The Magic Tricks of JJ Abrams: A Culture Show Special The Culture Show


The Magic Tricks of JJ Abrams: A Culture Show Special

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JJ Abrams is a man in demand.

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The ultimate fanboy, Abrams is the creative force

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behind Lost, Mission Impossible III and Super 8.

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He's been heralded as the new Steven Spielberg

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and now finds himself at the helm of the next Star Wars film.

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I hope he never grows up. Let's put it that way.

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He is wonderfully juvenile.

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He still looks at the world through the eyes of a 14-year-old,

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and that's very infectious because, if you're 14,

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everything that you see is the greatest thing ever.

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'Enormously energetic and smart. Very smart.

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'And he's been at it for a long time, learning how to do the job.

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'He does it extremely well.'

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He has this great kind of grown-up professionalism and ambition.

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He is able to operate on so many levels simultaneously.

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His mind is going "ping ping ping". Really special.

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It was JJ Abrams' second turn in the directing chair

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with 2009's Star Trek which cemented his reputation

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as one of Hollywood's rising stars.

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What you had in Abrams' Star Trek movie

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was effectively a rewriting of both the past

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and the future.

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As a result, the slate was wiped clean,

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and the Enterprise was relaunched in a new direction,

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taking it out of the exclusive domain of Trekkies

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to become a box-office hit.

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It was a much-needed boost to the franchise,

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and JJ has once again climbed onboard the Starship Enterprise

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for Star Trek: Into Darkness.

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But both Abrams and the Star Trek franchise

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remain something of an enigma.

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How could a lo-fi '60s sci-fi TV show,

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which originally only ran for three series, have endured this long?

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And how is it that the man who reinvented Star Trek

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grew up preferring magic tricks

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and the films of Steven Spielberg to the adventures of Kirk and Spock?

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Space. The final frontier.

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These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.

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Its five-year mission, to explore strange new worlds...

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..to seek out new life and new civilisations...

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..to boldly go where no man has gone before.

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No book or TV series has influenced the way people think about

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space travel and exploration quite like Star Trek.

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Like most people of my age,

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it was a regular appointment to view when I was a child.

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I remember struggling to get my homework finished in time

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to watch Star Trek.

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And when Gene Roddenberry first created the series in the 1960s,

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he envisaged it as Wagon Train To The Stars,

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a weekly Western adventure set in space.

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This new intergalactic series took up President Kennedy's challenge

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of space as the last great opportunity

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for American exploration.

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Star Trek became a fictional way to grasp the mind-bending science

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taking place behind the closed doors of NASA's 1960s space race.

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The final episode of the original series was

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broadcast in the USA in 1969, just before Neil Armstrong

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took those famous first steps for mankind.

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It felt to many of us to be just like an episode of Star Trek.

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You're in our field of view now.

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You do have to be rather careful

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to keep track of where your centre of mass is.

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Sometimes it takes about two or three paces...

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Star Trek was a vision of the future that suddenly seemed

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strangely possible and incredibly appealing.

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But the world of JJ Abrams, the mastermind behind the reinvention

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of the franchise, doesn't belong in the Star Trek universe.

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His production company Bad Robot

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is based in Santa Monica in Los Angeles.

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It's the top-secret hub of his growing film and television empire.

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I met him there to talk all things intergalactic.

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When you were young,

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you would have been the right age to be somebody who was caught up by

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Star Trek, but you weren't a great Trek fan

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when it was first out, were you?

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No. Star Trek came out the year I was born...

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-So you were born in...?

-'66.

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And I think the movie that we did in 2009 was an experience that

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let me fall in love with it.

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But the TV show, for some reason, I remember my friends

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who loved it when I was in elementary school,

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so I would watch it and I'd just be like... I was trying to get into it.

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I just couldn't find my way in.

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And part of it was that I was not Spock,

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I was not that smart or logical.

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I was not Kirk, because I was not that cocky

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or confident or good-looking.

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I was not really Chekov or Bones or Uhura or Sulu.

