BBC Cult - Printer Friendly Version
Herman Zimmerman - Production designer on Next Generation and Deep Space 9.

What does the production designer do?
  Explain the role of the production designer, what you’re responsible for, from script to visualisation.

Well, the production designer is responsible for everything you see on the screen except the actor in terms of the environment. The physical investiture, to use a big word, the physical environment that you’re creating to produce the illusion of reality.

There are about fourteen different crafts that the Production Designer touches. I won’t say they work for him, we all work together. And the only real boss is the Producer or Director, everybody else is at their service. But the Production Designer has an important role in pulling together all the threads that have to be woven into the fabric of the story being told cinematically.

Next Generation
  What look were you trying to achieve in Next Generation and what were the elements for that, the colours and the textures?

When I entered the arena on Next Generation there was a different climate in the studio about Star Trek at that time. Gene Roddenberry had literally blackmailed the studio heads, and I can say that freely, because they’re not the same studio heads that are now running the studio.

They knew they had a winner in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. This was going to be a topical story about whales and Earth. Of all the stories, whenever we go back to Earth those are always the most watched episodes, the most enjoyed episodes, because we relate to ourselves in a major way. Gene said, ‘I would like you to do the picture, if you will do another television series pilot for me.’

The studio thought, well, we’ll spend the money on the pilot, but we’ll probably produce it, otherwise no network will buy it. As the studio started looking at the rushes they said, this is too good to even try to sell to a network, we’re going to syndicate this ourselves.

I think that that was the beginning of the best idea that the best studio has had regarding the Star Trek franchise. It’s gone on and on and several other series have been created. I don’t see any end in sight.

Pastel sixties
  What were the elements in Next Generation? What about the original series colours being banned?

Well, in 1966, everything was blue. All the walls were painted a very light blue, because that was supposed to be good for skin tones.

1965, the first year I started working at NBC, was the year that they made NBC all colour. So all the art directors started using colour. Before that, you had to paint things shades of grey, you had to paint things green, you had to paint things almost any colour except the colour they really were in order for the camera to be able to relate to them and give you a realistic black and white picture. All of a sudden we were all going to colour, and the art directors were going wild.

NBC sent memos saying, "Tone down the sets. You can’t compete with the actors. The sets have to go pastel." So they literally turned 180 degrees, and went so pastel that if you watch anything from the 60s you’ll see a lot of nice pale blues and pale yellows and pale salmons so that the colours aren’t competing with what’s going on in front. As the film stock became more sensitive to variations and shades of colour we were able to go back to a more realistic palette in everything.

Picard and humanity
  What were the ideas for Next Generation in terms of colour?

Gene wanted families on The Next Generation starship. Gene wanted, instead of a five year mission, a ten year mission. Well, if you go out for ten years, he’s expecting that there’ll be children aboard.

As a matter of fact, in the first episode, Encounter at Farpoint, there’s a conversation between Riker and Picard where Picard is nervous. He doesn’t do well around children, and will Riker help him get over this. He doesn’t say the word ‘phobia’, but of course, it kind of is.

It was one of the more touching things in the first season. We saw the reflection of Picard in the glass of the observation lounge, in a rather poignant moment, when he has to admit to his First Officer that he really doesn’t do well with children. That’s a case in point about Star Trek, it has humanity up front, not just adventure, not just military bravado, but a lot of deep feelings.

Enterprise D
  And how was the look of the ship supposed to reflect this family ship?

Gene wanted, for lack of a better word, a ‘High-Regency’ approach to the interior of the star ship, he wanted it to be comfortable, wanted it to be spacious. The computer runs everything. It's the kind of ship that you could really feel was your home.

I think we succeeded in doing that. Perhaps to the point of ignoring the realities of space travel. We had lovely large living quarters, the engineering was so efficient that you really didn’t have to do much to keep the ship in motion or to make sure that gravity was functioning properly, unless you were under stress, in a battle situation, or the bad guys had taken out some of your services.

Enterprise 01
  Creating a look for Enterprise.

One of the things that’s really fun about the new series is that everything is hands on. It’s only a hundred years from our present, so we are seeing knobs and buttons and levers and dials and things that we had always put behind black plastic panels before. We’re seeing the monitors standing out from the wall, and we’re seeing all the structure of the ship. That’s exciting for us working on it and a real kick in the butt for complacency.

