remember, Bryan, when you
brought that up, and I fought you on it.
I think we actually physically wrestled
in the editing room.
But you were so smart,
because it engaged you,
it let you engage in a deeper way,
on one level,
and then, unexpectedly, it deepened it,
as opposed to kind of telegraphing
what the story was gonna be.
-I think it was a smart...
-You're already so into the sequence,
it's so insane, and then it
just ratchets up the stakes 10,000%
when you realise
there's a pregnant woman on the ship,
and subliminally start to realise
that this must be Kirk in there.
It just bifurcated the focus,
having it earlier.
And, Bryan,
you want to talk about that or no?
For me, I mean,
Jennifer has this one sequence here
where she's so powerful and emotional,
and you're completely moved by her
in this one moment.
And it felt like, you know,
this alone was able to carry the birth
of Kirk and it was kind of heartbreaking.
And I remember,
one of the things that we talked about
early in the development of the script,
and this is a place where I really dug in
and was dead wrong,
was that she doesn't
make it off the Kelvin,
that Kirk needs to be beamed.
There was a whole thing
where basically,
in a emergency scenario,
like a caesarean,
you could actually beam a baby
out of a mother's womb.
We wrote that version. Yeah.
But if you did it, you kill her
because it's an inexact science.
Which is a really cool idea.
But the idea that...
We ended up playing it straight,
that it was a conventional birth
that everybody could identify with,
and that the first time that you actually
use the transporter in the movie
-is in the space jump.
-Right.
Where we didn't overuse
our beaming gags,
I think was really smart.
More importantly, she survives.
You know, which is really important.
There is a victory.
Well, it's funny, because we ended up
cutting a sequence later
where you saw their uncle,
who now in this film
became the stepfather,
the question is sort of
what role she played.
It was an interesting thing,
'cause there was a while
where she was on the phone call,
and she was mad at Kirk.
And it felt like... You love her so much
from this sequence,
that to have her being mean to Kirk later
felt counterintuitive.
It felt like, "I don't want to not like her.
I just loved her."
So, we ended up
having it just be the stepfather.
But, I think, you know, given how
few minutes she's actually onscreen,
I think Jennifer Morrison
did an amazing job.
And I think, you know, for us,
for the five of us,
when we first started talking about Trek,
I remember in the very first meeting,
probably about five minutes in,
we basically said,
"How in God's name are we gonna get
our wives to go and see this movie
"other than the fact
that they're married to us?"
You know, we will not be successful
in rebooting Trek
unless we can get women
to enjoy the movie.
And that's where I feel like...
At least the birth of Spock
really had that going for it.
But opening the movie with this
and kind of saying,
in the midst of all this
space battle craziness,
this is what the movie is, you know.
This is the moment where my wife,
when she first saw it,
sort of grabbed my hand,
and I looked over at her
and her eyes were all moist,
and I was like, "Okay.
I think maybe this is gonna work."
And from a canon point of view,
this is the first canon divergence.
-Whereas Kirk was always born in Iowa.
-Yeah, that's right.
He would have been born there...
Well, actually,
the Romulans showing up alone.
-Exactly.
-Nero's showing up and changing...
Created the premature contractions.
And the idea that Kirk was born
in space in mid-battle
always seemed like a great reason
to break canon.
I should just also point that
Giacchino's score in that sequence,
I think, really was genius.
-And this transition is unbelievable.
-And this transition was not here.
This