In the film “Independence Day,” the saga of an alien invasion that opens in massive national release Tuesday, various American landmarks are blown up by the aliens as they decimate the cities of Los Angeles and New York. However, when the alien spaceships get to Washington, D.C., and blow up the White House, audiences roar.
What that says about the American view of politics these days has been analyzed in newspaper editorials coast to coast. But that didn’t make the filmmakers any less nervous when summoned to the White House recently to show the film to the president.
“It was very odd to sit in the White House and watch it blown up on screen,” says Dean Devlin, the film’s co-writer and producer. “But the president had fun with the movie. All through it, though, everyone in that room waited for his response before we responded; when he laughed (at other comic points in the film) there would be a big sigh of relief. So at the end of the picture, our hearts were in our throats. But he had a big grin and gave me a big handshake at the end.”
A few days before, Devlin and his partner, director and co-writer Roland Emmerich had had a similarly heady experience, watching the first finished print of the film in a Manhattan theater. It sounded like a rock concert as the audience screamed wildly at scenes of nations around the world uniting to beat back the aliens.
“Obviously people were waiting for a movie like this,” says Devlin. “They were feeling good about feeling patriotic again. That’s why we called the movie `Independence Day.’ It’s the best American holiday because it expresses the best about Americans, freedom, independence, charting your own destiny. And we wanted to make a movie that wasn’t patriotic at the expense of other nationalities, that strips away the nationalism. You’re not celebrating the country as much as being part of the human race. We wanted to make this an international holiday.”
As such, world capitals get screen time and pilots of other countries (in one politically feel-good moment, Iraqi, Israeli and British) work side by side. But the primary screen destruction is of American capitals and symbols, such as the Empire State Building and the White House and Capitol.
“On one hand,” says Devlin, “we needed to use symbols of the free world, so we wouldn’t have to subtitle New York, Washington, D.C. But on another, by destroying these symbols of continuity, that have been around our whole lives, it showed that if they can be destroyed then anything can happen.”
That sense of “what if” was the impetus for the project.
In January 1995, Emmerich and Devlin rented a house in Mexico and started writing. Four weeks later, they had a finished script, with homages to other movies woven in. “It really is a combination of three different genres,” says Emmerich. “The disaster films of the 1970s crossed with science fiction scenarios like `The War of the Worlds’ and the World War II let’s-fight-against-the-enemy films.” And there are specific film references throughout, among them “2001,” “Dr. Strangelove,” “The War of the Worlds,” “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “Alien” and “Star Wars.” “We stole from the best,” says Devlin.
The script was sent around by their agents in late January on a Thursday at noon. By 3 p.m. they had three offers; by Friday morning they had nine. By Friday night, they’d sold it to Twentieth Century Fox and on Monday morning were in pre-production with a budget estimated to be around $70 million.
From the beginning, the studio interfered very little, according to the duo, with the exception of the initial usual suggestions of casting. “Hollywood tends to repeat itself, offer the same names for everything,” says Emmerich. “But I didn’t want the A-list (action heroes). I didn’t want the budget going up, and it would have made the movie predictable. . . . We just wanted to get the best actors for each role.”
Will Smith, for example, as the gung-ho marine pilot in a pivotal role to save the world might not have seemed the obvious choice, but he was to the creative team. “First, his brilliant work in the film `Six Degrees of Separation’ showed his talent, and we only considered talent,” says Devlin. “Then, our pilot is all-American and Will is the all-American dream. He made himself rich and famous by becoming a black rapper. Then the world said, “You’re a black rapper’ and he said, `No, I’m a TV star,’ and he became one. Then he says he’s going to become a movie star and does. That’s the dream, not allowing anyone to define who you are. And when we met him, he’s such a nice person that Roland and I were determined to get him in the movie.”
