By GustavoLeao / 04:05, 27 December 2012 / Star Trek: Nemesis

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Collider posted an extensive interview with Star Trek Into Darkness co-writer Damon Lindelof and here are few excerpts,

What was the writing process like on the sequel versus the first film?   Did anything change?   Did anybody’s responsibilities change?   Were they similar?

Lindelof: It’s different on every movie no matter what you do and I think that J.J., Bob and myself, we’re all TV writers at heart, so the majority of the writing process happens in- on a TV show, we’re referred to as the writers room where all of you are basically sitting and hashing out character stuff and story stuff, and actual story structure.  That’s all happening in group think, but then when it comes to the actual writing of the script or the writing of materials, whether it’s the outline or the scene, you’re spinning off and going and doing that stuff.  So the continuity of the movie, it started with J.J., Alex, Bob, myself  and even Bryan Burk, J.J. and Bryan are not credited writers but we’re all producers on the movie, the creative vision of the movie.  We all talk about what are the big picture story ideas that we want to reflect in the movie?   What is the story that we’re telling this time?   What’s happening with the characters, what’s happening in the story, what if any thematic feel are we going for here?   Let’s get all our ducks in a row on that stuff and you have those meetings and then you go off and riff off of them and then you come back and say, “O.K.  we’re now pitching the following storyline.” Then you pull some things out, make some things better, rubberstamp some things, and then you go off and repeat the process. 

When you go off its different permutations every time because Alex was directing People Like Us for a certain part of the period I just described to you, that was Orci and I doing the majority of that heavy lifting, then I would get distracted and Orci and Kurtzman would fill in the blank, then Bob would go off and then Alex and I would work together, and sometimes only just one of us would be working and so we generated the first draft of the script.  So literally I could not point to the script that we shot and say, “Oh, Bob wrote this scene, I wrote this scene or Alex wrote this scene, or I remember when the three of us wrote this scene.” By the time the movie gets shot every single person has weighed in on it multiple times and we reach a consensus.  Alex, Bob and I are getting screenwriting credit but obviously all of it is in service of J.J.’s vision as director.  He doesn’t take a writing credit, but he’s one of the primary storytellers in there too.  And I don’t think anybody is really precious about the idea.  Very often we get into disagreements about what should happen in a scene.  Always respectfully, it’s not like there are blue states and red states.  I think we’re all sort of aligned in terms of what it is we’re going for.  The thing we talk most about in terms of what is our allegiance to the original Trek?   What is our level of fandom?  You have Orci on one end of the pole where he’s read the novelizations in addition to seeing all of Voyager, DS9, Enterprise, all of the movies; everything.  And then ne step to the right of him is myself.  Well, multiple steps because I stopped watching; I’ve seen all of the original, Next Generation, some of DS9, but no Voyager, no Enterprise, no novelizations, and I stopped really going to the Trek movies after, probably Insurrection was the last one I saw.  Were there a couple after that?

I’ve lost count of the Next Generation movies; there are like four.

Lindelof: Yeah, so there was First Contact then Generations.  First Contact may be the last on I saw.  I saw the one where they were with the Borg, that’s First Contact.

Yeah.

Lindelof: That’s probably the last one I saw.  Bob’s knowledge, particularly of the original series, which is probably the most important thing to have knowledge about for these movies, is second to none.  I can’t quote those episodes chapter and verse like he can.  Then you have Kurtzman and J.J. in the same kind of field of saw the original series and all the original series movies and liked them.  And then you have Bryan Burke who really had no entry point to Trek whatsoever; and he wants to stay that way so that he can be our bouncing point for the audience who has no inside knowledge of what proceeded.

Lindelof: Well, it changed in terms of anytime you cast any actor, even though you think that Kirk is a fixed thing and you’re not going to change him at all, when we cast Chris we rewrote the part to basically match up with what we viewed Chris was doing.  Because these parts are not off the rack suits where you put them on and they fit like a glove.  You make the suit and then the actor puts it on and then you say, “I’ve got to now tailor this thing so it fits them perfectly.” So Benedict was no different.  The kind of actor that he is-

Which is spectacular.

Lindelof: Which is spectacular, necessitated a certain shift in just the way that the character was going to sound, you know?  Our own inner ear for that character we were like, “O.K.  we wrote this character John Harrison and this is what he said and this is what he did, but now we’ve got Benedict Cumberbatch playing him so let’s rewrite the movie with that in mind.” And that didn’t mean that John Harrison did anything differently, or it didn’t change the story in anyway, but it did change the words coming out of his mouth.

Are we going to see or talk about the long term impact of destruction of Vulcan?  You mentioned earlier that that’s obviously a major thing, is that something you guys address?  Or was that lets kick it down to another one?

Lindelof: It’s too specific of a plot question to answer, suffice to say we understood when we did it in the first movie that it was going to have a 9-11 level impact on that universe.  In the same way that 9-11 happened over ten years ago, but we’re still talking about it and it still influences everything about our daily lives.  Anytime you want to fly on a plane and you take your shoes off we’re still reliving that experience in a certain way.  Anything that happens in our new timeline has to walk in lockstep with Vulcan was destroyed and what is the impact of that on the federation?  And what is the impact of that on Spock?  What is the impact of that on Kirk?  What is the impact of that on the geo-politics of the galaxy itself?  We had to enter in to it.  How directly this movie relates to the destruction of Vulcan is not anything that we’re willing to talk about.

The full interview is here.