"I believe in the great 'What If?' What if aliens showed up, what if tomorrow morning, you walked out of your door and these enormous spaceships hovered over every single city in the world? Wouldn't that be the most exciting thing that could happen?"
Better still, what if the director could film it for you wholesale?
This is the unique skill that has helped to turn Independence Day director Roland Emmerich into a major Hollywood figure. The German-born filmmaker has succeeded in creating spectacular American-styled fantasies with a European sense of financial restraint.
Which is to say that Emmerich has come a long way from his early days as an art student in Munich. Though his studies were originally devoted to painting and sculpting, he quickly changed to production design and film making. Since The Towering Inferno was Emmerich's idea of an old masterpiece, the jump was not so surprising.
What remains surprising was the speed with which Emmerich scaled the commercial ladder. His student film, The Noah's Ark Principle(1984), blossomed into a sizable success at the Berlin Film Festival and was released through out 20 countries. This paved the way for his next two movies, Making Contact and Moon 44. It was especially with the production of Moon 44 (1989) that Emmerich demonstrated his remarkable skill at producing impressive special effects at bargain basement prices.
Or as Emmerich would put it, he made "the biggest low-budget film in history."
Seemingly, he was a natural for the commercial driven German cinema of the 1980s. Under the conservative government of Helmut Kohl, Germany was seeking to create a movie industry that could directly challenge the wild fantasies of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. But Wolfgang Petersen's production of Enemy Mine(1985) turned into a Volkswagen built at the cost of a Mercedes. It was an expensive stumble that sent the Germans back to the drawing board.
Though Emmerich was already proving himself to be a better fantasy filmmaker than Petersen, he wasn't that interested in being limited to the European scene. Emmerich had a passion for the disaster epics of Irwin Allen (whose films he can quote without irony) and a detailed familiarity with pop American culture that would be the envy of any Yankee "trash hound."
He also had an emerging work relationship with the actor-turned-writer Dean Devlin, a man who could fill in the narrative gaps to Emmerich's wild fits of cinematic vision. The two quickly formed into a non-sibling version of the Coen brothers, including the odd ability to seemingly finish each other's thoughts.
From the start, the Emmerich-Devlin team brought a distinctive quality to their films. Though Universal Soldier (1992) was only given passing approval as a respectable Jean Claude Van Damme thriller, the movie actually had a surprisingly serious tone to its off beat storyline about dead American commandos who are turned
into zombified heroes.
But it was the surprise hit of StarGate (1994) that fully represented the Emmerich-Devlin universe. The movie was a freewheeling combination of UFO folklore, tabloid newspaper fabrications, paranoid interpretations of ancient history, and good clean fun.
StarGate also managed to put most of its $60 million dollar budget onto the screen, which is more than can be said about a recent
$200 million dollar bathing epic (Waterworld). Better still, StarGate also
managed to have a sense of humor about itself without developing a bad case of self-parody.
Which is one of Emmerich's great strengths as a filmmaker. He has an ability to laugh along with his movies, but he doesn't laugh at them. He can entertain an audience without feeling superior, and he is just as in love with his own giddy concepts as his fans. When he says that "I believe in fantasy," the man is actually sincere.
It is a sensibility that happily filters through his movies.
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