by Edward Gross
DENNY MARTIN FLINN
The first thing I did was sit down and in two days watch all the films and some of the episodes. Since I wasn’t a Trekkie, nothing was risky for me. There was an attitude on my part that if somebody in the first draft says Klingons don’t eat with their left hand, they eat with their right, I’ll just change it. That gave me a certain amount of freedom. I didn’t worship those characters, so I was able to see them in a rather fresh light. The same was true with Nick, who, having done II and IV, knew a great deal more about it than me, but nevertheless is not constrained. He’s willing to add to the lore.
WILLIAM SHATNER
In the script there’s a wonderful line, “In space, all warriors are cold warriors.” Both sides have come to define themselves by their antagonism. “What will I be without my enemy?” The best Star Trek stories have their genesis in real life.
DAVID A. GOODMAN (coexecutive producer, Futurama)
Star Trek VI did something that Star Trek always did, which was to say something about something currently going on, but in space. It’s a movie that still holds up because, as opposed to Star Trek V, which is terribly cast, Star Trek VI is brilliantly cast. And I loved that Brock Peters, who was a good guy in Star Trek IV, turns out to be one of the conspirators. I saw Star Trek VI eleven times in the theater; there was something very satisfying about it.
DENNY MARTIN FLINN
There are three kinds of people in the universe of Star Trek VI. The people who wanted peace, the people who did not want peace for their own self-interest, and then there were people like Kirk, who had lived a certain way for twenty-five years vis-à-vis the Klingons, but were intelligent enough to say, What does the future have to offer? Maybe this isn’t wrong. We were lucky to be able to see Kirk as a man who, if he was rigid at all, at least recognized his own rigidity. And, of course, it allowed us to create a character that in essence was a spokesman for the uncertainties and the whole idea of the undiscovered country. The future, being scary, got nailed down because we had a character that could say that.
NICHOLAS MEYER
The heroic thing about Kirk and the rest of the crew is their effort to acknowledge, to confront, and ultimately try to overcome their prejudice. If a man leaps into a raging torrent to save a drowning child, he performs a heroic act. If the same man leaps into the same pond to save the same child, and does so with a ball and chain attached to his leg, he must be accounted not less heroic, but more heroic for overcoming a handicap. That’s what heroism and drama is about. Kirk is more of a hero for being a human being and not less because he’s superhuman, which I never believed.
WILLIAM SHATNER
The portrayal of Kirk attempts to show a man who has spent a lifetime imbued with the idea that his mission in life is to subdue, subvert, and make the enemy submit to his nation’s or his Federation’s view. That’s his whole training and that is the military training. He learns differently, and that is the classic dilemma that Star Trek has sought to present in its most successful shows.
LEONARD NIMOY
Spock experienced prejudice growing up half Vulcan and half human. In Star Trek VI, Spock becomes an emissary against prejudice and discovers, during the course of the story, his own prejudices.
NICHOLAS MEYER
Leonard is a highly intelligent, highly professional guy who’s been around, who knows this business back and forth in ways that I certainly didn’t at the time, and I would say even now he’s several classes ahead of me. As the executive producer, he was certainly my boss, and the movie was his conception. It started off as his idea. There are certain people that you always sort of put a foot wrong with in some way … and I think I frequently put my foot wrong with Leonard.
I don’t know if he brought out the worst in me or I brought out the worst in myself. But I think I exasperated him. Sometimes justifiably and maybe sometimes not. When we were editing the movie, he took the last reel home with an editor and played with it and then brought it back, and I did not realize that as far as he was concerned, this was final cut. I thought this was his pass at it and I would take a pass at it. And he was very angry that I had played with it. And in that case, I didn’t think that was my fault. I don’t think I understood and I probably would have argued about it and said, “Can we talk about this?” But it never even occurred to me. But there were other sections where I was clearly out of line and he took umbrage.
