" I am Ronald D Moore." " Brannon Braga." "We are the co-writers of Star Trek Generations here for your pleasure." "This was our first feature film, for Brannon and I." "Rick Berman approached us, the Next Generation's executive producer, about midway through Next Generation's sixth season, as I recall." "We got a mysterious message from Rick's office to "come immediately and Rick has something to talk to you about"." "Given the nature of Star Trek and how it ran, we assumed we were being fired." "There was much panic and stress, because Rick generally didn't ask to see the two of us together ever." "We sat in his office, and Rick being Rick, he milked it for all it was worth." "We sat there and he got up, paced around his office, looked out the window, and very dramatically said," ""I've just been in negotiations with the studio for several months."" "A very long pause." "Brannon and I sat there, our sphincters tightening." "He said, "I've been asked to produce the next Star Trek feature film" ""and I want you two to write it."" "He looked out the window again, looking like he was posing for Rushmore." "Brannon and I looked at each other, our eyes popping out of our heads." "We were almost giggling and shifted in our seats." "He said, "They'll commission two scripts." ""One with the original cast," ""bridging the original series to the Next Generation." ""Then they'll do another without the original cast altogether." ""Then we'll see which one's better and make that movie." "What do you say?"" "We, of course, said, "Yes, please!" "Thank you, Daddy!" "We're so happy!"" "And so we were asked to write the version that would bridge the two that ultimately became Generations." "This champagne bottle sequence was my only contribution to the script." " I think you wrote this on a Post-it." " You folded it in." "I appreciate that." "As I recall, it was a difficult genesis for this project." "There were a series of requirements that this film had to have that we thrashed out early on." "We wanted this, like I said earlier, to bridge the two generations." "I love that shot." "We wanted it to..." "The studio required that the original cast only appear in the first 10 or 15 minutes of the film." " Right." " Captain Kirk could reappear at the end." "He could have an adventure with Picard, but this was a Next Generation film." "They also wanted a very large villain, an arch-nemesis throughout the film à la Khan, who was in the most successful, creatively successful Star Trek film, The Wrath of Khan." "They also wanted some Klingons and also a Data comedy runner to go through it." "With those requirements in mind, we started crafting the story." "I remember early discussions about what the film would be." "Brannon had this great image." "Remember your idea for the poster?" "I always seem to start with posters, just in images of the two Enterprises in battle." "Is that the one?" "That it should be Kirk versus Picard." "It didn't go anywhere." "That was the best poster, the Enterprises fighting!" ""Kirk versus Picard." "This summer."" "Of course, we didn't make that movie." "I think if you..." "Somewhere in here, right there, is Tim Russ." "He goes on to play Tuvok in Voyager, but was one of the bridge officers here." "Is that right?" "Well, there's Noreen in the background." "That lady with the long hair was a recurring extra on Next Generation." "This scene went through many drafts." "An early draft had the entire original cast make an appearance in this sequence." "In fact, I think you would open in a turbolift on the way to the bridge, and all of them were crammed into this one turbolift, uncomfortably close." "They'd make little cracks back and forth." "You got the sense that they were rolling their eyes at doing this publicity stunt, but they were also happy to be back together and giving it one last go." "We were looking over a very early draft that had some of the other original series characters in it." "We ended up with these." "There was a point where we started contacting all the original cast members and eventually we met all of them." "We met DeForest Kelley at a Star Trek convention in Detroit." "We were working on the script and he was appearing." "We ran into him." "That was the first time I'd met him and for you, too." "He was looking forward to the script." "He was such a wonderful, sweet man." "It was very happy and great to meet." "Walter Koenig came in a couple of times." "We'd met with Jimmy Doohan on the show, 'cause he appeared on it." "They were all wonderful." "The only cast member I didn't meet," "I don't know if you did, was Leonard Nimoy." "You're forgetting that we had a meeting with him." "I didn't." "Did you?" "I never met with Leonard." "Maybe I remember Rick telling us about a meeting." "There was a meeting with Leonard..." "Yeah, they tried to get him to direct it." "I remember Rick was meeting with Leonard." "We were in the Hart building." "We were told, "Rick wants to see you."" "As we walked over, Leonard was coming out of the building." "He was walking fast and didn't look up, the first hint that he wasn't directing it." "By the way, I love..." "This is the Enterprise-B." "Always loved this starship design." "I talked about which ship it would be." "That was from an earlier film, that design, wasn't it?" " I believe it's a riff on the Excelsior." " That's right." "I always loved it." "I think it's a great design, too, and I liked this bridge." "I really liked this version of the Enterprise." "It was really nice." "This is a pretty good opening to the film." "Lots of fun to have them sequestered off to the side in an undignified way." "Then Kirk has to take control of the situation." "I like the way he just stands up there." "Shatner knows this character so well." "He's a blend of the man and the character." "You can't imagine anyone else having played Kirk, once he's made it his own." " That's the woman from Aliens, right?" " Right." " She played... the Hispanic lady." " I cannot remember her name." "Brannon and I had one meeting with William Shatner." "There was a point during development where Bill wanted to talk about the script." "We had a meeting over in Rick's office and I'd never met Shatner before." "I don't know that you had." "But I was the original Star Trek fan growing up." "Captain Kirk was my hero, so this was a major moment when I met Shatner for the first time." "We're in the office, kind of nervous and waiting." "Rick's also a little nervous around him." "Shatner comes in, looks at us, shakes our hands and goes," ""They're so young." "Look at them, they're so young!"" " It immediately puts us in our place." " I peed my pants." "I'm confessing it here." "We sit down, we're having the meeting and Bill didn't say much for some while." " He kind of sat there..." " I don't even think he looked at us." " No." " He just talked to Rick." "He talked to Rick mostly." "We were the people on the couch that were also there." " He eventually warmed up." " He did." "He's a charming, funny guy." "Do you remember the Kirk moment?" "We were sitting talking with him and his chief note that he wanted to convey was that he didn't feel that Kirk was integral to the plot of the film." "And we were..." "I think it was you or I, or the two of us were basically spinning him and telling him," ""Well, no, he is very integral to the plot because the theme's immortality..."" "We're going on a bit, doing the sales job." " Suddenly he just uses the Kirk voice." " Yeah, I remember." "He just goes, "Well, he's not in fact integral to the plot!"" "Our heads snapped back and Rick readjusted in his chair." "The captain had spoken and that was it." "I think that broke the ice and he was pretty funny and charming after that." " He was right, actually." " He was right." "Writing a feature film with established characters is a particular challenge." "You get a lot of input from different sources, whether it's the director," "Patrick Stewart, William Shatner or Brent Spiner." "A lot of people chimed in because they'd played these characters for so long." "Everyone has kind of good points and bad points." "You try to take the notes that are good and weave it all together." "Ultimately it's a very collaborative process to write a feature film like this." "All these things had many drafts." "This whole sequence was rewritten and rewritten." "And rewritten on the day." "Exactly what the orders were, how Kirk saves the day, what is his idea versus what's Harriman's idea..." "Then we were also juggling this notion of them getting close to the Nexus but not in it, because Guinan has to cross over." "Guinan's going to be in there, too, and Kirk is in there and then not." "It was very confusing to write." "There's Tim." "Yeah, well..." "they're in a temporal flux again." "You learn riffs when you write Star Trek." "Brannon and I wrote it for many years." "There's certain terms, phrases in the techno-talk that keep recurring:" "temporal flux, capacitors, auxiliary power, plasma conduits, the warp core is continually on the verge of being ejected." "We put the number 47 into many scripts over the years on Next Generation as we thought it was lucky." "Joe Menosky, one of the writers at the time, got us hooked on this." "Every episode either references 47 or it's on a graphic somewhere in the show." "There was even a website a long time ago about the 47 s on Star Trek." "If you look at the DVDs now of Next Generation, starting around the fifth season you'll see 47 s in every episode." "It'll be like "Find Waldo" for people who have extra time on their hands." " I still put 47 s into scripts." " Do you?" "I absolutely do." "The cult of 47 has gone far and wide." "Yeah, this was all a complicated bit of business, figuring out Soran." "Soran's there." "Soran saw something and wants to get back." "Then we go and the camera finds Guinan." "Whoopi was great to work with." "I think it was her idea originally to appear on Next Generation, so the story goes." "She went and met with Gene Roddenberry who came up with the idea of Guinan on Next Generation." " Named after "Texas" Guinan, right?" " I don't know." "I think it's named after "Texas" Guinan who was a famous bartender back in New York City, I believe." "She was a very difficult character to write for." "The scenes had to be..." "The dictum on those scenes was:" "she has to make a really good point, but not seem like she's making a point." "Yeah, it has to be oblique to the vanishing point." "We always struggled with her scenes and got a lot of notes from Mike Piller on those scenes." ""More off the nose."" "We joked that we wanted to write a Picard-Guinan scene played with looks." " Yeah." " Remember?" "No dialogue." "Could we convey a scene with just looks, meaningful looks?" "He sits at the bar." "She comes over." "He looks up." "She nods, pours him a drink." "He shakes his head, takes a sip." "Almost takes a second." "Puts it down." "Guinan nods." "Picard's problem solved, he exits Ten-Forward." "Ron mentioned all the challenges of this film, bridging the generations, trying to tell the cohesive story." "There were so many parameters." "Another thing we considered going into this, we were writing the final episode while doing the core screenplay work." "We wrote many drafts, but when it started getting into prep and we were doing the final rewrites on this, we were also writing the final episode of Next Generation, All Good Things." "It was interesting to compare writing a two-hour TV episode versus a two-hour movie." "The same was true on First Contact." "When you write a weekly TV show with continuing characters, you want to keep them more or less the same because you're with that family week to week and want incremental evolution." "In a feature film my analogy was that you move away from the family." "You only see them every 2 to 4 years and want to do bigger things." "So we introduced Data's emotion chip, something you'd never do on TV because you'd essentially unravel his whole reason to be." "But because it's a movie, we knew there may not be another movie." "You want to do bigger things in a feature, not only in an optical budget sense, but in character." "Features are events in character's lives." "The series is "next week on Next Generation, this will happen"." "The film is supposed to be big pivotal events in their lives." "I also love that even the shakes are bigger." "People get..." "We can afford to have them thrown off their feet." " Actually, wasn't this set on a gimbal?" " Was it?" "Yeah, the set really shook." "On the TV show we didn't have the money for that." " The bridge actually shakes in this." " You're right." "I think I remember that." "I really liked this piece." "I felt this was very effective." "I liked it on the page and it was well realised on the screen when they realise that Kirk is gone and rush down to find him." "James Doohan here was terrific." "He really..." "It's coming up here." "The shot coming up, the big pull-back from the Enterprise and seeing the big gaping hole, it's really touching and I like this transition." "There's a nice transition coming between space and then it goes to the water." " Was that "Aye"?" " "Aye."" "There was a cut back after this that was scripted and filmed, after this moment, going back to the bridge and confirming he's gone and them saying they've looked everywhere and he can't be found." "I think Chekov weeps and they confirm that he's dead." " But it's not as effective as this." " That's a great shot." "Because we'd just spent the first 20 minutes in space, we wanted to get to the Next Generation cast in an offbeat, surprising way." " We came up with the..." " It was Jeri Taylor's idea, as I recall." "Jeri Taylor was a writer/producer on Next Generation and what we had in the initial drafts for this transition..." "I love that, Picard standing near the taff rail of the Enterprise." "In the early drafts the transition to the Next Generation was to be that you'd cut into a small Federation outpost out in the middle of nowhere and there are these two guys, who are low-level Starfleet nobodies," "stuck in the middle of nowhere." "I don't remember what they're doing." "They're wasting time staring at screens." " Like Beavis and Butthead." " Yeah, talking and doing nothing." "Then the Romulans attack." "A warbird de-cloaks and the Romulans board." "They're shooting everyone and these guys are about to get blown away." "Then the Enterprise, under Picard, comes to the rescue and saves the day." "That was the opening of the Next Generation section, a big action piece." "Then we gave the script to Jeri Taylor to read, who Brannon and I worked for on Next Gen and respected." "She commented, "It wasn't very exciting." We were, "It's a big action sequence."" " She said, "Yeah, but not interesting."" " And seen a million times." "She came up with not this, but was saying do it in some offbeat way." "Her image was what if you cut...?" "I wish we'd done it, as it was so bizarre." " The nose." " She wanted to cut to Ten-Forward." "Picard is pushing an egg across the floor with his nose." "What does that mean?" "She said, "I don't know, but it's an interesting image."" "That got us thinking about offbeat, bizarre ways to get into this sequence." "We started talking about the holodeck and came to this romantic notion that there's always been this analogy to the seafaring tradition in Star Trek and why don't we put them on a ship." " Weren't you on there?" " I did go out one day." "I was very grateful that I'd put on my seasickness patch." "Some people had not, like Marina Sirtis, and they weren't happy." "They were pretty much throwing up the entire day." " This is off the coast of LA?" " Off Marina del Rey." "It really wasn't that far out." "If you look the opposite direction you see traffic." "We always enjoyed humiliating Worf." "It was a pastime for the writers to do something to humiliate Worf." "I was really sad that I didn't get to go and do this." "I'd scheduled vacation." "In between Next Gen and Deep Space, where I'd go next, I needed a break." "I was overseas when you were shooting this." "I love nautical and naval history and Hornblower books and the O'Brian books, so I was sad not to do this." "I bet it would have been deeply uncomfortable." "It was so cramped on that ship and shooting on..." "Back into the water!" "Throwing a doctor and a Klingon into the water really spices up a show." "So, this was back in the visor days here, before Geordi got his ocular implants." "LeVar, as an actor, was getting a little tired of having his eyes covered." "It was a very good