After Paramount Pictures announced last month that it won’t be producing Quentin Tarantino’s hyped R-rated Star Trek movie, WandaVision director Matt Shakman has signed on to take over the helming duties on the next installment in the space adventure franchise. With the studio making new plans with the Emmy Award-nominated director, screenwriter Mark L.
Smith, who penned the script for Tarantino, based on an original idea from the Oscar winner, revealed new details about the story he created for the Star Trek series.
Smith, who scribed the screenplay for the Academy Award-winning drama, The Revenant, revealed on the Bulletproof Screenwriting podcast (via Total Film) that J.J. Abrams’ production company, Bad Robot, personally called him on Tarantino’s behalf. “They just called me and said, ‘Hey, are you up for it? Do you want to go? Quentin wants to hook up.’ And I said, ‘Yeah,'” the scribe shared. “And that was the first day I met Quentin, in the room and he’s reading a scene that he wrote and it was this awesome cool gangster scene, and he’s acting it out and back and forth. I told him, I was so mad I didn’t record it on my phone. It would be so valuable. It was amazing.
“Then just we started working,” Smith continued. “I would go hang out at his house one night and we would watch old gangster films.
We were there for hours…We were just kicking back watching gangster films, laughing at the bad dialogue, but talking about how it would bleed into what we wanted to do. Kirk’s in it…All the characters are there…I guess you would look at it like all the episodes of the show didn’t really connect. So this would be almost its own episode…There’s a little time travel stuff going on…
It’s really wild.”
The screenwriter also told IndieWire last December that Tarantino’s version of Star Trek featured fun moments for Chris Pine’s Captain Kirk. The news came after the direct said that the Emmy Award-nominated actor’s portrayal of Captain Kirk was the reason why he was interested in contributing to the current Star Trek film franchise, which started with Abrams’ 2009 reboot.
Tarantino mentioned to MTV that he “thought Chris Pine did a fantastic job not just playing Capt. Kirk but playing William Shatner’s captain — he is William Shatner. He’s not just another guy, he’s William Shatner’s Capt. Kirk.”
Smith’s revelation about the time travel element in Tarantino’s Star Trek script comes after Deadline speculated on the news last August. It was reported that the latter was working on an entry in the series that would focus on an earthbound spacecraft in the 1930s, and feature gangster elements.