ICON INTERVIEW
William Shatner shows his vulnerable side in You Can Call Me Bill, a new documentary
THERE CAN SURELY BE FEW contemporary lives better documented than William Shatner’s. The erstwhile Enterprise captain has conducted thousands of interviews, and penned a shelf-full of memoirs. However, a new film by Alexandre O Philippe (director of films like Memory: The Origins of Alien) goes where no documentarian has gone before, offering new angles on this 20th century icon.
Drawing on several days of interview sessions (interwoven with scores of vintage clips), You Can Call Me Bill may surprise those whose image of Shatner is fixed as James T Kirk. For one thing, it showcases the somewhat mystical views of a man who has a firm belief in the interconnectedness of things.
CONNECT THE DOTS
“There is the whole theory of our molecular connectivity,” the now 93-year-old actor tells Red Alert, “but you see it all around us. Is there such a thing as happenstance, or is that connectivity tied to things happening in our lives? I was thinking of so-and-so, then the phone rang and it was so-and-so – is that part of our connectivity? It’s possible to explain it that way: that everything is tied together, and there’s no chance. This activity raised here raises activity there – we’re connected.
“Dark matter, for example,” Shatner continues, warming to his theme. “We don’t even know what it is, but we know something’s afoot. Underneath the ground we walk on is a latticework of mycelium. It’s like electrical cords under everything. Is it only there – and in leaves, and our nerves? They’re all similar! The scaffolding is very similar. Why would it be dissimilar out in space, with dark matter?”
Was he always fascinated by such things? Not in quite the same way. Shatner recalls a youthful moment when, as a city boy out in the country, he became entranced by the night sky. “I’m sitting in absolute darkness, in a forest, on a log, and I look up and see the Milky Way.
And I fell over backwards, and landed on my back! That falling backwards emphasised how enthralled I was with the sky and the mystery of all of that.”
Today, after years of reading, studying and “asking questions”, Shatner is “consumed” with such mysteries, professing a “great interest in the universe, and its meaning”.
The documentary also shows his vulnerable side. In one particularly affecting section he discusses loneliness, confessing, “I’ve never had a real friend”. How did Philippe get him to open up? Shatner was simply “ready”, he says. “I wanted to reveal the human being. Very rarely do we speak to somebody and reveal a real tru
