Roland Emmerich explains how science and conspiracy theories informed his movie Moonfall, and shares some thoughts on streaming and theatrical releases.
Director and screenwriter Roland Emmerich has pitted the protagonists of his films against all manner of cataclysmic threats, from aliens and rampaging kaiju to superstorms and apocalyptic Mayan prophesies, but his latest cinematic thriller adds another source of potential disaster to the list: The moon.
Digital Trends: Moonfall has such a wild, fascinating concept for a film. Can you give me a brief overview of where the idea came from and how you refined it to get to the point where you were ready to make a movie out of it? Our visual effects supervisor, Peter Travers, told us a couple of things which weren’t going to work in the script. So from there, we went and looked for some opinions about how to make certain things work. It was a slow but sure process. When we were shooting, for example, we had an astronaut with us when we did all the shuttle scenes.Yeah, that definitely helped, because nobody knew what buttons to push in the shuttle! So there were a lot of scientists involved.
So many of your films involve epic visual-effects shots. What’s your process like in working with the VFX team? How much of the scenes do you typically have mapped out and envisioned — whether through the previsualization process or concept art — when you begin production? Without spoiling too much, is there a particular scene you’re really excited for audiences to see in Moonfall?
We ended up putting more things inside the moon than we planned, in order to give it more dimensions and let you see more of the depth inside it. We also realized pretty early on that we had to put the light source inside the moon not totally in the middle, but a little bit more like a backlight, because it looked so much better that way and the shadows didn’t cause as many problems. There were lots of little things like that we changed along the way.
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