Thanks to the breathless destruction in Independence Day (1996), Godzilla (1998), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), 2012 (2009) and Independence Day 2: Resurgence (2016) — and well before his latest date with Earth’s reckoning, Moonfall — Roland Emmerich earned the nickname “the master of disaster.”
That doesn’t mean he embraces it.
“Not really,” he told us when we asked him if he likes the term during our latest Director’s Reel interview (watch above). “It’s fine. It just kind of cuts out all my other movies. … It’s a name I’m not really fond of.”
Indeed, the 66-year-old filmmaker has a résumé far more eclectic than that moniker implies.
After directing a handful of films (including The Noah’s Ark Principle and Moon 44) in his native Germany, Emmerich made his English-language debut with 1992’s Universal Soldier, the actioner that united highly in-demand screen brawlers Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren. He followed that effort up with the $55 million sci-fi epic Stargate, which spawned a number of popular television spin-offs.
Though, as Emmerich told us, he failed in his bid to direct the 2000 Oscar winner Gladiator (helmed by Ridley Scott), he did make his own historical epic that year, the Mel Gibson- and Heath Ledger-starring Revolutionary War story The Patriot.
In more recent years, Emmerich has helmed the 2013 attack-on-D.C. thriller White House Down, the gay-rights uprising recounting Stonewall (2015), and the high-flying war drama Midway (2019).
With the release of Moonfall, though, Emmerich’s tendency to blow things up real good is getting renewed attention, especially considering it’s his most proudly over-the-top offering yet. The story revolves around a startling scientific discovery: the moon has dropped out of orbit and is on a collision course with Earth, spelling an extinction-level event that only the unlikely trio of a NASA director (Halle Berry), disgraced astronaut (Patrick Wilson) and “megastructurist” conspiracy theorist (John Bradley) can prevent.
Emmerich talked about his biggest disaster and non-disaster movie hits in our interview above. Some highlights:
On wanting Michael Jackson to play the alien king Ra in Stargate — and working with The Crying Game Oscar nominee Jaye Davidson instead:
“One of our producers asked me once, ‘How do you see that character?’ And the only [person] I could see was like kind of Michael Jackson. It sounds like crazy … but he was too old for me already. … You need really interesting actors, and Jaye Davidson was fantastic [for] it. We got really excited and then all of a sudden he didn’t want to do any movies anymore. [So] we had to buy him, in a way, by offering him $1 million, which was at that time a lot of money. And then he did it and then he kind of quit.”
On Fox not wanting Will Smith or Jeff Goldblum for Independence Day:
“They [didn’t feel] that Will was ready for it. They said ‘No’ to it, and I could never understand that. And I then insisted on Will Smith. But they also had a problem with Jeff Goldblum. I mean, how can you have a problem with Jeff Goldblum? [But with Will], at that time, [diversity] was less of a subject matter, but I kind of thought, ‘This is 1996, we need some black heroes.’”
On Heath Ledger smoking ‘a lot of stuff’ while filming The Patriot:
“He was so young. … He was just still a kid and he brought one or two of his friends to the set. And they were smoking a lot of stuff. [Editor’s note: While not explicitly stated, Emmerich implied that he meant weed.] So at one point, Dean Devlin, my producer, had to [intervene], and it didn’t work. So we had Mel talk to him about it and that worked. … [Heath] was super nervous about starring opposite Mel Gibson, which [was] his all-time favorite actor. … That was just incredibly nerve-wracking. He wanted to calm his nerves.”
On why he almost didn’t make The Day After Tomorrow:
“I watched 9/11 happen in my house in Mexico so I immediately put the script aside and said, ‘I’m not doing destruction movie anymore.’ And then nine months later, a friend of mine said, ‘But you could. If you don’t destroy any buildings, it’s totally OK.’ So when you see the movie, the Statue of Liberty is upright and stays upright when the whole wave goes into Manhattan. There’s not one building getting destroyed and that’s how we solved that. The movie was meant as a [climate change] warning. If you don’t change your ways, this will happen.”
On why he doesn’t think White House Down predicted the Jan. 6 insurrection, but how it is a tribute to Barack Obama:
A lot of people actually said this to me, [that White House Down predicted] the January 6th thing. And I said, ‘No, I mean, it’s too far away.’ I think it gives it too much credit. I mean, [there is] a right-wing plot going on. … I became an American because of Obama. I said, if the Americans can vote for Obama, that’s such an amazing thing. And I went to my sister and said. … ‘Let’s become Americans.’ Right. So that was that. And then I was approached by Sony to do this movie, and there was this like feeling of, ‘We have to make [the villains] more right wing. We have to make it a little bit more brutal, because it was Obama [really Jamie Foxx playing Black president James Sawyer] at the end who survived.”
On Will Smith dropping out of Independence Day 2: Resurgence:
“I kind of started with Will Smith and all of a sudden decided to opt out. And then I had to find a new way, how to tell the story. But at the end, it was always like about the [alien] queen coming down to Earth.”
As for why Smith didn’t want to make the sequel: “He decided to do Suicide Squad.”
Moonfall is now in theaters.
— Video produced by Jen Kucsak and edited by John Santo
Watch the trailer:
