10 Reasons To Stop Hating Star Trek: Nemesis
3. Blame It On Baird?
In another candid moment from the 2005 DragonCon panel, LeVar Burton was asked, with regards to Nemesis, "Well, what went wrong?" His answer, with little hesitation, was, "the director [Stuart Baird]". LeVar had an apparently valid personal reason to take umbrage since, as he went on to say, "For the first six weeks [the director] kept calling me Laverne" (and apparently thought Geordi was an alien).
In terms of familiarity with the material, both Burton and Sirtis then stated that Baird "knew nothing" and "didn't even watch a single episode of Next Gen," which, as Sirtis pointed out, is problematic for the lore-dependent, relationship interdependent, Star Trek franchise.
About ten years later, as Trekmovie reports, at the 2014 Star Trek Destination convention in London, the TNG cast were asked about the "end of an era" moment that was Nemesis. Michael Dorn replied that "it was a tough shoot […]" before Sirtis quickly added, "Oh come on, say it! The director was an idiot".
Others have been critical of Baird in the past. Star Trek production designer Herman Zimmerman once called him, "impossible to work with [on Nemesis] [as] nothing satisfied him".
In Baird's defence, he was already an established, and Oscar-nominated (for Superman [1978] and Gorillas in the Mist [1988]), film editor and director by the time he got the job on Nemesis. Producers made the conscious decision to hire him despite his lack of knowledge of Star Trek and, as Baird put it in an interview for the BBC, "I took it very seriously to give you two hours of entertainment, with […] thrills, spills, emotion, and humour".