Star Trek icon William Shatner revealed what went wrong with his lone directorial effort in the series with 1989’s Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
“I wish that I’d had the backing and the courage to do the things I felt I needed to do,” Shatner said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “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.”
Following the path of co-star Leonard Nimoy, who directed the blockbuster hits Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Shatner negotiated with Paramount to star and direct the fifth installment where the USS Enterprise crew confront Spock’s half-brother Sybok. Between multiple rewrites, the 1988 WGA strike cutting into pre-production, and budget cuts on the visual effects, Star Trek V was notorious for its troubled shoot. The production issues resulted in a compromised finale which Shatner takes the blame for.
“It is on me. [In the finale,] I wanted granite [rock creatures] to explode out of the mountain,” Shatner added. “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].”
Does William Shatner want to return to Star Trek?
Released in the highly competitive summer of 1989, Star Trek V received mixed reviews and underperformed significantly in comparison to Star Trek IV. Fortunately for Shatner and the original cast, they received a far better sendoff with 1991’s Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Though Shatner’s final appearance in Star Trek: Generations saw the tragic death of Capt. James T. Kirk, the actor has not ruled out one more go around in a Starfleet uniform akin to Nimoy’s return as Spock in 2009’s Star Trek reboot.
“Leonard [Nimoy] made his own decision on doing a cameo [in J.J. Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek]. He’s there for a moment, and it’s more a stunt that Spock appears in a future,” Shatner said. “If they wrote something that wasn’t a stunt that involved Kirk, who’s 50 years older now, and it was something that was genuinely added to the lore of Star Trek, I would definitely consider it.”
