Australia will, once again, host the premiere of JJ Abrams' second Star Trek film 'Into Darkness'. The premiere is scheduled for April 23, 2013, but unlike the 2009 Sydney Opera House event, 'Into Darkness' will be a little more low-key; opening up at the Village Cinemas in George Street.
Karl Urban, Chris Pine, Bryan Burk, Zachary Quinto, JJ Abrams, Eric Bana & John Cho at the Sydney World Premier of 'Star Trek' in April 2009. |
In keeping with the first film's premiere, many of the actors and production team will be on hand for the Sydney premiere. It's been reported JJ Abrams, Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and Karl Urban will be attending the Sydney premiere in 9 days time. All four came to Sydney last time, as well as John Cho, Eric Bana and JJ Abrams' right-hand man Bryan Burk. I was lucky enough to get along to one of the press days Paramount put on for the film because of my association with the Star Trek fan scene. Myself and fellow fan, Michael O'Louhglan, spent the day in one-on-one & round-table interviews with all the actors, as well as JJ Abrams.
Our last interview was scheduled to be Karl Urban, which was done as an on-camera interview. By the time Michael and I had finished with Karl, most of the other interviewers had finished and left for the day. We went back to the room that Paramount had set-up for all the interviewers and, on our way back, I noticed Bryan Burk talking to one of the Paramount team. It was at this moment I had an idea. I told Michael that I'd be back in a minute, but not to pack up just yet ...
I went and found Di Campisi, who was the head of publicity for Paramount here in Australia at that time. I asked her if she could swing an interview with Bryan Burk. I figured this guy is a serious film & television producer. If anyone can shed light on what goes on with making a movie, he's going to be the person to know. Di came back after a couple of minutes and told me to wait in one of the rooms. I went and got Michael and we headed into the room where Di had told us to wait.
A few minutes later, Bryan Burk appeared. The transcript below is a cleaned-up version of the audio file that I've attached to this piece. It's a broad-ranging discussion about Star Trek, movies and the reasons why no one talks to Bryan Burk!
Audio interview with 'Star Trek' 2009 Producer Bryan Burk
We started off by asking why it
was no one else wanted to talk with Bryan Burk.
He jokes, telling us that it’s
“anti-Semitism”...
He then gets into the swing of
things by telling us that he’s “normally deep behind the scenes.” He admits
that sometimes he has to ‘come out of the cave’ just to check on things.
He then continues with his
jocularity be responding to my comment about being an important part of the
film making process, by telling us that his mother thinks so!
I kick off the formal questions
by asking Bryan to explain to fans (specifically Austrek members) about the
roles he plays as a Producer. However, Bryan quickly turns the tables on us by
asking if we’d seen the film the night before? We both answer yes, which leads
him to ask us the question on everyone’s mind.
“Did we screw it up?”
Both of us tell him that they
(being the entire cast & crew), got it right.
Bryan goes on to tell us that it
was weird because the Sydney World Premiere was the first time the film had
been shown to an audience who had no connection to the production.
Bryan was pleased to hear our
feedback from the premiere, and we told him that we had spoken to long-time
Original Series fans and they were very happy with the new film.
Bryan admits to us that out of
the five key production staff of JJ Abrams, Damon Lindeloff, Robert Orci, Alex
Kurtzman and himself; he knew the least about Star Trek.
“I didn’t watch the series at all,
and didn’t really pay any attention to Star Trek until the films came out ... I
didn’t really know who any of these people were, I just felt stupid, all these
people were standing around a bridge, and they were talking gibberish.”
Bryan goes on to compare TOS to
Star Wars.
“There was a beginning. There’s
this kid Luke ... and his Aunt and Uncle, and they die ... and you really get
pulled into it. So when the movie (Star Trek: The Motion Picture) came out a
couple of years after Star Wars, I was like WOW! I remember sitting in the
audience, loving the spectacle and it was enormous and it was big! Then, the
(Jerry) Goldsmith music came on, and everything was like I was in heaven ... I
remember the theatre I was at was in Westwood in Los Angeles, and the whole
experience was a very seminal experience for me. Simultaneously, I remember
every one in the audience cheering when these characters came on. That’s when I
felt like, ‘Why are they cheering’, who are these people, and again you realise
that there was never a beginning for Star Trek. There was never a way in.”
Bryan continues, with absolutely
no prompting, and continues to relay his thoughts about successive films in the
Star Trek movie franchise.
