by Edward Gross
DeFOREST KELLEY
When the scene was first presented to me, it was a little harsher. Once we smoothed it out, I still knew it was going to be a difficult scene to do, and I felt if it didn’t come off exactly right, we could be in trouble.
WILLIAM SHATNER
After De read the script, he didn’t want to do the scene. So I took him to lunch and tried to convince him it would work. I said, “De, this is the best scene you’ve had to play in a long time.” He’s such a wonderful actor, and I really felt he hadn’t had a chance recently to show what he was capable of doing. Finally, after much talking, I convinced him to do it.
DeFOREST KELLEY
I don’t know whether the public realizes it or not, but a character that people have watched for so many years was being stripped in front of them of a very private and secretive situation that took place in his life. That moment of McCoy’s privacy in Star Trek V would have been divulged to Kirk before anyone. His opening line, “Oh my God, don’t do this to me,” meant so many things: he knew that it was happening to him there, in front of these people. Plus the fact that he had to relive it again was tough.
WILLIAM SHATNER
His one stipulation was that we add an explanation of why McCoy committed the euthanasia. We added a short bit of dialogue where Sybok asks, “Why did you do it?” and McCoy answers, “To preserve his dignity.” With these new lines, De felt that McCoy’s motivations were clearer and more understandable.
DeFOREST KELLEY
The more I looked at it and studied the scene, the more important it became to me, because it’s a topic that goes on today. I thought it would be interesting to lay it out in the presence of a motion-picture audience and let them decide within themselves what is right or wrong.
Along with the challenges inherent in realizing the flawed screenplay were myriad production problems, including the originally conceived finale. In that sequence, a horde of gargoyles are released on “God’s” planet and attack the landing party. Captain Kirk must also confront a giant rock man, a concept successfully realized many years later in Galaxy Quest to more comedic effect. As a result of budgetary issues, all these elements were excised from the final film.
WILLIAM SHATNER
I didn’t have the sense to hoard my money for the grand finale. I was very busy spending wonderful dollars fighting for effects in the opening. I’m not that much of a neophyte not to know that you need a good opening, but I hurt my finale by not having enough money. Nothing I could do to the studio would make them say, “Here’s another three million dollars for more gargoyles and special effects,” which it needed.
DAVID LOUGHERY
When the torpedo came down and explodes the hole, it’s like the bottle is uncapped and the imps spill out, free, and chase our characters back to the shuttle. That was our original concept. A movie, especially a movie like this one, goes through so many transformations from original story to final film. Because of all the hands involved in the making of these movies, it sometimes starts to take on a committee atmosphere to moviemaking. Things don’t turn out exactly the way you originally wanted them to, but there are reasons for that.
WILLIAM SHATNER
I was required to reduce the budget, and I kept slicing away at the ending. I didn’t realize until we got there how much of the ending I had lost and what a disservice I had done to the film. That was lesson number one.
RALPH WINTER
We never ran out of money. We ran out of good ideas and good execution. What we thought with the rock creature was just completely silly and we bagged it. It became obvious that it was just silly and it would have been more expensive. On some of these movies, the third act doesn’t get developed at the same pace.
DAVID LOUGHERY
We certainly wish we could have hung on to some of the concept. That sequence got lost when it became financially impossible for us to create the gargoyle creatures. You’re always sorry to see those things go, because your imagination is one thing and the budget is something else. In various places, we had to make certain cuts and rearrangements based on how much we could afford.
HARVE BENNETT
Basically, I was called in to control Bill’s appetites. They were extravagant because he didn’t know anything. He had spent all those years in front of the camera, and believed because he had directed T.J. Hooker and Leonard had done it, he could too. Bill would come in and present a concept and he thought he was discovering the wheel. It’s funny how first-time directors try to be pioneers in the craft.
WILLIAM SHATNER
It’s like youth. I wish I were able to say it was because of my youth. A first-time director knows no boundaries, and it’s not knowing them that you shatter them. Rather than accepting the status quo, I tried to break boundaries and make the camera do things that it wasn’t supposed to, not because I didn’t know how, but I thought that by standing firm and being as adamant as possible it would happen. But there came a point where I had to compromise. I was rushing around trying to save what I thought was my movie, but I had spent days and weeks with Harve telling him the story and him telling me his version of the story and the script, and we worked in a very close and intimate way. It got to the point where we were talking about the death and birth of people close to us, and there were times where tears passed between us in the intimacy of his office. These moments are part of Star Trek V for me. If anybody else is doing another trip, that’s their problem.
ANDREW LASZLO (director of photography, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier)
Working with Bill was a great incentive, because, frankly, when an outsider directs a Star Trek movie, I don’t think it measures up. If they had called me and said, “We’d like you to shoot this film and it’ll be directed by so-and-so famous director,” the attraction would have been a great deal less. The reason I was attracted by the aspect of Bill directing the film is that he has been Star Trek, he is Star Trek. You remove him from the scene and there is no Star Trek. Who understands Star Trek better from the point of view of its special audience than the person who is Star Trek? I also wanted to do it because it was part of a very famous and well-known series, and having done a couple of those before, such as First Blood and Poltergeist II, I wanted to get another one under my belt.
