In a 2019 interview with TrekMovie.com, Trumbull revealed that Spock’s spacewalk sequence, wherein he makes contact with mysterious entity V’Ger, was initially shot by Wise. When Trumbull (who, as the special photographic effects director, would be on the hook for all of the visuals in the film) took a look at the scene, he was appalled. As Trumbull told TrekMovie:
“I thought the whole thing just looked completely unusable and just not serviceable at all. Badly lit, badly designed, and it just looked like guys hanging on wires. And this was before the more present-day of wire removal and a lot of stuff we could do digitally. They just didn’t pay any attention to weightlessness or any of the things associated with that.”
Trumbull, whose integral contributions to “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” had recently earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Visual Effects (which he lost to the “Star Wars” team), immediately asked Wise a serious question. For a film with a then-massive $44 million budget, Trumbull couldn’t allow something this clunkily old school to make the final cut. So, with time running out in post-production, he asked Wise to let him reshoot the entire scene. How would Wise, who had two Best Director Oscars on his shelf (for “West Side Story” and “The Sound of Music”), react to such a bold request?