At the Las Vegas Star Trek Convention the team behind the Deep Space Nine documentary, What We Left Behind, dropped more concrete information about their long gestating project as it heads to a wide release.
For those who don’t know, What We Left Behind is a documentary detailing DS9 as a series: chronicling what it meant to the cast and crew of the series, and also involves a writers room from some of DS9’s core writers to develop what a season 8 would have looked like. The documentary itself is being directed by the series showrunner, Ira Steven Behr, and David Zappone, the Executive Producer behind William Shatner’s Star Trek documentaries and Adam Nimoy’s For the Love of Spock. For the audience, the crew dropped the first clip from the actual film, a touching portrait of Avery Brooks’s (Benjamin Sisko) and Cirroc Lofton’s (Jake Sisko) on and off-screen relationship, and how that onscreen relationship mimicked their real life relationship. It featured a never before seen blooper of the two actors laughing their way through a serious scene and their first HD remastered clip from the original series. Frankly, the remaster looked amazing.
Ira Steven Behr began the panel by addressing the 800 pound gorilla in the room, “We’ll cut to the chase and say that Avery Brooks is in the documentary in archival footage. Avery has been involved in the doc all throughout. He talks to Dave [Zappone] once a week.” In response to a follow up question about Avery Brooks’s perceived absence, Behr responded by saying, “Avery, basically, is done. He says he’s done talking about Deep Space Nine. He said he’s said everything he wants to say, and not just in terms of the doc, but coming to conventions. I would love it to change, I’d love him to change his mind, but the amount of conversations we’ve had in terms of having him participate, I mean, just finally ran its course. He’s not exactly a wishy-washy kind of guy. So when he says something he means it. He’s very involved, he questions Dave all the time, he wants to know exactly what we’re doing. Who did we talk to? Who did we not talk to? So he’s watching over the doc, but he just feels like he has no need to participate.”
Zappone then jumped in and said, “And I will say that, what he feels like is his definitive on Star Trek is The Captains Close Up … I’ll never forget after we first showed it to him, he cried. He was in tears because he was so moved by the piece.”
Behr then replied, “I remember that when it came out. He was so moved by it, that I guess he thought ‘that was it.’”
The film itself is about 108 minutes long “give or take some credits” and is picture-locked, which means they can get a composer to write music for the series. The only other thing that seems to be delaying the film is the very lengthy process to remaster the original footage from the series.
“We are going to be getting as many HD scans as we can afford to go in and replace the standard definition clips from the show,” said one of the film editors, Joseph Kornbrodt.
The bulk of the film contains clips from 40-50 interviews and over 100 hours of interviews recorded over the last five years, including never before seen archival footage and remastered clips from the series. The documentary, “is about the family of Deep Space Nine,” said Kai de Mello, one of the film’s editors and producers. “We’ve done our best to include as many people in the film as we can … but I know that these guys editing the film keep the story about family.”
The film is due to premiere sometime in 2018. Currently they don’t know about the distribution, as that would be determined by the company that purchases the film, but there will be a home video release containing hours upon hours of extra footage.
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