Trek Writers Talk Abrams, Writing

Star Trek writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman recently spoke with Wired about the upcoming movie, discussing Abrams, canon and writing. The full interview is here and below are select portions of it.

Wired.com: When was your first exposure to Star Trek?
Kurtzman: I was a little too young for the original motion picture. Trek hit me at Wrath of Khan. The experience of being in a theater and seeing that movie was certainly the first time anything paralleled Star Wars for me in terms of emotional intensity and sci-fi lore. That alone — that feeling, wanting to create that feeling — was reason enough to do the movie, but not without being aware of the rules.

Wired.com: J.J. Abrams makes no secret that he's more of a Star Wars guy and not so much into Star Trek, but you two were full-tilt fans.
Orci: In terms of fandom, yeah, and Damon too is a fanatic — we're not going to drop the ball out of ignorance. Nobody can say that we don't know Star Trek. There might be some things we do that people could question, where they go, "I hate them for some other reasons," but they can't say, "They didn't know their stuff."
Orci: And it's controversial to even mention Star Wars and Star Trek in the same sentence, but Alex said, "We have to bring more Star Wars into Star Trek."
Kurtzman: (joke-coughing) Original Star Wars.
Orci: Original Star Wars. I want to feel the space, I want to feel speed and I want to feel all the things that can become a little bit lost when Star Trek becomes very stately -- which I love about it , but....
Kurtzman: Star Trek is often the space equivalent of sub battles, which is what makes it unique and different from Star Wars, so you can't blow that away, either.
Orci: It's somewhere between that the truth lies.

Wired.com: J.J. Abrams was originally just going to produce Star Trek. I guess your script convinced him he needed to direct?
Orci: J.J.'s not a Star Trek fanatic by any means. We figured if we came up with a story that interested him as a casual fan....
Kurtzman: It was secretly our agenda to hook in J.J. so that he couldn't say no.

Wired.com: Your Star Trek story won over J.J. Abrams. It sounds like you're pretty confident the fans will like it, too.Orci: There's going to be a debate when this movie comes out whether or not it's consistent with canon. We argue that it is. But there's literally nothing we can say about this movie. Even if we think it's not controversial, people will say, "Oh, that's convenient, they're covering a story that's never been covered before instead of dealing with canon."

Wired.com: It's a pretty intense legacy.
Kurtzman: The questions we're most attracted to are, "What are the rules of these characters and the rules of that universe and the rules of what makes Star Trek works?" If we don't tap into that, no matter how consistent the movie is with anything that came before, who cares? If you tap into that and come up with something that embodies the spirit of what we felt when we first saw it, then hopefully we have Star Trek.