Mark:I shouldn't have to introduce you. This is Leonard Nimoy. Leonard, welcome to ...
LN: Thank you! Hi!
Mark: Hi! Uh, we have such a short time that I feel obligated to literally... you with questions.
LN: Okay, go.
Mark: The character Mr. Spock came along in a time in our country of peace, love, Woodstock, sex. drugs, Rock 'n roll, let it all hang put – that kind of time.
LN: Right
Mark: And yet Spock was the picture of the very essence of self control, self denial, self governance. How could that character become such a hero in such an uncontrolled atmosphere?
LN: Well, Paul, it's a great question. I think for one thing the time was someone could become cynical about government and authority figures. It was clear that bureaucracy was not responding to the individual and the war in Vietnam was ongoing in spite of the fact that more and more every day believed it is wrong. We do believe in supporting our country but we shouldn't be in that war. And here came a character who had a dignity and an integrity and intelligence, I think it stands for, this was a person that you could believe and count on, that wouldn't be involved with hypocrisy, duplicity.
Mark: There was a hunger then?
LN: Yeah, I think so. Absolutely. And I think, too, that we were ready for the idea of a friendly alien.
Mark: Well, that's right. How do you feel about the role itself? Of course you wouldn't be Mr. Spock for ever? Did you ever get resentful of that?
LN: No, I am very comfortable with it. This is why there is this book that I wrote: "I Am Spock". I really come full circle with it. I am totally comfortable.

 

Mark: Do you think that Gene Roddenberry would approve of the repeat direction of the usage of the original characters that have been now exhaustedly repeated in, you know, some or the other knock-offs.
LN: Well, I don't think Gene had any problem with... Star Trek. I think he would always enjoy the idea of the success of the franchise. But I do think that he would be at least interested in seeing that thematic idea was strong. That's what Star Trek really is about when it was at its best: The thematic idea. There should be great entertainment, great adventure, but it should be about something.
Mark: Yes, and Star Trek always was. Is it moving away from that slowly?

LN: You know, I gonna be honest with you. I don't watch enough of it to pass judgement. I feel very good about what we did, I feel very good about the TV shows and the movies that I was involved with. I've seen Generations and I have seen Contact, but I'm not really sure that their story is what I would have set out to do when I'd to make motion pictures. 

Mark: So, your reaction to Contact was not …
LN: It was very well done, very well executed. I wasn't blown away with the story. 
Mark: Let's go back to Star Trek for a moment. Do you remember the gentlemen, and I cannot, who was with you as they cast as captain of the Enterprise as Christopher Pike.
LN: That was Jeffrey Hunter. 
Mark: What happened to him?
LN: Well, Jeffrey hunter was an important movie star. He was a great gentleman and a fine actor, he did the first pilot as captain Pike and then, about a year later, when Desulu decided they want to make a second pilot, he simply wasn't available. I'm not sure whether he had another job or whether the negotiation with him got too tough.
Mark: He was later brought back in The Menagerie, right?
LN: Yeah, that's right.
Mark: Well, I guess you already answered this, but otherwise other television programs, movies and so forth, has anything come close to the genre of Star Trek? 

LN: Ehm, well, an interesting question, I saw a few episodes of Outer Limits that I though was very interesting. The X-Files has a great deal of internal
life going on, it has a style, it has an attitude, it has an attitude, I think that is very important. I think … . has got an attitude which works sometimes. This is pretty much of what it is in my range of experience.

Mark: A very trivial question but important to me, nether the less, in the early episodes where Star Trek, the women, all had these wonderful uniforms which in later years changed to pants! (Annoyed) Who did that?
LN (laughing): I don't know. You are touching an interesting point. Science fiction for a long time was a self genre. It was considered a grey, distant cousin of important work. And when I started acting in science fiction, 45 years ago I think, in a Saturday afternoon series called Zombies of the Stratosphere it was, science fiction was genre in which you saw monsters, you saw people in strange outfits who came from other worlds and you saw Ladies who were scarcely dressed. And there was always some sexy aspect to it. And that was what you saw in the early days of Star Trek. Some did a brilliant job of dressing some of the ladies. And then later on I guess political correctness and feminism came on the scene and there were some question why or not this women shouldn't wear any more clothes in their professional situations. And that's what happened.  
…. 

Mark:  Where did the idea of the all famous Vulcan mind meld come from?
LN: Ahm ... we were doing an episode called I believe Dagger of the Mind. And there was an actor playing the character who was mentally deranged and he had information that we had to have. And the scene as it was written was kind of a tedious interrogation scene where I asked them lot of questions and got information for a piece meal, a word here and a word there. It wasn't as dramatic as it might be and Gene Roddenberry came up with this idea that Vulcans could do this meeting of the minds and extract the information that way. It was kind of a Vulcan version of hypnosis, and it made it much more dramatic to get information and became a useful tool for the Spock character.  

Mark: I remember clearly and I saw every single episode and every single movie and I remember how you nearly died. I remember when you … flashed and burned in the atmosphere. What was it like to be killed off? 
LN: I had a tough time with it. I took the job because I frankly believed that that would be the last Star Trek movie. And I thought: Why not go out in a flash and a blaze of glory saving the Enterprise and the crew and dying in the process? I really thought this might be the last film. By the time we got around to shooting the final scene, the good-bye scene where I am saying "good – bye" to Captain Kirk I had the sense that the movie is going to work and this movie is as good as I think it is and I began to have second thoughts about what I have done. The die was cast and it was too late to do anything about it. Except that on the day we were shooting this scene Harve Bennet came down to the set and said: Do you think you could do something in that scene that gives us a thread to keep up if there is another movie? And that's why I came up with this idea of doing a mind meld with De Kelly and I simply said the word "Remember".
Mark: Yes
LN: It was ambiguous enough that a writer could pick up that idea
Mark: Remember there might be another
LN: Yeah, exactly. If you're doing another movie, don't forget me! (laughing)

Mark: In Search Of – a lot of people wrote and asked me to ask you about In Search Of.
LN: Well, I'll tell you: In Search Of was a pleasant surprise to me. To begin with: I thought three or four season would be the stretch of the show. We did seven years. And we did 144 episodes and I think and I think it became sort of a model and the granddaddy of a lot of reality based searching shows that are on the air now, in fact in the last couple of years I've been narrating a show called Ancient Mysteries which has it's own similarities to In Search Of. I have heard a word about In Search Of being resurrected. It's not a bad idea.

