Sunday 05 February 2012

Behind the scenes on The Wrath of Khan

Despite its weaknesses, Star Trek: The Motion Picture had been a success, so it came as no surprise that Paramount Pictures decided to develop a sequal. With Gene Roddenberry stepping into the background, Star Trek was handed over to executive producer Harve Bennett. It was Bennett's job to develop a script that could be filmed on a reasonable budget and put a new Star Trek feautre in the theatres in the summer of 1982. One of his biggest problems was finding the right approach to the material. The Motion Picture had adopted a very serious and epic style, which many felt was inappropriate. Somehow, the sequal would have to capture the essential heart of the show and give the audiences what they had been waiting for.

Script development

Bennett watched all original Star Trek episodes in preparation for his task. His thrawl through the episodes provided him with what he had been looking for. He was determined that his movie would have something the first one lacked–a real villain. When he saw "Space Seed", Bennett was struck by Ricardo Montalban's performance as Khan, and decided that he would make the perfect villain for the film.

In November 1980, Bennett wrote his first treatment called "Star Trek II: The War of the Generations". In this story Kirk is called to investigate a rebellion on a Federation world. En route, he saves a woman he was once in love with and learns that their son-–whom he never knew had been born–is one of the leaders of the rebellion. Upon arrival at the planet, Kirk is captured and sentenced to death by his own son, before we learn that Khan is truly the mastermind behind the uprising. Kirk joins forces with his son to fight Khan, and the film ends with Kirk's son joining the crew of the Enterprise.

Bennett had already decided that one of the film's major themes would be the aging of the characters. In the drafts that followed, Kirk was consistently confronted with a son he knew little about, Spock was often preoccupied with death, and, in the later versions, McCoy had to struggle with his feelings for a much younger woman, who had made it clear that she was interested in him. Bennett still had to turn his outline into a workable script that could be shot, so he hired Jack B. Sowards, who had written several admired movies of the week and was a self-confessed Star Trek fan. Sowards instantly had a major impact. Where Bennett's original treatment made no mention of Spock, since Leonard Nimoy had made it clear that he was not keen to make a second Star Trek film, Sowards thought he had a way of persuading Nimoy to return: he suggested that Bennett tell Nimoy that in this film Spock would die a little more than a third into the story. The opportunity to play his death scene was too good for Nimoy to pass up, and he agreed to come aboard. From this piont on, all the scripts featured Spock's death, although its position in the film would inevitably be pushed toward the dramatic conclusion.

Sowards had only a few months to write a full script before a writers' strike was called in April 1981. By late February he had produced a first draft that significantly expanded Bennett's outline and added several vital elements. This script introduced the idea that the Federation was preparing to test a terrible weapon known as the Omega System.

The film opened with Captain Clark Terrell and his first officer, Pavel Chekov, beaming down to Ceti Alpha V, which had been selected as a test site, to make certain that the planet was as dead as sensor readings suggested. Starfleet know that Kirk had left Khan and his people stranded on this planet, but was amazed to discover that he and a handful of his followers, including Marla McGivers, had survived. A vengeful Khan took control of Terrell and Chekov, and used them to take control of Project Omega. Terrell claimed that Kirk had ordered the Omega System to be loaded onto the U.S.S. Reliant, which was a Constitution-class starship like Enterprise, and made it clear that it was going to be used to fight the Klingons in the Neutral Zone. Project leader Janet Wallace contacts Kirk, who orders Enterprise to set a course for Gamma Regula IV, the planet on which the project was headquartered. As Enterprise approached the planet, its engines were badly damaged, and Spock sacrificed his life to get them back online in time for Kirk to fight the Reliant off. Later Khan and Kirk would fought a psychic battle in a variety of exotic locations, using quarterstaffs, whips, and swords. Khan, who had acquired impressive mental powers during his isolation, eventually won, but Kirk survived because he understood that he weapons were only illusory. The film ended with a pitched space battle in orbit around the planet, in which Kirk defeated his enemy with his superior tactics.

