By GustavoLeao / 10:44, 28 June 2009 / Star Trek: Nemesis

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WizardUniverse posted a new interview with Star Trek writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman and here are few excerpts.

This movie had a strong sense of excitement throughout the film that's been missing from "Star Trek" for a long time. How did you infuse that into the storyline?

ORCI: The tricky part regarding an origin story with characters you know and love is how are you going to have that kind of excitement if you already know what happens to them? When we came up with the idea of having Leonard Nimoy come back and have this story be something that changes history to such a degree that now the future is not written. That was the biggest thing we came up with that would allow us to have not only the freedom but also up the dramatic stakes to take the audience on a ride where you wouldn't know what was going to happen to them.

KURTZMAN: I think this movie was also inspired by the first half of the Richard Donner "Superman" movie. All of the adventure movies that we grew up with had such an enormous sense of epic adventure against the backdrop of very personal storytelling. All of them, "Star Wars," "Superman," "Star Trek"... any of those movies were always so big and anamorphic, and yet the stories were so relatable. It felt to us that it had been a very, very long time since we had seen a space epic that really did that. I think for us it was also a weird chance to reclaim our childhood.

ORCI: You actually care about the characters and that's why it's exciting.

Why did you choose to use the Romulans as the villains when they didn't work the last time out?

ORCI: [Laughs] When we came upon the idea of Leonard Nimoy, we wanted to pick up where he left off in "Star Trek," which was in the "Next Generation." In those stories, he was the ambassador to Romulus, so we wanted to keep continuity with what that was, that's why we brought them in.

KURTZMAN: And it's funny because some people have said, "Wow, you've broken continuity by having this encounter." That's not exactly true. Yes, we meet Romulans early, but we meet Romulans early because one of them comes back in time. It just changed everything right there.

What part did you play in the IDW comic prequel, Star Trek Countdown?

KURTZMAN: We produced it and generated the story. We came up with the idea of it being a countdown to the movie. And we got [Tim Jones and Mike Johnson] to work with us to write it and we all came up with the story together.

I really liked the idea that the Romulan ship was enhanced with Borg tech and I was hoping for some kind of reference to that in the movie.

ORCI: We did the "Countdown" comic after we finished the movie. So it was very difficult to do that.

When you originally came up with the story, what was your explanation for why the ship was so advanced?

ORCI: That it was from the future.

KURTZMAN: They had advanced their technology. And it's not only from the future but it's a very industrial ship designed for massive mining.

How does Kirk differ as a result of this new timeline?

KURTZMAN: Because of the events of the opening of the movie, there's a very fundamental difference. Kirk ends up growing up without a father and so he doesn't have that grounding. He's much more of a reckless wildcard and yet he has all of the same instincts of the Kirk that we know and love. We say that he is the same Kirk in soul it's just that the experiences in his life have shaped him...

ORCI: And the route to get him there. You know, one of the differences is that he gets to the academy later because he defers college. Yet ironically, he becomes Captain sooner.

Do you think this altered timeline precludes any other visits to the "Next Generation" era, given how the timeline has changed?

ORCI: I don't think so. If you saw the end of "Countdown," you know the Next Generation era is continuing on. Their universe is fully intact.

What direction would you like to see the franchise go in the future?

ORCI: We've said it before and we mean it, we want to see how fans react first. Because we are fans and fans have sort of been our consultants on our shoulders just by reading their reactions as we've been developing the movie. I'd love to see it become even more sci-fi than you can do when you're introducing something, because sci-fi can be distancing. I'd love to continue doing what we're doing.

KURTZMAN: I'd like to keep it emotional, if we're lucky enough to make more movies. One of the things that we were proud of is that everything came from an emotional big bang from the characters; which buys you the sci-fi.

ORCI: And we want to give that to all the characters. It's tricky. It's not just a single lead kind of thing; it's a family that you have to portray.

The full interview is here.