Mark: It was Alan Keyes who said: "Star Trek in many ways personifies the spirit of NASA used to be than does the current NASA. Am, would you agree with that? 
LN: It's interesting, I wasn't aware of that. I think it's true and I think just this last week that we have been seeing a revival of interest in that. I think they can have an enormous success with the manoeuvre on Mars and I think that they have gotten out of their kind of bureaucratic mind and gotten into in adventurous spirit to capture the imagination again and if that's true, of they can keep that kind of sense of adventure going I think they might do that successfully. There is a tremendous interest I think in what's out there and I think NASA is the organization that's best set up to do the exploring.

Mark: ….  What about moving in into the roam of reality? How much chance do you think there really is that there will be contact…
LN:  (laughing)
Mark :I mean there is so much media there, it's almost as if we are being prepared.
LN: Yu, you know, when we were making the Star Trek series, the first season or middle of the first season some people came to me and they said: You may not know it, but you have been chosen as a passer as a kind of a vessel to carry information to this civilization to help prepare the society for the coming of another civilization or alien arrival. And your character is a character designed to educate this public that there is nothing to fear. And that it is possible to interact with other species. And I said: O.k., (laughing) It was okay with me if it was the case. And yes, it is ongoing it doesn't stop, I guess there is something in me that responds to it as well I got hooked up with John de Lancie and some of other Star Trek actors and we call ourselves Alien Voices. This group is doing these audio tapes. We are doing the Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Time Machine and Lost World and I guess we're kind of touched by that, we are tickled by that idea that our imaginations awaken. I am curious, I am very curious.

The Carl Sagan movie, the movie Contact based on Carl Sagan's book, it's a flawed movie, but one of the most important moments of the movie is when Jodie Foster tells us the numbers which are something like 4 Billion stars in our galaxy alone. And there are Billions of other galaxies, each of those stars are potential suns just like ours. And that means that if there is one out of every Million (!) of those stars which has planets around it and out of every billion of those has some kind of life on it, then the numbers tell us that chances are very, very great that there is life out there some place.

Mark: But the distances are immense and the technology involved to get here … they would be far, far ahead of us.
LN: Not necessarily, they might be far ahead of us, they might be parallel with us, we don't know that for sure. But you are right: The chances are that they are ahead of us.

Mark: The question is whether you think that being, not just humans, evolved towards or away from violence. That's an important question if we are going to meet up with somebody.
LN: Yu, well, that's always the question, well, the first thing that we would like to know is: How did you folks get to the technological days of your civilization and survive? How did you survive atomic weaponry and atomic power and that? And the assumption is that we are able to ask these questions and that they are bale to educate us and help us get through. It won't necessarily work that way. It may take an enormous lot of time for us just to learn how to communicate with them.
But alone to get information from. The assumption always is that they have travelled the same path that we have been travelling. They might be a hundred or a thousand years ahead of us. But that they have gone through the same chances or experiences is not necessarily true.   

Mark: You were following a Prime Directive. If you look at what we have done here on Earth in our reality when we have met people who have been isolated, they are from another part of the world, in the jungle somewhere, we destroy them.
LN: Right. Right.
 

Mark: Listen, I don't know, you did some music stuff, didn't you?
LN: Yu, I have … with music in my time. Where are you going with this?
 

Mark: I just wanted to ask whether there there is more .. (laughing) coming. Not too many people know that you have … with music.
LN: Well, music has always been a love of mine. When we were doing the Star Trek series I had the opportunity to do some recording which I did. I must have done about 6 albums. I have dome some musical theatre. I toured the country with musical shows in the 70ies. I did Fiddler On the Roof, My Fair Lady, The King And I, Camelot, I had a great time, I loved doing it.

Mark: How do you get a life? I mean, how do you, so busy, so many demands, I am one of them right now, how do you make time for a life?
LN: Well, first let me say this: When I came to California I was 18 years old, I left Boston and came to California to be an actor. For the first 15 years that I spent working and building a career, I was always hunting for an opportunity. I was always struggling to get more work. When it all came together it … me and Star Trek started and I haven't been out of work since, and particularly when I had a couple of hits directing movies, and all of that came together, suddenly, your are right: What happens to you is, that a tremendous amount of pressure builds up to do this, do that, and people would be happy to keep you busy 24 hours a day. I don't resent it because of the time that I spent wanting more, needing more, knowing what it's like being out of work.    
Mark: Say, you just make rules.
LN: Exactly, I tried to keep a level about it and I tried to help people understand (laughing) a man doesn't want to live by work alone.
Mark: Leonard, that's it. Half an hour.
LN: Too fast!
Mark: Too fast is right. So, can we do this again, some time?
LN: Yeah. I'd love to.
Mark: All right. Leonard Nimoy, thanks a million. And I wish I had hours. Take care!
LN: Thank you!
Mark: Leonard Nimoy! I'm Mark for CBC