Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1504940
C A S Q U A R T E R L Y I FA L L 2 0 2 3 29 more time to do some rewrites. "But there were opportunities in the sound mix to do that with that scene in particular. Ilia heals Chekov's pain and you hear the dropping of the ambience of the bridge at that moment. Things with her presence as the Ilia probe and the synthesized voice, which was done by Alan Howarth, and what it means when it's not synthesized versus when it is. There were other ways to amplify the story. And the music at the end, Bob was not quite happy with how the music was edited, and it was also basically repurposed music going on there. We made a change in 2000 that he liked, and it worked, but there was one little extra moment of repeated music that still bothered me, and I found out a way to get around that this time. But what happens is that the inevitability of what occurs in the climax of the picture with the Decker meld scene is entirely communicated through the music because, editorially, we didn't change it at all. The only thing that's changed is the music, but now you feel this buildup and this inevitability of what's about to happen. That wasn't there in the '79 version." David C. Fein shares, "The goal [of sound] is to tell the best story using the best tools to take you away on the adventure, to sweep you into the story. Bob always told me, 'Focus on the story, not how you get there.' Just to focus on telling the best story and making it be the best experience. So, flash a couple of years later, he was getting older and he brought me into his little kitchen dock that he had. We had a little talk and he said, 'No matter what happens, I need you to promise me that you'll make sure that the director's edition will be properly finished on film, film quality.' Bob wanted to be known for the finished film. The quality of what could be there, not what was there. "We have a number of benefits here. Number one, we have a brilliant director who understood and impressed me, so I was partnered with him on it. And this is, again, another case of Bob knowing the right people to work with and knowing who to trust. He was inspired by my talks about technology, how things were evolving, and where they could be. But you have this brilliant director who, as some people have said, was the Spielberg of the '60s, who innovated and knew the right direction to go and imparted on me that magic in many ways. Then you had a story that hasn't taken place yet, it's about the future, it's not about 1979. So, there's no reason to make it look like '79 unless you're nostalgic for something that was old and didn't work. "You can't call this a 'Director's Cut.' Bob never wanted it to be called that. That's why it's 'Director's Edition' and even on the film it says, 'The Director's Edition' in the title card at the end credits. The point is that 'Director's Cut' is not just a title, it's a description. It indicates the director had their control and their final choice of what's going to happen. Bob didn't want anyone to have the belief or thought that at any time he wasn't in control [even though] there were so many circumstances that made it difficult. But it wasn't that he in any way wasn't the leader of this; [he was] the captain of the ship. "[There were] so many 65mm original elements from Doug Trumbull that we scanned at 8K. So many VistaVision elements that were from John Dykstra that we scanned at 6K. And then we had the 35mm elements that we scanned in 30mm and 4K that we re-composited so many shots of the film to bring the picture quality up. "They did a marvelous job for the two-and-a-half years before we got started, just searching everywhere within the studio. And it was a godsend to find those ADR tapes— because [there was] so much ADR. Even those scenes from the 'Special Longer Version' had on set recorded audio. Bob would loop them, but those scenes were never officially put back in. So, the chosen takes were missing or omitted, like the long shot of going around the Enterprise to each one of the characters before Spock's crying. Each one of those were looped. Bob looped it for putting that scene in, but those looped takes were never put in until now." One of the things I really felt watching it this time, I felt like V'Ger was just enormous. Whereas on the original mix, scene by scene, you'd see new stuff, but I never felt like we