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The writer/producer team of Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman is currently riding a high level of success, with Star Trek and Transformers taking over the summer box office, and the Fox television series Fringe returning for its highly anticipated second season on September 17th.
During the Television Critics Association Press Tour, Bob and Alex spoke to IESB about alternate realms on Fringe, sequels for Star Trek and Transformers, and a movie about a View-Master.

Q: What is coming up on the show that you can talk about?

Orci: Peter (Joshua Jackson) is going to really take charge. Walter is going to explore freedom that he maybe shouldn't have.

Kurtzman: Last year, it was very much about Peter finding himself blackmailed into the position he was in, of having to be his father's caretaker. He was always faced with the possibility of running. What was interesting to us was that he was a character who could bail on everyone else, at any second. I think a lot of what happened, towards the end of last season, and what we see at the beginning of this season, is leading to his commitment to say, "I'm the guy. If we're going to do this, we're going to do it my way. I'm taking charge now. If you want me to help in the Fringe division, then you have to go through me to figure out how we're going to get to cases." That's going to be a very different way of approach for the character.

Q: How involved will you guys be this season, and what will J.J. Abrams' involvement be?

Orci: We're divvying it up, so that we'll oversee one, J.J. will oversee one and we're all together, once or twice a month, planning what the next big steps are. Then, we have an amazing staff that divvies up the episodes. We get together on the phone and improve the stories, so we're all in there. Jeff and Joel are the ones who are physically on site, handling all the horrible things that we're protected from, in addition to doing what we're doing. But, we're all in there creatively.

Q: Are you masters of multi-tasking?

Orci: We are. Part of why we all like doing shows together is because we make it easier for each other to be involved than it would be if any one of us were involved alone. Sometimes J.J. can see them when we can't, but then we can get together with J.J. The more people who are in the know, the more everyone can continue to be creative. That's part of the flexibility of having safety in numbers.

Kurtzman: And, we've learned a lot from television. Television really teaches you the discipline. It teaches you about having to work on many things at once, because you're breaking story, while writing a script, while shooting an episode while posting another one.

Orci: There's plenty to do.

Kurtzman: The key is that you have to keep your quality level high. That's why you have other people around you to make sure that you are keeping your quality level high.

Q: What is different in your alternate realm?

Orci: The White House was hit instead of the World Trade Center.

Kurtzman: Kennedy's still alive.

Q: Where's Walter (John Noble) in the alternate world? How does he feel about our Walter taking his son?

Orci: I'd be pissed. That feels like a juicy train to collide into. That's looming somewhere.

Q: How much of Walter is improvised and how much is written? Do you put it in the script, when Walter goes off?

Orci: Absolutely. You say, "In the background, Walter is inspecting whatever thing is catching his eye. You're not even sure what he's doing yet until you get over there." It's still very written, but John's improvs are underlines and exclamation points on the scene. One line can change a scene. It can do so much to everything that came before. Obviously, you can't make some of that stuff up. It takes a team of people. But, he really knows his character and he can get in an out of character almost without the script.

Q: Does the cow exist in the alternate world?

Orci: Uh, yes.

Q: Is there still Massive Dynamic?

Orci: Yes. The trick is not to confuse people. You only want to change something, if there's a really good thematic reason to have it be different. It can't be red is blue, just for fun. We want to let it really resonate because it's something major.

Q: How many conversations have you had about Mrs. Bishop?

Orci: We've had a few, but that definitely seems like a big target that you want to make sure you build up to correctly.

Q: Is Olivia (Anna Torv) the only one going over to the alternate realm?

Orci: So far, she's the only one. We've gotta play that carefully.

Q: What are your thoughts on parallel universes?

Kurtzman: I think they exist.

Orci: It's the latest thinking on it, you know. Anything that can happen, does happen. That's what Mr. Data said in Star Trek: The Next Generation. It seems to resolve a lot of the paradoxes that exist, but who knows. It's an old idea now. It's not a new idea.

Q: Do you have to wait for word from Leonard Nimoy that he's available or willing, before you do a William Bell script?

Orci: We do two scripts in advance, at a time. We'll go, "Hey, you up for two more?" It's a buy one, get one free kind of thing.

Q: How far are you with Star Trek 2?

Orci: We had about a 15 to 30 minute discussion with the whole gang, and then went our separate ways. We're still in the re-reading and taking it all in phase, before we actually sit down and start designing it.

