Enterprising: Scott Chambliss talks about J.J. Abrams & Star Trek Into Darkness

“J.J. is the genius kid who has a great personality too so you can’t hate him,” chuckles long-time J.J. Abrams collaborator Scott Chambliss who has done production design work for him ever since they brought the television series Felicity [WBTN, 2000 to 2001] to the small screen.  “He’s quick on the draw and is also brave.  The telling moments for us in terms of the transition were at the beginning of Mission: Impossible 3 [2006].  It was being strongly suggested to him that he surround himself with a bunch of well-known seasoned pros on every level, in front and behind the camera.  J.J. made a strong case that he’d do a better job for them if he brought some of his key players with him; once J.J. got his way with that he was able to charge into this challenging and some ways frightening circumstance for both of us.  We had a couple of conversations about that along the way but J.J. felt confident because he knew his back covered was by those of us he brought with him.”  A wealth of experience was shared between the two friends.  “J.J. is an entertainment business kid so he grew up in it and by the time I had met him I been designing for independent movies.”  Chambliss believes, “The two of us started coming-of-age in our collaboration together.”

 

 

“It’s a total machine,” remarks Scott Chambliss when discussing his time spent making TV productions.  “Doing ambitious episodic television, like we were doing with Alias [ABC, 2001 to 2005], is the hardest job in town because of the pace you have to keep up continuously and the amount of balls you have to juggle with the resources that you have which are far more limited than feature films.  It’s a steam engine and you don’t have a moment to pause and reconsider.”  The small screen proved to be a great training ground for big screen projects.  “Because we had to work with such speed and to have strong instincts to rely on that definitely helped us in those first films because we were able to move through issues at hand, J.J. and myself with a speed that others who have been doing movies forever couldn’t quite fathom.  Ultimately, it has served the both of us well for the rest of our careers.”

“Although I rely on our language it continues to evolve as we work together too, and every time we get back together we’re both at different places in terms of what we have to bring to the party,” notes Scott Chambliss.  “For some films, including this last one, I did maybe three full months of research and development, and prepping design ideas for J.J. before he was ready to get on board and start collaborating in earnest.  “I would check in with J.J. now and then and show him where I was going with things, and he would interact and tell what he liked or didn’t like.   It wasn’t until J.J. came on board full-time there was any significant serious development that went on with the film, and that’s one of the shifts that has happened with us.  J.J. has brought me on for some extensive R&D to help him start getting his mind into the context of the work before he is even ready to get firm and serious about anything.  It helps to immerse him into the world he is about to jump into full-throttle.”

There was not much of a difference between Star Trek (2009) and Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) when it comes to number of location and sound stage shoots.  “It ultimately didn’t,” remarks Scott Chambliss.  “On this one we were going down the road of us doing some more and rather extensive location work for the sequence which starts off the movie on this island you see in the trailers with the red foliage.  But we didn’t and it’s mostly sound stage work or the equivalent of back lot work, big outdoor sets that we build and a little bit of location work.  We certainly had one phenomenal location you’ll see in the climax of the movie that is used as part of the Enterprise ship and a couple of other really good ones although they didn’t have as key a part in the visual story development.”

“It is no different for this kind of movie than for any other kind of movie,” explains Scott Chambliss.  “You would only choose a location because it suits the story you want to tell.  Because Trek has a retro influence at its core in terms of the Starfleet language that helps us to find more rooted location choices for those sets.” The Primetime Emmy Award-winning production designer remarks, “Given all of the major recent architectural locations we’ve been using we were joking that the Starfleet organization must have been the official sponsors of 21st Century Modernism in international architecture.”  Chambliss adds, “After a certain point you start to run out of options and we lucked out on this one because there is a set that we shot at the National Ignition Facility here in California that never had a big feature shooting there before; it turns out that the guy who runs the show there is a huge Star Trek fan and distilled the notion of introducing what they’re doing.  They’re trying to create fusion for ignition to the world in the context of a big Star Trek movie so that was a coup and a big pleasure to shoot there.”

