Michael Piller

Aperçu

Naissance
30 mai 1948 · Port Chester, New York, États-Unis
Décédé(e)
1 novembre 2005 · Los Angeles, Californie, États-Unis (cancer)
Nom de naissance
Michael Brent Piller

Biographie

Famille

Conjoint(e)
Enfants
Parents

Anecdotes

On the week of Piller's death, Canadian sci-fi station Space aired a marathon of Star Trek: Voyager (1995) and Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987) episodes he had written.
Piller is a HUGE baseball fan. He has over two hundred thousand baseball cards. You can see his baseball interest in "Captain Sisko" on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993).
Cast Anthony Michael Hall in The Dead Zone (2002) after seeing Hall's performance in Les Pirates de la Silicon Valley (1999).
A fictitious 24th century chemical element on "Star Trek", "pillerium", was named for him in his honor for all the contributions after his death.
When he married Sandra Piller, her daughter Christy was age 12 and her son Shawn was age 8. After eight years of marriage, they had daughter Brent.

Citations

It's always about the human condition. Go back to that and you'll find your story.
A writer is very much like the captain on a star ship facing the unknown. When you face the blank page and you have no idea where you're going. It can be terrifying, but it can also be the adventure of a lifetime.
You will never come up against a greater adversary than your own potential, my young friend.
When I write a script, I like to write seven days a week-it helps keep me 'in' the movie-but I only ask myself to do six pages a day. Six pages don't feel like a lot, and that relieves some of the psychological pressure to sit down to sit down and perform. I've found over the years that I can easily write those six pages between eight and noon. Whenever I try go longer, my productivity drops sharply. I can do other things in the afternoon-read, take meetings, dictate memos, discuss other material. I just can't write.
"As I approach a new project, my process always begins with the question: what is it about? Here's one answer that might apply to a 'Star Trek' movie... I want it to be about the most horrible, treacherous aliens ever known to man who are about to destroy life as we know it, leading to the most spectacular thrill ride of an adventure with fantastic space battles and huge explosions and great special effects -- a white knuckle ride for the movie audience. Yeah, but what's it about? I can write space battles with the best of them, but what makes that space battle interesting to me is: why are they fighting? What are the stakes? What does the hero lose if he loses? And what does he win if he wins? Why should we care? I'm talking about the second level of story-telling. The level that examines what's going on inside the characters - their moral and ethical dilemmas, their doubts, fears, inner conflicts, how they change as the story progresses. These are the things that make us, as members of an audience, get emotionally involved." -- Michael Piller, Fade In: The Writing of Star Trek: Insurrection