[Robert] Orci, meeting with the producers J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof and Bryan Burk, and his fellow writer Alex Kurtzman, jump-started the discussion with an iPad slide show, showing stills from the first film, snapshots of potential locations and a photo of a suggested actress for one of the roles. On the woman’s photo, he had used his iPad to paint on a Vulcan ear.

Khan will not be the villain. You would think this would go without saying, but people keep speculating. In fact, my source says that the film won’t be focused on a traditional ‘villain’ type at all.

The story will focus on a classic “Trek” character. And when I say classic, I mean a character who appeared in season one of the original series, when Gene Roddenberry was in charge.

It’s definitely a character that will make fans of “TOS” excited. Think along the lines of Harry Mudd or Trelane or Gary Mitchell or the Talosians or the Horta. Actually it’s one of those that I named.

Alex Kurtzman: Well, we have broken the story, which is very exciting. I think one of the weird challenges that we’re facing on this one is that in many ways, with the first movie, I don’t think people knew what to expect, so when we were in the writing process, Bob and I really spent our time going to things that we loved about “Trek” and it was a very unfiltered process. It felt intimate and small. There weren’t a lot of voices other than [producer] Damon [Lindelof], J.J. and [executive producer] Bryan Burke. Now, that first movie has come up and did well and everyone wants to know what happens next. We didn’t have that pressure, exactly, on the first one. That said, part of what we have to do is listen to it all, ask a lot of questions about what people’s expectations are — and then let all of that go when we sit down to write. We need to find our way back to the same kind of vibe that we had when we wrote the first one: What do we want to see here? What moved us about “Trek”? Where can we go from where we left off?

    Robert Orci: One of the big challenges is all of the characters are together now. A prequel is a pain in the butt, but one of the nice little advantages was that you get to meet the characters as you go through the story and they get to meet each other. That’s fun. We don’t that luxury of not having the entire family there together at the start of the story. So now you want the character stories to be good for everybody but also not just be there to be stories but also fit into the plot and be organic. We’re looking at a lot of the old episodes for inspiration, still. Whereas the last movie was all about breaking free from “Star Trek” and its canon, now that we can do whatever we want, we still want it to feel like good ol’ “Star Trek” even though it’s a new story.

Not true.

We’re shooting on film, 2-D, and then we’ll do a good high-end conversion like the ‘Harry Potter’ movie and all that. Luckily, with our release date now we have the months needed to do it right because if you rush it, it never looks good.