the problem becomes that we know the fate of the characters from The Original Series. So if you are going to breathe new life into Trek, how do you do it while making it unpredictable? If you know how they die, you can never put them into real jeopardy. That led us to where if we altered the timeline we can tell a whole new set of stories with our characters.
We always felt that Star Trek fans can handle paradoxes and multiple interesting thoughts. Yeah, that is why we couldn’t say ‘no’ once we hit upon the idea of it being both a prequel and a sequel. It is literally a film for two audiences. If you know Trek, then you understand where it all comes from. If you aren’t, it acts very much as a prequel.
We hesitated to use time travel, because it was so used. However, it was such an important reason to use it — to have both a prequel and a sequel — to maintain canon, yet free us up. Despite its overuse, we thought ‘let’s use it one more time before we put it away, and then not use it again.’ It was also the only way to justify the level of involvement that we felt for Nimoy to be a genuinely active participant in the movie. And that was worth it and specific enough that it didn’t feel like a gimmick. So we allowed ourselves to use it to jump off.
