TREKCORE > DS9 > EMISSARY > BEHIND THE SCENES INTERVIEWS > Michael Piller
 

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."

BACK TO EPISODE LIST, BACK TO EMISSARY INDEX, Interviews: David Carson - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 | Marvin Rush | Michael Piller | Rick Berman | Terry Farrell | David Livingston