Interview: Mark Lenard, The First Klingon Speaker
At the beginning of September, toward the end of
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)
that they didn't want the language to sound anything Earthly, they
wanted to sound not like an Earthly language. They didn't quite
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
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
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
ML There are lot of
There's
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.
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