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JJ Abrams is a man in demand. | 0:00:45 | 0:00:48 | |
The ultimate fanboy, Abrams is the creative force | 0:00:48 | 0:00:51 | |
behind Lost, Mission Impossible III and Super 8. | 0:00:51 | 0:00:54 | |
He's been heralded as the new Steven Spielberg | 0:00:54 | 0:00:57 | |
and now finds himself at the helm of the next Star Wars film. | 0:00:57 | 0:01:00 | |
I hope he never grows up. Let's put it that way. | 0:01:00 | 0:01:03 | |
He is wonderfully juvenile. | 0:01:03 | 0:01:06 | |
He still looks at the world through the eyes of a 14-year-old, | 0:01:06 | 0:01:10 | |
and that's very infectious because, if you're 14, | 0:01:10 | 0:01:14 | |
everything that you see is the greatest thing ever. | 0:01:14 | 0:01:16 | |
'Enormously energetic and smart. Very smart. | 0:01:16 | 0:01:20 | |
'And he's been at it for a long time, learning how to do the job. | 0:01:20 | 0:01:25 | |
'He does it extremely well.' | 0:01:25 | 0:01:27 | |
He has this great kind of grown-up professionalism and ambition. | 0:01:27 | 0:01:32 | |
He is able to operate on so many levels simultaneously. | 0:01:32 | 0:01:34 | |
His mind is going "ping ping ping". Really special. | 0:01:34 | 0:01:38 | |
It was JJ Abrams' second turn in the directing chair | 0:01:42 | 0:01:45 | |
with 2009's Star Trek which cemented his reputation | 0:01:45 | 0:01:48 | |
as one of Hollywood's rising stars. | 0:01:48 | 0:01:51 | |
What you had in Abrams' Star Trek movie | 0:01:51 | 0:01:53 | |
was effectively a rewriting of both the past | 0:01:53 | 0:01:56 | |
and the future. | 0:01:56 | 0:01:58 | |
As a result, the slate was wiped clean, | 0:01:58 | 0:02:00 | |
and the Enterprise was relaunched in a new direction, | 0:02:00 | 0:02:04 | |
taking it out of the exclusive domain of Trekkies | 0:02:04 | 0:02:06 | |
to become a box-office hit. | 0:02:06 | 0:02:08 | |
It was a much-needed boost to the franchise, | 0:02:10 | 0:02:12 | |
and JJ has once again climbed onboard the Starship Enterprise | 0:02:12 | 0:02:15 | |
for Star Trek: Into Darkness. | 0:02:15 | 0:02:17 | |
But both Abrams and the Star Trek franchise | 0:02:20 | 0:02:22 | |
remain something of an enigma. | 0:02:22 | 0:02:24 | |
How could a lo-fi '60s sci-fi TV show, | 0:02:24 | 0:02:28 | |
which originally only ran for three series, have endured this long? | 0:02:28 | 0:02:32 | |
And how is it that the man who reinvented Star Trek | 0:02:32 | 0:02:35 | |
grew up preferring magic tricks | 0:02:35 | 0:02:37 | |
and the films of Steven Spielberg to the adventures of Kirk and Spock? | 0:02:37 | 0:02:41 | |
Space. The final frontier. | 0:02:48 | 0:02:50 | |
These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. | 0:02:52 | 0:02:55 | |
Its five-year mission, to explore strange new worlds... | 0:02:55 | 0:02:59 | |
..to seek out new life and new civilisations... | 0:03:00 | 0:03:03 | |
..to boldly go where no man has gone before. | 0:03:04 | 0:03:06 | |
No book or TV series has influenced the way people think about | 0:03:08 | 0:03:12 | |
space travel and exploration quite like Star Trek. | 0:03:12 | 0:03:16 | |
Like most people of my age, | 0:03:16 | 0:03:17 | |
it was a regular appointment to view when I was a child. | 0:03:17 | 0:03:20 | |
I remember struggling to get my homework finished in time | 0:03:20 | 0:03:23 | |
to watch Star Trek. | 0:03:23 | 0:03:24 | |
And when Gene Roddenberry first created the series in the 1960s, | 0:03:24 | 0:03:27 | |
he envisaged it as Wagon Train To The Stars, | 0:03:27 | 0:03:31 | |
a weekly Western adventure set in space. | 0:03:31 | 0:03:35 | |
This new intergalactic series took up President Kennedy's challenge | 0:03:40 | 0:03:44 | |
of space as the last great opportunity | 0:03:44 | 0:03:46 | |
for American exploration. | 0:03:46 | 0:03:48 | |
Star Trek became a fictional way to grasp the mind-bending science | 0:03:48 | 0:03:52 | |
taking place behind the closed doors of NASA's 1960s space race. | 0:03:52 | 0:03:57 | |
The final episode of the original series was | 0:03:57 | 0:03:59 | |
broadcast in the USA in 1969, just before Neil Armstrong | 0:03:59 | 0:04:04 | |
took those famous first steps for mankind. | 0:04:04 | 0:04:07 | |
It felt to many of us to be just like an episode of Star Trek. | 0:04:07 | 0:04:12 | |
You're in our field of view now. | 0:04:12 | 0:04:15 | |
You do have to be rather careful | 0:04:15 | 0:04:18 | |
to keep track of where your centre of mass is. | 0:04:18 | 0:04:21 | |
Sometimes it takes about two or three paces... | 0:04:22 | 0:04:26 | |
Star Trek was a vision of the future that suddenly seemed | 0:04:26 | 0:04:29 | |
strangely possible and incredibly appealing. | 0:04:29 | 0:04:33 | |
But the world of JJ Abrams, the mastermind behind the reinvention | 0:04:39 | 0:04:43 | |
