this scene,
so you actually thought
about the bad guy.
There's a whole movie
that you didn't see,
where basically the Kelvin
and sort of its kamikaze run,
when George Kirk
runs it into the Kelvin, it becomes...
-Knocks it into the Neutral Zone.
-Right.
And then they get
picked up by some Klingons,
and they get imprisoned by the Klingons
for 25 years.
And during that period of time, basically,
Nero is working on these calculations
to figure out
when Spock Prime
is going to emerge from this singularity.
And he figures it out, and then
they plan this whole prison break
and they steal their ship back.
You didn't need to see any of it.
It was really hard
for the audience to understand.
"Who is the bad guy now?
I don't understand."
But by removing it,
it eliminated the questions.
-This was shot at Northridge...
-Library.
At the library there.
And, obviously, ILM did an amazing...
I wanted to do an establishing shot
that was part of a scene.
So you see...
"Look, there's future San Francisco."
By the way, now is as good of a time
as any to talk about Michael Kaplan.
I just love the costumes.
Yeah, he's the costume designer
who, it was infuriating,
'cause every time I'd go
into his workshop, I would just say yes.
Like, he never had a bad idea.
He's amazing.
I wanted to not reveal the green
until the lights came on,
so we did some colour work here.
That's Rachel Nichols,
who was in Alias.
This was obviously something
we could have done
a whole bunch more elaborate makeup,
but we wanted to sort of do something
that was real throwback
to the original series, that felt
completely connected to the old show.
We re-shot this scene.
It was done originally
a different version of this scene,
in which, among other things,
Uhura did not get undressed.
And I literally felt like,
Chris Pine's in his underwear,
this girl's, you know... I just thought,
like, the idea of all three of them being
in their underwear was so funny to me.
It just felt like a ridiculous situation.
That's the way you're gonna justify it?
-It's not bad, actually.
-I almost bought that.
And also, I wanted to, you know,
have Uhura get undressed.
No, but it was one of those moments
that felt like it really did emphasise
Kirk's love of her,
which I think also helped
the reversal later,
when you discover, you know,
that she's with Spock.
So, I love the idea that, you know,
you really think you're playing
on the axis of the Kirk/Uhura story.
I love the way that Spock, Kirk's
and Uhura's triangle plays,
which is the idea that,
you know, in a conventional movie,
Kirk is gonna get the girl.
-And the fact that he...
-That's right.
I love her in this shot, by the way.
He lost her before
the movie even started.
-That's right.
-You know, I mean, because she...
-But you don't realise that until later.
-She's still in play, maybe, in the bar,
but at some point in these three years,
she's fallen for Spock.
Now, this is the same set
that we used in the Kelvin.
It was redressed a little bit, but it has
much more of the submarine vibe.
And then this was actually,
you know, part of the set.
And they had to rebuild it
over about a month or so,
but it was interesting
working on the same set.
And we changed
the camera movements
so that it was very static.
Even though the camera's on a dolly,
it never felt like it was really moving.
So even though the ship is being shot
and everything, I wanted to make sure
it didn't feel like
it was supposed to be a real ship.
Now, Kobayashi Maru, on a script level,
we spent a lot of time
talking about this sequence.
Well, the green girl
used to be a huge part of this.
She was the one who ended up
basically planting the bug.
Kirk had been sleeping with her
specifically to get her to insert
the virus into the computer.
But it somehow felt more fun
to keep it a mystery as to who did it.
That sounds so dirty,