LEONARD NIMOY COMES HOME

On June 1, 1984 I had the privilege of interviewing Leonard Nimoy. The occasion was the premiere of STAR TREK 4 in Los Angeles. The attached video is a document of that interview. I met him several times, but on this particular occasion, as director of the film, he had a special pride in its message about ecological concerns. Moreover, he talked about how the film was a “homecoming,” of sorts, for him and the “Star Trek” story in general. Imagine that easy smile and quietly amiable manner as he speaks. . . Here is an excerpt.

NIMOY: I became interested in introducing [ecological concerns] into this film when I read a book called Biophilia, by Edward O. Wilson, a biologist at Harvard. He tells us by the nineteen-nineties we’ll be losing ten-thousand species per year at the rate we’re going now. That’s an average of one species per hour! What’s really fascinating is that many of them will not even have been recorded; we won’t even know that they were here; we won’t even know what they were; and the scientists will not have even gotten to them before they’re gone. So, although this picture is essentially an entertainment piece, there is an opportunity to introduce the idea that what we’re losing today may turn out to be terribly important to us a hundred or two or three hundred years from now. We thought at first about some kind of a plant that we might need to create a medicine— something that we had to go back in time to get and bring it back into the twenty-first century to save Earth. What was it gonna be, either a person or a plant or a bird or a fish? Well, we ended up deciding on a couple of very large creatures, namely, whales!

TIBBETTS: What aspect of “coming home” can we find in your character of Spock?

NIMOY: We do have a lot of homecomings in this picture. We come back to Earth now, in 1986 (two years in the future from now, in 1984). We come back to the spirit of the series in the sixties, and Spock comes back to his full identity at the end of this picture.

Better yet, see the photos and the attached.