Director Nicholas Meyer and Leonard Nimoy talk on the set of Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan. 

In an interview with Stephen Payne and Nicholas Briggs that was printed in Starburst #162 (February 1992), Meyer was characteristically upfront about his role in writing the movie that many have credited with saving the Star Trek franchise:

“Yeah, I wrote it. My name isn’t on it. What happened with that film is curious. They said ‘We’re waiting for draft number five to come in, and then we’ll send you the draft’…and then I never got it. Ten days went by and I called up Harve Bennett, and I said, ‘What happened to you guys?’ and he said, ‘Well, the draft came in and we don’t like it.’ I said ‘Well, send it to me.’ He said ‘No, no, no you don’t understand. It’s 160 pages of nothing.’ So I said, ‘What about draft four, send me draft four.’ He said, ‘You don’t understand. All five drafts are merely five different attempts to get a different Star Trek movie, they are unrelated to one another.’ I said, ‘Oh, well, send them all up.’

“So I sat and read these things, and then I called Harve Bennett and Robert Sallin who was his partner on the project. And I pulled out a yellow legal pad and said, ‘Here’s my idea. Let’s sit down and make a list of everything we like in these five drafts. It could be a character, could be a plot point, could be a story…let’s make a whole list. And then I’ll write a new screenplay that accommodates all the things we like.’

“I’d never done it before, but this is a whole story about being young and foolish — that’s the point of this story! So they said, ‘Well, that’s an interesting idea, the only problem is that if we don’t have a screenplay in 12 days, Industrial Light And Magic, which is supposed to be doing the effects for this picture, will not guarantee delivery of the shots in time to be in theaters in June ‘81.’ I said, ‘If we can do this now I think in 12 days we can have a screenplay. Certainly good enough for ILM to know what they’re going to be doing.’ And they said, ‘We couldn’t even make your contract in 12 days.’ I said, ‘Forget about contracts, forget about all of that, because there’s not going to be any movie if we don’t shut up and start working. I will not be on it as the writer of record, because we don’t have time for any of that. These guys have written it. These guys have been paid. Let me go to work on the things that we like.’

“When my agent heard this, I thought he was going to kill me. He got very angry. But that’s how it came to be written, and I forget whose name is on the finished screenplay. But in 12 days, we had taken the things we liked: Kirk finds his son, the Genesis plan, Khan comes back — there was a scene aboard a simulator, which was on page 50 of one screenplay, I moved it to the first scene in the movie…and then with a real piece of inspiration, we put Spock in the simulator and killed him off in the first scene of the movie! 

“So, we took story elements and ideas from five screenplays and then I wrote my own story. So I wrote and directed too. I think I’m entitled to claim that.”

Photo scanned by Movienutt and downloaded from moviestillsdb.com

Director Nicholas Meyer (with trademark cigar) addresses a group of background players in the torpedo bay set while filming Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan.

Prior to directing The Wrath of Khan, Meyer had previously written a screenplay for The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, based on his own novel of the same name, and handled screenwriter and directorial duties on the time travel epic Time After Time, based on a college friend’s uncompleted novel. 

When asked by Allen Asherman about how he was contacted about directing the second Star Trek feature film, Meyer recounted: “The project was offered to me by a woman named Karen Moore. She was not empowered to confirm the offer; she was the first person who broached the subject. I’ve known her since she was about twelve…she’s a friend of mine, and she was at my house for dinner. She was working at Paramount Pictures at the time, and she said there were two very nice fellows making this movie, harve Bennett and Bob Sallin, and they had a good script…would I be interested. Then I went in to meet Harve and Bob, and got along very well. Then they showed me the first movie and I thought, ‘I’ve got to do this, because I’ve got to be able to do as good as this.’”

(Quote source: Allan Asherman’s The Making of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, published in 1982 by Pocket Books.)

Photo scanned from my personal collection.

Kim Cattrall as Valeris, alongside an unidentified background player in a publicity photo for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. 

Valeris was not originally part of the conspiracy that causes so much trouble for the Enterprise and her crew. In Nicholas Meyer & Denny Martin Flinn’s original screenplay, there was a complicated tracking sequence that climaxed with Kirk, Spock and Scotty coming across the conspiracy after they break into a secret Klingon base. Unfortunately, this was estimated to add up to $5,000,000 to the movie’s budget — money that the studio didn’t want to spend. 

