Roland Emmerich, director of Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012 and many more, was at the Big Screen event on the weekend for a panel and preview of his new movie Anonymous. After his panel he visited the press room for an impromptue press conference.
Question: Have you been enjoying the Empire Big Screen weekend?
Emmerich: I've been here since like eleven o'clock and i did only my stuff so i couldn't see anything else
Question: Talking about your film Anonymous that's brought you here and you've been sharing a little bit with your fans tonight, perhaps you can tell us a little bit what the films all about and what inspired it?
Emmerich: Anonymous is about the authorship question that Shakespeare didn't write his plays and it's a theory i believe in and share with many other famous writers and actors and the movie is mainly kind of a political thriller during the Elizabethan age.
Question: Do you think this film represents a bit of a departure for you, it's a period piece and based on real events as opposed to something a bit more fantastical?
Emmerich: Well it's definitely a departure you know and all I can say it that when you make these big movies you sometimes loose the connection to real film making and I was just craving that and I found like 9 years ago this terrific script that was an amazing idea and I got into it and really obsessed about it and am really happy that I finally did it.
Question: Can I ask why it's taken so long for you to bring it to the screen?
Emmerich: Well there was always other projects too but once i did a failed attempt, like 5 - 6 years ago, where we went to England and tried to do it here and it just didn't pan out it got more & more expensive, We couldn't get the cast we wanted and then we just stopped. Then I did one or two other movies and then after 2012, You know because in 2012 I had to kind of shoot the whole world pretty much all in Vancouver and i realised all of a sudden how far compositing, especially when you're shoot in digital, had become and all of a sudden I had this idea to do this technique for anonymous which is normally not done for a period drama, strangely, but its a way you can create anything with not so much money.
Question: Do you think disaster movies are not as respected as they were in the days of The Poseidon Adventure or The Towering Inferno when big names were queueing up to get in them?
Emmerich: They were actually then the really a plus movies, I don't know what happened but I'm not so terribly concerned about it because I love these movies you know and I don't really care how they are received.
Interviewer: And can I thank you for saving the queens corgis by the way in 2012
Emmerich: Exactly you know, we kind of saved the queens corgis, I mean you can make these statements and that's why i love these movies the most because you can make personal statements on a bigger canvas for example I also used it to get a political message across in The Day After Tomorrow which was a classic disaster movie but in its heart it's a criticism on how we conduct our life and how we treat our planet and then what you can do as a film maker, you can get quite sarcastic and you have all of a sudden the americans illegally getting into mexico and nobody can stop them which is kind of like the reverse. So I have fun doing these movies but I also want to do other stuff, Anonymous is one of these things, I'll be doing my next movie Singularity is totally completely different again.
Question: What were the biggest challenges you faced doing a film on such a controversial subject?
Emmerich: Well it was one of these movies where we already discussed a lot what we were doing because we knew it's a hotbed and that said, the shooting itself was fun and relaxed and super creative because everybody was really in-sync with one thing, they really loved the script. It was one of these movies where everybody loved the script so thats always a good kind of thing. What I learned about it is that, I worked on this movie like 1 and a half years or so, and this 1 and a half years I realised all of a sudden that the biggest enemy of art is actually that stubbornness from certain people who don't want to openly discuss something they don't even want to let you talk they want to just shut you down, not even answering your questions, so thats something i'm not necessarily looking forward to but i think there will be a lot of discussions about this film and we also have really appraised it you know with a university tour, we're going to the german book fair, we're doing a lot of unusual things which normally you don't do for movies.
Question: Was there anybody who wouldn't cooperate with you because of the subject matter?
Emmerich: We had problems, we wanted to hire a young theatre director who was very adverse in these matters and we had a hard time finding somebody who wanted to do it and then we got really lucky because we found a young woman who was fearless and she said she doesn't care and she was working before on the Globe so she came with incredible credentials and she did a fantastic job. But there were a lot of directors when they read the script they said no i'm not working on this because it will affect my career because, in england especially, the Stratfordians are not very happy about whats happening because more and more they realise they cannot sustain their position and especially a movie is really dangerous for them because movies are very persuasive and because of that i think they are very afraid. These professors sometimes wrote 2-3 books about William Shakespeare and when i'm right and they're wrong their whole lives fall together like a house of cards.
Question: Are you ready to be denounced as a heretic now?
Emmerich: They call me that already and they call me even worse you know also what they like to say it's a conspiracy, it's even used in the advertisement because conspiracy is this word that everyone uses. I don't like to use it really because I think conspiracy is a little nutty you know it feels a little bit like nut case territory but it's not nut case territory at all. You don't want to call Sigmund Freud or Walt Whitman nutcases because they were amazing people.
Question: Do you feel a bit like Darwin trying to push the theory of evolution?
Emmerich: Well a little bit, you feel a little bit like that. I'm always saying it's an uphill battle you know, it's not won with 1 movie but I think it's a big step for the authorship question and just to make it valid because there is a lot of people who say this should not be done at all when I'm saying what kind of society do we live where you can't ask questions?
Question: For you, what are the big pieces of evidence that make you believe that the conventional view of the authorship is perhaps inaccurate and what effect do you think this film is going to have on an audiences perception?
Emmerich: Well for me the biggest thing are the facts, the things we know. A man who had illiterate parents had also illiterate daughters, thats a proven fact. That's hard to understand how a learned man who in his will not one book, not one evidence in his lifetime where somebody referred to him The Writer of Stratford-upon-Avon and Stratford-upon-Avon themselves had no idea there was a writer living under them and from all the other writers we find evidence from their time and from the most famous writer we cannot find any shred of paper or a letter or anything that he was a writer, the only thing what we have and what the Stratfordians rest their case on is after his death, which was not commented by anyone, after a couple of years when the first folio was published, that's when all of a sudden people were talking about the swan of avon and all these things and that's very very strange and on top of it a lot of writers have a whole other view, they don't say there is evidence or not evidence it doesn't matter because the philosophy and the work itself is only about the upper class, it's from an upperclass point of view. It's not like shakespeare wrote a lot of stories about a commoner who was looking from a far at the court and the nobleman it was most of the time a point of kings and queens and princes and their identity crisis, why they couldn't become king, and a lot about bastard children and all these things when you profile it, it doesn't make sense that somebody like Shakespeare from Stratford-Upon-Avon wrote them.
Emmerich: Also people don't understand that William Shakespeare from Stratford was not even called Shakespeare, he was called Shakspēr and it was written in 4 or 5 different ways in his own signatures. There's a guy who writes 36 plays, 2 epic poems and tons of sonnets and the only thing we have of this man is 6 signatures with 3 different spellings and not 1 is called Shakespeare. I'm looking forward to asking this question to one of these Stratfordians but most of the time they don't let you, they yell you down before that because usually they are afraid, they're totally, terribly afraid because they know themselves they have not much evidence and they've devoted their whole lives to these books where they were doing all this invention. There is another thing you can do you just read a normal book and highlight could, should have, maybe have, most possibly had, it's all conjecture there's no evidence.
