I quickly said that, because of my loyalty to 'Star Trek' and also just being a fan, I wouldn’t even want to be involved in the next version of those things. I declined any involvement very early on. I’d rather be in the audience not knowing what was coming, rather than being involved in the minutiae of making them.

'Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope' (1977) is probably the most influential film of my generation. That work was the personification of good and evil and the way it opened up the world to space adventure, the way westerns had to our parents' generations, it left an indelible imprint. So, in a way, everything that any of us does is somehow directly or indirectly affected by the experience of seeing those first three films.

As a kid, 'Star Wars' was much more my thing than 'Star Trek' was.

I feel like obviously the standard for what TV looks like changes all the time.

Well, we knew that we wanted to tell a story that made bold choices, and one of those bold choices was meeting a storm trooper and seeing who this person was. That's something that had never been done.

Ratings have changed, viewer habits have changed and the options for the audience have grown enormously, but I don't think how you tell a story is fundamentally different.

Cameron Crowe is someone who I've admired for so long, and I've been friends with him for many years, and I've wanted to work with him so badly that I just never stopped bothering him about writing a script that would be for a pilot.