Like his writing partner Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman has been busy publicising the new Transformers movie and is talking about Star Trek as well.

"Each project comes with different challenges," Kurtzman told Voices from Krypton. Asked about how he felt about writing the screenplay for the next Star Trek movie, he added, "It is an honor to be part of it now and to inherit that mantle, but I feel like we couldn't have been doing that without the instruction that everyone else has given us."

Kurtzman also said that he appreciates the "road map that has been laid out" for himself, Orci and director J.J. Abrams, assuring fans that their script for the eleventh Star Trek film would not attempt to reinvent the franchise like Ron Moore did with Battlestar Galactica.

"The thing that strikes you when you watch [the original Star Trek] is how unbelievably sophisticated those shows were for the time," he explained. "They didn't pander to anybody and in a way you had to catch up with a lot of the technology that was happening at the time." On top of that, the show was entertaining and "managed to have this very relevant social parable...it is making a comment on basic human relations and politics."

Episodes that accomplished all that, added Kurtzman, "are a miracle" and well worth looking at for inspiration: "You certainly couldn't imagine doing Trek without taking that into account."

The full interview is in four parts here and following.

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