William Shatner directed ‘Star Trek V’ in 1989, but the movie did not get good reviews at the time. The actor talked about this with The Hollywood Reporter and said he regretted how it turned out. He mentioned his original plans for the story:
“I wish that I’d had the backing and the courage to do the things I felt I needed to do. 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.”
Then added:
“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.”
He Takes The Blame
‘The Final Frontier’ cost $33 million to make. Paramount had to cut some parts of the movie to stay within budget.
Shatner wanted to introduce angels and demons for the end of the movie. The studio changed this to rock monsters. The director also asked for six monsters but had to settle for just one.
Still, he blames himself for the failure:
“It is on me. [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].”
The idea to use one suit did not look good so they had to drop it in the end.
