors cast in this movie, from Simon Pegg (‘Shaun of the Dead’) to John Cho (‘Harold and Kumar’), are better known for comedy than science fiction. Was that intentional? Is this movie supposed to be funny?
JA: The great thing about this movie for me is that it has all these elements that I love about movies. There’s obviously great action and great spectacle, there’s romance and real emotion’hellip; but one of these things that was key for me was humor, because ‘Star Trek’ has been parodied so many times. And it’s just been mocked to death . . . I knew if we did not have a sense of humor built into this movie . . . then we would get laughed at, then people would find a way to take a self-serious version and just disregard it. It was really important to be funny and the key to me was in casting the movie to get actors with a great sense of humor . . . We had this crazy funny cast and it was just this wonderful thing to kind of allow the natural sense of humor to, through osmosis . . . seep into the movie . . . I think that when you see the movie you’ll see that the stakes are high, the stakes are real, but so is the humor and humanity.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
