VARIOUS: Director JJ Abrams, who made Star Trek relevant again, brings audiences a sci-fi thriller that awakens an 80s film nostalgia coupled with a solid coming of age story via the old-timer Super 8 camera

Record ID: 644638

  • Title: VARIOUS: Director JJ Abrams, who made Star Trek relevant again, brings audiences a sci-fi thriller that awakens an 80s film nostalgia coupled with a solid coming of age story via the old-timer Super 8 camera
  • Date: 2nd August 2011
  • Summary: BERLIN, GERMANY (RECENT) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) DIRECTOR J.J. ABRAMS SAYING: "Some ideas feel like they should be movies, and some ideas feel like they should be TV shows or a song or a poem or a painting. You know, the idea that some of my favourite movies had been books - my issue, it's funny when I read a book, I don't always see the movie instantly. In fact, a lot of people who've adapted books have said that they often take a character who is not the main character and bring that person up. I don't have that ability to read a book and immediately see what the movie is. And when I have, it's usually been made into a movie. There's one exception which is a book that I read by Colum McCann called "Let the great world spin" which is a gorgeous novel, and it's heart-breaking and funny and just an amazing read. And the soul of that book is spectacular. But it's got that issue just how do you, who is the main character? How do you make that work? And I'm actually working with Colum on it now, it's a story that I think will be a spectacular movie. But again the challenge of translating it into a movie is real."
  • Embargoed: 17th August 2011 13:00
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  • Location: Germany
  • Country: Germany
  • Reuters ID: LVA747J9W7T6QFNBC7YT9J0708ML
  • Story Text: JJ Abrams - the man who reinvented Star Trek, and created cult TV series "Lost" - pays homage in "Super 8" to the films that influenced him during his childhood.
    "The idea for "Super 8" was to make a movie that felt like movies I loved when I was a kid. But it needed to be a movie that wasn't just a derivation of various movies," Abrams told Reuters.
    Set in 1979, the film follows a couple of children who encounter a suspicious entity while shooting a Super 8 horror movie. After witnessing a mysterious train crash, the group of friends begin noticing strange happenings going on in their small town, and begin to investigate the creepy phenomenon.
    Abrams has previously stated that this film was a meshing together of two scripts - one, a rites-of-passage period tale of young teenagers shooting Super 8 movies, and the other which focused on the military transporting an alien from Area 51.
    But he strongly denies any copying of ideas from other movies or borrowing of plots, saying he just wanted to make movies that he loved as a child. "I wanted the feeling of the movie and the elements and the genre of the film to be the things that I loved. And when I was a kid those were the movies that I loved. And I wanted to find a way to connect those things. But there was never a list if films I wanted to copy from. There were elements that just felt like... things I was passionate about."
    Over the past decade, after a fitful start in movies, Abrams has delivered some of television's most intriguing shows. More recently, he has powered his way into cinema with "Mission: Impossible III" and the Star Trek reinvention.
    "You know the thing that I love about movies and TV is, it lets us take people places they wouldn't normally go," said Abrams about the secret to his success in film-making. "My favourite stories are stories where the main characters in the world that you see is relatable and something you want to follow, even if it's just a straight drama, but then - as the story progresses - they go places that ... where things wouldn't normally happen. They become sort of hyper real stories."
    As much as anything else, the film is a tribute to the early adventures of both Abrams and Steven Spielberg (who produced the film). The two men cut their teeth making Super 8 films as children. In this spirit, one of Abrams' oldest pals, Larry Fong, a collaborator from those distant days, was director of photography on the film.
    "Super 8" also returns to certain, more personal, themes from the films of Spielberg's classic era. So many of those pictures dealt with broken homes and used the invading force, often kindly aliens, as a distraction from those nagging domestic crises. The protagonist of "Super 8", played by young Joel Courtney, has recently lost his mother in an industrial accident, and is struggling to find a common understanding with his cop-father.
    Abrams said that there are so many great characters in books that are hard to translate to the screen. "I don't have that ability to read a book and immediately see what the movie is. And when I have, it's usually been made into a movie. There's one exception which is a book that I read by Colum McCann called "Let the great world spin" which is a gorgeous novel, and it's heart-breaking and funny and just an amazing read. And the soul of that book is spectacular. But it's got that issue just how do you, who is the main character? How do you make that work?" But that is a problem that Abrams intends to solve, working with Colum McCann at the moment.
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