Abrams isn’t just a geek. Obviously, he fulfils all the requirements of the once-derogatory label. But you can throw a stone in Los Angeles and the likelihood is high that you’ll hit a writer/producer/director with an outlandish enthusiasm for pop-culture juvenilia. What elevates Abrams above the geek herd is his ability to imbue massive genre projects with intimate character moments. He did it with Mission: Impossible III, which executed the impossible mission of making Tom Cruise seem like a down-to-earth guy. He did it with Star Trek, which he reshaped into an origins story tracing the friendship between Kirk and Spock. And he did it with Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens. The task of taking on a tarnished legacy and giving a gun-shy generation back their childhood memories could have broken a lesser man. Instead, the rapturous reception and £1.3bn-plus worldwide gross are clear indicators that Abrams, 49, is now Hollywood’s most trusted reviver of ailing franchises. But there’s a problem that comes when your name is synonymous with breathing fresh life into familiar films — and Abrams is well aware of it.

When you can generate gargantuan global profits endlessly rebooting the same movies, why bother gambling on anything fresh and unfamiliar? If Star Wars didn’t exist, it’s debatable if anyone would have the foresight to green-light it today. It’s not adapted from a comic book, video game, TV show, board game or a toy. “I’d like to think that it would,” says Abrams. “It was so wonderful and it’s not impossible to get original stories told, so there’s a possibility that it would get made. But I know what you mean. I think it’s less likely now than it was in 1977.”

The Force Awakens opened to tidal waves of emotion from audiences gratified that Abrams had given them a new film that also functioned as a Greatest Hits. But initial fan reaction to the first teaser trailers was harsh. Comment boxes across the planet boiled over with fury at the first glimpse of John Boyega removing his helmet. Having to continually worry about the reactions and opinions of an audience that is completely engaged, completely obsessive and completely conservative must be tough. Or not. “It isn’t,” Abrams insists. “I’m incredibly grateful to the audience that George gathered. It was a lot of pressure, and is for anyone who’s working on the Star Wars movies, to do something that works for those fans. Like you say, they are very passionate and obsessive, but it made the experience immeasurably more fun knowing those fans were so involved. And I’m one of them.” (Chris Rock recently asked him the same question, adding, “If you got an envelope with your wife’s ear in it, somebody wanted ransom, who would it be: Star Wars fans or Star Trek fans?” Abrams laughed ruefully and said, “That’s a fucked-up question for so many reasons.” (So, deep down, he fears those fans!)

Abrams’s only original movie as writer-director to date was 2011’s Spielberg-esque Super 8. His big-screen success surely qualifies him as a blank cheque director, ie someone who has generated sufficient profits for studios to present him with a blank cheque to make anything he wants. Christopher Nolan is a blank cheque director, M Night Shyamalan once was. So were The Wachowski siblings. “I’m certainly not in a position to get anything made,” he claims. “But I’m sure that being lucky enough to have been involved in some of the projects that I have in this moment, which like everything will pass, I have an opportunity to do something that a studio might not at first glance think is the obvious thing to do. But people do say no to me all the time.”

As for his potential next movie, Abrams says, “I’m trying to take my time and figure out what comes next. At the moment, I’m most excited to not know. It means I can be open to anything.”

The cast of Lost, season one. Photograph: Allstar

Although Abrams made his screenwriting debut with the 1990 Arthur Hiller comedy Taking Care Of Business, his most significant subsequent success came on the small screen. He created the sappy but much-loved Felicity in 1998. Under the auspices of his Bad Robot production company, he would go on to produce huge, much-discussed hits (Lost), big hits that didn’t inspire frenzied conversation (Person Of Interest), medium-sized hits with devoted audiences (Alias), smaller cult hits (Fringe) and outright flops (Almost Human, Alcatraz, Six Degrees). At a time when The X-Files and 24 have been successfully revived, with Prison Break and Twin Peaks on the horizon, it’s hard to imagine there isn’t some life left and some stories left to explore in Lost and Alias, two series whose endings polarised their crazed fans. “Not necessarily,” replies Abrams. (But he says it in a way that makes me think the doors are not completely closed. Or maybe I’m delusionally optimistic.)

Bad Robot’s current production is an eight-part adaptation of Stephen King’s 2011 novel 11.22.63, which takes the “What if you could kill Hitler?” time-travel trope and applies it to the JFK assassination. James Franco plays a small-town teacher who walks through a temporal portal in the back of a diner that whisks him from the present day and deposits him in the early-60s, where he makes it his mission to stop Lee Harvey Oswald pulling the trigger. Much as Mission: Impossible III humanised Tom Cruise, 11.22.63 showcases a credible traditional leading man performance by James Franco. I tell executive producer Abrams that I feared the usual mannered art experiment from Franco but ended up fully invested in his predicament. “James reminds me a little bit of Christopher Walken in The Dead Zone, another Stephen King story,” he says. “Despite his leading man looks, you believe that he’s heartsick and confused. He’s not the absolute good guy and he’s not the absolute bad guy. The idea of this man trying to determine whether or not Lee Harvey Oswald was the shooter, coming up against all these obstacles, falling in love: it was a brilliant combination of some very familiar elements and some elements I’d ever seen before.”

11.22.63 slices all the fat from King’s door-stopper of a novel. It executes successful tonal shifts from romance to sweaty paranoia and it metes out numerous beatings to its leading man. My one issue with the series: I wasn’t able to watch it all at once. The Netflix binge-watching model, I inform Abrams, has ruined the weekly viewing experience for me. “It feels like we live in an age of instant information and access to whatever it is that we want,” he says. “There is a sense of entitlement to have the thing you want, when you want it, which is understandable, and I’ve been very grateful for the ability to watch a show in a sitting or two. On the other hand, you call it binge-watching. There is something inherently unhealthy about that. Just because we can do it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best way to do it.”

I don’t have a coherent argument, except to repeat, like a child, that I want it now. “There’s an old-fashioned but ultimately satisfying and perhaps even deeper experience you have with a show you love when you have to wait a week for the next episode,” he says. “You’re living with the characters, thinking about the show, letting it sink in and allowing you to really consider what it is you’re watching. It doesn’t mean it’s not fantastic to watch it all in one sitting. It might even be better that way but I would argue that it’s not.” (It is, I say under my breath.)

James Franco in 11.22.63. Photograph: Fox

In 1982, JJ Abrams was a 16-year-old California kid making thrillers, sci-fi and monster movies on his grandfather’s Super 8 camera. I ask him if he thinks he has made, or will ever make, anything as good as the movies, books and TV shows that inspired him when he was young. There’s a long pause. Long enough for me to realise that was an unanswerable, probably insulting question. “I appreciate the question,” he says, finally. “And I get what you’re asking. What I would say is this: the things that inspired me and continue to inspire me are things that make me feel that kind of envy and amazement, that kind of ‘Oh my God, I wish I’d done that, that’s incredible.’” There’s another pause as he grapples with the worst question he’s ever been asked. “It’s hard for me to imagine being part of these films that they’d ever achieve the kind of greatness of someone like Rod Serling or Steven Spielberg or David Cronenberg or any of the directors I admire. One day, I’ll have learned enough that this is the movie or the TV show that has done that great thing, but I feel wrong in saying that because it sounds very self-aggrandising and self-satisfied.”

And right there, in the way he took that awful question, and turned it into an opportunity for a candid, vulnerable moment, is the reason JJ Abrams isn’t just a geek.

11.22.63 continues Sunday 1 May, 9pm, Fox

