SFX Trek
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The latest issue of SFX Magazine (#231) features Star Trek, both Star Trek into Darkness and a look back at Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and five lucky UK fans will win a copy.
SFX interviewed Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and Director J.J. Abrams for this issue.
Abrams spoke about the difficulty of making something new and fresh today. “The problem with movies that my friend Steven [Spielberg] has made, and people like George [Lucas] have made, is that they’ve done friggin’ everything,” he said. “It’s so hard to do anything and not be like ‘Oh, that’s sort of like Poltergeist,’ or ‘That’s Munich.’ It’s very hard to do something where you don’t feel like any number of seminal classic genre films are being nodded to. This movie is definitely an action-adventure thriller that’s as romantic and as scary and as funny and as unexpected as any movie I love. It’s the cocktail of all the stuff that made me want to make movies when I was a kid. Certainly with the opening of this movie, we were aware of the nod to the opening of Raiders, but the spirit of the movie is a group of characters that I hope you like that make you want to laugh, that you root for.”
Not thrilled about making Star Trek into Darkness in 3D, Abrams came around to the studio’s viewpoint after seeing how it could work for a movie. “The studio said you have to make it in 3D if you’re going to make it, for economic reasons,” Abrams explained. “But my feeling was I didn’t like 3D. So the idea of doing Star Trek in 3D was ridiculous.
“But that was very helpful in some ways, because it let us work with sterographers and the 3D crew in a way that didn’t assume we just loved 3D. I have trouble with 3D sometimes. I can’t see it quite right; I get a headache; it annoys me; I hate the glasses; I hate the fact that things get so dim. So I approached it very cynically. And the fact is that we’ve been using techniques that haven’t been used before in 3D. They’ve figured out things. They’ve made enough movies now with this new process that they can understand ways to eliminate some of these problems. Things like breaking shots into zones, 3D zones, using multiple virtual cameras. A lot of this has made me a believer, whereas before I was really against it… There’s this myth that if you don’t shoot the movie in 3D it doesn’t look good. Actually the opposite can be true. Because we’re doing this in post, I got to shoot the movie with anamorphic lenses. You can’t shoot anamorphic lenses in 3D natively. We shot anamorphically so it had the same look and feel as the first movie. But because we’re converting it later, you have so much more creative opportunity and ability to push certain things and limit certain things, and fine tune it so the audience gets to see something really fun and dynamic. The key for me is I got to make my 2D movie that I wanted to make, just the way I wanted to; and it gets to be augmented in 3D but that doesn’t detract from the 2D.’
SFX #231 also takes a look back at Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Writer Alan Dean Foster explained how he envisioned James T. Kirk in the movie. “I painted Kirk darker,” he said. “Think of a typical sea captain stuck on land without a ship. Suddenly, he has the chance to regain command, but it means displacing those already in his position – very conflicting.”
A movie often thought of as being a bit humorless, Foster insists that The Motion Picture had humor, and would have had more had a certain line been kept in the script. “Yes, there’s humor, but it’s more subtle,” said Foster. “Actually, there was a wonderful line that Leonard Nimoy improvised as they were shooting. Spock is standing there and he asks Kirk if McCoy is going to remain onboard. Kirk says yes and Nimoy said something like ‘If Dr. McCoy is going to remain onboard, then my continued presence here is imperative.’ It’s a great, funny line and I wish they’d kept it in.”
TrekToday and SFX are giving away five copies of SFX #231. To enter (UK residents only), send your name and email address to TBonz@Trekbbs.com, putting “magazine contest” in the title or body of the email. All entries must be received by Tuesday, January 15 11:59 PM EST. Winners will be announced on Friday, January 18.
SFX #231 is available on iTunes, on newsstands or from My Favourite Magazines. An iPad version is available via Newsstand, and SFX is now available on Google Play.
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