http://www.space.com/common/media/video/player.php?videoRef=NA_090505_Nimoy_01

LN: It is a giant movie, it really is. Have you seen the trailers?
Audience: Yeah, Yes!
LN: I'm not in th etrailors.
Audience: No. No!
LN: No! (Laughing) I asked the publicity department, they said: Well, it suggest time travel and it's confusing. I said: Are you kidding me? One of our best stories deals with time travel: City On The Edge Of Forever, come on!

Audience: Yuh! Yahoo.
LN: Star Trek IV!
Audience: Yahoo!!! Yuh! Yuh! (applause)
LN: Anyway they felt it might be interesting to keep me under wraps for a while. And then suddenly: There he is in the movie. It works, too. The movie is wonderful, it is really wonderful. I will tell you something that not many people are aware of, this is really news. My wife and I first saw a cop in the movie. It wasn't all finished, they didn't have all the effects in and it didn't have all the music, so it was about two months ago when I said this.

Now, my wife is, you know she loves me a lot and I love her and she is a great Star Trek supporter, but she is not a science fiction fan, not like … (making a gesture towards the audience), now she can be skeptical. About 15 minutes before the film was over, she turned to me and said: I don't want this movie to end. Oh boy! We got something happening here. It is so human.

The movie is BIG. Big, gigantic movie, cinematic movie, but it has also a great heart with the characters. And that was what she was experiencing. And then we saw the final movie about two weeks ago. And I gonna tell you: I cried a lot. I did. I sat there and I cried a lot watching it. Don't tell anybody (twinkle in his eyes). It's out of character for me.
Zachary Quinto was excellent. They are all are, Chris Pine, they all are wonderful. Wynona Ryder plays Spock's mother. Wow! She's wonderful. Bob Cross plays Sarek, wonderful, wonderful stuff. Big, gigantic canvas. The story is a big, big story and the people in it are so personal, so human, the way the cast, this crew crew comes together to become the crew of the Enterprise is a wonderful story.
You are gonna love it. I said it many times.

Audience: In the opening weekend.
LN: Opening weekend, yuh. 7^th May – on the weekend, yuh, later.

Answering a question from the audience: When we started to make IV I did some research. First I went to Massachusetts to meet some people there: What's the expectation of science? … What might happen in the nest 10, 50 years? And I met some people from the SETI program, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. I learned a lot from them. I was interested in the ideas and about what they were doing. I was particularly touched by a discussion I had with a physicist named Phillip Morisson.

I spent an hour with him at his home in Massachusetts and I said to him finally: have you ever seen a movie called The Day The Earth Stood Still, the original The Day The Earth Stood Still directed by Robert Warrens? And he said he hadn't. So I explained to him: A man comes from another planet to warn earth that it is heading on a destructive path and that they have to stop this because it is effecting other planets. This person from another planet walk into a room with a very complicated equation on a blackboard. The equation had been put there by an actor played by Sam Jaffe, the Einstein of the story, a brilliant earth physicist of the story. And there is no solution of the equation. This guy takes up a chalk and he writes in the solution. When the actor walks into the room and does that he realizes that he is in the presence of a superior intelligence. And he says to this person: There are a lot of questions I'd like to ask you.

So, the suggestion is that this person is from a planet ahead of ours scientifically. They probably have a cure for cancer, they probably have scientific answers we have been unable to resolve. Maybe we can learn something from these people. So I said: If you, Dr. Morisson were in the presence of a person who came from a planet like that what question would you ask? And he got very upset with me. He said: That assumes that they speak your language, that they are on the same track scientifically as we are, just simply 100 or 200 years ahead, and exactly the same path.
It doesn't work that way. He said: If we made contact the people from an alien civilization we would have a very difficult time even to communicate with them. Their method of communication would be so foreign to us, we may have difficulties at all how to communicate with them.

That set me up to a whole new line of thinking about the making of Star Trek IV. What if there were an alien species coming to earth – how to communicate with them? It doesn't always work. There is no communal translator, you know? (laughing) So, that set up that part of the story.

