Roberto Orci Says That Many Events in New Star Trek Movie Happened Exactly That Way in the Original Timeline

The latest issue of Script magazine features a new interview with Star Trek writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman and here are few excerpts.

Orci : Leonard Nimoy blessing and that character's genuine involvment as an organic story point in a way generates our story. His being the cause (in a sense) of the prequel was the thing that we needed to realize : Aha, now we can both be free from the constrictions because he literally travels back in time and changes the history of the characters, but also be true to Star Trek because [Spock] is the original character. So, that freed us and made us respectful to the history.

In our movie the characters face different choices than they did originally. Therefore, they find themselves the same characters -the same soul- in a different situation. [That scenario] allows us to be reverential as we want to, or not. And even though we could have given ourselves complete freedom with the altering of the timeline, you will find that many of the events in our movie -including some of the characters' introductions- happened exactly that way in the original universe.

[...]

We read everything we could, including college dissertations. We read all the commercially available guides to Star Trek and also inside stuff that Paramount had from Roddenberry, including notes he had written on later movies in which he was less involved. Before we start writing, we sat down with Shatner and Nimoy, just sort of pitched them in general what we were thinking and what their interest might be.

http://trekweb.com/articles/2009/07/14/Orci-Says-Characters-Introductions-in-New-Movie-Happened-the-Same-Way-in-Original-Timeline.shtml