Q: How much of that involves classic missions?

Orci: Everything's on the table.

Kurtzman: We have to comb through everything and make sure that we leave no stone unturned. That's what we did with the first movie.

Orci: And even when you pitch stuff, sometimes someone will be like, "Wow, that's like that one episode." So, even in trying to stay away from it, you can crash back in there.

Kurtzman: And, there's obviously a lot of expectation with the sequel. We take nothing for granted, at this point. We're only going to do it when it's really right.

Orci: But, we haven't hit the ground running yet.

Q: Could it bridge to a third movie?

Orci: It was more the fact that we talked about the minute you start seeing how much Star Trek there is, and how many ideas everyone's having, you could have enough material for more films. There is 43 years of material. That's all that we meant by that. It has to cross your mind, but we're not leaning one way or the other yet.

Q: How careful do you have to be not to overdo it?

Kurtzman: Well, it's a balance. The approach for us, on the first movie, was, "How do we please fans? And, how do we please people who have no relationship to Trek?" That's what we have to keep asking ourselves, constantly. That's a very tricky formula because it's hard. A lot of what makes die hard Trekkers really focused on Trek are those details that can sometimes be alienating to people who are not on the inside. So, that leads us back to, "What are the big themes and the emotional ideas?" That's a language everybody speaks.

Q: You still have to have Bones say, "He's dead, Jim."

Orci: That's right, that's right. I was watching Star Trek on cable, the other night. The original series has been on rotation, and I noted that. He said, "He's dead, Jim." I was like, "Oh, that has to go."

Q: Wouldn't it be cost effective to do two Star Trek sequels?

Orci: Even if we conceived of stories that were connected, I don't know that we'd be interested in shooting them, back to back. It's not about doing them together. It's just about what's best for the story.

Q: Are you also doing a View-Master movie?

Orci: We're producing it.

Kurtzman: It's funny, when we signed on to do Transformers, there was this incredibly cynical reaction to the idea of, "Oh, it's just a toy movie." I would hope that, by now, people would know that we would never walk into something, if we didn't actually have a real story behind it. The one thing, without giving away any details of about the story, is that certain toys should never be movies and certain toys should be. I think we've spent a lot of time talking about the difference between them.

Orci: It wasn't born in sin. What happened is that we have a friend who wrote on Fringe, who came in and had a pitch that he wanted to do of this movie. He wasn't even thinking of View-Master. Then, our company got a look at it and thought, "We could actually connect this with View-Master, who we know happens to be looking for someone." It wasn't like, "Let's come up with a View-Master movie." There was a great idea out there, and it was perfect to marry with View-Master.

Q: But, the Transformers were characters, and a View-Master isn't a character, so how would that work?

Kurtzman: It depends on how you define character. Some characters are obviously human. But, the Enterprise is a character on Star Trek, even though the Enterprise never speaks.

Q: Could it be in 3-D?

Kurtzman: Oh yeah, we'd love to do it in 3-D.

Orci: That's a good idea.

Q: How is Cowboys and Aliens coming?

Kurtzman: We literally just handed in the script.

Q: Have you had any chance to think about a third Transformers film?

Orci: No.

Kurtzman: No.

Q: Are you considering doing a third Transformers?

Kurtzman: I don't think we're going to.

Orci: We're not.

Q: Transformers 2 was such a hit, but how do you feel about it, artistically?

Orci: On any movie, we never feel like we're done. Even Michael will tell you that he wishes he had another two weeks in the editing room to cut it down. Without grading it on a curve, as we've said, we knew we were going to be in for a tough haul with the strike, with three months to prep it, with them prepping it from an outline, and dealing with US Auto, the Pentagon, two studios, Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg. We were lucky just to survive it and to get it on the screen, so that's its own victory. But, there's more we would do to it. We're never done.

Q: Then, why don't you want to try a third?

Orci: I don't know. I think that's what's best for the franchise. Just get some fresh blood in there. From the very beginning, we agreed with Michael that we wanted to make sure that each movie was just its own movie, so we didn't come into this with a trilogy in mind. It's not like we're leaving, midway through our concerto. We've done two of them. They were each supposed to be their own movie. We'll see. May the best idea win. We want to make sure we make room for the best idea.

Q: Do you expect to stay on Star Trek for more than 2 or 3?

Orci: Expect is a dirty word. It would be nice, but again we gotta take it one movie at a time. With Star Trek 2 being two years out from now, it's so hard to say, "Yeah, sign me up for 3."