idea to give him..." " It was in First Contact that he gets..." " Gets the eyes." "Yeah, but I always thought we lost something, too." " It was so distinctive." "The visor..." " It was Geordi." "It was." "Everybody knew who Geordi was." "In his defence, LeVar had campaigned to lose the visor for a couple of years." " When you wear that for ten years..." " It's hard to see out of." "The point he always made is that it robbed him of an acting tool." "An actor's eyes are really important to his performance and we had robbed Geordi of the ability to convey anything with his eyes." " Good old holodeck." " Always a favourite." "We came up with many holodeck scenarios on the show, so it was a given that we'd use it in the movie." "One of the coolest inventions of The Next Generation was the holodeck." "I don't think anything had been seen like that before." "It's virtual reality, but done before that was being thought about a lot in mainstream sci-fi." "Yeah." "In fact it goes back a ways, in Star Trek that is." "Gene Roddenberry put a holodeck on the animated series in the early 70s." "Gene thought about a lot of these things way in advance of anybody else." "Tangible virtual reality was something he had introduced into this concept." "So, here's where Picard learns about the death of his nephew, who had been established in..." " In Family." " Was it Family?" "An episode of Next Generation from the fourth season." "Ultimately the theme of the movie is mortality, dealing with one's mortality and having epic heroic characters of fiction grapple with their mortality." "That was the underlying theme we talked about ad nauseum in the writers' room," "Rick, Brannon and I, and that was what we set out to do." "OK, let's tackle a thing that Star Trek never tackles really: death." "Star Trek II handled it beautifully in the death of Spock, but he comes back." "So it's not really a death." "In this film the Enterprise-D dies." "More importantly, Captain Kirk dies, and Picard, through that experience, starts to grapple with his own mortality, which we felt was really interesting to present a big heroic character with." "Typically there's always a way for the hero to win at the end and not die." "We said let's not do that." "Let's confront this head on and say everybody dies." "Even larger than life characters ultimately die." "In my opinion," "I think our reach exceeded our grasp on that level in the film." "I think that it's a provocative theme and I'm not sure the film brings it home..." "I don't think..." "Just to be candid, again those parameters, those things to be unified, all the things we had to accomplish and those we couldn't do." "I think to figure out even how to get these two captains together and the whole Nexus business, it was unwieldy." "In the end, I think we never really knew..." "Although everything you're saying about the general themes is right," "I don't know that it coheres into anything." "It's a little all over the place." "But interesting nonetheless." "I think it all had to do with the passing of the baton." "Yeah." "There were really interesting sentiments that never cohered into a theme you could put your finger on." "This is one of those things I look back on and wish we had written now, years later when we were more seasoned and had done two features and weren't doing our very first motion picture, and that then we had tackled this kind of subject matter." "I think we'd have been able to make it hit on all cylinders in terms of the script." "I'm proud of it." "I think it's a good picture, but wish I could take another crack at it." "Love Malcolm McDowell." "He's one of my favourite actors." "No matter what he's in, you watch him because his performance will always be interesting and always fun to watch." "He plays a character here terrified of death, obsessed with immortality." " Much like Brannon and I." " Yeah." ""Romulans!"" "He has a lot of one of the things that I..." "There's Spot." "Spot the cat, version 4 of 12 or something." "We had so many Spots." "Brent hates the cat." " Brent Spiner actually hates cats." " That's so great!" "The cat was always all over him and he always hated the cat." "Here's the emotion chip scene, again pretty radical for Data's character." "This brings up another challenge of this movie, of Star Trek movies in general." "The emotion chip is established about a couple of seasons ago, right?" "Here you have a TV series with a seven-year run with continuing characters, storylines, back story that the TV audience is up on and they love it and are imbued with all of it, but the feature films go at the audience..." "in a different way." "They don't assume that the audience for the features has seen the TV show, so you're sort of reintroducing everything while also trying to bring the fans along and trying to bring people that just go to the movies on Friday night." "It's a difficult balancing act, continually tripping over how do we establish...?" "Here's an emotion chip and we need to say what it is without boring the fans or confusing the audience new to Star Trek." "There were executives at Paramount who were good measuring rods, who'd say things like, "What's a holodeck?"" "It's tricky, 'cause at what point do you...?" "You won't explain what a holodeck is." "You have to just leave some things alone." "Some of it is just part of this universe, so you just have to go in and accept it." "It's interesting also to see all these sets on the big screen." "We went in and did extensive reworking of the sets and lighting schemes to prepare them for the feature." "This is the ready room seen in the TV show for seven seasons unchanged." "You've never seen it lit like this, never seen this glow through the window giving it more texture." "It had to be painted differently, I believe." "It was never meant to be seen in really exquisite detail." "John Alonzo photographed this, who recently passed away." "An amazing cinematographer." "A couple of things are remembered about this film." "One is the lighting." "People have often commented on how Ten-Forward had never looked better." "This set has never looked as good as it did in this." "Part of that is time." "In a feature film you have so much more time to light each individual shot." "In TV you basically have to go in and shoot what the lighting scheme is." "You can set up some key lights, bounce cards and specific lights, but you didn't have time to go into Ten-Forward and light it like this." "Ten-Forward is lit the same way every week." "We also never had the budget in the TV show to use this many extras." "Ten-Forward should have always been like this week to week, filled with people, alive, a common place for people on the Enterprise." "In production meetings on the TV show, one of the first things you'd chop would be extras." "For a ship that had 1,000 people on it, walk down the corridor, there'd be one dude." "People slept a lot on the Enterprise on the TV show." " Brent was great here." " Yeah, Brent's great." "Brent is one of the most reliable and "go to" actors I've ever worked with." "You know if you give Brent Spiner something, he'll deliver it in spades and probably surprise you." "I remember when we were shooting First Contact and I was on the set." "They were doing a big scene with Brent and the Borg Queen." "He was doing that thing when she blows on his little patch of flesh." "He reacts to it and he was so good." "He was just so good." "I said, "You're such my hero on this show."" "Always he and Patrick really would blow you away on a continuing basis." "Not to slight the other cast." "I loved the entire Next Generation cast and respected them." "Brent really just would knock it out of the park regularly." "Another thing that people sometimes do with this movie is quote that line." "He has lots of time quotes and I still have Bartlett's quotation book with pages marked where we were groping for time quotes." " That's right." " We either made these up or changed them from other quotes, but I should show you this." "I've got 20 pages marked with all these time quotes." "We were hunting for little aphorisms about time like," ""Time is the fire in which we burn."" "The pocket watch." "All those little touches were very nice." "But we would also have long tedious discussions about the pocket watch." "Is it really a pocket watch?" "Do they still have them in the 24th century?" "Could he have found one?" "Why would he carry that and not a digital watch?" " He's obsessed with time." " Yeah." "Ultimately we came to those answers." "Guinan's sixth sense." "I never really knew what the hell..." "Was she psychic?" "I don't know." "In the series there was that business between her and Q, a weird relationship." "Did finger puppets at each other periodically." "These uniforms, you'll notice that we're blending the uniforms at this point." "There was a concern that Worf has the traditional Next Generation uniform." "Riker has the uniform that was about to become Voyager's uniform and also Deep Space Nine's." " It was Deep Space Nine's first, I think." " I can't remember." "You might be right." "It was Deep Space Nine's uniform." "In the movie we started blending the two back and forth, partially because Bob Blackman was worried that the costumes wouldn't hold up on a 30-foot screen." "He was worried about the zippers." "Next Generation was designed for TV." "Suddenly it was being projected 30 feet tall." "There was worry that not all the uniforms were up to the same level of quality." "I think that was where we started discussing using both uniforms." "And the communicator pins as well." "This is the sick detail that fans obsess about, that we would talk about and I would notice." "The communicator pin, how it looked in Star Trek:" "The Motion Picture and how it looked in the next films and "it used to be a circle and now it's a bar"." "Then it's two bars and then it was several bars in All Good Things in the future." "I remember being concerned early on that the tonal shifts between this Data comedy runner and the main story would be a problem, but watching the film I never felt that." "I always felt like it blended pretty well into the overall piece." "These are the kind of jokes that got groans and laughs from the audience in test screenings and at the premiere, unable to believe he's making that pun." "He's so obviously doing it for a joke that everybody enjoys it at the same time." "We wanted him to become annoying." "And we succeeded." "A lot of people talk about techno-babble in Star Trek." "There are scenes in this movie that..." "that have techno-babble." "It's a constant struggle to give the script a little vérité and make it believable." "So often, particularly on the TV show, we just fell into way too much of that stuff." "We had long discussions in the writers' room on technical aspects of the show." "Many times you were depending on techno-babble to carry plot information, so you'd find yourself in a room with other seemingly intelligent people, arguing about what the warp drive could and could not do, and getting passionate." ""No!" "You can't do that with the warp drive." "You have to envelop the ship."" "Ultimately I don't think the audience really cares about a lot of that." "A trap that we all fell into was that the tech talk ran away with the show." "In the final moments of an episode, to get out of a tight spot someone would "tech the tech", you know, and "The End"." "You'd write that in the scripts." "I wrote scenes where Picard would say, "Commander La Forge, tech the tech."" "Geordi would say, "I've teched the tech, but it's not working." ""If we tech the tech in a tech direction, maybe we can tech."" "Picard would say, "Very well." "Tech the tech."" "You'd take this page to the science consultant." "He'd come back with three options for every single tech that should be there." "Then you'd try to assemble something from that and then it wasn't really drama." " It was just sort of jargon." " It was definitely our show at its worst." " Here's the nephew." " Right, the nephew." "Someone Picard was very close to." "Counsellor Troi is..." "I'm glad we got a scene for her, as Marina's a lovely actress." "She was a tough character to utilise." "Her empathic powers were really..." "So she can read emotions." "Was it really ever helpful?" "That's to say that people..." ""He's angry, Captain." It was usually pretty obvious anyway." "It was a difficult character to conceive and to figure out, because an empathic ability to feel what someone else feels is hard to dramatise." "What is that?" "The audience has no touchstone for that." "When she feels someone else's anger, does that mean she feels angry or just has a sense of anger?" "It was a very weird, ineffable thing to try to convey." "It was, to me, a paradox." "In Gene Roddenberry's 24th century world of highly evolved humans, why is a therapist on board and what are they encountering?" "What hang-ups do they have?" "Gene was big on "people don't have hang-ups."" "They don't have sexual hang-ups, there's no more prejudice, no crime." " They're not racists." " These humans are so far beyond." "Except for moments like this when someone's sad and needs to talk, why is a therapist on board?" "It's a military vessel." "Not only is she on board, she has a seat right next to the captain on the bridge." "Joe Menosky used to say the one thing that would date Next Generation was the idea that the therapist was so important she'd sit next to the captain." "Very 80s sensibility with the therapy craze." "So in the show we shifted her away from the empathic aspect of the character and more towards therapist." "Then we made her in charge of the schools aboard the ship, and like a cruise-line social director." "She had various aspects 'cause she was a lovely actress and great to work with." "She was very good and you wanted to give her more, but you had to find roles for her to do other than go, "Why do you feel angry?"" "In this movie she finally gets to drive Enterprise and ends up crashing it." " Right." "She finally got to steer the ship..." " Women drivers!" " Or Betazed drivers." " And she ploughed right into a planet!" " If I may sound juvenile for a second?" " Oh, please." " I never liked Picard crying here." " I never liked that." "I don't know if it was scripted or Patrick's choice, it just felt like in his big screen debut," "Picard should not be crying." "I tend to agree." "It's one of those moments I cringe a little bit." "You don't want to see the great Captain Picard weeping, not in this movie." "It didn't seem like a right choice and I can't remember if we wrote that or not." "Picard's quarters also wonderfully lit, like nothing else we ever did in the show." "Picard's quarters were the same set that we used for Marina's quarters." "Not Data's quarters, but everyone who had living space with a window was basically this set and we swapped the walls, repainted and moved all the fixtures around." "My big bugaboo with the quarters was that they had space pictures on the wall." "I thought that absurd." "If you're on a sailing ship, do you have pictures of the ocean?" "Maybe you do, but if you've got a window looking at space, do you then hang a space picture on the wall?" "This is Soran destroying stars." "This was a very convoluted aspect of the story that I hated working on, which was why Soran destroys stars to alter the trajectory of the Nexus." "It was so complicated, but it did result in what I think is the best scene in this movie, which is the..." "Stellar Cartography scene." "Picard and Data map the trajectory and talk about what they're going through." "I thought that was such a Star Trek scene." "Great imagery, great emotion." "Here we go." "Enter the Klingons." "Lursa and B'Etor were Klingon sisters introduced..." "This is bringing characters from the series to the feature audience without giving their back story." "I remember when Soran was picked up by Lursa and B'Etor in early drafts, there was a big, almost Roman orgy scene on their ship." " Remember?" " No." "Lursa, B'Etor and Soran were having dinner on their bird-of-prey, and Lursa and B'Etor have these male Klingon slaves that are half naked and serving them grapes and stuff." "There's all this weird sexual energy going around, and they're trying to give Soran a girl or a boy." " There was this whole bacchanal." " I don't recall that." "It was pretty wild and got cut." ""We can't produce this!" "This is crazy!"" "You know, you try to pick the popular characters." "I don't think First Contact did it." "Oh, Barclay was in First Contact." "You try to throw