So it's an interesting process just going through and seeing what works and what doesn't work, and what's the best version of it. It was a good process because I think we all collectively, when everyone would run into issues in the cut or know that things weren't working, they kind of glaringly stuck out so we could focus on fixing those things and it wasn't a situation where you would show it to ten people and you would have ten problems.
It's interesting because the way J.J. cuts - we're very close with our editors as well, so it's kind of the first cut and then he went back and started tightening things up, etc, then loosing things when it was too tight. Then you start watching it and you start figuring out performance - not performance, character-wise I should say, who you're really able to follow, whose journey is harder to follow, and you make all that work.
Is it inevitable after a successful film that they're going to ask for another one? Yes. Do we want to rush and do it for that reason? No.
So that's one of the reasons why we took time between the last one and this one, was to make sure that we could do something that we believe could be equal if not better than the last one. In this case we already have ideas of things we're talking about, and I think in a perfect world it will not be a four year break and it will come out significantly sooner than the last.
It depends on the project, what's happening that day on the project, at what stage were in on the project; it various from project to project and where we're needed.
It's a combination, I think they want to know - it's for every show, which is I think networks want to know that you have a vision for where the show could go to make sure that it really is a show, that it's not just a one-off forty minute pilot, that it's an actual series.
And then simultaneously I don't think they're asking you to necessarily write in stone that this is what you're going to do or what you have to do.
As J.J. has said many times, when you start a series you want to have a destination. It's like driving a car, when you pull out of your garage and you head out driving down the road, you have a destination, okay?
You may change your destination, you may have a hundred stops along the way, there's a hundred different possibilities, but usually when you get in your car you are thinking, "I am going to go somewhere."
We approach our shows the same way where we just have a map and we present them to the network so that they realize that, all things being equal, we can definitely head in that direction. Sometimes we do and sometimes we find better ways along the way.
There is just this need to feed the beast of movie, or TV, or whatever it may be and you don't want to do things just because you're supposed to do them, or because they're required, or whatever it maybe.
Well, truth be told it was the hope on the last one, it's always the hope. It's just you don't just wasn't to do it- everything we do is, for a lack of a more crass term, everything we do is pushing against the conveyer belt.
We were going to call it "Star Trek: The Avengers", and for a while we were like, "People are going to love that title". No, we had a whole bunch of titles, we never had any official title until we came out with this, we had different conversations about other things.
Then we started looking at story and what was making sense and what wasn't making sense, emotionally and thematically the intention that we had a year earlier when they were working on the script, did all that come across? It's all kind of generic things, but it's fascinating and it's weird - I haven't made that many films, but it's weird that every time you think you learn from your mistakes on your last film you have a slew of new mistakes and things that you learn.
Yeah, we definitely have screenings; we just don't have screenings out on the street. We bring in - it starts internally, so its people who work at Bad Robot, then it starts going to our friends outside of Bad Robot, and then it starts going to friends of friends outside so we get really fresh people who don't have to pretend to like us.
Screening is an invaluable part of the process, obviously, having test screening and you definitely learn something.
There's an overlap of people we've used from previous films and we also like to obviously bring in new people so we get a fresh voice and opinion when you bring them in. All different ages and genders and everything, you just want a wide spectrum of people who are coming in to see what works.
Well consciously what we were doing when making the film was, we really wanted to make sure it was a film about - in our mind it was never really a sequel, it was its own movie going forward and it's why the movie doesn't have a number by it.
It was really important to try to reach a whole new audience so we had a lot of people in who not only had not seen the last film but were not Star Trek fans, or thought of themselves as not being Star Trek fans, or they had seen bits and pieces of Star Trek in the past and it was just not for them.
So that was an important part of the process and strangely, early on, we started to realize, in that respect, we were successful in what we were trying to do, which is make a film that everybody would be able come out and not be scratching their head at all.
And more importantly what we found with those people is that a lot of them said, "Hey it's not what I thought it was going to be." Which is a great reaction, particularly if they liked it.
You know, things come up and we have those conversations. I feel that they're all in a kind of similar state, which is that we all keep working on them, in house, until we feel like it's ready and then it goes from being something that were working on to ready very quickly.
