'Star Trek Beyond' Movie: Director Justin Lin Discusses His Plans For the Movie and What Advice J.J. Abrams Gave Him

Star Trek Beyond
Star Trek Beyond |

Hot off the heels of the success of his movie "Furious 7," director Justin Lin is now tackling "Star Trek Beyond" and is taking the sci-fi franchise into new emotional heights.

Talking to Collider, Lin revealed that the movie will open two and a half years into the five-year mission of those aboard the Enterprise. The director really wanted to highlight the crew's relationships, so their interpersonal relationships will be the focus of the sequel of "Star Trek: Into Darkness."

"I wanted to hopefully create an opportunity or a situation where we really see how they react to things and to each other," he said. "Those are things that even in all the years of watching Trek we had hundreds of hours with the movies of stuff with engagement, but in this timeline I wanted to hopefully create something where we can be on the five-year mission, we can hopefully explore and push, and introduce new species, and put them in situations where hopefully it then mirrors back and reflects about the exploration of humanity."

Lin also revealed that previous helmer J.J. Abrams, who now took on "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" strongly encouraged him to make the movie his own. Lin initially thought that Abrams wanted to give input to the movie, but only did otherwise.

"It came from my initial conversation with J.J. He kinda tracked me down and we're talking and I didn't know what to expect. I thought maybe he's offering to go shoot a script that existed, and he said, 'No, it's yours. Go and be bold, and just take it. Be bold and make it what you think you would do to Star Trek,' and the more we talked about it the more we kept saying, "Well, let's keep pushing, let's keep pushing.'"

When actor Simon Pegg overheard their discussion, he came up with the perfect title for the film.

"That's when Simon kinda said, 'Well, it should be Star Trek Beyond,' and it was his idea and it kinda came from all our conversations and then we looked at each other and like, 'Oh! That sounds like the title of this film.'"

According to Lin, the movie will also best be viewed in 3D so audiences will best appreciate the vastness and beauty of outer space.

"Star Trek Beyond" will be released in cinemas on July 22, 2016.