Roland Emmerich Breaks Down Scenes from Independence Day, Moonfall & More

I had a long discussion actually with my co-writer

and producer, he said where's the humor in this film?

And I said well, I want a pilot tester outfly

a spacecraft in the Grand Canyon,

make it crash and then like knock out the alien and say:

Welcome to Earth.

Hi, I'm Roland Emmerich and I will break

down some scenes from my career.

[electric zapping]

Ah, what are you shooting at?

Where you at?

That's what I call a close encounter.

[Roland] This scene is from Stargate.

I'll never believe you again.

So this was the set of the build completely,

the Stargate was built kind of mechanical

and this was like an insert which we started doing

as a special shot because otherwise, you know,

everything would like kind of shake

and it's most of the time a very simple trick,

you put under the table a shaker

and that shakes the whole thing

but you can only use this as an insert.

Wait! [electric whirring]

Here is like kind of the only thing we actually

composited in, this was actually created

in a glass tube which was filled with water

and then they injected air into it

and that like actually made this whole effect

of like kind of the Stargate and it was like

kind of a pretty big tube so they had to

kind of slow it down to kind of make it work.

It gets sucked back in, you steer the thing so long,

creates like this effect of a suction movement

trying to steer this thing so it slowly

kind of formed this tube, we used water,

we could have also used oil or something

but water was kind of the cheapest

and we had to do this quite a long time

until we finally found the shots which worked.

And it was like just here, a piece of water

and this actually was the only digital effects we did,

this was one of the first digital

shots ever created in a movie.

At that time, we couldn't kind of make glasses work,

what you have to be careful is like certain reflections

in the glass, which you actually see here a little bit,

here, here, here, and here, you see actually

the reflection of the light, get on my later films,

we sometimes take the glasses out

to have not the reflections in,

and this next scene is from Independence Day.

It was like a model shot, you know,

which was like cut here a gap, right, like here

in the foreground and the background is also model

so what you do there is like you make

a little blast of air, the spaceship would kind of

make that too, the model itself was shot extra

with like a motion control in front of blue screen

and what you have like kind of then

you composite this together and it's a very simple way

to create a lot of like kind of excitement

because we wanted to kind of that he runs out of air,

he blinds the person and then here is the foreground

model with real sky behind it because it's so hard

to create sky, you wouldn't believe.

You still see here a little bit of the Grand Canyon,

mainly this was all done in camera.

Today it's easy but at that time, it was not

because it's like it has a certain luminance

you know, which is hard to kind of create

and you know, and we kind of knew that

and at that time, digital technology was not

as advanced as it is today, there was like a shot

which we wanted to have because he's like ejecting

himself so we needed like a little shot

where the thing opens and he flies down.

This was like a figure this big

and the parachute was like this big

and then you kind of shoot it in slow motion,

it totally works and you see how he's very stiff here

because it's actually a model, I mean it's like

a little parachute with like kind of strings

and you can only shoot it for a moment

otherwise it falls apart but it's such a short

little moment that you can do it.

Something like this costs you like 500 dollars to do

and then you like throw it in the air.

See and this was actually from

a crane dropping a stunt guy down.

[Will grunts]

See and this is now a shot where what we do here,

we shoot something wide, we shoot here uh,

it's really hard to see but there's like a real element

background with a foreground element and another element

here in the very foreground so this was like probably

here converging and then went more like this.

We have Will seeing the spaceship

and this is like a foreground element here,

this is a foreground element and this was shot

in the same light than the background has

and here we kind of like build some sort of a steps up,

you know it's like kind of hidden

naturally behind the foreground element

and that's how simple you can sometimes do shots.

This was real, well no, it was not real,

you know what, it was not real,

I just see that they kind of put these things in

in blue screen and composited them in the foreground.

It's very hard to kind of create these kind of things

and you have to kind of constantly do the thing,

maybe you have to shoot them even extra.

I think we didn't want it to do that

and then we kind of said, oh we need some foreground element

and came up with this then that's naturally

shot totally in the camera somewhere totally different

and see here, you see like another clouds

which you haven't seen before but that's like kind of

just the fact that you have constant changing skies.

This next scene is from Moonfall

and this here was like kind of a set we just had

and here was all blue screen, this was like all,

you know, like this and this is the foreground

and everything else is put in afterwards.

These days they creating like elements, you know,

in different forms so this is like composited

out of many, many different layers

and Day After Tomorrow, I remember we had like

36 water shots, one company totally failed on it,

we had to find another company in due time

to kind of create them, it was kind of a nightmare

and actually it takes like 36 water shots

were the last one going in, even some of them

I kind of rolled my eyes because they were not

like kind of that good but most the time

you cut them just so short and then you're fine

but now it's a company I'm using a lot,

they're called Scanline and they're great with water.

This is like a full CG shot, it's all CG,

there's nothing ever created for real in this shot.

This is a shot which took them six, seven months.

The gravity came from above, this has to be

like these arms slowly getting sucked up

and it's not a normal wave, you know,

because the top part gets like kind of sucked up

but the main part of the wave goes like kind of towards

the shuttle which is taking off.

We had like a little bit of shake

and we had to shake them a little bit

but naturally not as much as we shake it at the end

because first of all we have to kind of paint

certain reflections out of the helmets

and I would actually never ever use helmets

like this anymore, just take it out

and create it afterwards because it had a total

problem with that and because we shot this scene first,

I then took all the glasses out

because it only like reflections

and it's easier to actually put something in

than take something out, but here we probably had to

paint out certain things, you know,

because they covered up too much of the face

and then it's always like kind of

can you reconstruct the face or not?

And then it's always like most the time

you say ah, let's leave it like that.

This was like a very simple thing,

this is kind of the foreground, you know,

so this was actually two shots,

that's like actually foreground rain

otherwise we will never have these impacts,

you know these small little impacts everywhere

but you have to be careful that you never see the rain

instead of the impacts, otherwise like you get

in trouble because you have something

in the foreground which you don't want to have,

and here, this was also like shot in real,

here we had a couple of problems

because there was like some rain showing up

but it like doesn't really matter.

See here, this is like a typical shot

where we used the foreground element

so it has kind of a realness, it becomes a real

kind of feeling because of that.

This is like kind of a chopper taking off

but the chopper is not taking off,

this is all blue screen here behind it

and there is real rain in the foreground

because we can, because it's like doesn't matter

for us, the camera does like this,

because of that, the chopper takes off.

This shot we labored forever, see,

this is all about how much water is in the foreground.

I labored forever on that, and I said

OK, a little bit more and then it was too much

and then I said make it a little bit less

because that's, even in CGI shots,

there's always a certain thing, is it real,

does it feel real or not real?

Most of the time, I'm shooting like stuff wider

so I can go in and make shakes and all kinds of things

because if you don't do that, your like

kind of movie shrinks and shrinks and shrinks

so when you shoot it a little bit wider

or like when you make it a little bit

wider then they can create this all

in real and then you can make little movements.

In old days, you know, like Stargate,

you had to build huge sets, you know,

I wouldn't do them anymore, I would like them

to just have everything what I need to kind of

do some closeups but then the rest, I would kind of do CGI.

Well it's like how you can make a movie look bigger

because of that, this will be the future of cinema

that you can create like enormously big scenarios

but actually only shoot in a relatively small stage.