a couple of those characters into the movies." "This was weird." "He's smiling." "Every time I saw this it's like he's amused." "Very cool effects." "Many effects were in the transitional period between model work and CGI." "If I'm not mistaken, most of the ships and stations in this film are actual..." "They're models." "Some computer animation was used in a destruction sequence like that." "By and large this is the last of the old-school model work." "The entire crash sequence in this film is model work." "Although it's spectacularly done and the sound mixing is wonderful," "I think it shows that it's a model, although there are two CG shots after it's crashed." "They probably enhanced things with CG, but it's all a gigantic ship that they're flying on wires." "Yeah, and a big, table-top model." "Some of the fans were more upset that we killed Lursa and B'Etor than Kirk." "That's very true." "There was a version of the script where Lursa and B'Etor live." "In an early version..." "Not to jump ahead of the film, but why not?" "The Enterprise crashes and Lursa and B'Etor's ship is destroyed in the film." "There were a couple of drafts where, as you cut back and forth between what's going on in the Nexus," "Riker et al on the Enterprise are crashed on this planet and need to get out." "They discover that Lursa and B'Etor and some Klingons have also crashed." "They're out there as well." "They come under attack by Lursa and B'Etor." "Then everybody realises, "OK, we all need to get off this planet." ""You guys have part of a ship." "So do we." "We work together or all die."" "There was a whole thing between Riker and Lursa and B'Etor negotiating this." "Lursa and B'Etor were double-dealing and I think they all got away in the end." " Didn't they actually rescue everybody?" " What's amazing is I think we wrote that." " We did." "A couple of versions of it." " It's amazing." "Guinan, of course..." "has this nice big space picture and she's selling Pottery Barn candles for some reason." "It's the only time we saw her quarters." "We never went there in the show." "We kept her enigmatic." "Again, somehow Guinan knows all of these things." "She met Soran in the past, but she has some sort of psychic powers." "Guinan just knows things." "She knows what we need her to know." " Right." " That's what Guinan knows." " We learn about the great Nexus here." " A very confusing concept." "If I remember, the whole notion of the Nexus came out of us saying we're going to have the old crew and the new crew." "In Star Trek time those two time periods are separated by 80 years." "How do you cross the two?" "We don't want an ancient Kirk in a wheelchair." "We want Kirk and Picard." "Was it going to be time travel?" "These movies have done time travel." "First Contact is going to do time travel." "We were hunting for a way to cross the two captains without time travel." "The Nexus was an interesting alternative, this region that was outside of time," " that they were drawn to." " We never conveyed..." "I haven't seen this in a while and may be wrong." "We thought of it as a point at which the past, present and future converge." "Yes." "It seemed a super-tantalising concept that I don't think was properly conveyed or even exploited enough, and the Nexus just came off vague." "The best thing about it in this is the way it looks." "The ribbon of energy is very cool, but the concept seems contrived in getting these two guys together." "You're right." "I forgot that." "It was past, present and future at the same point." "At some point in the universe there are points where this occurs." " Where the time all became one." " There's still a good episode in that." "Playing with the visor." "It's always thrilling to be able to do a dirty set, 'cause we've spent so much time on these super-tidy Enterprise sets." "This sequence was actually cut here." "I'm not sure if it's in the deleted section, but there was more torture here." "He literally stops Geordi's heart as he tortures him for information." " With a device, and then starts it again." " Isn't that in the cut?" "If I'm not mistaken, I think it was cut before the final..." "We'll see if it's in here." "Another good Next Generation plot device is Geordi's visor." "Every now and then he'd see something no one else could, or in this case a villain uses it to see through his eyes." "I'm sure there were half a dozen other examples of things we did with his visor." "Yeah, we cut before he tortures him." "There was a sequence where, to get information out of Geordi, he has some device that you see on a monitor and he stops Geordi's heart." "Geordi's in agonising pain and then he starts it up again." " Here's the Stellar Cartography scene." " Well, this is not the..." " Is it not the big scene?" " This isn't it, I don't think." "Or maybe it is." "This was a set that was just spectacular." "Herman Zimmerman did Next Gen  Deep Space Nine and then Enterprise, and also most of the films." "Wonderful set designer." "This set was way up high and was just spectacular." "To stand in the set was like being in the real thing." "We referenced Stellar Cartography on the show, but we never went in." "I think if we did once, it was a tiny little crappy set." "You're right, this is the big scene and my personal favourite scene, because the performances are great, this is where the themes converge..." "It seems this is the one point in the film where it does seem to gel, at least with these two." "I love the images here, the two Star Trek heroes surrounded by the galaxy." "It just felt good." "I liked this idea that you could go into a room and..." "It grew out of this idea of, well, how do you...?" "What's a map in the 24th century, for people that live in space?" "Wouldn't it be a three-dimensional thing where you could walk around the planets and walk through and see them from all angles, instead of in two dimensions?" "That's where this came from." "When we wrote it, it wasn't this elevated platform." "That was Herman's idea." "What we had in the script was, you walked into the room, turned on the machine and it surrounded you, like you were standing in the middle." "In space." " You could walk around." " It wouldn't have looked as good." "At the time, that was a little beyond what they were capable of in CGI." " For our budget." " They would've stood on a green screen." "Total green, it would have been." "I remember walking onto that platform and feeling a little uneasy, 'cause it was a good 10 or 15 feet off the floor." "Again, this is nothing you would ever see on the TV show." "I actually liked this sub-plot." "This is a film that, in retrospect, was very successful in some ways and, I think, not all that great in others, and there are things..." "I love that first sequence on the Enterprise-B." "That's terrific." "I love..." "I think the film really is very good." "Where it falters for me is when we get in the Nexus and the two captains are scrambling eggs." " That wasn't the poster I had hoped for." " No, it wasn't." "From two Enterprises locked in battle to two captains cooking." ""You'll believe a captain can scramble eggs."" "I don't know quite what happened." "We were obviously trying to convey a paradise, a nice place in the Nexus, but... there was something about it that just doesn't feel right." "I think in many ways this was the most true to what the series was of the Next Generation films." "First Contact is a big gigantic adventure, but we never did that in an episode." "Because you're in a different time period, it felt..." "This is sort of the show." "Good and bad, this is what the show was really." "And we were writing the show." "It was strange to write the final two-hour and this." "They were both movies really." "I remember thinking, "Oh, my God!" "All Good Things is better."" " I did, too!" " That's the movie." "It was the irony of it all, 'cause we laboured on this for a year and a half." " All Good Things took three weeks!" " We just did it." "Being asked to do it was a surprise." "We assumed Michael Piller would write the final episode and he was busy." "He asked us and it was like, "Wow!" "God, now I have to write another two-hour."" "But it flowed." "Because of the lack of time, we couldn't think about it." "We did it." " And it was so much more complicated." " Yeah." "It's like when you have a year and a half to develop a feature and so much input, it just maybe is not the most ideal process for a piece of film writing." "You'd think it would be." "Maybe in most cases it is better to have more time." "You're right." "We were immersed in the show, so this does feel like Next Gen." "When we were writing them both simultaneously and we were really getting tired and stressed, there were times where I remember us getting confused on which script it was." "It was the same characters on the same sets dealing with various techno issues." ""Is this the Nexus or is this the Q court?"" " Is this the time... whatever that was?" " What did we call it?" " I can't remember." "Time..." " Anti-time?" " Anti-time." " "Is it anti-time or is this the Nexus?" ""Which script are we on?" "No, you're talking about the other scene."" "That was a weird period." " There's the great Klingon cleavage." " I had a thing for the Klingon sisters." " Who did you like better?" " If I knew them apart!" "That's..." "That's Lursa isn't it?" "B'Etor is the saucier one." "I always liked B'Etor." "I think I liked Lursa." ""Mistress!" That was a good one!" "Big eyebrows." "The Klingons haven't changed their clothes in a long time." "These costumes were established in the very first Star Trek movie and have not really changed in a century in Star Trek time." "The Klingons get something and they stick with it." "Ah!" "Another time phrase." "The Enterprise-D I thought was awkward to photograph from certain angles." "Like that angle." "It has that very large saucer that overpowers the entire form." "The post-production guys complained that it was hard to film and make look heroic." " It was a bit top heavy in design." " Yeah." "And a stumpy little rear." "There were some angles it looked really nice from." "Others just looked awkward." "Oh! "That's a pretty big margin of error."" "If you think about that line, it's wrong." "It's should be "narrow margin"." ""Too narrow" is a small margin." "With a big margin of error, everything's cool!" "But nobody caught it." "Not the actors, not at any point did anyone catch it." "It drove Rick nuts." "He's a real stickler when it comes to specific words and dialogue." " Syntax and exact on grammar." " Missed it." "Everyone missed it." ""That's a pretty big margin of error," he says." " "Too big." - "Too big."" "This was also very convoluted, reasoning who went where and why." "I remember lots of drafts on the trade and how Picard gets to the surface." "It was Data, now it's Picard." "They'll beam Geordi over, but that's not our concern..." "Lots and lots of stuff to try to just..." "This is sort of indicative of bigger problems." "You just need to get him to the surface." "All we care about is getting Picard to the surface to meet Soran and how to do it." "We wanted the hero and villain to have a scene." "They really haven't met so far." " Great location." "Where was this?" " Valley of Fire, outside Las Vegas." "Oh, right." "I wasn't on this location, but I heard it was brutal heat and wind." "It's really high up." "They had to lug all the stuff up." "Yeah, way up the side of this mountain." "It's a spectacular location." "This is Soran's best scene I think." "I like what he has to say as he climbs around." "I like the way it's shot by the director David Carson, who was our ace director on Next Generation." "He did Yesterday's Enterprise, the pilot for Deep Space Nine, many memorable things on the TV show." "I don't know if this villain was as successful as we'd hoped..." " Ye olde forcefield, the biggest ever." " The biggest forcefield we ever did!" "What made Khan great was that he had a personal vendetta against Kirk." " This guy's just narcissistic." " Yeah." "He just wants to be immortal." "I love when Lursa and B'Etor are revolted by Beverly." "And in First Contact Alfre Woodard wakes up and sees her and screams." "We were always being vicious to Gates for no real reason." "Just to be mean." "There was more and we had a ball in the script with people watching through Geordi's eyes while he did nothing interesting." "He took a bath." "We were going to show his feet sticking out of the tub." "He dries off and has a snack, screwing around before he gets to the bridge." "Geordi and Data always had a really nice relationship on the screen." "Along with Picard, Geordi was Data's mentor." "This whole business with Picard and the forcefield went through many iterations on the page." "We were just constantly rewriting this." "When this was first written, I had always envisaged this sequence..." "Say if I'm wrong, wasn't it a jungle environment?" "I don't remember describing it as a barren wasteland." "They changed it in production, but I always envisioned this in a heavier, overgrown, wilder kind of atmosphere where this was all taking place." "Was this new?" "Did we reshoot this to better motivate his character?" " We might have." " I think it originally ended on "Nice try."" "We came back later when we reshot the ending and added this entire scene with him talking about why he's doing this to flesh out the villain more." "We either added it or just reshot it." "It wasn't in the first cut, but I remember what you're talking about." "I think this was in the first cut." "This is the heart of the show, thematically, this spiel from Soran." "And time, Kirk talking about making a difference before it's too late." "You know even Picard, one of the things we did on the series was we hinted that he regretted not having a family." "Which is why we gave him a family." "Here's your thing." "This is as much as you got, where he's just roaming the ship." "And Worf finally got a chair in the movie." "All those years on Next Generation Worf never had a chair at his tactical station." "Now we've got a motion picture and extra money, give the man a chair." "This is, like..." "This was an uncomfortable moment in the movie theatre." "I'm not sure..." "There was a little bit of laughter." "But I think we enjoyed it more than the audience, 'cause we're so twisted!" "Brent was hesitant to do it. "Come on, guys, you really want me to sing this?"" "You want to run a level three diagnostic on the port plasma relays?" "Well!" "You realise in retrospect how much of that is completely unnecessary and you just wish you could get in there and take it all out." "What did we need with that?" "Why not have Geordi just walk to the console?" " Why the extra talk about tech?" " Tech that has nothing to with the plot." "This was cool." "I enjoyed the space battle." "It came at a point in the film where there had been no action since the opening." "Maybe too long, so finally we get excited." "This is good old-fashioned Star Trek." "There's the periscope." "We don't know why Klingon ships have a periscope." "They shoot through the shields." "I love those Klingon birds-of-prey." "You'll notice - this is an obvious observation - the damage to the bridge is much more extreme and so much more cool than anything we did on TV." " By far." " Lost of stunts, lots of pyrotechnics." "Lots of wounded." "Like Brannon said, the Enterprise-B bridge was gimballed and could shake." "This is the old Enterprise-D, TV series bridge which was not gimballed, so this is the actors throwing themselves around as we shake the camera, which they'd gotten very good at by this point." "You could tell them it was a slight shudder and they'd give you that." "Or that it rocks hard and they'd do that." "And they'd all just do it in sync." "Yeah, at exactly the same moment, and they all had their places they liked to fall and places they liked to hold on to." "I'll say this now so you can watch for it." "After the Klingons' ship is destroyed," "Data has this moment where he makes a fist and says, "Yes!"" "Right before that, there's a hammy extra in the background who does the gesture." "Do you remember how upset we all got?" " Oh, I do remember!" " He ruined it, but we couldn't reshoot it." "He stole Data's moment, that's right." " He never worked in this town again." " We'd never throw this guy on a show." "If you said this in a production meeting on the TV series, they'd say, "He'll bounce on the captain's chair." And it doesn't turn." "You can't destroy..." "can't touch the captain's chair." "On the show if we