Michael Chabon Relates Star Trek: Picard to John Carter and Spider-Man 2, Says It “Still Feels Like Fan Fiction”
"Michael Chabon" by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Star Trek: Picard series showrunner Michael Chabon is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and yet, he says, writing for Picard is still like writing fan fiction.
In the first of a two-part interview with StarTrek.com, Chabon related that despite all his successes in literature, he’s still amazed by what he’s doing now. He said, “For me, yeah, I’m getting paid to do it. And yet it really still feels like that fan fiction, like I’m getting to make more and tell stories about these pre-established characters.”
Chabon compared his work on Picard to two films he worked on as a writer: Spider-Man 2 and John Carter. Though his stint on Spider-Man was brief, he said, he did get the thrill of putting words in Peter Parker’s mouth, much as he gets to do with Picard. Or for that matter, with Spock, in his recent Short Treks episode, “Q&A”.
John Carter was a different beast, though. With that film, he said, they were adapting an origin story, so there was little freedom to deviate from an established story. Contrast that with Picard, and he says, “The Picard stories have all been told, in a sense, on TNG and in the films, and now we get to do something new, we get to go off in another direction.”
Relating Picard back to fan fiction again, Chabon posed that there are two “primary impulses”: one is to explain holes in an existing story, and one is to push past established boundaries. “And I feel like we’re doing a little of both actually,” he said. “On Picard, we are filling in some gaps. We are explaining things that might've gone unexplained heretofore, but we are also very much pushing into new territory and taking the character of Picard into places that he hasn't been before.”
Star Trek: Picard is currently in post-production and due to premiere on CBS All Access on January 23rd, 2020.
