– Is it true that you were reluctant to use 3D at first?
J.J Abrams : Frankly the decision to do it in 3D was made for me. The studio said, ‘if you want to do this movie we have to do it in 3D’ and I was against it because I was not really a fan of 3D. But then, I was also never really a fan of Star Trek to begin with so the idea of working on something that is not necessarily your favourite thing or your forte can actually help because it forces you to engage with something in a way that an outsider can appreciate. But my initial feeling was that I didn’t like 3D. But it was very helpful in some ways because we worked with the 3D crew in a way that didn’t assume that we loved the technology.
– Why didn’t you like 3D before?
J.J Abrams : I have trouble with 3D sometimes – I can’t see it quite right, I get a headache, I hate the glasses and it annoys me. So I approached it cynically. And the fact is that we have been using techniques that haven’t been used in 3D before. And they have made enough movies in 3D now that they can understand ways to eliminate some of these problems. We shot the movie with anamorphic lens so it had the same look and feel as the first movie, but because we were converting it to 3D later, we have so much more creative opportunities and ability to do things, push certain things and limit certain things. And it actually allows you to be able to fine-tune it and the audience gets to see something that is I think really fun and dynamic. The key for me overall is I got to make my 2D movie, that I really wanted to make, just the way I wanted to, and it gets to be augmented in 3D, but it doesn’t detract from the 2D.
– You’ve got a big ensemble and you’ve got new characters in Star Trek Into Darkness. Is it hard to find moments for all of them to develop their characters?
J.J Abrams : The first movie was easier in a way because it was introducing all of these people. And in a way it was easier to give these characters moments to be introduced because they would be introduced to each other and to the movie. The key to this one was not just how do we introduce them again to the audience but how do we give them moments so that the story couldn’t take place unless they were all there? If you take out any one of them it would fold like a House of Cards. We knew that in the first film, when we introduced these great characters to the audience. They each had their part to play. We needed to do the same thing on this and it was really important that every single character has a moment and without that the story just wouldn’t have worked. And part of the multi layered process of developing the script was making sure that every single character had not just their moment, but their thread, their story line.
– You talked about how special a moment it was when you first walked out on to the Bridge of your Enterprise set. You must have had quite a few special moments making these two films?
J.J Abrams : I remember meeting William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy separately and just hearing their stories about what Star Trek was like back in the day was wonderful. The first screening of the movie we had with an audience was the premier at the Sydney Opera House and that was an incredible evening. It was so big that I couldn’t tell if they hated the movie or not. I couldn’t tell what the reaction was. And I was fairly certain that they didn’t like it because it was such a big place and you couldn’t hear the audience the way that you can in a normal movie theatre and then when it was over they gave it a two minute standing ovation and it was just this crazy relief of ‘oh OK, they didn’t hate it..’ That was really nice.
Click to Enlarge any pictures
