In his reimagining of Star Trek, Abrams found the intimacy he favors in the relationship between James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto) at first contentious, and then a true partnership and friendship. For spectacle, Abrams had to adjust his sights upward from even from the ambitious Mission Impossible III, which was, after all, terrestrial: He estimates that Star Trek had approximately 1,300 visual effects. It was definitely an education in scale, he said. When youre doing a space adventure and you do an establishing shot, it needs to be a planet its not just a building.
But one of Abrams first challenges with Star Trek was casting. In his television work, Abrams had been credited with discovering Felicitys main cast (Keri Russell, Scott Foley, and Scott Speedman), and Aliass leads (Jennifer Garner, Bradley Cooper, and Michael Vartan), but coming into the Mission: Impossible franchise, the main roles were already set. With Star Trek, he was starting from scratch to find an ensemble to inhabit the iconic characters created by Gene Roddenberry in the original 1960s television series. He wanted, he said, to find actors you could believe were spiritually on the same page as every character you knew.
The story of our film was that a new timeline arose out of an event where the character of Spock goes back in time, therefore the characters that were going to come together were literally the characters that people knew from the show, Abrams continued. So we were 100% taking Gene Roddenberrys lead.
That meant, of course, also following in Roddenberrys revolutionary footsteps in the casts diversity. It was important to me, in that I very much appreciated what Roddenberry was doing in 1966, in a time when it was not common to have a multicultural, multiethnic cast and having women in positions of authority and power, Abrams said. Working on a movie like Star Trek, you learn how important those choices were to people who saw themselves in those shows in ways that they hadnt before. So it was something we were thrilled to get to continue.
The result was a blockbuster platform for Pine, Quinto, Zoe Saldana (as Uhura), and John Cho (as Sulu) and Abrams best-reviewed movie so far.
But his follow-up, Star Trek Into Darkness, did not receive the same across-the-board positive critical and fan response. The first movie was written by Kurtzman and Orci; they signed on to write the sequel, along with Damon Lindelof, Abrams collaborator on Lost (who had been a producer of Star Trek). I take full responsibility for this I was encouraging the writers in certain directions, and we were working on the script and putting it together, Abrams said. But by the time we started shooting, and this was literally at the very beginning of the shoot, there were certain things I was unsure of.
Any movie, any story has a fundamental conversation happening during it, he continued. Theres a fundamental argument; theres a central question. And I didnt have it.
The first movie, according to Abrams, had a very strong story about two orphans who are completely at odds, who then come to realize they need to work together to survive; the second did not. Kirk and Spock remained the films central characters, but, Abrams asked: What was their issue? What was their dynamic? What was their problem? He answered: And it wasnt really clear.
It was a little bit lightweight, ultimately, that Kirk was disappointed that Spock didnt feel that their friendship was as meaningful to him as it did to Kirk, which is sort of what were saying, Abrams said. And that Spocks arc is coming to unabashedly love his friend Kirk.
Then there was Khan. Word leaked out early that the canonical Star Trek villain would be featured in Into Darkness, and that Benedict Cumberbatch would be playing him. The spoiler-averse Abrams sought to put this genie back into the bottle, and said Cumberbatch was playing someone named John Harrison true. But Harrisons real identity was Khan, and the attempt to fool fans only succeeded in angering them.
Abrams laughed while talking about it now: At the end of the day, while I agree with Damon Lindelof that withholding the Khan thing ended up seeming like we were lying to people, I was trying to preserve the fun for the audience, and not just tell them something that the characters dont learn for 45 minutes into the movie, so the audience wouldnt be so ahead of it.
(He added: But it was Simon Pegg who lied outright, and I adore him for doing so. I remember when I read that he basically said, He doesnt play Khan, and I thought, Oh my god, Simon Pegg!)
Abrams did reshoots on Into Darkness, which he felt helped a little bit here and there. But his problems with the final movie come back to its plot, which, he said, was not anyones fault but mine, or, frankly, anyones problem but mine.
I felt like, in a weird way, it was a little bit of a collection of scenes that were written by my friends brilliantly talented writers who I somehow misled in trying to do certain things. And yet, I found myself frustrated by my choices, and unable to hang my hat on an undeniable thread of the main story, Abrams said. So then I found myself on that movie basically tap-dancing as well as I could to try and make the sequences as entertaining as possible. Thank god I had the cast that we have, who are so unbelievably fun to watch. And an incredible new villain in Benedict Cumberbatch.
I would never say that I dont think that the movie ended up working, Abrams said. But I feel like it didnt work as well as it could have had I made some better decisions before we started shooting.