"Star Trek is fed by ideas." "That`s what makes the series." "That`s what`s always made the series." "Ideas that are evocative or provocative." "I help other people come up with those ideas and filter them so they fit the form of the show as defined by Gene Roddenberry." "They`re the Borg." "Protect yourself or they`ll destroy you." "Maurice Hurley was on that season." "He came up with the characters." "He felt that the series needed an unbeatable foe." "So he came up with the Borg." "Interesting, isn`t it?" "Not a he, not a she." "Not like anything you`ve ever seen." "An enhanced humanoid." "My involvement with Q Who, the first time we saw the Borg..." "Rick Sternbach in the art department wanted to do a simple cube." "lt`s as unaerodynamic as an object can be." "But in the vacuum of space, that`s irrelevant." "It gave the Borg a very sinister and indifferent quality to their surroundings." "We built a three-foot by three-foot miniature of the Borg." "At that time, we had to build our physical miniatures." "It took days and days to light and shoot them." "The Borg episode had more shots than we thought we`d be able to handle." "Captain, this is incredible." "We`ve entered what must be the Borg nursery." "The first time we did the Borg hive, that was our inspiration to do the shot better in First Contact." "The same company did that first painting for us of the interior of the Borg ship, with Riker and the crew looking around." "The original time we saw the Borg, the description was that it was this vast chamber." "Endless. lt`s a very complicated set." "There was a lot of detail, a lot of elements to it." "It was fairly tricky to accomplish the live part of it." "When it was put together, we were all pretty proud of it." "We built a large model of the surface of the Enterprise." "In one scene, the Borg shoot a beam, drill a hole and extract a series of decks from the Enterprise." "You see them stacked up like coins." "We had to build a special large-scale model with a hydraulic ram to push up the decks and link that up with the animation." "A type of laser beam is slicing into the saucer section." "They`re carving us up like a roast." "Another challenge was the Borg`s personal shields." "They`ve been redesigned each time we see them." "The first time, I wanted them to look like they were flat planes." "If a Borg got shot, a shield would appear." "If it was shot here, a new shield would appear." "So it had a prismatic quality." "Mr Worf, use whatever means to neutralise the invader." "We took pieces of the frame in which the Borg appeared." "We`d cut them out electronically, twist them, throw them out of focus and change the brightness." "When the phaser beam hit them, then that would appear for the duration of the beam." "When the beam went off, it would disappear in a dissolve." "The show is shot in a seven-day schedule." "That much work being accomplished in that time frame is pretty amazing." "lt`s three of us, Rick Berman, Gene and myself." "We arc the series." "We say, "How do we want the characters to go by the end of the series?"" ""How do we want the episodes to progress?"" ""How much humour or use of the holodeck do we want?"" ""How do we arc one character different than another?"" ""What happens to Wesley now that his mother`s not on?"" "We want to see if we can make Data cry a tear." "He can`t cry." "He`s an android." "But near the end of the season, we want that emotional commitment from Data." "More human." "You arc that through the series." "A little in episode three." "Some more in episode 12." "That`s what we look for as we approach the years." "How to make the series one thing." "One play, so to speak." "Instead of 22 hours, we look for 11 movies." "But they`re all connected." "You`re a wise man." "Not yet, sir." "But with your help, I am learning." "Somebody comes up with a premise." "Riker`s going to serve on a Klingon vessel as a TDY officer." "I like that." "We`ll start with that as a premise." "Then how does that affect people on the Enterprise, or Riker?" "Obey my orders." "We will be destroyed." "If we are, it will be in battle, and I will die with you." "Does the story involve everybody?" "Everybody reads it and makes comments." "The same thing happens in script." "We hone it down until it fits the requirements of the show, servicing the characters and being Star Trek." "Over all of that, you have the Roddenberry umbrella, which is, is it Star Trek?" "Roddenberry`s thumbprint on every script." "is this Star Trek?" "Until he puts his thumbprint on it, it`s not." "Once he does, we know we`ve got a show and we move forward." "One thing I wanted to redesign was the sash on Worf." "I wanted to redesign that." "What was so interesting was that he loved it so much, it was hard to get it out of his grasp." "Once he got the new sash, he began to love it, I guess." "I think he gets very attached to things." "I love to go to hardware stores, especially for things like Star Trek and science fiction." "There`s a milieu of incredible hardware that you can choose from and put together, like an erector set." "That was just a bicycle chain." "Those were bicycle chains that I put together." "I wove leather through them." "I just sort of came up with it in two or three inches." "I said, "This looks really great." "Let`s do this."" "And so we set about making it." "They were concerned with her not having her normal dreadlock look." "They wanted to make her look very different." "We tried to set about thinking of designing without her hair, and to see her face, which is beautiful." "Be careful." "Putting me on a pedestal so high, you may not be able to reach me." "Then l`ll learn how to fly." "I came upon this store that had these incredible hats made out of wires and things." "I thought, "What a great idea for her."" "lt`s very easy to wear." "That`s how I came up with that." "A couple of weeks before that show, they came to all the departments and said, "We need a new bad guy of the universe."" ""We want it to be a cyborg."" "We said, "OK."" "So we went about trying to develop the