LEONARD NIMOY
Nick Meyer is a gadfly. Nick loves to speak in headlines. I remember one day we were talking about opera and he declared, “Carmen is the greatest opera ever written!” He was saying it as if he wrote it. There is something that attributes to him in that statement. That it is his perception, and therefore it’s his baby. There is something possessive about it in the pronouncement. He’s a great PR man. Of course, that’s what he was before he wrote novels and screenplays.
NICHOLAS MEYER
During one of these movies, and I can’t remember which one it was, I somewhat grandiosely said, “Well, they don’t have any right to criticize me. I am the man who saved Star Trek.” And Leonard said, “Oh, you? You alone?” And I felt stupid the moment I’d said it. It was like I was listening to my own PR. I thought, “You sound like a jerk.”
RALPH WINTER
We went away from the visual effects on Star Trek V because we thought we were going to get something new and different from another guy, which didn’t happen. We went back to what we know is proven, and stuff that ILM did was spectacular. We were the benefactors of technology for T2. The look of the picture, the cameraman, the set dresser, the designer—everything about this film was trying to stretch and be something the other films weren’t. I was a key member of Star Trek V, and when someone talks about it, it hurts.
DENNY MARTIN FLINN
The budget caused us to lose several sequences which would have been very beneficial to the film. When you’re in preproduction, sometimes what you substitute is better, so who’s really to ever know? But my original vision of the film, which certainly would have been twice as much money, was an epic action-adventure, and it became a kind of detective story action-adventure. The word epic would not be considered applicable. Money always impacts on art.
Much like films such as The Dirty Dozen and The Magnificent Seven, the film would have opened with the recruitment of its protagonists, in this case by an enigmatic Federation envoy. After the teaser sequence in which the Klingon moon Praxis is destroyed and Sulu, who has been promoted to captain of the Excelsior, informs the Federation, the retired crew of the Enterprise would have been gathered together for one final mission. In the unfilmed sequence, the envoy with a mysterious glowing hand was to arrive first at Kirk’s home during a rainy and foggy San Francisco evening while Kirk is making love to Carol Marcus, with whom he has apparently reconciled. “This sailor is in port for good,” promises Kirk. “Take a good look at my retirement pay if you don’t believe me. I can hardly afford to cross the street.” But when there’s a knock at the door, Kirk is stunned to find he’s been called back to active duty. As Kirk leaves, Carol pleads, “But he’s retired … you’re retired!”—losing Kirk once again to a mission.
Getting into a flying car with the alien, Kirk is propelled through the skyline of San Francisco to where they find McCoy inebriated at an upscale medical dinner where the doctors are lamenting about a patient who actually had the audacity to request a house call, much to McCoy’s utter disdain. Kirk is surprised to find that Sulu is registered as “still active” and Spock’s status is mysteriously “classified.”
The next stop is a hangar bay where Professor Montgomery Scott is lecturing a group of college students about Klingon technology in front of the Bird of Prey, fished out of the harbor from Star Trek IV, while a bored Chekov is found at a chess club losing to an alien. As they leave, Kirk warns Chekov about his opponent, “Never play chess with a full Betazoid,” leaving Chekov to reply, “I vas robbed.” Meanwhile, Uhura is recruited at a Federation ra
dio station where she hosts a talk show. All of them gather at Starfleet Command for a briefing.
NICHOLAS MEYER
I loved [the roundup] and didn’t want to lose it, but we just couldn’t afford it. The movie was made under a very, very tight budget. The thing that II and VI have in common is that they’re the only two in the series that cost less than their predecessors. I run a very tight ship. We wouldn’t have gotten the movie made otherwise.
DENNY MARTIN FLINN
What I had done originally was to give every one of the seven principal actors an entrance. The scenes demonstrated who those people were and what they did when they weren’t on the Enterprise. They were either retired or rotated to R & R, and it added some humanity and humor to the characters. I called it the roundup. It would have been a very effective sequence and we held on to it until the very last minute, but Paramount was saying, “We’re going to discontinue preproduction unless you cut another million dollars out of the budget.” We just had to drop fifteen pages. Maybe what I’m thinking of would have been rambling and slow and dropped in editing anyway, but there was a kind of The Over-the-Hill Gang Rides Again attitude.