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Any of them. I didn't have a way in, and yet I knew it was a thing that

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people who were smarter than I was really enjoyed, so I kind of just

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felt like, all right, it's one of those things that I won't ever get.

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-But did you have a predisposition to sci-fi?

-I did.

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There are two types of science fiction I loved.

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One was spectacle, those kind of '50s monster movies, Godzilla films.

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Or I loved The Twilight Zone, which was

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typically not about spectacle at all,

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rarely about visuals or pyrotechnics, but almost always about tension

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and character and emotion and psychological twists.

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So to me, those were the things I loved.

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There's a signpost up ahead. Your next stop, The Twilight Zone.

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JJ Abrams sold his first screenplay at the tender age of 24,

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but his big break came as a script doctor

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on the 1998 blockbuster Armageddon.

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That same year saw Abrams make his mark on the small screen,

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with the teen series Felicity, which he followed up with Alias.

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The CIA spy drama gave him his first international success.

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His next project Lost would become one of the most popular

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television programmes of all time.

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Abrams created Lost with Jeffrey Lieber

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and the up-and-coming writer Damon Lindelof.

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There was a guy I'd heard about named Damon Lindelof who was

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working on another show called Nash Bridges.

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Heather Kadin knew that I had been stalking JJ. I had been

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writing on another couple of TV shows, but I said,

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"I will get coffee for him, I will wash his car, just get me in the door."

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And she's like, "OK, you're a little creepy."

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I was working on a script for a pilot.

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I got a phone call from Lloyd Braun, who at the time was head of ABC,

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and he said, "We need to do a show about people who survive a plane crash."

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And I said, "OK. Sounds all right."

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"Please go, think of something, and call me back,

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"because we have a week to green-light it."

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And she said, we've developed a little bit of a story,

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but we want to go in a different direction

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and we're trying to get JJ, we're trying to rope JJ into this thing.

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So a few hours later I called back and said, "I have a couple of

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"thoughts, but you're not going to like it, because it's weird."

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I started to pitch this idea that was more a Michael Crichton thing

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than it was Castaway, which is what I thought he wanted.

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And he said, "I love it!"

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So he said, "I need you to write..." What are you talking about?!

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He said that if we could give him

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another writer that he could supervise,

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that maybe he'd be open to it.

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So that Monday, Damon came in, and he was wearing a Star Wars shirt.

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I have this T-shirt from when I was a kid that is a Star Wars

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Fan Club Bantha Tracks T-shirt.

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I fell in love with him instantly. I thought, "I love this guy."

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He was immediately someone I felt like I knew all my life.

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I just hear this guy go, "Bantha Tracks!"

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And I looked up, and it was JJ.

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And we started talking about what this idea could be,

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and he was pitching these ideas which were spectacular,

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so I started to get excited.

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And we just had this immediate sort of excitement about what this show,

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Lost, could be.

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And two hours later,

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we walked out of the room with the beginnings of what would be Lost.

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And he said, "Do you want to come back tomorrow?"

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And I said, "Yes, I do,"

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and I've been coming back tomorrow ever since.

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'As far as I can tell,

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'Bad Robot is one of the coolest places to work in movie land.'

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See, this is like every boy's wet dream.

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The idea was not to have any magazines or newspapers here,

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but to have a space where when you came in here,

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the first thing you were encouraged to do is create,

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so we collect the waiting room art

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and then we put it up on the walls in the back,

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and then we do a book at the end of the year

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of the best waiting room art.

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And we have some typewriters. When we designed the building,

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they said that we could put a sign outside,

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and I thought, I don't say Bad Robot,

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so we put outside "National Typewriter Company".

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How often do you see a new typewriter company?

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The best thing about that was we've had three different

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people come in here with typewriters to get repaired. Which is fantastic.

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-Did you repair them?

-I didn't know about it until after they came in.

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Because the cool thing would have been...

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100%. Next time someone comes in, the directive is, we repair it for free

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-and give it back to them, no questions asked.

-Fantastic.

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-What is this machine here?

-Is called a Mold-A-Rama.

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It is a machine that was used in the States a lot.

