Original subtitles

"What a place" is right.

[ Birds Chirping ] The-- What's this flying around?

You hear that? Yeah.

There's a small airdrome, or airfield, I think, in your language,

[ Chuckling ] not far from here,

and there's a small flying club,

and they have little single-engine planes-- Cessnas and so forth.

But they have the microlights. You know, the--

So, little, small people in these small airplanes in this small airdrome--

Mm-hmm. These small people--

We're an odd nation. We shrank as the years went by.

We just got smaller and smaller. Little hobbits.

[ Chuckling ] What a beautiful place, Patrick.

Oh, thank you. Yeah. Yeah.

I am very, very lucky.

Let's sit down and talk.

You're very, very lucky.

We're both very, very lucky,

when you think about where it all started.

Yes. I-I--

I live here mostly alone,

and there are some evenings I will go out here, walk about the place,

and I will yell to the sky--

"You lucky bastard, Patrick!" Really?

And then a voice says-- Nobody hears me.

"Yes, you are." [ Chuckles ]

"But not much longer." [ Laughing ]

[ Shatner Narrating ] He grew up in Mirfield,

a small town in Yorkshire, England,

where other boys his age spent time playing rugby and getting into trouble.

Instead, Patrick focused on the theater,

as his early love of Shakespeare would foster a lifelong passion for acting...

and pave the way for him to be recognized...

as one of the most respected and honored actors in Britain.

But it would be an unlikely casting...

as Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation...

that would introduce Patrick to a global audience...

and alter the course of his professional life forever.

I'm William Shatner,

and this is The Captains Close Up...

with Sir Patrick Stewart.

Patrick is one of those guys that can read the phone book and make it sound amazing.

His level of professionalism set a bar for us.

Always on time and always knew his lines...

and always was there for everybody , and we all loved that.

You could give him something and he would make it better than it was on the page.

[ Explosion ]

[ Stewart ] I've often suspected that I must have been conceived...

the evening before my father went to war...

because I was born in July, 1940,

and war broke out in September of '39.

Wow. Do the sums and--

June, July-- Yeah.

And I'm called Patrick,

which was a very uncommon name in the society I grew up in.

My mother's parents were horrified.

Irish, you see.

In those days people had not felt warmly towards the Irish.

The reason being, my father had a notorious bad temper.

And in this country someone with a temper is said to have a paddy.

A paddy because Irishmen were bad-tempered, allegedly. Really? Yeah.

And so my father instructed my mother...

that if it were a boy I should be called Patrick,

because he was known as "Pat" or "Paddy" because of his temper,

and he said, "If I don't come back from the war,

there will still be a Patrick Stewart in the family."

Wow, Patrick. But he did come back.

But you were aware of war.

Yeah. My eldest brother was 17 years oer than me, and he was in the Royal Air Force.

And while he was home on leave one night,

he woke the family up and said, "Listen to that."

We listened for a few moments and I heard my brother say,

"Everybody out. That's a V-2."

Because what would happen is, the engine would cut off...

and then they would tip over and go straight down.

There'd be this moment of silence. Exactly.

This was one of the rockets that the Germans were firing from fixed positions.

When the first couple of them landed,

Churchill gave instructions that the nation was to be told...

these had just been gas explosions,

because the devastation was so bad he was afraid...

that it would so totally intimidate the civilian population...

if they knew these things were falling out of the sky.

So this night we were going up the steps into my mother's sister's house,

because she had a deep cellar.

So it acted as an air raid shelter for us.

My brother carrying me-- We were the last to go into the house.

And before we went through the door he said, "Look, Patrick."

And he pointed up.

And I saw the flames coming out of the rear of the V-2 rocket overhead.

I can still see it as clearly today.

Of course I was just excited. I was a kid, and I was being shown a rocket.

What it was, of course, was death and destruction.

[ Shatner ] You're 12 years old. You've been playing soccer.

Are you doing well in class?

I was okay. But it was not an academic school.

We had some tough kids in my form.

I mean, a number of my fellow school friends...

spent a lot of their time, their adult life, in jail.

This s a tough school.

Expectations were modest of the kids that went to this school.

[ Shatner ] What were the expectations?

Well, they would go into unskilled work.

They would do laboring jobs or go work in factories.

You were expected to follow your dad, then, into unskilled labor work?

Yes.

[ Shatner Narrating ] Prior to World War II,

British society adhered to a rigid class system.

A person's class would determine not only the schools they would attend,

but also the jobs that would be open to them.

It was expected that people would conform to the values of their peer groups.

Any attempt to rise above their class...

was frowned upon by society.