A significant discussion during the course of making Star Trek Into Darkness was deciding much green screen was needed to digitally augment the physical sets.  “It affects a lot of people because to come up with the answers to that we have to do an exhaustive amount of drawings and models, and look at different camera angles,” states Chambliss.  “With J.J. the rule of thumb is to put as much real in front of the camera as you possibly can and that is what makes him happiest at this point.  We try do that first and when we can’t in the case of the island sequence that you see with the red planet we went from an elaborate story there which would have required a lot of visual effects down to something that was relatively simple, and except for that jump virtually all of it is done in camera.”  The IMAX and 3D formats had to be kept in consideration.  “We always have to know that the images are going to be taller for IMAX for sure and with 3D it’s more of a technical challenge for the director and camera department.  We weren’t shooting with 3D cameras; they did a transfer after the fact.  Our physical worlds are in 3D to begin with so as long as we were conscious that the film experience was going to express that even more it isn’t a huge ordeal for the physical production design.”

 

Key production team members were cinematographer Dan Mindel (The Amazing Spider-Man 2) and Roger Guyett (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) from Industrial Light & Magic who served as the visual effects supervisor.  “We’re all of the prime collaborators with J.J. to get the visual world up there,” states Scott Chambliss.  “What we do in the Art Department is to provide the environments for the film.   We’re designing what the worlds are not just the set components that we build but what the visual effects will look like after we’re done shooting and it goes into post-production.  All of that design work is ideally in place and is being handed over as we’re going so it’s a complete visual world is developing while we’re shooting and continues after we’re finished.  With Dan it is important how we design lighting into the sets especially on a spaceship.  The lighting of the actors and environment has to be part of what appears to be actual running lights of the ship itself.  Dan is a wonderful collaborator in terms of figuring out what special things we might want to do in there to make it unique to our story.”

 

As for whether he can image a future where the jobs of a production designer and visual effects supervisor merge into one, Scott Chambliss believes, “It can happen.  That will happen more with films that are primarily digital, in terms of their created environments, and it is certainly happening in things like Avatar [2009] which had two production designers, Robert Stromberg specifically did all of the visual effects work and got onto Alice in Wonderland [2009] and Maleficent [2014].  And there will be the other films like Lincoln [2012] or other ones that have a visual effects component but they’re also grounded in practical environments.  I don’t think that the two roles can blend into one until movie genres are distinctly one or the other.  They may well go that way soon but there will still be the two different kinds of production designers and visual effects supervisors based on the kind of film they’re working on.”

 

Compared to its cinematic predecessor, the expectations of moviegoers are greater for the sequel.  “There is definitely that,” admits Scott Chambliss.  “It was the notion of it being a darker story and in some ways it is much bigger than the first Star Trek. The action sequences are bigger in scope and there seems to be more of them. The sets certainly grew in scale.  It seems like it came from more, more and more.”  When told that the opening sequence has been described as having a James Bond and Raiders of the Lost Ark[1981] influences, the production designer laughs, “I would say from the first days of Alias up to this very moment we have always being knocking those guys off one way or another!” The interior of iconic spaceship commanded by Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) is explored more this time around.  “It’s not that it is different looking.  It’s just that you get to see new places in it.  We were able to give it a larger scope with the help of location work and also ground it a kind of technical and scientific reality that we weren’t able to do on the last one and that’s going to be an exciting component this time around.  Fans got so pissed off that part of our Enterprise engine room was shot at the Budweiser Beer plant.”