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When I was a kid, you'd find it in zoos or amusement parks,

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and basically, you put 25 cents in and you get this little wax

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sculpture that is moulded in front of you. The thing closes.

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It extruded wax, and then it opens up and the thing falls out.

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Magic was my first love, I think.

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My grandfather took me to this magic store in New York

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called Lou Tannen's Magic.

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I remember illusions that my grandfather bought for me

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that I got to perform for my relatives.

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And that feeling of doing a magic trick for someone and having them

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react in a way that you could see they were surprised was like a drug.

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I could impress people, not because I knew how to play anything.

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I was no good at football, but I could make a card disappear.

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Or I could do a cool flourish and a cool reveal,

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and then when I realised that movies were sort of magic tricks

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on celluloid, I sort of found another way to channel that energy.

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Lost went on to become one of the biggest TV hits of the decade,

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and it demonstrated something important to JJ Abrams -

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the power of mystery in storytelling.

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-CRACKLY RECORDING:

-Il les a tue.

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It killed them.

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Il les a tue tous.

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It killed them all.

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This passion for the enigmatic is encapsulated

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in Abrams' now-famous mystery box.

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I bought it when I was a kid with my grandfather,

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and it was a magic box that basically said

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there was 50 worth of magic in it for 15.

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So it was a big kind of gamble,

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-because you didn't know what you were going to get.

-Yeah.

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I remember getting home and having this box and having this

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epiphany that if I opened the box, no matter what's inside of it,

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it's not as good as what MIGHT be inside of it.

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There is a connection between the idea of the power of mystery

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and what might be that connects not just to that box

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and the idea of magic, but to what we do at Bad Robot,

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and the idea of storytelling, the possibilities of where a story

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may go. It just started to make sense to me that there was a theme

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that connected magic, movies, storytelling, mystery,

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a sense of innate human natural curiosity

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and that ridiculous magic box that I bought with my grandfather.

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And crucially, talismanic that you haven't opened it,

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-you still have it as unopened box.

-It is indeed unopened.

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You said it's like the mystery is the point.

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Explain to me what that means.

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I think there are some stories that benefit enormously from the unknown.

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Now, I'm not saying, and this can be misconstrued,

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that a story shouldn't have a point, but there are some stories,

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obvious ones that come to mind are things like Pulp Fiction,

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where you have this case with the light in it.

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I promise you no matter what Quentin Tarantino,

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if he would ever show us what was inside that case,

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nothing would be as powerful as just that light

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-and the reaction the characters have to it.

-Yeah.

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But with Lost, we had a lot of big ideas as to where it could go.

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But on that pilot, if you had said to us, "What is the end of this series?"

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It's impossible! We couldn't possibly tell you.

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Lost cemented Abrams' reputation in the television world,

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but he was about to get a foot in Hollywood's door with Mission Impossible III,

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the most expensive film ever made by a rookie director.

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And that was Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise,

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potentially writing the remake of War Of The Worlds

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that Steven and Tom did. And we had this two-hour meeting.

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I'd never met Tom before, and it was a really fun meeting,

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and when they were leaving, my assistant gave Tom the first

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two seasons of Alias, the spy show that I had done with

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Jennifer Garner, and I went to do the pilot for lost,

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and I'm shooting the pilot, the last scene,

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the sun was going down, and from across the hill,

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my assistant says, "I've got Tom Cruise on the phone for you."

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I'm like, "We have to shoot this." And she's like...

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So I ran back over to the phone, picked up the phone and said,

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"Hello?" "JJ!"

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"Tom, how's it going?"

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He said, "I just watched the first two seasons of Alias. Unbelievable!"

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He was incredibly sweet about it.

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I was like, "Thank you, Tom Cruise. I'm in the middle of shooting this thing."

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He's like, "Yeah, let's hang out when you get back." I'm like, "Great."

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So that filled me up for a month. I got a call from Tom Cruise.

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So one day I get a phone call from my agent,

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who says, are you aware of the conversations?

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I thought that was the greatest thing. I don't know what you're talking about!