of the franchise, doesn't belong in the Star Trek universe. | 0:04:43 | 0:04:46 | |
His production company Bad Robot | 0:04:49 | 0:04:51 | |
is based in Santa Monica in Los Angeles. | 0:04:51 | 0:04:53 | |
It's the top-secret hub of his growing film and television empire. | 0:04:53 | 0:04:57 | |
I met him there to talk all things intergalactic. | 0:04:58 | 0:05:01 | |
When you were young, | 0:05:09 | 0:05:10 | |
you would have been the right age to be somebody who was caught up by | 0:05:10 | 0:05:14 | |
Star Trek, but you weren't a great Trek fan | 0:05:14 | 0:05:17 | |
when it was first out, were you? | 0:05:17 | 0:05:20 | |
No. Star Trek came out the year I was born... | 0:05:20 | 0:05:24 | |
-So you were born in...? -'66. | 0:05:24 | 0:05:26 | |
And I think the movie that we did in 2009 was an experience that | 0:05:26 | 0:05:31 | |
let me fall in love with it. | 0:05:31 | 0:05:33 | |
But the TV show, for some reason, I remember my friends | 0:05:33 | 0:05:37 | |
who loved it when I was in elementary school, | 0:05:37 | 0:05:39 | |
so I would watch it and I'd just be like... I was trying to get into it. | 0:05:39 | 0:05:43 | |
I just couldn't find my way in. | 0:05:43 | 0:05:45 | |
And part of it was that I was not Spock, | 0:05:45 | 0:05:47 | |
I was not that smart or logical. | 0:05:47 | 0:05:49 | |
I was not Kirk, because I was not that cocky | 0:05:49 | 0:05:51 | |
or confident or good-looking. | 0:05:51 | 0:05:52 | |
I was not really Chekov or Bones or Uhura or Sulu. | 0:05:52 | 0:05:55 | |
Any of them. I didn't have a way in, and yet I knew it was a thing that | 0:05:55 | 0:06:00 | |
people who were smarter than I was really enjoyed, so I kind of just | 0:06:00 | 0:06:03 | |
felt like, all right, it's one of those things that I won't ever get. | 0:06:03 | 0:06:08 | |
-But did you have a predisposition to sci-fi? -I did. | 0:06:08 | 0:06:12 | |
There are two types of science fiction I loved. | 0:06:12 | 0:06:14 | |
One was spectacle, those kind of '50s monster movies, Godzilla films. | 0:06:14 | 0:06:19 | |
Or I loved The Twilight Zone, which was | 0:06:19 | 0:06:22 | |
typically not about spectacle at all, | 0:06:22 | 0:06:24 | |
rarely about visuals or pyrotechnics, but almost always about tension | 0:06:24 | 0:06:30 | |
and character and emotion and psychological twists. | 0:06:30 | 0:06:34 | |
So to me, those were the things I loved. | 0:06:34 | 0:06:36 | |
There's a signpost up ahead. Your next stop, The Twilight Zone. | 0:06:36 | 0:06:40 | |
JJ Abrams sold his first screenplay at the tender age of 24, | 0:06:42 | 0:06:46 | |
but his big break came as a script doctor | 0:06:46 | 0:06:48 | |
on the 1998 blockbuster Armageddon. | 0:06:48 | 0:06:51 | |
That same year saw Abrams make his mark on the small screen, | 0:06:51 | 0:06:54 | |
with the teen series Felicity, which he followed up with Alias. | 0:06:54 | 0:06:58 | |
The CIA spy drama gave him his first international success. | 0:06:58 | 0:07:01 | |
His next project Lost would become one of the most popular | 0:07:01 | 0:07:05 | |
television programmes of all time. | 0:07:05 | 0:07:07 | |
Abrams created Lost with Jeffrey Lieber | 0:07:07 | 0:07:09 | |
and the up-and-coming writer Damon Lindelof. | 0:07:09 | 0:07:12 | |
There was a guy I'd heard about named Damon Lindelof who was | 0:07:12 | 0:07:15 | |
working on another show called Nash Bridges. | 0:07:15 | 0:07:18 | |
Heather Kadin knew that I had been stalking JJ. I had been | 0:07:18 | 0:07:21 | |
writing on another couple of TV shows, but I said, | 0:07:21 | 0:07:24 | |
"I will get coffee for him, I will wash his car, just get me in the door." | 0:07:24 | 0:07:30 | |
And she's like, "OK, you're a little creepy." | 0:07:30 | 0:07:33 | |
I was working on a script for a pilot. | 0:07:33 | 0:07:36 | |
I got a phone call from Lloyd Braun, who at the time was head of ABC, | 0:07:36 | 0:07:39 | |
and he said, "We need to do a show about people who survive a plane crash." | 0:07:39 | 0:07:44 | |
And I said, "OK. Sounds all right." | 0:07:44 | 0:07:46 | |
"Please go, think of something, and call me back, | 0:07:46 | 0:07:52 | |
"because we have a week to green-light it." | 0:07:52 | 0:07:54 | |
And she said, we've developed a little bit of a story, | 0:07:54 | 0:07:58 | |
but we want to go in a different direction | 0:07:58 | 0:08:00 | |
and we're trying to get JJ, we're trying to rope JJ into this thing. | 0:08:00 | 0:08:03 | |
So a few hours later I called back and said, "I have a couple of | 0:08:03 | 0:08:06 | |
"thoughts, but you're not going to like it, because it's weird." | 0:08:06 | 0:08:09 | |
I started to pitch this idea that was more a Michael Crichton thing | 0:08:09 | 0:08:12 | |
than it was Castaway, which is what I thought he wanted. | 0:08:12 | 0:08:16 | |
And he said, "I love it!" | 0:08:16 | 0:08:19 | |
