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Typhon Station is a very fastpaced PBeM RPG with skilled, experienced
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Trek47.com- Your guide to Star Trek has episode guides, cast and character information, pictures, and more from all the Star Trek series and movies
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Typhon Station is a very fastpaced PBeM RPG with skilled, experienced
players and a warm sense of bonding and community. We play at the
turn-of-the-century, 2400, and are located in the Typhon Expanses,
bordering the Neutral Zone, proximate to the Romulan Empire, and near
the Iconian Digs, and are on the first warning route of the original
Borg Incursion.
We have three stations to post from, SB 185, USS Odyssey, and USS
Wraith. They all have general and particular storylines and all
interact. This game is not for the faint of heart! The writing is
superb and comes hot and heavy. We have some open spots and also we
will consider character suggestions. So, longtime RPGers and novices,
check us out. See if you want to make Typhon Station your home away
from home.
(0 comments | Add)
Don't miss a scene! Pre-order the STAR TREK NEMESIS novelization to support TrekWeb!
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Posted:
08:18:48 on December 11 2002
By: Steve Krutzler
Dept: TrekWeb Features
Written by Steve Krutzler
This article contains mild spoilers for STAR TREK NEMESIS.
Thespian, Shakespearean, Captain. Patrick Stewart has embraced the role of STAR TREK’s leading man of late, proud to be associated with Jean-Luc Picard and happy to deliver a film that he says needs no apologies. One is always earnest with the press, of course, but this time it just might be the real deal.
“Last night over dinner,” he begins without even a question, “I said, ‘you know, I feel so good about this because I can arrive at the Regency tomorrow morning feeling so good about this film and the work that we’ve done in every aspect of it that I don’t have to defend anything or use fancy footwork to get around things that maybe aren’t quite right.’” He could be talking about 1998’s STAR TREK: INSURRECTION, the film on which he served as an associate producer, a position he no longer occupies with NEMESIS.
“I have nothing but positive feelings about it,” Stewart told TrekWeb at the film’s press junket. “What excites me about this picture is I think we now really have made a good movie that just happens to be a STAR TREK movie. It stands on its own and I hope we will find that crossover audience that we’ve always talked about. Of course if you know the whole history of the series, there are charming elements, there’s history threaded through it. If you don’t, it doesn’t make any bit of difference.”
After the poorly received outing four years ago, it seemed talk of the NEXT GENERATION’s demise was almost obligatory—at least as far as the press are concerned—but it was something the studio’s marketing department decided to turn to its advantage. NEMESIS is vocally promoted as “a generation’s final journey,” a strategy that has guaranteed the tenth TREK pic much more fanfare than its predecessor.
“That was news to us,” Stewart says. “When I was sent the one sheet to approve and I saw this and I’m calling Rick saying ‘what does this mean?’ But a senior exec at paramount pointed out to me the other day that when you read that sentence, all the emphasis has to go on the last word… begins. It could go on for a long time, it’s like Churchill’s famous phrase, ‘this is not the end, this is not the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning.’ There were another three years of war after that, so we might have [something similar] with this!”
The actor is quick to hedge his bets, however, saying at least NEMESIS can serve as an appropriate goodbye if that congratulatory call doesn’t come Saturday morning.
“If it is the end I think this is a very appropriate way for TNG to bow out,” he says. “The film ends, in every possible sense, appropriately for this cast of characters, this group of actors and the history that we’ve had, so I would be pleased with this as a farewell. On the other hand, there is a sequel, there is another story waiting to be told coming out of this.”
Before we get there, however, Picard and the gang will have to show down the Romulan Empire and its uniquely connected young leader, Shinzon, a clone of the captain banished to slavery only to rise up and lead a coup d’etat against his oppressors.
“In the very first draft, he is an unknown child,” Stewart says. “I seem to remember that I was the one that proposed that I was uncomfortable with that concept. I thought that if he was a child of Picard’s, the kind of emotional connect might be toward the kind of sentimentality and emotional soul-searching that I’d done in some episodes of the series before and I really didn’t want to get into. So Rick and Brent and John Logan came up with the idea of another Picard, which is much more interesting. Much more challenging and daring and unconventional from the point of view of the actors who have to play the roles, because a child is not himself, it’s a separate identity, a separate individual, but in this case you are facing yourself as you might have been under other circumstances.”
The first circumstance that needed overcoming in bringing Shinzon to life was casting him. Stewart screen-tested with four actors before the eventual choice, Tom Hardy, had ever been auditioned. He was abroad and filmed a home video tape after his agent, an old colleague of Stewart’s, recommended him for the role as the clock was ticking to find the right actor.
