I'm taking her in. Brace for impact.
Chocolate ice cream, chocolate fudge and chocolate chips.
You're not depressed, are you?
I'm fine, Commander.
You've seen the spacesuit.
I was melted down and poured into it every morning.
I couldn't possibly eat as much chocolate as Troi was supposed to
because I would never fit in my spacesuit. So I devised a plan.
I only like dark chocolate.
So I told the props guy to get me milk chocolate.
And I would put it in my mouth and then at the end of the scene...
This is so glamorous! I had a bucket and I would spit it out.
And that's probably way too much information for you.
That's what I did. It looks glamorous and I'm spitting out after the scene.
At the last spoonful,
close your eyes.
I had no idea it was such a ritual.
Chocolate is a serious thing.
There was a scene called for where Data is painting.
He's trying to teach the boy who admires Data to paint.
They're working on a landscape.
And I thought it'd be fun if Brent was painting one of my paintings
so I brought in a landscape I'd done in Central California
and that's what you see Brent working on.
For the episode First Duty,
I had an oil painting of the outpost for Starfleet Academy.
It's an oil on masonite, about three feet by five feet wide.
That was one of the last oil paintings, matte paintings,
I had done for Star Trek.
We did almost all Data's paintings.
He did a lot of paintings. A lot of people helped out on that.
Rick Sternback and Dan Curry.
But the bulk of them
were done by the scenic artists.
There is one painting I absolutely love,
where Data painted a Picasso-esque cat.
Wendy Drapanas did that one, did a fantastic job.
It's my favourite Data painting.
When we did Star Trek Generations,
when the Enterprise crashed,
I made sure that painting was in the rubble and we saw it.
Spot!
I am very happy to see you, Spot.
Squadron leader, Nicholas Locarno.
Capt Jean-Luc Picard. My mother, Dr Beverly Crusher.
- Hello, Doctor. - Hello.
- Capt Picard. - Mr Locarno.
I did Next Generation, an episode of that.
I did a character very similar to Paris.
Rick Berman said that when they were creating the show
and casting the part...
I was in New York doing a play when they were casting.
Rick said they were casting and he said,
"We should get a type like Robert McNeill who was in Next Generation. "
"Kind of like Robert McNeill. "
"Sort of like that but not exactly. " So they auditioned and auditioned.
Finally, one day someone said, "We can't find anyone for this part. "
"Why not bring in Robert McNeill,
since we keep using his performance and his character in Next Generation
as the type? Why don't we call Robert McNeill?" So they did.
You're gonna turn us in!
- Wait a minute. - No, you wait a minute!
He got to you, didn't he?
Picard told you some big story about duty and honour.
Must've been a good speech to make you turn your back on your friends.
I'm taking her in. Brace for impact.
I thought it was a lot of fun.
It had a lot of action. It was an anomaly for Star Trek
in that it had so much action.
We had a planet set. I got to blow off the hatch off a shuttle.
We used a Luma crane,
going in and outside of arches on the planet set.
Did some weird optical effects.
And then... A lot of it took place in ten-forward.
There was a shoot-out in there with some action.
And it was very intense.
The other great thing was these light creatures invaded our crew
so they had to play different personas.
We go down to the planet and this storm comes in
and on the storm are these particles of bad people,
bad guys, that infiltrate us.
The director asked me if I wanted to do my own stunt
and I said, "What do I have to do?" He said, "Basically, fall over. "
I went, "Yeah, I can do that. "
She was very handy, like the rest of the cast.
All of them were talented. She always wanted to do her own stunts,
but I'd get a stunt double. We got the double in now and then.
But she was very active and kind of like Robert Conrad,
always liked to do your own action.
Years later into the series, she wanted to do her own footfall.
This was a scene where we're on a planet.
It was a scene with about five of the cast
and we had to double all of them.
Come the day of the scene, I look around
and I'm surrounded by stuntmen and I'm the only real actress there.
Of course, being me, I start to shout across the stage,
hurling abuse at my friends, calling them big girls' blouses.
"Call yourself men, I spit on you," all this stuff.
She came to me a week before and said she wanted to do her own stunt.
It was falling backwards pretty hard but it was on dirt.
She's handy. I knew she could do it.
So I told her OK, she could do it and we doubled the rest of the cast.
Come the scene, action, the storm comes in and I fall over
and as I had been taught at drama school I rolled onto my side
because there are no important bits on your sides.
I got up and I was fine.
The director came and said, "You're the only one doing your own stunt,
could you fall straight back so we can see your face. "
Well, my brain stopped and I said, "Sure!"
I did it in take two and I just fell straight back
and was laying there, immobilised.
David Livingston, the director,
said, "OK, Marina, you can get up now. "
And of course I couldn't, I had hurt my back.