Q: Have you talked with Damon Lindelof about collaborating on the Trek sequel?

Orci: Yeah, we're going to come up with a story together, obviously in consultation with J.J. and Bryan Burk. Then, we're going to write up the story together, and Alex and I will go write the script.

Q: Do you have a 2012 film also?

Orci: We did, at one time, but Roland Emmerich wrote his and got it set up during the strike because it was a spec, so he was legally able to write it, and he beat us to the punch. So, we had to dump it. Because it was a spec and no one was paying for it, he could keep writing his own thing. He finished it up during the strike.

Q: So there's only going to be one 2012 film?

Orci: Yeah.

Q: How do you feel about the passing of John Hughes? Was he an influence on you?

Kurtzman: Oh, my God, he was a huge influence. It was incredibly heart-breaking. We got John Hughes, at exactly the right time. We were 12 years old when The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles and Ferris Bueller came out.

Orci: He made movies for us.

Kurtzman: The thing about John Hughes, that really distinguished him from any other filmmaker, was that he always respected kids. His movies were told from the point of view of kids, which was odd because no other filmmaker out there seemed to understand kids as well as he did.

Orci: He didn't talk down to them.

Kurtzman: Even when he was being funny, and even when his movies were parodies, they were never parodies of kids. The fact that he was able to speak to us that way was unique. It's incredibly sad.

Q: How do you and Alex divide up your time?

Orci: We just split up the crises, as they come. In terms of writing, we do it together and we spend a certain amount of our day writing. Then, on the various projects that we're developing, there's one or the other who becomes responsible for it. We try to be together, but when we have to divide it, he develops half of our slate and I develop half of our slate with our team.

Q: Who's on point with Fringe?

Orci: With that, it's both of us. When we're writing it, we write it together.

Q: Has an element of Fringe surprised you that wasn't obvious when you started?

Orci: Actually, the idea of the parallel universe thing was something that Jeff Pinkner and the staff came up with together, once we had the pilot already shot. So, while we had an inkling of wanting some singular answer that explained what was causing the Fringe, it was actually Jeff Pinkner and the staff that came up with that and pitched it to us. So, here we are talking about what the second season's going to be, and it was the team that we assembled that came up with it.

Q: Where would you be if you'd waited until season three to reveal the alternate universe?

Orci: We would have continued a longer list of unexplained things and a more centralized version of asking the questions, "What is causing this? How can this stuff be explained? What single answer could explain this?" Also, there would maybe be more questioning of our own world.

Q: Is fringe science over there the same as it is here?

Orci: That's a good question. Nothing we've done yet makes that distinction. Until we determine otherwise, let's try to start with the same laws of physics. But, that's an area to play with, that's very interesting.

Q: Are you trying to avoid the alternate universe of Watchmen with Nixon still president?

Orci: I loved that in Watchmen. They had to change the constitution, too. But, no, we're trying to have the big events in history altered. So, Kennedy's alive and the World Trade Center is standing. Those things are actually hopeful, in a way. They move into the new White House because the White House was hit, not the World Trade Center.

Q: Are you working on Matt Helm?

Orci: Yes, we're producing that with Jerry Weintraub, who's amazing, and Paul Attanasio is writing it. We'll see if that's one of the ones we can get up and running soon.

Q: What's the vision for it?

Orci: It was an old series of great books about an American James Bond. Dean Martin played him, very much in a tongue-and-cheek, Austin Powers kind of way. It was campy. The idea of updating it is to make it a cool, sophisticated American answer to James Bond. That's the way we're thinking of it. There hasn't really been an American James Bond that has that slight swingin' sensibility, without it crossing over into parody.

Q: Is Steven Spielberg still involved?

Orci: He has still been very involved. He helped us develop it. It's something we all are still working on together, and he is no less excited about it.

Q: Is it out to any directors yet?

Orci: Not yet. Any second.

Q: At this point, are there things you see or read that still inspire you?

Orci: Absolutely, but mainly non-fiction. There's always stuff coming out that re-interprets what we already think we know, and that's part of what Fringe is about. You think you learned that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree, but maybe he didn't. Columbus discovered America? Not exactly. Growing up is a process of seeing that the lessons you learned, that you thought you already knew, are not exactly what you think. So, I love reading biographies, new history, seeing documents that are declassified now, and science.