Maxim Talks Trek With Abrams

JJ Abrams continues the magazine interview round, this time in the current issue of Maxim Magazine. Below are segments from the article which can be found here. Thanks to Brian for the link.

Abrams is many things—father, amateur magician, amateur guitarist—but he was never, ever a Trekkie. “I didn’t even remember that Spock was half-human. I thought, Well that’s fucking interesting!” Abrams chuckles, smiling mischievously in his Clark Kent glasses. “There were things about these characters that sucked me in, regardless of and despite their being on Star Trek.”

...Orci and Kurtzman brought him into their Trek script meetings with the hopes of seducing him. “Little by little we reeled him in, until he felt some ownership of it,” says Kurtzman, who showed Abrams 30 pages at a time. “Then we hit him with a stick and dragged him onto the boat,” adds Orci.

“This movie was not intended to honor the existing Star Trek fans’ expectations as much as it was intended to be entertaining and emotional and fun and relevant,” says Abrams. “If it works, a lot of people will enjoy it who never knew they wanted to see a Star Trek movie. Because, honestly, for many of us that was the case.”

Abrams’ grandfather Kelvin was a consummate tinkerer who taught his grandson to take apart phones and radios and put them back together. Most important, he handed his grandkid a super-8 camera when he was 10. Abrams began filming stories filled with fake spaceships, homicidal dolls, homemade explosions, and homages to his favorite show, The Twilight Zone. “This is why I can appreciate Trek fans,” explains Abrams. “Because I would actually resent whoever was working on a new Twilight Zone remake—like, ‘Who are you?’ (USS Kelvin named after his grandfather not the temperature measurement).

Pine recalls that one day Abrams spent all his time between sets fiddling with music on his MacBook. “A friend of his dropped by and found these separate tracks for The White Album: drums, bass, and so on,” he says. “So J.J. was fucking around on GarageBand with original Beatles recordings, remixing them himself while directing a scene and live-chatting with Trek fans on his laptop. It’s kind of infuriating how much he has going on. You look at yourself and think, What the fuck am I doing?” John Cho, who plays Sulu, adds, “He could honestly do any job on a film set: costumes, makeup, special effects.”