Page: Designing Klingons
2 min readHead creature designer Neville Page would like to work on Klingons, if he returns for Star Trek XII.
Page hopes to be part of Star Trek XII, due to his good experience on Star Trek XI. “I don’t know what the plan is with Star Trek,” he said. “I hope that it happens and I would love to, but it’s almost not about working on that movie again. It was such a treat to work with J.J. [Abrams], work with that cast. Having worked as close as I did with the cast, which is kind of rare that it happens with a concept designer. And then having been a Romulan with Eric [Bana] was just great.”
If Page could work on Klingons, he’s not quite sure what he would do with them, but he would like to make them realistic, with a backstory for them. “Truly, I couldn’t tell you what I would change or this is what it would look like,” he said. “Not because I’m not allowed to but because I’m not even there yet mentally. But my approach would be to try and come up with something that’s a unique look but is still a Klingon obviously. Because I think if I did them really tall like say nine feet and instead of brown made them blue, I might get into a little trouble! But I would try think about them as real deal people — and I know other designers have — but really give them a history and a motivation. Understand why they’re dressed the way they are. Understand their rationale for long hair and facial hair. Make sense of those physical features which they typically have, which are the ridged foreheads.”
Klingons may not look alike, just as there is variation within humanity. “…there are different physiological ticks even in the Klingon world,” said Page. “Maybe they are all brown, but the ridges are the African ones, the fewer ridges are the Asian ones. I don’t know, but I always feel the necessity to justify and rationalize even if I can’t actually. It just gives me something to work from.”
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