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He said, "Tom wants you to direct Mission Impossible III."

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In a franchise which had been directed

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by people like Brian De Palma and John Woo,

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you don't go to a TV guy. It made no sense.

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But it was a dream, the chance of a lifetime.

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Hollywood is fond of the tried and tested,

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with a steady supply of sequels on offer,

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but what do you do when you've wrung an idea out completely?

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Rebooting is a term borrowed from the world of computing,

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which basically means fixing something through the time-honoured

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tradition of turning it off and then turning it back on again.

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It's become a buzzword in recent years in the movie industry

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where it serves to breathe new life into a series

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which has run out of sequels

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by simply clearing the decks and starting again.

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And considering the huge success, both financial and artistic,

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of Christopher Nolan's Batman reboot, it's no surprise that

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JJ Abrams wanted to apply the formula to Star Trek.

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All stop...in three, two, one.

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We were mixing Mission Impossible III

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and Gail Berman, who at the time was head of Paramount,

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asked me if I was interested in producing Star Trek.

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And because I'd never been a fan of it, my brain was saying, "No, thanks."

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But I immediately said yes.

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It was a weird instinct that

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if Star Trek were done in a certain way...that I would love it...

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Hello, ladies.

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..that there was a way to present Star Trek that would make me laugh,

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that would pick me feel,

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that would make me sympathise with the characters,

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not by reinventing them,

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but by introducing them, or reintroducing them,

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and basically providing an unwrap to that series.

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Actually, the great triumph of that film was

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it introduced Star Trek to a whole generation of people

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who had never seen the original.

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How hard was it to keep that balance?

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We did not want in any way to throw away or disregard the Trek

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that came before. There's no sense in that.

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And if you're going to do Star Trek, don't not do Star Trek.

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If you're going to do Star Trek, embrace what it is. Love it.

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But to me, the genius of what Alex and Bob wrote

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in the first film was,

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it acknowledged and embraced the existing timeline for fans,

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and then it said, "And we're going this way."

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It doesn't say that what happened there didn't happen.

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It's not saying it didn't continue.

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It actually allows for everything the fans love.

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We're just branching off and saying, "And there's this."

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So our timeline co-exists, and in no way does it negate the stuff

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that people who do love the show love.

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Star Trek was conceived in the 1960s by Gene Roddenberry,

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an ex-Air Force pilot and Los Angeles police officer.

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In each futuristic episode, Roddenberry's Federation

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of space Cowboys explored a galaxy of alien nations.

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In truth, the show was less about intergalactic travel than it was

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about life on earth in the turbulent '60s.

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-ALIEN VOICE:

-We have analysed you

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and learned that your violent tendencies are inherent.

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We certainly realised that here was the chance to do

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the kind of drama I'd always dreamed of doing.

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Perhaps I could use this as an excuse to go to those

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far-off planets and be able to talk about love, war and nature,

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God and sex, and maybe the TV censors would let it pass

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because it all seemed so make-believe.

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-COMPUTER:

-Programme is classified and voice index log.

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He was a very, very bright man,

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and he was in touch with what Star Trek should be about.

0:18:150:18:18

He understood what the vision of Star Trek should be,

0:18:180:18:21

what it should say about mankind.

0:18:210:18:23

If we can keep them in the dark as to our strength,

0:18:230:18:26

they will never dare move against us.

0:18:260:18:29

'He expressed a great respect for what humanity could accomplish.

0:18:290:18:33

'I would like to think that Star Trek

0:18:330:18:35

'is still a place where useful ideas can be expressed.'

0:18:350:18:38

I am not sure how effective we can be in changing the world,

0:18:380:18:43

but we might be able to change a mind here and there.

0:18:430:18:46

The 1960s was the era of the civil rights movement,

0:18:480:18:51

the Vietnam War, the nuclear arms race and the Cold War.

0:18:510:18:55

Gene Roddenberry embraced the challenge of breaking

0:18:550:18:58

the social and political taboos of the day.

0:18:580:19:01

His boldest move was to cast the black actress

0:19:010:19:04

Nichelle Nichols as Lieutenant Uhura.