“By the time I saw Wrath of Khan,
I sort of knew who these people were from the previous film, and I loved Wrath
of Khan. It felt like I was surrounded by these people who I had discovered in
the previous film, but I never really had a gateway into it.”
Bryan then shifts his remarks
back to the new film, talking about the pre-production process, and how giving
the audience a story that would ‘let them in’ to the story and the Star Trek
franchise was critical for the new film.
“When we started talking about
taking on the film, Damon & Alex, and Bob & JJ were like this is the
best way in. In all the filmed entertainment they had never done Kirk and
Spock’s (beginning story).”
Bryan then tells us that, prior
to his involvement on the new film, he’d seen eight of the ten feature films,
but had always found it hard to grasp all the details of each characters back
story.
“If we do our job right, it (the
film) will appeal to those 40 years of people who had all been fans of Star
Trek.”
I then move away from the story,
and ask Bryan about his role as a Producer and the mechanics of his role in the
film making process.
“I’m involved in everything we
do, everything we produce. I do different things on different projects. On the
first season of Lost, I was responsible for all of our cuts and all of our
mixes. Now, I just mainly focus on the mixes and the dubs. On Star Trek, I was
involved in the conception of it, and when they were writing the script, the
casting, the production, and then I vanished a little. I was in the middle of
Fringe, and I would have to go off and do that pilot in Toronto.”
“When I came back (to Star Trek),
I was involved in the editing process, the mixing, the post, and the sound and
all the other stuff, as well as the marketing. It’s kind of everything ...
Someone asked me this recently, and a good producer is someone who’s involved
in everything and is helping their Director, or in the case of television,
their show runner, to free them up to be able to do their jobs as best as they
can ... To help free them up to clear the way for their creativity.”
Michael asks Bryan what it’s like
to switch back and forth between television production and feature film
production.
“It’s weird. It’s exhausting, and
mind-numbingly exciting at the same time! They are exactly the same process,
done completely differently. Economically they’re different. The speed of
everything is different. Part of our success in features, has been a television
education. We’re able to do everything so much faster, with significantly
smaller amounts of money. The ability to problem solve on the fly, and I think
we’ve had success in features, in the sense that we’ve been happy with, is that
every challenge is addressable, but you have to roll up your sleeves and figure
out how to do it.”
I ask Bryan what the biggest
hurdles were in getting this new film made.
“To say we had the greatest crew
is an understatement. It was amazing. The whole movie was shot in Los Angeles,
and we had big conversation about going to Iceland, and it just starts getting
really expensive. Then it all becomes, well, what do we do? That’s when you get
ILM to do the visual effects, and to say they did an incredible job is the
understatement of the year. They were incredible. The real challenge was, what
we like to do in everything we do, is make it tangible and real, and not just
visual effects. In a movie where it’s all in outer space, it’s all visual
effects. So, while a good percentage of the movie is shot on sound stages, like
the bridge of the Enterprise, or the Kelvin, or any of the spaceships, a lot of
it was not shot on sound stages. We found practical locations.”
Bryan makes a surprising
admission to us about one of the key Enterprise sets.
“We shot in factories. In fact, the whole of
the engine room of the Enterprise was shot in a Budweiser factory in Los
Angeles. What we fell in love with was that when we went inside, it was
working. It’s brand new. It’s perfect. It’s a fully functioning brewery, and
it’s enormous and it’s spotless; which is what felt perfect for the Enterprise.
The Enterprise is brand spanking new in our film. So, you see these scenes of them
running around inside this space, and – suddenly – you have this scope and this
feel of how big this ship really is ... The length of the Enterprise, in
reality, is supposed to be as long as the Empire State Building on its side.
It’s really big! So, to capture that kind of scope, we wanted to film in real
locations, and mix our visual effects in, so they are as practical as can be.
That’s the challenge with making science fiction real.”
In the 2009 film, a Budweiser beer factory became the setting for the Enterprise engineering section.
In terms of the production
design, there are some departures, and the story allows for those departures,
but when you were conceiving the film and imaging what it could look like, was
there a conscious decision by the senior production team about how far you would
veer away from what has been previously established, or did you allow the
designers to go away and reimagine and then present their ideas?
“We really focussed on The
Original Series, and that was the jumping off point, and we discovered things
along the way. For example, the coloured outfits that had been so iconic in the
series had never appeared in any of the films. Nobody had ever gone back to it,
so this instantly made us excited, to be able to do something different.
