Nicholas Meyer’s Unknown Universe : ‘Star Trek’ Director Keeps His Distance From the Cultists

A studio press release promoting “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country” makes passing note that Nicholas Meyer, the director and co-writer of the hit sequel, “unabashedly considers himself a Trekker.” This is not an unreasonable assumption, given that the three “Trek” films Meyer has worked on are considered by many series devotees to be the better of the six produced.

Talk to Meyer, though, and you get a different story.

“I’m not a ‘Star Trek’ buff, I’m not a fan, I don’t know anything about it,” he proclaimed, sitting in his Paramount office one recent morning in front of a poster for the film that made an impressive $18-million opening weekend bow, and has continued to stay in the Top 10, with $30.4 million in box-office receipts to date.

“The ‘Star Trek’ movies that I make are movies meant for the general audience, for people that wander in off the street and don’t know anything about it. . . . And since I am not a Trekkie, the fans, as it were, must sort of get what they can from it. Since they seem to be wildly enthusiastic over II, IV and now VI, I think I must be doing something right in relation to them. But I never took them into specific account.”

As if to cement his seeming irreverence toward the 25-years-and-running phenomenon, Meyer even uses the dreaded term Trekkie , which hardcore cultists have been known to heatedly disdain in favor of the preferred Trekker .

Leonard Nimoy, who conceived the new film’s storyline before recruiting past collaborator Meyer to develop it, has a slightly different take on the director’s seeming lack of awe for the “Trek” canon and its millions of liturgists.

“I don’t know about his irreverence,” says Nimoy of Meyer. “I prefer to think it’s a pose. I think it’s a posture which in effect says, ‘I dare not let myself get sucked into a reverie here or an acolyte position.’ And I think he’s absolutely right. I think his handling of the subject matter is very, very good. But I think it essentially comes from a chosen position.

“At least I hope it does.” Nimoy laughs heartily. “I’d hate to think that he really believes that we’re a bunch of (expletives) running around in these funny suits.”

Rather than take offense at Meyer’s lack of worshipfulness, longtime fans have responded enthusiastically to Meyer’s mix of tongue-in-cheek nods to well-established character quirks and breezy treatments of allegorical, topical themes--a slightly more ironic twist on the macro and micro elements that first made the series a cult favorite in the mid-’60s.

So, in the case of “Trek VI,” have the reviews, a response Meyer says was not quite as certain a given as the hefty opening-weekend grosses.

“It was really nice to make a film that not only does business,” he said, “but also (succeeds) critically--however grudgingly. After all, it’s ‘Star Trek’ and it’s No. 6 and first you have to review the toupees or whatever.”

Meyer is the first non-cast member to direct one of the space journeys since he helmed “II: The Wrath of Khan” back in 1982, after previously having been best known for the time-travel fantasy “Time After Time” and several award-winning mysteries.

By the time Meyer was brought in to co-write “IV: The Voyage Home” late in that project’s development, Nimoy was taking his second turn as director, to be followed on “V” by fellow co-star William Shatner. Since it might have seemed that being allowed the director’s chair was a condition of continued acting involvement in the series for the leads, it’s almost a surprise that . . .

” . . . Uhura didn’t seize the helm?” he quips, finishing the question.

“Not really. I don’t think they wanted to take any chances, there was so much money involved. And I think that it’s really a very dangerous thing--and not a very fair thing, either, I might add--to ask somebody to make their feature directing debut with a $30-million-plus movie.”

Despite instigating what was envisioned as a 25th-anniversary capper, at the suggestion of Paramount’s then-head, Frank Mancuso, Nimoy opted out of directing as well this round, wearing only an executive-producer hat in addition to his other duties.

Said Nimoy, “I love acting and directing, but I don’t love doing both of them simultaneously--particularly in the Spock character, which is a two-hour makeup. But I enjoyed being kind of the consultant figure on a day-to-day basis. And Nick is bright, he’s talented, he’s fast, and he gets it. He responded well to the ideas that I was offering, and he expands on them--immediately, quickly. He can take the ball and run. I was counting on that.”

After a mid-1990 meeting with Nimoy, Meyer opted to start writing before he agreed to direct, but eventually found himself having too much fun not to: “It’s such a good story,” enthuses Meyer--describing himself as “a storyteller, not a genre man”--waxing fannish over his own work (co-scripted with partner Denny Martin Flinn). “It has all the things you’d want to see. I mean, it has a trial scene, it’s got an assassination, it’s a P.O.W. movie with a prison break in it, and it’s got a locked-room mystery!”

Plus, no less significantly, the essential topicality. “Trek VI” is an allegory for the breakup of the Eastern Bloc, with Klingons standing in for Soviets; it also follows in the long tradition of right-wing conspiracy theory films like “The Manchurian Candidate.”

With an attempted coup in the midst of increased post-detente freedom being an essential plot point, current events turned in the movie’s favor during filming. This was in sharp contrast to “Company Business,” Meyer’s last filmmaking experience, which he calls “the very worst experience of my life.” That East-West spy saga was released in early ‘91, a year after its completion, and well after its Cold War holdover story held any relevance.

With “Trek VI,” he got another shot at it. “It’s two movies made on exactly the same subject. We were so astonished when the (Soviet) coup happened, because we thought, ‘Oh my God, this is incredible! It’s just like our movie!’ You know, when you’re working on a film, your world view totally shifts to distill everything through, ‘Is this good or bad for the movie?’ Never mind that Gorbachev might have been dead or under house arrest or what was gonna happen with all those nukes floating around the Soviet Union.”

Meyer maintains that his message is less idealistic than the traditional “Trek” humanism.

“You get into interesting philosophical waters, because Gene Roddenberry, the creator of all this, believed very much in the evolutionary perfectability of man. And I don’t. As I look through human history, I see no evidence--none--of human progress toward solving any of the big problems. I see a great deal of technology, I see a great deal of artistic triumph. But do you really think that we could weep over Romeo and Juliet or the plight of Oedipus if in fact we were not exactly the same people as those people?”

By this time, Meyer is actually shouting, in the friendly, confrontational, all-italics tones of a college English prof, which he often resembles in the literary references that pepper both his wide-ranging coversation and his in-joke-laden scripts.

“If we had really changed, Hamlet’s indecision, the death of Romeo and Juliet and the catastrophe of Oedipus, they wouldn’t move us, we wouldn’t know what the hell they were talking about. But we identify with them as if it were not yesterday but today. You can do that stuff in modern dress and it works. So please don’t try to tell me that by the 23rd Century, short of lobotomy or doing something to your brain with drugs, that we’re gonna change.

“I don’t think we’re gonna change. We’re just gonna keep on trying to be better. The thing that dignifies us as human beings is not our accomplishments so much as our efforts. We strive. And that’s what Kirk is trying to do. Kirk learns about his prejudices. What’s the theme of this movie?”

Class? “The theme of this movie is fear of change. Fear of change . Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.”

The “undiscovered country” of the title is, of course, Shakespeare’s perpetually quoted synonym for the future. Speaking of which . . .

Is this really the last voyage?

Shatner has said “never say never.” To that, the somewhat more definitive Nimoy responds, “I understand his position. I’m betting money that we’re done. I could lose, but at the moment, I’m betting money that we’re done.”

And Meyer?

“With this cast, I believe it is the last one.” Of course, adds the director of Nimoy’s premature cinematic death knell in “II” nine years ago, with some wry caution, “I thought Spock was done, too.”

Spoken like a true non-believer.