Starting with The Next Generation, going through Deep Space 9, going through Voyager, there’s always been a thread of, "We are so far advanced that we don’t even understand how all these things work." Now we’ve got a show that is so much closer to what’s going on in rocket science right now.

We are so much closer on Enterprise to the present. The shuttles on Enterprise are designed as atmosphere entry capable vehicles. When they’re in space they don’t need wings, so the wings are retracted. If we want to enter the atmosphere of a planet, ssss, they come out, and we land, just like a Space Shuttle would today.

Joining Star Trek
  How did you get the opportunity to work on Star Trek?

Well, going back to 1986 the scuttlebutt around the studio was that Gene Roddenberry was going to get to produce another Star Trek series, and it was probably going to be a bust. The Executive in charge of production for Paramount television, Mike Shawnburn, called me into his office and said, "I want you to interview for this show, I think you’re right for this show." He literally twisted my arm.

I didn’t say I’d do it but I went over and I talked to Gene Roddenberry and immediately just fell in love with the man. The man was the most caring and interesting producer I’d ever met. I never regretted making the decision to do the show.

Gene had hired a couple of illustrators who were doing wonderful work, but had both feet firmly planted in mid-air, didn’t know what construction problems were created by this line, as opposed to that line. I functioned as a creative doorstop to keep them from going wild.

In the other way I also made sure that what Gene wanted of what they drew was really possible, and got it on the screen. I’m very proud of all of that but it was very constricting because we had inherited, from Star Trek: The Motion Picture, most of the sets on Stage 9, which is where The Next Generation spent so many years.

We built a new bridge but we didn’t build new corridors, we didn’t build a new transporter room. We turned what was a space café into the sick bay and, of course, we used the engine room from the motion picture, but took the engine from horizontal to vertical. Which is curious, because now we are having a horizontal engine in our new Enterprise. I like that, because we’re going back in history with a purpose and it still leads us to where much of it started.

Those sets have been recycled from The Motion Picture through several of the other feature pictures and into Next Generation and then into Voyager. On the other hand, when I did Star Trek: Deep Space 9, we had three empty stages, a blank sheet of paper and we didn’t have any restrictions at all.

Recycling
  Is it common to have a set recycled for over twenty years as the Next Generation sets were?

No, it’s not common to have a franchise that lasts for twenty years, either. When I say recycled, everything gets completely re-designed but you can save an enormous amount of money if you don’t have to re-scaffold a set, for instance. And the studio is always interested in that.

The scaffolds are the catwalks that go above the sets and from which the lighting is generally placed. So that’s why the corridors haven’t changed their shape very much in terms of their floor plan, but the look of the corridors changed from venue to venue.

Deep Space 9
  What was the brief of Deep Space 9? What feel was it supposed to have?

We spent about three months conceptualising the station and what it would look like inside and out, and we never really got a handle on it until about two and a half weeks before we had to start construction. The reason we didn’t was we were going in the wrong direction.

As it was original written, it was to be a Tower of Babel station, built by several races over a period of two or three thousand years. Nobody would be able to communicate between one race to the other, parts of the station would be so old that nobody remembered or understood how the technology worked. We did a lot of models, we did computer modelling, we did sketches, and nothing looked right.

One day, Mr.Berman said, "You know, I think we’re going the wrong way about this. What I really want you to do is think about something, you’re at home, you’re in the kitchen, and you hear some music. You walk to the door of the living room and, way on the other side, you see something, and you immediately know that that something is Deep Space 9."

We were looking at a space station, so we’ve got to put it in orbit around a planet. It’s got to have artificial gravity. What creates artificial gravity here on Earth? Well, the closest thing on Earth to that is the gyroscopes inside battleships, aircraft carriers, ships that cruise across the oceans. They have huge magnetic, whirling gyroscope type devices to keep them stable in rough weather.

I started with a sense of what a gyroscope would be doing, and we ended up with a philosophy of how Cardassians engineered their space stations. They like things in sets of three. They like ellipses rather than circles, they like triangles and trapezoids rather than squares and rectangles. They’re militaristic, so they like things that are honest, nuts and bolts and nothing decorative, so everything that is decorative is also, in some way, structural.

We ended up with a station that had three concentric rings, held by three arms that joined the rings, and at the end of those arms were three docking pylons. That became the basic shape of the station. Over that we overlaid a kind of depth to the surface ornament, so that there’s both utilitarian structure and just below that a whole lot of machinery.