0:19:040:19:06

I was the guest star at a big dinner, and somebody came up

0:19:070:19:13

and said, "Miss Nichols, there's someone who wants to meet you.

0:19:130:19:17

"He says he's your biggest fan," and then I looked over his shoulder,

0:19:170:19:22

and there's Dr Martin Luther King with this big smile on his face.

0:19:220:19:26

And he walks up to me and he says, "I'm your greatest fan."

0:19:260:19:31

He came to tell me how important it was, because I didn't realise

0:19:310:19:36

I was the first African-American woman

0:19:360:19:39

on a successful television series.

0:19:390:19:42

He did say "What Gene Roddenberry has done

0:19:420:19:46

"is change face of television for ever."

0:19:460:19:50

Hey, Pres.

0:19:510:19:52

Yeah. Great guy.

0:19:540:19:57

The third season episode Plato's Stepchildren

0:20:030:20:05

made history by featuring one of the first ever interracial screen kisses

0:20:050:20:09

screened on American television.

0:20:090:20:11

Many television stations in the South refused to air the episode.

0:20:130:20:17

He said, "I've been waiting to get you in my arms for a long time."

0:20:210:20:26

'I've often been asked if I'm surprised that Star Trek is

0:20:310:20:35

'still vital, if I'd had any sense it would have that kind of a future,'

0:20:350:20:41

and the fact is it needs somebody like JJ to come along

0:20:410:20:44

and give it this fresh energy.

0:20:440:20:46

Your obsession with fireworks,

0:20:460:20:49

and I'm saying this as a friend, concerns me...

0:20:490:20:51

After resuscitating the ailing Star Trek franchise,

0:20:510:20:54

Abrams turned his lens onto a much more personal story.

0:20:540:20:58

2011's Super 8 gave him the opportunity to collaborate

0:20:580:21:01

with his hero and long-time supporter Steven Spielberg.

0:21:010:21:05

The film told the story of a boy not unlike Abrams who gets

0:21:050:21:08

more than he planned for when shooting a home-made zombie movie.

0:21:080:21:12

Mrs Hathaway doesn't want her husband to keep investigating...

0:21:120:21:15

-I know, we read it, we get it.

-God, I'm just directing.

0:21:150:21:18

East Coast-born Abrams grew up in the media mecca

0:21:200:21:22

of LA. Both parents were TV producers and his father Gerald

0:21:220:21:26

had an office at Paramount.

0:21:260:21:28

My father's camera was essentially a completely no-frills motor

0:21:280:21:32

with a lens on it, and so I remember going home and saying,

0:21:320:21:35

"Can I use your camera?" And then started to make movies.

0:21:350:21:38

I was eight at the time, but I remember trying to do

0:21:380:21:41

an animated movie without a tripod,

0:21:410:21:43

and I was holding it and I would move the clay

0:21:430:21:46

and then click it, and then later I realised there was a camera store

0:21:460:21:50

and I would ride my bike to the camera store

0:21:500:21:52

and they have things like cable releases for cameras.

0:21:520:21:55

What a cable release would let you do is let you hit the button

0:21:550:21:59

quickly and get one frame, and so years later,

0:21:590:22:03

I convinced my grandfather to buy me

0:22:030:22:05

a Super 8 camera that had sound and had a zoom lens.

0:22:050:22:10

It was incredibly exciting,

0:22:100:22:12

but it would take a week to get the film back.

0:22:120:22:15

It never looked good, you couldn't do any visual effects stuff at all,

0:22:150:22:19

so you have to be really, really desperately clever to get

0:22:190:22:22

any sort of results at all, and they never looked the way you

0:22:220:22:26

dreamed it would look for those ten days.

0:22:260:22:28

All night, every night for ten days, I'd think, "It's going to look..."

0:22:280:22:32

and I had this beautiful Cinemascope vision in my head,

0:22:320:22:35

and I get back this little film

0:22:350:22:37

and put it on my - brrrr! - little projector

0:22:370:22:40

and my heart would always sink.

