[[ [2011-11-03] Transcribed + proofread by zrajm [2013-04-11] minor source update Style: {}=bold, <>=italics, corrections, paginated Type: article Date: June 1995 Title: Interview: Mark Lenard, The First Klingon Speaker Author: Lawrence M. Schoen Source: <{HolQeD} 4:3>, pages 10--12 Publisher: Klingon Language Institute, Flourtown, PA, ISSN 1061-2327 Summary: Mark Lenard talks about how it was to record the Klingon scenes of . The lines spoken are listed (with the spelling originally used, i.e. not the transcription that we use nowadays). ]][[p.10]] Interview: Mark Lenard, The First Klingon Speaker At the beginning of September, toward the end of I sat down with Mark Lenard one afternoon in the forward lounge and enjoyed a discussion of his experiences as the first actor to speak Klingon (at least, on camera). A transcription of that interview follows, and while Mark quite graciously provided me with a copy of the original Klingon utterances, merely seeing them on paper cannot capture the sound or emotion he projected, despite the years since the film. You need to go back to the film itself and listen. One thing you will note is there are more lines here than in the brief scene appearing at the beginning of the film. Keep watching, and when the scene later cuts to the Federation picking up the Klingon signal you'll be able to hear the rest of it in the background. KLI: Tell me about the creation of Klingon for the first film. ML: John Povill, the associate producer on the Motion Picture, and Jimmy Doohan worked together; Jimmy claims one thing and John claims another thing, they sort of created it together. I think that John may have done most of the work but Jimmy recorded it. Gene Roddenberry asked me to play a Klingon; we thought it would be the only movie, it'd be done and that would be the end of it. And so he called me in and said "I'd like to have you in the movie but there's no role for Sarek, would you agree to play a Klingon?" I never thought I'd play a Klingon but I said "Sure." The gave me this recording that Jimmy and John Povill had made. And I listened to it and I did it once and then I listened to it another time and each time it was different, I hate to say, it was different, so I kind of did it my own way anyway, using the principles of what they had done. Later, Marc Okrand told me that he took a lot of the stuff from the soundtrack, the sounds were kind of the basis for his enlarging the language, and I noticed that he made mistakes in what he heard, you know, in the sounds. So, like any language it's a living thing and it's not quite accurate. KLI: What was your impression of the sounds of those first lines? The idea was, according to Robert Wise (and I guess to Gene too) [[^ :=ML:]] that they didn't want the language to sound anything Earthly, they wanted to sound not like an Earthly language. They didn't quite [[wanted:=wanted it]] succeed as you'll see, there are sounds in here that sound a bit like German, a bit like Japanese, and a bit like god knows what, Klingon you know. Anyway, the first line, they're attacked. They're in this old Klingon scow, and I'm sitting in this big chair in the front with my handsome Klingon face, and I have my henchman on one side. And it's terribly hot, I remember just so awfully hot, I was suffering and I thought I must be getting old, and these guys around me were big strong stuntmen and they were suffering worse than I was. It's a question of attitude and a kind of control. Anyway, they see the [[p.11]] green slime, something is attacking, we called it the green slime. So the captain says, {HUIT TCHA} and that means "Did you see what I saw?" And then there's shaking of the ship and so forth and the captain says, {ECHSS TU} And then some more shaking and what not, and the captain says, {HUIT TCHA EK'KOOS} or {HUIT TCHA ECH'CHOOS} And some more things happen, and the captain's next line is, {HUISS HA ZOONTAHK} That sounded like a little Yidddish or a little bit of German. {PSHAAH BISMACHT} And while this is going on, I had learned it, and was saying it, and the ship is shaking, and they're down in a close-up, it's shaking, the ship is shaking, and so they shake the camera and it's not quite enough so we have to shake too. So the camera is shaking and we're shaking and this is what I say, {KAIYI KLINGON KUZIMA PSHAAH KUZUG OCHS MUJI AZAK} That's not enough shaking, so they put a little machine on the camera and that really shakes the hell out of it. So I was standing up by this time, behind this big chair, and we're all shaking. The machine is shaking, and the chair doesn't shake so I have to shake the chair. So I shake the chair, I shake myself, and try to act and look up into the camera and not move around too much. And this is the main speech before they are done in by the green slime. {ICH ACH KOS ZZTUT TUDJIOCHS HARAS MUJIA UDJIK KAMAZAK SPUZ KAZUK GARAND -- KAIYI KLINGON KUZIMA AK ZO AK} I had to do this last one, he was impressed that I could do it all and remember it, and do the shaking, and look --- it was a big close-up --- look into the camera, keep my eyes up and down and just the right movement. It's not a cakewalk where you can do just the acting, you have to do a bunch of stuff. They never had a real meaning, they had various translations of it, but I got a call after the shoot, from the production assistant to ask [[p.12]] me what I had said, so they could put it, for posterity, into the script or something, because all they had was the sound track. So the plot begins to thicken. {KAIYI KLINGON KUZIMA PSHAAH KUZUG OCHS MUJI AZAK ICH ACH KOS ZZTUT TUDJIOCHS HARAS MUJIA UDJIK KAMAZAK SPUZ KAZUK GARAND -- KAIYI KLINGON KUZIMA AK ZO AK} Partly it's the sounds, partly the way I say it, but when you have things like {KAMAZAK} it sound very Japanese. KLI: What I find particularly interesting hearing this from you is the phonology, which seems to differ from what Marc Okrand produced. He's described listening to those few lines, taking the sounds he heard, working with those and then adding a few more. But some of the sounds you're producing here are not in Marc's Klingon. For example there's no sound, and it's all through there. ML There are lot of 's. I put it into a kind of phonetics, a lot of 's. [[ML:=ML:]] There's , there's , I put two 's because it was so emphasized. You know, they had the big Star Trek show at the Smithsonian and Marc came, I called him up and I was speaking, and I gave him some of the stuff to say. And he said it with a different accent. And he said it and I said it, and we both said it quite differently. He did sound different. This is the original, and that's all there is to it. That's the original and that's what he took it from. You know, he heard it his way and adapted it his way. It's be come a little different language. He took things a little mistakenly, but that doesn't matter, I changed them when I heard them too. Language take different routes, they are constantly growing. That's the way a culture grows. [[eof]]