The new Star Trek movie won't sail into theaters till May, but writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman are already bracing for impact.

The tag-team scripters, who previously worked with producer/director J.J. Abrams on Fringe and Alias, have good reason to be wary as they reboot one of sci-fi's most beloved franchises: They are going boldly where only those with a solid respect for Trek should dare to go.

Abrams' Star Trek already has sparked a snark attack from William Shatner, who complained about not being offered a lead role. And earlier comments by Abrams drew a barrage of skeptical blowback from concerned fans.

Despite the pressure to stay within the bounds of the existing Trek universe, Orci and Kurtzman (pictured above, left to right, in their Universal Studios production bungalow) insist that their screenplay sticks to the rules in a way that should satisfy even nit-picking defenders of the faith.

They are, after all, fans first. Orci, a bred-in-the-bone Trekkie, grew up using a telephone in the shape of the starship Enterprise. Kurtzman became a convert after seeing Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan in 1982.

Speaking with Wired.com, Orci and Kurtzman swap thoughts about their personal obsession with the Trek canon, the premise that put Abrams in the director's chair and the brainstorm sessions with *Lost *co-creator Damon Lindelof that brought some *Star Wars *mojo to the *Star Trek *mythology.

(Don't miss Part 1 of this two-part interview, in which the writers discuss working with Abrams on Fringe.)

Wired.com: Were you at all intimidated about reviving the Star Trek franchise?

Roberto Orci: This was not something you go into lightly, unless you feel you really have something serious to contribute because we really grew up on Star Trek. We couldn't turn it down out of ignorance or because we didn't have strong opinions about what we loved about Star Trek. It became more about: Are we worthy? And we came to the conclusion, well, this is our chosen profession! We might as well go for it.

Alex Kurtzman: And with Damon involved — Damon Lindelof, co-creator of *Lost *who is also a massive Star Trek fan — we sat down with him for one minute and realized how much fun it would be for the three of us to work together. The idea of having the safety net of Damon's brain made it like, there was no excuse to say no. We could not give in to the fear.

Wired.com: There's a huge amount of Star Trek material to work with. How did you guys zero in on the particular story you wanted to tell?

Kurtzman: We agreed it was going to be the original crew, and the minute we did that, it limited the scope of where we'd be looking for story.

Wired.com: What is the story about?

(Warning: Slight spoilers ahead.)

Orci: It's about how the original crew came together, which was never covered in its entirety by either the show or any of the movies. No one has ever told the story of how the Enterprise set sail.

__Kurtzman: __There are details in canon where the characters refer to their past but there are wide areas of interpretations and sort of blank spots where you go, "Wait, I understand this, but how did they get from here to there before they got to that point?" And that's where you have some room.

__Wired.com: __While staying consistent....

Kurtzman: You have to remain consistent. You cannot break one rule of anything's that's gone before.

__Wired.com: __When was your first exposure to Star Trek?



Right: Orci at his desk in front of a poster for General Dynamics, inspiration for Fringe's fictional corporation, Massive Dynamic.

Kurtzman: I was a little too young for the original motion picture. Trek hit me at* Wrath of Khan*. The experience of being in a theater and seeing that movie was certainly the first time anything paralleled Star Wars for me in terms of emotional intensity and sci-fi lore. That alone — that feeling, wanting to create that feeling — was reason enough to do the movie, but not without being aware of the rules.

Wired.com: So when you got hired to write a new *Star Trek *movie, did you get DVDs and go over all the movies and TV series again.

Kurtzman: Bob didn't have to.



Right: Kurtzman, backed by the sign from the coffee shop where he used to write screenplays before moving into Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks enclave.

Wired.com: It's all in your head?

Kurtzman: When I first met Bob in high school, he had an Enterprise phone that rang with the "Bridge" alarm.

Orci: (hums anthem)

Kurtzman: So Bob was covered.

__Orci: __You'd answer in the saucer section: "Hello."

__Wired.com: __J.J. Abrams makes no secret that he's more of a Star Wars guy and not so much into Star Trek, but you two were full-tilt fans.

Orci: In terms of fandom, yeah, and Damon too is a fanatic — we're not going to drop the ball out of ignorance. Nobody can say that we don't know Star Trek. There might be some things we do that people could question, where they go, "I hate them for some other reasons," but they can't say, "They didn't know their stuff."

Orci: And it's controversial to even mention Star Wars and Star Trek in the same sentence, but Alex said, "We have to bring more Star Wars into Star Trek."

__Kurtzman: __ (joke-coughing) Original Star Wars.

Above: A poster for sci-fi classic Metropolis *hangs on the wall of the writers' production office. *

__Orci: __Original Star Wars. I want to feel the space, I want to feel speed and I want to feel all the things that can become a little bit lost when *Star Trek *becomes very stately – which I love about it , but....



*Right: The writers' fondness for genre films of all kinds is reflected in this poster from the 1960 B movie *Peeping Tom.

Kurtzman: Star Trek is often the space equivalent of sub battles, which is what makes it unique and different from Star Wars, so you can't blow that away, either.

__Orci: __It's somewhere between that the truth lies.

__Wired.com: __ J.J. Abrams was originally just going to produce Star Trek. I guess your script convinced him he needed to direct?

__Orci: __J.J.'s not a Star Trek fanatic by any means. We figured if we came up with a story that interested him as a casual fan....

__Kurtzman: __ It was secretly our agenda to hook in J.J. so that he couldn't say no.

Wired.com: Besides sharing by now a creative shorthand with Abrams, why was it so important to get him to direct Star Trek?

Kurtzman: What we get from J.J. directing Trek is 100 percent translation from script to scene. An epic space adventure is something not a lot of directors can handle. You need someone who understands genre and the spirit of Trek to accomplish a movie of this scope, which is bigger than anything Trek's ever been before. Yet hopefully it's also intimate.

Wired.com: Your Star Trek story won over J.J. Abrams. It sounds like you're pretty confident the fans will like it, too.

__Orci: __There's going to be a debate when this movie comes out whether or not it's consistent with canon. We argue that it is. But there's literally nothing we can say about this movie. Even if we think it's not controversial, people will say, "Oh, that's convenient, they're covering a story that's never been covered before instead of dealing with canon."

Wired.com: It's a pretty intense legacy.

__Kurtzman: __The questions we're most attracted to are, "What are the rules of these characters and the rules of that universe and the rules of what makes Star Trek works?" If we don't tap into that, no matter how consistent the movie is with anything that came before, who cares? If you tap into that and come up with something that embodies the spirit of what we felt when we first saw it, then hopefully we have Star Trek.

Photos: Hugh Hart/Wired.com

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