0:22:400:22:43

Next time!

0:22:430:22:45

PROJECTOR WHIRRS

0:22:460:22:49

Though it was the most personal movie,

0:22:560:22:58

it was also a movie that was clearly a kind of love letter,

0:22:580:23:04

rather than its own completely original idea.

0:23:040:23:07

Super 8 was a nod to the Amblin movies that I grew up with,

0:23:070:23:13

and it was an opportunity, and they don't really ever come along,

0:23:130:23:18

to really go back to being that age again

0:23:180:23:20

and explore what that felt like.

0:23:200:23:24

The fact that I got to do it with Steven,

0:23:240:23:25

which was, on the one hand, the greatest thrill ever,

0:23:250:23:29

on the other hand, scary,

0:23:290:23:30

because he was someone who I have admired for so long,

0:23:300:23:33

that the idea of working with him and it not working out

0:23:330:23:36

was a real spectre. I was nervous that it would somehow not go right.

0:23:360:23:38

So I guess what I'm saying is I feel I still have yet to make,

0:23:390:23:43

as a feature, something that is truly and deeply and uniquely mine.

0:23:430:23:49

This is where we not only watch cuts of the stuff we work on,

0:23:520:23:56

but also mix trailers and do rough mixes in here.

0:23:560:23:58

We actually shoot here too.

0:23:580:24:00

We use this as a mini stage and the chairs go away, and we shot

0:24:000:24:03

a bunch of scenes that actually, even in the new movie, we did in here.

0:24:030:24:08

-Oh, look.

-Hi.

-So here's our music room. Charles, Mark. Mark, Charles.

0:24:100:24:16

-Good to meet you.

-Sorry to barge in.

-No, not at all.

0:24:160:24:19

We use it for recording music, songs.

0:24:190:24:21

You can pretty much do everything in-house.

0:24:210:24:24

That was the goal, to be able to do as much as we could.

0:24:240:24:27

She is one of our editors, Mary Jo Markey. Let's take a look.

0:24:270:24:31

Look, Mary Jo Markey, editor. Look, Spock right there.

0:24:340:24:37

The overall thing is that you are self-contained.

0:24:370:24:39

-You can do everything in-house.

-You can do a lot in-house.

0:24:390:24:42

It's an amazing thing, when we've had ideas of things which we wish

0:24:420:24:45

were in the movie, but weren't, we thought, "Let's just do it."

0:24:450:24:48

And every time we've done it in the building.

0:24:480:24:51

Bad Robot's all-inclusive approach has once again borne fruit

0:24:510:24:55

with Star Trek: Into Darkness,

0:24:550:24:57

Abrams' second big-money turn aboard the Starship Enterprise.

0:24:570:25:00

-I told you we'd fit!

-I am not sure that qualifies.

0:25:000:25:03

There's plenty to love about the new film,

0:25:040:25:07

which once again combines the TV show's interest in

0:25:070:25:09

contemporary issues - non-intervention, colonialism,

0:25:090:25:13

terrorism - with the kind of hell-for-leather spectacle

0:25:130:25:16

which only big-screen cinema can deliver.

0:25:160:25:18

As heavy on action as it is on nostalgic lens flare,

0:25:180:25:22

this second instalment pits Benedict Cumberbatch's intergalactic

0:25:220:25:26

villain against Spock's cool logic and Kirk's hot-headed passion,

0:25:260:25:30

always the true centre of the show,

0:25:300:25:32

and concludes that conversations about the politics

0:25:320:25:35

of aggression versus pacifism are best held whilst

0:25:350:25:38

jumping off exploding buildings or running down the corridors

0:25:380:25:41

of burning starships, preferably at warp factor five.

0:25:410:25:45

We wanted to do an old-school thing of just dropping you into action,

0:25:540:25:58

as opposed to doing another origins story.

0:25:580:26:01

We thought, "Let's just jump in and meet everyone in a colourful,

0:26:010:26:05

"fun, exciting, thrilling way."

