JJ Abrams

There’s no bigger gig than Star Trek. James Bond might be the largest franchise by numbers, and Star Wars the cultural touchstone, but no other series is loved as obsessively, as intimately and as jealously as Gene Roddenberry’s epic. Created in 1966, five years after President Kennedy called for “a new American enterprise” in space, and a mere three years before Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind, Star Trek embodied the hopes and dreams of a generation. Cut to 2009, however, and the franchise has become moribund and culturally irrelevant. Or has it? Enter JJ Abrams, the geek who inherited Hollywood, to re-energise , and take the modern sci-fi film (boldly) where it’s never been before. Can he do it? You’ll be able to check out our review online next week, but to whet your appetite, here’s a complete transcript of our exclusive interview with the man himself.

LWLies: I saw you at the London event where you were talking about not being a fan, and I have to admit I have a kind of scepticism about that. It sounds more like the marketing play to me than something you really believe.

Abrams: Sometimes the truth can sound like manipulation, you know? I didn’t believe it either when my wife said she’d marry me. I knew it would not hurt to speak the truth about this, and certainly I don’t think that marketing sell is necessarily the smartest thing everywhere. I’ve taken a lot of flack for the simple fact that I did not grow up a Trek fan. So it would have been far easier to not say that and not talk about it, and just go right into, ‘Look what we have here – this new movie.’

It’s still called ‘Star Trek’ and it still honours what fans of that series have loved in the canon of the show but the movie is one that, for better or for worse, was directed by someone who did not grow up a fan of Star Trek, didn‘t quite get it and always felt that there was a more exciting and thrilling and emotional story to be told. And part of the challenge as a producer for me was to be involved in trying to make a version that did appeal to me. Once we had a script for it, I realised that we had succeeded and that I would have been ridiculously envious of whomever was on the set calling ‘Action!’ and ‘Cut!’. While I had the opportunity, I thought that directing this movie was something I should do.

LWLies: Were you aware of the fact that you were going to walk into all this criticism from fans?

Abrams: Did I know that I was going to be criticised for not being a fan?

LWLies: Yeah – did you go into it with your eyes open, or were you surprised?

Abrams: I was, but I gotta say, I think that whatever it is, whether it’s something as trivial, I guess, as entertainment or something as important as politics or, you know, social causes, I think when you speak the truth, people feel it and they know it. It wasn’t as if I had to direct Star Trek – my commitment to it was, I think, unique and important to bring up at that event because I wanted people to realise that what this was, was not the eleventh in a series of films that was, like those prior films, concerned simply with maintaining their fan base. Those movies were made with what appears to be a conscious effort to keep the club closed. And I get it and respect it – that’s cool. My instinct is that we are not going to get one single new viewer in the sixth series of Lost. We’re not going to find someone who suddenly goes, ‘Oh, wait a minute…!’ I think by the time you get there, you know, you’ve established your followers. This movie was not made by a group of people for whom Star Trek was the end-all, with the exception of one of the writers who is a massive fan of Star Trek. Our concern was that we wanted to make a movie that our wives would love, that our friends who are not fans of Star Trek would love, that our parents and kids would love. We were not going out there to say, ‘Let’s make a movie for that one uncle who is a huge fan of Star Trek.’ We’re going to get that person anyway because the movie honours what he knows, what he loves and what he has, you know, considered important for 40 years. But to make a movie for that group, to me, is an exercise in myopia.

LWLies: Then you look at someone like Leonard Nimoy having a role, and you wonder, ‘Can you ever really shrug off the weight of history that clings to this film?’ Are you always going to have one hand tied behind your back?

Abrams: Well look, I mean, it wasn’t a mandate that we put Leonard Nimoy in this movie. Our decision was to make a very unique story that simultaneously stands on its own and also is connected to something that, for the purpose of this film, is backstory. The reality is, you know, we had an opportunity that was very unique to make a movie that stands on its own and has all of this, sort of, existing footage in the series and the films that are our backstory. So to not use that would be ridiculous. And Leonard Nimoy was someone who we felt would be a perfect bridge between the established and, for fans, revered; and for new fans someone who… You know, even the non-fans, the Trek neophyte knows Spock, they know that guy with the pointy ears, they know Leonard Nimoy. So to use him in a wonderful, wise, mentor archetype role – to have him be that person felt like a terrific way to not just acknowledge but grace the fabric from which this was made, and at the same time, if you look at the movie you’ve never seen Star Trek like this before. So it does both.

