All right, so, we should talk about this immediately.
Who are you, by the way?
- I'm J.J. Who are you? - I'm Damon.
- Where's Bob? - Hey, I'm over here. Hi, guys.
- Alex, you around? - I'm right here.
- So this piece of music... - Bryan Burk, sound off.
- Is Bryan there? - Hi. I'm here. I'm in New York.
- This is ridiculous. - Bryan is joining us via satellite today.
This music was not the original piece of music in this opening sequence.
Michael Giacchino had this recorded
like two weeks before we finished the mix,
- and I think this is a genius move. - Unbelievably awesome.
It's great 'cause it makes the Bad Robot logo really creepy.
- It does. It's very ominous. - It is scary.
- For the first time ever that robot... - Is actually bad.
...freaks me out.
The movie didn't originally open with this.
- Nope. - It opened with the birth of Spock.
And why was it changed, J.J.?
Well, we had the birth of Spock. Then we had the birth of Kirk.
Then we had young Spock, then young Kirk.
Then we had older Spock, then older Kirk.
And it just was too much back and forth for too long,
so we removed the birth of Spock
and made the Kirk birth sequence a pre-credit sequence
to kind of reset the movie, which I think helped the pace of the open.
I can't imagine the movie starting any other way than this.
That's very funny because we only debated it for a year and a half.
- But until we all saw it... - Until we saw it.
- Yeah.
I mean, I think the thing that's so genius about this is that
you're dropping the audience right into the middle of a situation
and a terror that's so cool.
That was Randy Pausch, by the way, who walked right past Robau.
We were also really concerned about canon and continuity,
because Spock is older than Kirk.
- Right. That's right. - So you couldn't do this scene first,
and then Spock's birth because of that.
So, it was either start the movie with this scene and lose Spock's birth,
which was... We're basically like,
"if we lose that, we lose his attachment to his mother.
"We don't understand that his mom is human."
Because in the other scene that Winona is in,
her ears are actually wrapped,
so other than dialogue, you don't know that she's a human.
But enough about that.
I love the way that the weapon systems on the Narada work.
The other thing that's genius for me about this is the way you cut it.
What's the Kelvin named after? Oh, sorry.
- I thought you were done. - Kelvin was my grandfather. Sorry.
Oh, yeah. No, you should tell that story first.
Harry Kelvin was my grandfather.
I love that story.
I use his name in almost everything that I've worked on.
- That story gets me every time. - Fade out.
No, but he was the guy who sort of inspired me
to make movies and make things, and have things work.
So he was sort of the...
Bryan Burk, was this your idea for sound design, right here?
I'd like to take credit for this,
but this was J.J.'s sound design from the very first cut.
I love the idea that everything goes out
when we enter the cold vastness of space.
Well, it's a weird thing 'cause I wanted to do silent space from the beginning,
but the truth is it feels like the movie's not completed
when you actually have silence in space.
It feels like the weight is not there.
I sort of did the, you know, occasional...
Acknowledgement that you're aware of reality.
Yeah, that it sort of says that
the reality is that there's silence in space,
but I wanted to, you know, give the sequences,
for the most part, the sound that you would expect to feel in here.
If you roll back, not us, but you, the viewer, on the shot of the screen,
- you'll see there's this... - How could we roll back?
Are you in a coffee can?
There are these handrails, which is really kind of a testament
to Scott Chambliss, our production designer,
who really made the ship really tangible.
And I remember being on set with a friend who was visiting,
who was commenting that when you think about it,
and you're flying through space and you're bouncing around,
just the fact that these are here and you can hold on to them
is something that you would assume would be on all spaceships.
And I can't remember seeing it in another film.
There they are.
I love the way that Robau there says, "You're the captain now, Mr Kirk."
Because if you've never seen Star Trek before, or if you have,
in that moment, watching this movie, you're like,
"That's Kirk. I've just been introduced to Kirk."
Because you've never seen Chris Pine before.
And the actor that we cast looks enough
- like Chris Pine that you're like... - My sister thought it was Chris Pine.
She said to me, "Why did you cast the same actor as the father and Kirk?"
- Right. - It's like, "I didn't."
The thing is this is one of my favourite sequences
because this was shot, literally all of this if you include the CG stuff,
months if not over a year apart.
So, you know, Robau going from the Bridge,
which we shot at Paramount, to going down the turbo lift,
which was shot at a power plant in Long Beach,
to his walking down the corridor and into the shuttle,
which we shot in two different locations back at Paramount.
You know, all these sequences have dozens if not hundreds of pieces
that are shot so far apart.
It's just the fun of filmmaking seeing them all come together.
And so how much in prep did you end up...
I mean, what of it was improvised and what of it was prep?
- Was all of it prep? - Well, in general,
what I tried to do is prep as little specifics as possible in terms of shots.
So, I wanted to be able to go to the set and make things up as I went along,
and sort of, you know, wing it.
But then there are certain sequences, like the space jump that come later
and some of the Kelvin attack,
that we needed to know what we needed to build.
So, within the parameters of what we had, you know,
I tried to storyboard nothing so that the thing would have an energy
and would feel vital, and we get to make it up as we went along.
And yet, certain things we needed to know how we were physically
ever gonna do them. I remember the first time
they saw the space jump, they were like, "What?"
- Right. - "Forget it. We can't shoot this."
I love Bana here.
It's awesome that he doesn't say a single word.
Yeah, he's terrific.
I mean, I remember the first day that I shot on this set,
I literally just broke out in a sweat because I was surrounded
by all these bald dudes with face tattoos
and pointy ears and the wardrobe.
And I was so afraid that it was gonna look insanely stupid.
- I really was. - My favourite cut
is coming up right here.
Now that's all one shot. We actually cut it.
Right here. The fact that you cut out
- before he finishes his sentence. - That's right.
That is so great. That is my favourite.
- I actually debated that. - Can you talk about that?
Because, literally, it is the most brilliant editing choice ever.
It was because he said it, and then it cut, and I just thought,
"You know what? Let's..." it just felt like the energy of the moment
- wanted to move ahead. - Yeah. Yes.
- It just was like... - Because, you know,
- it's just genius. - Yeah, it's funny. I didn't know
- you realised. That's hysterical. - Are you kidding?
It's funny because, you know, editorially, Mary Jo and Maryann,
it was this way on the Lost pilot, too.
You basically spend 75% of your time
editing a couple sequences in one of these things,
- and the other 30% on everything else. - Yeah.
And in this movie,
it felt like every time I came and visited the editing room,
- you guys were working on the Kelvin. - Yeah.
And this was actually Bryan's genius suggestion, as I recall...
- Yeah. - ...which was we,
in the script and in several cuts before this,
introduced Kirk's mom many, many scenes prior to this.
And the idea to basically say, we're gonna intro her here,
the idea that she's pregnant, I thought, was genius.
I remember, Bryan, when you brought that up, and I fought you on it.
I think we actually physically wrestled in the editing room.
But you were so smart, because it engaged you,
it let you engage in a deeper way, on one level,
and then, unexpectedly, it deepened it,
as opposed to kind of telegraphing what the story was gonna be.
- I think it was a smart... - You're already so into the sequence,
it's so insane, and then it just ratchets up the stakes 10,000%
when you realise there's a pregnant woman on the ship,
and subliminally start to realise that this must be Kirk in there.
It just bifurcated the focus, having it earlier.
And, Bryan, you want to talk about that or no?
For me, I mean, Jennifer has this one sequence here
where she's so powerful and emotional,
and you're completely moved by her in this one moment.
And it felt like, you know,
this alone was able to carry the birth of Kirk and it was kind of heartbreaking.
And I remember, one of the things that we talked about
early in the development of the script,
and this is a place where I really dug in and was dead wrong,
was that she doesn't make it off the Kelvin,
that Kirk needs to be beamed.
There was a whole thing where basically,
in a emergency scenario, like a caesarean,
you could actually beam a baby out of a mother's womb.
We wrote that version. Yeah.
But if you did it, you kill her because it's an inexact science.
Which is a really cool idea.
But the idea that... We ended up playing it straight,
that it was a conventional birth that everybody could identify with,
and that the first time that you actually use the transporter in the movie
- is in the space jump. - Right.
Where we didn't overuse our beaming gags,
I think was really smart.
More importantly, she survives.
You know, which is really important. There is a victory.
Well, it's funny, because we ended up cutting a sequence later
where you saw their uncle,
who now in this film became the stepfather,
the question is sort of what role she played.
It was an interesting thing, 'cause there was a while
where she was on the phone call, and she was mad at Kirk.
And it felt like... You love her so much from this sequence,
that to have her being mean to Kirk later felt counterintuitive.
It felt like, "I don't want to not like her. I just loved her."
So, we ended up having it just be the stepfather.
But, I think, you know, given how few minutes she's actually onscreen,
I think Jennifer Morrison did an amazing job.
And I think, you know, for us, for the five of us,
when we first started talking about Trek, I remember in the very first meeting,
probably about five minutes in, we basically said,
"How in God's name are we gonna get our wives to go and see this movie
"other than the fact that they're married to us?"
You know, we will not be successful in rebooting Trek
unless we can get women to enjoy the movie.
And that's where I feel like...
At least the birth of Spock really had that going for it.
But opening the movie with this and kind of saying,
in the midst of all this space battle craziness,
this is what the movie is, you know.
This is the moment where my wife,
when she first saw it, sort of grabbed my hand,
and I looked over at her and her eyes were all moist,
and I was like, "Okay. I think maybe this is gonna work."
And from a canon point of view, this is the first canon divergence.
- Whereas Kirk was always born in lowa. - Yeah, that's right.
He would have been born there...
Well, actually, the Romulans showing up alone.
- Exactly. - Nero's showing up and changing...
Created the premature contractions.
And the idea that Kirk was born in space in mid-battle
always seemed like a great reason to break canon.
I should just also point that
Giacchino's score in that sequence, I think, really was genius.
- And this transition is unbelievable. - And this transition was not here.
This musical transition was actually, and is still in the film later,
when they are going up to space for the first time to see the Enterprise.
And I moved this to here
'cause it felt more like an announcement that Star Trek is back.
Well, I think what happens here is that your heart breaks, but then it soars.
You know? And that's an amazing thing to have happen
in the first 10 minutes of the movie.
First breaks... I'm writing this down. First breaks, then soars.
This title card here, by the way, was done by Andrew Kramer,
who is this 23-year-old kid, who I found online...
Nice.
...who did the Fringe opening titles, and he's a brilliant guy.
- And he did this and then the end... - Amazing.
Let's talk about the scene that came before this that's not...
- That's right. - That's shot, but not in the movie.
- We just alluded to it. - We had the scene where
you basically saw George, his older brother,
Kirk's older brother, running away.
- Product placement. - Thanks to Burky.
There's Greg Grunberg, our good luck charm.
I think we have the deleted scenes after, so I don't know
- if we have to talk about them now. - Well, if it's there,
you'll see the scene. But it was cut,
and I think, ultimately, I really enjoyed the scene.
My favourite thing about that scene, by the way,
was there was a forced perspective miniature of the house
that we used that I hated to lose.
All right, now, this is what everybody
is buying this DVD to find out. In this scene,
we have to talk about the song selection.
J.J., why Sabotage by the Beastie Boys?
It's because it's a kick-ass song. That's the true answer.
It had nothing to do with Shatner.
- It was just a happy coincidence. - Happy coincidence.
But I want to just point the one thing out, which is that all these shots of the kid,
it was my least favourite stuff that we had shot, his close-ups.
Not that shot, but the close-ups. And they weren't working.
And this was a very hard sequence to do.
See, a shot like this, right?
There were all these different rigs that we used for him,
and I just didn't get good close-ups on the day.
And so we ended up going back and shooting all of his close-ups again.
Every close-up you see, there are 11 shots,
and they were all re-shot, except for that one.
They were all re-shot on the roof of the 20th Century Fox parking lot.
- Including his final line here, right? - That one right there, too.
Yes, that shot right there.
All these shots were all done in the parking lot, just shaking the camera,
and then the last shot of him standing up, saying his name.
And also when we shot it originally, the stuntman/actor
who's actually on the motorcycle, you could see his face,
but I just thought it looked silly.
And so I ended up actually having his face replaced.
And I wrote him a note 'cause I felt bad that I covered his face.
But the mask was put on digitally later,
and I think it actually makes all the difference.
And for the nitpickers, yes, there's no cliffs in lowa,
- but this is clearly a quarry. - It's a quarry, my friend.
- There were no cliffs in lowa. - That's right.
- Until the earthquake of 2011. - The great quake of 2011.
So, is the idea here that this guy is a robot?
I don't know. I mean, I think he was in a bad accident.
That's my voice, by the way.
It's amazing to me how the original version of this sequence,
with the close-ups that you ended up replacing,
- the energy level went up 10,000 times. - Well, you know what it was?
Because we knew what his experience was.
This is one of my favourite shots in the movie.
This shot, for some reason, destroys me.
I love it. LLM is... Look at lLM.
- Look what they do. - It's crazy.
I also love that, by the way,
there's like a title in the earlier scene that says lowa.
Like, "Sure, I know where lowa is." And the next one's, like, Vulcan.
Like, "Oh, yeah, of course, Vulcan. Sure. I know where that is."
My wife's like, "What now?
"Where is that in relation to lowa? Is that somewhere in Europe?"
So we had four of these, or three-and-a-half of these bowls
actually physically built, and then the rest were put in later.
And these were actual projections that were augmented later by lLM.
This kid, Kogan...
- Joshua. Jacob, that's right. - Jacob.
- He was in a movie called Joshua. - That's right.
That's why I got confused. He's a terrific actor.
And Sean Gerace, actually, who was our primary Trek researcher,
- turned us on to this actor. - Who was in the earlier scene.
- Yes. - He was one of the guys on the Kelvin.
That always gets a laugh.
Yeah, and affirmative was... This was a change that we made,
'cause he used to say, "Your mother is a human whore" there.
And Nicole, one of the people at Bad Robot,
suggested that we not have it happen here,
but have it happen at the end before the fight happens.
So we ended up changing that. We made some changes
in literally the last week before we locked the picture
that I think were huge improvements in a number of sequences.
Picture and music, as well. And that was one of the little ones.
