{"id":3935,"date":"2026-07-10T13:38:32","date_gmt":"2026-07-10T13:38:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/relocationobserver.com\/?p=3935"},"modified":"2026-07-10T13:38:32","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T13:38:32","slug":"star-trek-ii-the-wrath-of-khan-recalled-by-director-nicholas-meyer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/relocationobserver.com\/?p=3935","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan\u2019 Recalled by Director Nicholas Meyer"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\tIn the build-up to the Italian Global Series Festival\u2018s sneak-peeking \u201cStar Trek: Strange New Worlds\u201d Season 4 and celebration of \u201cStar Trek\u201d at 60, Nicholas Meyer spoke to Variety <\/em>about his time with the franchise, famously having directed \u201cStar Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,\u201d as well as the current landscape of television, having co-created Netflix series \u201cMedici \u2013 Masters of Florence,\u201d and more.<\/p>\n

Read more \u2018Fruit Gathering\u2019 Director on Exploring \u2018Conditional\u2019 Female Connection and Bringing the First Myanmar Premiere to Karlovy Vary<\/a><\/p>\n

\nItalian 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.<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tI can\u2019t speak very much about the evolution because I haven\u2019t 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\u2019t 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 \u201cRich Man Poor Man,\u201d\u201dThe Six Million Dollar Man\u201d and \u201cThe Bionic Woman.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nWhat were the expectations?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tThey said, \u201cCan you make a movie better than the first movie for half the money? And [Bennett] said, \u201cI can make five movies for it.\u201d 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 \u201cStar Trek\u201d on TV, and I didn\u2019t get it at all. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tI missed everything that was interesting about the show, the idea that people of different races and genders and cultures could come together to do something good that blew right by me.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tI just thought the costumes were dopey or something, so I didn\u2019t know what it was, and but I liked Harve Bennett a lot. He said draft five is coming in. Three weeks later, I\u2019d had a little epiphany in the meantime, I knew that this show reminded me of something that I did<\/em> like. At 13, an impressionable age, I discovered the adventures of Captain Horatio Hornblower. Did you ever read the Hornblower novels?<\/p>\n

\nI\u2019m afraid I have not.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s obviously supposed to be Lord Nelson, but it\u2019s a captain in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, and he has many adventures, and he has a girl in every port. When you\u2019re 13, this sounded pretty good, and I thought, \u2018wait a minute, Kirk is Hornblower in outer space. I know how to do that.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\nAt this festival there\u2019s been a lot of talk about the growing overlap between cinema and television: as someone who has worked in both mediums, how have you observed said changes?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tWell, we\u2019re in the midst of a whole technological overlap, which also coincides thanks to very short attention spans. Even film students in film schools say they they can\u2019t sit through a full movie. So everything is becoming a 32nd vertical, vertical dramas, and all financed out of China, as I understand it. Little three minutes. Some years ago, maybe 1,015 years ago, Jeffrey Katzenberg had this idea called Quibi, collected a lot of money to invest in short episodes that would be on your phone, and he was like 1,012 years early. It didn\u2019t work, but it works now, and this is what\u2019s happening.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nAnd any differences which still remain between film and TV?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tThe other distinction that I make between television and film \u2013 putting aside the whole phone digression \u2013 is that I believe in theater. I believe in the idea of committing to an experience, opera, play, ballet, movie, doesn\u2019t matter where you commit yourself, you have to drive to the place or walk to the place, you have to buy the ticket and you have to feed the meter or whatever, and you are going to sit with a bunch of people that you don\u2019t know and they don\u2019t know you and you are going to have a collective experience, which is simultaneously utterly personal.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tYou are going to laugh or cry with a bunch of strangers, but it is going to be a communal journey of some kind. And if it\u2019s good, it\u2019ll stay with you forever. And what I worry about with television and things on your phone, is we\u2019ve lost this collective experience, and I think that bringing people together, and I\u2019m not just talking about sports, I\u2019m talking about art, and why I think theater, in all its forms, is important for human beings as a species, and I think we forfeit all of this at our peril.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nDo you feel there is a kind of marked difference in how series might be structured or written?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tIt depends whether it\u2019s a single event, whether it\u2019s a limited series, or it\u2019s an ongoing series. The ongoing series, you know, in theory is not unlike, you know, Charles Dickens\u2019 novels or Alexandre Dumas that were published in instalments, and in that format you have time to develop and work out characters. If you look at \u201cBreaking Bad,\u201d and just follow Walter White\u2019s devolution. In the same way that you know serialized novels, that was like an interesting thing. With the attention span competition, it becomes, I think, increasingly difficult to find ways to hook an audience and keep them involved, and there is a lot of formulaic diktats. We need episodes to end with cliffhangers? That\u2019s always been true. That\u2019s been true from \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d\u00a0on, but now there\u2019s more and more things, do\u2019s and don\u2019ts. There are both restrictions that are competitive restrictions, and cultural restrictions, so it\u2019s harder and harder for the salmon to get upstream.<\/p>\n

Read more Meta AI Can Now Use Your Instagram Photos Without Consent. SAG-AFTRA Urges App Users to Opt Out: \u2018Take Action to Protect Your Likeness\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Meyer talked about the 1982 blockbuster at Italian Global Series, which this week celebrated 60 Years of \u2018Star Trek.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3934,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1445,3215,3216],"class_list":["post-3935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-film","tag-italian-global-series-festival","tag-nicholas-meyer","tag-star-trek-the-wrath-of-khan"],"yoast_head":"\n\u2018Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan\u2019 Recalled by Director Nicholas Meyer - Relocation Observer<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/relocationobserver.com\/?p=3935\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"\u2018Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan\u2019 Recalled by Director Nicholas Meyer - 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