wanted to have someone throw food at someone, it had to be dry food." " You couldn't soil the uniforms." " Or get anything wet on them." "Or spill coffee on the floors, 'cause you'd have to re-carpet." " Great stuff." " This is pretty cool." " That shot's actually from an earlier film." " Yeah, that's a stolen shot." "The budget for these films wasn't huge." "I can't remember what it was on this one." " Here's the guy." " There he is in the background!" "He just does it!" "What are you thinking?" "What was the budget for this?" "Do you recall?" "In the 48 range?" "I think it was more like 60 to 65, but don't quote me on that." "I don't know exactly what it was, but in terms of big, sci-fi, action films, it was not... it was a little on the mid-range side." "That was a surprise." "We had to cut on this and on First Contact." "We had to have meetings just to take out opticals, and it was painful to try to figure out where we were going to trim back." "On the TV show you'd get to production meetings, you'd have a phaser fight between people and there'd be a process of saying, "OK, this show's over pattern." ""We need to make cuts." "The optical budget is this." "Cut some phaser shots."" "You'd count shots." "You'd count the shots Picard could shoot and how many the bad guy could return." "You'd trade. "One less shot from Picard."" "You'd do the features and think that nonsense is over." "No, you have to do it, and now every phaser shot costs ten times as much." "It's the same problems, just writ large." "I remember the agony of figuring out how Picard would cross the forcefield." "I know." "Didn't we end up with, after weeks of work, a little break in the rocks?" "There's some rocks and he notices a hole." "This was a spectacular sequence to see in the movie theatre." "Sorry to interrupt, but LeVar wanted this so bad." "The door's coming down and LeVar waits." "He waits..." "Oh, and just me!" "And a cool roll." "This was great." "We always talked about saucer separation." "I'm glad we always saved it for special occasions." "Almost never done on TV." "A very special moment, to separate the saucer from the warp drive." "This is when you go, "Oh, there are kids on the Enterprise."" "It was always a bizarre concept and we always struggled with it in the series." " This ship carries families." " And they take on the Borg!" "Does Picard have to worry about them?" "It would come up on the show and a character would say," ""Our families are our strength."" "Never quite knew what that meant, but we said it a lot." "So is it strong to go fight the Borg and potentially kill all these kids?" "That teddy bear is sentient." "Most people don't know." "It gave us story material when we used the kids." " It was a nice concept that it was a city." " It brought home that's it's a community." "That space travel had reached that point was a great Roddenberry idea." " Ye olde graphics." " Yeah." "Lots of discussion on what that would be." "You shouldn't rely on graphics too much on Star Trek, which we've done before." ""Is that guy going to get through the forcefield?" ""No, he's not." "I'm going to go climb my ladder."" "Soran does a lot of ladder climbing in this movie." "Good exercise." "It's basically incline cardio." " So he's a fit villain." " He's a very fit villain." "This was a great sequence to behold in the theatre." "Big rumbling stuff." "It's a moment where they'll applaud when it's over because it was so exciting." "Like you said, I don't know that it was done, except in the first season." " Yeah, that was the only time." " I think so." "It was, yeah." "You're absolutely right." "No, no, there was a two-part episode where Data took the battle bridge for some reason, so it's only one other time." " And the shock wave." "That's "hard rock"." " That's the biggest..." "That's the biggest one we ever did." "And then back again." "The long-standing joke I'm sure everyone can appreciate is, why no seat belts?" "Seat-belt technology fell on hard times, like the 22nd century." "The "Oh, shit!" is a great laugh line and some people were shocked that we'd do such a thing." "The first... profanity ever said on Star Trek." "I never liked the image of him wiggling through the rocks." "And look at the rocks themselves." "They're so obviously stacked there." "That was cool." "We're here." "This is the cool sequence in the film, a good roller-coaster ride." "There's Troi. "Hey, I'm steering!"" " I'm not sure where they're taking them." " Where is it safest?" "By the windows?" " "Down on these beds!" "This'll be safe!" - "Yeah, you'll be fine over here!"" "Not that the beds have seat belts either." "This is all model, a big model." "Big..." "Yeah, it's all model." "This entire notion of the saucer separating and crash-landing on the planet's surface was inspired by something Mike Okuda, who was an art director, drew and wrote about in the Star Trek Technical Manual he put out." "We were leafing through that publication because we used it for the show, and he had this notion that the saucer could separate and also land on a planet." "We were fascinated by that." "There was an episode we proposed for the sixth-season cliffhanger." "It was going to be called All Good Things and the plot was going to be" "Starfleet recalls the Enterprise home to turn it into a museum ship." "It's past its prime, the crew will be broken up, Picard reassigned." "The journey's over and the Enterprise is going home." "On the way home something happened." "I can't remember the plot." "The ship is attacked, the saucer separated and the battle section lost." "The saucer crash-landed on some alien planet and that was the cliffhanger." "I don't even know if we had a second part, but that was the cliffhanger." "It was the destruction of the Enterprise-D." "It was rejected, but we held on to the saucer separation and the crash and used it in the movie and it was the title for the final episode of Next Gen." "I like those shots the best, the ones straight on at the tip of the saucer." "You rarely get to see that level of detail as the ship's usually seen in wide angle." "That's supposed to be the wreckage of the view screen." "That's hard to convey." "There was this question of what it looks like turned off." " That was always a question." " You never turn it off in the show." "If it's just a movie screen that would be disappointing." "What would it be?" "We just crashed into it and smashed it, and it became wreckage." "This is the death of the Enterprise." "A lot of... death imagery in this." "I liked this." "Riker can see the sky through the top of the bridge." "This is a pretty cool shot." "Is this the combo CGl-model shot?" "I'm not the guy to ask, but I believe this is CG." " And here comes the Nexus." " Here comes the Nexus." "This is where the difficulties really begin." "I'm just being candid and it's been a number of years, so I feel I can." "We didn't really exploit the two captains." "It's cool that they work together." "It's a great idea that Kirk dies in the film in Picard's arms, but they're never in conflict." "There's conflict in Kirk not wanting to leave the Nexus and nice sentiments." "There is some nice stuff, but I always thought that these two guys needed to be on their bridges fighting each other and then working together." "Although Kirk dies on a bridge, it should have been the bridge of his ship." " I tend to agree." " Those were things that I just..." "I'm not blaming anyone but myself." "I think at the time we were so concerned about not doing what was expected." "It's expected that he'll die on the bridge of his ship, save the day and die heroically." "We were so concerned not to do that and went to something not as satisfying." "Again, the constraints of two generations and just all the stuff." "This was done day for night." "They just narrowed down the shutter." "Good old technique, filmic technique." "There's that really cool ribbon." "That's really nice." "I like that effect a lot." "When you talk about something that is heaven-like and something that Soran wants to get back to that's so unbelievable, it's best left to the imagination." "You get there and it's clever that it's shown by memories you wanted to be in, but..." "I don't know." " It just becomes a fantasy." " I love this planet blowing up." "This is pretty cool." "That's pretty brutal." "They reset time again." "There's a bit of time travel here where..." "Where we go back." "We did many, many, many versions of the Nexus and what it is for Picard." "There was a version where Picard ended up in his father's..." "He's from a family of vintners in France, and there was a version where he ended up in the wine cellar where he used to play as a boy, and his brother was there." "It was like reliving a moment from his youth." "We tied it into family and the whole nephew thing." "It might have been at a meeting with Patrick that we came up with Christmas." " Yeah, I think you're right." " Maybe it was even Patrick's idea." "I don't know if it came out of his doing A Christmas Carol on stage, or what." "He was not happy with the Nexus." "Neither were we." "We were groping for what it would be." "Although something bugs me about this little perfect scene, and it's a little cloying, this perfect family and perfect little Christmas, it is, for the character of Picard, really appropriate." "Fans of the series know that he never had the family." "It's true, absolutely." "You believe it's his notion of an idealised Christmas with the wife he never had and the children he never had." "Another problem with the Nexus is that it's difficult to watch your captains that are usually one step ahead of you as the heroes, to be one step behind you as a viewer, and you're thinking, "Hey, this isn't real!" "Snap out of it!"" "I think on a subliminal level you grow impatient with them." " Do you know what I'm saying?" " Yeah." "It was interesting that when it came up, there was debate on whether there's Christmas in the 24th century, because Gene's vision of the future was a very secular, humanist one." "Religion, in Gene's viewpoint, was something man had long since let go of, so do they really celebrate Christmas?" "There was maybe one reference to Christmas in the original series, but Next Generation went out of its way never to mention these holidays." "It's true." "But it's the Nexus, so..." "there is Christmas in the Nexus, they still celebrate all that stuff." "I forgot about this." "This was a really neat little effect, almost like the star exploding." " Picard trying to remind himself of..." " I don't know that that came across." "I don't know if anybody but us got that." "For the record, that's what it was, not just a pretty ornament." "To remind you of..." "It was like a harbinger." "It was, "Oh, there's death."" "But it just looks like a pretty ornament." "That's... something that we worked out in a novel where you could explain it." "Now, a lot of this house is an actual house in Pasadena." "They shot this on location, this house." "A beautiful home." "This was also the subject of a reshoot." "We went back and reshot sections of Picard's Christmas Nexus experience." " Why did we do that?" " I don't recall." "I'd have to look back at it." " I'm not sure what the difference is." " Could be performance." "Maybe the kids." "Maybe there were some problems there." "I don't think it was a scripting issue." "Yeah, it was about the shoot." "That painting behind is a nautical representation of an ancestor of Picard's." "If you saw it closely, you'd see Picard's face painted onto an existing portrait." "This was a real pain to justify what Guinan's doing there, because Guinan's on Enterprise, so there's some part of her..." "An echo. "I'm an echo," I think she says, "of the Guinan that you know."" "At the end of the movie fans rightly started saying, "Is there an echo of Kirk?" ""Is there an echo of Picard?" We never had a good answer for that!" "It was all very confusing how this Nexus worked." "This I just thought was nauseating." "Yeah, it's too treacly." "In a way, what we should have done is..." "Picard's fantasy should have been the Roman orgy." "It should have been so dark and weird." "More like, "Whoa!" "That's what he really wishes he was doing?"" " Isn't she David Carson's wife?" " That's the director's wife." " And I believe his kids are in it." " That's his son." "Any time you have five kids all saying "Yeay!", you're in trouble." ""Yeay!"" "Picard goes off to have a very special relationship with..." "Very well dressed at the Picard household." "Again, well performed, nice music, beautifully lit, but not..." " Something always bugged me about it." " It doesn't really touch you." " It touches you in concept." " In concept it's perfect for the captain." "It's a sweet Christmas, the family he never had, emotional, it's the life that could have been that wasn't, but you don't connect with it." "I hated it." "I cringed every time I saw Guinan sitting on that carousel." "This is just..." "The thing about time travel is, it better be iron clad." "If you're going to travel back in time, although it's all fantasy, we normally apply a little scientific flair to it." "There are reasons things are being done." "This is pure fantasy." "Think it and you'll go there." "That's just not good enough." "It wasn't..." "I don't know if people really thought about it." "I don't know." "And here he is!" "He can just go anywhere he wants." "That's not a satisfying way to save the universe." "It's not." "We wrote ourselves into a corner because he's just swept into the Nexus." " He has no equipment." " No way out except think it." "Except to think, "I'll just get out now."" "Of course, the age-old paradox is, when you do leave with Kirk, why don't you go back...?" "Why go back to when the world ends?" "Go back two months." " Go back a while." "Take your time." " Go back a couple of years." "Get Soran when he's in the bathroom somewhere and handcuff him." " And there is no answer for that." " It's true of the Terminator films." "You know, the Terminator could go back at any time." "Why not send another Terminator?" "You don't ask these questions." "Or hope you don't ask them." "You hope that the movie is so engaging that you don't stop and go, "Wait a minute..."" "This is the infamous breakfast scene, which again came out of our desire to have the two captains do something different and unexpected." " That's where it came from, but then..." " The only things missing are aprons." "If only Martha Stewart had been as popular then!" "Martha could have made a cameo in this scene." " Shatner gives a lovely performance." " Yeah, he's definitely selling this." "This is the first time that the captains meet." "The audience saw the poster." "They've been waiting for this." "I don't think they expected..." "I think they wanted something more high octane than hanging around a house." "Butler, his dog." "In the script it was Jake, as my dog Jake had recently died." "Bill's dog had recently died, named Butler, so he renamed it on the set." "I remember some complaints in fan letters about why Picard saw that it wasn't real in 2 minutes and Kirk took 80 years." " Yeah." " I always thought it was a good point." "It was also always a little unclear." "Kirk enters the Nexus 80 years ago." "From his perspective, has he just arrived or has he chopped logs for 80 years?" "There's no time in the Nexus." " It has no meaning, so it's a bit..." " We should have better defined it." "It was a better concept than we executed, I think." "Well..." "Yeah, this is just painful." "Again, I think you're right." "We thought it would be charming and offbeat." ""Let's do something totally different:" "the two captains cooking."" "I think we were really intrigued with just trying to do something off." "They worked well together." "Everybody going into this picture, the fans, the press and even us, had this idea that when you do this film, look out for Shatner and Stewart." "That's going to be a thing!" "It's going to be the two giant egos and they won't talk." "They got along wonderfully." "They really enjoyed each other on the set." "They sparked well in their scenes with no clashes of egos or "star pulls" by either one of these two." "They were professionals." "They worked well, helped each other and were lovely." "I did like the idea that Kirk would think," ""The galaxy owes me one." "I've saved the galaxy a lot of times."" "It was great and there was something interesting about him being a mentor when he gives Picard some interesting advice in the next couple of scenes." "Yeah, that the two men are facing