Kurtzman And Orci On Star Trek XI And XII
2 min readDuring a question and answer session from a Paramount Home Video event held last week to promote the forthcoming Star Trek XI DVD and Blu-ray releases, Alex Kurtzman and Bob Orci answered questions about Star Trek XI and the sequel to come.
Question: “Now that you have Spock Prime who has actually boldly gone everywhere, is that going to be a problem with the exploration of the next film because you have a character that can say “if you go that way you will hit the Denobulans, and if you go that way…”
“No,” said Kurtzman, “because Spock came back into a different timeline where everything is…the circumstances on those planets could be entirely different than what Spock is aware of.”
“Spock may decide it is wrong to tell them everything,” added Orci.
Question: “Does the success of the first movie sort of embolden you guys to take more liberties as you’re coming up with ideas for the next one? Or does it put more pressure on you to go further to explore canon?”
“I think it is the exact same pressure as the first one, answered Orci. “It’s like, ‘Great, I’m glad we had a nice victory, but now we’ve gotta do it again.” There’s the same amount of trepidation and reverence for Trek.”
Question: “Someone sent me a letter saying that the fact that Spock had to stop the movie to explain to Kirk was some sort of break point script-wise. Do you agree with that? That you had to stop and explain to the audience, everything that has happened?”
“I think that we tend to be drawn towards structures that are very mysterious, for at least and hour, or hour and fifteen minutes,” said Kurtzman. “As an audience member, I always really like to be wondering, ‘What’s happening here? I don’t understand it. It’s really intriguing. Where is the punch line going to go?’ But, when you incur that debt, then you owe the pay off, and the pay off is always the moment where someone comes in and says, ‘Okay, here’s some of the answers to the questions you’ve been asking for the last hour and fifteen minutes.”
“The trick with those kinds of scenes, is to make them really interesting and to make them very character driven, because what you don’t want is a scene where someone is just telling you plot,” said Kurtzman. “That’s really boring, and the audience tends to just check out. The ace that we had in the hole there was that we knew that it was a very emotional story for Spock to tell, because he was telling the loss of his planet and he was talking about his
responsibility in that.”
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