Director J.J. Abrams has taken a break from putting the finishing touches to Star Trek Into Darkness to talk to Empire Online about his next project, which will see him heading to a galaxy far, far away for the first instalment in Disney’s upcoming Star Wars sequel trilogy, Star Wars: Episode VII.
“I don’t know [how I will approach Episode VII] because we’re just getting started,” states Abrams. “So it’s a great question that I hope I’ll have a good answer to when I know what the answer is. There are infinitely more questions than answers right now, but to me, [Star Wars and Star Trek] are not that dissimilar. Though I came at these both from very different places, where they both meet is a place of ‘Ooh, that’s really exciting.’ And even though I was never a Star Trek fan, I felt like there was a version of it that would make me excited, that I would think ‘that’s cool, that feels right, I actually would want to see that.”
Abrams then goes on to explain how he intends to draw on the experience he gained from his acclaimed Star Trek reboot: “How we were going to get there, what the choices were going to be, who was going to be in it – all of those things I knew would have to be figured out, but it was all based on a foundation of this indescribable, guttural passion for something that could be. It’s a similar feeling that I have with Star Wars. I feel like I can identify a hunger for what I would want to see again and that is an incredibly exciting place to begin a project. The movies, the worlds could not be more different, but that feeling that there’s something amazing here is the thing that they share.”
And finally, he offered an insight into Lucasfilm managed to persuade him to jump ship from Trek to Wars: “y knee-jerk reaction was that I’m in the middle of working on the Star Trek movie and I can’t even consider it. But then time went by and I got further along working on the movie and getting to a place where I had done most of the heavy lifting. So when I met with Kathy Kennedy we just started discussing it and I was able to actually engage in the conversation. I went down to tell Katie, my wife and I said ‘I had just a very interesting conversation with Kathy.’ That was the beginning. I will say that Steven Spielberg was very encouraging of Star Wars. It’s funny because I talked to him about it and it turned out he knew all about what was going on.”
Disney is looking towards a 2015 release date for Star Wars: Episode VII, which has been written by Michael Arndt (Toy Story 3) and is expected to see Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), Harrison Ford (Han Solo) and Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia) returning to their iconic roles from the Original Trilogy.
Originally published March 23, 2013. Updated November 6, 2019.
