“Star Trek Into Darkness” is a mere two week away from revealing all of its secrets to us, but since we still have some time to wait before see where the next adventure of the Starship Enterprise crew takes them, we have an exclusive to help make the waiting a little easier.
Tomorrow, May 7, the official “Star Trek” magazine publishes its special movie edition, complete with an interview with “Into Darkness” co-writer Damon Lindelof. We have exclusive excerpt from that interview, which you can check out after the jump!
As the co-creator of Lost, and the big screen co-writer of “Cowboys and Aliens” and “Prometheus,” Damon Lindelof knows plenty about staying humble in the shadow of success, as he’s taken plenty of praise and peltings for his written words. With regards to “Star Trek”…
“Our attitude coming out wasn’t high-fiving, bumping chests saying, ‘We own “Star Trek” now!’ Yet it’s a slippery slope, because at the same time you can’t write from a place of fear. You have to write from a place of confidence. My feelings about this movie are exactly the same as they were about the first movie, which are: we like it but we’re not entirely sure the fans are going to like it, or if the people who aren’t 40-year aficionados of ‘Trek’ are going to like it, or anyone is going to like it. If this movie is a complete and utter disaster, I would not be surprised. And if the movie makes a billion dollars, I would not be surprised. It’s just a big question mark.”
After each of the five (J.J. Abrams, Robert Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Bryan Burk and Lindelof) cleared their creative calendars to start work on the sequel, Lindelof says they got together to break (a TV writing term for finding the story as a group) the ideas they needed to continue from the first movie. Lindelof explains, “The first question we were facing, just on a plot level, is can there be a five-year mission when Vulcan blew up? How did that attack—which is essentially a 9/11-like incident in Federation lore—change history? That should be the catalyst for everything that happens in the second movie, so that was the conversation that happened when we initially made the decision to destroy Vulcan, because it’s a huge deal. The two key planets in the Federation are Vulcan and Earth, and now one of them is just gone, and it eradicated billions of lives, so we need to talk about that and understand what the ramifications are moving forward.” He continues, “Secondly, I think in the first series of meetings for the second movie, we knew what the first movie was, emotionally, and it was about these people getting to meet each other. It was a philosophical study of logic versus emotion, and ultimately landing on this idea that the two can’t be separate. They need each other, and those ideas are represented by Kirk and Spock.
“Star Trek Into Darkness” opens on May 17.