0:26:050:26:07

But I also knew that we needed to make this thing weighty

0:26:070:26:11

and have meaning, and hopefully some relevance as well.

0:26:110:26:14

-Captain on the bridge!

-Lieutenant?

-We have an open channel.

-Mr Spock?

0:26:160:26:20

The heat's drying his comms, but we still have contact.

0:26:200:26:23

-Spock!

-I have activated the device, captain.

0:26:240:26:27

When the countdown is complete,

0:26:270:26:28

the reaction should render the volcano inert.

0:26:280:26:30

That's going to render HIM inert.

0:26:300:26:32

-Do we have use of the transporters?

-Negative.

0:26:320:26:34

Because of the way technology has gone, you can

0:26:340:26:37

pretty much put anything on screen if you want to.

0:26:370:26:40

Has that in any way undone the idea of the mystery box?

0:26:400:26:45

How do you keep the air of mystery in a world

0:26:450:26:47

in which it is possible to show the monster?

0:26:470:26:50

I think at the moment everyone knows you can do anything,

0:26:500:26:54

so the question really is, what are you going to do?

0:26:540:26:57

Our eyes are immediate truth-tellers which go, "Fake!"

0:26:570:27:00

You could say, "No, it looks 100% real." Yeah, intellectually, that's true.

0:27:000:27:04

But - "Fake!"

0:27:040:27:05

You know somehow it's not real.

0:27:050:27:07

To me, the idea that you can do anything doesn't mean that you

0:27:070:27:11

should do anything. The question is, what does the story require?

0:27:110:27:14

And I feel like nobody cares about a spaceship flying by

0:27:140:27:17

unless you love the people on the spaceship.

0:27:170:27:19

-Such action violates the prime directive.

-Shut up, Spock! We're trying to save you!

0:27:190:27:23

Doctor, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

0:27:230:27:26

-Spock, we're talking about your life!

-The rule cannot be broken...

-CRACKLING

0:27:260:27:30

One of the interesting things

0:27:300:27:31

about the Star Trek TV series is that it was non-interventionist.

0:27:310:27:34

Do you think that idea that was so relevant

0:27:340:27:37

when the TV series was made is still at the heart of it,

0:27:370:27:41

the idea of the Federation as benevolent?

0:27:410:27:43

It's always a relevant message that we can

0:27:430:27:45

and should respect other cultures. The irony, of course,

0:27:450:27:49

is if you do look at the episodes of the show, this idea of

0:27:490:27:52

not intervening is a great idea, but is almost never really adhered too.

0:27:520:27:57

They do do a lot of intervening for non-interventionists.

0:27:570:28:00

Yes, the prime directive, as it is called, is broken, I think...

0:28:000:28:04

-Every show.

-..100% of the time. But the concept is cool.

0:28:040:28:08

And I do feel like there's something inherently optimistic

0:28:080:28:12

about Star Trek, and that is something

0:28:120:28:14

that I have really come to love.

0:28:140:28:17

Whether Star Trek: Into Darkness will find its own next generation

0:28:170:28:21

of fans remains to be seen.

0:28:210:28:23

As for JJ Abrams, he's going to face the same challenges again

0:28:230:28:26

as he takes on that other sacred cow of science fiction, Star Wars -

0:28:260:28:31

the challenge is giving the die-hard fans what they know and expect

0:28:310:28:34

whilst creating a brave new world that is

0:28:340:28:37

distinctly his own, of looking to the future without completely

0:28:370:28:41

closing the door on the past.

0:28:410:28:42

Space, the final frontier.

0:28:440:28:47

These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.

0:28:480:28:51

Their ongoing mission, to explore strange new worlds,

0:28:530:28:57

to seek out new life forms and new civilisations.

0:28:570:29:01

To boldly go where no-one has gone before.

0:29:010:29:06

# Where there's hope there is you

0:29:060:29:11

# It's time to start to live

0:29:110:29:15

# It's time to start to live again... #

0:29:160:29:21

In T minus ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four.

0:29:210:29:28

We've gone from main engine Starfleet...

0:29:280:29:30

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

0:29:300:29:33

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