LONG TIME NO SEA
Director Emmerich waited two decades to bring Midway to big screen
“I never like making books into movies because I’m too much into literature to even dare.” So says Roland Emmerich, the German director of such big-budget disaster movies as Independence Day, Godzilla and The Day After Tomorrow.
But scratch that sentiment and you’ll find it’s not quite the case. True, Emmerich won’t be making an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice anytime soon. But pseudo-scientific texts have long been jumping-off points for his work.
Take 2012, his 2009 movie in which a global catastrophe threatens humanity’s survival. The movie delivers some mumbo-jumbo explanation about “crust displacement,” which Emmerich says he came upon in the 1995 book Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth’s Lost Civilization.
“Also, I’d always wanted to make a movie about Noah’s ark, and how these days Noah would be the government, and they wouldn’t tell anybody anything.”
Then there’s 2004’s The Day After Tomorrow, about cataclysmic climate change. “I’d read a really crazy book called The Coming Global Superstorm. It’s written by Whitley Strieber and Art Bell. They’re both crazy.”
Seems a fair assessment: Strieber also wrote Communion, recounting his alleged meetings with extraterrestrials. Bell, who died last year, used to host the paranormal-themed radio show Coast to Coast AM. Their book supposes a sudden ice age that wiped out an ancient, technologically advanced society, and suggests it could happen again.
“Which for me was great,” says Emmerich. “You could show climate change as one big storm.”
He actually bought the rights to that book, because there were two images in it that he wanted to include in his movie. The first was a scene of people holed up in New York’s central library, burning books to keep warm. And the second was the notion of people fleeing south to avoid the ice sheets. “The idea that Americans have to illegally immigrate into Mexico,” he chuckles. “How great is that?”
Emmerich’s newest is Midway, which tells the story of the 1942 battle between the United States and Japan that turned the tide in the Pacific war. It’s a story he’s wanted to bring to the screen for more than two decades.
“I’ve always loved war movies, and it reminded me of my favourite war movie, which is A Bridge Too Far.”
Alas, when he first floated the idea to Sony Pictures in the 1990s, the studio turned him down, possibly because its new owners were backed by a consortium of Japanese banks. Undeterred, Emmerich shot a different piece of history: The Patriot, set during the American Revolution and starring Mel Gibson.
Then Michael Bay released Pearl Harbor in 2001, and Emmerich realized he’d have to wait awhile longer before doing such a similar project. (Midway includes a lengthy scene dramatizing that attack, as well.)
The delay proved to be a financial plus. The director estimates it would have cost $120 million to make Midway at the turn of the century. In 2019, he managed it for less than $100 million, thanks to extensive use of blue screens and computer-generated effects. The ocean-set film was shot mostly on tax-friendly Montreal sound stages, with two weeks on location in Hawaii. “All that helps you to make a movie like this.”
Emmerich will be back in Montreal in just a few weeks to start shooting his next movie, Moonfall. The science-fiction tale is, according to IMDb.com, about “a space crew (that) travels to the moon after it’s struck by an asteroid and is sent on a collision course with Earth.”
I have to ask: Where did he get that idea? Because 10 years ago I closed off my review of 2012 by stating: “If his urge for destruction manages to rear its head yet again, look for nothing less than a giant asteroid knocking the moon into a collision course with our home world.”
He chuckles at the question: “It wouldn’t be the normal moon. I wouldn’t do it. It’s something else. I wonder what it is?”
He says the idea did come to him about 10 years ago, but it wasn’t from my review. “I read a book called Who Built the Moon? It totally got me going. It’s always these odd books, which nobody else probably reads. It’s by these two English guys who wrote about the peculiarities of the moon, but they also wrote about megalithic yards” — an ancient unit of measurement first proposed in the 1950s — “and all kinds of things, and how this is all connected. And they had three different theories — and then I invented my own.”
Fair enough. No screenwriting credit for me. But an Amazon search turns up a copy of Who Built the Moon? It was written by Alan Butler. And Christopher Knight. If life were a Emmerich movie, this would be an end-of-the-world kind of coincidence. cknight@postmedia.com