WILLIAM SHATNER
Technically, it went well, I thought. We hired a lot of different people. We went to New York and got other special-effects people. So we experimented and I had to learn a great deal, not only about film but the politics of film.
ANDREW LASZLO
We were both under different kinds of pressure having to do with the tightness of the schedule and different ways of doing things. And this sometimes pitted us against each other. I understood that Bill was under tremendous pressure, this being his first big movie, especially since he hoped to match the success of Leonard Nimoy. Sometimes these pressures resulted in creative differences, but we managed to do the film not in spite of them, but because of them. It was a great experience and somehow, as we went through it together, we became good friends.
WALTER KOENIG
I read the script in Harve’s office and I was trying to be diplomatic, because we had already had problems in terms of discussing story, and I told him, “Don’t you think coming back and doing the campfire scene at the end is sort of gilding the lily?” He said, “Yes, I do, but he wants to shoot it that way and in the editing, we’ll pull it way back.” That didn’t happen, but that’s what he said to me.
HARVE BENNETT
It was a passive premise. The chore became to make the trip as interesting as possible, and to that extent we succeeded. The film was real good until the moment when the inevitable truth poked its head out and said, “Hey, this isn’t God,” and everyone said, “We knew that all the time, but we were having a good time up until then.”
LEONARD NIMOY (actor, “Mr. Spock”)
Bill worked very, very hard and he directed it as well and as capably as any of our other films. He
was not riding on a good script. If you’re not riding on a good script, you’re the person people point fingers at. And he was responsible. It was his story. I’ve had that experience. I did a movie for Paramount [Funny About Love] that didn’t work at all. I wasn’t successful with the script.
DAVID LOUGHERY
In retrospect, you look back from the distance of a number of years, and I’ve always felt—it was always in the back of my head—that one of the problems is that it’s a reactive story rather that an active one. What I mean by that is that our guys are kind of required to stand by and be dragged along on somebody else’s quest. In this case, Sybok’s. It’s sort of his quest and his passion, and Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and the rest of the crew are dragged along almost as though they were a supporting cast to this guy. If it had been Kirk who suddenly had this vision of God and hijacked his own ship and turned against the Federation, then you’ve got this much more active, passionate kind of story.
LEONARD NIMOY
I complained. I said, “I think you’ve got some problems here,” and the message I got back is “We know what we’ve got and we know what we want to do.” Having sent in my notes, once they got them it’s not my place to say “You must do the following.” Once the tank starts rolling, it’s tough to stop it. It’s very interesting. You cannot draw a rule and say “It must be done this way.” Sometimes things bubble together and sometimes they don’t, even though you’ve got very well-paid and professional people doing the job. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t and that’s why some pictures succeed and some pictures fail.
WALTER KOENIG
I didn’t initially feel the project was doomed. Bill’s a bright man. He understands the camera very well. I don’t think he has as good a story sense as he does of camera and how to direct. I never said I felt the picture failed because of his direction. It failed because of the story concept. I don’t think it was well thought out. We had the same problem we had on Star Trek: The Motion Picture. We had an antagonist who changes, who goes through a metamorphosis, and suddenly the guy that we’ve been booing and hissing is one of us and we introduce a whole other character to be an antagonist at the end of the story without building to this and without ever having a sense of learning to fear and to hate the evil entity.
JAMES DOOHAN (actor, “Montgomery ‘Scotty’ Scott”)
All we needed, and all of us say this, was a good script. Unfortunately, we didn’t have one in V, and even that made pretty darn good money for an ordinary movie. It was just a very bad script and a lot of things were badly done. He was not up to the task, there’s no doubt about that, and one of Bill’s problems is that Bill thinks of Bill whereas with Leonard, he thinks of the show and he thinks of himself second.
WILLIAM SHATNER
Yes, the cast loved Leonard, and why not? He’s a very lovable person. I don’t know why, a couple of people of the cast—and they’ve never said it to my face—didn’t enjoy making the film with me.
WALTER KOENIG
What it speaks to is that the supporting cast doesn’t have the influence with the executives in the front office that the big three do. Originally, Leonard and DeForest’s characters fell sway [to Sybok’s mind control] and Kirk was the only one that didn’t and they objected rightly, but the rest of us weren’t in a position to object. In my case, the onus was pretty much off of me because you didn’t see me convert and the consequences of the conversion. I abhorred the idea because it was really a religious conversion the way it was originally written, which was particularly objectionable. The holier-than-thou sort of stuff was almost a Moonies kind of thing.