She hit the ground like a stuntwoman.
Her feet were up in the air, her hair went flying.
She hit the dirt like the doubles.
I was proud of her. I said, "She's like a stuntwoman. "
But she got up real slow. I ran to her. She goes, "I'm OK."
She had dirt in her eye. It had knocked the air out of her.
Stunts knock the air out of you. That's why they use stunt people.
The capper to the story is that when I actually saw the episode,
it never came in for a close-up.
It was a big wide shot that covered all of us.
And it could have been Michael Dorn in my wig and costume.
No one would have known it was me.
So it was all for nothing in the end.
After that I've been more careful
about what the stunt is
and how I'm going to do it.
In the episode The Perfect Mate,
I think it was about this beautiful woman
hatched out of this cocoon thing on the ship prematurely,
before she could be delivered
to the planet where she was due to meet
the man she was scheduled to marry and live with.
Part of that ritual is that if you hatch,
the first man you see, that's who you are bonded to.
There was this elaborate sort of mating ritual
that Capt Picard had to participate in
where he had to match her arm movements
on a... it was like a marimba or a xylophone,
but it was actually a Balinese gamelan instrument
that comes from the Indonesian culture.
In the Star Trek tradition, the sound was totally changed
and it was lit up different colours
with each bar that was struck by a mallet.
I'm reminded of piano lessons,
preparing for some dreaded recital.
The piece of music was authentic Balinese music
that we had people from Bali come in
and coach him as to how to perform on this.
The deal was, if he matched her exact hand patterns or whatever,
then he got to perform in the ritual of the marriage rites.
It was quite an involved episode.
But another musically intensive thing
with lots of pre-records and him having to learn
how to put his hands and do all sorts of things.
That's right.
Richard wanted an emblem for Starfleet Academy.
I actually used something that Joe Senna had designed,
with the sunrise and the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge.
I reworked that a little bit.
They wanted a little slogan for it.
I went back to the Apollo 13 mission,
whose slogan was Ex luna, scientia, "From the moon, knowledge".
It seemed reasonable that Starfleet Academy's slogan might be
"From the stars, knowledge". So I made it Ex astra, scientia.
People liked the symbol. They used it on a lot of merchandising,
T-shirts and jackets and that sort of thing.
The funny thing is, about six months after the episode aired,
someone must have seen it in close-up.
I got a letter from a Latin professor at Brown University
who said, "Ex astra, scientia is incorrect. "
"The gender of the word is wrong. "
"It should be Ex astris, scientia. "
So even though the episode had long since aired, I redid the art
and I gave it to Licensing.
All the products since then have been corrected.
People pay amazingly close attention to the show.
They point out things
that never occur to you when you're doing the show.
Sometimes it's frustrating, but we're also very lucky
that people pay such close attention. It shows they love the show.
Disaster is our disaster movie homage.
I wanted to cast Shelley Winters. Nobody would listen to me.
I kept saying, "Let's get Shelley Winters. "
They said, "Stop that. It's beneath us. We won't do that. "
"C'mon, guys! Have fun. Let's cast Shelley Winters. "
"Let's get Red Buttons. Let's do the whole thing. "
It was great. I liked the opportunity to put Troi in command,
to do all the little stories in a disaster movie.
Brannon was a big fan of Towering Inferno and those films.
He and I had a lot of fun structuring out the piece.
Taking Data's head. "You want me to take your head off?" is a great line.
Carrying Data's head through the Enterprise was a scream.
Locate the ODN conduit, sir.
- Got it! - Yes, sir.
You must now change the input matrix of my secondary optical port
and then connect the ODN conduit.
- That is not the correct port, sir. - Sorry.
There was a scene
that called for plasma fire in the cargo hold.
Geordi had to figure out a way to put out the plasma fire.
He opened the cargo bay doors and turned off the force field
which drained all the air out and of course put out the fire.
Greg Jein had built some wonderful miniature barrels
that matched our cargo barrels.
Instead of blowing them out with air, we shot straight down
and held them on pins on a piece of miniature floor,
and pulled all the pins out to drop the barrels.
They fell away against a blue screen.
By shooting at a very high frame rate,
it gave them their proper scale and size
to believe that they were real barrels falling out of the ship.
The plasma fire that you see burning in the wall
was actually a clear glass tray
with hot water and little granules of dry ice.
The dry ice boiled.
Because it was on a glass tray, we could light it from the back.
We tinted it green and that became the plasma fire on the wall.
Also, to get the illusion that they are being pulled out sideways,
we took the pieces of the set
that would be structural, pipes and ladders,
and tilted them sideways and tilted the camera sideways.
When the actors hung on them,
it looked like they were pulled sideways.
Shooting against a bluescreen,
it looked like they were being sucked out.