similar things in their lives, that they both walked away from family and home for a career in the stars." "They're both worried about the same thing, that it's all going to become empty, that they'll go home to empty homes and lives when the adventure is over." "That I thought was intriguing, that it frightened both of them on some level." "This is presumptuous of Picard." "Antonia could be naked." "What's he doing?" "He doesn't even knock." "He just goes in." "The introduction of the horses into the movie, correct me if I'm wrong, it was a flat-out appeal to Bill to do the movie." "We knew Bill had horses and loved horses." "We said, "We've got to put horses in this film." "Then he'll do it!"" "Yeah, you're right." "He was wise to that and signalled in the script meeting that he knew that's why we were doing it." "He got back at us." "These are his horses." "He didn't loan them!" "He rented the horses to the production company!" "Again, a great image to have these two futuristic captains on horseback." "None of it's real." "They might as well be on a holodeck." " Yeah." " It's just not really an action sequence." "It's an uncomfortable place to put them." "One doesn't want to save the day." "The other one is forced into the position of begging him to save the day." "It's an awkward dynamic to have Picard chasing after Kirk." "But there's stuff I like coming up, when they stop and they talk." "It's some good captainly sentiment." "I think also the two actors, in a very real way, the actors are better than the material and take you through this section." "You really invest in the two captains because of the performances." "This whole section works because of these two actors." "I recall that this whole business about "making a difference", some of this came from Shatner." "He had some nice insights into what Kirk would say." " And who would know better?" " He really understands the character." "I think Shatner over the years has got a bad rap." "People have dismissed him as an actor or they make fun of him as an actor." "He has a goofy personality sometimes, deliberately so in the Priceline ads." "He's very smart and really understands Kirk, and why he's a hero to so many." "He understands what makes him tick." "This whole little speech that's coming up here as he walks the horse around, is all ADR added later, 'cause we rewrote this section after it was completed." "Everyone was dissatisfied with what he said." "I can't recall the draft." "This business about the empty chair on the bridge and making a difference was done in post-production." "Any time his back was turned we changed stuff." "Yeah." "The stuff about making a difference is very nice, but how does it fit in?" " It doesn't." " It doesn't stick with other themes." "It's too many notions and many different directions." "Making a difference isn't dealing with the mortality thing, of accepting that." "It kind of does." "Like, "You're here for a short time, so make a difference."" "I think this being our first film, we were very eager to please, we were a little scared, we were..." "being pulled in so many directions." " It was a major career break for us." " And a lot of input." "It was very challenging to try to pull it all together." " I'm not making excuses." " No, I think it's a fact." "We were young, green in the feature world and excited at the possibilities." "It was big deal." "A lot of people would see this and everybody had an opinion." "I think also this was, in some ways, the high watermark of Trek's popularity." "When this film came out, it got the cover of Time magazine with Shatner and Stewart." "I remember us saying at the time," ""This is the peak." "Where do you go from here?"" "Next Gen was at the height, Voyager was coming out," "Deep Space Nine was on, the cover of Time." "They were talking about the thing in Vegas at this point." " It was..." " The apex." "Trek never quite captured the pop-cultural zeitgeist like it did then." "Now we go back." "We did a lot of repeating time cycles on the show like this and many afterwards, but this one just..." "didn't work quite as well." "This section all through here becomes..." "Maybe we'll talk about it during the deleted scene section." "It was the subject of a vast reshoot and what happened was, we watched it with a test audience and Sheri Lansing and the Paramount executives on the lot, a recruited screening where an audience is brought in to give their reactions." "We were watching with the test audience and the audience was really with us." "They stayed with us." "Laughed at the right parts." "Gasped at the right parts." "Everyone applauded when the Enterprise crashed." "It was like we had them." "At the Nexus they quietened, but we hadn't lost them." "Here, when Kirk dies in the original version, there was utter silence in the audience." "It wasn't that stunned, on the edge of your seat silence, but we had lost them and we all knew it." "The movie ended." "Polite applause." "Brannon and I and Rick and the executives went to Sheri's office." "Before she got the test results back, as they did a quick and dirty test," "Sheri sat down and said, "You have a great movie, but a bad ending." ""So we're giving you some more money." "Go out and reshoot the ending."" "She knew." "She was smart enough and intuitive enough to know instantly." "The test results came in maybe an hour later and proved her exactly right." "She was the captain of that Enterprise and she knew what to do." "She said, "You've got to reshoot."" "We left Sheri's office, you, me and Rick." "Paramount's deserted, it's the middle of the night, and we're walking back to Rick's office trying to figure out what we'll do, how to get a second shot at killing Kirk that has to be in this same scene" "on the same set." "We'll rebuild this whole lattice work and the bridge." "It has to fit within the movie." "It can only cost whatever they were going to give us." "It has to be done in the next three weeks." "It was madness." "To make matters worse, Patrick had shaved his head for a different role." "He's wearing a piece." "Patrick's hair in this is a toupee." "Bizarre, but it's true." "If you watch the original ending..." "This is actually very exciting stunt work." "This was pretty good stunt work." "None of this is CGI." "It's real stuff." "This isn't even models." "These are guys on this cliff, clinging to things collapsing." "By comparison it is astonishing to me that we even ever thought that original ending would fly." "Yeah, the original ending was..." "In concept it sounded good." "I think that what happened in the original ending was that" "Kirk knocks out Soran, who gets the remote, and he helps Picard save the day." "Soran wakes up." "Kirk doesn't see him." "Soran shoots him and he dies." "What attracted us to that version of the death of Captain Kirk was the irony." "Here's a man who's done these amazing things, saved the day so many times." " In the end, he's shot in the back." " There was a John Wayne film like that." "John Wayne is shot in the back at the end of Sands of Iwo Jima." "He goes through World War II and the invasion of Iwo Jima with his platoon." "He's up on the hill and they're going, "We did it." There's this off-camera bang." "He's just shot in the back." "It's powerful." "That's what we were trying to do originally." " Absolutely didn't work." " Didn't work." "So then we..." "I don't know how we came up this bridge stuff." "There were many versions of this." "There was an underground version." "Soran had an underground chamber filled with cases of some explosive." "He was going to blow them all up." "There were variations." "The multi-forcefield version had Soran inside one forcefield in a bubble." "Then there's another bubble with Picard in it and another with Kirk." "The forcefields moved and could kill." "All these elaborate things kept falling on plausibility, logic, and we were having trouble fitting them back into the existing footage." "The prevailing opinion is that this was..." " That's a dummy." " Yeah, that's a dummy." "This just wasn't the most fitting end for Kirk." "I think that, in my opinion and it's just my opinion, it would've been fine to have him die that way." "The physicality of the death was fine, although he should have been on a ship." "I think it was the whole Nexus thing." "I think the movie works." " It's just the..." " It's the Nexus." "You go into this section where you just lose it." "You start to think about the movie and start wondering what's going on." "Instead of being caught up in it, you start to pull out and never really check back in." "It's hard to go from Kirk making breakfast to caring when he falls off the bridge." " You're just in a weird head space." " Now, here a spectacular fireball." " In the original Soran just gets shot." " That's right." "If you compare the two, this is much better." "There's no comparison." "It's better shot, it's better produced, it has more action to it." "This is a nice shot where Picard comes out of the smoke." "I remember when we wrote the first draft of the movie we had taken a month off and went away." " Yeah." " We were sitting in a hotel room." " We were in Hawaii." " We were writing the death of Kirk." "The "It was fun" line was always in the script, but it just got moved and changed round and I remember a touching moment." "You at the computer, me on the couch." "We'd talk, as that's what our method was." "One typing and one talking." "We got to this beat, "It was fun." And Kirk dies." "I was really moved." "I cried." "It was like, God, I've killed a childhood hero and what are the implications?" "Bill wanted Kirk's final line to be, "Oh, my." He says, "Oh, my."" "It was because he sees something, but what is it that Kirk sees?" " Is he back in the Nexus?" " Is it the next life?" "He sees something." "We wanted his last line to be, "It was fun."" "It was a comment not just on this adventure, but on Star Trek." "I didn't like "Oh, my" at all." "A moment of silence here." "That's like he went to hell or something." "It's not even a pleasant "Oh, my"." "It's like, "Oh, my, I'm terrified." "I'm dying."" "Which I guess is human." "It's a human reaction." "I don't think..." "I think about the fans of Star Trek, the original series, and I don't know that there's anything we could have done to please everybody." "It's just, as you say, one of those icons that..." "There's going to be someone who's pissed that you killed him at all..." " It's nice that we buried him up here." " I liked this shot." "It's not Patrick." "No, that's his stand-in." ""We need somebody to stand on the mountain as the helicopter circles."" ""Well, I'll be in my trailer." Sorry, Patrick." "You probably didn't say that." "Other pieces were cut here." "There was Picard getting into the shuttle that'll be in the deleted scenes, but none of it was really crucial, just shoe leather that didn't advance the plot." "I never liked that shot of the shuttle." "It doesn't seem real." " Very phoney." " It's too broad daylight." "It's broad daylight." "A lot of nice detail in that." "It's hard to see people walking around on the show." "Actually, I think people at home will probably be able to see the detail." "We're actually watching this on a two-inch monitor in a tiny room." "Ron and I are officially snuggling." "We haven't been this close in a very long time." "These cargo containers can be seen to this very day on Enterprise." " They've been in every Star Trek show." " For ages." "What could it be?" "It's the cat." "Brent hated this!" "He was so..." "Remember this?" ""Does he have to find the cat?" "Does it have to be the cat?" ""Can't it be Geordi?"" "I said, "No." "Trust us, the cat." "There won't be a dry eye."" "People love the cat." "We force him to cuddle the thing, no less." "The cat knows he hates him." "The cat's like, "Get me away from him." "He's choking me."" " Yeah." "Boy!" " Cut!" " A little music cue." " Yeah." "I was there for the shooting of this." "I happened to be around." "I wasn't around for much of the shooting." "I was getting ready to do Deep Space." "I walked into the soundstage to see what they were shooting, and they were shooting this sequence with Riker and Picard and the wrecked bridge of the Enterprise, and them basically saying goodbye to it." "The entire crew was emotional." "Everyone behind the camera had tears in their eyes." "It was like an impromptu moment of everyone saying goodbye to the show." " It was different on the last episode." " 'Cause we knew a movie was coming." "The final day on All Good Things was the poker scene." "We all went down." "It was applause and there was a bit of wistfulness, but the genuine emotion of letting go of the series really happened here, when they were saying goodbye to the set, the set that they'd been on for seven years and had launched their careers." "It had become a phenomenon and it was gone." "These two were saying goodbye to it and everybody in the soundstage was..." "I got caught up in it." "I was completely surprised and I was moved by it." "They called, "Cut!" "Print!" and people collapsed." "It was really the goodbye to the entire series." "I wish that had been the last shot 'cause you traditionally do this." "You go back up into space in these films." "Who cares about these ships?" "We don't even know who's on these ships." "I wish we'd stayed down there." " And that's... the end of the movie." " That's it." " Thanks for listening." " Thank you for listening." "In 1986, Star Trek celebrated its 20th anniversary." "The original series, once regarded as a network failure, was a resounding success in syndication." "Three Star Trek movies had proven the ongoing appeal of the show, and Star Trek IV looked to be a hit, too." "Paramount Pictures turned to Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek's creator, with an irresistible challenge." "Could he remake Star Trek for television?" "Roddenberry's answer was Star Trek:" "The Next Generation." "Fans were initially sceptical, but Roddenberry, along with a new cast led by Patrick Stewart, soon proved Star Trek could be successfully reinvented." "Still, Roddenberry was reluctant to mix the new cast with the original, preferring to let the new show stand on its own." "Except for a few crossover episodes, the two casts remained separate until now." "One of the background bridge crew members is played by Lorine Mendell." "Lorine, visible here, worked on S T:" "TNG as Gates McFadden's stand-in, and could also be seen occasionally as a crew member on the Enterprise-D." "Demora Sulu is played by Jacqueline Kim." "Kim is recognised by genre fans for her role as Lao Ma in episodes of X ena:" "Warrior Princess." "Demora's father, Hikaru, never had a first name until the previous movie," "Star Trek Vl:" "The Undiscovered Country." "By contrast, Pavel Andreievich Chekov, played by Walter Koenig, had not only a first, but a middle name in the original series." "Demora was probably born around 2271, at about the time of Star Trek:" "The Motion Picture." "This makes Hikaru Sulu the only major original series character besides Kirk to have a child." "(As far as we know, at least... )" "Enterprise-B captain John Harriman is played by Alan Ruck." "Ruck won popular acclaim when he co-starred with Matthew Broderick in Paramount's comedy, Ferris Bueller's Day Off." "Ruck also played visionary aerospace engineer Tom Dolan in Tom Hanks' miniseries, From the Earth to the Moon." "This is the first (and thus far the only) appearance of the Enterprise-B." "Previously, we'd seen a hint of the ship in the form of a sculpture on the back wall of the Enterprise-D's observation lounge." "That sculpture suggested that the Enterprise-B was an Excelsior- class starship." "The Excelsior model was designed by Bill George for Star Trek III." "In modified form, the same model was used here, although a computer-generated version was used for some shots in the energy ribbon." "Production designer Herman Zimmerman was responsible for the design of the Enterprise-B bridge." "He based it on the Enterprise-A and Excelsior bridges he had created for Star Trek VI, using parts from both sets." "The Enterprise-B science officer is played by Jenette Goldstein." "Goldstein played John Connor's foster mother in Terminator 2:" "Judgement Day." "The unnamed dignitary behind Harriman is wearing a suit of the same basic design worn by Sarek in "Journey to Babel" (TOS)." "Thomas Kopache plays the ship's communications officer." "Kopache recently appeared as a dying Sphere-Builder alien in "Harbinger" (ENT), and often played a civilian advisor in