It always amazes me that that happens
- in the last two weeks of a movie. - That last minute...
- it's frightening, actually. - Yeah, it is.
- We still might make changes. - I have some notes.
There was a lot of streamlining in these sequences here.
This used to start with the bit between Sarek and Amanda.
- Yeah, there was a great little... - Right.
It was one of my favourite shots, actually,
this fight between the two of them, which we should also put on the DVD.
But we ended up cutting it, again, just for pace.
- And you wanted to get to... - The heart of it.
Yeah, and you wanted to get to Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto
as quickly as possible. Ben Cross was terrific.
It was amazing how his bone structure looks so much like Nimoy's to me.
- I just think he's terrific. - And also like Mark Lenard's,
- who played the original. - That's right. That's right.
Who was actually, a little point that probably only Bob knows,
Mark Lenard actually played a Romulan...
- That's right. - ...in his first appearance in Trek
in "Balance of Terror."
And they liked him so much, they recast him as Spock's dad.
- For what it's worth, we... Yes? - That's right, Damon.
I got that off the lnternet. It was my one fun fact to...
- lmpress the fans. - ...illegitimately prove my Trekitude.
We looped this scene for Jacob,
and he did an amazing job looping these lines.
And so, originally, this went from young Spock to young Kirk,
and we had the driving scene, the fight with the uncle
and everything after this.
But using this dissolve sort of allowed for a time passage.
And I just love this entrance that you just saw him, he was a little boy,
and now when he comes in, he's taller than his mother.
And you've just heard that she's human, so you're tracking it nicely.
Now this whole set is actually a real building.
And we just put a huge greenscreen up behind it.
A church, right?
- Yeah, it's like a chapel... - it's a mortuary.
- Yeah, at a cemetery. - At a cemetery.
So, here's Winona.
With some slight old age stipple makeup on.
She looked so beautiful in the first scene,
where she's giving birth, and she looks older here.
And it was a nice contrast, but I think it works well here anyway.
I love the way that you guys wrote Spock's dialogue throughout.
"May I ask a personal query?"
Little things like that, I think,
are the things that really impressed the hardcore Trekkers,
but sort of immediately presented to people from outside of Trek
the idea that this is what a Vulcan is. This is how they talk.
Also, this is one of our first days of shooting.
Can we just discuss Zachary Quinto?
I mean, the guy showed up, we knew he looked the part,
but this was the first time we were actually filming with him.
And it was literally like... He was so impactful that I forgot...
Akiva Goldsman to the right, right there. Akiva Goldsman. Now he's gone.
But I gotta say that Zachary,
he was so good
that I actually forgot sometimes what Nimoy's Spock was like.
He became Spock in a way that I'd have to actually think
to differentiate them in my mind. It's very strange.
J.J., can you please tell the story of doing ADR with the Council?
- With the Council. - Yeah, the gentleman...
ADR, by the way, is dialogue that is recorded after the fact.
Additional dialogue recording.
That actor, who he's speaking with, whose name eludes me,
this is horrible. Oh, God. See, now it's not a good story.
Anyway, I met him at the ADR, and I said,
"Hey, how you doing? Good to see you."
He's like, "Yes." I said, "Did you have fun doing the movie?"
He was like, "The director was a slave driver."
And he started talking about the director, not realising it was me.
- And I was like, "What?" - He's like,
- "He had me do three hours of it." - Hilarious.
And I didn't know if he was joking. And I was like, "I'm J.J."
He's like, "Oh, sorry. Sorry!
- "Did I say slave driver?" - I meant...
"Where I come from, that is a term of affection."
- it's awesome. - Yeah, it was great.
I love the song choice here. Now we're back in lowa.
And I think that this is just such an awesome way to introduce Uhura.
I just love that walk. It basically tells you
everything you need to know about her right there.
She is spectacular.
Yeah, we shot this at an American Legion.
This song was written by our director, J.J. Abrams.
- I did the song. - Slave driver.
I believe it's called, I Love My Puppy.
- What's it called? - With George Jaculius.
But it's got a funny name.
It's a weird name. It's Kurosawa backwards.
J.J., who is that sitting next to,
not next to Uhura, but on that gentleman's left?
If you look right here, that's my dad right there.
- And now that's Chris Pine. - Before Pine enters frame, yeah.
And next to my dad is my wife's father. So it's Gerald Abrams and Jim McGrath.
I love how Kirk's entrance is basically like,
the camera is just about to reveal J.J.'s dad,
and then, "Hello, Chris Pine, star of the movie."
Was your dad difficult to work with?
It took us about a week longer to do this sequence than it would have.
He also thinks you're a slave driver.
By the way, the gentleman sitting between Kirk and Uhura,
- that's not makeup. No, he... - That's so weird.
Bryan Burk, ladies and gentlemen.
That's amazing makeup by Barney Burman.
And I never, during the, I think, three days we were in this set,
I never met that man without his makeup on.
So I only knew him... And the character's name literally was Bryan.
I swear to God. And I just knew him with that makeup.
And then the other night, I was at a party,
and this guy comes up to me and he's like,
"Hi, I was the guy at the bar." I actually got to meet him.
- And that guy? - Bryan Burk.
Mr Will Ferrell.
True story.
- Not a true story. - Not a true story.
And here's another place where I think there were, like, key dialogue lifts
that basically really punched it up.
Because their flirtation lasted for
- a page and a half, I think. - It went on a little longer.
And here's the "cupcake."
You know, he used to say, "A joke, like your hairline,"
which I always thought was funny, but maybe not.
It's not funny to me.
By the way, the stuntman who, in this moment...
There was a very weird move here. We ended up kind of cutting it down.
But, in this moment here, when he falls, right there... Oh, man, that really hurt.
Did he land on his head? 'Cause it really looks like he landed on his head.
Yeah, he really did.
Yeah, it was bad. Oh, no, sorry. He's fine.
That's a great Harrison Ford moment right there.
By the way, I think the boob gag works because you didn't have a close-up of it.
As many directors I believe would have, you didn't do that.
Yeah, I debated. There are the father and father-in-law right there.
By the way, question.
Are there really still glass bottles this far in the future?
- Have we come... - By the way, it's not glass.
- It isn't? - It's titanium crystal.
- Of course. See? - There you go.
I can't say enough good things about Bruce Greenwood.
- I can't say enough bad things. - But I'm not gonna try.
Here's one of my favourite lines in the movie.
And Chris totally just rocked it.
There's a great ADR line, by the way,
where someone goes, "I just got a drink."
He really grounds and gives credibility to the whole idea of Starfleet.
- And that head tilt is amazing. - There's something about him
that makes you take everything seriously.
By the way, that shot that just passed, what was cool is
that there were already all these little old planes hanging
- and we added a starship... - Cool.
...in the foreground, just to kind of add to it.
Tony Guma is an actor, and he plays the bartender who's in all this.
But you never see him onscreen, but he did a great job.
- Wait, wasn't Tony in M: I: lll? Yeah. - He was.
- He was the guy at the mailbox. - He was the guy in the bathroom,
- right? Oh, right, right, right, right. - No, at the mailbox place.
So, here's... Go ahead.
Just from a story point, this is one those scenes
where basically everything that you need to know
about a character's motivation to do everything they're doing in the movie
happens in a single scene.
And I think that's a testament to Alex and Bob's writing,
but also Greenwood's performance and Chris's performance,
'cause it's so understated, but the power of the scene...
it's basically like you hear all this dialogue
in all the trailers leading up to the movie.
Our trailer guys basically just won a couple of awards.
It sells the movie.
This was a hard scene to write.
Well, it's interesting. We shot it with two cameras simultaneously.
I wanted the actors to feel as comfortable as possible
to give them the chance to sort of overlap
- and I cleared out the set. - That's cool.
So it was just really the two of them, two cameras, really quiet.
It really helped, you know, give them... And also that background.
Scott Chambliss, our production designer,
- did an additional amazing thing... - Fantastic.
...which is, like, he took that old bar,
which is, again, a real American Legion bar in Hollywood,
and that background, those lights... l just wanted it to feel...
I wanted it to have that kind of Blade Runner-y future feel
where it's like, were those advertisements?
Was it information? Was it entertainment?
Was it just a light show? It doesn't matter.
But just that idea that in that bar, there's that weird background.
I dare you to do better.
By the way, that was an adjustment of a line from Maryann Brandon,
the editor of this sequence.
She edited this scene, didn't she, Bryan?
- This one? - Yes.
And it was just that addition of, "He saved all those lives."
- What were you gonna say? - Salt shaker, by the way.
Dan Mindel, our genius DP, said something very interesting about that.
I had them put the salt in, by the way. Sorry.
- Oh, really? How funny. - Isn't that funny?
What'd that cost us?
- $600,000? - Yeah, about $100,000.
About not being afraid to have something moving.
I'm so sorry. That shot right there, that's the same angle, just flopped.
I had him drive toward us and away from us.
How funny.
And then that shot we stole real quick.
We were driving by the field and I was like,
"Pull over quick. Get the camera on the truck."
And here's our Tatooine moment, before Alex continues
to talk about something that happened nine minutes ago.
- Continues? - Where basically...
We did talk about... A lot of fun-poking has happened
in terms of how we sort of echoed the storytelling in Star Wars.
But that is sort of the great myth of our childhood,
in the sort of Joseph Campbell tradition.
We always talked about rebooting Trek in terms of saying,
"Where's our moment where Luke is looking at the twin suns?"
- And, you know, that was it. - Yeah.
I gotta see that movie.
Star Wars? Very good.
This was shot at...
Start with The Phantom Menace, so it'll make sense.
This is one of my favourite things,
when the bike comes in and there's no spokes on the wheel.
Yeah, it's...
- Did lLM take those out? - They did.
This was actually at a power plant outside of Los Angeles,
and we just dressed it and brought in these shuttles.
- It was my favourite thing about the... - Who flew the shuttles in?
Bryan did.
This was one of those things where...
This is at Paramount, shot about a month and a half before the location.
Did you guys come up with that on the day?
That gag right there where he bangs his head?
- Yes. Yeah. - Love it.
What I like about it is later in the movie, in a very similar shot,
when he's saying goodbye to Spock, he doesn't hit his head,
and it still says low clearance.
But anyway, one of my favourite things about the production design
is the sort of tangible quality of it.
And so trying to use as many locations as possible.
So, you know, we use a bunch of power plants.
You'll see later the Budweiser plant.
I also love this, that, like, now he's joined and there she is.
And it kind of makes you feel like,
"There's gonna be some kind of fun flirtation and romance going on."
Of course, now Karl Urban, a man from New Zealand who came in,
having been the stud in Lord of the Rings
and the bad guy in Bourne,
and suddenly was the funniest Kentucky doctor,
and just blew my mind and channelled Bones.
This is one of those scenes that you guys wrote that did not change.
It was this way in the first draft, and it sort of stayed the same.
As Bones' introduction, this sort of idea
that he actually was a spaceophobe, or...
I don't know what the technical term for the fear of space is.
- And divorced. - And by the way, this line about,
"All I got left are my bones," was Karl Urban's line.
And that was something he came up with on the day.
- So good. Yeah. - And I gotta tell you, it's amazing.
- It just defines everything. - Everything. Yeah.
And his character, and it just explains it.
It explains a conversation that never happens.
The audience gets to fill the blanks in. I just love that.
- He's terrific in the movie. - He's amazing.
You know, we worked with him on Hercules and Xena.
That's right.
And by the way, this music,
this used to be the music at the beginning of the movie,
- from Star Trek. - For the credits, right?
- For the Star Trek logo. - That's right.
I moved it here 'cause it felt more like, the first time you hear
the echoing of the Alexander Courage theme,
right there, felt like it was finally earned.
Like, it's finally, Kirk's on his way to the Star Trek that we know.
Let's talk a little bit about...
Or I guess this will be covered in the deleted scenes,
but we do want to talk a little bit about...
- The prison? - ...how we ended up
coming to this as our Nero midpoint?
There used to be a sequence, that is on the DVD, showing Nero in prison,
which was a cool sequence,
and confounding to anyone who watched it in context.
This shot, by the way,
- was used in that earlier sequence. - The prison sequence.
But I felt you needed to see Nero again
and just hold on him, and let it burn into your brain.
So I took this shot, which used to be him being tortured,
lying on the table, and I moved it here,
and I put a sound of a guy off-camera saying, "He's ready for you,"
just so you actually could think about Nero for a second.
And then you go into this scene,
so you actually thought about the bad guy.
There's a whole movie that you didn't see,
where basically the Kelvin and sort of its kamikaze run,
when George Kirk runs it into the Kelvin, it becomes...
- Knocks it into the Neutral Zone. - Right.
And then they get picked up by some Klingons,
and they get imprisoned by the Klingons for 25 years.
And during that period of time, basically,
Nero is working on these calculations to figure out
when Spock Prime is going to emerge from this singularity.
And he figures it out, and then they plan this whole prison break
and they steal their ship back. You didn't need to see any of it.
It was really hard for the audience to understand.
"Who is the bad guy now? I don't understand."
But by removing it, it eliminated the questions.
- This was shot at Northridge... - Library.
At the library there. And, obviously, lLM did an amazing...
I wanted to do an establishing shot that was part of a scene.
So you see... "Look, there's future San Francisco."
By the way, now is as good of a time as any to talk about Michael Kaplan.
I just love the costumes.
Yeah, he's the costume designer who, it was infuriating,
'cause every time I'd go into his workshop, I would just say yes.
Like, he never had a bad idea. He's amazing.
I wanted to not reveal the green until the lights came on,
so we did some colour work here.
That's Rachel Nichols, who was in Alias.
This was obviously something we could have done
a whole bunch more elaborate makeup,
but we wanted to sort of do something that was real throwback
to the original series, that felt completely connected to the old show.
We re-shot this scene. It was done originally
a different version of this scene, in which, among other things,
Uhura did not get undressed. And I literally felt like,
Chris Pine's in his underwear, this girl's, you know... l just thought,
like, the idea of all three of them being in their underwear was so funny to me.
It just felt like a ridiculous situation.
That's the way you're gonna justify it?
- It's not bad, actually. - I almost bought that.
And also, I wanted to, you know, have Uhura get undressed.
