Abrams revisits youth for ‘Super 8’

By David Germain

AP Movie Writer

LAS VEGAS

J.J. Abrams is making good use of his boyhood apprenticeship shooting super-8 movies.

The director of 2009’s “Star Trek” and creator of TV’s “Lost” revisits his childhood with this summer’s “Super 8,” about a band of kids shooting a monster movie who end up documenting a train wreck that unleashes an alien force.

The movie is the most autobiographical he has worked on, Abrams said in an interview at CinemaCon, a Las Vegas convention for theater owners, where he showed off footage recently.

The youths in “Super 8” are doing exactly what the 44-year-old Abrams was doing three decades ago, when he was obsessed with making his own horror films and monster flicks.

“It was sort of an uncanny thing shooting it, because it felt like I had gone back to my childhood in a way that was just incredibly surreal and oddly disturbing,” Abrams said. “There are moments where I was like, ‘My God, this is exactly what it was like.’ The set dressing, the costumes. Certainly, some of the subject matter was just very transportive.”

Due in theaters June 10 amid Hollywood’s onslaught of visual-effects and action tales, “Super 8” began as a quiet drama about teen filmmakers in a small town. Abrams decided that while he loved the characters he had created for that scenario, it needed something to make it an event audiences would want to see.

At the same time, he was working with distributor Paramount Pictures on a sci-fi adventure about a train that crashes while carrying an alien presence from Area 51.

“The problem with that premise is I didn’t have characters that I loved and cared about inside that world. So I had a sort of premise on the one hand with no characters I could get inside of, and on the other, I had characters I was inside of with no story. So I thought, ‘Fit them together,’” Abrams said. “Why don’t they answer each other’s problems and become one thing?”

“Super 8” has an alien master among its producers in Steven Spielberg, whose blockbusters include “E.T. the Extra-terrestrial” and “War of the Worlds.”