Deep Space 9 is the most beautiful model you have ever seen. The detail is exquisite. You can tell when you see the opening to the show how absolutely perfectly everything was designed. That model’s only six feet around, but it appears to be a nine hundred metre circular space station.

Cardassian culture
  Is one of the strengths of Star Trek that it’s really coherent?

Yes, I think you need a philosophy of design for every culture that you create. It may not be much. When we wanted to delve into what Cardassians would like and dislike and what they looked like, what we had to go on was Bob Blackman’s Cardassian costume, done for one of the episodes of The Next Generation. Also Mike Westmore’s wonderful Cardassian make-up put an exoskeleton on the outside of the humanoid form. All those bumps, and the Cardassian shows his skeletal framework very, very shallowly under the skin.

So we made the station following those kinds of lines. It was really a very collaborative effort in that sense.

Quality sets aren’t just for films
  What’s it like working on a feature film compared to a TV series? Are there any major differences?

What we always say about the TV shows is they have a feature quality. Guest actors are always amazed when they walk on to the sets of a Star Trek set because everything is there, the walls, floors, ceiling, the window to space, through which you see space. The actor doesn’t really have to imagine it, it’s there.

If there’s a door open and there’s a room next door, there’s a room there. It a level of quality that you seldom get outside of a feature. Most television companies don’t go to that trouble. Paramount’s very kindly allowed us to spend what it takes to make these shows really look good.

How to make 85 Klingons look like 3,000
  Do you have a set that you’re most proud of?

A couple of sets were particularly difficult problems to solve. One was stellar cartography in Star Trek: Generations, the scene where Picard and Data are on a tongue in the middle of this enormous circular room on which is a star map. It’s a graphic reproduction of a star system that they are standing inside of, in a room on The Enterprise. As described in the script, it was a very minimal set.

I talked Mr.Berman into letting me do a really grand thing with it and I stuck my neck way out in doing so. When you do that, you’re always gratified that it works, and it was one of the more interesting sets in the picture.

The other set that I liked the most was a Klingon courtroom from Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country, because I had to figure out how to make three thousand Klingons. We could only afford eighty-five Klingons, so when you see what seems to be a whole court room full of Klingons, is a well calculated use of the camera.

It was a set that started all of the audience at ten feet. We would shoot all the principals against these ten foot walls, and then pull back and see our eighty-five Klingons, and then pull back further and see in CGI, the three thousand Klingons. That was successful, and when those things work, you feel you did a good job.

Alone in a crowd of Klingons
  What’s it like being surrounded by eighty-five people dressed as Klingons?

Well, it’s pretty scary. You always cast Klingons from football players and tall people in general, so they’re strong to begin with. Then you put them on four to six inch heels and put horns on their feet and bumps on their foreheads. And then you give them weapons that you wouldn’t like to have anywhere near you. Yeah, you’re intimidated by it, even if you know it’s a movie being made.

The people that play Klingons really get into it. Their sub-text is really well laid down, they learn the language and they don’t get out of character very often.

The original Enterprise: warp drives and UFOs
  Why is the original design of the Enterprise such a design classic?

I think Matt Jeffries is a brilliant designer. He was a pilot for many years so he was more familiar with aeronautics than most art directors would be. He brought to that original ship a classic design, and remember, this was the middle 60s. All through the 50s there had been the UFO scares. There was certainly a great interest in extra-terrestrial ships, and they almost always ended up being flying saucers in the movies of the time.

I think Matt Jeffries took a flying saucer idea and added an aeronautical shape to it, in the form of the engineering section and the warp drives. That was a direct order, I think, from Gene Roddenberry, who had read an article about warped space. Matt felt that he had to have an engine that was extremely powerful to go faster than the speed of light times nine cubed. Roddenberry never felt that we could achieve past ten. I’m not quite sure why, maybe it was just that he decided for himself that was the limitation that he should put on the warp capable engine.

Taking DS9 back to the 24th Century
  Trials and Tribble-ations was a really fantastic anniversary episode that took an enormous amount of effort.

I had just finished doing Star Trek: Generations. I came back and the art department was working off a set of plans that they’d discovered, a floor plan of the original series Enterprise, and we had a lot of photographs, archival footage and things that we could work from to recreate the corridors and part of the bridge.

