Chris Pine Talk

While making the rounds to promote his upcoming movie "Bottle Shock" that comes out August 8th, Chris Pine talked about Star Trek with Movies Online and Sci Fi Wire.

The highlights:
- "...really exciting is an incredible amount of humanity to the roles for a project that could be so...you know there's a lot of spectacle to it, there's explosions and graphics and computer graphics and yet it's really character driven and you really get to see why Kirk is Kirk, why Spock is Spock, how this crew got together."
- In regards to potentially emulating William Shatner, " I think what J.J. set forth in the beginning of the whole thing was to pay tribute to what was done before and to respect what these men had already given us in terms of creating their characters and then to bring our own unique take on it and I think that opened up just a myriad possibilities. I never felt particularly...I don't know about Zack but I'm sure he would say the same thing...I never felt encumbered. ... What Mr. Shatner did was very specific and very unique to him and all I did was try to do justice to what he did and what was done before, but to try to do [emulate] Shatner would not have been smart."
- "The [Enterprise] set was incredible. Frankly, the production design will blow people away. I think it pays tribute to that 60s look but it's very of the now and the gadgets are incredibly cool."
- "People will be blown away," Pine said. "Zach is great. Between him and Karl Urban and the rest of the cast, ... they've really captured who these characters are."
- "I wrote [Shatner] a letter in the beginning of the process and introduced myself, and said hello, just to make a connection, because I didn't know him at all," Pine said. "And he was very nice, and he was very gracious and sent me a letter back, and that's the only contact we've had. ... Except my father--in the first week I got the Star Trek project--did a Priceline commercial with William Shatner, so there was multi-generational contact with Mr. Shatner."
(source)