Writers Talk Trek with Newsarama

Newsarama talks with Star Trek writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci about the success of Trek and their approach to writing the movie. The full interview is here and with a few segments below.

NRAMA: You provided a fresh take on the Kirk/Spock relationship. Why go that route?
Orci: In a way, we went with reverse engineering from what you know. If you met them originally in the show as friends working well together, then dramatically what’s as far away from that which you could put them? Then we thought “What if they’re not friends? What if it’s a trial to actually realize the value in each other?” It seemed like very rich territory.

NRAMA: Sitting down, what were some of the things in the “must list” that had to be included?
Kurtzman: It’s funny because we all sat down, the two of us, along with Damon Lindelof, Bryan Burk, and J.J., made up a list of what we’d expect to see from Star Trek, they were all the same things. There was everything from how Kirk cheated on the Kobayashi Maru to the Tribbles to a million little details. There are certain phrases we knew the characters said and how we were going to get there organically. The exercise for us was in figuring out how to construct a story around revealing those things in ways that felt they were inevitable as opposed to gimmicky.

NRAMA: As Star Trek fans, which scene tickled your inner geek the most?
Orci: For me, it was when Spock Prime beams Scotty and Kirk back to the Enterprise and they have that conversation about cheating and he tells them to live long and prosper.
Kurtzman: My inner geek definitely jumps up and down when Scotty was introduced. It also goes crazy when the Enterprise is attacked at the midpoint and as a result of the crew being alive, our people end up in the chairs we know them to fall into.

NRAMA: The script took six to eight months to bang out so what other ideas did you bandy around?
Kurtzman: There was no other macro idea. We knew we wanted to do an origin story with Spock Prime coming back. Obviously, details within the story changed wildly. We had a draft with Carol Marcus meeting Kirk as a child and goes on to be the mother of his son. We had Nurse Chapel have a potentially budding romance with Spock that we explored. At one point, we were bandying around the idea of destroying the Enterprise mid-battle.
Orci: That was actually the only time the studio even put the brakes on us. “Please don’t destroy the Enterprise.” We said “Okay, you’re right. Vulcan fine. Enterprise no.” There were a few million things like that along the way.