No, but it was one of those moments
that felt like it really did emphasise Kirk's love of her,
which I think also helped the reversal later,
when you discover, you know, that she's with Spock.
So, I love the idea that, you know,
you really think you're playing on the axis of the Kirk/Uhura story.
I love the way that Spock, Kirk's and Uhura's triangle plays,
which is the idea that,
you know, in a conventional movie, Kirk is gonna get the girl.
- And the fact that he... - That's right.
I love her in this shot, by the way.
He lost her before the movie even started.
- That's right. - You know, I mean, because she...
- But you don't realise that until later. - She's still in play, maybe, in the bar,
but at some point in these three years, she's fallen for Spock.
Now, this is the same set that we used in the Kelvin.
It was redressed a little bit, but it has much more of the submarine vibe.
And then this was actually, you know, part of the set.
And they had to rebuild it over about a month or so,
but it was interesting working on the same set.
And we changed the camera movements
so that it was very static.
Even though the camera's on a dolly, it never felt like it was really moving.
So even though the ship is being shot and everything, I wanted to make sure
it didn't feel like it was supposed to be a real ship.
Now, Kobayashi Maru, on a script level,
we spent a lot of time talking about this sequence.
Well, the green girl used to be a huge part of this.
She was the one who ended up basically planting the bug.
Kirk had been sleeping with her
specifically to get her to insert the virus into the computer.
But it somehow felt more fun to keep it a mystery as to who did it.
That sounds so dirty, what you just said.
The other major change that happened was that in its original conception,
we didn't know we were in the middle of a test.
The top of, kind of, the midpoint of...
Once Kirk went off to Starfleet and you came back three years later,
he was in the middle of being the captain,
so the intention was originally to trick the audience into thinking
- he had become captain. - It felt a little bit like...
- And we went away from that. - Yeah.
It just felt a little bit like you saw it coming
in a way that wasn't as fun.
J.J., what about the apple?
- I don't know. It's so funny. - Where'd that come from.
Someone, I can't remember who it was, was like, "I hate it when actors eat..."
Maybe it was Josh Reims, "I hate it when actors eat apples in movies."
And you were like, "We need an apple. Let's get an apple on set."
For some reason while we were shooting, I thought,
"You know what? If the guy is eating an apple, he's so much cockier."
I just love that this is the moment, this whole sequence is really about that.
It's about, "This is where they cross."
People think it's a reference to an original Trek episode.
Wrath of Khan.
It's not.
Tyler Perry, who agreed to be in this movie,
who had never been in anyone else's movie,
never been on anyone else's set,
and he did this movie, which I was so grateful for.
He's such a nice guy and a terrific actor, I thought.
- By the way, to the right... - I think he is really good.
Ben Binswagner to the right, who's the biggest Trek fan I've ever met,
an old friend of mine. So we put him in there.
Who I also don't think had ever been in anyone else's movie or on any other set.
Only in Tyler Perry's film.
This shot was fun.
We just had these guys just sitting on the ledge up there.
This is one of those scenes that you kind of, you know, eagerly await writing
and also are terrified to write.
There's a version, I think, that's three times as long as this.
- It was a much longer scene. - There was a lot of stuff,
- and we ended up just trimming. - And you just realise
what's expendable when you go to it.
But what's so great about it, you know, is that it's...
Spock actually goes to a very emotional place here.
Even though he's presenting it as a logical Vulcan,
he plays the dead dad card.
Which, you know, is sort of a brutal piece of debating.
Yeah.
That was a set extension shot.
If you look behind Spock, the green girl is there,
Rachel Nichols' character right there.
She's playing angry in the sequence, if you watch it, because she was used.
So in the original version of this shot, of this scene,
she was mad, arms crossed, because Kirk had used her.
There was actually a second green girl, as well, later in the movie.
- That was a very funny scene. - Yeah.
Where Kirk basically goes and apologises to her.
By the way, we gotta put that on the DVD, as well.
- That's a great scene. - That has to be on the DVD.
But actually, I think a lot of that stuff went away
because Matt Reeves came to see the movie.
And one of his feelings and concerns was that we were playing Kirk too cocky.
He hated Kirk. His note was, "I did not like Kirk."
And we did a pass that was literally to, you know, answer that.
And that included...
- He also hated green girls, though. - Good point.
He also hates everybody.
I love McCoy here.
For canon fanatics, we always imagined that this could have been the way
that Spock and Kirk met in either universe.
He always cheated on the Kobayashi Maru,
as known by Star Trek ll.
And the idea that their first meeting was in conflict was kind of the way
we reverse engineered what the arc of their characters would be.
If you met them as friends, what's as far away as you can meet them?
Well, you can meet them as enemies.
That's what I liked about it, regardless of it being Star Trek,
these two characters who meet up in this way.
- Right. - We shot this at a real hangar.
It used to be a blimp hangar. And two of those shuttles are real.
Almost all the ones you're seeing right now are not.
It was a huge shot, 'cause the shot is a long shot.
- Yeah. - And lLM did an amazing job on this.
It's throughout the movie, so I should mention it now.
J.J. and Dan Mindel had this crazy idea
to have flares non-stop throughout the movie.
I don't know what you're talking about.
And you may notice all these flares.
And Dan was shining a flashlight directly into the lens in a lot of cases.
- Right there is an example. - Is that like piece of flair,
like in Office Space?
I was gonna say, at least for me, not only does it keep everything alive
and there's this perpetual idea that there's something off-screen,
what also was kind of great about the flares
is later, when lLM was doing their visual effects,
you'll notice that most of the visual effects have flares, as well,
where you can actually see the lens and you can see the dirt on the lens,
which is all, of course, fake.
Yet it's all giving the illusion that there's really a cameraman there,
with a camera, actually filming in space.
And I think it all stems from this idea of making everything real and palpable.
Yeah, the flare thing, the idea was sort of that,
the future is so bright it can't be contained in the frame.
And I know there's a lot of it,
and there are a few shots where it's preposterous.
But I just thought it was a fun piece of business to do.
I think where it went over, though, is
when we went out to dinner the other night,
and Dan Mindel was shining a light in my eyes over your shoulder.
- I think the live flare... - Going too far.
In life, it's called squinting.
So, here is sort of the longest running gag in the movie,
which is the sort of hypospray. Which is, you know, the idea that...
I've sort of gone back and looked at the other Trek movies
and some of the original series, and it only hurts in this movie.
You know, the whole point of them developing hypospray
- is that it's supposed to be painless. - Yeah.
But I guess when you get it in the neck...
I'm not sure that it was the injection itself,
as much as it was the chemical he was reacting to.
This is Alex Nevil, by the way, who I went to high school with,
who plays... He's a terrific actor.
Speaking of terrific acting,
- I love Chris here. - Come on, look at Pine.
- Look what's he doing. It's ridiculous. - Yeah, he's amazing.
So here's the music that's from the opening of the movie, again.
This is one of my favourite shots in the whole movie right there.
- On the left is the Tagruato... - Unbelievable. Just so good.
- ...the Slusho company. - And this one, too.
- I love this, you know. - This transition is amazing.
I mean, it's just like...
But what Bryan's saying, you know,
using flares in the CG shots kind of made it seamless.
I remember I was on set this day when you guys shot this.
And, you know, they were actually on a gimbal rig, right?
- They were not, but the camera was. - The camera was.
I think James Clyne designed that.
But this was a shot where we actually went by
the little piece of shuttle we'd built. And of course the rest of this.
And this sequence, I wanted it to feel like
what I experienced when I saw the original Robert Wise film,
The Motion Picture, because there was a five-minute sequence...
- Ofjust introducing the Enterprise. - Yeah.
Ofjust Kirk taking his shuttle to the Enterprise. And it felt real.
And I saw the panels on the skin of the ship,
- and it just felt tangible. - The guys flying outside the ship,
- and operating. It was amazing. - The whole thing.
And all the floodlights and everything.
So I really wanted this to be, as much as possible,
you know, an homage to that amazing original sequence.
- And this is all Budweiser. - What does NCC stand for, Bob?
I have no idea.
- What? - That's unbelievable.
- I've never stumped him before. - Wow, on the spot, failed.
By the way, this shot here, watch this shot here.
So, there you are, see, in the Budweiser plant.
And then here he is there.
And how did you do it, J.J.?
- Literally, my favourite thing. - Where's the cut?
We were on the set, and we just had a guy holding up a greenscreen,
and Zachary walked in, the door closed, the guy walked away.
Door opened, and they just put that thing in later.
But it was one of my favourite things to do.
This sequence also, which is, you know,
knowing it was the introduction of the Bridge,
I just tried to do as many, sort of, wide shots of the place.
This shot, when he sits down, you see the light in his eyes.
That's an homage to the original show,
'cause they had that strip of light on Kirk's eye all the time.
And now we start to meet all the characters, you know.
I think the choreography of...
Also one of my favourite shots right there, with the music swell.
- It just kills me. - Come on. Giacchino's score here
- is awesome. - Oh, my God. The choreography
of camera movement on the Bridge in every scene is amazing to me
because there's a lot of time spent on that Bridge,
and every time you're there, it's interesting
and kind of compelling, and it just moves.
Yeah, I did try, in the early sequences,
to keep the camera moving as much as possible,
knowing that any second now, there was about to be no movement,
and it needed to feel much more static, so...
This is great, 'cause the last thing you're expecting here is a gag,
and the way to introduce Sulu as...
I love John's performance here.
This brings up, I think, one of the challenges that we all had
in introducing characters
and finding ways to pop them into the story in the most organic way.
I mean, it's funny, early on in the process,
we all made a list of things we wanted to see in Trek
and character traits we knew we had to employ.
And in breaking the story, all of us coming together
and figuring out where we were gonna drop in Sulu,
and how we were gonna meet Uhura. And, you know, those are...
if you go one molecule wrong on the introduction, you're screwed.
Roger suggested doing the, you know,
zoom dolly move there, and I was like, "Really?"
Then we did it, and I was like, "That's cool."
- I love that Kirk... - That was his... Go ahead.
I was just gonna say...
- This is Roger Guyett. - Numerous places
we could talk about this, but we could talk about our sound design,
where we had an incredible sound designer,
a guy named Mark Stoeckinger,
who I think you first worked with on Mission: lmpossible lll.
- Right. Yeah. - Correct?
And a lot of these sounds, the warp, I think, came from him,
and a lot of that came from him.
And then as we were doing the final mix,
we wanted to keep the iconic sounds alive
and figure out how we could kind of
do the 2009 version of those sounds created 40 years ago.
And we all...
Best gag in the movie, by the way.
Sorry for interrupting. Best gag in the movie.
We found out we could get Ben Burtt, who had done all the original sound
on Star Wars and all the movies we grew up on.
And he was available. And he came down, and the first thing he did
was hang up his original Benjamin Burtt Star Trek certificate,
which he had when he was a kid, and hunkered down,
and for a month, really helped find the sound design for this film.
Well, one of the first sounds in the movie, that kind of sonar ping,
none of those things were in the film originally.
And he really brought back the original sounds of the doors and,
you know, the communicator and the sounds of the Enterprise.
I just want to say real quick about Anton Yelchin.
You know, he's Russian born, but U.S. raised, and he's an amazing actor.
Here's Barney Burman's hands, again.
I was asked by a number of people if that was CG.
But they're just real latex giant hands.
And that was certainly a conversation, in terms of script, basically saying,
- "Okay, is the swollen hands too broad?" - Just tone. Yeah.
- But I think it plays great. - Yeah.
And I love Zoë's reaction when she sees the hands for the first time.
Yeah, that was another two-cameras-at-the-same-time thing,
which we only did because of time. We were running out of time.
This set now, what you just saw, was at Paramount.
This is now at the Budweiser plant.
That's beer in those big aluminium containers.
- It was cold there. It was freezing. - And it's freezing and loud.
But this is one of those things we were running out of time,
so we shot this with two cameras, as well.
By the way, I think that it's inspired that Uhura is basically sort of a peon
- amongst thousands of peons... - Yeah. That's right.
...in the bowels of the Enterprise. And basically it's Kirk, you know,
- basically drafts her into the mission. - Need of her.
And the fact that she speaks these dialects of Romulan,
and the guy who is currently, played by Osgood Perkins,
you'll see him in a minute on the Bridge, doesn't understand Romulan,
that's what basically gets her her promotion.
And that's the key, is figuring out ways to get your characters...
That's what the audience is waiting for,
is watching them take their place on the Bridge,
- getting them there. - We moved this, too, by the way.
You know, I think coming to it here as opposed to earlier,
- before Chekov starts his... - Yeah, this used to happen
immediately after the Council meeting,
before the hangar scene, and we moved it later.
We were just talking about something else.
- I was gonna say something. - What's a prod, by the way?
- Praetor. - Isn't it supposed to be Praetor Nero?
- Praetor Nero. - But it sounds like he says Prod Nero.
Scenes like this were fun to do because they had nothing to do
with visual effects, and this is a movie that has so much of that.
So these are the kind of scenes, this one,
the one later when they're trying to debate what action to take
was another one, where it was just, like, the fun of having the actors
rehearse it, just run through it, sort of see what they would do,
and then, you know, doing it like a regular scene.
It was just kind of a relief to get to do, you know,
like we were saying, like the drawing room scenes, almost.
Now this scene is classic Trek.
You know, this scene, and then the scene where basically
Kirk and Spock, you know, are delivering
the massive exposition of, you know, an angry future Romulan,
I think the idea that you're getting exposition out in the context of conflict.
And, again, a big, big shout-out to Bob and Alex,
because this is not easy stuff to write.
And Kirk here used to say "fact," used to say "fact" before every fact.
And we just lost all the "facts"
and just made it one, you know, smoother line. It was funny.
And I love that Uhura gets his back there,
because here's the triangle in play, literally the way that you've blocked it.
You know, here is... And I love the fact that he's in blue
and Kirk is in black and...
Well, the key also, you know, for Uhura and for all the main characters,
there's Osgood, was that each of these characters
needed to have a critical role in the story.
That without each of these characters, they wouldn't end up where they end up.
And that was important. Osgood actually,
he was in Six Degrees of Separation that I was in.
- That's when I met him. - Yeah. We went to college with him.
- So funny. - I went to college with him.
