Star Trek's William Shatner has one person who loved being directed by him

William Shatner's turn as a director for Star Trek V: The Final Frontier isn't exactly spoken about positively these days. Yes, he had a limited budget, far less than he expected, but he also just didn't do a great job with what he was given. It's widely considered one of the worst movies in the Star Trek lexicon of films and for good reasons. It had a great idea, Spock's brother was leading a religious cult, which was antithetical to Spock's ideas.

It would've been great if that was the driving premise, but then Shatner wanted "god" involved and well, that's where things went off the rails. It was a rough movie to sit through and a lot of people weren't exactly thrilled with how it went. More so, Shatner's reputation as being hard to work with may have proceeded him, making the film harder than necessary to get through for those behind the camera.

Yet, despite the upheaval around Shatner, one person from the film loved working with him. Laurence Luckinbill, who played the aforementioned brother of Spock, Sybock, seemingly enjoyed working with Shatner quite a bit. Speaking to TrekMovie.com's podcast (via Screen Rant), Luckinbill spoke glowingly about working with Shatner. He didn't want his character to be overwhelmingly violent, as he was a peaceful man and he wanted the script to reflect that. Shatner loved the idea and worked with Luckinbill to figure out how to make that work.

Apparently, Luckinbill has never forgotten that, speaking very warmly of Shatner, sayin;

""I said I don’t want to because I am the human part of Spock. I am a peaceful person. Sybok is a peaceful person. He is looking for God. He is looking for help. He’s looking to relieve pain. Why would he carry a gun around? So Bill eventually said, ‘Well, we’ll fix that.’ And he did. We were able to do a big fight, and the gun wasn’t important. I actually love Bill Shatner. So he was a good director for me. Other people complained about him. I don’t."
"

Considering Shatner was just quoted as saying he's very lonely and had no real friends, it's sure a nice change to hear someone warmly talk about Shatner. He takes a lot of flack from his work habits while on the original series and his feuds stemming from that show are iconic and long-running. Yet, despite all that, Luckinbill did seem to enjoy working with him and the way he expressed his appreciation for Shatner seems beyond sincere.

As Sybock was easily one of the best parts of the film, and the only real idea worth building around, we're glad that Luckinbill thinks so highly of his time on set. After all, he's one of the few reasons to watch Star Trek V in the first place.