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RDM: Not directly. I’ve heard probably what you’ve heard, but I haven’t read the entire script or anything like that.

[inset]

SPACE.com: But that’s the premise that they’re going with?

RDM: That’s my understanding. That’s the word around the studio, but I haven’t heard that from anyone on the show.

SPACE.com: It seems like another ship show. Was there any discussion when you were on DS9 of doing the civilian show that looked at the rest of the universe?

RDM: A little bit, but the feeling always was that Star Trek really was about Starfleet in one way, shape or form. That part of it was a core concept of the franchise. We did talk about it amongst ourselves in "what if" possibilities, but we couldn’t quite visualize how you could say that that really was Star Trek.

SPACE.com: Do you think that there is Trek fatigue, and that the franchise could actually benefit from the [threatened summer writers’ and actors’] strike?

RDM: I don’t know about a strike benefiting anybody particularly. It needs a time out to creatively sit back and reassess. But that [needs to be] a deliberate choice to say, "Okay, I’m going to set this thing down and walk away from it and go do something else and then I’m going to come back and pick it up again." Whereas a strike is saying, "Okay, I’m marking time but I know what I’m doing and when are we going to get back in production?"

Next: writing the films

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SPACE.com: How is it different writing the Trek films? Obviously it’s not same as writing a TV two-parter?

RDM: No, it’s a whole different set of parameters and goals and it’s a much more complicated political game than the episodes. It takes longer, and it’s a whole different thing.

SPACE.com: What are the studio’s goals?

RDM: They’re big concerns are: that it’s not just another episode, that it’s something that they can promote to the general audience, that it doesn’t presuppose that you’ve been watching the series week in and week out, and so you can just kind of come and go.

Ideally they want you to be able to just go buy a ticket with only sort of a vague understanding of Star Trek, or at least sort of know the general makeup of the series and not get lost. It has to be big, and there has to be a sense of the stakes being larger than an average episode.

It’s a lot more money involved to produce it, but of course everything costs more on a feature scale, so that gets a little deceptive. You’re dealing with huge budgets objectively but, when you actually produce a feature film, everything just costs more, so it gets chewed up almost as fast as it does on the series.

If you look at First Contact, there’s a lot of effects in that show, but not nearly as many as in Independence Day or, God forbid, a Star Wars film. You get down to sitting in production meetings and arguing about how many phaser shots you can have in the scene and how many cut-aways of the Defiant you’re going to be able to get and does the Enterprise have to be at warp in this?

All the sort of standard arguments you have on the TV show, it’s just that you’re adding a zero to all of the figures.

Next: more about the movies, with a focus on the budgets

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SPACE.com: On the FX front, I personally want to thank you for doing the scene in Trek I’ve always wanted to see, which was the finale of Deep Space Nine, a bazillion ships shooting at each other! Did you do a bunch of ship-in-the-bottle shows so that you could save up for the big blowout or did Paramount say "we’ll give you extra money for the finale?"

RDM: We knew that we were gonna get some extra money, but then we were gonna push for every last shot that we could. Everybody on the production and in post was trying to do extra stuff just to go out with a big bang, and the studio was gonna give us more money anyway, and we just cheated and stole and borrowed and made it as big as we possibly could.

SPACE.com: So when you’re doing a Trek movie is there a standard like "we’ve gotta have four space battles?"

RDM: No, we didn’t really approach it that way. The biggest thing that we had to deal with was, it’s always going to be about Picard. Then [we ask ourselves] who’s the villain and what are the big action set pieces? Those are sort of the basics that you had to wrap your mind around when you approach the project.

Generations was very difficult because there were giant checklists of things that had to be dealt with in the screenplay. You had the old crew, you had Kirk, you had the introduction of the Next Generation characters. You wanted to bring in the Klingons but then the Klingons weren’t enough, you had to have a new villain, it was just on and on and on and on, and it was a difficult screenplay to execute.

SPACE.com: And you had to do crash rewrites? [Such as reportedly rewriting the ending to include a more heroic death for Kirk.]

RDM: Oh yeah, which we were used to. TV builds those muscles, you do rewrites on the fly all the time, on very short notice. So we were able to do that part of it, but it was more of a sense of frustration that we didn’t push the boundaries further and that we didn’t really tackle bigger things, especially in the first one.

In the second one [First Contact] we were very pleased with where we ended up. It was kind of arduous getting there, but we all felt good about the movie and it was well received and it made a lot of money and so at the end of the day we all had a really good feeling about First Contact.

SPACE.com: And then you sat out for Insurrection. Did you pitch or was there a political intrigue there?

RDM: No, Rick [Berman] came to Brannon [Braga] and I in February after First Contact had come out and said well, the studio has approached me and they wanted to get going on the next one, are you guys interested?

And I was really surprised because it was so soon. First Contact was still in some theaters, and I thought about it, and I just decided I didn’t want to do it. I felt like had done it in First Contact. I was happy with the film, I was proud of the work, it was critically well received, it was making a lot of money. Enough.

Next: everything we know about Trek X

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SPACE.com: What about Trek X?

RDM: From what I understand, they’re working on 10, they’ve hired, I believe, John Logan, who wrote Gladiator, to write the screenplay. He’s a great writer and from what I’ve heard he’s also a big fan of the show.

[uplink]

SPACE.com: Have you heard anything about the premise or where it’s going?

RDM: Not even the vaguest inkling. I don’t even know anything about the movie.

SPACE.com: Brent Spiner has said that he wants this to be his last Trek movie, and there’s talk about Data dying.

RDM: You never know. Leonard Nimoy wanted to die in Star Trek II, so they killed him. And then he decided he wanted to come back. It’s really hard to say.

I haven’t spoken with Brent, so I don’t know how serious he feels about it, and how seriously they want to do that, and what the studio’s feelings are.

SPACE.com: Do you think that if this is the last Next Generation movie, that they would create another movie franchise or they would do a DS9 movie or a Voyager movie?