At this point, art director Michael Minor made an invaluable contribution. Bennett was concerned that the Omega System was simply a weapon and that there was nothing uplifting about it, so Minor suggested turning it into a terraforming device. Because it would work by reordering matter on a planet's surface, it would still be a terrible weapon, but the Federation's goal was to create a paradise, not to kill billions. Bennett was delighted by this, and, in recognition of its Biblical power, the Omega System became the Genesis Device.

By April 10, Sowards had produced an updated draft of the script that incorporated the change. In this version Janet Wallace had become Carol Baxter and Spock's death had been pushed a little later in the story. During the final battle, Khan fired the Genesis Device at Enterprise but hit a planet, which was reborn as the two vessels continued their titanic struggle. This draft also included the first version of the simulator sequence in which "Savik" (then a young Vulcan male officer who was Captain Spock's first officer on board Enteprise) failed to rescue the Kobayashi Maru. When Savik questioned him about his failure, Kirk suggested that the test might be a 'no-win scenario'.

By now, pre-production had begun in earnest, and producer Robert Sallin and Mike Minor produced storyboards for the effects sequences. But, although this draft contained many, if not most of the elements of the final script, Bennett and Sallin were not satisfied. To their minds, the script did not have the epic sweep needed for a major film. So they called upon Samuel A. Peeples, who had written the original series episode "Where No Man Has Gone Before". His script entirely omitted the character of Khan and replaced him with two powerful aliens called Sojin and Moray, who had been exiled from another dimension and possessed almost godlike abilities. While Peeples was working on the script, Bennett and Salllin found a director they liked in the form of Nicholas Meyer. A week or so before the last draft was due to be delivered, they met with him and promised they would be back in touch as soon as they had the new script in their hands. Meanwhile, time pressures were becoming critical and Industrial Light and Magic told the producers that if they did not have a script within a matter of weeks, they would not be able to deliver the effects in time for the planned release date.

By the time the final Peeples draft arrived, Bennett and Sallin knew they could not film it. As Sallin explained: "We were off in some weird directions and I was really very concerned. It did not feel like a motion picture to me. Some of these ideas were too derivative and were too small in their scope. There wasn't anything underlying it. It was more about people shooting fire and things like that, as opposed to a real story."

Three weeks after their last meeting, Meyer called Bennett and asked where the script was. Although reluctant to share the script, which Bennett found almost embaressing to share, Meyer pursuaded him to send him the draft. Not impressed with what he had received, he called Bennett and told him and Bob Sallin to come up to his house with all the different drafts of the script. The three of them made a list of all the things from all the different drafts that they wanted to end up in the final film, and then Meyer set out to compile a screenplay that incorporated all those things. Meyer concentrated on crafting a strong narrative by getting all the scenes in the right order and putting the story into his own words. "I was only interested in cobbling together and cannibalizing various parts that seemed useful," he explained. "What I fall in love with is the story. I never looked at the scripts again, so there were no words that were appropriated. It all had to be in my own language and in a way that I could understand it."

Meyer had some very clear opinions about what made drama, and he was determined that, despite the futuristic setting, his film would make sense to a 20th century audience. Asked to quantify the character of his approach, Meyer produced two examples. The first was that he brought a sense of humour to the project, which is not to say that he did not treat it with proper respect. "I think that putting humour into a serious movie makes the serious stuff more serious, and the humour becomes more of an explosive release." The other important decision he made was actually something he thought about when Bennett and Sallin had first asked him to direct the film. "I had the haziest notion of what Star Trek was, because I didn't really watch the show on television. I finally latched on to the idea that Captain Kirk and friends were really an outer-space a series of novels that I had loved as a kid, by C.S. Forrester, called 'Captain Horatio Hornblower'. So I said, 'OK, this is 'Hornblower' in outer space; I've got it.' When I wrote the script in 12 days it was very, very, very Navy, or, as my late wife used to say, 'Nautical but nice.'"

