Star Trek Interviews (10) - Profile of/Interview with
                             Patrick Stewart/Jean-Luc Picard
       Taken from the Public Domain

(Sorry, this article will take 3 sections, not 2!)

Part Two: Continued from last issue

@~Just as eager to find out what we think about the show Patrick
@~Stewart suddenly turned the tables and asked what I had seen, and
@~what I thought of it.  In the course of this I mentioned the scene
@~with Picard's mother (Where No One Has Gone Before) which I had
@~particularly liked, feeling that it gave more depth to the
@~Captain's character.

"Gosh that was a good episode, one of our very best of the season.
It's pleasing how successful that one individual scene has been.
It seems to have made an impact with people.  We very often forget
that our heroes have had things like mothers, and the actress did
a marvellous job with that. And this whole idea of finding a
rather kind of antiquated figure sitting in the corridor of the
ship.  All of that was wonderful.  I loved for instance the scene
of the girl dancing, and also the Mozart sequence.  All that was
pure Star Trek stuff."

@~There was also a rather startling moment involving the turbo
@~lift...

"That was a very interesting shot, actually shot five days apart.
I stepped out into the void late one evening in the studio and
then did the scene in the turbo lift itself some five or six days
later, when the doors closed.  But that's the nature of filming."

"We have an absolute pattern of the way it goes, an unbroken
pattern.  We alternate between 7 and 8 days to shoot them.  The
reason being that we cannot use alien worlds on every show,
because it takes time to build them.  We have the permanent ship,
the bridge is on one, guest quarters, the Captain's ready room,
and the other studio has the rest of the ship, including the
battle bridge.  And also an area which is a cargo hold where they
can build, occasionally, extra sets.  There is stage 16 which has
become known to all of us as 'Planet Hell', because on Stage 16
they build the alien worlds, and we're only there every other
show, because it always takes twice as long to shoot on an alien
planet than it does on the bridge, because the conditions are
always bad.  And it's called 'Planet Hell' because we're always in
either smoke or steam or water or snow or something uncomfortable.
I say 'we are', I'm not often there."

@~Yes.  The impression seems to be that the Captain stays much more
@~on the bridge.

"Very much more than Captain Kirk.  Kirk was forever down there
muscling in.  In that sense I have much more of an executive role
on the ship.  But I'm looking for it to be a happy mixture.  I
have been beaming down more frequently of late, because I
complained I was too often absent from this.  Also I was
perpetually teased by my colleagues that I didn't really ever have
to rough it down on 'Planet Hell'.  I would get two or three days
off while they were fighting alien forces in the mud.  In fact I
beam down alone, much to the outrage of Commander Riker and others
who thought I should not be doing that, in the very last show of
the season, called Conspiracy, which is a terrific show... to meet
up with some renegade officers.  The Captain does have much more
of an executive position.  For instance one of the things I have
said is that unless I have something to do I should never be on
the bridge even.  I mean other people fly it.  They don't need me
there to fly the ship.  The Captain doesn't fly the ship.  Riker,
Geordi La Forge, Data, they fly the ship.  And so I won't just sit
around looking into Space.  The Captain has other things to do.
The day to day business of controlling and running the ship is the
First Officer's responsibility.  Picard is a negotiator, he is a
talker, he's an intellect on the ship.  He is also a pacifist,
dedicated to the principal of the Prime Directive of
non-interference and the use of non-violence.  Passionately
dedicated."

"I had no idea, not even having accepted the job, that I was
entering not into just an adventure TV series but a TV series that
because of the kind of man Roddenberry is, he is prepared to take
on 20th Century problems/ situations, reflected through the 24th
Century camera, and deal with social matters, with politics, with
questions of race, with prejudices and so on.  It gives the show
such substance.

So, for instance, at the end of Symbiosis the Doctor and I are
going up to a turbo lift somewhere and she's saying, I don't agree
with what you've just done.  You've condemned these people here to
suffer.  To real suffering, for a long time.  And surely there
could be another way.  And I stop the turbo lift, right where it
is, right in the middle (and this was something I developed with
the writers myself) and for the first time in the series the
Captain articulates his own personal belief in the philosophy of
non-interference, that history proves that whenever a society has
interfered in the life of an apparently less civilised society,
although it may produce some temporary benefit, in the long term
it is always calamitous for the less civilised.  Always, without
exception.


