How Michelle Yeoh’s ‘Star Trek’ role inspired every facet of ‘Section 31’ (Exclusive)

In the center of Star Trek: Episode 31 is Michelle Yeoh. Everything else within the first Trek films of the Paramount+ era revolve around her. The visuals, the camerawork, the colors of the costumes, the inclusion of certain spaceships are all inspired by the Emperor Philippa Georgiou Augustus Iaponius Centarius (or just Philippa for short), who was first introduced in Star Trek: Discovery.

“Ultimately, each scene usually belongs to a certain character. I Section 3199 percent of these scenes belong to Michelle Yeoh’s character, Philippa Georgiou,” says director Olatunde Osunsanmi, who also serves as executive producer on the film. Weekly entertainment. “So what you have is a film that’s visually inspired by who she is. She’s unpredictable, she’s dangerous, she’s relentless, she’s also discovered that she’s kind and has the possibility of redemption. Instead for a man on fire, you have a woman on fire and a visual design that is unpredictable for the first time in this modern era.”

Osunsanmi has been involved in the project for years. He remembers the work Star Trek: Discovery (“Disco,” for short), when Yeoh took a meeting with Alex Kurtzman, producer/overlord of Hollywood Trek empire. Their goal was to create a spinoff series, first announced in 2019, that centered around Philippa—not Captain Philippa Georgiou of the USS Shenzhou introduced in Disco season 1 premiere but Emperor Philippa Georgiou, an alternate version of the character from the Mirror Universe who rules the Terran Empire.

Osunsanmi planned to direct the pilot for this new series, written by Craig Sweeny. “We actually prepared and had a concept meeting about the pilot Section 31 while we were wrapping up and shooting the finale Disco season 2,” he mentions. “So we essentially had two parallel shows happening at the same time.”

A few starts and stops, another alternate pilot script treatment from Sweeny, a COVID-19 pandemic and two Hollywood strikes later, Star Trek: Episode 31 now stands as a movie out on Paramount+ next week. Osunsanmi credits Kurtzmans, Aaron Baiers (president of TV for Kurtzman’s production company, Secret Hideout) and Yeoh himself for keeping it alive. “I can’t believe we’re actually on the verge of releasing it to the world after all that,” he says.

Section 31 sees Philippa running a nightclub called Baraam when she is recruited to join the film’s titular squadron, a black-ops division of Starfleet. The other agents feel representative of classic spy and heist movie archetypes, but with a Star Trek twist.

There’s Alok (Omari Hardwick), the capable team leader; Rachel Garrett (Kacey Rohl), the Starfleet representative according to the books; Quasi (Sam Richardson), the “master of disguise”, shape-shifting camelid; Zeph (Rob Kazinsky), the “muscle” of the group, fused with a mechanical exoskeleton; Fuzz (Sven Ruygrok), the hacker type who isn’t quite the Vulcan he appears to be; and Melle (Humberly González), the “femme fatale” Deltan, an alien species known for their strong sexual attraction. The mission, the details of which will remain under wraps until the film premieres, involves Philippa struggling with her past. (Actress Miku Martineau plays a younger Philippa in flashbacks.)

“It’s definitely different to have this type of team in Star Trek universe,” says Osunsanmi. “That’s what was exciting about it, seeing what’s going on in the dark and what’s going on far outside of Federation space.”

Osunsanmi considers himself the kind of director who lets character and emotion guide how he visualizes the story for an audience. Similar to how previously Star Trek shows as Strange New Worlds, Lower deckand Picard came up with their own aesthetic, he latched onto Philippa’s unpredictability and used it to inform everything else. “That’s why we get the unpredictable lenses. We could be in this lens,” he says, referring to the horizontal Zoom screen through which he appears for the interview, “but then it could zoom in, it could zoom out again , it could do both within that, you don’t know what it’s going to do.”

He also notes how he went to Panavision and asked them to reconstruct some of their equipment to give them different bokeh camera lenses which create artfully blurred backgrounds. “Some of the bokeh you’ll see is very digital when (the story is) very mission oriented,” Osunsanmi explains. “Sometimes when we were in Baraam, we had horizontal ovals for bokeh in the background, which gave it its own special thing that hasn’t been in any other Star Trek.”

Even Team Section 31’s mission ship is closer to a typical starship, but it’s catered (by production designer Paul Kirby) to Philippa and the specific staff around her. The costumes, Osunsanmi points out, have pinks and purples, which fans don’t often wear Discoas well as distinct blues they haven’t seen since Disco season 1. “In this current version of Trek,” he says, “everything is just a little more on edge and unpredictable, which reflects Philippa Georgiou’s personality.”

You will see what he means when Star Trek: Episode 31 premieres on Paramount+ January 24.

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Olatunde Osunsanmi is credited as the author of Star Trek: Episode 31. He is credited as director and executive producer.