I'd always wanted to do a Director's Cut of Star Trek V just as Paramount had done earlier with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and I really wanted to go in and rebuild – or at least have CGI versions of – the rock men, and really redo the ending of Star Trek V and fix things. There’s a lot of really sloppy, bad work. The famous ‘rocket boots up the corridors of the Enterprise’ that are backwards, and there are way too many decks on the Enterprise; you’re at like Deck 75, then you’re at Deck 50, then you’re back up to Deck 75 again, or whatever the numbers are… it’s like, come on, man! We all know that Deck 1 is the bridge, and it goes down from there!
I wanted to fix all that, because I think the great problem with Star Trek V is the tone. I think there’s a much better – you could go in there and recut and restructure that movie and get rid of all the really dumb humor. Once those really horrible tonal inconsistencies were fixed, there’s a really emotional, really touching movie in there. But what it needed… now that we’ve got time, and in hindsight you can look at that and say look, the studio – because Star Trek IV was the biggest-grossing Trek film at that time – the studio said “Okay, you have this very serious, thoughtful movie, but you have to inject humor into it.”
William Shatner, as far as humor is concerned, he tends to go very broad. He likes broad humor. One of the things I said to him when we were making Free Enterprise, knowing that, was “You know, Bill, this film would not work with a lot of broad humor. The only way ‘Free Enterprise’ is going to work is if the audience at any one time has to wonder – is your character serious, or are you insane?” Shatner was like “Oh, I totally get that. I get that. You’re exactly right.”
He played it that way, and I think that if Star Trek V… if they made the ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ humor – if they played it the same way, but not as broadly – it would have been even funnier! “I don’t think you know the gravity of the situation!” and Spock, you know, swoops down like Superman and saves Kirk… come on, dude. That’s just really goofy. The fan dance, Scotty hitting his head on the bulkhead, “Don’t you know a jailbreak when you see one!”… it’s like, could we tone this stupid humor down?
I think Star Trek V has great moments in it, and I think that if you had somebody come in… also, the problem is – from an economic standpoint – of all the original films, it’s the least-selling. It has the least amount of box office [revenues], so you’re not going to get the people to invest any money into it because the sales figures don’t bear that out.