11/25/2023 0 Comments Star trek beyond targetWere you ever tempted to kick Chris Pine to the side and give Scotty the lead? Obviously you have a vested interested in ‘Star Trek Beyond’ as an actor as well as a writer. It’s interesting to look back on how the story grew it was quite an organic process. We came up with the idea for a space station, which was a proxy Earth in a way a diplomatic hub on the edge of Federation space that was a lynchpin of peace in the area, and started off from there. We had the idea that we wanted the film to take place a certain way into the five year mission, that the first original series was all about, so they were far far away from Earth, so the film wasn’t about them being near Earth or Earth being a direct target in the film it was about them being in deep space. Then I went to LA to Bad Robot, into the room with the whiteboards, and we just filled them with ideas. I was shooting ‘Mission: Impossible’ so they came over to me and we literally shut the door in a hotel room for 16 hours and tried to start bashing out ideas, some of which sucked, some of which didn’t. We had one brainstorming session at the Soho Hotel in London when Justin, Doug and Lindsey our producer flew over. SP: We were given a room full of empty whiteboards and were told “Off you go!”. In terms of the writing, were you given an outline or a starting point for the film, or were you just told “Into Darkness is over… Go!” It was a great group of people to do that with because it’s just trust left right, and centre. I am used to being very hands on and I had to relinquish that with this a little bit because it wasn’t just my gig there was Justin and my co-writer Doug, and the producers and we had to share. We had the space to make sure that everything was firing properly, and I would be there in rehearsals, working through stuff with the cast sometimes. I was on set all the time, when I wasn’t filming I was at the monitors with Doug, and because of the way I was writing it, Doug and I were still writing in our lunch breaks for stuff we had coming up because we were finessing things that we had already written. Having written the script, how did you feel filming it? Were you precious about it at all? To be given a pre-existing set of building blocks to work with was really interesting. In others, having to make sure that it was of the right quality and living up to the 50 years of history that have gone before it was obviously a big challenge. There’s so much pre-existing material and we were given characters that were ready made, and situations, a reality that had already been shaped and explored, so in some respects it was fantastic to be given those tools to work with. SP: Yes it was extraordinary because we were given a pre-existing universe – and it is a universe, literally… Or at least a galaxy. Your screenwriting in the past has been all original characters and scenarios, how did it feel to jump into a pre-existing franchise like this? I didn’t quit because I wanted to be talked back, I was deadly serious, but JJ knows what he is talking about so I was able to just listen to him, and go “OK fine, I’ll go back!” Doug came over to stay with me in the UK and I went to LA and we got through it, but there were a couple of times when it was like “This isn’t going to work!” but JJ is so used to living in the pressure cooker, he knows the score and was able to reassure me. The trouble was I was in the UK and I was writing with Doug over the phone and on email and that’s hard to write like that I like to be in the same room as the writer, as I always am when I write with Edgar or Nick. It was purely because it just felt like an insurmountable task. I did actually read that you tried to quit a couple of times and JJ Abrams wouldn’t let you… It was hard and it was, at times, maddening and terrifying and depressing, but looking back at it now it feels like a wonderful experience and I am so glad that I persisted with it. When you are faced with that kind of creative adversity, you have to just go forward and trust that you’ll get up the hill. It just felt like we were standing in front of a thousand Everests and only had six months to climb them. We talked last year for ‘Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation’ and you seemed slightly stressed about writing ‘Star Trek Beyond’. We are devastated I can only begin to tell you. Beam us up Scotty!īefore we get into talking about ‘Star Trek Beyond’, I just want to express my condolences to you about the death of Anton Yelchin. Movies.ie caught up with the comic actor turned writer to find out more about how daunting this new gig was. Just to remind us that fate has a sense of humour, Pegg was tasked with co-writing the third movie in the Star Trek reboot. Way back in 1999, Simon Pegg’s character in TV’s ‘Spaced’ uttered a line about every odd numbered ‘Star Trek’ movie being… ahem… subpar.
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