The View from the Bridge (16 page)

All of which I attempted to present in six pages, which I had the idea of shooting in one continuous take. Movies are inevitably comprised of snippets and fragments of film, close-ups, wide angles, etc., which place their own peculiar demands on the art of the actor. While many film actors are quite used to emoting in chopped-up sections, I, with my stage background, always wondered if even the most professional screen performer didn't experience this as coitus interruptus. In live theater, by contrast, the actor can work up a decent head of steam, and I had the notion that Montalban, with his stage history, might relish the chance to do just that. (Yes, in the editing room I would probably wind up using reaction footage and dialogue from the other people in the scene, yet I persuaded myself that it might serve Montalban well to turn him loose while doing the actual filming of his monologue.)

I told him my idea and showed him what I had in mind, how the camera would allow him to play the scene in toto, dancing (discreetly) around him. He listened politely and made no objection. I believe we worked out twenty-three marks he would need to hit.
Twenty-three
. (Some months later I was given a one-line role in a television movie where I was asked to hit
one mark
and found myself unable to do it.)

Of course, six pages of dialogue is a lot to memorize, but it did not occur to me that this would pose a problem and indeed it did not, though many of our greatest movie actors (think Marlon Brando) have extraordinary difficulties with even a single line. Billy Wilder recalled Marilyn Monroe needing
fifty-three
takes to say, “Now where did I put that bottle of whiskey?” in
Some Like It Hot
.

As cast and crew watched, Montalban stepped onto the set and, while hitting every one of those twenty-three marks, proved letter-perfect. It was astonishing.

There was just one difficulty: Montalban had ranted the entire speech at the top of his lungs, his bellowing voice piercing the rafters of the soundstage. As echoing silence fell Montalban looked at me, along with the company. “Like that?” he inquired, ever polite.

I reflected:
This man has been making movies since before I was born. This film is only my second. I do not know him and so far have been unable to penetrate the armor of his exquisite manners. What will he say if I try to direct him? Will he go ballistic over my presumption?

I harrumphed something or other about this being the general idea and then added, as casually as I could, “Now that we've worked out the moves, let's let the crew do their lighting and have a chat in your trailer about . . . interpretation.”

Montalban silently followed me back to his Winnebago while I wracked my brain for a way to broach the subject diplomatically. When we had settled ourselves and he favored me with a look of neutral attention, I began something like this: “You know, I read Laurence Olivier say somewhere that an actor should never show an audience his top. Once you show an audience your top, they know you have nowhere else to go. . . .”

Montalban did not jump up and toss me out but narrowed his eyes in attention. “Another thing,” I went on before I could chicken out. “The really scary thing about crazy people is you never know what they're going to do next. They can be very quiet but that doesn't reduce the terror because at any second they might leap—”

At which point I abruptly feinted a thrust in his general direction, causing an instinctive flinch, because my action had come out of nowhere.

“Ah, yes, I see, I see!” Montalban got up, very excited, before I could continue, then turned and grinned at me, very different from all that had gone before. “You are going to direct me!” he chortled. “This is wonderful! I
need
direction! I have no idea what I'm doing out there but I usually don't get help.” He then proceeded to relate a couple of choice, self-deprecating anecdotes about experiences that left him floundering. I remember one involved a Mervyn LeRoy production with Lana Turner,
Latin Lovers
, where LeRoy's sole comment before the cameras rolled (“. . . and I had so been looking forward to working with the great director of
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
,” Montalban recalled) had been, “Ricardo . . . Lana . . . make it a good scene.”