Casting

Because Ricardo Montalban had appeared on the original series episode "Space Seed", director Nicholas Meyer was not involved with casting him, though he certainly had no complaints-"Khan is enough to tell you that this is a great actor," he said. Most of Kirk's crew were in place, but Meyer was intimately involved with casting several new roles. He explained that what he was looking for was actors where he could see what the characters were feeling, even when they were not talking.

"For Carol Marcus I wanted a woman who was beautiful and looked like she could think; a woman who was attractive enough that you could see why Kirk would fall for her, and at the same time somebody who could keep up with him. [ . . . ] I loved Bibi Besch; I became very close with her, and I used her again in 'The Day After'. She's no longer alive and I bitterly regret it; she was a lovely human being, and a lovely actor.

"Merritt Butrick is also tragically no longer alive. [As David Marcus] he not only had to be Kirk's son, he had to be Carol's son, so on a physical level I think what I liked was that his hair was the same colour as hers but it was curly like Bill's, so I thought, 'Well, that's plausible.'

"Paul Winfield was an actor I had wanted to work with since I saw 'Sounder', and I thought, 'Wow, what a lovely actor.' There was no real reason for him to be the captain of the Reliant, other than my great desire to direct him in scenes! I knew he could do it, without any question."

The biggest casting coup was giving a young Kirstie Alley the role of Saavik. "She said as a child she wanted to be Spock and that she was so in love with the role that she wore her ears to sleep. [ . . . ] She didn't have to find the role; she didn't have to work her way into it. She'd been living it somewhere in her head for years. There just wasn't a contest. I don't recall seeing another actor for that part who was as persuasive." In addition to her instinctive understanding of the role, Alley brought another, slightly more definable quality to her role. "The thing about her is that she's beautiful, but she also had a slightly other-wordly quality. [ . . . ] She was also able to encompass that sort of flat unemotionality, but she's basically a comedian. What I didn't konw was that that flatness, like Leonard's, frequently comes out of a kind of a deadpan. I realized that when I watched her doing it. Then, at the other end of it, there she was at Spock's funeral, weeping. I remember somebody came running up to me and said, 'Are you going to let her do that?' And I said, 'Yeah', and they said, 'But Vulcans don't cry,' and I said, 'Well, that's what makes this such an interesting Vulcan.'"

Production design

When production designer Joseph Jennings reported for work on the second Star Trek film, he found the sets for the U.S.S. Enterprise still standing. After director Robert Wise had finished filming the first feature, he had simply closed the stage doors and moved on. In the intervening months, the interiors of the giant starship had sat patiently, waiting to go back into action.

Most of the action in the film takes place on the bridge of the Enterprise. Although the set may appear quite different from the bridge on The Motion Picture, Jennings only made cosmetic changes to the design. The layout remained the same, but in order to make the second film warmer than its predecessor the set was repainted in darker colours.

Director Nicholas Meyer very much disliked the design of the Enterprise bridge set, because in his view there were many things that did not make sense: "[ . . . ] to take a silly example, if they are in terrible circumstances and everything gets all shook up, why don't they have seatbelts? And the answer is, because if they had seatbelts if wouldn't be very interesting. Most of the movie actually takes place on that damn bridge, which is a very tedious set to photograph, and it was also, in a reconfigured form, the bridge of the Reliant, so I spent a lot of time there.

"The biggest problem was just keeping alive what is happening in a 360-degree world. The bridge was, very rightly, built in pie sections, so you could yank out sections and put the camera in. But, occasionally, you might want to be in the middle and sweep the camera around at what is going on. The sections are curved at the top, so when they are all in, how do you get light in there? It's a sort of a nightmare scenario. Gayne [Rescher, director of photography] invented a lot of very peculiar apparatus that dropped in from the top with light coming off, like a big chandelier on a chain."