So he said, "I need you to write..." What are you talking about?! | 0:08:19 | 0:08:23 | |
He said that if we could give him | 0:08:23 | 0:08:25 | |
another writer that he could supervise, | 0:08:25 | 0:08:27 | |
that maybe he'd be open to it. | 0:08:27 | 0:08:29 | |
So that Monday, Damon came in, and he was wearing a Star Wars shirt. | 0:08:29 | 0:08:32 | |
I have this T-shirt from when I was a kid that is a Star Wars | 0:08:32 | 0:08:37 | |
Fan Club Bantha Tracks T-shirt. | 0:08:37 | 0:08:39 | |
I fell in love with him instantly. I thought, "I love this guy." | 0:08:39 | 0:08:42 | |
He was immediately someone I felt like I knew all my life. | 0:08:42 | 0:08:44 | |
I just hear this guy go, "Bantha Tracks!" | 0:08:44 | 0:08:47 | |
And I looked up, and it was JJ. | 0:08:47 | 0:08:48 | |
And we started talking about what this idea could be, | 0:08:48 | 0:08:51 | |
and he was pitching these ideas which were spectacular, | 0:08:51 | 0:08:54 | |
so I started to get excited. | 0:08:54 | 0:08:56 | |
And we just had this immediate sort of excitement about what this show, | 0:08:56 | 0:09:01 | |
Lost, could be. | 0:09:01 | 0:09:02 | |
And two hours later, | 0:09:02 | 0:09:04 | |
we walked out of the room with the beginnings of what would be Lost. | 0:09:04 | 0:09:07 | |
And he said, "Do you want to come back tomorrow?" | 0:09:07 | 0:09:10 | |
And I said, "Yes, I do," | 0:09:10 | 0:09:12 | |
and I've been coming back tomorrow ever since. | 0:09:12 | 0:09:15 | |
'As far as I can tell, | 0:09:15 | 0:09:16 | |
'Bad Robot is one of the coolest places to work in movie land.' | 0:09:16 | 0:09:21 | |
See, this is like every boy's wet dream. | 0:09:21 | 0:09:23 | |
The idea was not to have any magazines or newspapers here, | 0:09:23 | 0:09:27 | |
but to have a space where when you came in here, | 0:09:27 | 0:09:29 | |
the first thing you were encouraged to do is create, | 0:09:29 | 0:09:32 | |
so we collect the waiting room art | 0:09:32 | 0:09:35 | |
and then we put it up on the walls in the back, | 0:09:35 | 0:09:38 | |
and then we do a book at the end of the year | 0:09:38 | 0:09:40 | |
of the best waiting room art. | 0:09:40 | 0:09:41 | |
And we have some typewriters. When we designed the building, | 0:09:41 | 0:09:44 | |
they said that we could put a sign outside, | 0:09:44 | 0:09:47 | |
and I thought, I don't say Bad Robot, | 0:09:47 | 0:09:49 | |
so we put outside "National Typewriter Company". | 0:09:49 | 0:09:52 | |
How often do you see a new typewriter company? | 0:09:52 | 0:09:54 | |
The best thing about that was we've had three different | 0:09:54 | 0:09:56 | |
people come in here with typewriters to get repaired. Which is fantastic. | 0:09:56 | 0:10:00 | |
-Did you repair them? -I didn't know about it until after they came in. | 0:10:00 | 0:10:03 | |
Because the cool thing would have been... | 0:10:03 | 0:10:05 | |
100%. Next time someone comes in, the directive is, we repair it for free | 0:10:05 | 0:10:08 | |
-and give it back to them, no questions asked. -Fantastic. | 0:10:08 | 0:10:10 | |
-What is this machine here? -Is called a Mold-A-Rama. | 0:10:10 | 0:10:13 | |
It is a machine that was used in the States a lot. | 0:10:13 | 0:10:17 | |
When I was a kid, you'd find it in zoos or amusement parks, | 0:10:17 | 0:10:21 | |
and basically, you put 25 cents in and you get this little wax | 0:10:21 | 0:10:24 | |
sculpture that is moulded in front of you. The thing closes. | 0:10:24 | 0:10:28 | |
It extruded wax, and then it opens up and the thing falls out. | 0:10:28 | 0:10:33 | |
Magic was my first love, I think. | 0:10:33 | 0:10:35 | |
My grandfather took me to this magic store in New York | 0:10:35 | 0:10:38 | |
called Lou Tannen's Magic. | 0:10:38 | 0:10:39 | |
I remember illusions that my grandfather bought for me | 0:10:39 | 0:10:42 | |
that I got to perform for my relatives. | 0:10:42 | 0:10:44 | |
And that feeling of doing a magic trick for someone and having them | 0:10:44 | 0:10:49 | |
react in a way that you could see they were surprised was like a drug. | 0:10:49 | 0:10:54 | |
I could impress people, not because I knew how to play anything. | 0:10:54 | 0:10:59 | |
I was no good at football, but I could make a card disappear. | 0:10:59 | 0:11:02 | |
Or I could do a cool flourish and a cool reveal, | 0:11:02 | 0:11:04 | |
and then when I realised that movies were sort of magic tricks | 0:11:04 | 0:11:07 | |
on celluloid, I sort of found another way to channel that energy. | 0:11:07 | 0:11:12 | |
Lost went on to become one of the biggest TV hits of the decade, | 0:11:14 | 0:11:17 | |
and it demonstrated something important to JJ Abrams - | 0:11:17 | 0:11:21 | |
the power of mystery in storytelling. | 0:11:21 | 0:11:23 | |
-CRACKLY RECORDING: -Il les a tue. | 0:11:23 | 0:11:25 | |
It killed them. | 0:11:25 | 0:11:26 | |