EDDIE EGAN
I think these actors have told these stories so many times that they actually believe they happened. Is Bill a larger-than-life actor with an ego? Absolutely. Are the others? Absolutely. But they’re not the hero of this story. No one would ever construct a story that is equal part Kirk, Spock, McCoy, or Scotty. It wouldn’t work. You wouldn’t know who to focus on. They were brilliant actors playing supporting roles, and it’s not something I think they ever acclimated themselves to in the structure of the movies as opposed to how they are hailed and received and applauded at conventions. People take little Shatner bits and exaggerate them. He was a guy with a job. He just wasn’t as gregarious as the others and Leonard was more gregarious than he was, because Leonard is just more curious about people and he likes conversations. But I really think that a lot of the situation is telling a story so much that you now believe it, and it’s like the Brian Williams effect. Every time you tell it, you add a layer to it until it implodes.
So the idea that they should be equal is nuts. I mean, even DeForest Kelley, the nicest man on Earth who could have taken some issue with not being a true trinity, knew his place and knew what his character was. And that character was designed and welcomed as the voice between the hot head and the logical one. He was happy to be that voice.
RALPH WINTER
We were one of the few who have actually been able to shoot anything inside of Yosemite. That’s a national treasure. They were terrific. We left it better than we found it and they were happy with us. We got some spectacular footage. The second-unit director who did all the climbing footage up El Capitan is the father of the lead singer of Maroon 5. I remember him giving me a tape of his son’s band.
ANDREW LASZLO
We went to great expense and a lot of difficulty to visit various locations, including Yosemite National Park and Trona Pinnacles. The opening sequence, a variation on the long-lens shot of Omar Sharif riding his camel toward camera in Lawrence of Arabia, as well as some of the later sequences, were shot in the California desert where we built an entire little town that was supposedly on this hostile, arid planet. We actually landed the shuttlecraft by suspending it from a huge construction crane. Not only does it land on the sand dunes, but a second later the rear hatch opens and out pop a bunch of marines who jump over the camera, followed by the crew of the Enterprise. We did that in a single shot. Everything becomes very difficult when you work in the sand—vehicles can’t move, especially those that can transport and then lift a very large eight-thousand-pound object.
HARVE BENNETT
We did some reshooting. We did do a day and a half that Bill directed to tie certain things together, compared to hundreds of other movies that go out and shoot five weeks and millions of dollars. You’re speaking about a day and a half of pickup shots. There was an absence of understanding with the Klingons. There was no understanding about why the guy [Klaa] apologizes to Kirk. That was necessary because of the evolution of the Klingon relationship in The Next Generation.
DAVID LOUGHERY
One of the things that was cut out of the movie is that the reason Captain Klaa was so passionate about chasing down Kirk was that he not only wanted that feather in his cap, but because there was still a bounty on Kirk’s head. That was a thematic thing that would have joined into the next movie. Then they had this ridiculous reshoot that was done without me in which Kirk comes aboard the Enterprise. In the original script he walks in on the Bird of Prey, the chair turns, and here’s Spock. They have this embrace—“Please, Captain, not in front of the Klingons”—and there’s a big laugh. But they went back and shot this bit where Klaa is forced to step out and say, “I apologize.” Their thinking there, I guess, is that he had gone off on his own after Kirk. That was something that bugged me. The only thing I do get out of it that’s really pleasurable is that during that reshoot, which was two or three months afterward, in the close-up of Bill his face looks about ten pounds fatter than in the previous shot. So there’s a little bit of revenge there, although I don’t blame Bill for that. Or anybody, really. It’s just one of those situations where they felt they had to plug a hole.
WILLIAM SHATNER
Having done a quick course with Joseph Campbell, I’ve realized the magic of Star Trek is to provide a mythology that this culture doesn’t have. As he pointed out, mythology relates man to his environme
nt and tries to explain some inexplicable dilemmas and the dichotomies that face us. Because of the construction of our culture, we don’t have time for that because all of us are busy solving these problems with science. I think mythology is best served by an individual, along with his hearty band of brothers, as was done so many times, so well by the Greeks.
Not since the Robert Abel debacle on Star Trek: The Motion Picture had visual effects proved to be such a detriment to one of the features. For Star Trek II, III, and IV, the studio relied on the safe choice of George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic. For Star Trek V, the producers turned to East Coast–based Associates & Ferren to create the film’s elaborate visuals. But unlike on the 1979 film—when the studio fired Abel and replaced him with Douglas Trumbull and John Dykstra’s Apogee, who created some of the most stunning visual effects of all time—Paramount had no appetite this time for incurring any cost overruns, and as a result accepted the largely amateurish special effects. After Star Trek V, ILM was again hired for every Star Trek movie up until Nemesis, on which they were replaced by Digital Domain.
RALPH WINTER
I took a lot of personal hits about that and I feel a tremendous sense of responsibility and it hurts. At the time, I made the decision on what I felt would be best for the picture. It was not a capricious decision. It was based on testing we all did. There were a number of people involved in that decision, but I was leading the process. I felt like we were going to get something better and, in the beginning, we did … but it didn’t work out that way.