- Yeah. We were both at NYU. - NYU. Yeah.
- We didn't know each other at college. - That's right.
- We were there the same year. - We don't know each other now.
One of the moments, by the way, just to go back 30 seconds,
is I love that Spock says, "The cadet's logic is sound."
'Cause in that moment, you're like,
"Okay, Spock cares more about the ship than he does about..."
They all have that moment. Uhura in supporting Kirk,
- Pike in allowing... - Now look, they all tilt that way,
but the ship goes the other direction. So, go figure.
Bryan, is there a little Easter egg coming up
that people should be looking for here on the DVD?
There are Easter eggs. One of my favourite things,
- actually, in these shots... - it just passed.
That was it? Are we pointing it out?
No, there's just something that you might want to look for.
There's also bodies floating throughout this shot,
which is really disturbing and...
- Love the sound design here. - Amazing.
This was a lot of what Ben worked on, as well.
This is one of my favourite sounds.
Right here, if you're watching this in surround,
you actually hear the sound as it passes the camera,
- as if it's hitting the cameraman. - Yeah, that was it. That was it.
And by the way, listening to a DVD commentary is great in surround.
That's really... You'll hear J.J.
- slightly back and to the left. - Right behind you.
- Just behind you. - Yeah. Exactly.
Now pitching, Manny Mota, Mota.
Here's another thing, just very briefly, that I wanted to ask you, J.J.,
- 'cause I don't think I ever did. - Jewish.
I think it was genius that the Romulans speak English
and that there's no subtitles. 'Cause if you think about it, you're like,
"Why would they be speaking English?" But I'm so glad that they do.
By the way, this shot has more lens flares than anything.
And I wanted to point out, also,
that that was a shot that I never... I can't figure out why I did this.
I had Sulu look over his right shoulder, as opposed to his left shoulder.
I can't figure out why I did that.
Because he should have looked towards camera.
I just think we all, you know, we discussed it. I think that the answer was,
"Let's not have the characters... Let's not try and confuse it by having
- "too many other languages." - But it makes this moment.
- I love Bana's delivery here. - He's so funny.
- Yeah, unbelievable. - "Hello, Christopher."
- Yeah. "Hi, Christopher." - That was genius.
That deadpan thing was brilliant.
- "Hi, Christopher. I'm Nero." - What does NCC stand for?
- We've already been here. - Somebody look it up, for God's sakes.
- Sorry. - Okay, wait a minute. That guy,
a lot of people think that's Kal Penn because John Cho's in the movie.
- Yeah, it's not. - It's not.
I actually think it stands for "no can comment."
But the... Yeah, this was...
it was very funny, when we were shooting this, I remember,
"Oh, my God, we're actually shooting a Star Trek movie."
'Cause we had this greenscreen and we had the actors talking to it.
It just felt like, this must have been what it felt like
when they used to do Star Trek. And here we are doing Star Trek.
This is a staple of all time travel storytelling,
which is when one character recognises another one,
and then that character says,
"I don't know you." And then the character says,
- "You don't know me yet." - "Not yet."
Because we're in a time travel story.
Not a classic time travel story, though.
- Yes. This is a non-classic. - I also like how the viewscreen
is also, you know, a window.
- Thank you. - So you can kind of see through it.
You know, one of the things that I love about Chris' performance,
and I love so many things, is that, you know,
he can actually kind of put on his captain's hat,
and that's what he's doing there when he's basically saying,
- "Now is not the time for diplomacy." - That's right.
You're like, "Wow, this guy's actually very bright."
That was the hardest thing to come up with, remember, in casting this part.
You know, some people were good at playing rebel.
Some people were good at delivering captain's dialogue.
- Nobody was good at doing both. - Yeah, Chris could sort of do it all.
- We actually, when we did this shot... - I love this shot.
- Yeah, amazing. - We actually had
this crazy rig. It was really hard 'cause the roof
or the ceiling of the stage wasn't as high as I wish it had been.
But anyway, we did this whole thing with this crazy crane,
and, of course, lLM did the rest. But it was cool to get.
- You didn't shoot it in space? - We did shoot...
That was the one shot we actually built everything.
- This to me is a... Look at that. - We shot it in space, too.
So much of that background was CG. It's amazing.
Like, we built a piece of the ramp. Everything else was CG.
But this was one of those sequences that, you know, I'm not quite sure
what is landing for the audience, but we were showing them that this guy is
going in and doing something somewhere.
And I don't think you're supposed to understand it quite yet.
But hopefully, as time goes on, you realise,
- "This is Spock's ship." Yeah. - That they're in the squid.
We made a lot of choices like that that I think make it so
that when you see the movie over and over, there's more cool stuff.
- Yeah. - I like not patronising the audience.
I like patronising the audience.
- I know, Alex is totally about patronising. - Totally.
I want the audience to patronise the movie,
- but I don't want to patronise them. - Patronise the audience.
We had to stabilise this shot later. Not that it matters.
I was there the day that we shot this, as well, and this was at Budweiser.
And this is the first time that l...
That was the day that you decided to
- swear off beer, isn't it? - Yeah, it is.
I was sitting next to Bruce Greenwood, and for some reason,
I just always get star struck around that guy. You know, he just...
- 'Cause he's awesome. - It's coming off him in waves.
One of the things that I love when they enter the shuttle,
- is the radio check, all that filter stuff. - Yeah.
There's something about it. It creates an amazing energy,
along with the music change that happens there.
- It's fun. - Well, that... The music change...
it's funny, 'cause this sequence is another one of those things
we made these changes where we ended up changing the score
in the last, you know, days of the cut.
I love that look right there between
the two of those guys. 'Cause it just, you know,
the fact that they're still unresolved and, you know, at odds, I think is...
I think there's this great moment in the writing, you know,
and also in the way that you blocked it, J.J.,
in that it harkens back to the Kelvin,
where basically Robau says to George Kirk,
"You're the captain now."
Well, you literally just played the same scene again
- as the guys are getting in the elevator. - That's right.
Which means you know bad things are gonna happen.
Exactly. The handoff has occurred.
And just back to Greenwood again, tying this back to the '60s
and how Kirk and the Captain Pike were kind of models
of a Kennedyesque kind of a figure, Greenwood really just brings that,
not just because he played Kennedy in Thirteen Days,
but he played that role great 'cause he has that genuine centre.
I love that we just embraced the fact that this guy is dead.
He's dead with a capital "D."
- Red shirt number one. - What were you gonna say, Bryan?
Well, the drill sequence
- wasn't in the original script. - That was our last-minute add.
- Space jump. - Quite a thing to add at the last minute.
- Yeah. - The sequence was here,
- but it just didn't involve the drill jump. - Right.
- The space jump. - There was still everything else.
Production was thrilled that we...
To think about the movie without the space jump...
"Can we have $6 million more, please?"
Yeah, exactly. But it was worth it. I mean, you know...
Well, this sequence is sort of the centrepiece of the movie in a way,
- you know, this whole thing. - And this is one of the last things
you shot, J.J. I remember, right as we were about to wrap,
going to the Paramount lot and you were shooting in the...
- The shuttle? - No,
you were shooting the three actors basically
- being pushed around on dollies. - The sky...
Well, yeah, but what was crazy
when we were doing this sequence was trying to find a way
to get the shots of them as they were diving.
'Cause they had a lot of dialogue, and when you hang the actors
upside down, you know, their blood is just rushing to their head,
they're getting headaches. It's really uncomfortable.
It just never worked.
And so this is one of the two places where I wanted the silence.
And there's that, you know, ring out of sound.
When we'd go to the theatre,
we went around and watched real live audiences watching the movie
after we'd seen it a thousand times,
in that silence, you can always hear them kind of, you know,
whispering to each other. It was always cool.
- Like, "Wow." - "Are the speakers broken?"
But what's cool about this is, like, when they go through the atmosphere...
So these shots are on their faces that are coming up now,
like for a shot like this or this one what we ended up doing was,
we couldn't get them, and so we ended up taking these big pieces of mylar
and putting them down in the parking lot, just like 6-by-6 foot square,
and having the actors stand on them,
and we put the camera above them looking down.
And so you had sky behind them. They're actually standing up,
and we're just shaking the camera like crazy.
- That's great. - It's so funny.
Like Pine, here, he's just standing.
J.J. keeps referring to shaking the camera,
and if you go through some of the making of, you'll see what he...
He really stands on top and holds the magazine where the film is
and really shakes it back and forth. All these shots really are given
- a sense of life because it feels... - Kinetic energy, yeah.
Well, Lost was the first time I really started doing that,
when we were doing the aeroplane crash.
And it just gave it that sense of movement
that the cameraman can't do himself,
'cause it's just impossible to get that kind of
high-frequency vibration and hold the camera.
You want to talk a little bit about how we ended up
coming to the blocking of this sequence on the drill?
Well, first of all, all this stuff here was done
at the parking lot at Dodger Stadium.
We built essentially a third of the drill,
and, you know, we shot it outside, mostly because, you know,
I knew that even if the light wasn't great, when you had real sunlight,
you would know you were not inside on a stage.
And I think it helped enormously giving the thing a sense of realism.
What did you want to talk about, Alex? The blocking?
We just didn't know how we were gonna play out this sequence on the drill.
I mean, we knew what it was, but we didn't, the moves of it
and, tonally, how much fun we wanted to have with it
versus, you know, how much gaggery could we put in there?
And we said to ourselves, we really want it to be like
when lndiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark
is basically... it's the spinning plane sequence, where Marion is basically
inside the plane, and then, you know,
every time he does something that is successful, it creates a new obstacle
that makes the situation more life threatening.
The best thing about that sequence, by the way,
in lndiana Jones, or in Raiders, is that the Ark is not even on that plane.
- That's right. - That whole sequence happens,
you're like, "it wasn't even on the plane."
I think one of the things that that movie taught us,
among all those kinds of movies, is that
the way these action sequences work best is you set up a problem,
you relieve the tension, and then another problem is created.
And it just happens over and over and over again,
so the audience never gets a sense that it's gonna rest.
And I remember we were kind of talking about the logistics of this,
and we broke for lunch on the Enterprise set,
and Steven came by, Spielberg, and we all sat and had sandwiches,
literally on the Bridge, and talked about this.
I got home that day, and my wife was like, "How was your day?"
And I was like, "Pretty good. Not bad."
That was really among the most surreal...
I remember, actually, Steven visited when we were shooting
the Kobayashi Maru sequence, and someone said to me
about five minutes before he got there, "You know, today is his birthday."
- Oh, yeah, that's right. - I'm like, "What?"
So I'm like, "Cake! Get a cake!"
- "Good God, get a cake!" - So, before he left,
there was a cake for him.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, this sequence was obviously, you know,
crazy challenging 'cause of all the moves in it
and the amount of time that we had.
But all the actors, the stunt actors, you know,
obviously John and Chris, they just all did an amazing job.
- And it was a lot of work. - By the way, this is all Sulu.
I mean, Sulu basically kills both these Romulans
- and saves Kirk's life. - Yeah, Sulu is a massive hero in this.
Well, what's great about the gag setup is that
- when you hear fencing... - That's a weird cut.
No, that's good. But when you hear fencing, you go,
"it's not... Fencing?" And then it turns out that he's a ninja.
Well, I gotta say, the swashbuckling vibe,
you cannot deny how much fun that is.
- Totally. - I love the background.
That was CG done later, and then this is all real.
Of course, then the CG on the left.
It's just an amazing thing to see how lLM seamlessly intercuts,
or not intercuts, but combines actual footage.
Here's another thing where we were like,
"What? How do they disable the drill? Should they have to open up a..."
Well, originally, in the script, they went inside.
- Right. Yeah. - And I was like,
- "Let's just shoot the thing." - Yeah, exactly.
We need to cut $200,000 out of the sequence.
- How about they just shoot it? - Just shoot it.
Yeah, you don't miss that scene.
Love that moment, too, where he slips up.
Although I keep referencing that moment as,
because of that screw-up, it is the reason why Amanda dies.
There used to be a moment here, by the way, where the guy said,
"The drill's been sabotaged," and Nero shot him.
- But it was so stupid. - The design of this device is amazing.
- Incredible. Just so cool. - It is pretty cool.
- The way it stabilises. - Who did that?
Scott Chambliss oversaw the design, but James Clyne did a lot of the design.
I'm not sure who did that pod.
This shot's... l like this kind of thing.
'Cause this is on a dolly going one direction, and then on the whip here...
- Yep, love it. Love it. - ...we cut to a dolly
- going the other direction. - Yeah. So good.
And then he turns around, and there are more lens flares.
I love Anton's delivery here, which is basically, this is the moment
where the audience realises, "Wait a minute,
"are they actually gonna destroy Vulcan?"
Just, you know, again, in one of those very first story meetings that we all had,
we basically said,
- "if we're gonna change things..." - "Let's do it."
- "...we've gotta change it in a big way." - Watch Zoë's eyes right here.
There are two things in particular
that blow my mind about her in this movie.
Right here. That little thing she does right there,
- it just says so much to me. - A lot, yeah.
- It says she loves him. - Yep. There it is.
And you just see there's a whole inner life going on.
I mean, she's amazing.
So, what I loved about this was just the idea that, you know,
you think, "it's gonna be one of those save the guy with a parachute."
And then the fact that, you know,
we go one step further and have the parachute break.
Yeah.
Just was one of my favourite story points.
Right, because of the audience who has not been initiated to Trek...
- That's right. - If you ask somebody,
"Hey, do you know anything about Star Trek?"
"I've never seen a movie." "Beam me up, Scotty?"
They just know that. But they've never...
So in this moment when the parachute breaks,
for those people, they're like, "These two are dead.
- "There's no way to save them." - Now, in these shots
where you see close-ups of them, like when they're falling together,
like this, they're just hugging and turning on the mirror
and the camera is shaking. That was the day that Walter Koenig visited,
who played the original... And I think he thought this was gonna be
the worst movie of all time.
I was so embarrassed. I was like,
"Mr Koenig, I swear, it's not gonna just look like two guys hugging on a mirror."
I'd watch that, though.
This was one hallway, and we cut there
to make it look like a bigger hallway.
For some reason, it's one of my favourite cuts in the movie.
