Evidently, the first meeting between Simon Pegg and Justin Lin was tempestuous at best. Lin felt that the “Star Trek” movies needed to be a little more daring than they had been, and that some lines needed to be crossed. Pegg, an outspoken pop culture nerd, was still keen on keeping the spirit of “Star Trek” alive. Lin recalled the initial outrage he encountered when he pitched his plot idea, and the fear that the film may not happen:
“Simon was like, ‘You can’t destroy the Enterprise and you can’t do it in the end of the first act. It has to be the end of the movie!’ […] That was our first meeting. We walked out and I think all of us were like, ‘I don’t want to work on this movie. What’s going on?'”
Pegg, likewise, admitted that their first meeting wasn’t entirely copacetic and that hours and hours passed without a compromise. The screenwriter said:
“We call it The Longest Day. […] We were in this room at the SoHo Hotel, just talking for 16 hours and we didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. But it was a great way to establish that all of us really wanted to make the best film we could.”
That’s a diplomatic way to say that it was a frustrating and unproductive day. Luckily, they soon found some equal footing and began to slowly extrude workable ideas out of their collaboration. Ultimately, the director and the writer found common ground in their mutual outrage over what was happening politically in the real world. They admitted that their film isn’t a direct metaphor for the rise of the Extreme Right in both England and America in 2016, but it did serve as inspiration.