Given the sheer amount of content created for it, Star Trek has a lot of ups and downs, but William Shatner is taking responsibility for one of its more infamous low points, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
Star Trek V has for ages been considered one of the worst Trek films, and it was helmed and co-written by none other than Shatner himself. Involving a quest to find God, who turns out to be an alien acting like God, rocket boots, a not-so-sexy fan dance, some horrendous writing, and some of the strangest decisions ever made in anything Trek has ever done, the film was universally panned. Given time, fans have come around to appreciating the camp of it all, but it’s still a bad movie, and Shatner is evidently well aware of that and takes some of the blame for it while also placing some on the executive team at Paramount.
I wish that I’d had the backing and the courage to do the things I felt I needed to do,” Shatner told Variety during an interview promoting the upcoming documentary My Name is Bill. “My concept was, ‘Star Trek goes in search of God,’ and management said, ‘Well, who’s God? We’ll alienate the nonbeliever, so, no, we can’t do God.’ And then somebody said, ‘What about an alien who thinks they’re God?’ Then it was a series of my inabilities to deal with the management and the budget. I failed. In my mind, I failed horribly. When I’m asked, ‘What do you regret the most?,’ I regret not being equipped emotionally to deal with a large motion picture. So in the absence of my power, the power vacuum filled with people that didn’t make the decisions I would’ve made.”
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Of course, Shatner basically forced Paramount to let him direct the film during negotiations for the fourth Star Trek film and after Leonard Nimoy was so successful directing Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. He put himself in this position and was clearly not ready for it. The story Shatner came up with was also troubled from the beginning with issues surrounding the characters and the very idea of God. However, Shatner taking the blame that he wasn’t ready to direct is a refreshing admittance from a man who is known to have a bit of an ego.
“It is on me,” he flat-out stated to Variety before giving an example of an eventually cut sequence that hampered the budget. “[In the finale,] I wanted granite [rock creatures] to explode out of the mountain. The special effects guy said, ‘I can build you a suit that’s on fire and smoke comes out.’ I said, ‘Great, how much will that cost?’ They said, ‘$250,000 a suit.’ Can you make 10 suits? He said, ‘Yeah.’ That’s $2.5 million. You’ve got a $30 million budget. You sure you want to spend [it on that]? Those are the practical decisions. Well, wait a minute, what about one suit? And I’ll photograph it everywhere [to look like 10].”