By the way, I think we've all gone on record as saying
one of our favourite Trek films is Galaxy Quest.
And this sequence is clearly an homage to
- Tony Shalhoub's great save in that film. - It's a brilliant, brilliant movie.
God, that movie is good.
And I love the way
- the beaming effects look there. - The beaming.
That it breaks. That it kind of shatters there.
When he says, "Yo-moyo," we were in Moscow and he said that line,
the audience went insane at the premiere.
What does it mean?
I can't really say it with my daughter listening.
- Okay. - But it's a sort of colloquialism.
- Involving borscht. - "I'm so happy?"
Roughly translated it means, "Good borscht!"
Exclamation point.
I love that Spock assumes the transporting position.
This was the first shot, by the way, that we did with Zachary
- in the movie, this very one. - I remember these were
the first dailies I saw. Obviously sans anything crumbling behind him.
- So that's a shuttle leaving the planet? - Yeah.
- These are all real rocks. - No, that's not true.
There's the katric ark.
And this was, again, another piece of music that we added,
- you know, put back in in the last mix. - Makes a huge, huge, huge difference.
This was one of my favourite shots that lLM, I think,
just did an amazing job, which was referencing existing Trek lore.
By the way, in watching the movie, you know, one of the things
that occurred to me, 'cause I remember seeing these dailies,
was basically like, "Wow, I don't think I've ever seen Spock run before."
- I'm sure he ran in the original series. - No.
Yeah, you saw him run a little bit,
- but not like this. - But very, very infrequently.
- Yeah, this is a whole other... - When that guy eats it there,
it's very pleasurable for some reason for me. I don't know why.
- That is even more pleasurable. - And that was all practical.
Literally. That was a stuntman who was just standing behind the rock,
but it sure looks like it took him out.
Vulcan elder known as Splat.
- Terrible. - Thank you.
And this is great. I love this moment that Winona gives us,
- which is basically, "Wait a minute." - "I know I'm about to eat it."
- "This is not gonna work." - "Yeah, see you later."
I just love Anton's performance there, just how he feels his failure.
This is a great series of shots,
but one of the performances that I really love here, again, is Ben Cross',
- which is basically, like... - I agree.
"Okay, I want you to play the fact that your wife is dead.
- "But you're a Vulcan." - But you're Vulcan. Go.
"And action."
- And let's begin. So there it is. - Well, same for Zach, for your mother.
It's basically like, "Wow, I really want to be very upset, but I'm a Vulcan."
And I just love how in the script, you guys went from a high
of everyone being saved moments ago to the planet and his mother dying,
- which is just tragic. - This is a great effect, by the way.
I mean, you basically say to someone,
"Planet sucked into internal black hole."
- Yes, it's easier to write than it is to... - Yeah, tell me about it.
- Have fun with that. - And by the way...
it should look like the Poltergeist house.
The sound there, that was another great move done, I think,
by Mark and Ben and Andy Nelson, the sound mixers, Anna.
But by having the planet get absorbed and kind of like muffled
and kind of get sucked in, and then have the whoosh of the ship go by.
They just did an amazing job with the sound.
By the way, just to kiss up to you again, J.J.,
I feel like, in these kind of movies, it's so easy
to use slow motion over and over and over and over again.
And I think that, if memory serves, this is the only time in the entire movie
- that you shot slow-mo. - There's one other time.
- Where? - When Spock is
dismissed from the Bridge.
- Oh, right. Yes. - And he walks down the hallway.
But it's so effective, when you use it there,
just in terms of the emotion about saying, "We're slowing the movie down."
- Thanks, man. - And here basically...
That was a nice little cut, by the way, when he stood up.
There was a cut from one shot to another wider.
I remember, basically Bob and Alex and I and Mr Leonard Nimoy
took the movie to Austin to show it to sort of the Star Trek geeks,
- for lack of a better word. - And they had no idea
- they were gonna see it. - And we sprung it on them.
But basically they were really reacting to the movie positively,
up until this moment. And we were all basically like,
"All right, this is where we basically, completely could lose them."
Because this is, I think,
the most intensive departure from canon in the movie,
and I know J.J. wants to talk about their performances here,
but I just feel like this was the gutsiest thing that we did.
Blowing up Vulcan was nothing compared to saying,
"Spock and Uhura are in love with each other
"and are having this incredibly intimate relationship."
Whenever I watch this scene, I'm watching it, you know,
I've seen it a gazillion times, and I think,
"Okay, I'm not really emotional while watching.
"I'm not emotional, I'm not emotional."
And then she does this thing when she says, "Okay."
This, yeah. Yeah.
And literally, even now, watching that, she is so great in that moment.
I just cannot... And it was interesting talking to her about it.
We were in Mexico for the release of the film there,
and she was telling me what she was processing
when she was doing that scene.
And it was actually kind of amazing to hear.
- What'd she say? - Well, she was going through
this whole thing, like, thinking that his mother, his mommy, died,
you know, the woman who gave birth to him and breastfed him,
and she had this whole story in her mind of his loss
and how emotional she was.
And literally she thought of a story that was a very personal story
about her family, what she and her family went through.
It was a fascinating thing, actually, to hear
the depth to which she had considered what Uhura would go through,
and then how to find strength and not just pure vulnerability.
But you see in that fraction of a moment when she says, "Okay,"
you see that vulnerability come through,
and I just love it that she was so restrained.
- Do Vulcans breastfeed? - She's not a Vulcan.
- You mean, do Vulcan babies? - No, I'm just saying, he was.
No, the point was she was just trying to, you know...
- No, no, I'm just trying to make a joke. - The answer is yes.
It was funny.
It brings a whole new level to it.
Once again, I think, Eric Bana, this is really his scene, you know,
and it's the scene that, especially now with the prison sequence gone,
it's the first time you really get to, you know, empathise.
There's a comic book that explains all of this incredibly well, with great detail,
- that's actually quite good. - It is.
This shot goes on too long. That's all I'm gonna say.
It's funny, 'cause he makes it look easy,
but Eric Bana had to be a bad guy in a space adventure.
- He does make it look easy, though. - You know.
His accent's also amazing.
- Yeah, he did an... - Really amazing.
He really brought so much to this character.
I've always felt that one of the greatest compliments an actor can ever be paid
by the critics is the word "unrecognisable."
- Yeah. - And I just saw that
sort of across the board. Every time I read a review of the movie, they said,
"Eric Bana was unrecognisable." And I just think that that's amazing.
'Cause it's not the makeup. It's his performance.
It's also interesting, you know, that Cameron Crowe
saw a very early cut of the film, and he was like,
"Who was the bad... Who was Nero?"
- Oh, yeah. - I said, "Eric Bana." He goes, "What?"
He literally didn't know who it was.
All this dialogue, by the way, was put in later.
Yep. Remember how many times we rewrote this line?
Yes. But I think the thing about learning... 'Cause we didn't want
Pike to have squealed. And if we learn that
what this bug did was force him to reveal the truth,
it wasn't his fault any more that he revealed the codes.
There was also a lot of debate about how it did that.
- Yeah, right. - Wrapping around your brainstem and...
This was one of my most favourite sequences to shoot.
Now, I remember, on the set that day, you guys were just running the scene,
and everybody was just running their lines.
And Chris was sitting in that chair, and Zach improvised that, right?
- Or you basically said... - I told him to say it,
but then I didn't know if we should do it or not.
- But I kind of felt like... - You were like, "Is it funny?"
I was like, "it's really funny."
it was just one of those scenes where I just thought it...
- it gets a laugh every time in the theatre. - I don't know. It made me laugh.
Huge laugh. 'Cause it talks about the destiny.
You know, and the audience is in on the joke.
- Yeah. - They know that
Kirk's gonna end up in the chair.
And it's a relationship moment between them.
That's why the joke plays.
But this sequence was a long... it's a long scene.
My favourite scene in the movie, oddly.
This was a fun scene to write.
But it was also fun just to have all the characters in that room together
finally doing their thing, you know?
This is where we basically say,
"Okay, you've been asking us, how are we gonna make a movie
"for the Trekkies, Trekkers, loyal fans for 40 years,
"and make it accessible to people who have never seen Trek."
And this is the scene that basically says, "All right,
"this is how we're gonna do it. This is our best shot.
"It's a parallel universe,
"and we're gonna follow the parallel universe from here on out."
Well, that was really, I think, the brilliance of the script
is that it allowed it to be true to Star Trek.
But to someone like me, again, who is not really
- a Star Trek fan to begin with, I was... - And still not, ironically.
- You hate it even more. - Well, now I hate it.
Yeah. I didn't hate it as much before.
No, but now I feel like, you know, these are my characters now.
It's not just that group of people. It's sort of everyone's.
I love that Kirk is really angry about what we've done, too.
He's basically like, "I don't like angry future Romulans.
"I don't like parallel Earths.
"I just want to go and save Captain Pike and get into space fights."
We talked a lot about how you needed to see the qualities of the Kirk
that we knew before this movie in this scene, in his reactions.
I love that Kirk also says, you know, he also said...
There's a very real quality to that.
He also said, "Come get me." it's like...
That was actually something... it feels very real for some reason,
- that little exchange. - Well, and it was important to us
- that they were both right. - Yeah, that's right.
Neither one of them could be wrong. And part of the inspiration, again,
going back to the '60s, was Lennon and McCartney
and looking at their friendship.
They'd both lost their mothers very young.
Lennon's, run over by a cop.
And they were, in a way, opposites.
And that bond allowed them to actually see past each other.
And now they have the same goal,
and yet they want to approach it differently.
There is one line that I always loved in the script
that I miss in the movie every time that I see it, which is when Kirk sort of
starts doing his log supplemental here, he kind of goes on this tirade
about Spock, where he goes, "Whose only way of expressing emotion
"is by using his eyebrow," or some such.
- But, I know... - it's in the audio book.
- You can still see it. - I know why we lost it
because in sort of like its tone...
Well, you couldn't hear it in the snowstorm.
Yeah. It's tonally weird a little bit.
There's one line coming up in the Nimoy introduction scene
that I desperately wish we'd kept in the movie,
because it's the thing we've been nailed on the most in all of the...
it was the line that kind of embraced the coincidences of...
I agree.
I mean, I can't tell you how many times we got nailed.
There's a quantum mechanical explanation for each...
This scene went on for so long.
This was all done at the Dodger Stadium.
You can watch it on the DVD, too.
This scene was originally supposed to be in lceland,
- and then we got the bill. - Right.
This shot was done, actually, second unit in Alaska,
with an actor walking, and then they added the snow,
the snow falling later and the distant mountains.
- But the... Go ahead. - What J.J. is also not talking about
is when we were doing this at Dodger Stadium,
in order to make our schedule and finish the movie,
is we had all these sequences all being shot at the same time.
We had the drill sequence set up right next door to this sequence.
And J.J., there were literally days where you were running
- from one sequence to the other. - Yeah. Even worse.
We'd be shooting the drill sequence, and you'd have little snow particles
flying over to the drills. Like, could we get the snow
- not to come over to the... - Not to be in the desert?
Above Vulcan.
I remember one of those days, all the international distributors
came to Dodger Stadium, and it was just, like,
"Okay, over here we're shooting this.
"Over there we're shooting the drill sequence."
it was like the factory floor. Like, "Here are the different models of cars
- "we're making for Star Trek." - That's crazy.
Originally, this creature came out a different way.
He was sort of behind a big snowdrift. And Roger Guyett had a brilliant idea
that he just looks over and sees this thing charging at him
from the beginning. And then this big red creature...
You know, again, all this was done on a fairly small piece of set
at Dodger Stadium. But you know, all that snow is paper.
We had a little teeny piece of a... Well, not a teeny,
but a smaller piece of this little hill built.
But Chris Pine inhaled probably, like, four reams of paper
shooting this sequence, and just worked his ass off.
And this is a staple of sort of classic, old school spirit of Trek.
You know, here's the massive alien and there's Kirk.
- And Campbell mythology. The cave. - That's a kid, by the way.
That guy running in is a 5-year-old kid dressed in a suit,
to make the hole look bigger of the cave.
How much of the monster was the Cloverfield monster?
Designed by the same guy, Neville Page,
but a very, very different creature.
- Just a totally different personality. - Looks completely different.
- Different tastes. - And here's another homage
to the original Star Wars.
Obviously, Obi-Wan sort of first appears to Luke
by making the call of the Krayt dragon.
He used to speak in this shot, saying that was the Hengra,
who's notoriously afraid of heat. Which we cut, thank God.
- Much better here. - Hengra being?
- When we were in Austin... - A reference to my kids.
...the roof pretty much blew off the Alamo Drafthouse
when Leonard turned around.
'Cause he was there watching it with those guys,
and it was just one of those moments, you know, in life
- where I was basically, "Wow." - I wish I had been there.
- I can't believe you weren't there. - I cannot stand it.
It's so wrong.
And unlike other time travel stories, this is the first time
where the knowledge of time travel is even relevant to this story.
Everything to this point could have played completely linearly,
and as such, it doesn't rely on the time travel gimmick at all.
And the perfect use of a curse in a movie, right there.
I remember when I first saw Temple ofDoom,
and lndiana Jones is in the middle of the bridge,
and he looks, and basically Mola Ram's guys
are coming at him from both sides, and he just says, "Shit."
And I just felt like, "Wow, you know, I can't believe..."
There were no curses in Raiders.
- That's funny. - The fact that they just
basically deployed their one bad word there.
And I felt like, again, an equally judicious use of the doody word.
So this sequence coming up, the mind-meld was sort of a...
We didn't spend any time on this sequence at all.
It was like the first time we did it, that's what ended up onscreen.
It took us, like, five minutes.
Not only did it take obviously a million passes,
I think everyone trying something at least a few times,
but we also recorded Leonard doing it I think half a dozen times
in different ways.
But, finally, literally in the last night, I believe in the last, like,
half hour of overtime that we had on the mix of this movie,
I decided to mix it up and just make it weird and mysterious.
I felt that if we said to the audience that you are not intended or expected
to hear and understand everything,
that somehow it removed the burden of not following it.
- Right. - It also makes you weirdly
pay attention more, as opposed to it's just a bunch of words that drone on.
Yeah, just having it be more of a drug trip,
and just this bizarre kind of, you know...
