Yep, More Interviews

The campaign continues to get you to see Star Trek. Click the links for the full interviews, just posting a few snippets.

Star Trek Movie Magazine - click the link for excepts of interviews with the cast for the magazine.

JJ Abrams (Director)

TrekMovie: You talk about how people do not need to know a lot to enjoy this film. One thing that I do think may be an issue and have some people at least asking the question: What was Nero doing for 25 years? Talk me through the decision to remove that. The one thing I would like to see in this film was more Nero.
Abrams: Well you are not wrong. Not only would it have been nice, but I thought it was nice to have that stuff in there. But I don’t think the majority of the audience has the patience and the willingness to do the kind of work that deep-routed fans of genre, and certainly of Trek, are willing to do and in fact live to do. I have found on Lost and on Fringe that the casual viewer may be confounded by a plot turn that I love. What I love about this is not just mystery, but sometimes these diversions that take you into a really weird place, then kind of get back on track and continue. That sequence took the audience off track into a whole new place that I thought was really cool, really weird, beautifully designed and had great mood. I loved the visual effects and the whole thing. It broke my heart to cut it. But when we showed the movie to the audience with that sequence it really threw them. Because we had a bad guy who is suddenly imprisoned by other bad guys. You didn’t know who was who. There was exposition that I really enjoyed, that people felt was confusing and distracting. And it threw the audience off and took them on this diversion and the truth is, not unlike Richard Donner’s Superman, the movie really begins in earnest about half an hour into the movie, when in that film Christopher Reeve is flying away from the Fortress of Solitude as Superman. Everything that preceded it was critical to emotionally connect to the story, but now the story begins. In our movie it just felt like a five minute diversion that people were like ‘what?’

Anton Yelchin (Chekov)

TrekMovie: How much of a discussion with JJ was there on the level of genuine ‘Russian-ness’ to put into it?
Yelchin: I wanted it to be close to the Chekov accent, I guess that is where our opinions differ. I have no problem doing a real Russian accent, but that wouldn’t be Chekov to me. The interesting thing about it is that his accent is a cold-war stereotype of a Russian person. And when I watched the series and the films, that is what I found interesting about it. And I adjusted it, it is not entirely the same, but Walter [Koenig] came on set and was like "that sounds like me." And that is what was fun for me. As a person familiar with a Russian accent, and someone with Russian roots who can speak Russian and knows what Russian people sound like, it was fun to purposefully mess around with the Russian accent — to purposefully change what I thought a Russian accent was to suit that stereotype they had in the sixties.

TrekMovie: You spent a lot of time at your console on the bridge and the console in the transporter room. Did any one of the set designers ever tell you ‘this button does this, and that button does that’? So when Pike issues an order, you know what button to push?
Yelchin: Me and John Cho kind of sat down the first day and talked to JJ said that because this is going to become the way for us to do things, we need to figure out what is what. We really kind of stuck to doing the same things over and over again. We also got these neat little space pens, like when I come up with the solution. No one sat us down so it was up to us and John and I really coordinated what we were doing to make sure it looks legitimate.

John Cho on Jimmy Kimmel 5/7 - Thanks to Brian for the link