the White House situation room in The West Wing." "Prior to shooting her bridge scenes," "Jacqueline Kim asked for lessons in working a starship's controls." "Kim wanted her character's keyboard work to have the same confident panache as Demora's famous father." "These transport vessels were the first spacecraft in a Star Trek film to be done entirely with computer-generated digital renderings, rather than with traditional miniatures." "Tim Russ plays an unnamed Starfleet lieutenant." "Russ later played Tuvok, the Vulcan science officer on Star Trek:" "Voyager." "Glenn Morshower, who plays the ship's navigator, also played a White House situation room advisor in The West Wing." "The Enterprise-B bridge was built on Paramount's Stage 7, near the spot where the main systems shaft had been filmed on Star Trek V." "The deflector room and corridor were also built on that stage." "Jenette Goldstein later appeared in Clockstoppers, a film directed by Jonathan Frakes." "Goldstein also played Private Vasquez in Aliens, and she once guested on the visionary s-f TV series, Max Headroom." "One of Captain Kirk's most memorable lines is from "Return to Tomorrow" (TOS)." "Kirk admonished his crew that "risk is our business,"" "reminding them that risk is "what this ship is about..." ""...that's why we're aboard her."" "Chekov's exclamation in Russian translates as "What a surprise!"" "Some fans have wondered if Tim Russ's appearance here suggests that Tuvok served on the Enterprise-B, but Russ clearly does not have pointed Vulcan ears, so he's definitely playing another character." "Russ's console, by the way, is a revamp of Sulu and Chekov's helm/navigation console from the first Star Trek motion picture, suitably redressed with new graphics and a new base." "No one seems willing to admit why the number 47 pops up so often in Star Trek." "Fans of the TV series Alias have noticed that 47 appears a lot there, too." "These jolts were partially created with motorised gizmos that shook the set." "This scene was shot in April 1994, just weeks after the powerful Northridge earthquake devastated parts of Los Angeles." "Almost everyone in the cast and crew was still a little jumpy." "The special effects staff diabolically took advantage of the situation by not letting anyone in the cast or crew see the shakers in action until the cameras were rolling." "As a result, the look of panic on some of the actors' faces was quite real." "One of the El-Aurian refugees in this scene is played by Judy Leavitt, the wife of Walter Koenig." "Whoopi Goldberg makes a cameo appearance, reprising her role as Guinan from Star Trek:" "TNG." "James Doohan makes his last appearance as Scotty in this film." "Actually, Scotty survived well into the future, where, in "Relics" (TNG), we learned our favourite engineer was still alive in Picard's time." "Seems Scotty had suspended himself in a transporter beam for all those years." "Astute observers have noticed that Scotty, in "Relics," seemed unaware of Kirk's fate in this film." ""Relics" was produced two years before this film, so Kirk's fate was not known yet." "Screenwriters Rick Berman, Brannon Braga, and Ronald D Moore reportedly knew of the inconsistency, but wanted Scotty to appear here anyway, simply out of affection for James Doohan's character." "This stretch of corridor didn't actually connect to the deflector room set." "A small piece of matching corridor was built on an elevated platform at the top of the deflector room for Kirk's entrance." "The deflector room was nearly three stories in overall height." "This was the first scene filmed for this movie." "It was shot on Monday, March 28, 1994." "Star Trek:" "The Next Generation was still in production at that point, but this set was built on a different stage, allowing both productions to be filmed simultaneously." "Star Trek:" "Deep Space Nine was also being filmed at the same time." "Those optical circuit cards are larger (and presumably earlier) versions of the "isolinear chips" seen in S T:" "TNG." "Visible briefly on the left is a recycled prop, the "photon torpedo targeting sensor" from Star Trek VI." "Although the Enterprise-B was a reuse of the Starship Excelsior designed by ILM from Star Trek III, there was some concern that the classic Excelsior design might not work with some of the camera angles planned for this film." "Still, no one wanted to disappoint the fans who expected to see an Excelsior- class Enterprise-B." "This is why co-producer Peter Lauritson worked with illustrator John Eaves to make a few minor changes to the Excelsior design." "Lauritson and Eaves added some detail on the secondary hull near the main deflector, since it was featured in this film." "The pulsing red "ALERT" computer display on some upper screens bears an obscure (and unreadable) "technical code":" "LRMRA." "It stands for "Liz Radley Memorial Red Alert,"" "a gag reference to video consultant Elizabeth Radley, who also consulted on the pilot episodes of Star Trek:" "DS9 and Star Trek:" "VGR." "This scene was filmed 7 days after Kirk's work in the deflector room." "The time was needed to allow for the set to be properly "distressed"" "to reflect the damage caused by the energy ribbon." "Not only was the set creatively mangled, but "damaged" pipes and other set dressing were added, and the set was repainted to give it a burned look." "And here's one final look at Peter and John's modifications to the Excelsior engineering hull, also suitably mangled by the artists at ILM." "The sailing ship Enterprise was represented by the Lady Washington." "The Star Trek shooting crew travelled to Marina del Rey, for filming on the ship, whose home port is Grays Harbor in Washington state." "The Lady Washington is a full-scale replica of an 18th century square-rigged sailing vessel." "Several British and French warships and merchant craft bore the illustrious name during the 17th and 18th centuries." "One such ship, the H.M.S. Enterprize, is depicted in the main title sequence for Star Trek:" "Enterprise." "The first American ship to bear the name was the U.S.S. Enterprise, a supply sloop during the American Revolutionary War." "Michael Dorn plays Worf, the first Klingon warrior to serve in the Starfleet." "The replica Lady Washington was launched in 1989 by the Grays Harbor Historical Seaport Authority." "She was built using traditional methods and materials, and serves as a floating classroom." "She is a museum of a bygone era." "The replica Lady Washington also appeared as the H.M.S. Interceptor in The Pirates of the Caribbean." "The holodeck, or holographic environment simulator was introduced in the first season of Star Trek:" "The Next Generation." "The holodeck theoretically uses holograms, shaped forcefields, and replicated matter to recreate nearly any setting imaginable." "In early episodes, the production staff had an informal rule that the floors in a holodeck simulation should not go down below the floor level of the holodeck's door." "This made sense, since the holodeck was part of the ship, and it's probably not a good idea to burrow down to the deck below." "Still, ever more ingenious story requirements and set designs eventually persuaded producers to change their "rule."" "They decided that at least one holodeck was a multi-story chamber, thus allowing hapless sailors to walk the plank." "(Or to fall off, if they refuse to walk by themselves.)" "Many were shocked in 1987 when they learned that a Klingon would be serving on the Enterprise bridge, but Worf's loyalty and courage soon won him many followers among Star Trek's fans." "Holodeck programs were thought to be so sophisticated that they included simulated people." "These were computer-controlled puppets, amazing simulations virtually indistinguishable from real humans." "The background sailors in this scene are presumably holodeck puppets, although many are real members of the Lady Washington's crew." "The holodeck entry portal arch was a prop originally made for the Next Generation episode, "Haven."" "Some holodeck programs used the arch to make it easier to find the way out." "Patrick Stewart plays Captain Jean-Luc Picard." "Stewart was "discovered" for his Star Trek role by TNG supervising producer Robert Justman, who saw Stewart perform at a Los Angeles theatre." "Justman was so impressed with the British actor that he convinced Roddenberry to consider Stewart." "The holodeck arch was originally intended to let outsiders know when it was safe or appropriate to enter a simulation program." "Star Trek:" "The Next Generation first aired in 1987, some 18 years after the original Star Trek series concluded its run on network television." "The first season of S T:" "TNG was set in the year 2364, some 95 years after the conclusion of the original series." "This film was set after S T:" "TNG's seventh season, in the year 2371." "The Amargosa Observatory interior set was an elaborate redress of the Enterprise-B bridge." "Production designer Zimmerman retained the basic structure of the bridge, but replaced many walls, added a second level, and added a large back room." "Set dressing, paint, and lighting helped make the reuse virtually undetectable on film." "Zimmerman wanted Amargosa to be an old station, so some control panels were done in the style of the original series." "There's the added second level." "Now you can see that Worf is kneeling where the captains' chair was on the Enterprise-B bridge." "That tubular structure was made for the Enterprise-D engineering lab when Picard was "de-Borged"" "in "The Best of Both Worlds, Part II" (TNG)." "Malcolm McDowell plays Dr Tolian Soran, the El-Aurian scientist." "The special effects department filled the set with a light fog to create a slight haze and so that the handheld flashlights would create beams." "Although the fog was non-toxic, it was not a pleasant experience for the cast or for the crew." "The Romulan warrior's wounds have a greenish hue, reminding us that Romulans, like Vulcans, have green blood." "Data's pet cat, Spot, was first introduced in "Data's Day" (TNG), although he did not get his name until "In Theory" (TNG)." "Data's Picasso-esque painting of Spot (seen on the back wall) was actually the handiwork of scenic artist Wendy Drapanas." "The three-dimensional chess set on the left side of the screen was a nod to the game played by Kirk and Spock in the original series." "This particular chess set was seen a lot in the Ten-Forward lounge in TNG episodes, and was also seen in Capt. Sisko's quarters on Star Trek:" "Deep Space Nine." "Data's emotion chip was first introduced in "Brothers" (TNG), where we learned that Data's creator, Dr Noonien Soong, had made the device to allow Data to experience human emotions." "In that episode, Data's evil twin, Lore, stole the chip." "Three years later, Data recovered the emotion chip when Lore was disassembled at the end of "Descent, Part II" (TNG)." "Later, in "Inheritance" (TNG)," "Data decided not to install the chip at that time." "(For some reason, the chip looks a little different here than it did in those episodes.)" "Picard's beautiful round aquarium was home to an Australian lion fish." "The Enterprise-D painting was done by Andrew Probert and Rick Sternbach." "The S T:" "TNG production crew nicknamed the lionfish "Livingston,"" "for David Livingston, supervising producer and director on the series." "Actually, Livingston (the fish) has a slightly larger aquarium here than he had during the S T:" "TNG episodes." "The model on the right is the U.S.S. Stargazer," "Picard's former command, seen in "The Battle" (TNG), and the book on the left is an illustrated volume of the collected works of William Shakespeare." "The Ten-Forward lounge was not part of the original design for the Enterprise-D." "The set was introduced in "The Child" (TNG), at the beginning of the second season." "In the series, Ten-Forward was the domain of the mysterious Guinan, played by Oscar winner, Whoopi Goldberg." "The character of Guinan was created after Goldberg called Gene Roddenberry and told him that she'd like to be a member of the Enterprise crew." "In several episodes, Guinan delighted in presenting her patrons with a wide range of exotic beverages from around the galaxy." "The Bolian waiter was played by Dennis Tracy, who often worked as Patrick Stewart's stand-in during Star Trek:" "The Next Generation." "Several other background performers in this scene were also regular extras or stand-ins during S T:" "TNG." "Director of Photography John Alonzo filled the set with harsh yellow light to emphasise the ship's proximity to the Amargosa star." "The Ten-Forward lounge was a fairly large set." "This size was enhanced by carefully- placed mirrors near the windows on both sides of the set." "Look behind Picard." "What appears to be an opening to another room is actually a mirror in the wall, reflecting the set itself." "There's a similar mirror in the wall behind Soran, as well." "The side walls of Ten-Forward were adorned with futuristically-styled acoustic foam tiles." "The Ten-Forward lounge was the last S T:" "TNG set to be designed by Herman Zimmerman before he left the series to become production designer on Star Trek V." "After Zimmerman's departure," "Richard James assumed production design duties for Star Trek:" "TNG, and later did the same on all seven years of Star Trek:" "Voyager." "The Enterprise-D engine room was originally built for the aborted Star Trek Phase II series in 1977." "The set was extensively rebuilt a year later for Star Trek:" "The Motion Picture, again in 1987 for Star Trek:" "The Next Generation, and in 1994 for Star Trek:" "Voyager." "Data's use of the emotion chip was part of the character's ongoing quest to become more human." "Throughout the series, Data put a great deal of effort into his pursuit." "He studied Shakespeare, he played poker, learned to paint, tried to fall in love, and he even once grew a beard." "The "Farpoint mission" refers to "Encounter at Farpoint,"" "the first episode of Star Trek:" "TNG." "We never actually saw Geordi telling Data a joke in that episode, although we can probably assume that he did so during a commercial break." "The table with the clear dome was recycled from the Enterprise-D stellar cartography laboratory." "That set was a redress of Counsellor Troi's office." "An entirely different version of Stellar Cartography is seen later in this film." "The wall-mounted control panel on the back wall is a reuse of a panel from the Enterprise-B sickbay, seen earlier in this film." "In the reused version, the backlit graphics were done in the style of the original series Enterprise bridge." "There's another recycled panel with original Enterprise-style graphics." "The TNG tricorder was designed by illustrator Rick Sternbach." "Sternbach was responsible for the look of many props and spacecraft throughout the series." "The solar probes were based on the photon torpedoes first seen in Star Trek II:" "The Wrath of Khan." "Those original props are seen in this set, as are the additional torpedoes made for Star Trek VI, suitably modified with new markings and operating hatches." "Those torpedo props also appeared in Star Trek:" "TNG, DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise." "Data's almost unnatural way of sitting up was something that Brent Spiner devised for Data in the early episodes of S T:" "TNG." "Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge is played by LeVar Burton." "When Star Trek:" "TNG first aired," "Burton was probably the best-known of the TNG cast, having won wide acclaim for his role of Kunta Kinte in the groundbreaking miniseries, Roots." "Even after the conclusion of Star Trek:" "TNG," "Burton remained an active member of the Star Trek family returning frequently to serve as director on episodes of the subsequent Star Trek series." "Picard's family scrapbook was compiled by the art department." "Many of the pages included ingenious bits of memorabilia from Picard's life, including items inspired by various episodes." "These included wine bottle labels from the Picard family vineyards, and an invitation to the wedding of Jack and Beverly Crusher." "Unfortunately, very little of this stuff was seen on screen, although a few bits were rescued for exhibition at Star Trek:" "The Experience at the Las Vegas Hilton." "Picard's quarters also doubled as accommodations for most senior officers during the run of S T:" "TNG." "The set was designed to fit an ingenious series of moveable room dividers, making it easy to reconfigure the set for a variety of different looks." "The