LWLies: That balance is interesting. Partly what you’re seeing on screen is this huge science-fiction movie, the likes of which we really haven’t seen for a while. But then all of a sudden you cut to the characters and you’re looking at that familiar insignia, the costumes, the spaceship, the names. It’s almost like you’re having to fight against the limitations of the franchise that you’ve inherited. As if you’re trying to make a great film despite not because of the material that you’re working with.

Abrams: Well, I’m not precious about it – I don’t really care where something comes from as long as it’s inspiring. And the great thing about what Gene Roddenberry created 43 years ago was that it was an optimistic view of our future. It’s not a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. This is a version of ‘us’. It’s certainly a fantasy, but the characters, the dynamic, the paradigm of those characters in that world having, essentially, those drawing room scenes – debate – my problem was, I didn’t know why I should care about them. And the debate was often the whole experience as opposed to any action that the discussion promised. So my feeling was, it wasn’t about being burdened by this, you know, fractured, non-functional albatross that we had to, you know, deal with and wrestle with and ultimately try and apologise for. Quite the contrary, it was rife with wonderful potential, great character dynamics, but what we needed though was to see how those people came to be.

Captain Kirk is far less interesting to me than the story of the becoming of Captain Kirk, you know? The idea of Spock, who I didn’t even realise was half human and for whom logic was a choice not a genetic necessity… You have this character who was raised in many ways as a half-breed with this conflict of, ‘Which way am I raised? Which side of myself do I choose?’ Those two alone, those two ideas of an aimless guy who’s going to become captain, and this sort of half-breed alien whose wrestling between humanity and emotion and logic, those are great stories anywhere.

So I feel like we inherited wonderful stuff, we inherited wonderful optimism, and we inherited wonderful potential for incredible thrills that, literally, Star Trek for some reason never demonstrated in my mind to the best of their abilities because that just wasn’t the pace of it, it wasn’t what interested them. For me, for better or for worse, I knew that I wanted to make sure that this Star Trek had a level of roller coaster fun that I had never seen in a Star Trek movie before, and also we had, for the first time, resources and technology to realise the promise of that universe.

LWLies: Speaking of the optimism, I spoke to an astronaut who now is more on the lecturing side of things, and he always shows the intro clip from Star Trek before all his talks. He said, to him, that still captures what it means for humans to be in space – that sense of optimism and adventure. But we talked about, in a post-space race world and post-Cold War world, what does it mean to be involved in space? And that question applies to Star Trek. Compared to the ’60s when the show was first made, the interest in and appetite for space has dwindled enormously. I’m interested in your take as to what Star Trek means now in the twenty-first century.

Abrams: Well, first of all that’s a very cool thing that he does that. The idea of ‘space the final frontier’ is such a cliché and has been around now for over four decades, approaching half a century, and I think that things that are so familiar and ubiquitous become invisible after a while and taken for granted. But if you actually stop and consider what that means, you know, space the final frontier, to boldly go where no man has gone before, that idea is actually really exciting and thrilling. And what’s obvious is that our technological limitations have prevented it from becoming a real consideration because we obviously cannot yet travel beyond the solar system. So the idea of that is something that it seems most astronomers and astronauts seem to feel and understand as relevant and vital, whereas, you know, it’s not as much of an issue for the everyman. You and I don’t actively think about that every day. But when I talk to people who are involved in either space, travel, look at NASA, the Cassini space probe, for whom that resonates in a very real way.

But I think that, you know, that idea is incredibly exciting and also very scary – what space is, what it means to go out there in that nothingness, potentially this vacuum or maybe another world where you will find intelligent life and what that means. The whole idea is so mind-blowing and crazy, and in this moment it’s probably still, kind of, cute, and a science-fiction cliché but it seems that it is something that when you actually stop and you look at the moon and you think, ‘Holy shit! That is crazy!’ And you look at the images of earth taken from various satellites and space craft, and you look at the earth, you know, there’s an amazing photograph I saw recently of Saturn in silhouette with a small speck near the rings. And I thought maybe that was Titan or one of the moons, but it’s earth. And that point of view was so crazy, so perspective-shifting and, kind of, groundbreaking for me. Like, to think we are just this speck, and of course we all know it. It’s like when, you know, you know that elephants and giraffes exist but until you go to a zoo or on safari and actually see them… It’s a different thing to really understand that and accept that, but to actually think that we are on this planet and it’s floating in space and clearly, you know, given the odds, we’re not alone…

I just think there’s something that is remarkable and inspiring and thrilling and terrifying about that prospect, and it is our lack of technology and experience that allows us to feel safe and unrequired to actually consider the ramifications. But that’s one of the things that Star Trek did and now continues to do, which is embrace the very real possibility that one day we are going to be able to go far beyond what is familiar and hopefully go boldly.