Il les a tue tous. | 0:11:26 | 0:11:29 | |
It killed them all. | 0:11:29 | 0:11:31 | |
This passion for the enigmatic is encapsulated | 0:11:31 | 0:11:34 | |
in Abrams' now-famous mystery box. | 0:11:34 | 0:11:36 | |
I bought it when I was a kid with my grandfather, | 0:11:36 | 0:11:39 | |
and it was a magic box that basically said | 0:11:39 | 0:11:42 | |
there was 50 worth of magic in it for 15. | 0:11:42 | 0:11:44 | |
So it was a big kind of gamble, | 0:11:44 | 0:11:46 | |
-because you didn't know what you were going to get. -Yeah. | 0:11:46 | 0:11:49 | |
I remember getting home and having this box and having this | 0:11:49 | 0:11:53 | |
epiphany that if I opened the box, no matter what's inside of it, | 0:11:53 | 0:11:58 | |
it's not as good as what MIGHT be inside of it. | 0:11:58 | 0:12:03 | |
There is a connection between the idea of the power of mystery | 0:12:03 | 0:12:07 | |
and what might be that connects not just to that box | 0:12:07 | 0:12:10 | |
and the idea of magic, but to what we do at Bad Robot, | 0:12:10 | 0:12:13 | |
and the idea of storytelling, the possibilities of where a story | 0:12:13 | 0:12:18 | |
may go. It just started to make sense to me that there was a theme | 0:12:18 | 0:12:21 | |
that connected magic, movies, storytelling, mystery, | 0:12:21 | 0:12:27 | |
a sense of innate human natural curiosity | 0:12:27 | 0:12:30 | |
and that ridiculous magic box that I bought with my grandfather. | 0:12:30 | 0:12:35 | |
And crucially, talismanic that you haven't opened it, | 0:12:35 | 0:12:38 | |
-you still have it as unopened box. -It is indeed unopened. | 0:12:38 | 0:12:41 | |
You said it's like the mystery is the point. | 0:12:41 | 0:12:43 | |
Explain to me what that means. | 0:12:43 | 0:12:45 | |
I think there are some stories that benefit enormously from the unknown. | 0:12:45 | 0:12:50 | |
Now, I'm not saying, and this can be misconstrued, | 0:12:50 | 0:12:53 | |
that a story shouldn't have a point, but there are some stories, | 0:12:53 | 0:12:57 | |
obvious ones that come to mind are things like Pulp Fiction, | 0:12:57 | 0:13:00 | |
where you have this case with the light in it. | 0:13:00 | 0:13:03 | |
I promise you no matter what Quentin Tarantino, | 0:13:03 | 0:13:05 | |
if he would ever show us what was inside that case, | 0:13:05 | 0:13:07 | |
nothing would be as powerful as just that light | 0:13:07 | 0:13:10 | |
-and the reaction the characters have to it. -Yeah. | 0:13:10 | 0:13:12 | |
But with Lost, we had a lot of big ideas as to where it could go. | 0:13:12 | 0:13:16 | |
But on that pilot, if you had said to us, "What is the end of this series?" | 0:13:16 | 0:13:19 | |
It's impossible! We couldn't possibly tell you. | 0:13:19 | 0:13:21 | |
Lost cemented Abrams' reputation in the television world, | 0:13:21 | 0:13:25 | |
but he was about to get a foot in Hollywood's door with Mission Impossible III, | 0:13:25 | 0:13:29 | |
the most expensive film ever made by a rookie director. | 0:13:29 | 0:13:33 | |
And that was Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise, | 0:13:35 | 0:13:38 | |
potentially writing the remake of War Of The Worlds | 0:13:38 | 0:13:41 | |
that Steven and Tom did. And we had this two-hour meeting. | 0:13:41 | 0:13:44 | |
I'd never met Tom before, and it was a really fun meeting, | 0:13:44 | 0:13:50 | |
and when they were leaving, my assistant gave Tom the first | 0:13:50 | 0:13:53 | |
two seasons of Alias, the spy show that I had done with | 0:13:53 | 0:13:56 | |
Jennifer Garner, and I went to do the pilot for lost, | 0:13:56 | 0:13:59 | |
and I'm shooting the pilot, the last scene, | 0:13:59 | 0:14:01 | |
the sun was going down, and from across the hill, | 0:14:01 | 0:14:05 | |
my assistant says, "I've got Tom Cruise on the phone for you." | 0:14:05 | 0:14:08 | |
I'm like, "We have to shoot this." And she's like... | 0:14:08 | 0:14:11 | |
So I ran back over to the phone, picked up the phone and said, | 0:14:11 | 0:14:16 | |
"Hello?" "JJ!" | 0:14:16 | 0:14:19 | |
"Tom, how's it going?" | 0:14:19 | 0:14:21 | |
He said, "I just watched the first two seasons of Alias. Unbelievable!" | 0:14:21 | 0:14:26 | |
He was incredibly sweet about it. | 0:14:26 | 0:14:29 | |
I was like, "Thank you, Tom Cruise. I'm in the middle of shooting this thing." | 0:14:29 | 0:14:34 | |
He's like, "Yeah, let's hang out when you get back." I'm like, "Great." | 0:14:34 | 0:14:37 | |
So that filled me up for a month. I got a call from Tom Cruise. | 0:14:37 | 0:14:41 | |
So one day I get a phone call from my agent, | 0:14:41 | 0:14:44 | |
who says, are you aware of the conversations? | 0:14:44 | 0:14:47 | |
I thought that was the greatest thing. I don't know what you're talking about! | 0:14:47 | 0:14:50 | |
He said, "Tom wants you to direct Mission Impossible III." | 0:14:50 | 0:14:52 | |