slanted window walls were mounted on hinges so that they could be easily swung out of the way when needed by the film crew." "Marina Sirtis plays Deanna Troi, the ship's counsellor." "The original Enterprise did not have a counsellor." "When Gene Roddenberry developed Star Trek:" "The Next Generation in 1987, he added the ship's counsellor to the bridge crew." "He felt that a counsellor could help the captain in matters of diplomacy, as well as in helping to maintain the emotional health of the crew." "Marina Sirtis was originally cast in the role of Tasha Yar, the chief of security." "Denise Crosby was cast as Troi." "Shortly before production began on the pilot episode," "Roddenberry switched the parts of the two performers, and Sirtis became Deanna Troi." "Troi's father was a human man who served in the Starfleet." "Her mother was a diplomat from the planet Betazed." "Troi's mother, Lwaxana Troi, was played by Majel Roddenberry widow of the late Gene Roddenberry." "Deanna's half-Betazoid heritage was responsible for her "empathic" powers that allowed her to sense emotions." "Those powers proved valuable in many episodes." "The Enterprise-D bridge was designed by illustrator Andrew Probert, along with set designers Les Gobrugge and Greg Pappalia, all under the supervision of Herman Zimmerman." "Bob Blackman's Starfleet uniforms are unchanged from the last season of Star Trek:" "TNG, except for a new version of the Starfleet "communicator" insignia." "William Ware Theiss designed the original "vector" arrowhead for the first Star Trek series in 1964, while John Eaves designed this version for this film." "The Eaves version of the Starfleet vector was subsequently used on Star Trek:" "DS9 and Voyager." "Here's a better look at the original Enterprise-style computer panels on the Amargosa Observatory." "That alien computer panel with the green controls is later seen on the Veridian III mountaintop, where Soran used it in his missile launcher." "The Amargosa Observatory model was later modified and reused in Star Trek:" "Deep Space Nine as a communications relay station." "Those recycled Enterprise-B sickbay consoles got new graphics and were reused numerous times in episodes of Deep Space Nine and Star Trek:" "Enterprise." "Computer-rendered images were used to show the Amargosa shock wave and the disintegration of the observatory station." "The Klingon Bird-of-Prey bridge was another reuse of the venerable set that had first been built for Star Trek IV:" "The Voyage Home." "Minor changes were made to the set each time it was reused, and the changes accumulated over the years." "It's interesting to go back to Star Trek IV and to see the cumulative effect of those changes." "Lursa and B'Etor, the infamous Duras sisters, were played by Barbara March and Gwynyth Walsh." "Barbara March was a writer and story editor for the 1995 fantasy series, Mysterious Island." "Besides B'Etor, Gwynyth Walsh also played Chief Examiner Nimira in "Random Thoughts" (VGR), and also guested on Alien Nation, Stargate SG- 1, Smallville, and the pilot episode of the 1988 Paramount series, War of the Worlds." "Although the Enterprise-D sets were basically the same as they were in the seventh season of TNG, a few upgrades were made." "One upgrade was the greater use of computer video monitors than had been used in the series." "During the series, most of the computer screens had been simulated with backlit graphics or with post-production burn-ins." "This is the only time we ever saw Guinan's quarters on the Enterprise-D." "When this set was filmed during the TV series, the windows were usually empty, meaning that there was no glass in the openings." "This was a timesaving measure so that the show's camera crew did not have to deal with unwanted reflections in the glass." "For this scene, cinematographer John Alonzo wanted to see reflections because he felt it enhanced realism and enhanced the mood to see the candles and room light reflections." "Those candles required the production company to get a special permit and to have a fire marshal on stage while the scene was being filmed." "These are standard precautions whenever open flame is used on a Hollywood soundstage." "The character of Guinan first appeared in "The Child,"" "the first episode of S T:" "TNG's second season." "She reappeared occasionally throughout the series, and also made an appearance in Star Trek:" "Nemesis." "This is the only time we've ever seen Guinan without an outrageous hat." "Geordi La Forge was born blind, but he wore a VISOR, also known as a Visual Instrument for Sensory Organ Replacement." "This remarkable gizmo gave La Forge the ability to see with greater clarity and spectral range than a normal human." "The VISOR prop was based on a hair clip donated to the show by WestEd researcher Kiku Annon." "This film was the last time we saw Geordi's VISOR." "When he appeared in the next film, Star Trek:" "First Contact," "Geordi had undergone surgery and had received ocular implants that allowed him to see without his cybernetic sunglasses." "This shot of the Enterprise-D was a reuse of film elements shot by Industrial Light and Magic for the first episode of S T:" "TNG." "Stellar Cartography had earlier been seen as a small laboratory on the Enterprise-D." "This new version is a three-storey set featuring a huge backlit star map that wrapped three-quarters of the way around the set." "In the years before this film was made, a huge graphic like the star map would have been very difficult to produce." "Thanks to computer graphics software and large-scale inkjet printers that had just become available when this film was made, this star map was relatively simple to create." "If you were to examine the star map very carefully, you might notice that nearly all the labelled stars and planets on the map are places visited by Kirk's Enterprise in the original series." "The Starship Bozeman was seen in "Cause and Effect" (TNG), where her captain was played by Kelsey Grammer of Frasier fame." "The Bozeman was named for the city of Bozeman, Montana, which is the hometown of writer Brannon Braga, who wrote "Cause and Effect," and was co-writer on this film." "Now the large backlit map has been removed, and the set is surrounded by a huge bluescreen so that a computer-animated star map can be superimposed into the scene." "Some other camera angles, however, still use the backlit map whenever the map doesn't need to move." "Use of the backlit map made it more practical to shoot this expansive set by reducing the number of computer-animated bluescreen shots needed for this scene." "In "Datalore" (TNG), we learned that Data's brain (and Data himself) were built by Dr Noonien Soong, and that his brain employed "positronic computing" technology." "Gene Roddenberry, who wrote "Datalore," used the term as a tip of the hat to his friend, science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov." "Asimov served as a science consultant for the first Star Trek movie, and is noted for having written s-f stories about robots." "Positrons are real subatomic particles." "They are the antimatter equivalent of electrons." "Where electrons have a negative charge, positrons have a positive charge." "Actually, neither Roddenberry nor Asimov claimed to have any real idea of how a positronic computer might work, or why (or if) it would be superior to an electronic device." "(But it did sound pretty cool.)" "Obviously, these star maps are now being all done with computer animation that has been superimposed into the scene with the bluescreen." "These 3D star maps were created by Santa Barbara Studios." "Most of the Enterprise shots in this film were done with models, but the jump to warp used computer-rendered effects." "Lursa and B'Etor were members of the Duras family, a formidable political force in the Klingon Empire." "The sisters were first introduced in "Redemption, Part I,"" "the cliffhanger ending to the fourth season of Star Trek:" "TNG." "Lursa and B'Etor sought to install Toral, son of Duras, as leader of the Klingon High Council after Duras murdered K'mpec, the previous council leader." "The sisters, who were working in complicity with the Romulans, plunged the Klingon Empire into civil war." "The Duras sisters returned in "Past Prologue" (DS9), when they sold weapons to Bajoran terrorists." "They also appeared in "Firstborn" (TNG), where they conducted an illegal magnesite mining operation." "The Enterprise-D bridge is the set from the TV series most upgraded for this film." "Herman Zimmerman removed the equipment lockers on the side walls and installed computer workstations." "As with other sets, Zimmerman installed computer video displays in the control panels to give them more life than they had in the series." "Zimmerman also added a platform for the captain's chair and made subtle changes to the set's colours, all to give the bridge a little extra depth and richness." "In doing this, Zimmerman was careful to retain the elegance of the bridge design as envisioned by Gene Roddenberry in 1987." "Roddenberry wanted Picard's Enterprise to be far more advanced than Kirk's ship." "He asked that the Enterprise-D be designed for human comfort, and that its technology employ great simplicity, which would imply great sophistication." "Roddenberry called this design ethic "technology unchained."" "As it was during the entire run of S T:" "TNG, the pattern on the back wall of the transporter chamber is based on a sweater owned by Zimmerman." "For some reason, the original back panels used in the series were damaged during prep for the movie, so were replaced here by new, but nearly identical panels." "The Veridian III planet scenes were filmed at the Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada." "The Valley of Fire is in the Mojave Desert, some 50 miles north of Las Vegas." "These scenes were filmed at the end of the shooting schedule, in early June, 1994, after principal photography on the Paramount lot and other locations had been finished." "Gates McFadden plays Dr Beverly Crusher, chief medical officer of the Enterprise-D." "Crusher had been married to Starfleet officer Jack Crusher." "She was widowed when Jack was killed on an away mission while serving on the U.S.S. Stargazer under Picard's command." "Patti Yasutake plays Nurse Ogawa." "Ogawa appeared in over a dozen episodes of S T:" "TNG." "Alyssa Ogawa got her last name from S T:" "TNG accountant Suzi Shimizu, whose maiden name was Ogawa." "Ogawa's first name came from Suzi's daughter, Alyssa Shimizu." "Malcolm McDowell is well known to genre fans for his portrayal of H G Wells in the 1979 fantasy film, Time After Time." "That picture was directed by Star Trek film writer/director Nick Meyer, and it featured David Warner as Jack the Ripper." "Warner played three different roles in two Star Trek movies and two episodes of S T:" "TNG." "McDowell also played the ultra-violent Alexander de Large in Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film, A Clockwork Orange." "McDowell's other genre credits include Mr Roarke in the 1998 version of Fantasy Island," "Geoffrey Tolwyn in the Wing Commander video games and television series, and a variety of voices for animated superhero shows." "McDowell even did the voice for an animated version of himself in an episode of South Park." "We first saw video from Geordi's VISOR in "Heart of Glory" (TNG)." "In that episode, we saw that Geordi's "sight"" "was a confusing swirl of shapes, colours, and details." "We assume the Klingons are using sophisticated image processing to make his vision understandable." "During production of S T:" "TNG," "Brent Spiner occasionally amused himself and his fellow cast members by singing between takes on the bridge and by pretending his console was a piano." "Spiner even released a CD of his singing, OI' Yellow Eyes Is Back." "The big ship cutaway diagram on the back wall was Gene Roddenberry's idea." "He wanted the diagram to be big enough that you could see the individual deck lines, so that the viewer could get an idea of how huge the Galaxy- class starship was supposed to be." "This ship is theoretically twice the length of Kirk's ship, which meant it has at least eight times the mass and internal volume." "That periscope was built for Klaa's ship in Star Trek V." "It vanished during Star Trek VI, and has returned here." "The Galaxy-class Starship Enterprise-D was designed by Andrew Probert." "Probert's elegant design follows Roddenberry's concept of "technology unchained," while remaining faithful to the basic symmetries of Matt Jefferies' classic Enterprise." "The gentle curves of Probert's ship exterior are echoed in his bridge design." "Probert was also among the key contributors to the design of the upgraded original Enterprise as first seen in Star Trek:" "TMP." "Probert's credits in film and TV also include work on the DeLorean time machine in Back to the Future, the helicopter in Airwolf, the Cylons in the original version of Battlestar Galactica, and the Klingon ship bridge in the first Star Trek film." "This was Lursa and B'Etor's last appearance in the Star Trek saga although a warrior named Duras (presumably one of their ancestors) appeared in a couple of episodes of Star Trek:" "Enterprise." "This explosion was originally used for the destruction of Chang's ship at the end of Star Trek VI." "Many of the rocks at the Valley of Fire are limestone, remains of the bed of a great sea that covered this area some 600 million years ago." "Over many millions of years, the sea bottom became covered with layers of silt, intermixed with the remains of the rich sea life that lived there." "Some 200 million years ago, the Earth's crust in the Pacific Ocean began to push against the North American continent." "This force began to push the sea bed upward, and the sea became shallower and eventually disappeared." "Around a hundred million years ago, those geologic forces further squeezed the former sea beds, causing them to fold into irregular mountains and valleys." "Since then, the inexorable forces of wind and water erosion have worn away the rocks, exposing the complex layers that were first created in that ancient sea." "That door was made for "The Naked Now,"" "the first regular episode of S T:" "TNG." "The silver gizmo on the outside of the door was a computer keyboard from the Starfleet Command set in Star Trek IV." "That big door sliding downward was first seen in Star Trek II, although it has been repositioned for the S T:" "TNG version of the engine room." "The concept of starship saucer separation goes back to "The Apple" in the original series, when Kirk suggested that the ship could be saved by jettisoning the warp engines." "The first time we actually saw separation was in "Encounter at Farpoint,"" "when it was used to protect the crew and families while the stardrive section went into battle." "Note the ribbed walls in the horizontal Jefferies tubes." "They were originally made from plastic forms that had been "borrowed" from the Russian missile bay in The Hunt for Red October." "That set had been built next door to the soundstages where S T:" "TNG was filmed." "After filming was done on Red October, those parts were salvaged for Star Trek." "The complicated-Iooking innards in Soran's solar missile included parts from a bird feeder purchased at a local garden supply store." "Those same bird feeders also came in handy a couple of years later when they found their way into the Borg interplexing beacon in the climactic scenes of Star Trek:" "First Contact." "This access shaft was also known as a Jefferies Tube, named in honour of Walter "Matt" Jefferies, art director for the original series and the man who designed the original Starship Enterprise." "This shot was another re-use of footage from "Encounter at Farpoint."" "However, this shot was created for this film." "Although the ship's counsellor was not normally assigned duty at the conn," "Deanna Troi took a field training programme and was certified for bridge duty in "Thine Own Self," a seventh-season episode." "And that's why she's flying the ship here." "(Of course, at this moment, she probably wishes she hadn't bothered.)" "That convenient rock arch was built and brought in for the film." "This was necessary, in part, because the film would not have been allowed to blow up real rock formations in this nature preserve area." "This saucer model was part of the original six-foot Enterprise-D miniature that was made by ILM for the first season of S T:" "TNG." "Although a 4' model was used in later seasons," "ILM returned to the