Fast Company feature: J.J. Abrams

Fast Company ranks J.J. Abrams as the 14th most creative person in business:

J.J. Abrams warps Time at will. Past, present, and future coexist as a kind of fluid that cannot be contained. The camera jumps back and forth in time. Characters age and grow younger again. Time itself accelerates, then slows. “It’s intriguing to play with exactly when you learn elements in a story,” says the Emmy-winning writer-director-producer, referring to Lost, his biggest hit on the small screen. “It engages audience members in a puzzle where they begin to question everything. It makes them look for clues in what they’re watching in a way traditional narrative doesn’t.”

The article makes an interesting point about how time has been a consistent theme in Abrams’ stories:

Abrams’s bent for time-bending goes back to his early screenwriting work: In Mike Nichols’s Regarding Henry (1991), the central character, played by Harrison Ford, recovers from amnesia and tries to amend his past. In Forever Young, the following year, the lead (Mel Gibson) awakes after a long cryogenic slumber and begins aging rapidly. In Lost, Abrams, who directed the pilot, uses a plane crash to draw a line between past and present, but his characters shuttle between their earlier and marooned selves, allowing him to trace multiple narratives for each of them. And in directing this spring’s Star Trek, a prequel featuring Spock and Kirk as hot post-adolescents, Abrams used time travel to reinvigorate a tired franchise (and spare us from seeing what the years might have done to Shatner since The Undiscovered Country).

As I recall, both Regarding Henry and Forever Young were spec script sales.

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