Michael Kaplan, who was our Costume Designer, whose first film he worked on as
a costume designer was Blade Runner, so we were in good hands. His approach to
doing Blade Runner was to go back to film noir, and his approach on this film
was to go back and look at the 1960s. Not the costumes themselves, but the
fashion of the 1960s, like Pierre Cardin and other people who were great
fashion designers of the time. He applied that to making this film, and, if you
look at the stuff, there’s kind of timelessness to it that makes it feel like
retro without being retro.”
One of the key elements of the
film is the design of the Enterprise. Bryan had this to say about it.
“Scott Chambliss, our Production
Designer, went back and looked at the (original) Enterprise, and then would try
and work out how the (new Enterprise) would feel familiar without reinventing
the wheel, yet make it feel modern and rich, and full. It’s the same thing when
you watch that original Enterprise. It’s still the same shape, everything’s
there, but they didn’t have the same budget when doing the original television
series. They didn’t have the ability to add all the lights and all the buttons.
It was much simpler. So, the idea was to do whatever you can to make it feel
familiar and be that place. The origins of that came from when JJ went to go
and see Phantom Menace, there was a great experience of sitting in the
audience, and we went as early as possible to go and see that movie, and how
exciting it was. It was palpable. The movie starts and the Fox logo comes on,
and everyone cheers, and the Lucasfilm logo comes on, and everyone cheers. All
the right things are happening, and then the movie comes on and, then, they cut
to a hallway and there was nothing there – it was just a hallway – but, it was
so familiar, there was this eruptive applause. That was kind of the idea;
bringing back that familiarity from something from 40 years ago, and making it
your own, but still let it be something that fans can back to and say I
remember that from so long ago. All these other incarnations of the series,
which kept evolving, but they kept moving further away from the original one
and creating their own. So we thought, let’s go back to the original one and
see what we can do with that one.”
Getting the design balance right was vital to give fans a sense of familiarity while simultaneoulsy creating environments that would appeal to a broader audience expectations for excitement.
I asked Bryan about the
pre-release hype surrounding the new film, referring to Gene Roddenberry’s
success at capturing ‘lightning in a bottle’ with the success of both The
Original Series and Next Generation.
“Hopefully people go and see it
(the film), but you never know. We do know it’s a movie we’re excited and proud
of. With all of our casting we have no one more to thank than April Webster and
Elisa Wiesberg. They did all of our casting on the Lost pilot, where – talk
about lightning in a bottle – that was a show that was put together so quickly
and under the gun. If you were to listen to the experts at the time, they were
like “you’re screwed!” All the good actors have been cast in other pilots,
we’re behind the eight ball ... Our cast has always been spectacular on Lost,
and we’ve been very lucky there. Again, it’s one of those situations, where JJ
had said to me early on, when I started working with him, “you’re gonna know!”
It always sounded like Hollywood gibberish to me, but sure enough! Like, when
Evangeline Lily walked in, we knew. We had the same experience going through
casting on Star Trek. We’re lucky enough to find Zach early on, because we knew
him through mutual friends. We were fans of Heroes, so it was kind of a
no-brainer. It took a while to find Kirk. Some great actors came in, and it was
like, maybe it’ll be him, or maybe it’ll be him. Then, Chris Pine came in and,
it was like, that’s our guy! So, we got very lucky, and April and Elissa are
tirelessly finding actors who are ‘lightning in a bottle’ for us. I hope
everyone goes to see the movie because this cast, a lot of whom will be fresh
faces for everybody, will be very exciting.”
We agree with Bryan that it’s
exciting to see fresh faces, but, then he mentions the one name that may have
made the new film even better!
“It’s a weird thing, particularly
with William Shatner, who could be held in higher regard than Shatner – he’s
Kirk! The idea, unlike all these other films where there have been other James Bonds;
there has not been other Kirks. There has been one Kirk and one Spock for 40 plus
years. The idea of Chris playing ... with Zach you can see a similarity, but
did not look like (Shatner). There are similarities, like he was good looking,
but a young Shatner does not look like Chris. But, his personality is exactly
what like Kirk is, and that was it. It was weird thing, where it exemplified
the idea of not wanting him to imitate his predecessor, and make it his own. I
think fans of the series will be pleasantly surprised, particularly as there
was a lot of scepticism going in as to who this guy was playing Kirk. All I
remember as a kid was watching Batman, and then the idea of Michael Keaton
playing Batman was the worst idea of all time, until the day he came out as
Batman and, suddenly, Batman was reborn. I think what people will discover is
that he’s not what you had in mind for Kirk, but he is reborn as Kirk, and
that’s very exciting.