larger model for this film because of the greater detail needed for motion-picture film." "These scenes were filmed in mid-May, 1994." "They were among the last scenes filmed on the Star Trek:" "TNG sets before they were demolished to make way for Star Trek:" "Voyager." "The crash sequence was filmed in the parking lot at Industrial Light and Magic in Marin County, California." "A 12-foot saucer model was used to give a proper sense of scale to the flying debris and dust." "Building the miniature landscape outside allowed ILM to film the scene using natural sunlight." "The crash was filmed with high-speed film cameras to enhance the illusion of size, since we expect larger objects to move more slowly." "John Knoll served as this film's visual effects supervisor for Industrial Light and Magic, assisted by Alex Siden and William George." "One of the age-old questions asked by nearly every Star Trek fan is:" ""Why don't they wear seatbelts on the Enterprise bridge?"" "(Unfortunately, no one has a good answer to that one.)" "Everyone knew that this was the last time the Enterprise-D sets would be used for filming." "As a result, the creative "damage" applied to the sets was far more extensive than had been done for any episode of the series." "ILM used their saucer model with a motion-control matte painting background for this shot." "The Valley of Fire got its name from the intense heat of the area." "Although this was once an ocean, it is now part of the Mojave Desert." "Serious precautions had to be taken to prevent cast or crew from suffering heat stroke on location." "Extensive safety precautions were also taken with the actors and stunt doubles for the fight sequences." "These precautions included the use of wire safety harnesses during some of the action shots." "These were necessary since they were literally filming on a mountaintop." "Because of this, digital image retouching was used in some shots to remove evidence of the wires and safety rigs." "Soran's missile was launched by a real solid-propellant rocket motor provided by Aerotech." "It must have had a warp-powered second stage to reach the star so quickly." "Even at warp factor one, it would take eight minutes for the probe to travel from the Earth to the Sun." "Soran's probe must have been travelling even faster, assuming that Veridian III is about the same distance from its star as the Earth is from the Sun." "Similarly, once the star was extinguished, it would take about 8 minutes until the effects were felt on Veridian III." "Although many of the visual effects in this film were still done with models, these scenes of the planet disintegrating were greatly enhanced with the use of computer-generated rendering." "Picard's version of the Nexus was filmed at a private residence in Pasadena." "The home was just a few blocks from the exterior for stately Wayne Manor in the 1960s Batman television series." "Sisko's wormhole dream sequence in the pilot episode of Star Trek:" "DS9 was also filmed in a park in Pasadena." "Picard's wife is played by Kim Braden." "Braden previously played Ensign Janet Brooks in "The Loss" (TNG)." "Picard's nephew, René, was introduced in "Family" (TNG), when the good captain visited his family home in France after the events of "The Best of Both Worlds, Part II,"" "where he was rescued from the Borg." "René was the son of Picard's brother, Robert, but he said he dreamed he would someday leave home on a starship, like his uncle." "On TNG, young René was played by David Tristen Birkin." "Birkin also played young Jean-Luc Picard in "Rascals" (TNG)." "Here, a slightly older René Picard is portrayed by Christopher James Miller." "Parts of this scene were filmed twice." "The first version was shot in late May, 1994." "One of the advantages of feature films over television is that higher budgets and longer schedules sometimes make it possible to tweak the film after a test version is completed." "In this case, the production company returned to Pasadena some five months later to shoot this slightly revised version of the Nexus." "In the original version, Picard celebrated Christmas only with his children and wife." "This revised version adds Picard's nephew to the celebration." "It very seldom snows in Pasadena, so these flurries were created by Terry Frazee's special effects crew." "The magical flashing ornaments, however, were created with visual effects." "Terry Frazee's credits for special effects include Star Trek VI," "Star Trek:" "Insurrection and Star Trek:" "Nemesis." "His credits also include work on Pirates of the Caribbean:" "The Curse of the Black Pearl," "Steven Spielberg's 1941, and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner." "René was introduced into this scene to reinforce the theme of Picard's mortality by reminding us of Picard's tragic loss of his nephew and brother in the early scenes of this film." "Guinan's background in S T:" "TNG was always somewhat mysterious." "This was a deliberate choice on the part of the shows' writers and producers." "We do know that Guinan lived on Earth in San Francisco during the late 19th century, where she met writer Samuel Clemens, also known as Mark Twain in "Time's Arrow, Parts I and II" (TNG)." "She was married several times and has had many children, although we never met any of them." "Guinan had a great disdain for Q, as we learned in "Q Who" (TNG), but she never revealed why she felt that way." "That was also the first episode in which we met the Borg." "Guinan's mysterious awareness of events beyond the time-space continuum served her well in "Yesterday's Enterprise" (TNG), where she was the only one aware that the timeline had been altered." "James Kirk's version of the Nexus was filmed up in Lone Pine, California." "The cabin was located some 200 miles from Paramount Pictures." "Because of this, most of the cast and crew stayed in hotels for the two days needed to shoot the cabin scenes." "Numerous westerns were filmed in Lone Pine, including the popular series Have Gun, Will Travel, to which Gene Roddenberry contributed several scripts in his pre-Star Trek days." "Set decorator John Dwyer adorned the inside of Kirk's cabin with memorabilia from his career in Starfleet." "These include a painting of the original Starship Enterprise, barely glimpsed." "Also present is an original series phaser, a Klingon bat'leth, and the dedication plaque from the original bridge." "Dwyer's touches also include a photo of the original series cast from Star Trek V." "Like James Kirk, William Shatner is very fond of dogs." "During production of the original series, a Dobermann pinscher named Morgan was frequently his companion on the Star Trek shooting stages." "Morgan would wait in Shatner's dressing room while the good captain performed his duties aboard the Enterprise." "Nine years prior to Kirk's disappearance from the Enterprise-B would put this day" "(or Kirk's memory of it) sometime between Star Trek:" "The Motion Picture and Star Trek II:" "The Wrath of Khan." "This suggests that Kirk did retire briefly at some point between those two films, but that he returned and evidently accepted his second promotion to the rank of admiral." "Kirk, of course, was demoted back to captain at the end of Star Trek IV, and he remained at that rank until his death later in this film." "William Shatner's association with Star Trek goes back to 1965, when he agreed to play James Kirk in the show's second pilot episode." "NBC had already rejected a pilot film made the previous year, so it's not an exaggeration to say that the fate of Gene Roddenberry's creation depended on Shatner's performance." "Shatner, of course, was no novice to the larger-than-life heroism of James T Kirk." "Even before the Enterprise took flight," "Shatner had already distinguished himself in numerous television, stage and film roles." "Shatner's pre-Trek film credits include The Brothers Karamazov," "Judgement at Nuremberg, and a strange horror film called Incubus." "Incubus was filmed entirely in the artificial language, Esperanto, and was directed by Outer Limits creator Leslie Stevens." "Shatner had also appeared in a wide range of dramatic television roles including appearances on such programmes as" "Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Dr Kildare, and The Outer Limits." "Shatner appeared with future Star Trek co-star Leonard Nimoy in an episode of The Man From U.N.C.L.E." "entitled "The Project Strigas Affair."" "A 1963 episode of The Twilight Zone won Shatner a place in cult TV history for his portrayal of Bob Wilson, an airline traveller who thought he saw something on the plane's wing in "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet."" "After the original Star Trek finished its network run in 1969," "Shatner found himself busier than ever." "He guested in several shows, including Mission:" "lmpossible, Columbo," "The Six Million Dollar Man, and Hawaii Five-O." "Shatner starred in such shows as Rescue 911 and T J Hooker." "He directed episodes of T J Hooker, as well as TekWar, a series that he created." "Shows like Third Rock from the Sun," "Free Enterprise, and an American version of The Iron Chef let audiences enjoy his comedic talents." "Shatner is also an accomplished equestrian, which he enjoyed demonstrating in this film." "Shatner's love of horses has been put to good use every year since 1990 when he hosts the Hollywood Charity Horse Show." "Funds raised from the annual event benefit many grass-roots charities including animal-assisted therapy groups." "These groups let handicapped children ride trained horses." "Not only is this fun for the children, but it has proven of value for physical therapy and motivation." "(It must be admitted that William Shatner was simply showing off his equestrian skills in this shot.)" "Early 1994, when this film was made, was an incredibly busy time for Star Trek." "Star Trek:" "The Next Generation was concluding its seventh and final season." "Star Trek:" "Deep Space Nine was in its second year of production." "Star Trek:" "Voyager was in pre-production for a January, 1995 premiere." "And Star Trek:" "Generations was made." "The last television episode of Star Trek:" "The Next Generation was a two-parter entitled "All Good Things."" "It was written by Ronald D Moore and Brannon Braga, two of this film's co-writers." "Part of "All Good Things" was set in an "anti-time" future, some 25 years after TNG's seventh season." "In that future, the Enterprise-D was still in service, under the command of Admiral William Riker." "The Enterprise herself was upgraded in that future, sporting a third warp engine." "This future is obviously inconsistent with this film, in which the Enterprise-D is destroyed shortly after the seventh season." "We speculate that the anti-time future might be regarded as an alternate timeline." "Or maybe Picard's revelations to his crew at the end of that episode somehow caused the timeline to be changed." "Or maybe the anti-time future was all a fabrication, created by Q to unnerve Picard." "This film was directed by David Carson." "Carson joined the Star Trek family in 1989, when he directed "The Enemy,"" "a third-season episode of S T:" "TNG." "Carson went on to direct many other popular episodes of that series, including "Yesterday's Enterprise."" "In 1992, Carson was selected to direct "Emissary,"" "the two-hour pilot movie for Star Trek:" "Deep Space Nine." "In genre television, Carson has directed episodes of Odyssey 5, Smallville," "Witchblade, and Birds of Prey." "In more mainstream work," "Carson's credits include episodes of LA Law, Beverly Hills 90210, and a segment of Tom Hanks' HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon." "All three writers on this film are veterans of multiple Star Trek series, each with many episodes to their credit." "Rick Berman has served as executive producer on Star Trek:" "TNG," "Star Trek:" "DS9, Star Trek:" "Voyager, and Star Trek:" "Enterprise." "He was co-creator of the latter three series." "Brannon Braga was a co-producer on Star Trek:" "TNG, an executive producer on Star Trek:" "Voyager, and executive producer and co-creator on Star Trek:" "Enterprise." "He wrote numerous episodes of all three series." "Ronald D Moore served as a producer on Star Trek:" "TNG, and a co-executive producer on Star Trek:" "DS9." "After a stint on Star Trek:" "Voyager," "Moore moved on to such projects as Carnivale, Roswell, and the 2003 Battlestar Galactica miniseries." "Braga and Moore also collaborated on the story for the 2000 Paramount film" "Mission:" "lmpossible II." "This film's ending was also among the scenes that were revised slightly after test screenings." "Captain Kirk was always scripted to die in the climactic confrontation on the mountaintop." "In the original version, Soran shot Kirk during that struggle, killing the captain with his energy weapon." "That version of Kirk's demise was filmed and edited into the picture." "After test screenings of the film, it was decided to make Kirk's death more dramatic." "As a result, the production crew returned to the Valley of Fire for the reshoot." "(No, we really don't know why Soran's panel displays those words in English, but if you look closely, you might note that the unit's "translation mode" has been enabled.)" "Ironically, the film's construction crew had just finished several weeks' of work removing all the equipment and rigging from the original shoot and restoring the mountain to its natural state." "Because of this, most of the original set and rigging had to be recreated, a huge task on a very tight schedule." "Nevertheless, the ingenuity and grim determination of the construction crew proved equal to the task, and the required footage was shot in time for inclusion in the film." "Schedule pressures became very high at the end because of the digital effects work necessary for "wire removal"" "from some of the revised stunt shots." "Visual effects supervisor Ronald B Moore oversaw much of the work." "Although James Kirk meets his end in this film, the good captain's story has continued, in a way." "William Shatner has authored a series of novels that chronicle Kirk's adventures after the events in this film." "In the first two books, Ashes of Eden and The Return," "Kirk does indeed return to life in the 24th century." "Shatner's novels have proven extremely popular with fans, often winning places on national bestseller lists." "That's a shuttlecraft model originally made for Star Trek V, here named in honour of physicist Stephen Hawking." "And that shuttle design was first seen at the beginning of Star Trek VI, then later was modified for the S.S. Jenolan, Scotty's ship in "Relics" (TNG)." "The Enterprise-D cargo bay wore many different hats during various TNG episodes." "The set was also used as the shuttlebay, holodeck, and gymnasium." "It occasionally served for alien settings, such as the alien plaza in "The High Ground" (TNG)." "Set decorator John Dwyer dressed the Enterprise cargo bay with virtually every piece of Starfleet and alien cargo ever made for Star Trek:" "TNG." "Most of these were plastic industrial containers, suitably repainted and re-labelled." "When Spot was first seen, in "Data's Day," he was a male Somali cat." "In later appearances, he somehow transmogrified into a female tabby." "(We speculate that Spot may have been a shape-shifter or an unfortunate victim of a transporter malfunction.)" "Picard is holding an alien artefact called a Kurlan naiskos." "It was given to him by his old archaeology professor in "The Chase" (TNG), and it resided in Picard's ready room for the rest of the series." "Jonathan Frakes, who plays the redoubtable "Number One,"" "returned in the next Star Trek film not only as William Riker, but as the film's director." "Shortly after this scene was filmed, construction started on the bridge for the Starship Voyager, built in the exact spot where the Enterprise-D bridge had stood." "Paramount donated the horseshoe-shaped tactical console to the Hollywood Entertainment Museum, but little else remains of Picard's bridge." "The Enterprise-D may be history, but Captain Picard returned in Star Trek:" "Insurrection, aboard the all-new Enterprise-E." "Just as Roddenberry had conceived of the Enterprise-D to carry on the torch of the original Enterprise crew, this new ship would do so for Picard and company." "And they'd have company too:" "Star Trek:" "DS9, Star Trek:" "Voyager, and Star Trek:" "Enterprise all followed, each exploring different aspects of Roddenberry's extraordinary universe, boldly going where none had gone before."