By GustavoLeao / 15:15, 27 September 2009 / Star Trek: Nemesis

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The July August 2009 issue of Star Trek Magazine features an exclusive interview with Star Trek movie writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman and here are more excerpts from the article.

You've added certain wrinkles to the relationships. Was the Spock/Uhura romance something you felt was there all the time, or was it something specific to this timeline version of the characters?

RO: We have sensed an undercurrent of that in some of the episodes that we saw. I think it was a subtext there, but the relationship is certainly unique to this timeline. In the original series, the first interracial kiss ever on television was between Kirk and Uhura, and it seemed that one of the themes we were playing with in this was because it's a changed timeline, what might be some of the fun differences? That was clearly one of the fun differences. What if, instead of the ladies man getting the prize of Uhura's attention, we let it be a way to humanize Spock?

AK: We knew the relationship was going to be controversial but context is everything in those decisions. The reveal that they have been together comes hopefully organically in a moment where Spock is suffering. You have just watched him go through this incredible trauma, and the fact that she's there to comfort him is sort of what the audience wants to do, especially since he can't show emotion - you so desperately want him to just have a hug. When Uhura does that, I think you're taken aback by the choice but also kind of grateful that Spock has a valve for all the emotions he is repressing. We were hopefully pacing the audience into accepting the boldness of that change.

Do you anticipate a backlash from fans?

RO: Not the majority, no. I think most of them will go with it. A 15 per cent vocal minority maybe.

AK: And you can argue context. You may not like the choice, but I think it's done as organically as we could imagine revealing that.

For the first time, we learn about Jim Kirk's father. As far as you're concerned, what happened in the original timeline? The Kelvin returned to Earth, Winona Kirk delivered Jim in Iowa, and George disappeared off in another ship?

RO: Yes, in the original timeline, we figured they made it back and Kirk was actually born in Iowa, but because the ship was attacked in our movie, he was born prematurely in space, in battle. We thought that was another interesting twist to what was semi-established. If he was born in the cornfields of Iowa once upon a time, the opposite of that is he's born in battle in space.

AK: At one point in conceiving of this, we had thought of naming the ship the U.S.S. Iowa. That was going to be our nod to him being born in Iowa, but then we decided that was too radical.

RO: The idea is that his father would have gotten back, and he would have known him for some time as a child - but again, even if we hadn't done this incursion, we could have said that he died when he was eight for all we know.

Did you ever intend to include Christine Chapel?

AK: In our original, original draft we wrote some scenes with Nurse Chapel but ended up losing them. Even in our first draft it's not included. We originally had a flirtation between her and Spock: Nurse Chapel was obviously really obsessed with him and he was not giving her the time of day, which we thought was funny, but then we came onto the Spock/Uhura connection and that's why Nurse Chapel ended up by the wayside.

One character who's noticeably different between the original series and the movie is Captain Pike...

AK: Bruce Greenwood is phenomenal.

Was there pressure for you to include Pike, or did you need a father figure for Jim, and Pike was the right person in the right place?

AK: I think we immediately gravitated toward the idea that we ought to have Pike in the movie without having any context to how we were going to use him.

RO: He seemed to loom large in our minds - the first captain of the Enterprise. Who was that? Who was before Kirk? The idea that there could be a first captain before Kirk is slightly romantic mystery that's at the periphery of even some casual fans. It might have been [Paramount Pictures executive] Marc Evans who said we had to have Pike in there, as we were immediately like, yeah. Then we found exactly the perfect context for him. We always thought if it was going to be an origin story, then it made sense for Pike to be around, because we were going to see some sort of transition to Kirk as the captain of the Enterprise.

AK: It's a funny thing; sometimes the magic puzzle pieces fall into place by themselves. When it started to become a story about how Kirk had lost his father and needed one, it was immediately obvious that Pike was going to become his surrogate father. It never wavered from that. The relationship dynamic wasn't easy to write, but was very clear for us because it just fit.

This is a story of fathers and mothers. You could almost argue there's too much father and mother story in here, but that's kind of the point. Everyone has a father and a mother!

Karl Urban makes an incredible McCoy...

AK: He was one of those amazing casts, in that when he first came in you didn't think he really looked like Bones, and you couldn't really imagine him as Bones. He was the killer in The Bourne Ultimatum, he was in The Lord of the Rings, and we had worked with him on Hercules. Physically he couldn't be further from DeForest Kelley, but then he started reading - and he became Bones. It was staggering how much he understood intuitively and physically the spirit of Bones. We never looked back.

RO: It was the most surprising transformation.

On a side note, when Jim and Bones meet, where are they going from Riverside?

RO: To San Francisco.

So why are they going into space?

RO: Just a suborbital path to get there in five seconds. Or maybe they're taking a long way because they've got to pick up another couple of cadets. They're going suborbital - Hong Kong and then Frisco!

Anton Yelchin has said how much he was channelling Walter Koenig's performance from the original series - but where did the whizzkid side of his character come from?

RO: We picked that up from the original series. If you read the bios and the bible and all that stuff, Chekov was the youngest. I remember reading he was cast to capitalize on The Monkees' Davy Jones' popularity at the time. He was very much supposed to be the youngest one of the crew. We wondered how someone that young got to be there. He had to be a prodigy of some kind. It was a mix of finding out his origin and letting that spring into a character idea.

AK: What Anton does capture with Chekov is that I felt Chekov always seemed very worried. He had worry lines on his forehead! He was always thinking through the problem. I feel like Anton channelled that whole spirit, that whole "Oh, yai yai yai!" That is pure Chekov.

