Quentin Tarantino has confirmed that his Star Trek movie will be set in the Kelvin Timeline, though he seems intent on making that fact as irrelevant as possible. On an episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast, host Josh Horowitz asked Tarantino to reveal as much as he could about the Star Trek project.

“Well, it’s an idea then we got together and talked it out and then we hired Mark Smith, who did [The] Revenant to write the script,” Tarantino explains. “I don’t know how much I can say. The one thing I can say is it would deal with the Chris Pine timeline. Now, I still don’t quite understand, and JJ [Abrams] can’t explain it to me, and my editor has tried to explain it to me and I still don’t get it...about something happened in the first movie that now kind of wiped the slate clean. I don’t buy that. I don’t like it. I don’t appreciate it. I don’t — f*** that...I want the whole series to have happened, it just hasn’t happened yet. No, Benedict Cumberbatch or whatever his name is is not Khan, alright? Khan is Khan. And I told JJ, like, ‘I don’t understand this. I don’t like it.’ And then he was like, ‘Ignore it! Nobody likes it. I don’t understand it. Just do whatever you want. If you want it to happen the exact way it happens on the series it can.’”

You can see why he refers to it as the “Chris Pine timeline,” since he can’t make sense of how the incident with the USS Kelvin wrote Star Trek into another timeline. It’s more than continuity though. The reason Tarantino loves Star Trek is because of William Shatner’s performance as Capt. James T. Kirk. It’s Pine’s ability to channel Shatner as Kirk in the new films that drew Tarantino towards the franchise.

“The reason I was actually intrigued by the JJ Abrams version of it is because I thought Chris Pine did a fantastic job not just playing Capt. Kirk but playing William Shatner’s captain — he is William Shatner,” Tarantino says. “He’s not just another guy, he’s William Shatner’s Capt. Kirk. And it’s literally, Zachary Quinto is literally Leonard Nimoy’s — because they both have the same scene together — he’s his Spock. They f******* nail it. They just nail it.”

That fact should make things interesting if Tarantino’s movie begins moving towards production. Star Trek 4 was put on the shelf after Pine walked away from the negotiating table. If Paramount Pictures can’t get Pine onboard for the Tarantino project, will Tarantino lose interest?

What do you think of Tarantino’s Star Trek project? Let us know in the comments.