William Shatner on the Death of William Shatner

There’s a scene in 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan where Admiral James T. Kirk is visited by his estranged son, David Marcus, following the death of Kirk’s best friend and first officer, Spock. In their exchange, Kirk admits, “I haven’t faced death. I’ve cheated death. I’ve tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing.”

Unlike his most famous character, 93-year-old actor William Shatner knows he can’t cheat death. Indeed, he faces his mortality head-on in the compelling new documentary You Can Call Me Bill, available now on VOD.

IGN recently had the opportunity to discuss the film with Shatner, who proved as candid and philosophical musing about his mortality with us as he is in You Can Call Me Bill. (This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.)

IGN: I found the documentary very moving because I’ve never seen a star, even in anything autobiographical, be as emotionally open, honest, and raw as you were in this. You’re talking about your life, your death. At what point did you feel like, “I want to talk about this and I want to do it on camera”?

William Shatner: Well, over the years you can imagine people came up and say, “We’d like to do a documentary about you.” And I would turn them down, “No, it’s not time.” When Legion M, with their unique way of financing, people are going to get their money back before I get paid sort of thing. And it’s now going to be released and we’re in a peculiar time in films. Releasing a film that doesn’t have all this hullabaloo. So I’ve been asked over the years to do a documentary about me and I’ve turned them down.

So here comes Legion M with all their smart guys and then the credentials of the director [Alexandre O. Philippe, who also directed The People vs. George Lucas]. And then my thought [was], “Jesus, I’m an old man. I don’t know when that happened. And I better if I’m going to say anything to my children rather than, ‘My child, dear old dad is…’ I could do it in a documentary and leave what your father, your grandfather was like, to some degree. Here I am, child, in all my blacks and whites, and take me for what I am.” I am talking to my family. I keep hearing the word legacy and I keep saying legacy doesn’t exist. They tear down the statues, the boats sink, the name comes off the building.

But what I can leave my kids is this documentary and the knowledge that your legacy is based on the good things you do in your life. The people you help, the good deeds, being a Boy Scout even once will make a difference. And if you can sort of keep that in mind, it’s what you leave behind. The other things, the money, the fame disappear immediately. If it’s not in a day, in a week, if not in a week, in a year. And if not in a year, in the blink of an eye when things rot and decay anyway. So that’s what I was thinking. This is a legacy to my kids.

“How do you know when you’re going to die?”

IGN: Talking about mortality can make people uncomfortable. Would you have felt as comfortable exploring that on camera or on the record back when you were a leading man?

William Shatner: I didn’t know it, I didn’t consciously know it, but looking back sometimes you make intuitive choices based on “oh, that’s why I did that” looking back. And I think the reason held somewhere in my brain that I didn’t do a documentary before and did this documentary. And without consciously [being] like, “I’m going to be absolutely honest.” It’s just that I’ve discovered over the years that by being yourself and calm, calmness inside and being yourself, you can’t do any – if you trust yourself, you can’t do anything wrong because that’s you.

The question I keep asking myself [is], “How do you know when you’re going to die?” How do you know that the cough you just had isn’t a harbinger of a heart attack, or it’s just a cough? And you get to a certain age, you think, “Wait a minute, am I dying?” You don’t know when you’re dying, until what? A friend of mine said – the daughter was sitting beside this friend of mine, her mother, sitting on the bed, her mother’s dying. And so they’re there, the daughter’s keeping company. And suddenly the mother says, “Veronica, I’m dying.” Like with incredulity at the grotesqueness of dying. “I’m dying.” And then thereafter she died. How do you know when you’re dying?

IGN: You also talk a lot in the film about nature. What do you think [Star Trek creator] Gene Roddenberry – known for this show that’s all about hope in the future – would make of the deeply precarious state of our planet?

William Shatner: I’m sure he would feel exactly what you’ve just described. He was a tough guy. He’d been through many careers, pilot, policeman, something else, then a writer. And then he had to learn to write. And then somehow this idea of Star Trek came about. He was also a guy who had his own demons. So he was fighting his own personal battle in life and having this Star Trek concept, this voyage to the universe. He would, like all of us, would be angry, hurt, disappointed, so many negative emotions about how… Christ’s sake, in our American government today there are people that say there’s no such thing as global warming. It’s idiotic. All the coral are bleached because of the hot water, the air, the plastics, which we thought would save us are all infecting us. It’s terrible.

And yet, I had a program on the air called I Don’t Understand, I did an interview show. And one of the guys I interviewed was an award-winner … and I said to him, “I don’t understand why all the scientists in the world are [not] getting together for a Manhattan Project to find out the cure for getting rid of all these poisons.” And he said, “We are.” And subsequent to that conversation of a couple of years ago, I’ve read and heard and spoken about all kinds of incredible possibilities of cleaning the air, cleaning the water, and cleaning the ground, all kinds of weird inventions and things that scientists have come up with that are just a few years away from being useful.

So I would now do discovery on that and talk to people like yourself about, “My God, do you realize they’re this close to taking the carbon out of the carbon dioxide and burying it?” There’s pilot programs that are doing that. The water, the cleaning the ocean, suddenly everybody’s being galvanized. Not everybody, but a lot of people are being galvanized into action to protect the world. It seems that this growing perception of the danger that we’re in is becoming apparent, and it’s a race between finding the answer to some of these problems and killing ourselves.

What comes to mind is in my will and now publicly, I’ve said, “I want to be a tree. When I’m dead, I want a tree planted over my ashes and let the earth feast on whatever I can add,” as against some tombstone. And then I wrote a song for this album that’s out now called I Want to Be A Tree. Ben Folds plays the piano accompaniment. So that’s all apropos of the intertwining of nature. The more I read, the more I talk about it, see how intertwined everything is. So this tree and my body will be intertwined.

You Can Call Me Bill is now available on VOD.