We’re not going to know anything definite about J.J. Abrams’ Untitled Star Trek Sequel for a while, so to hold you over until such a day arrives when we do know something – here’s producer and writer Damon Lindelof sharing in uncertain-ish terms what we can expect for both the immediate and far future of Star Trek.
These excerpts are culled from two interviews with Lindelof as conducted by TrekMovie.com – you can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
TrekMovie: …you had mentioned you hoped to show something at Comic Con this summer, what is the latest on that? Teaser trailer?
Lindelof: I’m not going to confirm or deny that. Our feeling is, that if we can get something together that is worthy of showing on that timetable, then we will most certainly show it. We need to put our best foot forward. We just wrapped principal photography as you know and Comic Con is in mid July so it is an aggressive timetable. If we are going to go we are going to go big or not go at all.
TrekMovie: Are we jumping in to a new spot on the character arcs [of the Enterprise’s crew]? Or are we picking up where we left off?
Lindelof: That is a very clever way of asking how much time has elapsed between the movies and that is not something we are commenting on at this point. What we can say is… we have not seen Kirk as the captain of the Enterprise yet. We will see him be the captain in this movie and that changes the dynamic.
On shooting in IMAX: JJ’s decision to shoot a lot of the movie in IMAX definitely makes the film seem a lot bigger and definitely the sequences he directed in IMAX I feel have tremendous scale and energy, without sacrificing any of things that I talked about on an emotional level.
And in 3D: We are now – I wouldn’t say converts – but I don’t think this is going to hurt the movie… and in terms of actual production, JJ shot the movie exactly the way he wanted to shoot it. But again, our job was to just make an awesome movie and to care about the characters and again do service to this amazing baton that has been passed to us and that we take incredibly seriously and treat with a great deal of reverence. So the 3D decision was more along the lines of like “are we going to screw up Trek by doing this movie in 3D or is Trek ready for 3D?” Hopefully it is the latter. Based on the dailies that I have seen, I think JJ pulled it off.
And as for Trek 3: It would be very hard to not be involved in Trek moving forward. We certainly don’t feel that a third movie is a foregone conclusion. Hopefully the second movie turns out well and we are really happy about everything so far… it does feel that three movies is the right responsibility for us to have the baton for before we then pass it off to the people who are take Trek to wherever they want to take it… we did talk a lot in the writing of this movie and during production about what the next movie might be and started getting excited about some of the ideas, so it would be hard to say no to that. This is a once in a lifetime experience.