LWLies: I’m interested in your take on the modern action film because, to me, there are guys like Chris Nolan or Paul Greengrass, both of whom I like a lot, but you watch their action movies and they’re shot for the quick edit – the visceral style. You seem to have more confidence and more belief in the power of the image – there’s a lot of wide angles and amazing vistas. Does that sound true to you?

Abrams: Hopefully when people see the movie they’ll feel there is a balance between the scope and scale and also the intensity and intimacy of moments and scenes. The challenge was… Obviously, you do a movie like Star Trek and it completely fucks with your whole approach to filmmaking. Typically, you know, an establishing shot is a building, on occasion it’s a city – in Star Trek it’s a planet. You have to literally change the way you consider orienting the audience. And so part of the challenge of the movie was wanting to give people a sense of perspective and place. Also I’m learning and hopefully will get the chance to continue to learn, but when I look back at M:I:III, that movie I did, I see all these things which, you know, I wish I could change in a lot of scenes. It’s important to give people as much as possible in terms of geography and wider shots. So I tried to in this movie hopefully take a step in that direction and provide not just the close ups on the intense moments, but also give people a sense of scope and scale that I think, especially on a movie like this, is critical.

LWLies: My favourite shot is where Kirk pulls up on his bike and in the distance you can see the workshop with the Enterprise being built. And it reminded me of something like Blade Runner, where it really feels like the future has been integrated into the world as we know it. What were your reference points for achieving that?

Abrams: That particular shot was… My wife is from Maine, which is a beautiful state here in the United States on the north east coast, and there’s a shipyard called Bath Iron Works, in a town called Bath, and every time we pass it they’re building a ship and I’ve always been struck by the scale of it and, I don’t know, the design…

LWLies: It’s kind of monumental…

Abrams: It is, and I’ve always just thought that was amazing. And the idea of the Enterprise being built… There are arguments among fans of Star Trek: could the Enterprise be built on earth? And there are arguments, ‘Yes, with a gravity well to help assemble it’, whatever. You could do that all day. To me, the visual of connecting a relatable image of a guy on a bike with this crazy, massive image of a ship under construction was just too good to pass up, and I wanted to make sure that when you see that it feels like, you know, the reason you’re able to look at it in some kind of awe is because of that scale. If you ever draw a circle and then you shade it so it looks as if it’s three-dimensional and then you put it on a ground plane with a little bit of a shadow – that’s cool and that’s one thing. But if you then draw a really small figure right next to that ball and you give him a shadow too, the ball takes on an incredibly different meaning. Suddenly there’s meaning to it, and there’s meaning because you’ve connected a relatable human to that thing, and the scale of it suddenly has this meaning whereas before it had nothing. It’s a really weird and interesting experiment that is something that has been important to us in the movie, which is that in order for this thing to feel like it is our future, it needed to feel like us before it felt like it was a space adventure.

And I would just finally say that because we’ve seen so many space movies, no one’s going to care about a space movie. That’s not enough. And no one’s going to care about a ship flying by – that’s not a spectacular vision anymore. But what people will, I think, care about are the people who are on the ship. So what I’m hoping is that as we move forward, you know, people will embrace this movie not because of what’s come before and not because it takes place in space and not even because the effects are as good as ILM made them, but rather because the characters make you laugh, they make you feel and they make you ultimately believe.

LWLies: What is it you love about movies?

Abrams: I think that, you know, the first thing that comes to mind is that I love the hyper reality of them. What I mean is, my favourite movies are movies that create a relatable world, a reality that doesn’t have to look exactly like mine, but is one that I believe in and I connect to it because of the behaviour. And then thrusts characters into situations that are, just… That even though they might be terrifying, you somewhere deep down either wish would happen or, as a cautionary tale, they challenge you to wonder what you would do if they did. And that, to me, is sort of what movies do, you know, again and again.