Borg." "I didn`t want it to be the shiny, clean imagery of that time in the late `80s." "The idea behind the Borg was that they were a nation of people that were very similar." "You couldn`t tell if they were male or female." "That was a scary part of them." "Their human parts would wear out." "They would take on mechanical parts." "My feeling was that, just like you need to have a hip replacement, people don`t have to have it replaced at the same time." "They have different parts." "That`s why I wanted them to look individual, losing their parts at different times." "That`s why some have eye patches, some have fake legs." "Things like that." "We wanted to do moulds of all the pieces." "There was a certain design I had first, kind of like a spine of a reptile." "But when we took it to all the companies to get made, it would have taken them three weeks." "I happened to find this one company that already had body-part moulds." "That`s what happened with the design." "I folded the pre-existing moulds into my design." "Then I added the tubes." "All the thinking, in terms of what would really happen to a human being that was losing human parts." "I remember a fashion photo of a leather jacket with these brass almond eye symbols on it." "And so we did that." "You are late." "Sorry." "I had to make myself beautiful." "Ten-forward came into our second season." "The producers needed a lounge, a place for the crew to relax and dine and drink after hours and throughout the day when they took shift breaks to eat." "Other items related to ten-forward created a great opportunity for me to create a lot of food." "Something that, again, I wanted to make different." "Something that I always felt I specialised in and took a great deal of joy and pleasure in creating." "Food of the future." "Especially in an episode in which Jonathan Frakes, as Riker, had to become acquainted with Klingon food." "I was in my heyday." "I created something that had never been seen before." "Being a fan of things that frighten people, I wanted to create food as it was written." "lt`s supposed to be frightening." "That opened the floodgates for me." " What is that?" " lt`s a Klingon delicacy." "Pipius claw." "This is heart of targ." "This, of course, is gagh." "Gagh." "Serpent worms." "Want some?" "Pipius claw." "That was one of them." "What the heck is pipius claw?" "I saw what it was." "I bought chicken feet. I don`t know if they have four or three toes." "I eliminated the middle one to make it look like a devil`s fork." "I stuck these chicken`s feet into bases of liquid." "I got organs from the butcher." "Heart of targ was an actual heart." "I would have a liver." "I did a lot more." "I would embellish it." "The Asian market was a plethora of items for me." "I found a terrific product." "Different types of fish." "I would just use eyes from different types of fish, and fins." "I can`t tell you how much fun I had with Klingon food." "That`s what this was about." "When he actually went to the Klingon ship, there was a Klingon feast." "Squid, octopus." "I did odd things with it so you didn`t see that." "The actors have to eat this stuff." " ls the food alright?" " lt`s delicious." "The pipius claw was ex cellent." "I enjoyed this bregit lung." "And the rokeg blood pie?" "Delicious." "When we first started out, the general consensus from Rick was to not get in your face with the music." "Don`t interfere with the dialogue." "In action, remember, you`re on an equal footing with sound effects." "But keep it in a very early 1900s sort of a feel." "Like early Stravinsky, or Mahler." "More tonal." "Occasionally, like Conspiracy, I would go pretty far out." "But generally, as I told someone one time, it was like using the second movement of a symphony to score every bit of the show." "We did try electronics a bit." "What seems to happen is, since the sound effects are digitised and created electronically and represent electronic sounds, like when you`re on the bridge, if you used electronics too much in the music, it blended in with the sound effects and wasn`t discrete." "The music is always orchestral." "The six French horns are always in the show." "We`ve never gone with less." "That creates a sound that, even if it`s played at a low level..." "There is a lot of dialogue and you have to stay out of the way." "The strings up here, the horns down here, the dialogue here." "You can turn the music up without putting the kibosh on the dialogue." "The first season of Star Trek was so successful." "We were all so excited about it." "Here comes the opening show of season two, The Child." "I looked at the show and thought, "This is a celebratory moment."" "And l`m going to do a celebratory..." "Quiet." "Not over the top." "What I felt would be a moving piece of music." "That was my inspiration to write that opening cue." "To this day, it`s one of my favourite pieces that l`ve done." "lt`s wonderful to have a show like this where you have the opportunity to write the things you dream of, that you can only dream of in any other situation." "In other shows I do, there`s no opportunity to write something with the melodic flow, content and emotional heart that you get out of writing a Star Trek." "lt`s a wonderful opportunity." "lt`s unique because you have to fall into Roddenberry`s thinking." "His mind, in the 24th century, is different than anybody else`s mind." "His vision of the future is not anywhere near my vision." "He sees it as a wondrous place, where everyone has thrown back all of the pettiness and jealousies and all the foolish trappings we have now." "He sees us as infants reaching our adolescence by the 24th century." "Well, you know, I think we may have some of the same problems then that we have now." "But you wash that away." "You go with his image and try to shine it up." "That`s basically what I try to do." "He is a life-force entity." "When we passed each other in space, he was curious about us." "So he decided the best way to learn was to go through the process." "To be born, to live as one of us, and in that way, to understand us."