One of Hollywood’s busiest men, writer/director/producer J.J. Abrams has had the Midas touch with television (Alias, Lost, Fringe) and mainstream action movies (Mission: Impossible III, Cloverfield, Star Trek). When he’s not overseeing his newest TV series, Anatomy of Hope or working as a producer on Mission: Impossible 4 and Star Trek 2, Abrams spends time gaming with his three kids. In this exclusive interview, he took some time to talk about games, television, and the challenges of 3D filmmaking.

What video games impressed you when you were growing up?

Asteroids was my first love. I played Dark Castle and Castle Wolfenstein. The first Tomb Raider game, when it came out, got me really excited about the soundtrack, the score, the mood of it. I thought it was really fun. Recently, Portal was kind of amazing, and I was never a Rock Band or Guitar Hero person until The Beatles: Rock Band came out and now my three kids and I are sort of obsessed [with it].

Do you feel that playing video games as you grew up has influenced you as a creative in Hollywood in any way?

I suppose everything you do, and everything that interests you—whatever you spend your time getting to know intimately and spend hours and hours doing—influences what you do. I don’t know if I can point exactly to how and what that influence is, but you can probably extrapolate a certain level of kinetic energy that the best games have to what the best movies have, which is a great sense of drama, a great sense of urgency. Not all games require this, but those that do, and those that are great, have characters you connect with and root for and [in this sense] often are like a good movie. And so I suppose whether it’s a novel or a great song, or a videogame, a well constructed story situation and character will always be impactful, and it’s inspirational for anything that you do moving forward.

The PC version of Star Trek DAC, the demo of which was included on the Blu-ray edition of Star Trek, is compatible with NVIDIA’s 3D Vision technology. What are your thoughts on gaming going 3D?

Well, I think that as we’re seeing—and will continue to see [after] Avatar—that 3D can be super immersive and incredibly additive to the experience of what is in a movie or a game. And I think that as technology continues to become more accessible and higher quality, that artists—whether it’s videogame, film, or television—[will continue] to experiment with it. While I don’t know if it will ever sort of be the norm until the technology doesn’t require wearing glasses, [3D] is going to add a fun additional dimension to the experience.

Is 3D something you would like to explore on the big screen?

Sure. Again, I have nothing against it. When we discussed early on the possibility of doing Star Trek as a 3D movie, I was never given to the idea in theory. It always felt like it made sense and I can understand the value of it and the fun for the audience, so it wasn’t that I thought, “Oh, who cares about 3D. It’s just a gimmick.” But working on Star Trek was an ambitious endeavor with many built-in challenges and the idea of adding another dimension of headache for me, limiting what I could do in certain ways, and as a filmmaker you need to adjust your approach and change it in order to suit the technology. Certain things like whip pans and rack focuses don’t function as well in 3D as they do in 2D.

Would outer space pose a challenge for 3D technology?

Yes. You have that issue, especially when you’re dealing with something like Star Trek where you’ve got to issue a scale and the reality is the scale is so crazy massive that there is no 3D for a lot of moments. [For example], we’re watching a ship fly by the entire star field. In reality, it wouldn’t have parallax. But you would then have to start adjusting it and testing it and seeing what works. And then there’s also a psychological component, where if you have the ship within a frame it actually can make the ship look smaller sometimes because what the three-dimensionality gives is a sense of relative scale, and if you’re using 3D you don’t want to have it and not use it.  You’re then saying, “Well, that ship, which looks massive in 2D, actually can appear smaller in 3D.” So then you get into a place, and this is part of the nuance and figuring out how it works, [where you're] dealing with something on an impressionistic and impactful level as opposed to a reality. Meaning, what makes the shot feel more alive and interesting and dynamic. That means, then, in real life you might not have that kind of three-dimensional effect—that kind of parallax—but it looks really cool with the glasses on. That becomes, again like with sound and visual effects, a question of technique and learning, despite what you might think works. That’s something that, while I’m excited to do it, and would love to try, the truth is that it was another level of learning how to do it that I thought was unnecessary.

Would you be open to using 3D for Star Trek 2?

On Star Trek, I would rather make a decent 2D movie than a lesser 3D [one], and I really wanted to focus on that. Having said that, I’m now more confident in a lot of that area, especially with the world of Trek, and so 3D could be, if I direct the second film, a challenge that would be worthy to accept.

What do you enjoy about directing?

Directing is the greatest…[it] implies that, you know, you’ve at least done some of the other stuff. I feel lucky to do any of it. Writing is a wonderful process (when it’s not horrible), and producing is fascinating because it’s the ultimate collaboration. You’re collaborating with sort of every aspect of the medium and every art form almost comes together. You know, it’s the design of wardrobe and set. It’s working with musicians and actors. It’s working with writers and the practical realities of where and how you shoot something.

Where did the idea for Fringe come from?

The idea of Fringe came from [thinking about] what kind of show would we like to see on TV? We had influences like the Cronenberg films and also shows like The X-Files, Night Stalker, and Twilight Zone—that we just loved growing up. We thought, how cool would it be to do a show that has that feeling?

What are the challenges of working on episodic television like Lost and Fringe?

The challenge is to do a show that is simultaneously viewable on a casual basis—every week you can tune in if you want, but you don’t have to watch every episode and you still can understand it—and at the same time do something that has a sense of continuity and, you know, revealing of layers. So, that’s always a challenge in writing a show that’s about the characters, and yet you don’t want it to be a closed club for only the avid viewer.

by John Gaudiosi