Composer Jeff Russo says Noah Hawley’s shelved Star Trek script would have made fans “lose their minds”
"Jeff Russo" (left) and "Noah Hawley" (right) by Gage Skidmore are licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
MAY 2, 2021- While we wait for details about the Star Trek feature film currently penciled in for June 2023 release, franchise composer Jeff Russo has chimed in with a few thoughts about his friend Noah Hawley’s now-dormant film that Paramount Pictures veered away from last fall.
In an interview with TrekMovie.com, Russo said he and Hawley had already had extensive conversations about the film, and while Russo had not seen any of the pre-production work, he had read the script and even started work on some musical themes for the movie. And in his words, what he read would have made Star Trek fans “lose their minds.”
“It would have been telling a story that they hadn’t heard, that hadn’t been done, in a way that would have been very fulfilling,” Russo continued. “Finding out answers to questions that have never been answered.”
Official details on Hawley’s story were never made public, save a piece in Deadline last August that said it might have been about a deadly virus. In any case, Russo’s comments about “questions that have never been answered” seem to indicate it spoke to the larger Star Trek mythology in a way that would have resonated with long-time fans of the franchise. And according to Russo, it’s a story that could still be told as a standalone film within the larger scope of what Star Trek is doing theatrically. “It stands totally on its own. It’s one of those stories where yeah, it can drop right into the middle of the whole thing. It could work if they just made one and never go back to it, and it would be totally fine.”
Even if Hawley’s script never sees the light of day, Russo also shared with TrekMovie that the musical themes he developed could still be repurposed in his score for the upcoming fourth season of Star Trek: Discovery. To read a transcript of Russo’s conversation with TrekMovie, or to listen to the interview on their All Access podcast, visit TrekMovie.com.
Jack Brown is a contributing writer for Daily Star Trek News on the Roddenberry Podcast Network. Jack teaches at a small film school in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and also helps to manage his wife's career as a novelist and speaker. In his spare time he writes fiction, cooks, and watches classic movies.
