I wrote an article not so long ago that was published in the Los Angeles Times, and I think I titled it "Movies vs. History." But I think they had another title for it. I got sort of sick and tired of seeing movies that got picked apart by people because they had taken dramatic or poetic license and I said "These people don't understand the distinctions."
Leo Tolstoy said the purpose of art is to teach you to love life. And that's what I want.
When you read a history or biography you are entitled to imagine that it is as accurate as the authors can make it. That research has gone into it and we say "This is a history of the civil war, this is a biography of Lincoln" whatever. But you don't make any such supposition when you say "This is a historical novel."
I think that the reason that people are so up in arms about movies that have historical inaccuracies is because now that we've trashed our education institutions beyond repair, people fear that the only people are getting their histories is through the movies, so the elephant in the room is that no one wants to talk about why we're so passionately obsessed with accuracy.
With a historical novel you know that liberties are being taken. Since Walter Scott, we know that poetic license, dramatic license, that events been conflated and that liberties have been taken, characters ditto, dates rearranged. But people don't seem to understand that movies are fictions, they are dramatizations, at least historical movies, and we should accord the moviemakers some of the same understanding and latitude. When you go to a movie you know it's a dramatization and not history.
What I want any genre to do, what I want any work of art to do, is to illuminate the human condition.
I think all my Star Trek movies are very earthbound.
I'm mainly interested in people trying to figure s#!t out.
In fact, we've entered a world which is arguably much more dangerous than [being] eyeball to eyeball with the USSR.
Movie studios, Hollywood studios, by and large are not making the kind of movies that I go to see.
I never gave my career much strategic thought. Maybe I should have.
We were extremely prescient in that we predicted the Soviet coup before it happened. That was kind of amazing.
Having done, you know, science fiction, I didn't want to get trapped in science fiction. So my eclecticism was my only conscious choice. I didn't want to find myself in a niche that I couldn't get out of.
