J.J. Abrams Press Conference
It’s very impressive how the cast captures the essence of the characters without doing caricatures. Did you have to watch out for that?J.J. Abrams: "The script was so good that all you needed to do was give these actors, who were young actors that were eerily accomplished and naturally wonderful, direction that was fairly clear because the characters were written so clearly. What was cool was that it didn’t take much machination, even in the writing of the script, because the characters live. You read the script and you go, 'Oh, these are those characters.' As someone who was not a big fan, of course I did my homework before directing and when I read the script, it’s not like these are scene and moments cut from other episodes or movies, but you felt them live and they were recognizable. You could read a line and go, 'Oh, that’s Bones.' You’d just know it was Bones. It really speaks to the great paradigm that Roddenberry created in ‘66. These characters were so strong. They were archetypes, but they were also very specific. They weren’t just archetypical. So, that was great. And I said to all the actors, 'Please do not do impersonations of any of these actors. This is all about you owning it, and the only way it’s gonna to work is if you are free to do your thing.' But, the perimeters were so clearly defined in Alex and Bob’s script that it wasn’t like you had to push them to be more like those actors. We just did what was on the page."
With all of the action sequences, what was the most difficult to film?
J.J. Abrams: "The most difficult to film, in some ways, was the space jump sequence and the drill. But, every sequence had its issues. The whole snow sequence with the monsters was crazy because of all the paper snow. We shot both of those things at Dodgers Stadium, in the parking lot, and it was insane. With all the stuff on the bad guy’s ship, there were challenges there because there was one set, even though it looks like all of these different areas. It was this modular set, brilliantly designed by Scott Chambliss, to move around, so we basically would take the set and move these enormous pieces overnight to take that one place and make it another place. And then, using ILM, they would help and add backgrounds and extensions to those sets. So shooting on that location, it wasn’t the location. It was this crazy, malleable set where you had to understand what the set was supposed to be that day. It’s all the same room, and yet you have to make it feel like it’s this massive location. So, every scene had its own weird, often mechanical, challenges. But the space jump was the most obvious because it was the longest."