In a franchise which had been directed | 0:14:52 | 0:14:54 | |
by people like Brian De Palma and John Woo, | 0:14:54 | 0:14:56 | |
you don't go to a TV guy. It made no sense. | 0:14:56 | 0:15:00 | |
But it was a dream, the chance of a lifetime. | 0:15:00 | 0:15:02 | |
Hollywood is fond of the tried and tested, | 0:15:07 | 0:15:09 | |
with a steady supply of sequels on offer, | 0:15:09 | 0:15:11 | |
but what do you do when you've wrung an idea out completely? | 0:15:11 | 0:15:15 | |
Rebooting is a term borrowed from the world of computing, | 0:15:15 | 0:15:17 | |
which basically means fixing something through the time-honoured | 0:15:17 | 0:15:21 | |
tradition of turning it off and then turning it back on again. | 0:15:21 | 0:15:24 | |
It's become a buzzword in recent years in the movie industry | 0:15:24 | 0:15:27 | |
where it serves to breathe new life into a series | 0:15:27 | 0:15:29 | |
which has run out of sequels | 0:15:29 | 0:15:31 | |
by simply clearing the decks and starting again. | 0:15:31 | 0:15:34 | |
And considering the huge success, both financial and artistic, | 0:15:34 | 0:15:38 | |
of Christopher Nolan's Batman reboot, it's no surprise that | 0:15:38 | 0:15:41 | |
JJ Abrams wanted to apply the formula to Star Trek. | 0:15:41 | 0:15:44 | |
All stop...in three, two, one. | 0:15:50 | 0:15:56 | |
We were mixing Mission Impossible III | 0:15:56 | 0:15:59 | |
and Gail Berman, who at the time was head of Paramount, | 0:15:59 | 0:16:03 | |
asked me if I was interested in producing Star Trek. | 0:16:03 | 0:16:06 | |
And because I'd never been a fan of it, my brain was saying, "No, thanks." | 0:16:06 | 0:16:11 | |
But I immediately said yes. | 0:16:11 | 0:16:15 | |
It was a weird instinct that | 0:16:15 | 0:16:18 | |
if Star Trek were done in a certain way...that I would love it... | 0:16:18 | 0:16:24 | |
Hello, ladies. | 0:16:24 | 0:16:25 | |
..that there was a way to present Star Trek that would make me laugh, | 0:16:25 | 0:16:29 | |
that would pick me feel, | 0:16:29 | 0:16:31 | |
that would make me sympathise with the characters, | 0:16:31 | 0:16:34 | |
not by reinventing them, | 0:16:34 | 0:16:35 | |
but by introducing them, or reintroducing them, | 0:16:35 | 0:16:38 | |
and basically providing an unwrap to that series. | 0:16:38 | 0:16:41 | |
Actually, the great triumph of that film was | 0:16:41 | 0:16:43 | |
it introduced Star Trek to a whole generation of people | 0:16:43 | 0:16:45 | |
who had never seen the original. | 0:16:45 | 0:16:48 | |
How hard was it to keep that balance? | 0:16:48 | 0:16:50 | |
We did not want in any way to throw away or disregard the Trek | 0:16:50 | 0:16:54 | |
that came before. There's no sense in that. | 0:16:54 | 0:16:56 | |
And if you're going to do Star Trek, don't not do Star Trek. | 0:16:56 | 0:16:59 | |
If you're going to do Star Trek, embrace what it is. Love it. | 0:16:59 | 0:17:03 | |
But to me, the genius of what Alex and Bob wrote | 0:17:03 | 0:17:07 | |
in the first film was, | 0:17:07 | 0:17:08 | |
it acknowledged and embraced the existing timeline for fans, | 0:17:08 | 0:17:13 | |
and then it said, "And we're going this way." | 0:17:13 | 0:17:15 | |
It doesn't say that what happened there didn't happen. | 0:17:15 | 0:17:18 | |
It's not saying it didn't continue. | 0:17:18 | 0:17:19 | |
It actually allows for everything the fans love. | 0:17:19 | 0:17:22 | |
We're just branching off and saying, "And there's this." | 0:17:22 | 0:17:25 | |
So our timeline co-exists, and in no way does it negate the stuff | 0:17:25 | 0:17:29 | |
that people who do love the show love. | 0:17:29 | 0:17:31 | |
Star Trek was conceived in the 1960s by Gene Roddenberry, | 0:17:31 | 0:17:34 | |
an ex-Air Force pilot and Los Angeles police officer. | 0:17:34 | 0:17:38 | |
In each futuristic episode, Roddenberry's Federation | 0:17:38 | 0:17:40 | |
of space Cowboys explored a galaxy of alien nations. | 0:17:40 | 0:17:44 | |
In truth, the show was less about intergalactic travel than it was | 0:17:44 | 0:17:47 | |
about life on earth in the turbulent '60s. | 0:17:47 | 0:17:50 | |
-ALIEN VOICE: -We have analysed you | 0:17:50 | 0:17:51 | |
and learned that your violent tendencies are inherent. | 0:17:51 | 0:17:54 | |
We certainly realised that here was the chance to do | 0:17:54 | 0:17:56 | |
the kind of drama I'd always dreamed of doing. | 0:17:56 | 0:17:58 | |
Perhaps I could use this as an excuse to go to those | 0:17:58 | 0:18:01 | |
far-off planets and be able to talk about love, war and nature, | 0:18:01 | 0:18:05 | |
God and sex, and maybe the TV censors would let it pass | 0:18:05 | 0:18:08 | |
because it all seemed so make-believe. | 0:18:08 | 0:18:10 | |
-COMPUTER: -Programme is classified and voice index log. | 0:18:10 | 0:18:13 | |
