Wonder-Con: Roland Emmerich on 10,000 B.C.

By George 'El Guapo' Roush on February 26, 2008

Why make happy movies when destroying the planet is so much fun? The director of Independence Day talks about his latest movie, 10,000 B.C.

What is it with you and the fall of the societies movies? You destroy a society better than anyone else.

Emmerich: Well, I just think the downfall of a culture is very, very interesting and in this case it's a guy who's a false God who's using technology to enslave other people. His knowledge is why he makes himself a God. The people enslaved have to be freed and they're freed by the most unlikely person, a guy who's actually a hunter gatherer. It's just an interesting concept.

When you were doing 'Day After Tomorrow', I noticed there were wolves chasing people in that. Is that where that came from for this movie?

Emmerich: No. It was actually interesting for me to do that scene because I realized that we had to do it better this time. I was very, very careful to approach the whole process, and what we did was that two and a half years ago we went to visual FX companies in England, or actually all over the world and we chose England because we thought that they had the most experienced because they did a couple of really good things like the 'Harry Potters' and stuff, and we said, 'Okay, guy. Lets first test it.' It took pretty much two and a half years to build and do all that stuff that we did because we had some stuff where they thought we were crazy because we said, 'There's a tiger. He's digital and he has to be in the water.' It's like the two holy grails of digital FX in one shot. It's something that you have to really, really plan. It's really interesting for me because I'm not that type of person, but at one point everyone was all of a sudden talking to each other and everyone was really, really upset and somebody said to me, 'Roland, we just found out that one frame of the Mammoth, to render it will be sixteen hours.' One frame. It was like a real disaster because form the very beginning they knew we were going to have to reduce that time down to five or six hours and we found tricks to do that without losing quality, but it was tough. For four weeks or so everybody was very upset.

Did you find a new way to do it?

Emmerich: No, but we found the simplest trick, and it actually wasn't us. Somebody else said, 'Well, do you see how many hairs?' It's like a mathematic problem and we found out that a Mammoth with half the hair looks exactly the same. It's as simple as that, but you have to get to that. It was a little bit like redoing the digital model to take only half the hair and still have the same quality.

What animal were you most excited to put on the screen for this?

Emmerich: The Saber-tooth Tiger. It was just an elegant animal and I remember as a kid I went to one of these museums and I saw a skeleton of one and it was really that big. It was just so fascinating. It's a cat that's that tall.

How was the set design process for this and what's the biggest set in the movie?

Emmerich: It's the palace facade. I think it was forty meters high, or thirty, thirty five meters high. The biggest thing that was done for the film was actually the model. The outdoor model of the whole pyramid construction site. We built that in [?] where our sets were. We used like a spider-cam to shoot it. It was the biggest, most expensive item in the movie. Warners was very kind of nervous about it because it was an outdoor model and it was very essential for the movie, but I convinced them to do it and now they're very happy that they did it because the quality of the light is so perfect that you can hardly believe it's a model. Also, outdoors you have such a high stop and so everything is in focus. The stop was always like at 22 or something like that.

Was Jean-Jacques Annaud an influence on this?

Emmerich: Yeah, totally. I was saying though it's not 'Quest For Fire' because 'Quest For Fire' is more like a time, like two hundred, three thousand years ago. It's like the Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon period.

Did you feel a weird sense of déjà vu when you saw 'Cloverfield'?

Emmerich: Yeah, a little bit. Actually, Dean Devlin said to me, 'You know they did one of our movies?' [laughs]

There were some exact shots from 'Godzilla'. I was amazed by that.

Emmerich: Yeah.

Do you have any feelings about 'Godzilla' ten years after?

Emmerich: I feel very good about 'Godzilla'. It's the only movie that once in a while when it's on TV that I'll watch a piece of it. Every other one of them I will immediately shut off. I don't know why. I've just always liked 'Godzilla'. I know everyone else hated it, but I liked it.

I did too, very much. [I didn't say that by the way. -Ed.]

Emmerich: A man of good tastes.

I heard you almost were going to do another one.

Emmerich: No. You know what, I just realized that the older I get you only have so many movies in you and I just don't want to do sequels. The only sequel that I once in a while consider is 'Independence Day' because it's just such a seminal moment for me. Also, once in a while I talk with Dean about it and most of the time it's always that we have a couple new ideas and then at the end we say, 'It's not good enough.'

So you don't think you'll ever make a sequel to it?

Emmerich: I don't know. Hopefully one day I'll have a good idea, but then what also happens to me is that another idea comes along for something new and I want to do that.

What are you working on after this?

Emmerich: '2012'. I'm doing the numbers now. I'm a numbers guy.

Like Apocalypto or...

Emmerich: Mayan.

It'll be like the end of the society and everything?

Emmerich: Uh-huh. It's just like a theory that's out there and I've been aware of it through many, many books over the years and naturally because of the date and it creeping closer I think more and more people believe in it. I don't know yet if I should believe in it, but I think it's fascinating, just think that our world will end and we know about it – what would you do? So the movie would deal with that.

So it's another comedy for you.

Emmerich: [laughs] Actually, I said to a friend who asked if it was an end of the world movie again, and I said, 'Yeah, it is, but this time it's fun.'

Source:Latinoreview

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