I do recall...

by the time I was 13,

when I was planning with my friends to go and see a movie at the weekend,

they would say to me,

"And, Patrick, in this movie the acting's really good."

Now, why would they tell me the acting was good? Aha.

Why would they use that as a means of persuading me to see a movie they wanted to see?

Why-- So what's the answer to that? I don't know.

I'm just offering this up as one of those mysteries.

At 13 I went on a Monday night to the Essoldo Cinema, Dewsbury.

I went to see a film I'd never heard of called On the Waterfront.

At that time they were still making films in black and white, not color,

and I knew, two hours later when I came out of that cinema,

that I had seen something entirely different.

Filmmaking, but even more than that-- acting.

[ Shatner Narrating ] Patrick's interest in acting was forever ignited...

when his schoolteacher, Cecil Dormand,

introduced Patrick to the world of Shakespeare at the age of 11.

By age 15 he'd dropped out of school...

and had left his newspaper reporter job...

to pursue acting full-time.

At age 19 he landed his first significant stage role...

in Treasure Island in 1959.

He never looked back.

I find acting more complex, more interesting, more problem-solving,

more requiring of study of the character you're playing,

of your own feeling towards the character,

of how you're approaching that character, which may not be you at all--

the solutions to all those complex problems...

are even more so the older you get.

It's a little different for me.

When I work now,

it is very different from,

oh, maybe even 20 years ago, 25 years ago,

when I first went to Hollywood.

I now know...

the work is inside me.

It's a bit like Michelangelo and those sculptures, those half-finished--

Ch-Chipping away the-- It's there.

The statue's in it. You just chip away the-- Yeah.

That's what it feels like now to me.

The complexity or the simplicity.

The older you get, the more you see within the--

The word "hello," it just doesn't become "hello" anymore.

Yes, you have more-- That's the complexity I'm talking about.

You have more choices, it would seem, now.

But that's the benefit of living for a year or two.

And that's what-- That life gives you choices.

But at the same time I feel that those choices...

are also inside me,

just waiting to be made.

And now when I go on stage, I don't know what I'm going to do.

All I know is, I have to take one step...

and I'm moving forward into the light.

And I don't know what comes next.

Oh! Hello. I've taken another step. Well, I don't know what happens then.

And then somebody says something.

And so the thing has now, for me, achieved...

a-a kind of--

Simplicity? quiet simplicity.

Even in the midst of doing something crazy like Macbeth.

But it's beautiful and-- and you admire it.

You feel comfortable in it. It makes me happy. That's the important thing.

[ Shatner Narrating ] During the early 1960s,

Patrick honed his craft in stage productions throughout Britain,

as he performed with several repertory companies...

including the Manchester Library Theatre...

and the Old Vic Theatre Company.

He joined the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company...

and appeared in productions of Much Ado About Nothing,

As You Like It and King Lear.

In 1971, Patrick's dedication to his craft...

finally received recognition outside of Britain...

as he made his Broadway debut...

in Peter Brook's legendary staging of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

In the early '80s...

Patrick joined the Royal National Theatre...

and expanded into television and film,

taking on small roles in both Britain and the U.S.

A 1987 production of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?...

would earn Patrick further critical acclaim.

But his career was about to take...

a dramatic turn.

As Patrick gave a reading at a Shakespeare lecture at UCLA,

a prominent television producr heard that voice.

Bob Justman went by a hallway where he was teaching at UCLA...

and heard this voice,

this tremendous, low, English voice...

that was...

reverberating down the hallway.

And he had to go find out who this was. It was Patrick Stewart.

He brought Gene to see Patrick Stewart,

and Gene, uh, said,

"I'm not gonna have a bald Englishman playing the new Captain Kirk."

Julian Picard, who was a little younger, had a French accent,

and, most importantly, hair.

He wanted a romantic,

big, you know, operatic kind of person.

We started a search,

and we saw...

dozens and dozens of actors...

to play the role of-- of, uh, Picard.

They were all but despairing of finding a captain.

What an extraordinary thing. Isn't that my son sitting right over there?

Dan, come on in.

He's gonna sit right up here.

I'll sit between you. Yeah.

So, Daniel. Yes.

You heard the last few remarks that your dad and I were--

- Yeah, I-- - What's your feeling about that?

I actually side with you, Bill.

For me, I agree with you. It gets more complicated as I get older.

At the beginning of the work,

you have these choices in your head and you think about where you're going,

and then for four weeks you struggle and wallow around in the mud...

and try and work out--

And invariably what you find at the end of the process...

is what you had decided at the beginning.

I was talking to my wife about this the other day-- Who is an actress.