“The first time I saw Tom was on a very bizarre bit of home video that he made,” Stewart recalls wistfully. “I don’t know what he was doing. It was very dark, you could barely see; he was in a hotel room in Morocco. He was naked, he told you that? Well it was certainly bizarre! They had been meeting with actors for weeks, months, knowing that this was going to be a difficult role to cast. I had worked with four actors, screen tested with four actors, all of them very good actors, very interesting, but when the tests were over we were still saying, ‘I don’t think we’ve found him.’
“This is how it happened; you may hear other stories, this is the true one: an ex-agent of mine, who is still a friend, I call her and said, ‘they’re telling me they’ve seen every young actor in London. You know the story, some of your clients have been seen, you know that it’s got to be somebody who can almost look like me and so forth and we’re looking for somebody who’s got to be strong, he’s got to be idiosyncratic, we’d like to try and find a new actor,’ and she said, ‘I have the client, he was never seen because he was filming abroad and wasn’t available and didn’t look like he was going to be available then, his name is Tom Hardy.’ So I said, ‘can he come in?’ ‘no, no he’s in Morocco, he’s filming something.’ Well she talks to Tom, and Tom makes this video of himself in which they sent him the sides for the scene but he didn’t really do them. He sort of improvised around the sides. And I saw this with my wife sitting there on our screen at home at this shadowy darkness and this, almost, sort of Kurtz-like figure in the gloom,” he laughs at the memory.
“We were riveted by it! And Rick was too! I said, ‘there is something very odd about this fellow but I think we should see him.’ So they flew him to LA and we waited and waited and it was nail biting because it was getting so late. Tom came in and worked with us for a morning and the deal was done. It’s a great lesson in don’t settle, hang on, hang on, hang on, when you’re really feeling it’s still not right, it’s still not right, and them Tom appears. I think he’s extraordinary in the film and I think it could be the launch pad for a very interesting career.”
As his first major theatrical role, Hardy was in awe of Stewart as a fellow actor and director Stuart Baird has said that he tried to disabuse the young actor of that notion. Stewart also played a big role in supporting Tom through the shoot.
“I wanted to support him as much as possible,” Stewart says. “He was nervous and there were some days when his fear was quite strong, quite potent, and it’s debilitating. I know because I suffered from it for years and years and years, too much fear. I think he was at times very nervous throughout the making of the film. He brings an intensity to the role, there’s a sort of electricity about him that might have been a part of that. And also it was appropriate for the relationship, I wanted to be able to say ‘this is great and it’s going to get better and better and better,’ and just be a support, and look at the work he does in the film. Stuart and Rick encouraged that as well. We didn’t socialize, we didn’t actually hang out together, not once in the whole movie. I’m terrifically impressed with what he does in this film.”
Coming face to face with Hardy for the first time was somewhat disconcerting, as make up fixtures were meant to enhance his likeness to Stewart. But the actor had a bit of prior experience to draw on in that department.
“It’s a necessary part of making this kind of story,” he explains. “You have to ask yourself, ‘how would it feel if I came face to face [with my clone]?’ Luckily, I’ve had that experience. Madame Toussaud’s have a wax figure of me… you laugh! Unfortunately it was in front of the press the very first time that I saw my figure. I didn’t know what to do, I wanted to look away,” he recreates the scene. “I was embarrassed, I was shocked too because there I was. Of course the photographers wanted me to stand nose to nose with it and it unnerved me so much so that in the first scene when I meet Tom, when I meet Shinzon, I had all of that sense memory, of ‘I want to stare but at the same time I want to look away because there’s something shocking about what I’m looking at.’”
One of the hot topics for everyone involved with the film has been the amount of excised footage. Although Stewart figures prominently in just about all of NEMESIS, believe it or not, there were plenty more scenes, and the actor was sorry to see one in particular missing from the final cut.
“It was a scene which very, very delicately anticipated the end of the movie,” he says. “But I have got to believe that the very clever people felt that a dialogue scene at that point was holding the movie up, because it was just the two of us sitting in chairs and talking, with a bottle of Chateau Picard, which was also part of the resonance, the fact that I’d had this drink with Data and then opened another bottle later. And we talked about the nature of existence, the way human beings mark periods in their life, why they’re so important to them, about aging about friendship, about family. Picard talked about, [how] he chose not to have a family, [but] chose to devote himself to this [life] and Data also in the same way although there wasn’t a choice involved. So it resonated beautifully and it was just a delightfully written scene and acted impeccably of course!”
So what about that sequel idea Stewart dangled in front of us earlier? Could they be working on STAR TREK XI already? Surely not!
“There actually is an idea in development; it’s not my duty to talk about it because I’m actually not, as with this one, not involved in that story development process. So it will be up to the individuals who are. But by 10 AM on Saturday morning of the 14th we will know whether there’s going to be another movie or not!”
© 2002 TrekWeb.com. All Rights Reserved.
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