The Wrath of Khan did not have the budget to allow for significant alterations to be made to the bridge set, but Meyer did ask Jennings to find ways of making it appear more detailed and specific. "The least I thought we could do was revamp the bridge and make it twinkle. I remember I had Joe Jennings build me a wall of blinking lights. It was on wheels, and we would shove this thing around behind people, to try anything to break up this expanse of grey panel."

Although several other sets were also still in place, the Enterprise still gave Jennings plenty of work to do. As he recalled: "A new script will call for different things; somebody walks down a corridor and goes into another room and, bang, you don't have that room, so you add it. And it grows [ . . . ] until the stage sort of bulges out."

The most obvious new addition was the torpedo room. Few people would realize it, but this set was actually a redressed version of the Klingon bridge from the first film. The torpedo room set featured a long channel where the torpedoes were loaded. Meyer wanted to have as much movement as possible in the action sequences, so he had Jennings put grates down over the channel that had to be lifted when the Enterprise went into battle.

Director Nicholas Meyer wanted the camera to be directly in front of the torpedo and to move with it as it slid into the launcher. "I [Robert Sallin] got a call from the head of production at Paramount: 'Nick [Meyer] wants this, and we're going to have to rip out the floor, and we're going to have to rebuild the set so it's high enough off the ground to get the camera in. We've got to talk to Nick.' We all went down there, and everyone was gathered around looking at this through. I just turned to the key grip and said, 'Do you have a Western dolly?' That's basically a trolley that you use to pull the camera. He said, 'Yes,' and I said, 'Have you that tubular track for it? And can you put on the little wheels?' He nodded, and I said, 'Can't we mount the camera on the dolly, put the track down inside the trough, then move the camera with an offset arm [which allows one to control it from above] and do the shot that way?' He said, 'Yeah we can do that,' and I said, 'What's that going to cost?' and he said, 'About $30,' and I said, 'Well, I think that's what we're doing, then!'"

The Enterprise bridge set was also adapted to serve as the bridge of the U.S.S. Reliant. "We had one thing going for us," said Jennings. "There's a great deal of similarity between the bridge of a destroyer and the bridge of a cruiser in the American Navy. We gave it a change of colour and orientation, and we got rid of the big screen in front. As I recall, we changed some of the seating arrangements and the elevators a little bit, and, of course, we added the ceiling piece to it, because the beam had to come down and pin Ricardo to the floor. The whole ceiling piece was something that had never been featured in the bridge of the Enterprise. That gave it a different look."

One of the non-starship sets Jennings worked on was the brief scene at Starfleet Headquarters, when Kirk walked out of the simulator and headed for an elevator. This set was in reality much smaller than it appeared. Jennings explained: "Mike [Minor] had a bright idea; he went out to several hardware stores and came back with a birdbath, a planter, and a bunch of junk. He went off and fiddled with it for about two days, and he came up with a miniature. We put that in the foreground as what is called a 'cutting piece,' and the real set was in the background. They tied together visually and created a perspective trick that made the set look much bigger."

The next time we saw Kirk, he was in his apartment. Jennings had fond memories of this set, and said that the challenge was to make it clear that it was in San Francisco, but also show that it was a 23rd-century building. The setting was established by using a backdrop showing the Golden Gate Bridge that had been made for The Towering Inferno. The next task, Jennings explained,' was to make the room appear futuristic. "You set up your frame of reference, and then within that you've got to be honest, which will lend credibility to the physical aspects of your show. Like all architecture, it has to look as through it's possible to live in it; you look for materials, for instance, that are unfamiliar, or that are being used in an unfamiliar fashion, to make your design look different from what the public is seeing today."

Despite the need to make the apartment look futuristic, Meyer also impressed on them that he did not believe that things would change that much in the future, so the apartment still had to look like a home. "A fireplace would be an anachronism but would still fit Kirk's image of having a cozy place to live," said Jennings, "so we had to make a fireplace that looked a little different; hence we used the curved wall and the mosaic treatment behind it." Meyer also wanted to suggest that Kirk had too much time on his hands in retirement and had a real attachment to the past, so Jennings and his team filled the set with antique collectables.