As I sighed with relief—I think we both did, actually, as the ice had finally been broken—I still could not imagine where this partnership would lead. Montalban was highly intelligent, and I seldom needed to finish my sentences. He would finish them for me and then embellish my notions. I have never driven a Lamborghini but I imagine that directing Ricardo Montalban is as close as I will ever come. The slightest touch of the steering wheel or pedal, and he responded immediately. He never made a move without consulting me beforehand. “Nick, what if I pause here before I . . . ?” And still more interesting and exciting from my point of view was the fact that, once he got my thesis into his head he was able to take it and run with it. Khan jumped to life more three-dimensionally than many a screen villain, his rage fueled by his sorrow, blended with his intelligence. While I watched Montalban film Khan's initial monologue with his disordered, flying gray locks, it occurred to me that he really should be playing Lear. When I mentioned this to him later, he smiled sadly and alluded to his Hispanic accent. “It doesn't matter,” I insisted, correctly. “You speak beautifully, you enunciate every syllable. No one will give a damn. You must do it.”

Alas, he didn't, and it is our loss.

If the question I am most often asked regarding the movie concerns Montalban's chest, the scene that evokes the biggest reaction in the early part of the film is that same cargo bay encounter between Chekov and Terrill and Khan's “pets,” the Ceti Alpha V eels. The eels are obviously not from Ceti Alpha V, a purely fictional designation. So what are they and where are they from? I think the story may now safely be told. The eels are not eels at all, but rather Andean shrimp, a mountainous cousin of the more familiar armadillo, though more fierce and in fact much rarer, as they are currently on the endangered species list. I can remember as if it were yesterday when I first met our shrimp wrangler, the infamous animal trafficker and trainer, Ole Machiado from Peruvia, who had hand carried the vicious critters through customs in a soundproof case and was now teaching Montalban how to hold the female in place with forceps on her neck while extracting her brood, nestled in the folds of her armor plating. Those are actually Montalban's unprotected arms in the shot, though the origin of his one glove can now be revealed. Unfortunately the actor did sustain at least one serious bite that entailed rabies and tetanus innoculations but, as always, Montalban was a good sport. The babies, by the way, were unharmed. They follow scent and Paul Winfield and Walter Koenig were obliged to daub their ears with Kaopectate in order to get the little things to dive toward their ear canals (models were used in the close-ups). To get them out again, we smeared a little Chanel No. 5 on their lobes.

No, I am not going to explain the Ceti Alpha V eels.

Interestingly Kirk and Khan (how did their names both happen to start with the same letter?) never get to play a scene together in the film. Did I notice this would be the case? I can't say I did—nor did anyone else ever comment on or worry about it during the shooting, though Bill Shatner remembers a long discussion about the need to have a physical fight scene between the two men that he says was eventually scrapped for budgetary reasons. I can't say I miss it. Kirk and Khan do have a “phone” conversation of sorts of the type now common on iChat, and it was interesting to compare their styles and to learn how I could contribute to Shatner's performance.

On
Star Trek VI
, Christopher Plummer told me that he could tell that Shatner would be a star when he watched him subbing for him in
Henry V
one night at Stratford, Ontario. “He did everything different from me,” Plummer recalled, “and that's when I knew . . .”

And if there was one thing Shatner knew, it was Captain Kirk. But the Kirk of
Star Trek II
was a bit different from the character of the TV series and the first film; he was aging, he was off his game, he was depressed (Captain Kirk depressed? This really was going to be different), and now he was in the fight of his life, up against a super-intelligent opponent whose only weakness was his obsessive hatred of Kirk. Khan has given him a minute to surrender the details of Project Genesis. Kirk, forced to put on reading glasses beneath the contemptuous glare of his implacable foe on the forward viewing screen, plays a desperate gambit and stalls until finally turning to Khan and telling him, “Here it comes,” before he proceeds to hammer Khan's hijacked vessel with torpedoes.

The first time Shatner delivered “Here it comes,” his sneer dripped off the lens. “Bill,” says I, “this guy is some kind of über genius. You telegraph like that, he's gonna raise his shields in a second. Let's try it again.”

