Bana, Kurtzman and Orci Talk Nero, Star Trek XI
3 min readIssue #19 of Star Trek Magazine hits the newsstands today and features interviews with Eric Bana, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci.
As reported by Titan Magazines,Bana was attracted to Nero’s tragic history. “Essentially, I was trying to draw on an incredibly tragic and brutal past,” he said. “For me, that was the most important thing about him. I felt like Nero had this incredibly tragic back story, and had become a villain as a result of the things that had happened to him.
That was more interesting than just him being born as the villain. To me, he was just a Romulan who had had a lot of amazingly treacherous things done to him, so whilst he wasn’t human, I felt there was some sort of characteristics there that humans could definitely relate to, and I wanted to draw on that.”Another attraction for Bana was Nero’s imprisonment, which didn’t make the final cut of the film. “I was fascinated by the notion of Nero being in jail on Rura Penthe for so many years, him biding his time, and being unbelievably patient in enacting his vengeance,” explained Bana. “Some of that is not played out in the film, because it’s not in the final cut, but it’ll be out on the DVD.”
Co-writers Kurtzman and Orci spoke about writing for Star Trek XI, beginning with how they felt about being asked. “When we were first asked in the broadest sense if we would ever consider doing Star Trek, it was like someone had just punched us in the solar plexus,” said Kurtzman, “just the idea that we would be able to inherit something like that. Before we even had any specific conversations, the idea of joining the legacy was so intense, and frightening, frankly, because it meant so much to us as kids. The fear of messing it up was the first feeling that we had.”
But the appeal of doing a story about Kirk and Spock overcame any doubts. “The immediate answer for all of us was that the only way we were interested in this was to do Kirk and Spock, going back to the genesis of the ship,” explained Kurtzman. “We weren’t interested in The Next Generation. This is where we wanted to live in it. But we faced an immediate problem: we knew the fate of all the characters”
That problem was solved by going back to the beginning, where the characters first met. “It occurred to us very early on that the show began on the five-year mission, and we realized that we hadn’t actually seen all these characters meet and go on their first adventure,” said Orci. “That became an obvious place to explore because the goal was to make sure that we had a Star Trek that made new audiences learn why fans like Star Trek. It couldn’t rely on a previous knowledge of Star Trek. The fact that the origin story had not been covered, and that’s what you
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