Screenwriter Jendresen Wants Less Sterile Star Trek

Erik Jendresen, who has been commissioned to write the screenplay for the eleventh Star Trek feature film with an all-new set of characters, said that the original series borrowed "in an often elegant way" from mythology and that he would like to return to a grittier type of emotion for the franchise.

"There's an old tradition in space films, if you think about it, where war and conflict are very sterile," Jendresen told SyFy Portal. "Death doesn't hurt, it's not really ugly. You can get killed by a phaser and just...disintegrate."

For the new film, whose story concept he called "pretty damn big," Jendresen said that he wanted to take an audience into an era before Kirk is born, where things aren't tied up comfortably at the end. "By the end of this story, everyone isn't fine," he explained. "I can safely say as a storyteller with certain standards...my intention is literally as a writer, as a storyteller, as a filmmaker, to go boldly where no one has gone before."

An Emmy-award winning writer and producer for HBO's Band of Brothers, Jendresen recently wrote Journey to thte Center of the Earth for 20th Century Fox but had no great desire to be involved with more science fiction. "I was not a diehard Star Trek fan," he said. "When they first approached me, I wasn't really interested. But they said, 'What if we could approach this as a blank slate, and here's a notion.'" He began to develop a story, "and it's a pretty good one."

The eleventh Star Trek film remains in very early stages at Paramount, and no director has been suggested. The original interview is at SyFy Portal.

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