How Justin Lin jumped from Fast and Furious to Star Trek to fill JJ Abrams’ very big shoes

JUSTIN Lin helped turn Fast and Furious into the monster it is today, but he had his work cut out for him to keep the hard-to-please Star Trek fans happy.

FOLLOWING in the footsteps of a director such as JJ Abrams is no small task.

The filmmaker has proved to have something of a Midas touch from his TV hits including Felicity and Lost to big-screen successes with the Mission: Impossible franchise and Cloverfield. He even (mostly) won over the notoriously hard-to-please Star Trek fans with his 2009 reboot of the long-running, sci-fi franchise and its even more successful 2013 sequel, Into Darkness. And of course there’s the small matter of that other spacegoing odyssey, having knocked Star Wars: the Force Awakens out of the solar system to the tune of $2.5 billion dollars late last year.

John Cho, Karl Urban, Director Justin Lin, Zachary Quinto and Chris Pine at the Sydney premiere of Star Trek Beyond earlier this month. (Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images for Paramount Pictures)

So who then to replace Abrams for Star Trek Beyond, the third film based on the adventures of the USS Enterprise and its voyage of discovery? As a massive Star Trek nerd and the man with his own blockbuster miles on the clock, thanks to the hugely successful Fast and Furious films, Justin Lin fits the bill very nicely.

“The wonderful thing about Justin is that he is a long-time Star Trek fan,” says Karl Urban, who plays Dr Leonard “Bones” McCoy in the films. “He gets it and I think he was able to successfully come in and build upon what JJ had established. He brought a longstanding and intimate love and knowledge of these characters and he was very specific in what he wanted and was very open to the idea of talking these characters and developing them and taking it to the next level.”

“There’s a lot in it for the old-term fans but also the people who have just joined the Star Trek appreciation club from our movies are going to be well happy.”

Lin, who was born in Taiwan, says that Star Trek was always a big deal in his house. It was bonding time with his father and brothers as they grew up in the US, attracted as much by the original creator Gene Roddenberry’s trailblazing storytelling as its vision of a multiracial crew working in harmony and boldly going where no one had gone before.

“What I really love about Trek growing up as an Asian American kid back in the ‘80s is that you really get a sense of this shared journey of people from very different background,” Lin says. “And yet it’s through that shared journey that they share this sense of family. I was very influenced by that being an immigrant and at the same time the mission statement of being bold and exploring — the more you push externally, the more you find out about who you are internally and I think that is something that is very appropriate for us now.”

Over the three films so far, the lead cast members — Urban, Chris Pine as Captain Kirk, Zachary Quinto as Spock, Zoe Saldana as Uhura and John Cho as Sulu have become close, and describe their reunions to make each film as a family coming back together. But when they visited Sydney to promote the film earlier this year, they were missing a member. Anton Yelchin, who played Chekhov, was killed last month when he was accidentally crushed by his own car.

Left to right: Anton Yelchin plays Chekov and Chris Pine plays Kirk in a scene from film Star Trek Beyond

The loss was acutely felt not just by the tight-knit cast, but also by Lin, who had just seen the promising young actor for some post-production work on the Star Trek Beyond, before his tragic death.

“Every time Anton shows up he has a smile on his face and I have a smile on my face because he does,” Lin says of the late actor’s irrepressible sprit. “That is so rare and in many ways working through it in these last couple of weeks as tough as it was I could really feel his influence and the fact that he was always so positive.”

Urban also paid tribute, saying that returning to the city where the first film had its triumphant world premiere in 2009, was “bittersweet” and “sombre”.

“It’s devastating losing someone in your family and I feel like this should be time of celebration not just of the film but of him and his extraordinary talent and just such a beautiful man that he was,” he says. “I have a difficult time talking about him and thinking about him in the past tense. It’s very raw and very painful. So this whole thing is bittersweet. We just take it one day at a time.”

Star Trek Beyond is out now.

Originally published as How Justin Lin jumped from Fast and Furious to Star Trek to fill JJ Abrams’ very big shoes