He was a very, very bright man, | 0:18:13 | 0:18:15 | |
and he was in touch with what Star Trek should be about. | 0:18:15 | 0:18:18 | |
He understood what the vision of Star Trek should be, | 0:18:18 | 0:18:21 | |
what it should say about mankind. | 0:18:21 | 0:18:23 | |
If we can keep them in the dark as to our strength, | 0:18:23 | 0:18:26 | |
they will never dare move against us. | 0:18:26 | 0:18:29 | |
'He expressed a great respect for what humanity could accomplish. | 0:18:29 | 0:18:33 | |
'I would like to think that Star Trek | 0:18:33 | 0:18:35 | |
'is still a place where useful ideas can be expressed.' | 0:18:35 | 0:18:38 | |
I am not sure how effective we can be in changing the world, | 0:18:38 | 0:18:43 | |
but we might be able to change a mind here and there. | 0:18:43 | 0:18:46 | |
The 1960s was the era of the civil rights movement, | 0:18:48 | 0:18:51 | |
the Vietnam War, the nuclear arms race and the Cold War. | 0:18:51 | 0:18:55 | |
Gene Roddenberry embraced the challenge of breaking | 0:18:55 | 0:18:58 | |
the social and political taboos of the day. | 0:18:58 | 0:19:01 | |
His boldest move was to cast the black actress | 0:19:01 | 0:19:04 | |
Nichelle Nichols as Lieutenant Uhura. | 0:19:04 | 0:19:06 | |
I was the guest star at a big dinner, and somebody came up | 0:19:07 | 0:19:13 | |
and said, "Miss Nichols, there's someone who wants to meet you. | 0:19:13 | 0:19:17 | |
"He says he's your biggest fan," and then I looked over his shoulder, | 0:19:17 | 0:19:22 | |
and there's Dr Martin Luther King with this big smile on his face. | 0:19:22 | 0:19:26 | |
And he walks up to me and he says, "I'm your greatest fan." | 0:19:26 | 0:19:31 | |
He came to tell me how important it was, because I didn't realise | 0:19:31 | 0:19:36 | |
I was the first African-American woman | 0:19:36 | 0:19:39 | |
on a successful television series. | 0:19:39 | 0:19:42 | |
He did say "What Gene Roddenberry has done | 0:19:42 | 0:19:46 | |
"is change face of television for ever." | 0:19:46 | 0:19:50 | |
Hey, Pres. | 0:19:51 | 0:19:52 | |
Yeah. Great guy. | 0:19:54 | 0:19:57 | |
The third season episode Plato's Stepchildren | 0:20:03 | 0:20:05 | |
made history by featuring one of the first ever interracial screen kisses | 0:20:05 | 0:20:09 | |
screened on American television. | 0:20:09 | 0:20:11 | |
Many television stations in the South refused to air the episode. | 0:20:13 | 0:20:17 | |
He said, "I've been waiting to get you in my arms for a long time." | 0:20:21 | 0:20:26 | |
'I've often been asked if I'm surprised that Star Trek is | 0:20:31 | 0:20:35 | |
'still vital, if I'd had any sense it would have that kind of a future,' | 0:20:35 | 0:20:41 | |
and the fact is it needs somebody like JJ to come along | 0:20:41 | 0:20:44 | |
and give it this fresh energy. | 0:20:44 | 0:20:46 | |
Your obsession with fireworks, | 0:20:46 | 0:20:49 | |
and I'm saying this as a friend, concerns me... | 0:20:49 | 0:20:51 | |
After resuscitating the ailing Star Trek franchise, | 0:20:51 | 0:20:54 | |
Abrams turned his lens onto a much more personal story. | 0:20:54 | 0:20:58 | |
2011's Super 8 gave him the opportunity to collaborate | 0:20:58 | 0:21:01 | |
with his hero and long-time supporter Steven Spielberg. | 0:21:01 | 0:21:05 | |
The film told the story of a boy not unlike Abrams who gets | 0:21:05 | 0:21:08 | |
more than he planned for when shooting a home-made zombie movie. | 0:21:08 | 0:21:12 | |
Mrs Hathaway doesn't want her husband to keep investigating... | 0:21:12 | 0:21:15 | |
-I know, we read it, we get it. -God, I'm just directing. | 0:21:15 | 0:21:18 | |
East Coast-born Abrams grew up in the media mecca | 0:21:20 | 0:21:22 | |
of LA. Both parents were TV producers and his father Gerald | 0:21:22 | 0:21:26 | |
had an office at Paramount. | 0:21:26 | 0:21:28 | |
My father's camera was essentially a completely no-frills motor | 0:21:28 | 0:21:32 | |
with a lens on it, and so I remember going home and saying, | 0:21:32 | 0:21:35 | |
"Can I use your camera?" And then started to make movies. | 0:21:35 | 0:21:38 | |
I was eight at the time, but I remember trying to do | 0:21:38 | 0:21:41 | |
an animated movie without a tripod, | 0:21:41 | 0:21:43 | |
and I was holding it and I would move the clay | 0:21:43 | 0:21:46 | |
and then click it, and then later I realised there was a camera store | 0:21:46 | 0:21:50 | |
and I would ride my bike to the camera store | 0:21:50 | 0:21:52 | |
and they have things like cable releases for cameras. | 0:21:52 | 0:21:55 | |
What a cable release would let you do is let you hit the button | 0:21:55 | 0:21:59 | |
quickly and get one frame, and so years later, | 0:21:59 | 0:22:03 | |
I convinced my grandfather to buy me | 0:22:03 | 0:22:05 | |
a Super 8 camera that had sound and had a zoom lens. | 0:22:05 | 0:22:10 | |