More of a mind-meld and less of a lecture.
There's the squid ship, which I feel, you know, some key design elements
came from Bryan Hitch, who is a great comic book illustrator.
The hardest part about this sequence, though, is just that
you either get the audience to go, "That is really cool.
"Now I understand everything," or they say, "You've just lost me
- "because it's too complicated." - I gotta say,
what blows my mind is in the early screenings that we had,
we had so many notes and questions and confusions
- about this whole sequence. - About that sequence, yeah.
And by losing the prison sequence, and by making this more obtuse,
intentionally obtuse, and sort of esoteric, people accepted it more as a...
And by the way, it allowed the music that I think was,
we were... Again, Giacchino, brilliantly done.
It allowed the sequence to be more impactful.
So even moments like this, when the ships get pulled into the black hole,
you feel them more, and you experience it more,
and it's less about intellect, and more about a visceral moment.
And we learn that story over and over again on everything we work on,
whether it's Lost or Fringe, or you guys on Alias, that,
what is the balance of exposition that the audience needs to follow the story?
And that if you cross over that line, you confuse them
- as opposed to elucidate them. - Yeah, and you lose them.
Yeah, it's true.
This was the one shot from the prison sequence
that we kept in the movie.
- Which is a much bigger moment than... - And you can see that his ear
got bitten off somewhere.
And this is a very cool sequence, to basically say, like,
"Nero was waiting around for 25 years, but it was just a second for me."
- Yep. - I always liked, too, the idea that
the black hole was both a staple of time travel devices in science fiction,
but can also be used as a weapon. So, this one item,
- even though it's double duty. - Yeah.
The ending of the mind-meld in every iteration was always the same,
because we basically said, you know, as an expositional tool
to explain to the audience what happened, it's really important.
But what's even more important is that we come out of this,
and Kirk's takeaway from this entire event is,
"Wow, Vulcans actually have the capacity for emotion.
"You guys do feel." So it always had to sort of end
with this moment of grandiose emotion.
And I really feel like Leonard played it beautifully here.
I am so grateful to him. I mean, obviously,
we couldn't have made this movie without him.
But to have, you know, Leonard come back and be Spock again.
I mean, something I don't think he necessarily thought he would do.
It was just it was such an honour to work with him.
- No, for us it was... - And to do it to continue it on,
it's so generous. That's what's amazing. His presence here is so generous
- and heroic and loving. - Totally.
And he was so great to Zachary. I mean, I remember, you know,
when we were on set shooting that scene between the two Spocks
at the end, and, you know,
he could not have been more supportive of Zachary.
And he didn't have to be, you know?
Here's this young kid coming in,
assuming this role that he created 40-some years ago,
and he was nothing but... And when he says, "Good luck,"
I literally feel like he's saying to Zachary, "Good luck."
- Like, "I got to live this life doing..." - I think he's saying...
- it's amazing. - "Thrusters on full," at the end,
which was the moment that he kind of came up with on set...
That was his line.
That is such a sort of blessing to the future of Star Trek.
And when you go from that moment, and you...
Maryann Brandon just hard cut to Sulu saying, you know,
"Thrusters at max," it's just crazy.
The line that I wish we'd kept in the earlier scene, just to make clear,
was that at one point we had written a thing where, you know,
Kirk sort of asks the question, "I don't understand.
"You're saying that our lives were diverged from the original timeline,
"but there's all these coincidences, and how's that possible?"
And Nimoy says, you know, "There's no real way to answer it,
"but perhaps it's the timestream's way of mending itself."
Which was essentially a way of embracing the coincidences and...
Well, if you study your quantum mechanics, though,
- there's a good explanation for it. - And he also...
He runs down, he asks, like, "So, who's the helmsman?" "Sulu."
You know, "Who's the chief security officer?"
And he's running them all down so that even getting to Scotty,
you know, felt like a little less coincidental.
Well, it's funny, 'cause literally, it was the thing that,
I remember when it was first pitched, like,
"How are you guys ever gonna make running into Spock in the cave work?"
Right, you were really stuck on that.
- You just didn't... Yeah. - I was,
but what you guys did so brilliantly is, like, by saying it's fate,
that it's destiny, these characters must be together,
that to me, I was like, "Oh, my God." it literally just for some reason,
just made... 'Cause you know what the answer is?
- 'Cause you want it. - Right.
- That's a Lost trick, which is... - it is such a Lost trick.
- ...do not mistake coincidence for fate. - That's exactly right.
This moment originally didn't have music over it.
This was another one of those pieces that we added at the very last minute.
By the way, for some reason, my son is obsessed with Keenser,
and he's never seen him, just based on describing Keenser.
I'm obsessed with Spock's coat here.
- I just feel like, why does... - I'm buying you one.
Why does this coat not exist in the real world?
By the way, half their jackets are amazing.
- Yeah, the other half, though... - Let's go raid the wardrobe after.
So we're shooting this... We're back at Budweiser.
Yeah, I saw this corridor when we were doing the location scout.
I'm like, "This is cool."
In the original cut, the first time I saw this scene,
it took Keenser about 20 minutes to run down the hallway.
I mean, literally, it just went on and on.
But the anticipation of it is so great,
'cause you've just seen the giant squid monster try and kill Kirk.
I love his eyes here.
- This is Deep Roy, of course. - Deep Roy, of course,
playing the guy. He's awesome. Deep is fantastic.
And actually deep.
You could really talk to that guy about philosophy.
Look for a tribble in this scene.
- There it is. - Trib.
So I think that our list of potential Scottys was about one-name long,
Simon Pegg.
When I e-mailed him, I just said, "Do you want to play Scotty?"
And I got an e-mail back that said, "I don't think I could do that."
So I sent an e-mail back saying, "Well, that's too bad.
"Maybe next time." You know, "We'll find something else."
'Cause we worked on Mission: lmpossible lll.
I instantly, almost before I sent it, got an e-mail back from him that said,
"Wait, wait, not so fast." And he just, you know...
Keenser, those eyes were put in later by Digital Domain.
They did a couple sequence in the movie and shots. They did a great job.
Scotty's obsession with food here, and obviously, you know,
the grapefruit beagle story is something that came out of the sides
- that we... - Yeah.
That we wrote in the event that Simon was gonna pass.
It's funny. When we were shooting on this location, once again,
at the Budweiser plant, we were in this real machine room area,
so every, you know, 109 seconds,
there would be this crazy steam release.
And it'd be this crazy whistle that would be just... it would go on for 30 seconds.
And we'd just have to stand there, and it was late,
and I just remember shooting this sequence was, like,
we could never quite figure out the timing of it,
and it was always interrupting shots.
By the way, when we leave Trek, you know,
or we're fired off of it and replaced by somebody else,
I feel like the way that we should mark the end of
our sort of tenure here is
that Admiral Archer's beagle should just show up.
- I agree. - 'Cause it always bugs me.
- Where is that dog? - I agree. I agree.
- It shows up in the novelization. - By the way, that's right, it does.
That sandwich line was another last-minute addition to the movie,
that line of Simon's.
I love that the shuttle is, like, between those poles.
Literally, it's like it's just shoved in there.
- Yep. - This is one of my favourite
shots for some reason. I don't know why.
- Just 'cause it was... - Yeah, totally.
One of the things that I love about this is that the first time I saw this
in the dailies, it reminded me of Alien.
- It looked like Alien. - It does.
It had the tactile feeling of that dirty ship.
- And it was lit similarly. - Yeah.
And all those movies that we grew up on always made it feel so real.
Nothing felt digital about being in space.
What was it like when Simon met Leonard?
Simon being, you know, one of us?
Well, he met at the read-throughs.
We just did some read-throughs.
And I remember they met there, and Simon was appropriately starstruck.
By the way, one of the great moments in music in this movie
is the "Live long and prosper" moment.
Giacchino's score in that moment when Kirk disappears.
So crazy good.
- I love that Spock is lying to Kirk here. - Yeah, that's right.
- He's using the old Doc... - Well, it's not exactly a lie.
- He's using the Doc Brown thing. - He's implying.
- Yeah, exactly.
But it's like, you know, this is another road of time-travel storytelling.
Don't tell me that I'm warning you.
Look at Nimoy's face.
- It's just the greatest. - Yeah.
His face is spectacular.
This cue literally makes me want to cry. I'm gonna cry.
That's an erhu. It's a Chinese two-stringed instrument
being played by this amazing woman who...
Look at Pine's nose here. Look at it. Just, it's amazing.
I don't understand. What just happened?
Did you steal my wallet? What was that?
- And this is our... - I didn't know you were an organ donor.
The headline is gonna be, you know,
- "Lindelof has crush on Pine's olfactory." - Pine's nose.
Now I can't take my eyes off it, though.
- Look at it. Look at it. - I just stole your wallet.
Just look at the left nostril. Especially here.
See, he just missed the low clearance bar in the shuttle.
Okay, get ready for the greatest moment ever.
Here it comes. Music. Ready?
Here we go.
And cue.
- Come on, stirring. Stirring. - What's better than that? Nothing.
- Nothing is better than that. - And look at that look.
- Chris Pine. - God, look at the nose.
- Come on. - By the way, the hack in me
always wants to put that light that's behind him in between the fingers,
and I'm so glad you didn't.
That's why you're good at directing, and I'm not.
- By the way, that sound, that actually... - So good!
That was the sound he actually made when we shot it.
- Really? - Yeah.
This was another Digital Domain sequence with Scotty in the pipes.
So here's a sequence, basically, you know, Mark Evans,
who is basically one of the huge champions of the movie,
along with Brad Weston and others at Paramount,
basically, we got into these conversations about,
how do we get the budget down?
How do we afford to make Trek? And this scene sort of kept coming up.
Do we need Scotty in the pipes?
And I'm just glad that everybody came together to...
Everyone kept saying, "Yes, we need it." 'Cause it's such a great reversal.
You're basically saying, if you're gonna beam these guys,
if you're gonna transwarp beam,
which has never been done on Trek before,
- there needs to be some side... - Danger.
Some side effect. It can't go off without a hitch.
Well, it's one of those things for me where it's like,
I don't think, honestly, the average moviegoer understands
the difference between warping and warping when a ship is in...
- The fans do. - Of course.
But I think that for the average moviegoer,
it's just a fun piece of business to have in the movie.
And, yes, you're right.
It serves a story purpose, as well, which I love.
By the way, why is that emergency hatch there
right before the spinning blades?
Just in case somebody gets caught inside.
- For this very reason. - Yeah, exactly.
Thank God it's there.
There was a cut right there when you went behind that pipe.
It was a stuntman that actually did the drop,
and then we threw Simon in.
I like Sarek just hanging out on the Bridge.
He's like, "And this button, what does that do?"
This is one of my favourite shots.
- Yeah, this was a... - Yeah, this is an amazing shot.
- So where did you... - This is all at Budweiser.
- Yeah. - And it's all real,
except for the markings on the side of those big barrels.
But that was all done on a Skycam,
- on a computer-controlled camera. - Right.
So there's no one up there with the camera.
- It's just on an arm. - No, that was all just...
Actually it was on three wires.
- The longest callback ever. - "Cupcake."
- Yeah.
That's from another movie. That's how long that is.
And I love, love, love Simon here.
Because, again, the idea of who is the audience in this scene?
And there's Scotty.
You taking your clothes off? What are you doing?
Bryan, what's going on in New York?
- Who's there with you? - Are you eating another pineapple?
I was actually putting my...
- Just had to take off your cloak. - Putting it back on.
- Who's there with you? Is it Chris Pine? - Sorry.
- Can I get a towel, please? - Just putting my clothes back on.
Oh, that's good.
This was all, you know, shot long before we shot any of the stuff at Budweiser.
It's just very funny. When we actually shot the Bridge,
there were a bunch of things we didn't know exactly.
For example, we weren't sure how the water pipe sequence would go.
When Kirk and Spock walk back on to the Bridge
after beaming back from the Narada, and they talk to Nero,
originally Nero and Kirk never met.
And when we shot that sequence, they would not have met,
and so when Kirk introduces himself, he was being literal.
But as it plays in the movie now, they've already met,
and it sounds like it's a point of pride.
So it's interesting shooting things so out of sequence sometimes, you know.
I love the ferocity of...
Yeah, I love the fight choreography here.
And the sound effect of the glass breaking right there when he landed.
It was fantastic. And what's cool is,
who would win in a fight between Kirk and Spock?
The answer is Spock. Vulcans are strong.
People don't know that. Right, Bob?
And they know the pinch.
We actually, visually, we put these red marks on Chris' neck.
- Yeah, that's pretty cool. - 'Cause we did not do it in makeup,
and it felt like there would be marks left,
so we actually put those little marks right there on his neck.
Cost? $700,000.
- $4 million. - Yeah.
I love how long you sustain that beyond Sarek saying, "Spock."
- That it's like... - Yeah.
- And in any other movie... - And what Zachary did right there,
with his eyes, like coming out of a stupor. Yeah.
We actually extended some of these shots.
Like, this one was a new shot we put back,
and we added head to this shot, too.
We extended this one, too, in those last days.
I love that in the Trek universe, and this is another decision that
and I think was so true to the original spirit of,
you know, the Roddenberry Trek is the idea that
the best way to commit mutiny is to hurt somebody's feelings.
That's right. Or, in this case, make them reveal that they have them.
- How great was Zach in that scene? - Zachary is wonderful.
- There's the empty chair. - And now, here comes a great line.
Just a home run.
And what's great is McCoy is sort of with Spock there.
Yeah, everyone is.
This shot was sort of tricky, 'cause we had this crazy arm
on the camera going over the console,
and for some reason, it took a long time to get it.
Can I ask you a weird question? What made you decide to use...
- Jewish. - Use the crazy arm?
- For that shot? - Yeah, yeah.
'Cause I wanted to go over the console,
and there was no other way to do it.
Yeah, here's the other slow-mo.
I like that it's, "Advanced me to acting captain,"
- as opposed to promoted me, because... - That's right.
I also love how those guys coming down the ladder there.
It gives the sense that there's something above and below.
So this is basically Kirk's first moment.
I cannot believe, by the way, I didn't have him look over and...
I guess it was beside the point,
but I wanted to have him excuse the security guy. Didn't matter.
