![]() Ridley Scott was not going to direct this movie. Jonathan Frakes, director and Commander Riker: Sherry Lansing, who ran Paramount at the time, said to Rick Berman, “I’ll leave this in your hands because you know this franchise.” First Contact was Star Trek 8. And the other “aha” moment for me was the idea that the hero to all of the people on the Enterprise, Zefram Cochrane, was a drunk asshole who is creating warp drive for all the wrong reasons and him realizing why he needs to do it because it’s going to change the world and I thought, if you could go back in time and meet one of your great heroes from history and they’re a jerk, it’s very shocking. We wanted these villains to want to be understood. Definitely when we conceptualized the Borg Queen, because at an early stage we were realizing the Borg are zombies but they don’t talk and we wanted some depth. Likewise, a lot of the action that took place on board the Enterprise, you’ll note that we are still down to counting phaser bolts, which was such a pain in the ass, where we’re budgeting, “Well how many shots can the security guys take?” “Oh, it’s $10,000 a shot” and you’re negotiating with the production people.īraga: There were a few “aha” moments. At the beginning, when the Enterprise comes in and the Borg are attacking Earth and there’s a huge fleet battle, that got way cut back. We were reusing the sets and reusing old stuff. Paramount didn’t really spend a lot on those movies. Even though the budget was obviously much bigger than your average episode was, it was still astonishing how quickly that got chewed up by visual effects budgets of the day. ![]() Moore: There were a lot of budgetary constraints. Patrick Stewart, who had read that first draft, said, “Why am I not on the ship? I’m the one who got raped by this species.” We were like, “OK. With First Contact, it was really just, “OK, what do you want to do?” So the three of us worked on the story together, and I think Rick was interested in doing time travel and Brannon was interested in doing the Borg.īraga: The first draft had Riker fighting the Borg on the ship and Picard down on the planet and everything was just backwards. ![]() It had to have the Klingons in it, it had to have a big villain, it had to have time travel in it. You could only have the original series cast in the first 10 minutes. ![]() It had to be a transition from one cast to the other. When we did Generations, there was literally a list of things that the movie had to accomplish. Moore, screenwriter: The big difference between First Contact and Generations was right at the start, there really wasn’t a list of things to do. The pair immediately agree - eager to get right what they feel they got wrong with the previous film.īrannon Braga, screenwriter: When Generations came out, Kirk and Picard were on the cover of Time magazine and it’s like, “OK, how much bigger does it get?” But at the same time, Ron and I felt that we had made some missteps with Generations and we wanted to redeem ourselves and make a really great movie. Moore and Brannon Braga are approached by producer Rick Berman about crafting a follow-up. It also would be considered a high point in Trek lore, with many fans arguing only Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan can top it.ġ994’s Star Trek: Generations is still in theaters and screenwriters Ronald D. 22, 1996, it went on to earn $146 million worldwide against a $45 million budget - making it at the time the second-highest-grossing Trek film ever. When Star Trek: First Contact hit theaters 20 years ago on Nov. It proved to be a wise choice, with Frakes commanding respect and affection from the cast and crew and utilizing his TV director’s ability to make the budget look much bigger than it was. Jonathan Frakes (Commander Riker) had proven himself to be a top-notch director on Next Generation, and was tapped to lead the crew of the Enterprise behind the camera for his debut feature.
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