Have you gotten most of the plot out in the pilot, or is there a lot every week that has to be explained?
Alex Kurtzman: Oh no.
Roberto Orci: I wish. We had to cut stuff out of the pilot, out of the script so you’d focus on what was important so we could use some of that stuff to develop later.
Alex Kurtzman: You have biblical mythology that collides headfirst into American history and world history. The show will be about how so much of those things were intertwined in ways that you never knew about. The bible alone and different interpretations of different religions, there are so many stories there. I think we’re only truly scratching the surface.
So what does episode 2 look like after the pilot?
Roberto Orci: We’re picking it up very much as though you haven’t missed a beat. It’s Crane’s first night in a motel room, some practical stuff. Irving’s like okay, I understand what happened, but we can’t be talking about this a whole lot.
Alex Kurtzman: Abbie says to Crane, “You cannot go around telling people that you’re from 1776. You’ve got to figure out a way to integrate into this town so that people can still take you seriously.” Part of what’s really interesting for Crane is, like Bob said, he’s in this hotel room because they don’t know where else to put him. What’s a television? What’s a shower? What’s a sink? He doesn’t know any of that.
He’s still getting his bearings in the real world. He and Abbie are still working through exactly what it is that they’re supposed to be doing. They have a direction and a compass at the end of the pilot, but they’re not quite sure what it means.
Roberto Orci: And the town is recognizing there’s weird things going on so slowly what’s happening in Sleepy Hollow starts to affect the whole town and starts to freak people out. We’re trying to treat it very much not cheating and not missing a beat.
Alex Kurtzman: And Irving is suddenly in the hot seat because people are asking questions.
Roberto Orci: People are asking him, “How are you keeping us safe?”
Alex Kurtzman: “What’s going on here? What are you doing to keep us safe?” And he doesn’t have any real answers so suddenly he’s an outsider, not from Sleepy Hollow, who’s being integrated into a town of people who’ve lived there for centuries.
Whether or not they’re going to accept him and whether or not he’s going to be able to deal politically with how to manage that is going to be tricky. Coming to any small town is very tricky. The city guy coming in is tricky. Most importantly, we wanted to let the audience know that it’s not going to be the Headless Horseman show every week. The Headless Horseman will be back for sure, but the story of the villain of the second episode is not The Headless Horseman.
We’ll see Amazing Spider-Man 2 next year. We know you wrote and they shot a scene with Mary Jane that was cut. Will you have to completely rework that into the next script, or could a version of that be her introduction still?
Roberto Orci: Can we use that footage?
Alex Kurtzman: You’re talking about with Shailene [Woodley]?
I know you couldn’t use the footage, but script-wise would you introduce her the same way you planned?
Alex Kurtzman: I think we would not approach it from that place because each story has to fit organically into what’s around it. Part of why we ended up deciding not to have MJ in the movie was because there is so much happening in the movie. We wanted to make sure that MJ, being one of the most beloved characters in the Spider-Man universe, was getting her due and was going to have enough screen time frankly. Rather than have people come out feeling it’s kind of a half version of it, we said let’s just do it when it’s really right and we have the time to go there fully.
Roberto Orci: However, the scene fit beautifully into “Sleepy Hollow” luckily.
At one time you were writing a View-Master movie. What ever happened to that?
Alex Kurtzman: We were never writing it. We were going to produce it. Some stories were meant to be told and others aren’t. We didn’t get there.
Roberto Orci: We jumped from that to Pogo Stick: The Movie.
Was it after Battleship that the heat on View-Master died down?
Roberto Orci: No, it was before that.
Alex Kurtzman: It just didn’t come together.
I was interested just to see how you would figure that movie out.
Roberto Orci: We had kind of a fun take. Remember the View-Master idea was it could transport you to wherever you could see. A writer we worked with on “Fringe” actually ended up doing a draft, but other things just came together instead.