When asked how he balanced need to be futuristic but also relatable, Scott Chambliss responds, “That sounds like a question said directly from J.J. himself because he always wants to make sure that everything is relatable.  You make everything feel grounded.  Nothing is too perfect, magic, floaty, digital feeling and unattainable.  There has to be those elements in the layers and problems that make it feel like something that you would recognize in your own life.  That was the large part of the conversation on the first one.  Earth, Starfleet and all of that have worked out so many issues it’s a much better world that we live in the present but it is still Earth and we’re still human beings and not everything is perfect and squeaky clean.  There are issues that have to be dealt with and keep it like real life so that is always a touchstone for us even when we’re doing other planets and civilizations.  We have our own human emotions and intelligence to draw from as creative artists so that creeps into our definition of anything in the future of our Star Trek world or any future cultures. They have to be things that we can understand as human beings as feeling real whether they are or not.”

Conjuring a futuristic version of London, England was a matter of creative routine.  “Took what was there and developed it, added on to it and subtracted things,” states Scott Chambliss.   “What you always do is extrapolate what exists and project it forward.”  A cinematic moment occurs that echoes the helicopter attack in The Godfather, Part 3 (1990).  “For that sequence we’re distinguishing in the stories the Starfleet headquarters from the Starfleet campus which was where we were in the earlier Star Trek movie for all the student graduations sequences.  This is located elsewhere and it is a massive tower complex.   The conference room is on top of the tower and we wanted it to feel an idealized version of a big serious campus.  They aren’t military but they do have a strong sense of organization and identity as a unit.  We wanted to make it a visually exciting place to be.”  Holograms do not feature prominently in the picture.  “We had some in the first one there isn’t a lot in this one.”  Trying to come up with a unique spin on a technological staple of the science fiction genre is not an easy matter. “It’s hard and I’m dealing with it once again and we haven’t been able to fairly successfully breakaway from that yet.”

Captain James T. Kirk and his crew encounter a formidable enemy spaceship piloted by a rogue Starfleet operative portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch (Tinker Tailor Solider Spy). “We were doing the bad guy Enterprise and it was going to be bigger, meaner, and feel like that it had been militarized in a certain way,” recalls Scott Chambliss.  “The question was do we want it to look like the Enterprise or do we want it to look radically different?  We found that staying closer to the Enterprise obviously made the comparison stronger.  Then there was a question about the exterior which has a strong resemblance to the Enterprise but does the interior necessarily need to in the same way.  If it’s advanced technology maybe they don’t need as many people? Maybe they need one person?  The questions went on and on and we came up with some interior solutions which were exciting.  We took the Enterprise bridge and magnified it like crazy but couldn’t afford it so we wound up sticking a little closer to home than any of us initially intended. But because we pushed it so far out there by the time we reeled it back it was still an exciting place to be.”

“The two biggest challenges were we always want to deliver the unexpected or welcomed surprises or reveal things about the world that you might not be expecting and we wanted to do that with the Enterprise itself,” reveals Scott Chambliss.  “We want to keep allowing the audience to explore and discover more about the ship and what it means to the people who work and live on it.  Finding what that was for this story and how to go about that in a consistent and exciting way was an interesting challenge.  The other big one for me on a pragmatic level was figuring out the [Klingon] world of Kronos for our film.  What was going to happen there wasn’t clearly defined in the script.  It took awhile to get down to the core of what J.J. wanted to do with that sequence.  We knew it was going to be a big action sequence but beyond that I didn’t know much.  What had to go on was J.J. needed a big playground so he could do all sorts of crazy stunts but we always like to ground our environments in a layered reality or story.  It was hard to come up with that when we didn’t have the root of what the story was in that sequence until way further down the road.”

Eventually, a solution was uncovered for the planetary riddle.  “What I wound up doing was many different design approaches,” states Scott Chambliss.  “All different worlds of what it could be and what the language was and what was important and what wasn’t important.  It seemed to go on to endless iterations until we were all exhausted and nothing was landing until the last second when I recalled one of the earlier iterations that I always felt should have been developed because there was a strong core idea and all of this time later it still felt like a strong core idea for us.  I trotted it out and that is one in the film.”  The look of the Klingons themselves was less troublesome.  “That was done primarily in the make-up. The big visual cue we were wrestling with was the physical world itself.  We discovered there was little that had been developed in the whole canon of the original series which is what we always base our material on.”