Visual effects

The visual effects for The Wrath of Khan were filmed quickly and efficiently-–and, most importantly, they came in on budget. Contrary to the first Star Trek feature, the effects were produced by Industrial Light and Magic, a company which would come to dominate the industry in the coming decades. Producer Robert Sallin recalled ILM's approach to the project: "They were incredible. The most professional, the most delightful, the most responsive; I couldn't say enough good things about the whole crew. It was an amazing experience."

As a sequal, Star Trek II was able to reuse most of the models that had already been built for The Motion Picture. Besides the Enterprise model, Sallin wanted to make use of the orbital office complex that Kirk beamed up to in the first film; it became the Regula I spacestation. Steve Gawley, head of the model shop at the time, recalled: "We took it [the orbital office model] apart and put it upside down and then reattached some of the outer pods in a different way."

The remaining model shots required entirely new models. The ILM team built the Regula planetoid and several other simple pieces, but the main task was the construction of the Reliant, which was the first Starfleet vessel other than the Constitution-class ever seen. Paramount's art department provided the model builders with detailed drawings to work from, and, as modelmaker Bill George remembered, a general instruction that the Enterprise and Reliant should look as different from one another as possible. "The one thing that was a little big different on the drawings was that they had come up with a totally new colour scheme for the graphics, thinking that would make it look different. [ . . . ] When I got them in I said, 'This can't happen.' So I showed them to Kenneth Ralston [ILM supervisor to the film]. His take on it was, 'Let's put on the Federation graphics we've seen before, and see what they say.' Thankfully, the producers were happy with it."

The biggest challenge the ILM team faced was that the script called for the Enterprise and Reliant to inflict heavy damage on one another. The model shop used several different approaches to make sure that they did not actually have to damage the models. On the Enterprise, the damage was essentially cosmetic; pieces of aluminum were added on which were tainted so that, where need be, the damage could literally be peeled off. The damage to the Reliant was much more serious, so larger versions of different parts of the ship were built that could be destroyed.

The initial confrontation ended with the destruction of a dome toward the rear of Reliant's saucer. After that came the biggest single effects sequence of the film-–the Battle of the Mutara Nebula. To create the nebula, the team used a cloud tank, which is basically a large container with coloured liquid in it. The team spent weeks shooting the tank, searching for shots that could be used as background for the epic battle. When everything was finished, the team sat down to look through all their footage for shots they could use with the models.

Once the nebula had been filmed, the team focussed on the starships that would be moving around inside it. Because the ships were often in the distance, they were able to use small versions of the models which were much easier to handle than the full-size models, and could perform bigger maneuvers. In one of the most impressive scenes of the battle, the Reliant fires its phasers at the Enterprise "neck" section, cutting an enormous gash in the process. This shot was created using traditional stop animation techniques. Kenneth Ralston explained: "I had that section done as a wax piece and then painted it to look like the ship. Obviously, we worked out exactly how the camera was going to move. Then I just went into the wax version, and I would take little sculpting tools and rip stuff up and bend it around. We'd film that, then the camera would move whatever distance it would cover in one frame, and I'd sculpt some more damage. Then, on top of that, we did some animation of a laser hit sort of cutting into it, but if left a real cut-–a big scar [ . . . ]."

The damage brought onto the Reliant was even more severe, and involved making several separate sections. "One of the engine pods blows up," remembered Ralston. 'We couldn't blow up the whole pod for some reason, so I built a shape similar to it and it was more like glass blowing out of the warp nacelle. We shot that as a separate element and then printed that on top of the actual model fo the Reliant, with other pieces blowing off of it. Then, when the whole nacelle blows off, that was just a bunch of explosions and a separate arm that we shot using motion control."

 

N. Ottens
8 August 2006
Last updated: 23 July 2007

Sources for this article include:
• Star Trek: The Magazine, volume 3, issue 5 (September 2002)
• Images courtesy of Trekcore.