J.J. Abrams Interview For ‘Super 8′

Director and writer J.J. Abrams’ (Star Trek, Mission Impossible 3) Steven Spielberg inspired (and produced) ‘Super 8′ follows a group of friends in the summer of 1979 in a small Ohio town as they witness a catastrophic train crash while making a super 8 movie, they soon suspect that it was not an accident. Shortly after unusual disappearances and inexplicable events begin to take place in town, and the local Deputy tries to uncover the truth – something more terrifying than any of them could have imagined. ’Super 8′ stars Kyle Chandler, Elle Fanning, Ron Eldard, Noah Emmerich, Joel Courtney, Riley Griffiths, Ryan Lee, Zach Mills, Gabriel Basso and AJ Michalka. The film is set for release June 10th in the US and August 5th in the UK. Check out what Abrams had to say about the film below.

How did the idea for the film come about?

J.J. Abrams: ‘Super 8′ came out of two separate ideas. One was an idea of doing a film about kids making super 8 movies in the late 70’s, early 80’s. And the other one was an idea of a monster movie that I’d had. One was a group of characters I had loved, but without a story that I thought would compel people to go and see it. And the other was a compelling premise but with no original characters. So I kind of combined the two and found that they serviced each other in a cool way.

The kids are fantastic in the film, what was it like casting them?

J.J. Abrams: One of the challengers was that the cast of the movie has some adults and some kids. I wanted the kids in the movie to feel like genuine, real, soulful kids. Not entitled, actory kids, which is often what you get. The search was endless, it took months and months and months and months! It was pushing production because we couldn’t find people. But we had an amazing casting team, they were wonderful, they saw thousands and thousands of kids.

It was important that the main kid, in my mind, was not the bossy movie maker, but rather he’d be the kid that followed that bossy movie maker. So the main kid is Joe, we found Joel Courtney who we brought back in a dozen times to audition him, because the character of Joe needs to do a lot, he goes through every emotional extreme. He’s gotta be funny, terrified, heartbroken, love-sick, he’s gotta be furious, devastated, the range was so huge, could the kid also be brave, it was endless. We kept bringing him in to test him because I needed to know that this kid, who’d never been on the set of anything, wouldn’t fall apart when we suddenly threw a scene at him. At every stage and at every step he was just wonderful. All the kids were wonderful.

Elle Fanning is fantastic, one of my favourite parts was the sort of love story.

J.J. Abrams: Yeah, the catalyst for the movie…..there’s sort of two elements to the film, one is this mysterious creature that escaped from the train, the other is the equally mysterious creature for these boys, which is Elle’s character Alice, who goes to their school. The main character is clearly smitten by this girl before the movie begins. Working on this movie, which she agreed to be apart of, gives them this excuse to hang out and get to know each other. We were incredibly fortunate to cast Elle as Alice, Elle brings a kind of sophistication and presence and poise and goofiness and maturity and…..talent, absolute talent that I don’t know if I’ve seen before, really. It’s amazing because she wasn’t even 13 years old when we shot this, she was 12, the boys were all 14 or 15. She clearly is a light-year above their sophistication level, even though she’s 2 years younger. She’s incredible, she gets to be a really tough and strong presence, she’s a strong character and yet there’s this love story at the heart of ‘Super 8,’ that to me was always the most important part of the movie. All the monster stuff and mystery is great fun but the key to movie, and the only thing I REALLY cared about, more than anything, was this love story. The movie is a sort of science fiction monster movie, juxtaposed, or imposed upon a kind of coming of age love story. That’s the melding of the two.

What was it like letting the kids make a film within a film?

J.J. Abrams: In the film the characters, the kids are making a film. At the very end of the movie, in the credits, you get to see the movie they’re making. So when we were filming, before we would leave a location, I would make sure we would film a scene from the film they were working on. I thought it would be a fun idea. They didn’t write and direct it, they wrote some of it, some of the scenes. So for example I would say to them, “OK, here’s this scene. Here’s the situation. Go off and write the scene.” They’d go off and do a pass on the scene and then come back, and I was trying to get them invested in the movie itself.

There’s so much secrecy surrounding this film…

J.J. Abrams: The idea was really just to maintain a certain level of discovery for the audience so that you didn’t give them the little bit of plot synopsis in every trailer we released, whether it was trailers, commercials or clips. One of the interesting things about this movie was it’s a combination of genres, there are kids that share and even own the spotlight, there are definitely a lot of challenges to selling the movie. But one of the things that drives me crazy is seeing a trailer and feeling I have no real need to see the whole movie now, because this showed me everything. So the goal was really just to try to keep things secret to the point that the audience would actually come to see the movie.

What was it like recreating 1979?

J.J. Abrams: The crazy thing about recreating 1979 was just how eerie it was to be in the world surrounded by people who looked just like the friends I had at that time I was going to Elementary School, wearing the same clothing. Being on the set and seeing magazines, just set dressing, that I would open up and realize I read that thing cover to cover. There were constant sense memories, which is very different to doing something like ‘Star Trek’ which is all extrapolating a future time, it’s all imagination. This was really a revisiting, which was an intent of the movie, but to actually be there day after day in that period was uncanny.

How was working with Steven Spielberg on this project?

J.J. Abrams: Working with Steven Spielberg on this was just the absolute greatest. He was deeply involved in the development of the story, the script, casting, editing the film. He was immediately interested in collaborating. During production he watched dailies and came to the set a few times, he was filming another movie but he still came by a few times, which was great. And in post he spent some hours in the edit room and was incredibly helpful with that because it was a real challenge to structure the thing. In post we had a bunch of second act things that we needed to figure out and he was really helpful in that. It was one of those things where I was amazed at how available he made himself to me and to this movie.

One of the fun things about working with him was always knowing that I could email him, or call him and ask him his advice on a scene we were going to shoot, or something that we’d cut together and get a response. There were times we were sitting in the editing room and he’d say, “You know what I would do?” and he’d give a suggestion. And I’d laugh inside because I can’t tell you how many times I was working at any stage and said, “What the hell would Steven Spielberg do?” So to have him just sitting there going, “You know what I would do?” was just unbelievable (laughs).