/Film Interview: JJ Abrams Talks ‘Super 8’, Bad Robot, Lens Flares, LOST, Spielberg And The Mystery Box
By Peter Sciretta/June 10, 2011 1:39 pm EST
Peter Sciretta: Hey JJ.JJ Abrams: Hey, how’s it going?Peter: Good. Loved Super 8.JJ: Thanks, man.Peter: Your film focuses on a son and a father trying to recover from the death of their mother/wife. Spielberg drew the story of ET from divorce. I was wondering where this story sort of came from. What elements did you draw from your own childhood?JJ: Though I haven’t lost a parent, the emotional lives of kids are so fraught and deep and complicated. And I just remember being a kid and seeing friends whose parents were getting divorced left and right. My parents are still married. I watched friends who lost parents or who had a single parent. I just remember the complexity of being a kid and all the type of fears that you had about “what if?” You know, what could be sort of the terror of the adult world. And that was the thing that was, for me, kind of the most compelling, which was being a kid and feeling…in a way you could almost kind of quantify the encroaching adult world and the reality that you were, at some point or another, be hit by the adult world stick. So I didn’t go through a particular story in that regard as Spielberg did with a divorced family. But the idea of loss and being without a parent. And the thing that I did experience was I had a father who, in a sort of typical 1970’s way, was a little bit less involved than I think dads are now. So the idea in my life was if the mother is suddenly gone and this boy didn’t have the greatest relationship with his dad, what is that relationship once she’s gone? And part of the story was that. Like, what do you do when the primary parent goes away, and how do you reconcile that? How does the father reconcile it?Peter: Definitely. You don’t see movies like this anymore. You don’t see movies about kids where it’s not condescending or a family movie. This is a movie about kids’ dealing with complex issues and it doesn’t have The Rock as the focal point. Why is it that Hollywood can’t make more movies like this?JJ: I have no idea why anything does or doesn’t get made. But I feel like there was a kind of movie that I watched when I was younger, which was a movie that had believable characters that made you laugh, that made you comfortable, that then went through something insane and extraordinary and often faced with this genre. And by the end of the movie you didn’t just go through something that made you scared, and laugh, and amazed, but also made you emotional and perhaps even made you cry. And there was something about those movies that were simultaneously moving and also fantastical.
Those were the kind of movies that I loved. I’m not saying that you can’t never try them at all. But there was a kind of movie that I loved when I was a kid where I would be laughing one minute, crying the next minute, I would be amazed the next, and scared the next. And by the time the movie is over I felt like I had been through this sort of roller coaster of various emotions and it was a wonderful, satisfying thing. The goal of Super 8 was to try to make a movie that was not just a comedy, not just a horror movie, not just a science fiction film, not just a love story, not just an emotional family trauma or a weird sort of paranoid thriller, but all of them.