Leonard Nimoy has praised Zachary Quinto's performance, particularly the scene at the Vulcan Science Academy and the way he played "Live long and prosper." Is that how you saw the scene in your minds?

AK: Yes. The parenthetical direction in the script in the dialogue is "(F*** you)". That's exactly what he did.

THE ORIGINAL BEGINNING

Was the intention that Jim and Spock are the same age?

RO: No, they're three or four years apart.

Where did Spock's birth scene come originally?

AK: We shot the scene and ended up losing it for all the right reasons, but the movie originally started with the birth of Spock in terms of sequencing of their births. Spock was always first because he was four years older, then four years later came Kirk. But because of the way we ended up changing it in post, it does end up feeling like they're the same age. However when Kirk is taking the Kobayashi Maru, you see that Spock designed the test, and he's described as the most esteemed graduate, so you know he's already graduated.

So how did the movie originally started?

AK: The original opening was: the Paramount logo of the mountain comes on screen, then the mountain starts to tremble and explodes as it's ripped off into the sky. Suddenly the entire ground of Earth is destroyed - and you realize it's not Earth you're looking at, it's actually Romulus. From that, into the chaos of a planet being destroyed comes the Jellyfish being chased by Nero, and then we go through time. We never reveal in that original scene scriptwise that it was Spock in the Jellyfish. It was more about establishing Nero and why he's chasing the Jellyfish. Nero goes through the wormhole, it goes black, and you're at the birth of Spock.

The point was always to drop the audience in the middle of the story and have them catch up to it. For us as viewers, that's the most fun way to go into a movie, especially a movie about time travel. It just makes the mystery so delicious. We ended up maintaining the spirit of that by starting with the attack on the Kelvin. "What is this? Why are they being attacked?" You don't know what's happening right away, so you feel like you're trying to catch up to it.

AIDING THE DESIGN

How much did you indicate in the script how the Kelvin should look older than the Enterprise?

AK: We indicated that it was an older generation ship, so it did not have the same look. In the description, we were setting up when you reveal the Enterprise that it is a different class. There was a sense almost that you were starting on the ships from the original series. We wanted to feel that a bit in the texture of the Kelvin.

We spent a lot of time describing the feel of the Narada because it was going to be something you have never seen on Trek before.

RO: But you can never describe what [production designer] Scott [Chambliss] is going to ultimately come up with - he takes it to another level. But we do give a context for it, to give him the goals of what we're thinking, then he runs with it and turns it into his own thing.

AK: We're using adjectives - he's using steels. It's a very different game.

In terms of the timeline, the Enterprise creation doesn't tally with the original series where Pike's had the Enterprise for 11 years when Jim takes over. In this timeline is it running five years late?

RO: We always tried to figure out what the fan fiction explanation would be, and for that, it would be that after the death of George Kirk, the Riverside shipyards were commemorated in his honor, and that's why there's even a shipyard near his home. The Kelvin shuttlecraft escaped with telemetry from their encounter with the ship from the future, so Starfleet's development and construction plans were slightly altered. Hence everything being potentially more advanced, slightly ahead of schedule.

Did you simply script that scenes happened on the Bridge of the Enterprise, or did you give a description of what you wanted it to look like?

RO: We were faithful in their positions and the basic shape of the layout but certainly we knew that the Bridge was going to be something that would require all hands on deck in order to be able to conceptualize. I don't know that we spent hours poring over every detail of describing the Bridge.

AK: We gave broad strokes, but we can't take any credit away from Scott and his brilliant design team. It is one of the most brilliantly production-designed movies I've seen in a really long time.

How much day to day input did you have into the Countdown comic book?

RO: We came up with the story. It's very much of a targeted prequel to the movie. The comic book writers are outside our door just down the hall so it was a "K/O" production. We are doing a lot more stuff, and a lot more Trek stuff as well. I'll leave it to our comic partners to discuss that.

How much were you involved with Alan Dean Foster's novelization?

RO: We had a great meeting with him. He read the script and he said "When I read things, I have to be honest with my criticisms," and he gave his couple of well-thought Trek notes, but he said, "Don't worry - I'll help you cover some of these gaps in the book." He's done Transformers as well, but we'd never actually met him before, so to finally get to sit down with him, and him being an amazing sci-fi writer on his own, the idea that he would cover our screenplay was great.

Would you be interested in annotating a version of the screenplay for publication?

RO: That's a good idea, I'm sure they'll do that.

Looking forward to the sequel, how far are you with ideas for it?

AK: We have some ideas.

RO: We've talked about it very informally over a glass of wine here or there, but we haven't really dived in because we're waiting for this experience to come to closure, and really see what fans in particular think work and didn't work.

Has there been anything in the reactions so far to the movie that you weren't expecting?

RO: I'm always surprised when anybody likes anything!

What's been the most rewarding part of doing this for you?

AK: The night we screened the movie in Austin was the first time we had seen a movie with an audience. I was sitting with Leonard Nimoy on my right, Bob next to Leonard, and Damon Lindelof on my left - and there was this very intense moment of the different generations of Trek coming together for the fans that everybody has made this movie for. Hearing the fans alternate between applause, some crying and a lot of laughter, and having people come up to us afterwards literally in tears because they were so grateful: we didn't expect that reaction. The reason that we did it was because Star Trek means as much to them as it always has to us, and to know that they felt we did them proud is definitely the whole enchilada.

RO: Hear, hear!

The full interview can be found on issue 19 of the official Star Trek Magazine.

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