She's an actress also. Mary.

And I was thinking back to when I was 24 or 25.

I don't remember learning lines.

I don't really remember having to sit and think about it.

It seemed organic. It seemed that--

When you were younger. Yeah.

And now-- God! It's-- It's hard work.

It's hard work. See, I think you're going into that middle phase.

You didn't say there was a middle phase. Well--

[ Laughing ] I'm talking about it now.

What has your dad told you that gave you the most pointed feeling?

When I was a young teenager and I was preparing for drama school auditions,

[ Chuckles ] my dad was coaching me.

"Coaching" meant being locked in a room for four hours.

All right, now, I gotta hear this.

I think it's an embarrassing story for both of us. Painful, actually, probably.

I had my pieces, and we would practice them every day for four hours.

You were auditioning to get into-- To drama school.

- Which drama school? - I did them all in London.

So you're locked in a room for four hours, you're desperate to get into one of these schools,

'cause it means you'll get a job once you get out.

Absolutely. It's hugely important. And I really did want his help.

There's not much better help out there. Exactly.

But the thing that he did say and kept shouting at me--

We'd get into the first line of the piece and I'd get two words in--

"Stop! Stop!

Think! You're not thinking! Think!"

It's one thing just to say the lines. And you're just saying them. Anyone can do that.

But to have a thought behind it, to see it behind your eyes--

What I think is you could be thinking about anything...

as long as there's some-- something going on inside.

Exactly. Some-- Some mass.

It's final casting, and it's Gene and I.

Rick Berman was sitting there.

He went to read along with one other actor.

Uh, 'cause you never went with just one actor.

And Gene said, "You know, that number two guy, that Patrick Stewart guy,

let's bring him back, let's read him again."

He-- He nailed it.

And Gene said,

"We got him."

He was brought in for a reading, they all loved him.

The only thing I think is, they should've changed the name.

'Cause he isn't in any way French.

Did you ever feel that-- the thing of Captain Kirk on Captain Picard?

Huge responsibility. Tell me. Tell me!

- I have never, never talked about it. - Tell me about it.

I think I was cast in March or-- or April,

and we started shooting in May.

So I didn't have much time to prepare.

I was working just a few miles away from here...

at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon.

I'd been there about three or four years,

and Daniel, I guess, was two or three.

And I would rush home after a matinee,

out into the country where we lived,

so that I could have some tea with him, maybe even see him in the bath.

I used to come home, and when I'd go in often he would be having his tea,

and there would be these guys on television in these T-shirts,

these different-colored T-shirts,

in these futuristic sets.

That's all I knew about Star Trek.

I had to ask my kids,

and they said, "Watch the movies, most particularly."

Well, I think I watched two of them and then I stopped,

because I said, if I watch all of the work of these people,

I'm never-- I'm never gonna get on that set.

I won't leave my trailer.

Too intimidated.

You hovered over...

our early weeks and months on the series...

like a Klingon warbird.

[ Both Chuckling ]

Oh, no. The Romulans had warbirds, didn't they? You see? You know--

It's been longer for me than you. I know.

But I bet you would not have made that mistake.

I would not have used that simile at all!

But I was trying to find, you know, something that rather ominously,

slightly threateningly, you know, can hang over your heads.

It was alleged that, in some interviews,

Bill Shatner made some negative remarks...

about the new series.

And, um--

Our attitude-- My attitude to that was, "Well, that's a shame."

We were under the-- the pressure and expectation...

of really making this good.

Let's really make this good.

I'd expected to be fired before the pilot was over. I really was.

I lived out of a suitcase in a friend's spare bedroom...

'cause didn't want to have to go through that whole packing thing...

when they said, "Patrick, it's not working out."

We'd work very late every Friday night--

1:00, 2:00 in the morning, sometimes later.

Or if we finished early, we'd go to Nickodell, which was a famous bar--

[ Shatner ] The great steakhouse, yes.

Which is gone because Paramount pulled it down to build a car park.

So Saturday morning I would wake up quite early, maybe sleep in for an hour.

I would do my laundry. That was the very first thing I'd do.

- I had my own washing machine. I'd do my laundry. - For goodness' sake.

Then I would go to the market.

I'd do my week's shopping, have a little lunch, come back,

and Saturday afternoon I would pick up next week's work...

and I would start working on Monday.

Saturday night I gave myself off. Wow.

I love music. I'd go to a concert at the Music Center, or an opera.

But Sunday morning,

up early working.

I would learn Monday's work,

more or less learn Tuesday's work,

get really familiar with Wednesday's work...

and be looking over Thursday and Friday.

