The Making of Star Trek V, Part 1: 20 Years Later

STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME was both a critical and commercial success that achieved its goal of being the much sought after "crossover film;" a TREK film that appealed to the mainstream audience. As such, it was a hard act to follow, a fact that no one could deny, let alone William Shatner. The actor had, as stated previously, made a point in his contract for the fourth film in the series of being given the opportunity to direct number five. After all, Leonard Nimoy had twice been given that chance and Shatner knew that he was contractually entitled to the same thing.

   "Directing has been a lifelong dream," Shatner enthused. "My business is to entertain people, and to communicate my feelings to them, so I find the best way is to direct. Directing is the pinnacle of our business. A really good director has a point of view on his film and all his other skills emanate from that spine. I've always wanted to entertain, and I think I can do that with my point of view, so I'm under the impression that I can gather all my skills around me to make people laugh and cry. I wanted to do more. I haven't done it to the extent that I wanted to. I think the movies have matured beyond the series and we have to give our audience that maturity. I'd like to think that's what I've done."

   No sooner had production been completed on STAR TREK IV, than Shatner began thinking of the next chapter in the ongoing saga.

   In terms of his goals, he stated, "I have two things that I'd like to see. They're contrasted and yet unified. One is that I'd like to see romance in the stories again. The second is that I would like to see gritty realism. You know, with hand-held cameras, dirt under the fingernails and real steel clanging doors. I hope that the end result will reflect certain life experiences that I am going through, because as we take the characters through the aging process, there are certain inevitable questions one asks oneself through each passage, each decade that we pass through, roughly. We ask ourselves questions which are universal that don't occur when you're younger [and] so I hope that the end result will reflect some of these questions that I want the characters to ask. It is our hope that this film, like STAR TREK IV, will appeal to a larger audience than just the aficionados of STAR TREK. With the humor and action/adventure the film has, it is my fervent wish that that will come true."

   Shatner definitely had his storyline in mind, beginning with the fascination he had always held for television evangelists who claim that God is speaking through them, rather than someone else. "I took the TV evangelist persona and created a holy man who thought God had spoken to him," said Shatner. "He believed God had told him, 'I need many followers, and I need a vehicle to spread my word throughout the universe.' That vehicle he needed became a starship [the Enterprise] which the holy man would capture when it came to rescuing some hostages he had taken....Finally the Enterprise arrives at the planet where God supposedly resides, in the center of the universe....Kirk, Spock, McCoy and the holy man are beamed down to the planet. It's like the drawings of Dante's INFERNO, like a flaming hell. When God appears, he seems like God....but gradually, in a conversation between God and the holy man, Kirk perceives that something is wrong and begins to challenge God. God gets angrier and angrier, and begins to show his true colors, which are those of the devil....So essentially that was my story: that man conceives of God in his own image, but those images change from generation to generation, therefore he appears in all these different guises as man-made Gods. But in essence, if the devil exists, God exists by inference. This is the lesson that the STAR TREK group learns. The lesson being that God is within our hearts, not something we conjure up, invent and then worship."

   To turn his story into a screenplay, Shatner went to NINJA author Eric Von Lustbader, whose work he felt had the right touches of mood and mystery that would be perfectly suited to the premise of STAR TREK V. Unfortunately, Lustbader reportedly wanted a cool million for his services, which Paramount Pictures refused to pay. While Shatner threatened--albeit briefly--to quit the project, he ultimately came to his senses. Both he and the studio decided that they wanted Harve Bennett to serve as producer, but Bennett, who, as previously discussed, felt that he had been abused on STAR TREK IV, was not too taken with the idea. However, he and Shatner had an extremely long and intense meeting and ultimately decided to work together. Upon coming aboard, Bennett's major problem was that he didn't like the basic thrust of the story.

   "The real problem with V," Bennett told CINEFANTASTIQUE, "was that the premise was faulty. You pick up a TV GUIDE and you read the log line which says, 'Tonight on TREK, the crew goes to find God.' Automatically, and unconsciously, you know we're not going to find God because no one has and no one will, and no one would be so arrogant to say what they're depicting on screen is actually God, because others will say, 'No it's not.' So we know we're going to face an anticlimax, a trick. The nature of the trick is the only suspense in the story. But you'd say this to Bill and he's say, 'No,   no, it's the greatest adventure of all time,' and I'd say,  'No, it's not an adventure because everyone is ahead of you. So what we have to do is make getting there as interesting as possible."