Picard: Jonathan Frakes on Directing Star Trek in 2023 vs. 1990

Warning: Full spoilers follow for Star Trek: Picard Season 3, Episodes 1-4.

Jonathan Frakes is well established at this point not just for his iconic role as William Riker on Star Trek: The Next Generation, but also for his time behind the camera. He’s been a director on Star Trek for decades, and many other titles as well, from the hit film Star Trek: First Contact to TV series like The Librarians, Burn Notice, and even The Orville.

Of course, that also includes the modern Star Trek shows Discovery, Strange New Worlds, and Picard, the latter of which is currently in its third and final season. Frakes is back as Riker for the new season alongside most of his old Next Gen buddies, but he also directed two episodes for this run: last week’s “Seventeen Seconds” and this week’s “No Win Scenario.”

I recently jumped on a call with the actor-director to talk about those episodes, including his directing style today and how it’s evolved since the old days of The Next Generation, what it was like to shoot the big reunion scene between Picard and Beverly Crusher, and more!

Picard and Crusher Reunited

In Episode 3, “Seventeen Seconds,” a key moment comes in Next Gen history when Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) finally discuss what transpired between them in the years since we last saw them together in 2002’s Star Trek: Nemesis — including the fact that they had a son, Jack Crusher, who Picard never knew about. Frakes says that the fascinating thing about that scene to him is that you really can see both sides of the characters’ argument.

“That one was very important obviously to all of us, particularly to Crusher,” he says. “I really ended up believing Picard’s point of view, which is, ‘You could’ve told me, it could have changed everything for me.’ So he’s bitter, he’s hurt, he’s a little angry, he’s disappointed, he’s got a lot of colors to cover. And her defense is, ‘I see how fucked up your life is. I see what you’re loyal to. And I see how hard it was going to be on the kid.’ I thought both points of view were really, really strong.”

Frakes starts the scene in wide shots, with the characters standing on opposite sides of sick bay, and then slowly starts to bring his camera closer to them as the conversation evolves, until finally they’re in close-up.

“The simplicity of the staging was that they started, in my mind, separated,” he continues. “And as they gradually closed into each other, they started to understand each other’s points of view. And whether they liked it or not, they were going to carry on.”

Before it was even shot, there were rehearsals and dialogue work done to get the characters’ history, and the actors comfort level with that history, just right.

“[Showrunner] Terry [Matalas] has been incredibly collaborative with all of the actors about their characters and about their arcs and about their story,” Frakes says of that process. “That was well received. A lot of people in social really responded to that scene. She says, ‘I got pregnant that night.’ It was very powerful.”

Farpoint! Rebirth in the Face of Death

Episode 4, “No Win Scenario,” culminates in what is perhaps the most “Star Trek” moment of Picard to date: When the collapsing nebula that the USS Titan is trapped in turns out to be a celestial womb, myriad “space babies” are born from it as the ship utilizes the erupting energies to also escape from danger. “To seek out new life,” as Beverly says.

“I thought that the timing was good for a positive, uplifting, hopeful beat scene, if you will,” says Frakes of the moment. “And so the emotion, as always, is the essential part of it. Get the emotion right of this birth, because it represents obviously that Riker’s son is dead. Picard finds now that the child that he had has been born. Gates is going through the quandary of what’s going on with her son. So we’ve got real births [and] have new meanings to characters who are looking at [the space babies]. And we were all going to die a minute ago. So now we’re going to live, and is that a rebirth? There’s all kinds of levels that play into that.”

I thought that the timing was good for a positive, uplifting, hopeful beat scene.

As Frakes points out, it also feels like an end to the two-episode “movie” that he directed. Picard’s seasons are highly serialized, including Season 3, and yet “No Win Scenario” does play like the finale of a mini-arc.

“It has a nice completion, or it’s a nice place to pause for the next couple of chapters where… we have to start bringing the rest of the team together,” he says.

When it came to shooting the cast’s reactions to the critters being born, Frakes knew that his actors were going to want some kind of reference in order to understand exactly what they were looking at. Fortunately, things have gotten better on that front in the modern era.

“For years we just looked at a fucking piece of tape on a green screen and pretended we were talking to some crazy Vulcan,” he laughs of the old days on Star Trek. “[Nowadays] I bring all the reference materials that have been given to me during prep. And I bring the visual representative of the visual effects department who will hopefully have something to share – either an animatic or a clip. And I’ll ask the writers to explain… [And] the scope, the shooting in anamorphic, meant that the screen would be wider and therefore your eyeline could move back and forth in a way that would help inform the visual effects artists. Because what they’ll do is they’ll design to where [the actors] have actually looked [in the scene].”

What’s a Master Shot Like… in Space?

Star Trek, and television in general, has evolved in the years since Next Generation ran. Frakes cut his teeth as a director on that show, and he remembers the challenges, and restrictions, of getting an episode in the can back then compared to the more ambitious and cinematic expectations of an episode of one of the modern shows like Picard.

There’s a scene Frakes directed this season where his camera whirls around Worf (Michael Dorn) and Raffi (Michelle Hurd) while they interrogate a Changeling. But the funny thing is, that essentially serves as his master shot for the scene. 

A master shot is basically an establishing shot that shows all your characters and what they’re doing, and can be used to cut back and forth to as needed between close-ups, medium shots, and so on. Back in the day, a master would typically be a static wide shot. But nowadays, Frakes seems to like to move that camera, even for his masters.

The simple ’80s version of a master… it’s just too dull for the audience nowadays.

“I remember circling from both the inside and from the outside,” Frakes laughs, before addressing a different style master that he cooked up on Star Trek: Discovery involving the camera tracking left to right and right to left from just outside the viewscreen on the main bridge.

“I love that huge wide,” he says. “On the bridge in Discovery, I was able to do more of it where Olatunde [Osunsanmi], who’s a producing director on that show, and I used to compete about how much we could connect, how long we could stay in a shot. Connect, follow the puck as they say up there [in Canada, where Disco is shot], and follow the dialogue around. And invariably it gets cut up because the writers and the producers believe that you’re sacrificing story for shock. But the simple ’80s version of a master where you’d stay wide and then you go into over the shoulder and get a two-shot and then two singles, it’s just too dull for the audience nowadays.”

It also helps, as Frakes says, that modern Star Trek’s not afraid to spend money to tell those kinds of stories.

“It’s all influenced by J.J. [Abrams’] world; J.J. created this filmic Star Trek with his movies,” says Frakes. “And that’s influenced Discovery, Picard, Strange New Worlds and whatever else is coming down the line. And I’m a big fan.”

Star Trek: Picard Season 3 is streaming on Paramount Plus now.

Talk to Executive Editor Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottCollura, or listen to his Star Trek podcast, Transporter Room 3. Or do both!