Introduction: To Seek Out New Life And A New Director

No Star Trek celebration would be complete without a feature on "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan," widely considered the best Star Trek movie and one of the finest science fiction films of all time. After the misstep of "Star Trek: The Motion Picture," writer and director Nicholas Meyer came aboard and gave the franchise a much needed overhaul.

"Star Trek II" held its own in the summer of 1982 against the box-office juggernaut of "E.T." and other blockbusters, and is still widely remembered for its sinister villain Khan (Ricardo Montalban) and its powerful conclusion. Now Meyer talks to TwitchGuru about why Khan and Star Trek have stood the test of time.

David Konow: How did you get the job directing "Star Trek II"?

Nicholas Meyer: I got in the wake of doing "Time After Time," which was a very successful debut film for me. And as a result of that, there was a movie I wanted to make very badly based on an extraordinary novel by Robertson Davies. At that time, no one had heard of Robertson Davies so I was just sitting in my house saying, "Don't talk to me unless it's about this." I had a friend who was an executive at Paramount; she was a friend from my childhood. You know the way people can talk to you from childhood and you'll listen to them in ways you might not listen to other people? She said: "Listen, if you want to learn how to direct movies, then you shouldn't be sitting up here holding your breath. You should be out there doing it. And I happen to know they're going to make a second Star Trek movie and producer Harve Bennet is someone you would like." I told her: "I've never watched Star Trek, I don't even know what it is. It's a guy with pointy ears, yeah?" I went down there, I met Harve Bennett, and we did in fact get along. They showed me the first movie, then they showed me some of the episodes, and I began to get stoked on this idea.

David Konow: Speaking of the idea, how did it come about for "Star Trek II"?

Nicholas Meyer: Harve said: "Draft five of the script is coming in a week and I'll send it to you." Great. Then a week turned into three weeks, and I woke up one morning and wondered, "Gee, whatever happened to that Star Trek thing?" I called and Harve said: "Oh, I'm very embarrassed, but I can't show you this [script]." "I can't look at it?" I asked. He told me: "It's really not good," and I said: "Let me read it." I finally read it, and it wasn't very good. I said: "What about draft four or draft three?" He said: "You don't understand, it's just five different drafts of unrelated stories." I told him: "Let me read them all." Because by this time I was completely stoked on this idea of making my outer space opera, and I began to think that I had some kind of idea, which was Star Trek was really the outer space version of a series of novels I used to love as a kid, which was the Captain Horatio Hornblower novels [by C.S. Forster] about an English sea captain during the Napoleonic Wars. This was the same thing in outer space and I wanted to do that. So I read all the other drafts, and I didn't like any of them either, but then I had a conversation with Harve. I said: "Well suppose we did this..." I brought out a legal pad, and told him: "Let's make a list of anything we like in these five drafts. It could be a line of dialog, it could be a character, it could be a scene, it could be a sequence, it could be a subplot, and it could be a plot. And then I'll write another screenplay that incorporates all this stuff. I won't take credit for it. I'll just do it, because if we don't do it, then there's no movie." So they didn't believe my offer, but we sat down eventually and we decided on the Genesis project, Khan, Kirk meets his son, Saavik is a character, the simulator sequence which came in the middle of one draft, and I decided we should put Spock in it so we could kill him, and so forth. That's basically how I wrote the screenplay based on those other elements from all those other scripts.

The Cult of Khan Slide Show!

Boldly Going

David Konow: Wasn't it your idea to bring Khan back?

Nicholas Meyer: It wasn't even my idea to bring him back, it was just one of the things we all agreed on that we liked. They showed me the episode. At the very beginning, when I first went in, I didn't know anything about Star Trek. They showed me the Robert Wise movie, and they showed me four or five episodes from the original series; I sat and watched, and said: "Ah! Hornblower...outer space..."

David Konow: Although the first Star Trek movie did well at the box office, many considered it a disappointment because it didn't live up to people's expectations. It was also the most expensive movie ever made at the time with a budget of $46 million.

Nicholas Meyer: What Barry Diller, who was running Paramount at the time, told me was that one of the most gut-churning experiences of his life was looking at the lines that went around the block waiting to get into this movie in New York, and knowing that in his opinion the movie didn't work. It's very easy to criticize that first movie, but I don't because I don't think the other movies would have been as good (without it). I certainly don't think my first Star Trek movie would have been as good if I hadn't been able to watch that and sort of learn things you shouldn't do. I thought its self-inflated solemnity was off-putting, and I didn't like the way it looked. I never understood when I watched the T.V. show why they were all running around in pajamas, so I tried to change some stuff [like the uniforms].

David Konow: From what I understand, the Wrath of Khan had the lowest budget of the series, true?

Nicholas Meyer: Yes, $11.2 million. There was a very tight reign being kept on this movie, and I think in some places you can see it. But it didn't matter because everybody loved the movie.

David Konow: Actually I thought the special effects in it still look pretty good.

Nicholas Meyer: The special effects are good on it. At the end of the day, if people are sufficiently invested in the narrative, they really don't care about a lot of things, and things can be sort of minimally okay. The special effects by the way aren't minimally okay, they're okay, but there are other things, other moments in the movie that definitely are insufficient, and nobody ever gives a fuck!

David Konow: I thought in "Star Trek II" you had a better grip on effects. The effects weren't that good in Time After Time, but the movie's great so you don't mind it.

Nicholas Meyer: Exactly. Also with "Time After Time" you have to ask what was I attempting to do? And my feeling about it was showing time travel, in addition to being sort of hard to imagine what it was, wasn't really very important. It was just important that H.G. Welles did it. My feeling about a lot of movies is that all artistic media rely on their success on something they leave out. Paintings do not move. Music like Beethoven's Fifth has no text. You listen to that piece, it's a non-intellectual experience. It's your imagination that's investing this stuff with meaning, with feeling. Only film has the hideous capacity to do everything for you, and in doing so, it can put you to sleep. Cross every "t," dot every "I" and if you leave nothing out, you make no distinction between an important image and an unimportant image. If you never, ever leave anything to the imagination of the audience, they'll tune out because they have nothing to do. So when I was trying to do a time travel sequence in "Time After Time," I didn't know what time travel is, I didn't really care, I didn't have a lot of money, and I wanted the audience to use their imagination. Maybe it would be great if we could turn the theater into a radio for a minute, and just hear things, hear snippets of sounds. All we needed was colored lights flashing, and let people hear those sounds. It wasn't that the special effects weren't good, they weren't intended to be good. I wanted the sounds to invoke certain periods, because that I could do.

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