That was the first season. I didn't go on like that for seven years.

But it was because I was terrified that I wouldn't be prepared.

Patrick Stewart I met the first day.

We were going to makeup tests,

and we talked about the merits of cricket versus baseball.

And from that moment to this moment...

we have been, uh, very dear friends.

I had actually worked with several of his friends from the R.S.C.,

so that was kind of really nice.

And I was thrilled that he was going to be captain.

And it turned out that most of us had done a fair amount of theater.

People always love to ask the question,

"What is the difference between stage acting and film acting?"

I have a maybe somewhat simplistic way of analyzing it,

which is to say that essentially stage work,

theater work is about action.

Now, I don't mean by that action sequences so much,

but it is about movement.

When you go to a theater, you're looking at the entire body of an actor.

So everything about that body...

is having some kind of impact on the audience.

Film, for me-- and this might take us right back to our conversation...

about On the Waterfront.

Film, for me, is about thinking.

You think,

and the camera watches you think.

And the actors I've most admired--

movie actors from when I was a teenager until now--

are those actors when you look at them on the screen,

you know what they're thinking.

And I used to say, if you want to learn about an actor,

what you should do is, you should watch...

the first 20 years of the career of Jack Nicholson.

Just sit down and watch all of his movies.

You'll know about Jack Nicholson by the end of those movies.

Because what you're seeing is what's behind those eyes of his, what's behind him.

[ Shatner Narrating ] As the impressive seven-year run...

of The Next Generation series came to an end,

Patrick had already been at work on other productions and was diversifying.

On the theater stage he adapted Dickens' A Christmas Carol on Broadway...

with a critically acclaimed one-man show.

He portrayed Captain Ahab on the small screen in Herman Melville's Moby-Dic,

bringing him the first of four Emmy nominations and a Golden Globe nomination.

On the big screen Patrick reprised the role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard...

in four Next Generation films,

then landed another iconic role,

that of Professor Charles Xavier...

in the successful X-Men film franchise.

But 2009 would be a very special year,

as Queen Elizabeth II bestowed upon Patrick...

Britain's highest honor of knighthood...

for his lifelong service to the dramatic arts.

Sir Patrick Stewart.

Not bad for a kid from the most humble of beginnings.

And I know violence was a part of your early life.

Mm-hmm. And that, in fact,

one of the charities you talk about and encourage people to give money to...

is for abused women.

Refuge, yes.

It's a charity that's been in existence for a few decades.

And it is a charity that helps victims of domestic violence--

98% women and children,

occasionally men who are victims of domestic violence.

Abused by their wives. Yeah.

And because it happened by my-- my father, an unhappy and bitter man--

When he'd been drinking he could lose control,

and when he lost control it was nasty.

I couldn't stop him.

You saw him hitting. Yeah. Yeah.

I can do something now.

So in my work for Refuge--

I'm patron with Cherie Blair.

We are two patrons of Refuge.

I do it for my mother.

What's it like? Six-year-old--

It's lonely.

Nobody comes. Nobody comes to help.

My other brother, Trevor, was five years older than me.

He would be out, or with friends or something.

Occasionally we would both be there together.

But the sense of helplessness, of loneliness,

of not being able to-- to get control of the situation.

And the other thing that goes with domestic violence...

is shame,

knowing that the neighbors knew and heard.

Although I do remember once we had a neighbor--

her name was Lizzie Dixon.

And Lizzie, like my mother, was a weaver.

- She worked on huge industrial looms. Big looms. - Looms. Mm-hmm.

My little mother running two of these monstrous machines.

Lizzie Dixon, she was a-- a big woman.

And I do remember one night...

her crashing into the living room in the middle of one of these,

and I remember her putting her forearm up in front of my father and saying,

"Come on, Alf! Come on! Try it on me! Try it on me!"

And this army boxer-- Yeah.

[ Whooshing Sound ] Wow.

It worked. I wish Lizzie had come in more often. God rest her soul.

And I never got beaten or struck by my father. It was only my mother.

And there would be blood on the floor. Holy cats.

Ambulances called and police coming. [ Gasps ] Oh, my Gosh.

And I heard, in my house, a policeman say to my mother,

"Well, you must have done something to provoke him."

Oh, my gosh.

They didn't understand.

They had no idea in the world.

What do you think that's done to you, to Sir Patrick?

I have that inside me too.

I have my father inside me.

Of course.

And I've always known this.

For years and years and years I couldn't act anger,

rage, fury, murderousness.

Couldn't. Faked it. I faked it.

Well, I know we fake it all.

- It starts from a place. - Yes.

It starts from a place of truth.

