In an era where directors can revisit their older films and recut them, William Shatner on why he won’t touch Star Trek V again.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen Francis Ford Coppola go back over a number of his films, to give them a few nips and tucks, and oversee their remasters. Ridley Scott is no stranger to extended versions of his movies. Sylvester Stallone meanwhile managed to suck virtually all of the fun out of Rocky IV with his recent re-edit of the picture.
There’s certainly an audience out there for alternative cuts of movies (a recent Film Stories podcast has explored Superman II, as a further example). Yet several movies that didn’t come out quite the way the filmmakers had hoped remain untouched. That’s clearly going to be the case for the majority of films, but still: if a filmmaker is dissatisfied with how their film came out, there’s at least a slim window to go back for another go.
Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of chatting to William Shatner (for the 50th issue of our magazine, no less), who was talking about his memoir film, You Can Call Me Bill. We’d got around half way through the conversation before I brought up one of the two feature films he’s directed, and certainly the highest profile: Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
It’s a regularly-told story that William Shatner had a contract on Star Trek that allowed him to basically do whatever Leonard Nimoy got to do. Nimoy directed Star Trek III: The Search For Spock and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. As such, Shatner was able to activate the contract clause and make his directorial debut with Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
He told me what he was hoping to achieve with the movie. “My thought was Star Trek goes in search of God. As a result, we find the devil. What a great sentence, right?”
He thus went in search of a writer to wrestle the idea into a screenplay, and found a famous novelist who he wasn’t naming. Off Shatner went to New York to seal the deal, but when the writer then started negotiating with Paramount Pictures , things went awry.
An agreement was not reached, not helped by the writer concerned wanting the story as a novel. “And of course, Paramount said that’s our script. They couldn’t reach an agreement”, Shatner said.
Undeterred, a fresh screenwriter was recruited and work got underway. This time, a new objection popped up: “somebody said, you can’t do God.”
This was a bigger hurdle than a writer deal not coming together.
“Everyone’s got a different God, and we’re going to alienate people. Finally somebody said what happens if we use an alien who thinks he’s God. And I agreed to that in order to get the film made.”
Filmmaking, of course, is a collection of compromises at times, and so a tale of someone sacrificing something to get a film made is hardly new. In this case though, William Shatner pinpointed that compromise as the turning point for Star Trek V. “That was the moment where everything – unbeknownst to me until much later – went to hell.”
The release of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier was not a hugely successful one. To this day it’s seen as one of the weakest entries in the Trek big screen boxset, and its box office was disappointing too. Shatner would not be at the helm for the far superior Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
Reflecting on The Final Frontier three decades and change later, Shatner was quite sanguine. But I asked him: why not go in and re-edit it, and maybe put out another cut of the film? Given that it’s part of a massive franchise, it’s not as if Paramount would be resistant to the idea, unless it needed the $70m or so Zack Snyder required to hack his Justice League together.
But he’s not going to do it. “I think I’d be too sad about Star Trek V”, he conceded to me, thinking about it. “In my mind, it had great promise. The ultimate Star Trek film: we had all these magnificent ideas. And it failed, essentially. It’s a huge disappointment to me.”
“I thought because I’ve got a good sense of vision and what I want the camera to do, that sort of thing… I didn’t achieve what I wanted to do for a variety of reasons, many of which were not up to me.”
I wondered at least if Shatner gets any consolation from the fact that people are still watching and responding to the film? The answer: not massively.
“The consolation I take from that is what I learned, mostly about compromise. When do you compromise, and when do you stand on principle? We do that every day. That truth struck me like a thunderbolt. What would you like to eat? Well, are you really going to say what you want to eat, or shall we get soup there? We compromise all our life. I compromised that film and I could have done better. And I compromised everything, including weakness to management.”
“I could go on. It’s worth of an evening’s discourse about using Star Trek V as an insertion point in discussing how much we lose in our lives by not following through on principle. And also, how much we fail by standing on principle, and failing as a result of it.”
Shatner has thus decided to let Star Trek V: The Final Frontier be, and long ago moved on. There’s never been even a hint of a recut on the cards – and it strikes me that the reason for that is William Shatner himself. That the movie remains a little bit of an open wound.
Albeit one, I’d suggest, that’s now looked at with slightly kinder eyes.
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