Friday, May 8, and JJ Abrams is on the phone. Might as well call it Star Trek Day. For, thanks to the cinematic carpet bombing known as “simultaneous global release” — a means by which marketeers exploit the “event” status of a film — it’s the date on which the earth has been designated to stand still. Backed by a dawn raid on children’s telly, in which ads for the Star Trek action figures have assaulted the preschool senses, the movie is rolling out, cogs whirring in multiplex projectors across the western hemisphere, as Abrams speaks. The UK and Europe have had their matinées; East Coast USA is about to yank up the shutters. Thanks to the time-shift propensities of the International Date Line, viewers in Australia, New Zealand and obscure Polynesian archipelagos are already kipping on the exploits of the all-new Enterprise.

For a man with a $150m project at stake, Abrams seems remarkably unruffled. “Hopefully, by the end of the day, I’ll find out something that is better news than not,” he says, with what you fancy is a shrug. His son is off school. They are going to hang out at home in Pacific Palisades, LA. The proliferation of five-star reviews, broadsheets and all — rare for a studio action-adventure film — is not something that computes. “I just cross my fingers and hope people like it.”

Is there anybody out there who isn’t aware of Abrams’s movie, the prequel to the landmark 1960s television series, featuring the junior versions of Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Uhura et al? Abrams has been no slouch. Six months ago, he hauled 25 minutes of raw footage on a global tour, personally introducing it to press audiences in all the “key markets”, a move untypical of his prissy directorial breed, for whom anything other than the finished article is to be locked away. Then again, Star Trek is no ordinary beast: 43 years, umpteen TV series, 10 films, a whole literary and digital alternate universe. “It was really important that we, as early as possible, give people a taste of what our movie is not,” he declares. “We needed to show people this movie was connected to the existing franchise, yet a new breed.”

There is another inescapable fact. When it comes to the names involved, Abrams is the star. His contractual deals with Paramount Pictures (film) and Warner Bros (TV) are said to be worth $55m, making him the highest-paid writer-producer in Hollywood. Since establishing himself as the new godfather of sci-fi — most notably with his TV brainchild, Lost — he has entered into that small bracket of auteurs whose name defines a project.

“A lot of times, I feel guilty about that, because my name will be out there — ‘Oh, the creator of Lost’ — but it’s critically important that I remind people it was created by Damon Lindelof and myself,” he stresses. “And Fringe was not just me. Even when I did Alias (his young-woman-as-CIA-agent adventure), although I created the show, it felt as if Jennifer Garner did as much to create the character of Sydney Bristow as I did. Though I will say this: if people see a movie and don’t like it, I take full responsibility.”

Rebooting Star Trek was no cast-iron guarantee of success, he adds. The latter films in the franchise had become box- office poison, albeit still cherished by the Trekkie faithful. Traditionally, a Khan-like wrath has been reserved for anyone messing with the sacred text — not helped by Abrams’s mischievous pronouncements that he never much cared for Star Trek in the first place. “I don’t know why, but I never got into it,” he reiterates. “I never accepted it the way friends of mine did. I always felt a little bit on the outside. But Star Wars — in 1977, I was 11 years old, and it just blew my head open. So, for me, Star Wars was redefining and Star Trek was a disconnect.”

There has, however, been a diplomatic softening. “Of course, I’ve come to love the characters and the world. I feel a little stupid that I had to direct a movie to understand what my friends had loved for so long.”

Wind back a few weeks and Jeffrey Jacob Abrams is sitting in the Four Seasons hotel, Beverly Hills. In person, he is an engaging sort, a Tarantino-like fast-talker, his demeanour suggesting “wacky best friend” in an American sitcom; short in stature, gravity-repulsing thick dark hair (perhaps a little too black for a man of 42), chunky, narrow, meeja-type specs, black V-neck sweater over white T-shirt, tastefully distressed jeans. A wizard of multitasking — including writing the music for some of his projects — he has, out in the corridor, been fielding calls about Star Trek’s promotional campaign and liaising with the editing suite while churning out ideas on other projects. Plonking himself into an armchair, he lays on the coffee table his instruments of fortune — a BlackBerry and a jotter. “I’m gonna do a little portrait,” he quips.

You never know when inspiration is going to strike. “I remember when my wife and I went on our honeymoon,

I had this idea. My wife, Katie, she knew who she had married. I’m not saying we didn’t have a wonderful honeymoon, but we have pictures of us in Bali, and I’m in the hot tub with a notebook, filling out pages like an idiot.”

At college in the mid-1980s, while his contemporaries were wearing traffic cones on their heads, Abrams was busy writing the scripts that would mark his entrée into the business. “If I’d been more popular, I probably would have done more partying,” he joshes. “But when I went to a party, I would always have ideas for things that I’d want to go home and work on, so I would end up leaving early, being a dolt.” It paid off. During his final year, aged 21, Abrams sold a treatment that became Taking Care of Business, a comedy made with Charles Grodin and James Belushi.

He was born in New York, but grew up in LA, with movie- producer parents, and cautions about the pitfalls of The Biz fell on deaf ears: “My father was not necessarily encour­aging. I didn’t care.” (His sister, Tracy Abrams, also ignored parental counsel, going on to write for television too.) As a kid, he made Super 8 movies, inspired by his hero, Rod Serling, creator of the classic sci-fi series The Twilight Zone. “It was always the thing I wanted to do, since I was eight years old. There was no question that it was my dream.” After college, there followed screenplays for the two biggest stars of the day: Harrison Ford (Regarding Henry) and Mel Gibson (Forever Young). By the end of the 1990s, Abrams could add the mega-hit Armageddon, the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced met­eor movie. Life was good.

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