NICHOLAS MEYER
I don’t think the studio was willing to spend that kind of money. They were very disappointed with the revenues of Star Trek V, which was a very expensive movie. I don’t think it lost money, but I don’t think it made the kind of money they wanted.
DENNY MARTIN FLINN
Money always impacts art. Our budget was low for a science-fiction film. But it’s hard to call Star Trek science fiction. We weren’t trying to do Terminator, Star Wars, or 2001, so maybe Star Trek is better off when it comes more from drama and less from the invention of more scenes with aliens and things. In fact, I found that because Star Trek grows out of a television series, there has always been an attitude of low budget; here’s an alien planet and there’s a foam rubber rock, and there’s a red cyclorama in the background. The fans have not only put up with that but embraced it. It’s as if they’re saying, “We don’t need your high-tech jazz to tell a morality play.” Maybe it’s smarter to do Star Trek with a smaller budget and force writers and directors not to rely on fancy pyrotechnics.
For the scenes on the ice planet, Rura Penthe, Steven-Charles Jaffe, also the film’s second unit director, headed to Alaska for three days of filming to supplement the stagebound shots of the Klingon penal colony.
STEVEN CHARLES-JAFFE
It was two and a half days of very intense second unit work on a glacier, which normally would have taken a week and a half to two weeks to shoot. We were getting up at four in the morning, driving an hour, and flying an hour in a helicopter. It was ten degrees and we had one stunt man in about three and a half hours of very heavy makeup. We had a crew of thirty people and four helicopters. It was a real challenge.
NICHOLAS MEYER
Every director in the world would say, “I could’ve used more [money],” and I’m no exception. I didn’t have it and that’s the real world. You have to play the game. People may say how come we didn’t do this or that, but that’s nitpicking.
Long before he donned a Bajoran uniform aboard Deep Space Nine as Odo, actor Rene Auberjonois played the treacherous Colonel West, an Oliver North analogue, who is in league with the other conspirators, including Star Trek IV’s Admiral Cartwright, once again played by To Kill a Mockingbird’s Brock Peters.
RENE AUBERJONOIS (actor, “Odo,” Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)
I almost wasn’t in Star Trek VI, because the character was almost entirely cut out. I did it because Nick Meyer is a personal friend and asked me to. I was in Scotland hiking with my wife and rushed back to get the makeup all done. I’ve played a lot of different kind of parts and I usually play villains and I love them. I remember when my son was much younger and I was doing Richard III at the same time I was doing Benson and he asked, “Why do you always play the bad guy?” and I said, “It’s because they’re usually the best part to play.”
NICHOLAS MEYER
When we were making Star Trek VI there was so much fighting in the executive offices. Frank Mancuso had been running the studio, Sid Ganis was head of production, and then Frank Mancuso left, Sid Ganis left, David Kirkpatrick left, and it was just like a musical chairs. Nobody was minding the store, so, we were left alone to make that movie. I think that a lot of times they are simply penny wise and pound foolish. They were always looking to cut the wrong corner, and the same thing with the budget for that whole movie. Where I had proved with geometric logic and hard numbers that every Star Trek movie, with the exception of II, cost 41 percent more than its predecessor, and I was proposing to do VI for the same price as V, two years later, they were still going to chop four or five million dollars out of it. It was silly.
I remember that when the movie was over and we were in the cutting room, the coup happened in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev disappeared and nobody knew if he was alive or dead. And I blush to say that we thought, “Oh, this is so cool for the movie.” We really didn’t waste a thought, certainly not that first day, on what had happened to this poor man. And I remember John Goldwyn calling and saying, “How soon can we get the movie out?” I said, “We’re waiting for three hundred special-effects shots, I don’t think we can get it out right away.” There’s a certain tunnel vision.
WALTER KOENIG
I was absolutely fucking miserable from day one on Star Trek VI. It was so disappointing to me … and I didn’t even have Harve Bennett to blame anymore. Ralph Winter is a charming, delightful, and considerate man, and I had considered Nick a booster of mine because he had written the best stuff in Star Trek IV as well as directing Star Trek II, but I found this script to be so totally devoid of any individuality for the supporting characters. It was as if you could literally have taken one long speech and taken a scissor to it, cut it into pieces, and handed it to us.
