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MICHAEL PILLER
(Writer, 'Emissary')
"I thought we had a very ambitious pilot. I think the
script that I wrote attempted to do things you don't ever
see on television; that's really what you have to try to
do if you want to be doing interesting, creative things.
We took a lot of risks, and it was very ambitious, and
when it was all done and on film and cut together, I
thought it was going to be a disaster. Rick spent week
after week in the editing room recutting, trimming,
patching and fixing and, ultimately, at my insistence,
reshooting major sequences. The postproduction people
worked twenty-four hours a day for weeks to make those
things look good. When I saw it on film for the first
time, I was blown away and realized it finally worked.
We reshot Sisko's first scene with Kira. We didn't reshoot
the Sisko/Quark scene - although I wanted to. We also
reshot part of the scene with Sisko and Jake in their
quarters. They were all first-hour things, and the reason
was I felt that Sisko was very unlikable on first meeting
and that if we did not make him more personable we would
lose the audience. I felt it was terribly important that
he be a competent, respect-worthy commander even though he
was troubled when he came aboard. We asked Avery to go
back in with Nana and reshoot a couple of things and make
a few changes that softened him, which I think helped
enormously."
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