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Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman Talks Star Trek Canon in New Video Interview

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By GustavoLeao / 16:44, 27 August 2008 / Star Trek: Nemesis

Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman recently sat down with Fox Movie Channel's "Life After Film School" series and spoke about being the co-writers of the upcoming Star Trek movie.


They discuss how challenging it can be to deal with the weight of the Star Trek canon which is over 40 years of continuity of television history and why they decided to set the movie storyline at the beginning of The Original Series era and why they decided to tell the story of the original crew first meeting. Here is an excerpt.

"Our version of Star Trek is not exactly a prequel." said Orci "It is in some ways and you will have to see it to label it exactly. Canon, that is a word that was invented for Star Trek, meaning, does it fall within the continuity of this forty-year puzzle. But it was amazing when we went back to look at Star Trek,  no one had ever done the story about how the original crew came together."

"[...] there's five thousand hours of Star Trek and no one ever covered how they all met [laughs]." Orci continued "So in a way that was liberating in that no one had stated how that happened exactly. And because we had been fans truly-who knew all those years sitting in front of the TV watching Transformers and Star Trek that we weren't wasting our time. It was all tax deductible. It was daunting, but we thought, if we can't do it, the no one can! No, not exactly. But it was like we had been called to duty and it woudl have felt cowardly to back away just because ‘it has been forty years, what can we do?'" 

"We, at first, we were scared -- not because we didn't think it was worthy, it was we didn't think we were worthy of it." said Kurtzman "So, it became kind of about thinking, "Alright, well, god, if we're going to do this, what did we really love about it?" What inspired us when we were kids, and how do we get back to that feeling, and what was that feeling about for us? Ultimately, I think it was very much about Kirk and Spock and that bridge crew, that was a big part of it. So, what got us through the fear was the excitement of that opportunity, which really comes probably once in a lifetime."

You can see the interview here.

Thanks to TrekMovie.com and 'TRexx' for the transcript.



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RE: And so it ends... | Report this post to moderator
By: Keoki (Odo's file, contact) @ 17:50:08 on Aug 27, 2008

Quote:
Lazy writing? Tell me, have you ever been a Hollywood writer before? No, you haven't. In fact you have no clue what you are talking about. Writing for a feature film is difficult enough, especially for a franchise as big and important as Star Trek. When you combine the fact that there are 10 films and 700+ episodes worth of canon and history that they aren't even responsible for? It would be too confining and frsutrating not to pick a timeframe that hasn't really been fleshed out yet -- in this case, the years before season one of TOS. They chose a good time period.

I agree, it is a good period. But it apparently wasn't chosen for the reason we had previously been led to believe. Every other Trek writer (and there have been many) has had to deal with Trek continuity, some more successfully than others. I'm quite sure these screenwriters knew a lot of Trek had been done before when they started working on this project. To echo your childish phrase, they definitely "had a clue." Instead, they chose the path of less resistance.

I have never been a Hollywood writer, but some folks that have been wrote 10 Trek films before this one, and they didn't take the easy way out. These guys did.

--------

Jesus Saves... no one dares charge him full price

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RE: And so it ends... by cnathanw @ 18:21:16 on Aug 27
    RE: And so it ends... by Keoki @ 19:06:05 on Aug 27
       OMFG by prometheus 59650 @ 19:22:04 on Aug 27
          RE: OMFG by Keoki @ 19:26:14 on Aug 27
             RE: OMFG by Bean @ 23:12:52 on Aug 27
                RE: OMFG by jimbtnp @ 02:24:57 on Sep 01
                RE: OMFG by Keoki @ 05:49:49 on Aug 28
                   RE: OMFG by Bean @ 07:56:19 on Aug 28
                      RE: OMFG by Keoki @ 12:30:16 on Aug 28
                         RE: OMFG by Bean @ 14:11:04 on Aug 30
             RE: OMFG by prometheus 59650 @ 23:00:31 on Aug 27
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