"
We’re conscious of Bryan’s time,
and start to wrap things up at this point, but Bryan has other ideas! He asks
us if we ever travel to the US, which leads into a conversation about sitting
down to watch the film with an American audience. This leads to another
discussion about the US premiere, and the fact that no US was planned until
after Australia, New Zealand, Germany and England.
“Here’s the problem, when you’re
under the gun, and you’ve got four weeks to go around the planet, and get
everyone into it. I keep getting calls back from Paramount telling me that they
need us back by a certain day to do all the junkets. We haven’t done one in the
US yet!”
He does, however, make reference
to a screening that happened in Austin, Texas on the same day as the Sydney
premiere.
“Did you hear about our Austin
screening? What was exciting was that we wanted Leonard to come down here (to
Sydney), but it was a big flight and the whole thing. And then we said, what
about if we go to Austin!”
Bryan then asks “How good was it
to see him in the movie?”
Michael and I tell Bryan that
most fans believe Leonard’s presence gives this film a legitimacy and connection
to the 40 plus years of Star Trek.
Bryan tells us that he felt
nervous about taking the project on initially, and then recounts a story about
his experience with the expectation surrounding this film.
“At ABC, one of my executive’s
assistants just emailed me to remind me to get her a ticket for the premiere.
She’s very quiet, and mild-mannered. She’s in her 50s. The day it was announced
that we were doing Star Trek she calls me up and says “I’m shaking.” I said
“What?” She said, “I’m shaking! I’m a closet Star Trek fan.” I said “Hello...”
She said, “I’m a Star Trek fan and I’m so excited!” What you realise is that
it’s 40 years, there’s so many fans all over the place who have’ like you said,
abandoned it after The Original Series. So, it was really the idea that if we
could make it appeal to all of those people who have come before, and really
bring it back. One person who saw it last night, Karl Urban’s agent
coincidentally, is a huge Star Trek fan. We got on the plane top come over, and
she was like I’ve seen every episode and she was referencing, and, you’ve got
to remember, I don’t know anything. So, I’m just like nodding, like I know what
the hell she’s talking about. She came out of the movie last night, and she
said her kids are now going to see this movie and want to go back and watch
everything that’s come before. All this makes her want to do is go back and
watch all the other ones. That’s what’s happened to me. Now that I’ve worked on
this one, I’ve started going back and watching the other ones. It’s a whole new
appreciation.”
I make the point to Bryan that
the new film does what Star Trek hasn’t, in my opinion, done for a number of
years, is surprise me.
Bryan responded by talking about
the support that JJ Abrams and his team received throughout the making of the
film.
“It’s always about your finances,
and whether or not your studio is behind you, and understands it. All the
people who have come after Gene, who worked on incredible stories; I keep
running into these people, because a lot of them are television writers. These
people are geniuses. But, you’re always limited by how much money you can
spend. There was always this feeling, from the studio’s point of view, that
Star Trek was for “them”, whoever those people might be – Star Trek fans.
Because they weren’t, the studio wasn’t. Even in this case, the studio
appreciated Star Trek, but they didn’t know there’d been ten films before and
this whole new team of people at Paramount came together and they said go and
make it. We’re gonna spend more than we have before and we’re gonna give you
those things, and we’re going to make it a real film.”
“I always used to point out that
there were the same amount of Star Trek films as there were Friday the 13th
films. It always felt like one of those franchises that they would just do for
“that” audience, whoever those people were who liked to watch those movies.
Gene, and all those show runners who
came after him, created incredible characters and they were great worlds.
Again, I discovered all of this just recently. You go back and you watch those
stories and they were incredible. The best ones were as good as television
gets; or nay medium for that matter. They’re ambiguous and they’re great and
the characters are moving and tragic, and everything you want them to be; but
they were always had limitations with technology or you don’t have the money to
do it right. It’s just amazing how many great hours of television came out of
that franchise. When we stepped in there was none of that. There was no television
and there were no features. It felt like it was too good of a universe to let
it just die.”
With that, our interview, and our
day, came to an end.
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