There is no proof that history gives us where interference has
been of benefit to the non-civilised society, or the less
civilised society.  And so that's what I argue.  Although these
people are going to suffer in the short term, in the long term
they will resolve their own problems in their own way and we are
not here to impose our values on them.  It's a philosophy I have
come to believe in, passionately.  I see it working, so it's
something that I can lend myself to very strongly in the character
of Jean Luc."

@~This sounds as though Stewart has some control over his character.

"This is always a contentious question when you are dealing with
TV series, and different series and different actors will have
different answers.  From my first serious conversation with Gene
Roddenberry, after I had accepted the job, and before we started
work, he and I sat down to have dinner together, talk about the
Captain.


"At that stage I made the point that I had been my practice as an
actor throughout my career to be involved in every area of the
work that went on.  I can't keep out of it, not because I need
power or I want to interfere, but because it's the desire to make
something as good as possible.  And that so far as the development
of the character, the relationships and the scripts, were
concerned I wanted to have input into that.  It was for me to one
of the attractions of the series, to be given the opportunity to
create a character, not just in a three hour play or a sixty
minute TV story, but over hours of television, to gradually coax a
three-dimensional character into life.

"So although we've now done 25 shows you haven't yet seen anything
more than a fragment of the Captain.  It's one of the principals I
think that with each episode something that is new, something
that's unexpected should be introduced.  Maybe it'll be a major
element like Picard meeting his mother, or perhaps it's maybe
learning that the Captain has a passion for detective stories, or
that he has a sense of humour, even.

"Also the background of the kind of stage work that I've been
involved with.  I've spent years and years acting in Shakespeare
but I've also spent a lot of time working with the best modern
playwrights living in the United Kingdom today, and working along
side them, having them in the rehearsal room with me, so I know
what it's like to talk to writers, to discuss plots, who the
character is.  And I know that the best writers are the ones most
prepared to listen to actors and to make adjustments.  The better
the writer the more prepared he is to."

@~So is there much opportunity for this in Star Trek?

"Very much so.  I take every opportunity that I can to spend time
with the writers, socially as well.  Maurice Hurley who is now
Co-executive Producer and principal writer on the series is a
friend, and we talk.  You would probably be interested to hear
that we are actually obsessive about the show.  I mean that this
is one of the things that really surprised me.  All of us who work
on the show, we tend to be one-track minded when we are together,
we talk about Star Trek.

"On the very last night of shooting, just two and a half weeks
ago, I don't know why but curiously it was just all the male
actors in the cast - myself, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, LeVar
Burton and Michael Dorn, went to a restaurant for dinner.  We were
all going to do different things, someone was going to Jamaica,
someone was getting married, I'm coming back to England.  A whole
lot of exciting things ahead of us, things that we might have
talked about.  For four hours we talked obsessively about Star
Trek, even though it was over, done.  Nobody was going to put on a
space suit again for two and a half months, and I like that.  I
like the fact that people are engaged by it.  We quarrel about it.
We fight about what things should be.  So far as the scripts are
concerned we're lucky to have producers and writers who respect
the actors involved, and I like to feel that either in the sense
of taking a long-term view of how a character will develop.

"For instance, in one episode I am re-acquainted with someone from
my past.  Now for me that was going to be locking in a fact into
the part's character construction, and therefore I was deeply
concerned, because he was a very important person from Picard's
past who had a great impact on him, by exactly just what kind of
person that was.  How it should be developed was of great
significance to me.  So from that right down to being on the set
in the middle of shooting and finding that a line doesn't work and
picking up a phone calling the producers, and saying, 'Please can
we change this?  Can we talk about this?'.  We are blessed by
having a group of people who are not remote, power crazed
individuals who see themselves only there to obstruct the actors.
They are always available, and that is because the enthusiasm for
getting the show right exists at that level too.  So we work,
while respecting the particular talents of all the different
departments, and we have some very clever people working on the
show.  We work in harmony.  My hope is that as the months and
episodes go by that will increase."

@~To be concluded next issue


                              - o -