In the build-up to the Italian Global Series Festival‘s sneak-peeking “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” Season 4 and celebration of “Star Trek” at 60, Nicholas Meyer spoke to Variety about his time with the franchise, famously having directed “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” as well as the current landscape of television, having co-created Netflix series “Medici – Masters of Florence,” and more.
Italian Global Series is celebrating 60 years of Star Trek. That made me wonder about your perspective on the evolution of the series from when you directed the films through to now.
I can’t speak very much about the evolution because I haven’t paid much attention. When I first was invited to participate in the second movie, it was because the first movie, which was a runaway production, cost $45 million in 1979 and it still made money, and so they were going to make another movie, but they weren’t going to spend any $45 million, nothing like it. And they brought in Harvee Bennett, he was a wonderful man, a television producer who made “Rich Man Poor Man,””The Six Million Dollar Man” and “The Bionic Woman.”
What were the expectations?
They said, “Can you make a movie better than the first movie for half the money? And [Bennett] said, “I can make five movies for it.” And by the way, our budget was like $11.2 [million]. And then they went looking for a writer and they had script after script after they had five drafts of script. I had seen “Star Trek” on TV, and I didn’t get it at all.
