Simon Pegg Just Handed In His First Draft of STAR TREK 3
Simon Pegg has been hard at work trying to get a script done for Star Trek 3, and in a recent interview with Radio Times he says that he's just turned in a first draft. What's crazy about this is the movie goes into production in only four weeks! Hopefully the first draft doesn't need a lot of work and revisions.
Before Pegg came on board, there was an existing script that Roberto Orci was working on, but that was completely scrapped. Pegg and his co-writer Doug Jung (Dark Blue, Banshee) had to start from scratch. Here's what Pegg had to say:
"We started again six months before we were due to start shooting, which is insane! In fact... we start shooting in Vancouver in four weeks – and we’re only handing in our first draft today."
Pegg previously spoke about how his approach to the sequel was to open it up to an even wider audience:
"People don’t see it being a fun, brightly coloured, Saturday night entertainment like The Avengers. Let’s make a western or a thriller or a heist movie, then populate that with Star Trek characters so it’s more inclusive to an audience that might be a little bit reticent."
That makes complete sense to me, as I've always seen Star Trek as a western in a sci-fi space setting. The thriller and heist aspect just goes right along with that. I was happy to hear that Pegg was going to co-write this screenplay since he has such a good handle on the characters.
Pegg will co-star in the film alongside Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Carl Urban, Zoe Saldana, John Cho, Anton Yelchin and more. Star Trek 3 is scheduled to open on July 8th, 2016. Pegg previously talked about the terrifying task of taking on this project in an interview which you can read here.