Filmmaker Nicholas Meyer is best known for his contributions to the Star Trek franchise, including directing The Wrath of Khan and The Undiscovered Country as well as co-writing The Voyage Home. He’s had a varied career before and after Trek, but the film that led to his involvement in Khan was Time After Time.
The 1979 time-travel tale was a unique spin on H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, depicting the author as the time traveler himself (played by Malcolm McDowell) who instead of visiting the far-flung future of the Eloi and the Morlocks (as in the original book) instead travels to San Francisco of 1979 in pursuit of the one and only Jack the Ripper (David Warner). While dealing with the complexities of what for him is the future, Wells also finds love with a bank clerk played by Mary Steenburgen.
Malcolm McDowell is H.G. Wells in Time After Time.
Time After Time has just become available on the Warner Archive Collection on Blu-ray, and I spoke to Meyer recently about the film. Read on for our chat, or click here to hear what he had to say about his Star Trek regrets.
IGN: Can we talk a little bit about how the project came about? I know you had written [the Sherlock Holmes story] The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and that became a film, but how did you end up getting this book into your purview to turn it into the script and then even become the one who directed the project?
Nicholas Meyer: I was an undergraduate at the University of Iowa and later in the early '70s living in Los Angeles when The Seven-Per-Cent Solution became a best-selling novel, and toward the end of the '70s a film. I got a call from a fellow I had known at the University of Iowa whose name was Karl Alexander. Karl said to me, "I'm writing a novel which is loosely inspired by your novel, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, I'm 65 pages in and an outline. Would you be willing to read them and tell me what you think?" And I said, "Sure." In those days, I had time on my hands to do that sort of thing. So I read his novel, I read 65 pages. I read the outline. And I gave him such notes that occurred to me and thought no more about it except that I couldn't stop thinking about it. I thought, gee, what an amazingly wonderful idea, which I would never have had in a trillion years. Never would have had it. Gee, it's even more than a book. It's essentially a visual idea. It's two guys in Victorian outfits running around 20th Century San Francisco where everything they see is basically science fiction. And it reminded me of a film by Jean-Luc Godard called Alphaville. Did you ever see Alphaville?
IGN: Yeah, sure.
Meyer: In Alphaville, nothing has changed except the name of everything. Somebody says, hand me that communicator and they give Eddie Constantine a book or something like that. I thought, this is what it would be and I bet this is a movie where they would let me direct it because it wouldn't be that expensive. I optioned Karl's book, his pages and his outline, and then I sort of wrote the movie the way I thought it should go and then I gave him my screenplay. I said, “Here, help yourself. Take anything you want and put it in the book.” Because I thought they would cross-fertilize one another, what you call a tie-in. And so that was all well and good and then I took the scripts to a reputable producer, a lovely man named Herb Jaffe, and I said I want to direct this, would you be interested in producing it? And he said yes. We went to Orion and Warner Bros. and they both said yes and so that's how I parlayed myself into a directing career. That's the short version of it.
IGN: Was that always the plan for you? To be a director?
Meyer: Yes. I always wanted to be a director.
IGN: And yet, the thing that put you on the map was the book, the Sherlock Holmes book [The Seven-Per-Cent Solution].
Meyer: Yeah. I suppose that comes under the heading of irony. I'd never planned to write books. It was something I did when the Writer's Guild went on strike.
IGN: When you were working on the script for Time After Time, did you feel the need to go back to The Time Machine, the H.G. Wells [book] itself?
Meyer: Not really. My memory of both the novel and the movie of The Time Machine were quite vivid. Whatever I was doing was sui generis and that was sufficient for me. In fact, it might be argued that by consulting the other Time Machine movie or the novel, I might be sort of muddying the waters of what had appealed to me so much. One of the things that I really love about Time After Time, with all the mistakes I made and all the first time directing errors, is that it's nonetheless five movies playing simultaneously. I think it's five. It's a romance, it's a thriller, it's a comedy, it's science fiction, and it's a social commentary. These things are all sort of going at the same time, which movies I think don't do that. They do one thing or two things.
IGN: I wonder if that's what made you the ideal guy to do Star Trek eventually, because Star Trek sort of does that as well. It's able to balance multiple genres at the same time.
Meyer: That is entirely possible, although I don't think it was conscious on anyone's part, including mine, that those things were related or related in that way. Serendipitous.
Meyer would later incorporate aspects of Time After Time into Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home's script.
IGN: I know that you've said that Time After Time influenced your work on Star Trek IV when you were called in to sort of help -- I guess it was to help rewrite Star Trek IV. Can you talk a little bit about that? What was it in Time After Time that came into [the] Star Trek IV writing?
Meyer: Well, I was asked to write Star Trek IV very much at the last minute. They had a script based on a story by Harve Bennett and Leonard Nimoy and they didn't like the script. They threw out the script. They were very soon to start shooting so Dawn Steel, who was head of production, called me up and said, "I need a favor, and I need it very fast." And I went to speak to Harve and Leonard and they told me their story, the story about the whales, and San Francisco and time travel, and I said, "Gee, I already did this." Only instead of going to San Francisco from the past, now they are coming from the future. “Can't we go to someplace else? Does it have to be San Francisco? Can't they go to Paris?” And they said something to the effect that the whales wouldn't fit in the Seine. I wound up sort of writing the same movie and I did find that there were things that I had written or even in one case, even filmed, from Time After Time that I cut out of the movie that I was able to repurpose and throw into Star Trek IV. I remember that in the original screenplay of Time After Time, Wells, having already caused one traffic accident because he doesn't understand about street lights, traffic lights, is now stuck at a red light where it says don't walk, and a Chinese youth with a ghetto blaster blaring some intolerable rock and roll pulls up next to him. And Wells would like to move away but he can't because it says don't walk and so... and then later on in the original cut of the movie, he's having dinner with the girl and she says, “What kind of music do you like?” And he thinks about it and he says, “Anything but oriental.” Now, this was the sort of object lesson because nobody in the preview audience understood what his remark was about because it was like 10 or 15 minutes earlier in the movie that he'd had the encounter with the boy, the Chinese boy, with the radio. I had to cut it out of the movie. And I simply recycled it with a punker or whatever he was that was played by Kirk Thatcher in Star Trek IV, listening to a ghetto blaster on the bus and Spock gives him the Vulcan nerve pinch.
Continues
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