The film's story initially combined the writers' desire to feature the Borg with producer Rick Berman's wish for a time-travel plot, and was first set during the Renaissance in a 15th-century Italian castle, with sword fights, phasers, and Data becoming Leonardo da Vinci's apprentice.

The Renaissance setting was abandoned because writer Ronald D. Moore feared it would seem campy, star Patrick Stewart refused to wear tights, and test audiences showed little enthusiasm for the era, leading the writers to shift the story to Zefram Cochrane's first warp flight instead.

The planned title 'Star Trek: Resurrection' was scrapped when 20th Century Fox announced the fourth Alien film would be called 'Alien Resurrection', so Paramount rebranded the movie 'First Contact' on May 3, 1996.

Directors Ridley Scott and John McTiernan reportedly turned down the film before cast member Jonathan Frakes was hired, since producers wanted someone who truly understood the 'gestalt of Star Trek' rather than an outside director who 'didn't know Star Trek'.

Paramount floated Tom Hanks, a big Star Trek fan, for the role of Zefram Cochrane, but producer Rick Berman said it was never seriously considered, and Frakes felt casting someone so famous would have been a mistake.

Alfre Woodard was cast as Lily Sloane partly because she had promised at a barbecue to become Jonathan Frakes' godmother after learning he didn't have one, and Frakes considered landing an Oscar-nominated actress a real coup.

Whoopi Goldberg was not asked to return as Guinan and only found out through the newspapers, saying she had wanted to be involved since she felt the Borg story couldn't be told without her character.

Robert Picardo appeared as the Enterprise's Emergency Medical Hologram after he himself suggested to producers that the Enterprise and Voyager should share similar holographic doctor technology, and his line 'I'm a doctor, not a door stop' references the original series' Dr. McCoy.

To make it look like there was a whole army of Borg despite only eight to twelve actors filling the roles, makeup designer Michael Westmore created a slightly different design for a drone each day, while background Borg were simulated using half-finished mannequins.

Borg makeup sessions grew from one hour on the TV series to five hours for the film, plus 30 minutes to get into costume and 90 minutes to remove it, and the blinking lights in each drone's eyepiece were programmed by Westmore's son to spell out crew members' names in Morse code.

Actress Alice Krige suffered real discomfort playing the Borg Queen: her tight costume caused blisters, and the painful silver contact lenses she wore could only be kept in for four minutes at a time.

During filming of the spacewalk scenes, the fully enclosed helmets made it hard to breathe, and Patrick Stewart became ill after wearing one for just a minute, forcing shooting to be discontinued temporarily.

Four days of location filming took place inside the disarmed nuclear missile silo at the Titan Missile Museum near Tucson, Arizona, which stood in for the booster of Cochrane's warp ship Phoenix.

For the spacewalk scenes, a one-armed actor played the Borg drone whose arm Worf slices off, and the actors' boots were fitted with lead weights of 10 to 15 pounds to force them to move slowly as if in zero gravity, despite actors like Neal McDonough asking to skip the weights.