What nobody realised was that the original corridors were ten feet wide, and the drawing they were working off of was showing corridors that were only about six and a half feet wide. If I hadn’t walked into the art department at exactly that moment, or if I’d stayed on the feature for another month, I wouldn’t have had anything to seriously input into the Trials and Tribble-ations episode. We began designing at that moment, when I realised that the scale of the drawing we were working from was wrong.

Putting Kirk in his place
  What were the problems in recreating the set, matching the paint and the costumes?

We had to be very careful about that. What you may not know is that the footage in Trials and Tribble-ations, is partly from The Trouble with Tribbles, but it’s also partly from another episode. In order to get Kirk in the position needed for Avery Brookes to relate to him, they went through thousands of feet of film to try to find the exact scene that could do it. It didn’t happen to be in the Tribble episode, but it worked.

Franchise phasers and toasted tribbles
  Did you have to recreate all the original phasers and communicators?

Oh yes, yes. But those things are quite easily come by these days. You can go to any Star Trek convention and buy a replica of Kirk’s phaser from those days, or the communicator and they’re actually better made than the ones that were used on the series originally.

There’s an enormous number of products generated for Star Trek and it’s become a fairly large part of the franchise in addition to the sale of tapes, CDs, books. Instead of recreating them, we could just go purchase them.

We did have to make an enormous number of tribbles. As a matter of fact, I was talking to somebody this morning, a retired labourer, who said that after the original Trouble with Tribbles, he burned about four fifty-five gallon drums full of tribbles. He said that he wished he’d known that they would have been so popular, he would have saved them and made a fortune for himself in his old age.

The challenges of Enterprise
  What are the challenges behind the new series? What’s the philosophy behind how that looks?

It’s a challenge in the sense that all of us who have worked on Star Trek for so long have a certain five finger exercise of our bag of tricks (sic), that we’re used to doing in order to create environments for a) the Star Fleet Command personnel, and b) all the aliens.

Coming back to our own future, we’re going back in Star Trek time. We’re still a hundred years from the present but we’re much closer to the present than Kirk and Spock were to our present, so everything is more identifiable with what we see as our immediate future in NASA and in science in general.

What are Enterprises made of?
  What kind of materials are you using to create this?

We’re using kevlar and titanium and aluminium and steel and all the metals that we are familiar with. Obviously, weight is a precious commodity, and everything that you have to get past Earth’s gravity to assemble in space requires tremendous amounts of energy. So you look for materials that are light-weight and designs that are honest. There’s not anything that is not utilitarian aboard the new Enterprise.

Das Boot in space
  Is the new Enterprise a dark ship or a bright one? Is it like a liner or more complicated?

It’s very much more like a submarine, with the efficient use of space that you would find on a naval vessel today. Rick and Brannon and I went aboard a sub and used a lot of the ideas that we saw there as a springboard to define the kind of things we want to see on the Enterprise. It was very valuable, a field trip worth taking.

So it makes the Next Generation Enterprise look like a luxury liner.

Yes, you could see it that way. This is a leaner, meaner machine, a more hands on machine for the crew. It’s got buttons and levers and dials and cranks and things that the actor can actually relate to, other than just tapping buttons on a console.

The computers aren’t always reliable, there is dead reckoning, there is a lot of advanced science, but there’s also a lot of by-the-seat-of-your-pants, gut instinct. Quite a lot of the kind of thing that Kirk did, because Kirk was kind of a space cowboy, taking chances. Our new Enterprise has some of that element of adventure for adventure’s sake and the need to see what’s over the next horizon, to find out what’s out there.

The future on Enterprise
  Is your job more or less finished on this now or is there a lot more to do?

There’s a lot more to do, and it’s all good, it’s all exciting, because we are re-inventing this franchise, starting over literally from scratch. With Deep Space 9 we had empty stages and a blank sheet of paper, now we have that same condition. There was nothing recycled from the Voyager episodes, there was nothing recycled from Next Generation philosophically. We certainly used some stock but you’ll never see that it’s the same stuff at all.

We’ve spent a great deal of money, we’ve spent a great deal of time. It’s been done in a compressed period of time, so there’s a great deal of energy in the execution, a great deal of energy in the cast. This is probably the most perfect cast I’ve ever seen on a television show. Scott Bakula is the quintessential captain of a starship. I think the fans will relate to him easily as well as they related to James T Kirk.