I faked it. Badly.

I don't fake it anymore. Wow.

I was afraid of going to that set of feelings.

I'm not afraid anymore now.

I know that I can do it and it's safe. I can do it as an actor.

I spent a whole year playing Macbeth.

You know?

Exactly 365 days from first performance to last performance.

And I know what it feels like to say,

"I am in blood stepped in so far,

that should I wade no further,

returning were as tedious as go o'er,"

and mean it.

When they were naming the Roddenberry Building on the Paramount lot,

Bill came to that.

And I was introduced to him. It was the first time I ever met him.

And I was very much on my guard.

But he seemed...

very civil...

and... pleasant.

I certainly had no complaints about him on that first meeting.

I have two major regrets in my life,

and they're both to do with the failure of--

my failure in my marriages.

[ Exhales ]

How I behaved,

what I did,

um...

can't be corrected.

And guilt, I think, has gone,

but regret remains.

And I have that very strongly.

You know, regret is the worst emotion of all.

And that's because...

you haven't forgiven yourself.

I think that I do see regret...

as having a different quality and nature from the way you see it.

It is not something which handicaps me,

which holds me back, which makes me--

which is the basis of my fear...

about being married again.

It's a quality that lives inside me...

that has now become part of Patrick Stewart.

I failed in these ways.

Now, I don't brood on the failure,

but failure makes up an aspect of my character,

that I have failed.

This week...

I was reading an article...

about an Italian mountaineer.

While I was reading it I was asking myself, Why am I reading this?

I'm not especially interested in mountaineering.

I've never heard of this old guy-- he's in his 80s now.

Why am I reading this? And then I came to the end of the article.

He's now in his 80s,

and he pioneered...

some of the great solo climbs...

in-- certainly in Alpine mountaineering.

He said, What is important...

about mountaineering is not that you win,

is not that you get to the top or that you're the first.

The important thing about mountaineering...

is that you can get within a hundred meters of the top...

and turn back...

because you can't go on...

and feel good about it.

Mmm.

I can feel the regret of those failures,

but it's okay.

That's what he said. I think he said,

I can say to myself it's okay to fail.

I think that's...

huge.

Everything really...

took off years later...

when we were at ShoWest--

you know, when studios show their upcoming shows.

Our first movie was Generations and Bill was costarring in that.

So we were there together and we were doing a panel,

and for some reason I had to be back in L.A.

And the studio had put the Paramount jet at my disposal...

to get me back to L.A. quickly.

So before this panel was over I just went along saying to everybody,

"I'm sorry, I've go to go. Good-bye. Good-bye."

And I said this to Bill and Bill said, uh, "How are you getting back?"

And I said, "Well, the-- the Paramount jet. They got a plane."

And he said, uh,

"Do you mind taking a passenger?"

And I said, "You?" And he said, "Yeah, me."

I said, "Sure. Come along. Of course. By all means." So we both left.

There we were on the Paramount jet.

There was only one meal.

So, uh, I said, "Come on. We'll split it."

We did have a couple glasses of wine.

And in the 45, 50-minute flight from Las Vegas to L.A.,

William Shatner and Patrick Stewart became friends.

You've been fascinating.

And this whole Captain Kirk, Captain Picard thing is part of our history--

Yeah.

and just part of our lives.

And it's...

knit in there.

You know, um, um, I spent a lot of time in Brooklyn, in New York,

which I've come to love-- Brooklyn.

I worked there as an actor, and now I got to know the neighborhood.

And I get used to, especially in New York, building sites particularly--

- What do they say to you? - "Hey, Captain! How ya doin'?"

Or they say, "Make it so"? Yeah. Or "Engage."

I was walking down the street where we live.

Couple of guys are sitting on a stoop,

and as I walked past this guy says,

[ New York Accent ] "Hey, Mr. Stewart.

Welcome to the neighborhood. Enjoy!"

It was one of the-- Total acceptance.

Total acceptance.

"Welcome to the neighborhood. Enjoy."

Beautiful.

Bill, thank you. Thanks for coming.

Thank you for having us, Patrick, and thank you for talking to us.

If I were to do this, I was gonna have to commit for six years.

And at that point I said, "Out of the question.

I've got too much to do."

My agent was the first person to tell me not to worry...

'cause there wasn't a hope in hell that this show...

would probably even make it through the first season.

I knew a director, I knew a couple of screenwriters.

And so I called them or I went to see them,

and they all said exactly the same thing.

"Everybody knows it's not going to work," they said.

"You cannot revive an iconic series.

You cannot replace those guys."

It's what William Goldman said about Hollywood--

no one knows anything about anything.

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