It was incredibly exciting, | 0:22:10 | 0:22:12 | |
but it would take a week to get the film back. | 0:22:12 | 0:22:15 | |
It never looked good, you couldn't do any visual effects stuff at all, | 0:22:15 | 0:22:19 | |
so you have to be really, really desperately clever to get | 0:22:19 | 0:22:22 | |
any sort of results at all, and they never looked the way you | 0:22:22 | 0:22:26 | |
dreamed it would look for those ten days. | 0:22:26 | 0:22:28 | |
All night, every night for ten days, I'd think, "It's going to look..." | 0:22:28 | 0:22:32 | |
and I had this beautiful Cinemascope vision in my head, | 0:22:32 | 0:22:35 | |
and I get back this little film | 0:22:35 | 0:22:37 | |
and put it on my - brrrr! - little projector | 0:22:37 | 0:22:40 | |
and my heart would always sink. | 0:22:40 | 0:22:43 | |
Next time! | 0:22:43 | 0:22:45 | |
PROJECTOR WHIRRS | 0:22:46 | 0:22:49 | |
Though it was the most personal movie, | 0:22:56 | 0:22:58 | |
it was also a movie that was clearly a kind of love letter, | 0:22:58 | 0:23:04 | |
rather than its own completely original idea. | 0:23:04 | 0:23:07 | |
Super 8 was a nod to the Amblin movies that I grew up with, | 0:23:07 | 0:23:13 | |
and it was an opportunity, and they don't really ever come along, | 0:23:13 | 0:23:18 | |
to really go back to being that age again | 0:23:18 | 0:23:20 | |
and explore what that felt like. | 0:23:20 | 0:23:24 | |
The fact that I got to do it with Steven, | 0:23:24 | 0:23:25 | |
which was, on the one hand, the greatest thrill ever, | 0:23:25 | 0:23:29 | |
on the other hand, scary, | 0:23:29 | 0:23:30 | |
because he was someone who I have admired for so long, | 0:23:30 | 0:23:33 | |
that the idea of working with him and it not working out | 0:23:33 | 0:23:36 | |
was a real spectre. I was nervous that it would somehow not go right. | 0:23:36 | 0:23:38 | |
So I guess what I'm saying is I feel I still have yet to make, | 0:23:39 | 0:23:43 | |
as a feature, something that is truly and deeply and uniquely mine. | 0:23:43 | 0:23:49 | |
This is where we not only watch cuts of the stuff we work on, | 0:23:52 | 0:23:56 | |
but also mix trailers and do rough mixes in here. | 0:23:56 | 0:23:58 | |
We actually shoot here too. | 0:23:58 | 0:24:00 | |
We use this as a mini stage and the chairs go away, and we shot | 0:24:00 | 0:24:03 | |
a bunch of scenes that actually, even in the new movie, we did in here. | 0:24:03 | 0:24:08 | |
-Oh, look. -Hi. -So here's our music room. Charles, Mark. Mark, Charles. | 0:24:10 | 0:24:16 | |
-Good to meet you. -Sorry to barge in. -No, not at all. | 0:24:16 | 0:24:19 | |
We use it for recording music, songs. | 0:24:19 | 0:24:21 | |
You can pretty much do everything in-house. | 0:24:21 | 0:24:24 | |
That was the goal, to be able to do as much as we could. | 0:24:24 | 0:24:27 | |
She is one of our editors, Mary Jo Markey. Let's take a look. | 0:24:27 | 0:24:31 | |
Look, Mary Jo Markey, editor. Look, Spock right there. | 0:24:34 | 0:24:37 | |
The overall thing is that you are self-contained. | 0:24:37 | 0:24:39 | |
-You can do everything in-house. -You can do a lot in-house. | 0:24:39 | 0:24:42 | |
It's an amazing thing, when we've had ideas of things which we wish | 0:24:42 | 0:24:45 | |
were in the movie, but weren't, we thought, "Let's just do it." | 0:24:45 | 0:24:48 | |
And every time we've done it in the building. | 0:24:48 | 0:24:51 | |
Bad Robot's all-inclusive approach has once again borne fruit | 0:24:51 | 0:24:55 | |
with Star Trek: Into Darkness, | 0:24:55 | 0:24:57 | |
Abrams' second big-money turn aboard the Starship Enterprise. | 0:24:57 | 0:25:00 | |
-I told you we'd fit! -I am not sure that qualifies. | 0:25:00 | 0:25:03 | |
There's plenty to love about the new film, | 0:25:04 | 0:25:07 | |
which once again combines the TV show's interest in | 0:25:07 | 0:25:09 | |
contemporary issues - non-intervention, colonialism, | 0:25:09 | 0:25:13 | |
terrorism - with the kind of hell-for-leather spectacle | 0:25:13 | 0:25:16 | |
which only big-screen cinema can deliver. | 0:25:16 | 0:25:18 | |
As heavy on action as it is on nostalgic lens flare, | 0:25:18 | 0:25:22 | |
this second instalment pits Benedict Cumberbatch's intergalactic | 0:25:22 | 0:25:26 | |
villain against Spock's cool logic and Kirk's hot-headed passion, | 0:25:26 | 0:25:30 | |
always the true centre of the show, | 0:25:30 | 0:25:32 | |
and concludes that conversations about the politics | 0:25:32 | 0:25:35 | |
of aggression versus pacifism are best held whilst | 0:25:35 | 0:25:38 | |
jumping off exploding buildings or running down the corridors | 0:25:38 | 0:25:41 | |
of burning starships, preferably at warp factor five. | 0:25:41 | 0:25:45 | |
We wanted to do an old-school thing of just dropping you into action, | 0:25:54 | 0:25:58 | |
