Over its 40 plus year run, the Star Trek universe has provided fans with a lot of details about the history of not only the Federation, but also the characters who inhabit Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future. With hundreds of hours on both the small and large screen, the task of creating a new, original script for the next installment of the Star Trek franchise might have seemed daunting to screen-writers Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman.
However, the writing partners agreed that while finding the right script to please long-time Trekkers and attract new fans to the franchise could seem a bit overwhelming, finding a time and place to tell the story wasn’t as difficult as you might imagine.
“It’s tricky, but we found out that it was an amazing opportunity, which is there’d never been an origin story of how this original crew of Kirk [Chris Pine] and Spock [Zachary Quinto] and Bones [Karl Urban] and Scotty [Simon Pegg], how they met,” Orci said in . “So when we went back and started thinking about it, we realized, ‘Goodness, that’s never been covered.’ It’s not even a remake. There simply has not been a story that told how they got together.”
“When we realized that, we thought, ‘Well, that solves the introduction problem, because this will literally be an introduction to these characters that everyone knows, but not everyone knows how they met.’ So we knew that we could tell a story that was still viable for Star Trek fans, because it’s not a retelling. It’s a new story. But we knew that for those who don’t know Star Trek, it’s going to be an introduction to the world. So we kind of lucked out in that it hadn’t been done before.”
Orci and Kurtzman have written several “first” installments in a potential franchise in recent years. Along with the Trek reimaginging, they wrote last summer’s successful Transformers. However, Orci stated the tendency to see the first films in a franchise as an origin story and a necessary evil to set up superior second installment as a bit of a disservice to the first film and its creative team.
“I can tell you right now, we need not make any qualifiers like that,” Orci said. “This is not something like, ‘Oh, just sit through the first boring one, and then we’ll get to the fun.’ This one, I’m telling you, it’s an origin story, but … we didn’t save anything for later. We wanted to make sure that it was, A, great for the fans, but [also for] a regular audience, a general audience. They’re not going to be able to rely on they love Kirk or they love Spock. They have to love it on its own merits.”
Orci added: “Transformers and Star Trek are very different things. However, I don’t think anyone would say that the first Transformers somehow is like waiting for the second one to happen. Our goal is always, ‘Do not be arrogant enough to think that you’re going to get more than one movie.’ Make one good movie, and if that movie’s good, then hopefully you’ll get another one. Don’t save anything for later. Don’t plan on the sequel. That’s a mistake. And that’s how we approached it. We were like, ‘Let’s make one good movie, and … God willing, we’ll get to do another one.'”
Leave a Reply