Every good ship needs a crew, and the team behind Star Trek: Picard has assembled quite the team. Not only are Hollywood heavyweights Alex Kurztman and Akiva Goldsman on-board as producers, they also have a writing team led by sci-fi extraordinaires Michael Chabon and Kirsten Beyer. We sat down with the four of them to discuss some of the joys and challenges of assembling the rest of the team to make Star Trek: Picard take flight.
Obviously Star Trek has such a rich history for you to choose from. What made use Romulans, Borg, and this android-synthetic story that you’ve gone with?
Michael Chabon: We had this whole menu, like you say. We had a star who had things he was interested in doing and some that he wasn’t interested in doing. We had a star was 78 at the time we were starting, and that presented us with certain givens. It’s probably a given that at that point in his life he’s at a somewhat retrospective mood, looking back on his life, thinking about things he has and hasn’t done, the ways he has and hasn’t lived up to his ideals, and maybe looking back on experiences that were very powerful and important to him at some point in his life and trying to assess what, if anything, that means to him now. Right away, we saw the idea of Data and his death, his very abrupt death at the end of Star trek: Nemesis, was probably something that would be lingering for him. His experience being assimilated into the Borg Collective might, or might not, be something that he was wrestling with or had incorporated into a part of himself, but it was definitely something there in his past. The Romulans and the supernova was partly because we had this 20 year period to account for in his life and absolutely no canon that we knew of, beyond little bits and pieces, of what his life was like during that period. But we did know about this one big thing established as an event in the prime time canon in the 2009 Star Trek, and we just thought that maybe that had a big impact in his life. It was such a big event and Picard had played such a big role in Romulan politics, diplomacy and warfare so it felt like that could be important.
Patrick Stewart has said that he had said no to a return to Star Trek in the past. How did you convince him?
Akiva Goldsman: It was a lot of begging and money (laughs). We really took him seriously when he said no, we just refused to take him literally. We just kept coming back to him and listening to what he was really saying no to. He wasn’t really saying no to playing Captain Picard again, he was saying no to playing the same Picard again. He had lived the experience of that man at that stage in his life fully, and that to return to it would not be exciting or interesting for himself or an audience. His supposition was that as he moved further into life as a man that as an actor he should move further into the life of Jean-Luc Picard. We went back and forth with him and each other trying to assure him that we had the same goal as him. It is a post-Logan world, it is a time when people are interested in more modern storytelling, as Michael just alluded to. Drawing a character whose dilemmas are those of a man who is in his 90’s in canon, is very different from the dilemmas of almost anybody else you see as a protagonist on screen. This isn’t the detective who gets dragged back in for one last case or is a 50-year-old widow. This is a man who has lived an entire life and believes that twilight has come. What happens in twilight, and how twilight can turn out to be daylight again, is what our story is about.
It looks like this is going to be a version of Star Trek that will once again look a bit more into the darker corners of Starfleet, to look at power structures and corruption, why do you feel now is the time to tell that story?
Kirsten Beyer: I don’t think of it as that the Federation has changed so much as we’re able to see the Federation in a more complete way than we ever have before, showing the really complicated conversations and struggles that accompany these really big challenges that we’re facing as opposed to as glossing over them. There are no easy answers to any of this, and that’s something that Star Trek has always embraced and part of why it has endured so much, because it searches for the hard answers but also the right answers.
When Star Trek first started it was a reflection of the new frontier as coined by JFK. Could we say that this show is reflecting the world under Trump?
Chabon: There is no way to make a television show of any kind that doesn’t reflect the time in which it was made. In most cases, that reflection is accidental or unintentional and just happens to be a byproduct of being made by people being alive at that time. What makes Star Trek unique is that from the beginning it has always been a deliberate attempt to reflect, but not to be an allegory. It’s the issues that are weighing on people’s minds at the time, and the thing about Star Trek is to open the door and let them into the storytelling and that’s what we did here.
What issues did you want to tackle in the show?
Chabon: Primarily it’s a question about ‘The Other’ in various ways. How do people become othered, and how Starfleet and the Federation deal with the other and how that may change over time. That is certainly something that we are all thinking about in this time.
Over the history of the show, it has always been amazing how much new technology it has managed to predict and inspire in the real world. Is there ever a pressure in a writers room to come up with the next new piece of tech, or is part of the fun discovering where you can ground elements and allow new tech elements to grow from the story?
Beyer: I think they grow from the story pretty organically. Everything we’re doing comes from the people, right? Sometimes somebody might need a tool, and you think ‘what would be the most modern beyond version of that kind of thing that we can think of?’ It’s usually not driven by the opposite of that. Star Trek has already given us a wealth of things to play with. Sometimes it’s about pushing those things a little bit, and sometimes it’s about reigning them in.
With Star Trek: Discovery, the working title was ‘Green Harvest’, which is a nod to the original Star Wars working title. What was the working title for this and was there a cheeky reference anywhere for a fan?
Alex Kurtzman: No actually, it was ‘Royal Flush’. Where did it come from exactly?
Chabon: I think from just the poker imagery in the opening of the first episode. And that way, if somebody happened to catch a glimpse of us working and saw the poker table and that title, they’d just think it was a show about poker (laughs).
Where did the desire come from to bring back Patrick Stewart as Picard, as like you say he’s not a young man anymore?
Kurztman: That was the strength, his age was the challenge and what was so beautiful about it. There are so few opportunities to get to have the lead of your show, in Starfleet years, a 94 year old. A show that is about a man looking back at his life and the subtotal choices of his life, his regrets and his loss, getting another opportunity to get it right. That is a universal idea, but we could not have told that story with a 50 year old man, or a 60 year old woman. It’s really about being at Patrick’s very unique age. I think we all considered it such a privilege to be able to tell that story. Like all Star Trek shows, he has a whole crew of people who join him who are of so many different generations. So, as a viewer, you’re going to be able to look at the show and you’re going to be able to connect to Patrick and somebody else, or you’ll find yourself in one of the other characters in a unique way. That to us was the gift of the opportunity.
What made you convinced Patrick could do it?
Kurztman: I don’t think there’s anything he can’t do! He is an actor and a human with such integrity, and I think that we all felt that if we could get him to say yes, then it was going to be a show that would be considered and thought through and meticulous curated, in a way so many things don’t have the opportunity to be, because he said he would never do it again. We had to give him real reasons to do it and we have to live by and stick to those reasons. It’s a tremendous responsibility for all of us, we all recognised that in so many ways Patrick himself, not just Picard, would say ‘I want this to be one of the greatest choices of my career.’ If we had messed that up I think we would have felt incredible guilt for a very long time.
Chabon: As soon as you meet him you say ‘oh yeah, he can do this.’ He’s vital, he’s strong, completely present and motivated and interested, curious about people of the world. The second you meet him you don’t have a shred of a doubt.
Could you talk a little bit about working with Amazon, what was that relationship like?
Kurztman: It has been so unilaterally positive. They came on-board early on. Jeff Bezos is a fan of Picard, in fact there’s a picture of Jeff and Patrick at some event together both wearing tuxedos looking remarkably similar, so I think there’s some deep innate love there. Bezos also named his space company after Star Trek, so he was obviously massively influenced by Trek anyway. There was only support, from the very beginning. I’m so glad that they’re able to bring it to the rest of the world, we want as many people to see it as possible.
Chabon: I mean there was that thing where we had to put Alexa on the ship (laughs).
Kurztman: Hey why not, it’s probably going to be what it’s going to be!
Star Trek: Picard launches on Amazon Prime from January 24th, with each new episode dropping every Friday.