as opposed to doing another origins story. | 0:25:58 | 0:26:01 | |
We thought, "Let's just jump in and meet everyone in a colourful, | 0:26:01 | 0:26:05 | |
"fun, exciting, thrilling way." | 0:26:05 | 0:26:07 | |
But I also knew that we needed to make this thing weighty | 0:26:07 | 0:26:11 | |
and have meaning, and hopefully some relevance as well. | 0:26:11 | 0:26:14 | |
-Captain on the bridge! -Lieutenant? -We have an open channel. -Mr Spock? | 0:26:16 | 0:26:20 | |
The heat's drying his comms, but we still have contact. | 0:26:20 | 0:26:23 | |
-Spock! -I have activated the device, captain. | 0:26:24 | 0:26:27 | |
When the countdown is complete, | 0:26:27 | 0:26:28 | |
the reaction should render the volcano inert. | 0:26:28 | 0:26:30 | |
That's going to render HIM inert. | 0:26:30 | 0:26:32 | |
-Do we have use of the transporters? -Negative. | 0:26:32 | 0:26:34 | |
Because of the way technology has gone, you can | 0:26:34 | 0:26:37 | |
pretty much put anything on screen if you want to. | 0:26:37 | 0:26:40 | |
Has that in any way undone the idea of the mystery box? | 0:26:40 | 0:26:45 | |
How do you keep the air of mystery in a world | 0:26:45 | 0:26:47 | |
in which it is possible to show the monster? | 0:26:47 | 0:26:50 | |
I think at the moment everyone knows you can do anything, | 0:26:50 | 0:26:54 | |
so the question really is, what are you going to do? | 0:26:54 | 0:26:57 | |
Our eyes are immediate truth-tellers which go, "Fake!" | 0:26:57 | 0:27:00 | |
You could say, "No, it looks 100% real." Yeah, intellectually, that's true. | 0:27:00 | 0:27:04 | |
But - "Fake!" | 0:27:04 | 0:27:05 | |
You know somehow it's not real. | 0:27:05 | 0:27:07 | |
To me, the idea that you can do anything doesn't mean that you | 0:27:07 | 0:27:11 | |
should do anything. The question is, what does the story require? | 0:27:11 | 0:27:14 | |
And I feel like nobody cares about a spaceship flying by | 0:27:14 | 0:27:17 | |
unless you love the people on the spaceship. | 0:27:17 | 0:27:19 | |
-Such action violates the prime directive. -Shut up, Spock! We're trying to save you! | 0:27:19 | 0:27:23 | |
Doctor, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. | 0:27:23 | 0:27:26 | |
-Spock, we're talking about your life! -The rule cannot be broken... -CRACKLING | 0:27:26 | 0:27:30 | |
One of the interesting things | 0:27:30 | 0:27:31 | |
about the Star Trek TV series is that it was non-interventionist. | 0:27:31 | 0:27:34 | |
Do you think that idea that was so relevant | 0:27:34 | 0:27:37 | |
when the TV series was made is still at the heart of it, | 0:27:37 | 0:27:41 | |
the idea of the Federation as benevolent? | 0:27:41 | 0:27:43 | |
It's always a relevant message that we can | 0:27:43 | 0:27:45 | |
and should respect other cultures. The irony, of course, | 0:27:45 | 0:27:49 | |
is if you do look at the episodes of the show, this idea of | 0:27:49 | 0:27:52 | |
not intervening is a great idea, but is almost never really adhered too. | 0:27:52 | 0:27:57 | |
They do do a lot of intervening for non-interventionists. | 0:27:57 | 0:28:00 | |
Yes, the prime directive, as it is called, is broken, I think... | 0:28:00 | 0:28:04 | |
-Every show. -..100% of the time. But the concept is cool. | 0:28:04 | 0:28:08 | |
And I do feel like there's something inherently optimistic | 0:28:08 | 0:28:12 | |
about Star Trek, and that is something | 0:28:12 | 0:28:14 | |
that I have really come to love. | 0:28:14 | 0:28:17 | |
Whether Star Trek: Into Darkness will find its own next generation | 0:28:17 | 0:28:21 | |
of fans remains to be seen. | 0:28:21 | 0:28:23 | |
As for JJ Abrams, he's going to face the same challenges again | 0:28:23 | 0:28:26 | |
as he takes on that other sacred cow of science fiction, Star Wars - | 0:28:26 | 0:28:31 | |
the challenge is giving the die-hard fans what they know and expect | 0:28:31 | 0:28:34 | |
whilst creating a brave new world that is | 0:28:34 | 0:28:37 | |
distinctly his own, of looking to the future without completely | 0:28:37 | 0:28:41 | |
closing the door on the past. | 0:28:41 | 0:28:42 | |
Space, the final frontier. | 0:28:44 | 0:28:47 | |
These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. | 0:28:48 | 0:28:51 | |
Their ongoing mission, to explore strange new worlds, | 0:28:53 | 0:28:57 | |
to seek out new life forms and new civilisations. | 0:28:57 | 0:29:01 | |
To boldly go where no-one has gone before. | 0:29:01 | 0:29:06 | |
# Where there's hope there is you | 0:29:06 | 0:29:11 | |
# It's time to start to live | 0:29:11 | 0:29:15 | |
# It's time to start to live again... # | 0:29:16 | 0:29:21 | |
In T minus ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four. | 0:29:21 | 0:29:28 | |
We've gone from main engine Starfleet... | 0:29:28 | 0:29:30 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 0:29:30 | 0:29:33 |