J.J. Abrams doesn't wear his ego on his sleeve. Asked about TV series he's produced -- including Lost, Fringe and the upcoming Alcatraz and Person of Interest -- he enthuses about his talented partners.
Mention a rare failure, last year's Undercovers, and he says, "that was completely my fault." So success is other people's and failure is his own.
"Well, that's the way it should be," he says with a laugh over the phone from L.A.
And then are his films. Still a career in progress, he directed Mission Impossible: III and Star Trek and produced Cloverfield.
But it's never too early to crown someone king of something, so Abrams is aghast to hear that GQ crowned him "the next Steven Spielberg."
"Oh, dear God, really?" he says.
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Superficially, it's true. Spielberg is producer of Abrams' Super 8, about smalltown kids in 1979 who, while making a movie, witness a train derailment. The derailment allows something to escape. But for a darker sensibility, it could be a reboot of Spielberg's The Goonies, spliced with the plot of E.T.
"There is no next Steven Spielberg, and never will be," Abrams says. "Working with him was an incredible privilege and education. I feel I was already benefiting from him years before I met him."
Their relationship dates back to when Spielberg tried to get Abrams onboard as a writer for War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise.
"Steven and Tom and (Cruise's then producing partner) Paula Wagner came and we talked for a few hours. And because I had to do the pilot for Lost, I wasn't available to work with them. So they went off and did a great version of that film, and I did Lost, and Tom and I got to know each other on Mission Impossible: III. So I guess I owe Steven for that as well."
It turns out they are simpatico enough for parallel thinking. Like Spielberg, Abrams spent his youth making do-it-yourself backyard movies using film (remember film?).
"I had this notion of a movie called Super 8, about kids making movies the way I did and I knew he had. And he said he had always wanted to incorporate that into something."
The missing ingredient came from the mouth of a conspiracy buff, part of the crew of Abrams' Star Trek.
"Someone had mentioned how the U.S. Air Force had moved the contents of Area 51 (supposed warehousing site for the Roswell "saucer crash") away from Nevada in the '70s. I thought that was such a great idea. What would happen if it didn't make it? It turned over in my head for a while. And then I brought these two things together and this thing escapes, and it became almost a metaphor for what this kid (Joe, played by newcomer Joel Courtney) is going through. There was spectacle, inevitability to be managed and confronted. It just started to fill in the blanks by itself."
Setting the movie in the exact era of Spielberg's golden age might seem a little idolatrous. But Abrams says it was always his plan, given the importance of Super 8 in his life. I tell him I'd used the camera in a film course to animate a game of Risk, and that people who knew about my assignment had mentioned their own Super 8 memories.
"It's funny talking to people who are old enough to have had access to Super 8 cams," he says. "It's a charming and very real reminder of that time. Making the movie, just the set dressing alone, it was amazing how many flashbacks I would have."
The year 1979 was such a flashpoint in Abrams' view, that he had the year the movie takes place in mind before he had the movie.
"There's a wonderful analog sense to '79. It was really the end of an era and the beginning of the digital age -- the first Walkman or answering machines, the idea of word processors and the very first home computers were still on the horizon. There was a different kind of rhythm to life."
And then there was Super 8's centerpiece, the train crash -- something Abrams has always wanted to do, and which we maintain eclipses the one in The Fugitive. "That's very kind," he says, "because that's the benchmark for all traincrashes.
"As a kid, having done my share of exploding cars and planes and buildings and roller coasters and everything else I could think of to blow up at that age, doing that sequence was one of those crazy movie dreams come true."
jim.slotek@sunmedia.ca
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