For me, it was not a wrap-up at all. I thought, at last some recognition, some attention had to be paid to the supporting characters, and given their moment. There were no first-person personal pronouns; none of us ever said “I.” It was always “Keptain, there is a ship out there,” not “Keptain, I see a ship out there and I’m worried about this.” We were there as expository vehicles, and that alone, and that was really painful. My sense of ego and identity just cried out for some opportunity to express character, and it was just not available.
RALPH WINTER
I remember on Star Trek VI I had an idea that we should do a press conference to promote the movie on the bridge of the Enterprise and we should do it with all of the cast. Leonard kind of pushed that off and said, “Do you want Jimmy Doohan to make up stuff about the engineer? And what the engineer thinks about Star Trek? Because what Jimmy Doohan does is from a script. You don’t want Jimmy Doohan writing that stuff.” It’s one thing to let Leonard and Bill do that who had more of a public presence, but with the rest of them, it could have been a disaster. I always thought that would have been a cool idea if we could have pulled it off, but the studio was afraid that if it wasn’t scripted, they were not sure what they were going to say, so it didn’t get very far.
WALTER KOENIG
I had written pages of notes before we started shooting and gave them to Ralph, who thought they were all very germane. It was not to subvert the story, but to make the words the character had on-screen at that time significant. Ralph told me he gave them all to Nick, who never acknowledged them, so every time we did a scene, I was angry. I became angry at the other actors. I didn’t blow up or scream and carry on, but I was in a state of constant agitation. I wanted this to be what the other actors apparently felt that it was, which was a wrap-up in a way that made it feel that we had grown as characters and the audience had an opportunity to really experience who we were. Ultimately, what I decided is there is a huge irony about Star Trek. It was always a show about the future, and the supporting characters were hopelessly immersed in the past. We never grew, we were the same characters
we were on the television series, and we never had a chance to develop, to go into the future with the stories and the Enterprise. We were forever stuck back in the sixties in terms of the lack of dimension of the characters and the studio perspective on who we were as actors and characters.
RALPH WINTER
Jack Palance was an early choice for Gorkon, the Klingon chancellor, although David Warner did a great job for us. He’s a good actor and he fit the role so we brought him back.
NICHOLAS MEYER
Chang [the Klingon general] is not Khan. Khan is a very specific individual, and they’re not the same. You want an antagonist worthy of somebody’s steel and you want to throw people curveballs if you can.
It’s the only time other than [for] the Star Trek cast that I ever knowingly wrote for one actor, because I had this CD of Christopher Plummer doing the excerpts from Henry V. And I so fell in love with this that I thought, “I’m going to write a character based on the guy who’s doing these excerpts and then I can just get him to recite Shakespeare for me whenever I want.” I said to Mary Jo Slater, my indefatigable casting director, “Mary Jo, do not come back without Chris Plummer or I can’t make this movie.”
DENNY MARTIN FLINN
The person I had in mind for the changeling was as different as night and day from Iman. I had Sigourney Weaver in mind, but I’m not sure that we didn’t come up with a better choice. I just saw the character as a big, ballsy, space pirate; a female version of the dark side of Han Solo.
RALPH WINTER
Nick wanted to go with actors who were going to make a contribution and really wanted to work with us. That’s what attracted us to Kim Cattrall, Rosanna DeSoto, and Kurtwood Smith and, in other places, we went for a specific look, and also a good actor, Iman.
HARVE BENNETT (producer, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier)
The only serious problem that I would have never allowed if I were king was that, for the first time in the Star Trek movies, they violated the rules of some of the characters. They did not behave in character, and the reason for that is Nick always wanted to do that and I was always there to say no. I would have never had Spock do some of the things he did in that movie, and I would have never allowed Shatner to be in drag and fight with himself and to do all that stuff, because those things in the series did not appeal to me because it was like, “Look at me, I’m Bill Shatner.”