As director, Meyer opted to cut this (expensive) portion of the film and streamlined the reveal of the conspiracy, allowing the production to use existing sets while saving some runtime in the end.

In Starlog #205, Flinn talked to Craig W. Chrissinger about how Meyer’s rewrite handled this: “With the cutting of the cabal scenes, it was necessary to come up with something a little more intriguing, and Valeris was right there. When I read it, I liked it. It didn’t bother me at all. If anything, it’s nice to have good and evil represented in all races because that’s much more in line with reality. There sometimes is an ambiguity in Star Trek because you don’t want just white hats and black hats. I guess there are some bad apples on Vulcan, too.”

Flinn then went on to give readers a bit more detail about the character’s origins in the production: "Valeris originally was, in fact, Saavik, but we couldn’t get Kirstie Alley for the role. Kirstie was already on the Paramount lot doing Cheers, so both Nick and one of the executives made calls to her. I don’t know any of the details, but the next thing I knew, we were changing the name to Valeris.”

(As to why the production didn’t simply move down to the next available Saavik, Robin Curtis? No idea. Maybe Meyer just liked working with Alley and wanted her back.)

Photo scanned from my personal collection.

In a 2011 screening of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan for the Hero Complex Film Festival, Nicholas Meyer was matter-of-fact about the way that he and Gene Roddenberry butted heads while the director was working on Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. 

“There are moments in one’s life where you look back and you say, ‘Well, I wish I had done this differently.”

“If I’m interpreting him correctly and if I’m believing what he said, Mr. Roddenberry really believed in the perfectability of man, of humans, and I have yet to see the evidence for this. So [Star Trek] VI is a film in which the crew of the Enterprise has all kinds of prejudice, racial prejudice, vis-a-vis the Klingons. And some of their remarks, including how they all look alike and what they smell like, and all the xenophobic things which we grappled with — that was all deeply offensive to him because he thought there isn’t going to be that. In fact, in his original Star Trek concept, there wasn’t any conflict. So he always had problems with writers who were trying to write conflict, because that’s what drama is, so he was very distressed with the world of the Enterprise – the kind of ‘music’ I was writing.”

Meyer attended a meeting with Roddenberry, to try to find a point on which the creator of the Star Trek: The Original Series and the man who had been hired to move its characters through their final mission, could agree. It didn’t work out.

“His guys were lined up on one side of the room, and my guys were lined up on the other side of the room, and this was not a meeting in which I felt I’d behaved very well, very diplomatically. I came out of it feeling not very good, and I’ve not felt good about it ever since. He was not well, and maybe there were more tactful ways of dealing with it, because at the end of the day, I was going to go out and make the movie. I didn’t have to take him on. Not my finest hour.”

Roddemberry died soon after.

In 1992, Nicholas Meyer spoke to Cinefantastique’s Ron Magid about returning to direct Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country after Nimoy and Shatner had handled the previous three installments.

“I don’t think you could distinguish the fact that Shatner and Nimoy were directors from the fact that they were actors working with a director and we were all trying to make a movie. If anything, what did some up again and again, not just with Shatner and Nimoy, but with all of the original cast members, was the fact that they had been involved in the series with these characters for so long that they didn’t always agree that certain lines would be said by their characters. Actually, I had a great deal of fun working with them. I find them individually and collectively charming.”

Meyer also detailed how the ensemble would also offer input on matters that went beyond characters and dialogue, such as lighting. Cinematographer Hiro Narita wanted a moodier, frequently dramatic tone and that caused some clashes with people who, naturally, wanted to look their best in their final outing in the series.

“I was occasionally in the middle, but only occasionally. When it came down to it, I lit the actors. They’re what’s important and why should they go through the movie feeling upset? It was usually about close-ups, not about the wider shots. I wanted a kind of gritty theatricality. I’m a big opera fan and I think Star Trek is a species of opera. I wanted the film to have a theatrical, operatic quality and I think I got that.”

However, he admits that budgeting was a concern:

“My vision was much, much grander, and it got scaled down and down. I didn’t have the production money or the shooting days or the locations. I’m not sure it’s appropriate to get into Paramount’s little behind-the-scenes stuff.”

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