Robert Blackman has been the Costume Designer on Star Trek since 1987. In this 2002, interview, we found out how he designs the look of the future for Enterprise.

This is a partial transcript of the video interview.

When did you start working on Star Trek?

I got the job in 1989, during the second season of TNG. William Ware Theiss had conceived the original garments, the original uniforms for The Next Generation, and left after the first season. Then they brought in Durinda Rice Wood, who I had known previously and who had actually assisted me in theater. I was working on the lot; I came on the lot in 1987 to do a Gary Goldberg sitcom called Day by Day which was about a day-care center and was being directed and executive produced by an old theater friend of mine who conned me into doing it. The lure was working with the twelve four-year-olds. I was interested in doing costumes for the kids and to see what they were like. But the show only went for two seasons. When we were wrapping, I was in the main wardrobe working with the person that ran the Paramount wardrobe named Bob Harris. He'd just started working and needed someone to interview for the job. The people that they had interviewed to replace Durinda so far weren't acceptable. He said to me: "You know, there's this great job on the lot! Don't you want this job?" I said "Oh, are you kidding me? I spent 20 years on the 19th century, why in the heck would I want to try to figure out what the 24th century is about? I'm not a futurist — I don't have any sense of the stuff. I deal with present to past." And so he said "Well, okay." I saw him two days later when we were finishing up and he said: "You've got to do me this favor. You've just got to go do the interview for me. I'm desperate here, and I'm going to look like a fool. I just started in this job, so would you please be so kind as to just go in and interview?"

In the end I had the interview with David Livingston and it's a tribute to just how successful you can be if you don't want it. Because I was a little bit arrogant — I mean, I wasn't rude or anything — but by the time the interview was over I had my feet propped up on his desk and I was just gabbing about theory and design and stuff. Consequently, two and a half weeks later I had the job. I said: "So I'll take the job for a year. What the hell? It's steady income, and while I'm here I can look for other stuff." And here I am, fourteen years later! It's amazing. It's a really great job. I would not have, at the beginning, said what I did because I didn't know all the personalities involved, and I didn't know how I would connect and what this sort of synchronicity would be in regards to Rick Berman, primarily, and then Mike Westmore, Herman Zimmerman, and now [hair designer] Michael Moore — a wonderful group of collaborators. You couldn't do better.

At what point do you become involved with an episode?

I think Herman Zimmerman and the Art Department get the earliest information about the upcoming episode, whatever it might be. And then that is pretty much followed by me. If I'm on the top of my game I might call Merri Howard or Brannon Braga's office and say, "Any beat sheets today?" And then I think Michael and Michael fall next. They are hands on every day on the set and I am not. I'm there every day, and I have a quick look and then go back to the work room and figure out how to do the next thing.

Are you pleased with the way Enterprise has turned out?

I thought we were very successful. I was excited about the [pilot] script. I thought that it worked very well. I thought it was a very good pilot script. What the pilot has to do to serve a series is hard! You have to introduce all the characters, you have to introduce all the relationships, and then somehow weave all of that information into enough of a story to keep people interested for 44 minutes, and end with a big enough bang that they go "Oh, I think I'll come back next week." That's a lot. As you get into the episodic aspect, then you can spend an episode and think about one character, but you have to get all of it enough in the mix to keep us going, "Wow! Who's that guy with the bumps in the background?" or "What's that?" or "What's she about?" I thought the script was very successful in introducing them and weaving them around, and starting the relationships. I think the look of it — to pat all of us on the back, including myself — was excellent. I think we achieved what we wanted to achieve, which was to clearly re-invent the timeline, to clearly tie it to today rather than to tomorrow. We're 150 years in the future, but if you think about the button, which is what I always say, you know the button was invented around 1100 A.D. and it's still here, big as life. So we can now use all those things. There was a previous theory that said, "No visible closures" — no buttons, no zippers, no anything. When I came aboard, I was jarred by this for several reasons. So it was great to be able to figure out how to do that, to keep a kind of look — what I would refer to as "The Star Trek Heroic Look" — going, but in a much more accessible way than we had evolved from The Next Generation into essentially Voyager, which things loosened up and could open different ways, and seemed much more user-friendly.

What is your favorite part of the job?

There is that which I would refer to as the conceptualization. That is my favorite, favorite, favorite part. It's only about 5% of the job. It's a small amount, but it's kind of the golden nugget you get for doing the other part. And that's done by reading the scripts or the beat sheet and conceiving an idea image and then going and talking to Rick [Berman] or Brannon [Braga] and batting that idea around. And we've done it so long. I might meet Rick at his car in the morning and walk with him to his office. And we get pretty much the day's work done that way. As soon as he walks into his office [he's working] so you either get him first up or at the end of the day. He's a very busy man. So I found this weird window that I can create for myself in which he's out of the car and I can be the first face he meets. We have a very good friendship. We can have a nice chat as well as make design decisions as we go. So that's my favorite part. It's linked tightly to the next stage which is actually the real drawing stage, when I draw and then find the materials that would be used to create it. Then it goes into a kind of larger area that has many other things to deal with. The art part is really thick for about a minute and a half, and then it goes down to things that require psychology, politics, all kinds of other things that you have to draw upon to get the job done.

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