No Star Trek celebration would be complete without a feature on "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan," widely considered the best Star Trek movie and one of the finest science fiction films of all time. After the misstep of "Star Trek: The Motion Picture," writer and director Nicholas Meyer came aboard and gave the franchise a much needed overhaul.

"Star Trek II" held its own in the summer of 1982 against the box-office juggernaut of "E.T." and other blockbusters, and is still widely remembered for its sinister villain Khan (Ricardo Montalban) and its powerful conclusion. Now Meyer talks to TwitchGuru about why Khan and Star Trek have stood the test of time.

David Konow: How did you get the job directing "Star Trek II"?

Nicholas Meyer: I got in the wake of doing "Time After Time," which was a very successful debut film for me. And as a result of that, there was a movie I wanted to make very badly based on an extraordinary novel by Robertson Davies. At that time, no one had heard of Robertson Davies so I was just sitting in my house saying, "Don't talk to me unless it's about this." I had a friend who was an executive at Paramount; she was a friend from my childhood. You know the way people can talk to you from childhood and you'll listen to them in ways you might not listen to other people? She said: "Listen, if you want to learn how to direct movies, then you shouldn't be sitting up here holding your breath. You should be out there doing it. And I happen to know they're going to make a second Star Trek movie and producer Harve Bennet is someone you would like." I told her: "I've never watched Star Trek, I don't even know what it is. It's a guy with pointy ears, yeah?" I went down there, I met Harve Bennett, and we did in fact get along. They showed me the first movie, then they showed me some of the episodes, and I began to get stoked on this idea.

David Konow: Speaking of the idea, how did it come about for "Star Trek II"?

Nicholas Meyer: Harve said: "Draft five of the script is coming in a week and I'll send it to you." Great. Then a week turned into three weeks, and I woke up one morning and wondered, "Gee, whatever happened to that Star Trek thing?" I called and Harve said: "Oh, I'm very embarrassed, but I can't show you this [script]." "I can't look at it?" I asked. He told me: "It's really not good," and I said: "Let me read it." I finally read it, and it wasn't very good. I said: "What about draft four or draft three?" He said: "You don't understand, it's just five different drafts of unrelated stories." I told him: "Let me read them all." Because by this time I was completely stoked on this idea of making my outer space opera, and I began to think that I had some kind of idea, which was Star Trek was really the outer space version of a series of novels I used to love as a kid, which was the Captain Horatio Hornblower novels [by C.S. Forster] about an English sea captain during the Napoleonic Wars. This was the same thing in outer space and I wanted to do that. So I read all the other drafts, and I didn't like any of them either, but then I had a conversation with Harve. I said: "Well suppose we did this..." I brought out a legal pad, and told him: "Let's make a list of anything we like in these five drafts. It could be a line of dialog, it could be a character, it could be a scene, it could be a sequence, it could be a subplot, and it could be a plot. And then I'll write another screenplay that incorporates all this stuff. I won't take credit for it. I'll just do it, because if we don't do it, then there's no movie." So they didn't believe my offer, but we sat down eventually and we decided on the Genesis project, Khan, Kirk meets his son, Saavik is a character, the simulator sequence which came in the middle of one draft, and I decided we should put Spock in it so we could kill him, and so forth. That's basically how I wrote the screenplay based on those other elements from all those other scripts.

The Cult of Khan Slide Show!