Then I was reading a book called “Biophelia” by a scientist who is writing about the loss of species on this planet, on earth. And he was saying that in about 10 or 15 years we will be loosing thousands of species we might not even have discovered would be lost. ….

And then I had this discussion with a friend about whales and this whale song, the sounds that they make. That song goes from whale pack to whale pack around the planet. And they tell us that a pack sings a certain song, makes a certain group of sounds, say in the Indian Ocean. Suddenly, in the other part of the earth, they pick up the song and repeat it. It goes around. It didn't change. When it changes, it changes all around the planet. You can hear the pattern of a group of whales thousands and thousands miles away with another pack of whales. If it changes it changes everywhere again. Are they communicating with each other? That is what Morisson was talking about. we don't understand their language and why they do it that way. That's how the story of the Star Trek IV came into place. We may not be able to communicate with these aliens if they came to earth. And the communication might not be meant for us. It may be meant for some other species on the planet.
Now here is the final touch of the story: When the movie was done, and the administration people saw it, I got a call from the head of the studio, if that probe opens the movie and it makes that strange sound (imitating a whale sound) it confuses the audience because this sound is from the whales to be heard and the audience doesn't know what's this all about. And I said: That's right, that's intentional. And he said: Fix this up and put some subtitles down there. (laughing from the audience) and the subtitle should be: “Where are you?”

Can you believe that?
I said: No. no no! we are not going to do that. No.

They said: They are not going to know what's going on in this movie.

I refused. We fought that battle and I won it temporarily. When we had the test screenings with 50, 60 people in the audience, they asked questions: What do you think of this, what do you think of that? Did you like the story? which character do you like? Then they asked specifically: Did you understand what this communication was? Yeah, no problem! so, the head of the studio turned to me and said (making a gesture of unhappy agreement)

(laughing from the audience)

Question from the audience: What made you put on the ears again?
LN: I got a call from, well.. I thought I was quite done. I didn't get a call for …, well and I was concentrating on photography for about 15 years now. I knew who JJ Abrams was. I had seen Mission: Impossible III which I thought was a very good movie. The TV work he was doing I thought was interesting and very well done. I got a call from him and I got to the meeting with him and the writers and the producers and I was struck by the intensity of their feelings about the classic Star trek material that we did and about their awareness of what the characters were about and how important the characters development was and how important the ideas in those shows were and I was really touched by this, very touched.
It has been reported that I got misty in that and I actually did. And in fact: For a long time I felt marginalized. I felt it is past me and they have nothing to do with me and they are doing some other kind of work and that it is over for me. But these people made me feel that what we have done in the original series was terribly relevant, and was useful and meaningful and they wanted to get back in touch with that.
And that's what brought me back to the project. I said I would at least read the script. and when I had read it I was impressed with the script and particularly with the humanity I think I mentioned earlier and I wanted to be a part of that. I think that made a wonderful movie and you'll have a great time seeing it.

Q: Are you excited about working on the TV show Fringe?
LN: Oh, yuh!
(Applause from the audience)
LN: Thank you for … Do you watch Fringe?
Audience: Yeah! Yooh.
LN: Well, I did one scene, two days ago. I just did it. Thursday, I traveled here on Friday. I think it is a fascinating show, I think very well written, very good people connected with it: Orci, Kurtzman, they are on the Star Trek movie, writing on it, and its JJ Abrams' show. I think very highly of him. He is a very, very talented guy and he asked me to do it. I couldn't refuse. I tried to refuse, but then hmmm, nujuh, he wouldn't have a refuse.

I am very excited about it. I'm going to do at least two more episodes for the next season. the scene that I did is the very last scene of the very last episode of this season. I think it's gonna be here on May, 12^th. I think in June or July I'll do at least two more episodes for the character we developed. The character is William Bell. O. k.? Thanks for the question.

Q: Thank you.