Here's another day that I'll always remember when I was on set.
And you were directing the scene, J.J. And it's an incredibly challenging scene,
both to play for the actors,
but also to direct, because they're Vulcans.
And they're talking about this incredibly emotional thing,
and they're talking about how to express emotion.
And I remember you got a lot of different takes from Ben here,
as to, you know, how is he gonna answer this question?
How's he gonna play this line about loving Amanda?
Well, that was always the scene that, in the script, when I read it,
I got an emotional reading, when Sarek would say, "I loved her."
Like, for some reason, that was like a massive revelation for me.
I don't know. I just loved that idea.
That actually came out of a conversation we had with Nimoy where,
I think the first time we all met him, and we pitched him roughly the idea,
and asked him, "We always imagined that Sarek loved Amanda."
And he said, "Well, I always assumed it was just logical,
"as a result of him being ambassador."
So the idea of having the loss actually accelerate both of their emotion
to the point where, in the original movies it had to,
he had to go through a whole lifetime
to admit that he loved her, and now here we have it in one movie.
The movie is sort of secretly about Spock,
- because the idea that... - Yep.
The idea that, you know, that's a scene where,
basically, how do you reconcile being half Vulcan and being half human?
And the idea that, in that moment, his father is saying, "Even I feel still.
"And it's okay." And that's the thing that allows him to sort of give in
- to that feeling. - Reconcile.
And, by the way, I've always felt,
though I've never discussed this with you guys,
but my feeling is always, his partnering up with Kirk
is what allows him to embrace fully his Vulcan,
because he knows that having that human,
emotionally driven person at his side
allows him to more completely embrace being Vulcan,
and not deny that emotion, that humanity. I don't know.
And the same with Kirk. By holding hands in the centre...
- I love that, when she steps right in. - Yeah.
"My man, my man."
Whoever's idea it was to put that scene in the transporter room
- where Spock lost Amanda... - Yeah.
...again, great.
What were you saying, Bob? Same with Kirk?
That's it's the ying and yang. By clasping arms in the centre,
they can each lean more towards their true nature,
knowing that the other one is providing balance.
By the way, one of my favourite shots in the movie is coming up,
basically seeing those two guys in profile for the first time.
'Cause you're using overs here, but then, just cinematically,
you're about to show, okay, Spock and Kirk just became partners.
And then that moment is, here it is. I just love this shot.
- This says everything... - I love Zachary's look at the end.
- Yeah. - So good.
And I said, hit him twice as hard as
you would normally slap someone on the shoulder.
You would normally slap someone on the shoulder.
That scene, by the way, for whatever reason,
they were all together. The actors were literally goofing off.
- It was the only time the entire shoot. - Was this the day
where you walked off set?
And literally, they were just kind of all laughing.
We're at the end, we had no time. And I just said to them, I'm like,
"You tell me when you're ready," and I walked off.
- Wow. - And I walked out and I thought, as l...
Did you ever think you'd be the teacher?
Well, as I was walking out, I thought, "Oh, my God,
"I just walked off the... Like, what have l..."
And then, you know, literally eight seconds later
they're like, "We're ready to go."
But they're the greatest group. They really are.
This was one of my... it says...
There was an impact load on the screen for a flash.
This is my favourite thing,
this thing of the Enterprise when it rises through the clouds.
- Love it. - Oh, my God. And the music here.
Well, what I love is that there's a hidden Starfleet logo in this shot.
I also love that, you know, you see these guys
pushing these little buttons, and then you cut to these shots.
And just, the connection between the humanity
- and this crazy epic scale. - Yep.
So, if you watch in the negative space between the rings and the planet,
you see a sideways version of the Starfleet logo.
- No, I don't. - Right there. See?
Right there. See? Over there.
It's the old FedEx trick.
- It is. The FedEx trick. - Nice.
Now, this is one shot which we cut from here to there.
That's one shot. But we actually lost a little bit of it.
And now Scotty is where we always imagined him.
This is my favourite scene, by the way, I think.
Just the idea that in the background they're, like, basically,
- "I love you. I love you." Kissy, kissy. - Well, I think the fact that you blocked it
as something that you catch on to,
as opposed to sort of cutting to a moment in there
- is what makes it great. - I love the music here, by the way.
This music, I love the heroism of the music here, you know.
- Yeah. About what's about to happen. - Yeah.
- It's just like, he's a total hero. - But here's the genius. Right.
- They're so funny here. - Here.
- This. This shot. It's this shot. - How great is Chris?
Look at Chris. He's amazing.
He's basically like, "Wow. I lost."
Yeah.
- And the fact that we get... - How sweet is she? Look at that.
And we get her first name here. That's the best.
Yeah.
- There it is. Nyota. - I just love that they're in love.
And Nyota, actually, lots of controversy about that.
Never actually made its way into canon. Is that correct, Bob?
- It was like in novels. - There were hints of flirtation
- in the original series. - No, but her name.
- The name Nyota... - I'm sorry.
...was never actually uttered in any actual Trek movie.
I don't know that it was.
Burky, I still think your idea was good here
of what they were gonna hear over their headsets when...
- Yeah, that Scotty was going to say... - "How'd I do?"
Why don't you just perform it live, Bryan?
That's Zachary Quinto's brother, Joe.
I literally thought it was Zach the first time I saw it.
- Wow. He looks exactly like him. - Yeah.
By the way, the sound effects with no music here is the best thing ever.
Yeah, this is once again a lot of what Ben did,
Ben Burtt, along with Mark Stoeckinger, but having
a tangible, you know, literally the kind of old-fashioned, you know.
- This is a corridor fight in Star Wars. - Yeah.
And hearing the pangs and the pings of the impacts
- I thought was fun. - Yeah. Totally.
And I love the phaser design. I mean, the idea...
This voice?
- That's Wil Wheaton. - Really?
- Yeah. - Nice.
Wesley Crusher. I did not know that.
It's Wil Wheaton, but... Or modulated?
It's Wil Wheaton modulated, and onscreen Joe Quinto.
This set, by the way, I want to talk about the Narada set.
Every Narada scene was shot on one sound stage.
And Scott Chambliss designed the set to be modular,
so that all those pieces were movable and, you know,
we could sort of deal with it like it was a giant Lego set.
And so whether it was the Bridge or, you know,
a cargo hold or whatever it is,
there's a little cut right there,
every day, we sort of would move these big pieces around.
And it kept the feeling of the ship being mysterious and, you know,
- amorphous, and... - Where was the cut? What cut?
When the guy got shot. It used to be a longer shot.
We just sped it up there so he went down faster.
This is one of my favourite effect shots, where it looks so tangible and real,
- and nothing is real. - Yeah.
- You mean the smoke and... - Yeah.
Everything.
Once again, we're at Northridge. I love this.
Although there would be a shadow. If you look the way the sun is going,
there would be a shadow of that big pole.
- I was just thinking that. - Shut up.
It's one of those little things.
Seeing them run through the bridges.
We spend too much time in the editing room.
Seeing them run through the corridors is amazing.
Given what the corridors actually were and the sense of space that you get.
That was the corridor where we met with Spielberg.
This was great 'cause this was all real.
What you see behind them is all real.
It's real, real, real. And it becomes not real right there.
And that's all bluescreen that they're running towards.
And it's just an amazing thing to see what...
Here's another moment that I love, just in terms of performance
for especially Chris when he just basically, "How about that?"
- What I love is they are all really funny. - Yeah.
- All the actors are genuinely funny. - Everybody.
And so it allowed for a movie that had this kind of
effects and schedule to also have levity.
Speaking of which, I do want to say, I remember J.J.,
you and I were lM-ing the night after you shot this scene,
and you were basically trying to describe to me,
this was the one moment where Chris actually channelled Mr Shatner.
- You know, it was like... - Yeah, well, this is the first scene
where he calls him "Jim." That was the first time Spock calls Kirk "Jim."
And here, where he says, right here.
It felt even more when we did it on the set,
but for some reason it doesn't feel as much in the movie,
but I wanted it to be like, "Spock." I wanted it to feel...
- The cadence of it, though. - I feel it.
- Definitely. - You do.
And you kind of go, like, "Wow."
Chris really went his own way for the entire movie.
- Yeah. - And I don't think anybody has said,
- "He did not do the character justice." - "He is ripping off..."
But that was the one tip of the cap of basically saying there is that.
And in the very end when he walks on with the yellow shirt,
and he kind of has this little bit of, "Bones."
- You know? - Yeah, that's right.
- But this is again, you know... - Great design.
Again, yeah, I think this was Bryan Hitch,
the idea that, the way that the gyroscope spun.
But just this whole... You know, when you look at shots like that,
and you think, you know, the location, the vehicle,
the whole thing is done virtually, it's amazing.
This shot was originally for when Kirk went and found Pike,
and we cut it, and Maryann Brandon found a way to cut this together
with this piece, which was a separate piece all together,
and it ended up being seamless.
This was my least favourite shot in the movie,
- but it ended up working out. - I love this shot.
Those things in the foreground...
it's so funny. Those things in the foreground were
actually put in by Stefan Sonnenfeld
when we were doing the colour correction.
I was like, "I wish we had foreground things,"
and he just literally, on the day, created these black fuzzy pieces
to look like hanging wires.
I also say that working on this, I keep mentioning Maryann Brandon,
but Mary Jo Markey, our other editor,
just did an insanely brilliant job
with the film. They would take, they would share,
each do separate sequences.
So they would each take a reel, essentially.
And working with Mary Jo is a joy.
- She also edited the Lost pilot. - She did.
Which, you know, she's incredibly talented.
She is amazing. She worked on Felicity,
way back in the day.
- And Alias. - And Alias.
She also blew open the ship here.
- She did. - Joking.
This is one of those things where I knew the story, I read the script,
and in the editing room,
when we watched the early cut of this sequence,
it's so effects-dependent. The idea of sort of really understanding
what is it that Spock is doing to the drill or...
Well, this whole sequence, by the way,
of Kirk and Nero meeting, which, again, was not originally in the script,
it became really important.
And I think it was a great thing to do,
to finally have them sort of physically face off.
But the whole idea here where he just jumps down,
the other thing that wasn't planned in the design was the multi-layers.
And when we were there...
it was funny. When I was scouting the Budweiser plant,
there was one moment where I was up on this one layer
and I looked and I thought, "Wow, look how scary it is,
"how high up we are."
So we did this thing where we had Nero jump,
and this is all done on one level.
And so this is all one level of the stage.
And when he jumps down, we created this.
That was just on the stage,
and that was done on scaffolding, down to the same level.
So the whole thing feels like it's
all these multi-levels, but it was just all on one stage.
I think the idea that this was a mining ship,
and it was a practical mining ship,
and that's what this guy did before,
just really gives such a sense of character.
- Yeah. - You know,
and something that we'd never really seen before in Trek.
Well, he's not a king or a conqueror or anything like that.
He's like a blue-collar, average worker.
But he shares something that most Trek villains do,
which is a desire to kill either Kirk or Spock.
Wouldn't it be great if there was a villain who was just like, "I want to kill Sulu."
Should we have our meeting about the sequel now?
Yeah, we should start talking about Trek ll now.
Who should it be? Who should it be?
This was a late addition, too, seeing the Narada go to warp.
But they did an amazing job with that shot, too.
- Which I love. - Yeah, that smoke trail is amazing.
So this is one of my favourite ideas here, that having...
This is, again, the stuntman did this jump.
That's more slow motion. Sorry.
- That's three times. - Yeah, it is more slow motion.
I'd like to reverse my earlier position and say
you have overused slow motion in this movie, J.J., and...
I like how Kirk is hanging throughout his life.
- That's true. - As a child.
Yeah, it is sort of a motif.
Yeah, he hangs a couple of times in the movie.
This is Clifton Collins Jr doing a great henchman, bad guy, Ayel.
The old "I got your gun" gag.
- I love the interior, too. - He actually
fell like that. No.
Have we talked about Russell and the props in this film?
Go for it.
I think it was in general your desire to make everything
a callback to the original series but to have it all be fresh and new.
And if you look at the phasers, for example,
they're all the familiar, original phaser, and yet new and different.
Yeah, no, he did an amazing job. I mean, all around.
It's the one thing that I feel watching the movie,
I'm so proud of the work the entire crew did.
I just think everyone just was, like, top of the...
Top of their game, best in the business, amazing work.
That's Neville Page, who designed the Cloverfield monster
and also the big red Hengra creature.
The idea that the Enterprise swoops in and helps Spock out.
But you've never seen the Enterprise fire like that,
which is what makes it so incredible.
I mean, that moment is just...
We, by the way, we restructured this whole...
- Oh, my God, how many times? - No, but literally,
in the last day of editing.
We were gonna... Bryan, remember this?
We were gonna leave, and I was like, "There's one more thing."
We intercut or changed the intercuts structure of this whole last sequence.
It was very... 'Cause it used to be...
There was a whole big sequence, too, that you just, kind of...
- Well, we rearranged it because it felt... - Flipped it around.
Well, it felt like, you know, Spock's ship was flying
- inside the Narada for way too long. - Yeah.
And we changed it up a little bit, and it just feels much stronger now.
There's a little indication that he's being warped.
Yeah, you start to see him getting warped, yeah.
There is that moment where you think, "Did he just kill himself?"
Like George Kirk.
But what a testament to the geography of,
just conceptually, of the whole sequence.
There are so many things happening there,
and not for one second are you confused.
And there, of course, you hear the Courage theme.
That's right. And the music here wasn't in until the last day.
And there's Scotty next to Chris Doohan.
Yeah, that's right, James Doohan's son.
I love everyone kind of coming together for this moment.
And then, to go from this to his smile,
'cause in the old cut, it used to go to the Narada.
Anyway, it was a much, I think,
stronger structure, the one we ended up with.
I love this effect.
This was something that Roger Guyett really
went nuts with, and just led the way,
and I think came up with a really cool shot. And the sound here is cool, too.
How just, literally, it goes silent for a few frames.
Absolutely silent.
This is one of my favourite shots, as well.
I love how the camera is kind of bouncing around behind it.
So here's the $64,000 question.
And to adjust for inflation, it's a $6.1 trillion.
Yeah.
- Is this gonna kill Nero and his crew? - Yes.
- I think it rips the ship apart.
