You Can Call Me Bill

Captain’s Log,
Captain’s Tree

You Can Call Me Bill
Directed by Alexandre O. Philippe
USA Exhibit A Pictures 2023
London Film Festival screening, 7th October 2023

Documentary film maker extraordinaire Alexandre O. Philippe’s You Can Call Me Bill is, as the director himself put it in his introduction to this UK premiere screening at the London Film Festival, not the William Shatner documentary you were expecting. Indeed, if you are expecting a blow by blow account of William Shatner’s personal history and the various roles which have made him a modern icon (of a sometimes dubious nature but, hey, that image of him is exactly what I wanted to dispel by coming to see this thing) and serviced by various actors and studio producers who have worked for him than, I’m afraid, you are going to be out of luck...

I mean, put it this way... apart from various clips from some of his film and TV work (plus clips from stuff he’s not even in), where you will naturally see other actors in archival footage... William Shatner is the only human being you will see in this film. And, tedious as that proposition sounds, it’s certainly not a dull movie (far from it) and, you will come out of it with a sense of knowing something about Shatner as a human being... rather than the grandiose celebrity personality he’s become. No, this film is all about Shatner as he is now, looking back on a few moments in his life but ultimately, at 92 years of age (as at time of this screening), as a man who, despite being in the best of health for someone his age, knows he will certainly be shuffling off this mortal coil sometime very soon.

And that’s what this film is mostly about... death, the nature of the universe and a human being’s place in it. The film is split into chapters and, certainly, certain parts of his childhood and acting life are talked about by him but, it’s more about where he is in his life right now and how he chooses to reflect on that life and, more importantly to him, his place in the universe and what comes with death. And I say this coming out of this screening with very much the idea that Shatner is not especially religious or, certainly, a follower of one religion... more that he’s open to the great adventure of life and death and is, curious about what, if anything, comes next.

The other big vibe from the movie is that Shatner is very much into nature and, for example, his statement that he wants to be a tree... and he’s given instructions for his ashes to be placed in a forest with a redwood planted on top of him, so his cremated remains can nourish the growing tree. He loves horses and dogs and forests... and so on. So, one of his concerns is that the population of the planet is killing it off somewhat quicker now.  So he’s very eco friendly in his outlook these days. And also, another concern about his personal impending doom is... he won’t get a chance to see his grand children grow older to see what kind of people they become.

All this is done using Shatner in a chair with what looks like two or three cameras trained on him... one held static and at least one other moving around him, so the director and editor can cut between the shots through Shatner’s monologues and responses to the interviewer’s questions (almost all questions and prompts not included but... I think I heard the director’s voice once in this) and give the whole film a more dynamic feel. Bringing a sense of movement to the stillness of Shatner’s wonderful and somewhat optimistic outlook on life.

But, as I say, there are other visual things going on. For instance, apart from the various clips from things like Star Trek and T. J. Hooker etc, which all were picked to mirror some of the sentiments of what Shatner is talking about as the view of a 92 year old man, you also get things like a beautiful static shot of a tree in a forest, which both opens and closes the film and which, honestly, reminded me of something my second favourite director, Andrei Tarkovsky, might have shot for inclusion in something like Solaris or Mirror. There is also recent concert footage of Shatner and an orchestra performing a musical narrative of his thoughts since he went up into space a couple of years ago.

And of that experience, which is touched on briefly towards the end of the documentary, you can tell that he had a very profound response to his short time in space, for sure. And as he reflects on the irony of the privilege of having the opportunity to go into space, I learned another thing about him I never knew...

I remember as a youngster in the 1970s, the reruns of Star Trek on TV was one of my favourite shows... I had the blueprints, I had the Kirk and Spock action figures put out by Mego... but I also remember wondering what the heck had happened to Shatner because, he wasn’t in much before Star Trek started up again as a cinematic franchise... or at least that was the way it seemed to me. I remember him headlining shows like Barbary Coast but I often wondered what had become of him in between. Well, the irony of his recent space mission for Shatner was that, after Star Trek was cancelled and he got divorced, it turns out he was completely broke or, as Shatner corrects himself in this movie, not broke in terms of being a broken man but... he had absolutely no money. So he and his dog lived in a small truck which he’d camp up in a field or whatever and sleep in at night. He recalls a day in 1969 when he was in the truck looking up at the moon and on his smallish TV set he had in the truck, he watched the moon landing. I bet if you told that unemployed actor looking desperately for work that he’d one day get to go into space himself, there’s no way he would have believed it.

And that’s me done, I think, with this rather unexpected but certainly interesting and enlightening look at the modern acting legend that is William Shatner. There are some funny moments in the film, such as when he addresses how alien the impressions of him with his broken sentences sounds and then relating it to a story about him asking Edward G Robinson about the odd delivery he’d noticed from him in his movies... but mostly the film is a somewhat surprisingly optimistic look at impending death and how one chooses to live a life. You Can Call Me Bill is a really nice little tribute to the actor and, if it doesn’t give you all the specifics of his career or his marriages or whatever else you were expecting... it does give you a sense of the man himself as he feels about things now, which is a nice thing to have as a... hopefully somewhat premature but ultimately fitting, epitaph. If you are a fan of Shatner or are just curious about where he’s at as a person these days, then this movie is definitely worth a good look.