Interesting perspective from Ms. Kennedy. What's happened to the simple, "No comment," when asked a question one doesn't want to answer? Why lie?
If you give nine straightforward answers in an interview, but on the last one when they ask you specifically if the villain is Khan you say "no comment," the interviewer and the readers will assume that he or she hit the mark and that the villain is Khan. Saying no comment to such a specific question after answering so many others might as well be like saying "yes" from the perspective of entertainment magazines, websites, and fans with their rampant speculation, exaggeration, and misinterpretation.
The choice would be to either say no comment on everything, in which case you're doing a bad job of promoting and building excitement for your movie, or to do a rope-a-dope or a denial when it comes to the really important stuff, while still talking about the less important things.
Plus, can you imagine the tedium of having to give the same response over and over again in the hundreds of interviews that the top tier cast and crew have to do leading up to the movie? I'm sure after a while they just start screwing around to break the boredom of answering the same questions.
Either way, there's nothing malicious about it, any more than a magician is being a malicious liar because he fools you with a trick. It's all about maintaining the illusion and keeping the audience entertained.
That is not what she said.
Kathleen Kennedy said:
If we're shooting anything outside, it's almost impossible to not have things end up on the Internet. So my feeling is, you need to embrace that, especially with the fans around something like Star Wars. You need to recognize they're important to the process and acknowledge there are things you're gonna want to make sure they get to know.
Doesn't take a genius to get what she was saying.
She said if you're shooting something openly it's rather silly to deny it, and she said it's sometimes a good idea to include the fans in on the process. Nowhere did she completely rule out keeping secrets or using misdirection and denials to conceal major character and plot points.
I don't think Abrams would disagree with any of that. Despite his accurate reputation for secrecy and misdirection, he does actually share a lot of information with fans when it gets closer to the film's premiere, he just tightly controls which information that is going to be. So you might get a preview of the first nine minutes of the film, but you're not going to find out who the villain is.
Abrams is quite adept at promoting and building up anticipation for his films and TV shows (some of his critics would say that's what he's best at, in fact), so why should he change a formula that works for him?
Can't "Khan" be a title as well as a name?
Khan
is a title. It's not part of his name.
It's probably been mentioned, but perhaps they had access to all the original treatments and drafts of "Space Seed" when preparing the script. The use of the name 'John Harrison' might have evolved just from reading Memory Alpha's background on the episode.
Memory Alpha said:
In writer Carey Wilber's original treatment, the Khan character is a Nordic superman named Harold Erricsen. This evolved in the first draft, where the character first introduces himself as John Ericssen, but is later revealed to be Ragnar Thorwald, who was involved in "the First World Tyranny".
Yeah, I mentioned that's one of the reasons I thought Khan was the main villain way back before all the spoilers started pouring in.
My suspicion that Cumberbatch might be Khan has hinged not only on the several allusions to
TWoK in this film, but also to a couple of the original names for Khan in the early drafts of
Space Seed:
In writer Carey Wilber's original treatment, the Khan character is a Nordic superman named Harold Erricsen. This evolved in the first draft, where the character first introduces himself as John Ericssen, but is later revealed to be Ragnar Thorwald, who was involved in "the First World Tyranny". (Star Trek Magazine issue 120, The Star Trek Compendium, pp. 57-58)
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Space_Seed_%28episode%29
John +
Harold E
rric
sen becomes John Harrison. Also, he initially gives a false identity to conceal his infamous name, just as it's been speculated Harrison might be doing here.
Given Orci and Kurtzman's (especially Orci's) knowledge and referencing of Trek lore, and the fact that they would undoubtedly have researched
Space Seed extensively while working on the script, that seems like something they might do to give the villain a name that's a hint but at the same time deniable and not completely obvious.
