Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman wrote two of the biggest movies of the year, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Star Trek. Transformers 2 is out on DVD and Blu Ray with Star Trek coming in November. We got to sit in on a press conference where the sci-fi wunderkind duo, also behind Fringe and Alias, discussed both films.

Q:  Do you have a different approach to the DVDs for Star Trek and Transformers in terms of what you talk about? 

Alex Kurtzman:  No, we tend to sit down and talk very loosely about the experience of making the movie.  I think the differences are in the way that the movies were made but not necessarily in the approach to the DVD extras.  What’s really cool about the DVD extras is that in both cases they documented everything we were all doing together, from the minute that it started, to the minute the movie was released.  It’s pretty extensive. We grew up having nothing like this at all. For example, there was one screen writing book when we grew up, only one. Now there are DVD’s, you can go online, and you can see everything.  There is so much there.  I think we feel like, “How cool is it for people to actually have the thing that we didn’t have?”  So, we try and give as much to the DVD extras as we can.

Q:  What was the screenwriting book you grew up on?

Alex Kurtzman:  Well, there was actually one screenwriting book that was interviews with screenwriters and one that was just format.  Just format, no creative tips at all.

Q:  So how did you learn your craft and structure?

Alex Kurtzman:  A lot of writing badly for a long time. 

Roberto Orci:  We met in high school, senior year.  We wrote through every year of college.  And, by studying movies.  We’d watch a movie and actually write down every scene and stare at it as on outline to see what did the structure look like on paper.  Then you reverse engineer from that.

Q:  From a writer’s point of view, how important was it to get Leonard Nimoy back in Star Trek?

Alex Kurtzman:  We couldn’t have made the movie without Leonard.  We knew early on that so much of what was going to be required in re-imagining Star Trek and also in staying true to everything that came before it, was going to hinge on Leonard, in a way, blessing us moving forward.  Also, in a way telling the audience that it’s okay.  “You can make this transition now, I’m here to help you.” We knew without him we were never going to be able to have a movie.

Roberto Orci:  We didn’t agree to do the movie until we had the idea that we could get Leonard to be in the story.  That’s going to be a way to do both pleasing old fans, and having him the soul of Star Trek the plot reason for the changes.  We knew that his blessing, it wasn’t until we hit upon that, that we said “Okay, now we might know how to do this.” It was pivotal for us.  We couldn’t have done it any other way.

Alex Kurtzman:  Pitching the fate of Spock, to Spock, was a little unnerving. 

Roberto Orci: It’s like “And then your planet blows up.  Huh?  You like that?”

Alex Kurtzman: But it was great and actually I think he gave us the confidence.  He didn’t commit right away but he gave us the confidence to move forward knowing that he liked a lot of the direction that we were going in.  I think that both creatively in hearts what we wanted the movie to be, and what the movie became could not have happened without his okay.

Roberto Orci:  We took a big risk.  We spent five months writing it with him in it, not knowing if he would say yes.

Q:  Did you feel you had to at some point explain how Spock got in there, with the scene in the cave?

Alex Kurtzman:  I think that we tend to be drawn towards structures that are very mysterious for at least and hour or hour and fifteen minutes.  As an experience for the audience, as an audience member I always like to be wondering, “What’s happening here?  I don’t understand it, it’s really intriguing.  Where is the punch line going to go?”  But when you incur that debt then you owe the pay off.  The pay off is always the moment where someone comes in and says, “Okay, here are some of the answers to the questions you’ve been asking for the last hour and fifteen minutes.” The trick with those kinds of scenes is to make them really interesting and to make them very character driven because what you don’t want is a scene where someone is just kind of telling you plot.  That’s really boring, I think, and the audience tends to just kind of check out.  The goal with us, the ace that we had in the hole there, was that we knew that it was a very emotional story for Spock to tell.  Because he was telling the loss of his planet and he was talking about his responsibility in that.