That's the way that I've always felt.
Given the point of origin, the ship is getting...
- People keep asking. - By the way, that shot right there,
if you look at that, what the Steadicam operator, Colin Anderson,
did right there, he swooped around, made it look like it was a computer.
- He was so crazy stable. - Yeah. Amazing.
This whole shot was just done with a Steadicam.
It's an amazing work.
No, I think his ship gets destroyed.
I think it's crystal clear that the ship is getting broken into tiny little pieces
and he's dead, but people keep saying,
- "Did Nero survive?" - In our study of black holes... Sorry, go.
No, go ahead.
This was one of J.J.'s big final changes at the end on the mix.
There were a lot of sound effects here,
and you made the decision to take out everything
and just have the music play here.
When you're doing the mix,
they do these passes that are only music, only sound, only of dialogue.
And all of a sudden they did a pass where they only have music,
and I was like, "Oh, my God, it's so much better with just music."
'Cause you just feel it. And it doesn't feel like
you're being bombarded with stuff. And it was just, you know, an accident.
Especially because of all the choral stuff that's starting to happen here.
By the way, when we were there listening to the choir,
I said to Michael, I'm like, "What are they singing?"
And they were literally, like, singing his pets' names growing up.
It was like, you know, "Cinnamon." Or whatever. That was ridiculous.
- Cinnamon? - I don't know.
- I can't remember... - Wow.
...what his dog's name was. But this moment and that music
reminds me of a Spielberg moment like crazy.
That music for some reason reminds me of a John Williams-y sort of thing.
I don't know what Giacchino was channelling right there,
- but I just love that. - Same with Scotty's introduction
and walking down the hallway into the...
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's got that sort of, yeah...
- That E. T. thing. - The E. T. thing, yeah.
Bob, so, theory?
Just the black hole is like a whirlpool.
So, you don't drown if you have a good ship
that can navigate you through the singularity at the centre.
But if your ship's breaking up,
you're essentially sinking into the whirlpool and dying.
That's why he's not travelling back in time.
Cool.
- For anybody who cares. - I do.
And this just in, NCC-1701, Matt Jefferies,
the original production designer, made it up.
They're aircraft registration codes of the 20th century.
"N" equals registered in U.S., "C" equals civil aircraft,
second C equals space.
And the 1701 is for seventeenth design, first ship.
- Wow. - Wow.
Thank you.
If you've been watching the whole commentary for that, thanks for waiting.
Well, the number of the ship on the Kelvin is my grandfather's birthday.
And then, once again, the silence.
The sound.
My favourite thing here was the glass breaking.
That was Mary Jo Markey's idea.
Which happened earlier, you know, a few seconds ago.
But when the glass starts to shatter,
that to me was an editorial decision,
and one of my favourite ideas I ever heard in my life.
She had that, I'm like, "Oh, my God. That's genius."
By the way, I love the decision that this is not a "yay" moment,
where they all throw their arms up and say, "Yay."
That you played it as relief.
Like, "Oh, my God. I can't believe we just got out of this."
But this is the money moment right there, which is the nod.
- Huge. Huge. - Yeah.
To underplay that moment is what makes it so powerful.
Now, J.J., I know that you don't understand sports,
but there's a thing that happens in baseball when you get somebody out
- where you throw the ball around. - When you throw the what?
You know, the third baseman gets an out, he throws...
I really wish I knew what you were talking about.
Well, you just did it there. In cinema terms, it's basically
they're throwing the ball around the horn.
- It was a triple play? - Yeah. Well, no.
I mean, the out has been made. But... Forget it.
You mean it's like a... Was it a touchdown?
Very much like that.
This is one of the first scenes.
You shot this very early in the schedule, right?
We did.
You almost cut this scene. We would have had to kill you.
Everything was cut at one point. But...
There was no movie. It was four minutes long.
But Nimoy... it was funny. We were shooting this scene,
and about halfway through the shoot, I took him aside and I said,
"Well, you know, how's Zachary doing? You know Spock.
"What should..." And he just said to me, "He's good."
Like, he was very sweet about it.
This, by the way, was looped because the sound was really bad in this place.
And I think they did an amazing job.
Amazing. Like, kind of shockingly, actually.
Yeah, yeah. Really amazing.
In other words, he watched Back to the Future too many times.
And by the way, most of the time in time-travel movies,
when you are talking to an older version of yourself,
the same actor is playing both roles.
The fact that we didn't do that, and this is Nimoy,
who used to play Spock, and Quinto,
who is going to be playing Spock for the indefinite foreseeable future,
you know, I think was... Are we keeping you awake?
- Who was that? - What was that?
- It was me, breathing. - That was amazing.
I'm so sorry. Was it too loud?
I thought the airlock just leaked. Seriously.
Somebody wake Alex. Jeez. It's unbelievable.
- Sorry. What were you saying? - I don't remember.
It was putting me to sleep.
These are two different actors playing the same part.
Yes, exactly.
There's something about Michael J. Fox playing, you know,
- Marty McFly at 45... - Yeah.
...where you go, "I don't buy it."
if you notice, Zachary's right hand needed to be glued together,
his fingers, 'cause he couldn't do that with his right hand.
Wow.
Another one of my favourite lines in the movie is the,
"Since my customary farewell would be..."
- He still wishes himself luck, though. - Yes. That's true.
This was great set extension, I must say,
just for those who are keeping score.
There's Ben Binswagner on the left again.
And once again, Tyler Perry.
We were shooting a scene once and he didn't like his take.
He said, "Cut." He's like, "Oh, I'm sorry." He's so used to directing himself.
Flare. Flare.
- In that case, flare in both senses. - And now, here's another thing.
I remember when I first saw this in the editing room, you read the script
when Pike says, "I am relieved," you go, "Wow, that is all Greenwood."
I mean, like, you just never really...
- Talk about a double entendre. - He's terrific there.
And that wheelchair, yes, ladies and gentlemen, does answer
yes and no with single beeps.
And literally, I'm not kidding you, weighed, like, 4,000 pounds.
It was the worst wheelchair.
It was a beautiful look, but it was ridiculously heavy.
I think what's so cool about the way that the movie ends is that
people are smiling, sort of, wall-to-wall.
Like, you just get this great, you know,
when the movie ends, everybody's so happy.
That's a very rare feeling in movies these days.
This was Nimoy's... He said, "Can I just say a line here?"
I said, "Sure."
And I love the bittersweet nature of that.
Come on.
Here it is. Nice.
Whatever. He used to say, "Same ship, different day."
That was the name of the file, actually.
This was a last-minute idea, to have Keenser back on the thing.
So did you just call up Deep and you were like...
We called Deep and said, "Could you come today and shoot this?"
And so, that was a cut, actually. We shot...
And he was like, "Fortunately, I have not taken my makeup off,
"so I will be there."
it was funny. Shooting this scene,
you know, within the first weeks of shooting,
- having not shot the whole film. - Yeah, it's amazing.
And it was like trying to figure out what should we be feeling here.
And again, I think that Chris and Zach and the whole group just killed it.
They're so good.
Come on, look at the smile on Sulu's face.
- This is my favourite. - So, this moment...
- Happy that her boyfriend is on the ship. - Yep.
It's spectacular.
She's so good there.
And there was debate who to give these lines to.
Some people thought we should give it to Shatner.
Some people thought we should give it to Pine.
I just think, you know, you gotta give it to Nimoy.
Well, you wanted to do it.
I did actually record a version. Joking.
And then these end credits, again, are by that guy, Andrew Kramer,
who I just think did an amazing job.
It just, it looks so...
Yeah, I love the way that the camera just sort of swoops around and...
This is like a two-minute sequence of CG.
But is there a reason you put our names over Uranus?
Wait, what'd you call me?
Well, his is over two big balls over there, so that's...
Wait a second.
We made it through this entire commentary and now we go blue?
- Now it's getting ugly. - Wonderful.
Of course, Jeffrey Chernov, the...
Such a huge part of this movie, by the way.
And by the way, there's a name that
we neglected to mention during the commentary, but...
it wouldn't have happened without him.
- Essential member. - The guy came in
literally six weeks before shooting and took control of the production.
He said, "I need one week to wrap my head around it,
"one week to figure it out," and then you know,
we started on schedule, we finished on schedule.
And almost never said no.
He's amazing. He really is the greatest.
We discussed Roger Guyett.
Shari Hanson, who also was just invaluable.
David Witz was an amazing producer.
We should just name everyone we're seeing.
Dave Baronoff, you know...
Come on, April. Should we talk about April?
No.
April cast the following people: John Cho, she cast, Ben Cross, she cast...
April, who did and does Lost...
Are you taking your clothes off again?
- What is that sound? - Seriously.
Sorry, sorry. I just took them back off.
- That's obviously the... - Just as we're winding down.
- It's ending. Time to put... - Get comfortable.
I'm sorry. I was anticipating Chris' nose.
I keep feeling like we should have done something at the end of these credits,
because that's what all the crazy kids are doing these days.
- I don't know what it is. - I don't think so.
We had actually talked at one point
about doing something at the end of the credits, you know...
The sequel.
...involving the Botany Bay, but I'm glad we didn't,
because that would have tied our hands for the sequel.
It would have.
Anything else we want to talk about before we...
ls Gormley's name about to come out?
There he is.
I could literally talk about Tommy Gormley for another two hours.
- Do your Tommy Gormley impression. - I can't.
- Just do it. - I can't.
But Tommy Gormley, who's the first AD, he's Scottish and is just...
He did Mission: lmpossible lll with us and is just the greatest.
And literally keeps it going, you know, keeps the production going,
keeps everyone motivated and, you know, working with him.
He's just the greatest. And he has an amazing, beautiful family.
He's just a spectacular guy.
See, Gerald W. Abrams, James McGrath, Jr. There they are.
Come on, someone? Bob?
I can't believe this worked. I mean, it's like a time warp.
I just remember when we all sat down with Nimoy
and we were like, "Hey, how about we blow up Vulcan?
"How do you like that, my friend?"
- it's crazy that the... - And now here we are.
You know, the movie has been out for a month now
and people are going to see it.
More than once, which is weird.
The greatest thing ever is,
people are saying, "Oh, my God, I dragged my wife to the movie,
"and she actually really liked it a lot." So, again, that was the mission,
to get our wives to think that Star Trek was cool.
Speaking of wives, I just want to say that Majel Barrett-Roddenberry,
who we were honoured to have visit the set
when we were shooting, she was so wonderful.
She showed up and was supportive and funny and sweet,
and she literally said, you know, "Gene would love this."
Like she was just gracious, and as supportive
as Nimoy was to Zach, she was to me and the production.
And we all stopped and applauded her, and it was really wonderful.
And we were lucky to get her to do the voice of the computer,
Starfleet computer again.
And she, of course, sadly passed away before we finished production. But...
And a few weeks after that we had a nice call
from Eugene Roddenberry, their son,
who had seen the movie and who said that
he felt his father would have absolutely recognised it as Star Trek,
- and that he just loved it. - That's awesome.
It's great to hear things like that.
Barney Burman, who, again, did a lot of the makeup for the aliens and stuff,
his father is a famous Hollywood makeup artist.
And I used to write letters to musicians and makeup artists
and directors and stuff when I was a kid.
And I actually found, during production, a letter from his father back to me.
And I brought it to the set one day
- and I said, "Dude, look at this." - Oh, my God.
And he literally almost started crying.
- Of course he did. - It was the greatest.
- I was like, "Can you believe this?" - You don't pull that on someone...
- Oh, my God. - It was some ridiculous thing
I'd written to him, and he was so sweet to write me back.
It's amazing. Later you'll see when the lLM credits come up
and you see the number of people who work just at lLM.
I mean, obviously, we had a huge construction crew
and the crew of the whole film, hundreds of people.
But when you look at the lLM list alone, it's shocking.
And they're just, they are brilliant. I'm so grateful for the work that they do.
- It's incredible. - We're going up there on Thursday.
- I'm really excited. - Good.
- See, Roger Guyett. - I've never been there.
- You're gonna lose your mind. - What are you doing on Thursday, J.J.?
- I'm supposed to go up to lLM. No. - Nice.
Roger Guyett also shot the second unit stuff,
which is usually right next door to the main unit,
and he did so much amazing work. It was just spectacular.
- We should make a sequel to this. - I don't know, man.
We should do another one. I think that'd be a lot of fun.
I had this impromptu meeting with George Lucas before we shot,
and I said, you know...
- You just dropped a name. - I know. Let me, I'm gonna pick that up.
And I was like, "What do I do? How do I make this movie work?"
And he said, "Just put lightsabers in it." Thank you.
- Is that what he said, really? - Yeah.
- That's awesome. - Digital artists.
So you might notice,
I think there's every name in the world here. Look at this.
And each one of those people deserves, like, a single card.
They're all amazing.
Going up there, you'll see when you meet with them,
it's like walking past genius wizard after genius wizard.
Like, they're just all amazing. One guy does, like,
he'll do the, you know, just the lens artefacts,
like the dirt on the lens, and that's his thing.
- And someone else will do rotoscoping. - Wow.
And they're all the best in the world at what they... it's incredible.
The effects in this movie are incredible.
They really do put everyone else to shame.
It's very painful not to work with them.
There are lot more names, I think, coming.
Yeah, it's an amazing group. It really is.
Are you really still listening to our commentary?
- What's going on? - Okay, if you are,
we're gonna say something really, really important at the end.
- Bryan? - The secret word is...
Stefan Sonnenfeld.
- Pineapple. - Bryan will take his cloak off
- one last time. - My cloak.
Stefan does the amazing colour correction work.
He's a genius. And Varèse Sarabande, one of our favourite labels.
I love that the name of the song is "Josh Greenstein."
Yeah, that's what I was... Where did you get that from?
Well, 'cause it's in the green girl scene.
- And Josh Greenstein is the... - Now I get it.
The guy who does all the... How do you describe him?
The promotion stuff at Paramount. He's amazing.
- Marketing. - Marketing.
- Head of marketing. - Head of marketing.
We thank him for getting people to the theatres.
And we thank Gene Roddenberry for everything.
And now that you've made it this far, the sequel will be called Pineapple.
- Thanks for listening. - Thanks for listening.
Thank you for watching.
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