[On the passionless pilot.]
"I remember feeling that [Caretaker] was passionless. As an audience member, I was ready for a real rock-'em, sock-'em adventure and I really wanted to have this crew off on this remarkable adventure and spend all the studio's money in creating a really neat adventure, but when it was over a couple of people said, 'You know, it's got the kitchen sink in it but no heart,' so we really had to get the audience to care about these people and Janeway's plight. I think the hardest part of the process was making anyone care about Neelix, so we had to rely a great deal on the character of Kes to make us care about him."

[On the search for Voyager's captain.]
"The search for the captain was a long and difficult one. This is the person that gets the white-hot glare of publicity as the first female ever to head one of the Star Trek series and she had to be just right. We considered, auditioned, looked at tapes of what seemed like every actress between the ages of probably thirty and fifty-five in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Canada, London and Europe. We had several people we were happy with. Some of the studio executives didn't necessarily share our feelings. Finally, with days to go, we were made aware that Genevieve Bujold was interested and we were ecstatic. So we went ahead with that and thought, 'Wow, we've got it,' and, of course, when that didn't work out it was distressing for everybody. I am deeply grateful to her that she did this after a day and a half instead of after six weeks or two months, because that would have destroyed us. She did what she knew in her heart was right, which is the way she functions as a person and as an actress, and she was right."

[On Kate Mulgrew.]
"The third [audition] she absolutely nailed the part. She was so right and in all of her work she has continued to validate that choice."

[On the original Janeways's name, Elizabeth.]
"There is a prominent Elizabeth Janeway, and we're not allowed to use names of prominent people because it can be sticky, although we heard sort of secondhand that Elizabeth Janeway was flattered about it. It then changed to Nicole at Genevieve Bujold's request, because that is in fact her given name and she wanted that. For two days it was Nicole Janeway and then when Kate came on board, it was Kathryn - in fact the name we'd already chosen even before Kate was cast in the role."

[On a female captain.]
"The most pressing concern about a female captain, of course, is will people buy that she's a captain? Will they accept that a whole crew would follow her, report to her, trust her in battle? This is the most important selling point in a woman. Kate Mulgrew has that without even working at it - as a person, as a human being, she is everything that we envisioned Janeway being. She has power coming out of her genetic code and the moment she walked out on that bridge the first day, she owned it. I have always said during this whole process that surely by the twenty-fourth century women can assume roles of leadership without acting like men. We have created and will continue to explore the softer, nurturing side of her. She can be a caring and compassionate person. We are going to see that she interacts much more easily on a social level with the crew in a way that Picard never did."

[Commenting on producers' Gingrichian sympathies from Janeway's final speech to the Caretaker about the Ocampa.]
"I think that we were certainly cognizant of the issue of taking responsibility for oneself. It was after that the whole Newt Gingrich Contract with America issue came along, and, unfortunately, in my mind they have been lumped together. I think we weren't talking about anything as drastic and draconian as he seems to be; we were thinking as speaking to our children and saying you must learn to take responsibility for yourselves. If we do too much for you, this does not prepare you to go forth into the world. Now, of course, many people assume that we are part of the New Right, which is anything but the truth."

[On her character.]
"I was basically just kind of jabbing in the dark and hoping I was in the right ballpark. I was just kind of praying that when the thing finally aired and I saw it up on the screen that I would see a character. I still had no idea how to work my face under that rubber and I really wasn't sure who [Torres] was at the time, so I was just taking some jabs, and some of them were right and some of them weren't."

[Referring to Rick Kolbe's illness during the shoot.]
"He missed a day of shooting, and I got a call the night before saying I may have to come in and fill in for Rick for a day. I had to direct a couple of scenes and I was real concerned he wasn't going to be well enough for the dry lake bed, because there was no way I could shoot that out there. It takes a director a long time to plan out all that stuff, and fortunately he got better. He was a point man in Vietnam, so he has a lot of intestinal fortitude and pulled it off."

[Discussing location filming on the Ocampan Underground City at the Los Angeles Convention Centre.]
"When you get an I. M. Pei building that's worth a couple hundred million dollars, that's pretty good production value. I told [production designer] Richard James if he won the Emmy, he would have to share it with I. M. Pei."

[Discussing location filming on the shaft leading to the Ocampan surface, filmed on the Pit set built for The Next Generation on Stage 16.]
"We never used the pit again; in fact we covered it over and build a set on top of it. Any time we need a cave set, we've gone over to Deep Space Nine's cave sets on Stage 18."