Shatner On Lessons Of 'Star Trek V'

William Shatner recently spoke about why working on 'Star Trek V: The Final Frontier' taught him some very valuable lessons.

"The lessons of Star Trek V," Shatner told Dreamwatch Magazine, "Are for me, the art of compromise... I had learned from 'Star Trek V' that when you feel strongly about something, when you have a passion and you have to be honest with yourself that it isn't a conceit - you should follow your bliss, and that's exactly what I learned to do with that movie."

"But I learned it after 'Star Trek V' and not during it," the actor laughed. "Because the premise of that movie was that our beloved cast goes in search of God and find the Devil instead: that was too profound and too trouble making an idea for the studio to handle.

"I compromised on the basic premise of the movie and therefore robbed the movie of it's basic energy. I didn't realize it at the time, only much later - too late. On the other hand. I spent $30 million and not many people can do that in a couple of months."

The Star Trek V director went on to talk about another incident in his career that featured trouble with studio bosses. "When the Star Trek movies finished as far as I was concerned, I went on to write a series of books that became four movies - the Tek series - and there to lessons of Star Trek V came back to me," he said. "I directed the first Tek movie and the network loved it. In fact the head of the network said it was the best piece of television he's ever seen. He was subsequently fired! He knew!"

"So that has been a continuum of creative events in my life, reaching a crescendo now as I'm getting older and wiser."

Much more from William Shatner, including reflections on his early career and his recent appearances on the big screen, can be found in the current issue of Dreamwatch magazine, out now in the United Kingdom. Extracts from the interview have been made available online here at Scifi Pulse.

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