Jung: Developing Star Trek Beyond Script
2 min read
Doug Jung spoke recently about working on the Star Trek Beyond script.
At first, Jung was unsure about taking on the task of writing the next Star Trek movie. “I was hesitant to take [the job] because, I mean, you’d have to be kind of an idiot to not see that opportunity – but it’s a little intimidating,” he said. “There’s just a huge amount of information and so many years and layers that go into canon.”
That canon makes it tricky when it comes to writing as both Jung and co-writer Simon Pegg didn’t want to be repetitive. “There were definitely times when we were sitting there together,” said Jung, “and we would both be like, ‘All right, this is just weird. We need to think of a really good Spock line.’ Or whatever – A really good Bones quip.
“We’d have some cool idea, but think, ‘Did they do that once in some Next Generation episode? Is that what’s coming to us? Is that where we’re getting it?'”
The duo welcomed help from people they knew were Trek fans. “[We had] so many people who were such fans of Star Trek, who knew it so well,” said Jung. “[We were able] to lean on those people a little bit. We had this guy who did all the alien dialect, and in the script where there was something about Vulcan theology, and I got it wrong.
“He sent me an email saying ‘In the Original Series, we did establish that Spock…’ And I literally was like, ‘That’s great!’ How fantastic is…that? We would take that [help] from anywhere we could get it.”
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