The second take was similarly heavy-handed but, as it happened, no good for sound. (A stratagem I had contrived beforehand.) The third take, I think the focus was soft—and so on. Eventually Shatner became bored and when he got bored he got good. He dropped the attitudes he was prone to strike and instead
became
Kirk, with no trimmings. It was a good trick to stumble on and it happened early enough in the shoot that I was able to make good use of it throughout. (The only difficulty was ensuring that Shatner, who got better with every take, did not have to appear in a two-shot with someone who was at his best on take one and thereafter deteriorated.) When all's said and done, however, a director can only do so much; Shatner's triumph in the movie is his own, the product of his own intuition and his gift.

Montalban knew he was not a good judge of his own work (“I don't know what I'm doing out there . . .”), but many actors are convinced they are. And this despite the fact that so far from being objective, actors frequently pick the wrong roles in which to appear, let alone the wrong takes. Shatner was no exception. He would come up after the shot and say softly, “Take three was best for me.” I would always nod and make a note of it, regardless of whether it was the take I wound up selecting. Similarly, if an actor wants another take and I have time, enough daylight, and I'm not blowing up a bridge behind him, I will always give it to him. Why should an actor have to go through the movie feeling his best work is getting away from him, even if he's mistaken? There's always the possibility that (a) it will get better or (b) he'll feel he's not been cheated or (c) it may not be better, but it may give you an idea for something you hadn't thought of that
will
be better.

William Wyler, Stanley Kubrick, and Warren Beatty are known for doing scores of takes, John Huston and Clint Eastwood for doing very few. Which is correct? Can you tell the difference watching their films?

Nimoy had long since figured out how to play Spock. “I never played Spock as a man with no emotions,” he explained to me early on. “On the contrary, I always played him as a man of deep passions who was continually struggling to keep them in check.”

I didn't need to say a word.

Normally, a film is prepped, shot, and edited in that order. But in the case of
Star Trek II
(still known as
The Undiscovered Country
), the fact that the studio had already booked the film into theaters, coupled with our late start, forced me to shoot during the day and edit through most of the night. Fortunately I was in good health, and because we shot exclusively on soundstages, hours were pretty regular. Nonetheless, since I watched dailies in a screening room during lunch (fumbling with my sandwich in the dark, food and crumbs everywhere), I calculated that there was a monthlong period when I never saw daylight: I would sleep in the cutting room, head over to whatever soundstage we were on before sunrise, film indoors, then head for dailies, then back to the soundstage, from which I would emerge for only the brief walk to the cutting room again after dark. It grew to be an increasingly disorienting experience. My skin paled and, surreally, I became confused as to what day or time it was—was it day or night? (Later, when people would ask, “Oh, you directed
Star Trek
—were you on location?” I would always respond, “Yes, three weeks on Venus.” Which was about how it felt.)

Because everyone liked the script and felt confident, shooting was nonetheless a pleasant, and even on occasion amusing experience. My friend from the University of Iowa, Dave Dierks, came from Iowa City to visit the set on the day we were shooting the entrance to the Genesis cave, a long corridor tunneled, ostensibly, through solid rock. For some reason joints in our fiberglass tunnel had split, occasioning what looked to be yet another dumb delay. The carpenters were on break, and no one would touch the thing for fear of inciting union issues. I turned to Dierks and wondered, “Could you get up there and hold the damn thing together for a couple of minutes?” He could and did, complaining afterward that he never got to witness any filming.

The Genesis cave was my biggest disappointment. It should have been filmed on location somewhere, but because of our omnipresent financial straitjacket we were forced to use an implausible set, and everyone—including the brass, when they saw it—hated it. (Nowadays, with the advent of sophisticated CGI, we might have pulled it off.)

It was during this most frantic period of shooting and cutting that my assistant, Janna Wong, came up to me one evening (was it evening?) and said she thought the studio had changed the name of the movie.

“What're you talking about?” I demanded, frazzled as we walked from soundstage to our editing rooms. Janna wasn't certain but she'd heard rumors. I dismissed them.