ZFF Master Class by Roland Emmerich – Excerpts from his interview

For some, he might strike as a crazy rich film-maker and for the ones who understand his love for art, would qualify him as a rooter for meaningful cinema. Roland Emmerich is one of the constantly successful directors in Hollywood who delivered epic movies such as Stargate, Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, Anonymous, 2012 and The Patriot. He is an extensive art collector and a strong supporter of the LGBT community and is openly gay.

Even though he is the heir to his prosperous family business, he always eluded the idea. He would rather immerse in a book and get lost in an imaginary adventure than gauge profits and losses for things. For its 15^th year celebration, Zurich Film Festival (ZFF) has honoured Roland Emmerich with “A Tribute….Award”. As part of the award ceremony, ZFF has arranged a master class with the film-maker himself. Vivamost reports you here the excerpts from that precious Master Class. 

 

A boy With Fantasies

He was born in Germany to a wealthy founder of a garden machinery production company. He travelled across Europe and the USA during his summer holidays and was enthralled by different cultures. He was certain from his boyhood days that his future is in arts than in business. His initial thoughts were to become a production designer as for him direction was out of his league and skill.

But, Life Had Set Him Up For A Challenge

In 1981, while at the University of Television and Film Munich, he conceived an idea for his final thesis, a short film. Because the story and the resources to bring it to life were beyond what is usual, all his 3 teammates dropped out from the project. The budget also overshot the university’s student fund so he had to take a loan from his father. Roland had to become not just the writer but also the director of the film. Soon, discovering his passion for the project, others joined him and together they created the full-length feature The Noah’s Ark Principle, which was screened as the opening film of the 34th Berlin International Film Festival in 1984.

Hollywood Spree

With this rookie confidence, he launched a production company with his sister and made films such as Joey, Hollywood Monster, Moon44 among others. His earlier movies flared up critics because of the films’ resemblance to American cinema. He was soon discovered by Hollywood producers who saw in Roland a young talent with futuristic ideas that promised ensuing successes. He debuted Hollywood with Universal Soldier. And, then followed Stargate, which was an idea from his school days. To convince the production team into his vision was a hard nut to crack for Roland so he worked on almost all technical departments himself for Stargate.  

Roland’s first big break, however, came with the 1996’s surprise blockbuster, Independence day. It was not just the highest-grossing film of that year but also kicked off a mania for sci-fi genre for the years to come and broke all the box-office records set till then. A fun fact: Roland worked three and a half weeks in Mexico to develop the script for Independence Day and the shooting was completed in 11 months.  

Unlike what the majority thinks, Roland strongly believes that monster movies are not a good bet. He knew this even before he accepted Godzilla. In fact, he was reluctant to work on it because he didn’t find the script good enough. Also, the project was stalled midway due to budget constraints. Still, Sony was adamant to finish it so eventually together in association with a Japanese organization completed the shooting. Godzilla made half of what Independence Day did and garnered harsh reviews all over yet, commercially it performed decently as the third-highest-grossing film worldwide for 1998.

Moving On

Negative feedback never stopped Roland from experimenting with new ideas. He went on to do films that irked and raged commonplace such as Anonymous. It is the movie that debates William Shakespeare’s existence. As an answer to one fan’s question on why he fancies destruction in movies, Roland replied that he is deeply disturbed by climate change adversities and this is his way of alarming his audience. He reads voraciously on the subject and wants to create projects that will warn but also educate the public on environmental negligence. The other subjects where he wants to lay his focus upon are film making and comedy. Someone asked if he believes Aliens are real and to this, he smilingly replied that he wants to believe that they exist.

His recent work Midway details the Battle of Midway of World War II. It has an ensemble of actors that include Ed Skrein, Patrick Wilson, Luke Evans, Aaron Eckhart, Nick Jonas, Mandy Moore, Dennis Quaid, Darren Criss and Woody Harrelson. Midway will be released on November 7th, 2019 in the German part of Switzerland. With that announcement of his gift to us, the master class ended with applaud and cheer.

• A Tribute Award
• cinema
• Midway
• movies
• Roland Emmerich
• ZFF
• ZFF Masters Class