Pierre [from Dude, Where’s My Car?] could be the best thing I’ve ever done. When you distill it down to a minute and a half of work, that may be my finest effort.
As it turns out, sometimes that bites you. In this case, I saw pictures of Earl [Mills], and…I actually met him. He was quite old at the time, but he had this sort of curly red hair, so we did that in the film. I got a perm and had red hair, and… It was a mess.
I think everyone agrees First Contact was our best film, and even at that, they’re kind of… I don’t know, they’re sort of movies. But they’re kind of really Star Trek movies, if you take my meaning. It’s hard for me to say. I was glad to be doing them.
They were nicely written and nicely directed episodes [Star Trek: Enterprise]. I enjoyed working with Scott [Bakula]. So it was good to do, and, as you said, it did serve to enhance the Soong legacy.
I can tell you one other story about Rent Control. The lead actress in the film, her name was Elizabeth Stack, and it turned out she was Robert Stack’s daughter.
That’s what kids were like then. So I really like the movie [Dude, Where’s My Car? ], I think it’s genuinely funny, and I wish I hadn’t been so arrogant about it. And, of course, I didn’t know it was going to be my best work, either.
We got to be really good friends [Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau]. It was just thrilling, every day. Every single day. I had a big couple of musical numbers in [Out to Sea], and I remember doing one of them and shooting it from beginning to end.
Earl Mills is probably the best role I’ve ever been given in a film. And it was a great experience to work with Halle [Berry] and Klaus Maria Brandauer, an Austrian actor who’s a hero of mine.
Like, she had a caterer, she had wardrobe people, she had two makeup artists… I mean, we have makeup and we have wardrobe, but Felicia [Day] was, like, on it. She had two cameras operating, sets, extras everywhere. It was unbelievable.
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