Other roles were similarly filled with actors, not franchise stars. Jeff Goldblum, admittedly a regular in high-grossing disaster flicks, plays a brilliant MIT-trained scientist underachieving by working at a New York cable company who detects early evidence of the aliens’ communications. Judd Hirsch plays his father. Bill Pullman is the president; Mary McDonnell, the first lady. Randy Quaid plays an alcoholic ex-pilot who claims he’s been abducted by aliens. Margaret Colin is the president’s adviser and the scientist’s ex-wife. In all, there are 12 leads and 200 speaking parts.
Smith, in particular, turned out to be a gifted improviser. One of the high points of the film is a scene in which he drags a captured alien in a parachute across the Bonneville salt flats.
“In the script, he says, `Now that was a close encounter,’ ” says Emmerich. “But in his version, he punches the alien and says `Welcome to Earth.’ It gets one of the biggest reactions in the movie.” So does the monologue that follows, an almost street talk rant in which he complains about the alien’s weight and smell as he pulls him across the salt.
The filmmakers wanted the characters, not the special effects, to be the main draw. But, of course, the special effects are what provide the movie’s thrilling ride and they’re groundbreaking, from the moment the alien spaceships appear.
“Roland always said that he never understood these movies where aliens show up in the backwoods and two farmers get to meet them,” says Devlin. “If you could fly 9 billion light years, if you had that kind of technology, you don’t need to hide. You could make a big entrance. And that’s what we did. We choreographed a big entrance.”
In their invasion, giant, dark menacing ships loom over the cities, first blocking their light and then sending out lasers, setting off firestorms of mass destruction in the cities below.
To fight back, forces around the world drop their national conflicts and band together in rousing John Wayne, gung-ho style. But the technical reality of producing those scenes was dizzying. To create the effects, Emmerich and Devlin used five visual-effects companies, and shots were often composites of 75 images; in other films such as “Apollo 13,” five or six images blended together was the norm.
“In the aerial battle scenes, we had over 200 flying objects in the air at the same time,” explains Devlin, “flying around this 15 mile wide spaceship above a landscape that’s familiar to the eye. And foolishly enough, we did it in broad daylight. If you go back to other aerial fight scenes in movies, they’re normally in outer space or at night, where you have a lot of room for error. In daylight with F-18s, there’s no room to make mistakes. Often we were sending shots back 30 to 40 times to make them look real.”
Adding to the technical difficulty was the sheer physical difficulty of shooting on location, particularly in the heat of the Nevada and Utah desert early in production. Plus, in the scenes involving Smith and the captured alien trying to get to the government’s secret UFO facility Area 51, they had to deal with the corrosive environment of the Bonneville salt flats. In one scene, Smith encounters an army of RVs trying to escape, a group assembled after the producers put an ad in a local paper asking anyone who had a camper and wanted to be in a movie to appear. “What we hadn’t realized, though, was that the salt eats through cables and through tires,” says Devlin. “After it was over, we had to spend two weeks cleaning up all those vehicles.”
Shooting on location helped at least one performance, Bill Pullman’s as the president, particularly in the scene in which he delivers a stirring speech to send the fighter pilots into the air. They were at Wendover Airport in Utah, the airfield from which the Enola Gay took off for Japan carrying the atomic bombs intended for Hiroshima. It was Aug. 6 last year, the 50th anniversary of the bombing. “The gravity of that decision . . . that was the beginning for me,” says Pullman. “I found the voice, the posture, being there really informed everything.”
His co-star Jeff Goldblum also found himself getting emotional but not during shooting; it happened afterward while watching the finished film for the first time. “I got very emotional seeing things blown up,” he says. “New York, Chicago gone! How dear this planet is . . . how dare anyone hurt it.”
A fan of sci-fi films since his childhood, Goldblum remembers every film he saw in those years, and he’s sure that kids who see “Independence Day” will remember it as vividly years from now. And it gives him pleasure to watch the effect taking place.
“Seeing it with an audience, it was like the Super Bowl. The movie obviously delivered whatever it was they wanted to see,” Goldblum says. So that’s what he’s planned to do this July 4–take a few friends and watch the movie and the audience watching the movie again.
“This Independence Day will be a good one,” he says.
