- I had a long discussion actually with my co-writer
and producer, he said where's the humor in this film?
And I said well, I want a pilot tester outfly
a spacecraft in the Grand Canyon,
make it crash and then like knock out the alien and say:
- Welcome to Earth.
- Hi, I'm Roland Emmerich and I will break
down some scenes from my career.
[electric zapping]
- Ah, what are you shooting at?
Where you at?
That's what I call a close encounter.
- [Roland] This scene is from Stargate.
- I'll never believe you again.
- So this was the set of the build completely,
the Stargate was built kind of mechanical
and this was like an insert which we started doing
as a special shot because otherwise, you know,
everything would like kind of shake
and it's most of the time a very simple trick,
you put under the table a shaker
and that shakes the whole thing
but you can only use this as an insert.
- Wait! [electric whirring]
- Here is like kind of the only thing we actually
composited in, this was actually created
in a glass tube which was filled with water
and then they injected air into it
and that like actually made this whole effect
of like kind of the Stargate and it was like
kind of a pretty big tube so they had to
kind of slow it down to kind of make it work.
It gets sucked back in, you steer the thing so long,
creates like this effect of a suction movement
trying to steer this thing so it slowly
kind of formed this tube, we used water,
we could have also used oil or something
but water was kind of the cheapest
and we had to do this quite a long time
until we finally found the shots which worked.
And it was like just here, a piece of water
and this actually was the only digital effects we did,
this was one of the first digital
shots ever created in a movie.
At that time, we couldn't kind of make glasses work,
what you have to be careful is like certain reflections
in the glass, which you actually see here a little bit,
here, here, here, and here, you see actually
the reflection of the light, get on my later films,
we sometimes take the glasses out
to have not the reflections in,
and this next scene is from Independence Day.
It was like a model shot, you know,
which was like cut here a gap, right, like here
in the foreground and the background is also model
so what you do there is like you make
a little blast of air, the spaceship would kind of
make that too, the model itself was shot extra
with like a motion control in front of blue screen
and what you have like kind of then
you composite this together and it's a very simple way
to create a lot of like kind of excitement
because we wanted to kind of that he runs out of air,
he blinds the person and then here is the foreground
model with real sky behind it because it's so hard
to create sky, you wouldn't believe.
You still see here a little bit of the Grand Canyon,
mainly this was all done in camera.
Today it's easy but at that time, it was not
because it's like it has a certain luminance
you know, which is hard to kind of create
and you know, and we kind of knew that
and at that time, digital technology was not
as advanced as it is today, there was like a shot
which we wanted to have because he's like ejecting
himself so we needed like a little shot
where the thing opens and he flies down.
This was like a figure this big
and the parachute was like this big
and then you kind of shoot it in slow motion,
it totally works and you see how he's very stiff here
because it's actually a model, I mean it's like
a little parachute with like kind of strings
and you can only shoot it for a moment
otherwise it falls apart but it's such a short
little moment that you can do it.
Something like this costs you like 500 dollars to do
and then you like throw it in the air.
See and this was actually from
a crane dropping a stunt guy down.
[Will grunts]
See and this is now a shot where what we do here,
we shoot something wide, we shoot here uh,
it's really hard to see but there's like a real element
background with a foreground element and another element
here in the very foreground so this was like probably
here converging and then went more like this.
We have Will seeing the spaceship
and this is like a foreground element here,
this is a foreground element and this was shot
in the same light than the background has
and here we kind of like build some sort of a steps up,
you know it's like kind of hidden
naturally behind the foreground element
and that's how simple you can sometimes do shots.
This was real, well no, it was not real,
you know what, it was not real,
I just see that they kind of put these things in
in blue screen and composited them in the foreground.
It's very hard to kind of create these kind of things
and you have to kind of constantly do the thing,
maybe you have to shoot them even extra.
I think we didn't want it to do that
and then we kind of said, oh we need some foreground element
and came up with this then that's naturally
shot totally in the camera somewhere totally different
and see here, you see like another clouds
which you haven't seen before but that's like kind of
just the fact that you have constant changing skies.
This next scene is from Moonfall
and this here was like kind of a set we just had
and here was all blue screen, this was like all,
you know, like this and this is the foreground
and everything else is put in afterwards.
These days they creating like elements, you know,
in different forms so this is like composited
out of many, many different layers
and Day After Tomorrow, I remember we had like
36 water shots, one company totally failed on it,
we had to find another company in due time
to kind of create them, it was kind of a nightmare
and actually it takes like 36 water shots
were the last one going in, even some of them
I kind of rolled my eyes because they were not
like kind of that good but most the time
you cut them just so short and then you're fine
but now it's a company I'm using a lot,
they're called Scanline and they're great with water.
This is like a full CG shot, it's all CG,
there's nothing ever created for real in this shot.
This is a shot which took them six, seven months.
The gravity came from above, this has to be
like these arms slowly getting sucked up
and it's not a normal wave, you know,
because the top part gets like kind of sucked up
but the main part of the wave goes like kind of towards
the shuttle which is taking off.
We had like a little bit of shake
and we had to shake them a little bit
but naturally not as much as we shake it at the end
because first of all we have to kind of paint
certain reflections out of the helmets
and I would actually never ever use helmets
like this anymore, just take it out
and create it afterwards because it had a total
problem with that and because we shot this scene first,
I then took all the glasses out
because it only like reflections
and it's easier to actually put something in
than take something out, but here we probably had to
paint out certain things, you know,
because they covered up too much of the face
and then it's always like kind of
can you reconstruct the face or not?
And then it's always like most the time
you say ah, let's leave it like that.
This was like a very simple thing,
this is kind of the foreground, you know,
so this was actually two shots,
that's like actually foreground rain
otherwise we will never have these impacts,
you know these small little impacts everywhere
but you have to be careful that you never see the rain
instead of the impacts, otherwise like you get
in trouble because you have something
in the foreground which you don't want to have,
and here, this was also like shot in real,
here we had a couple of problems
because there was like some rain showing up
but it like doesn't really matter.
See here, this is like a typical shot
where we used the foreground element
so it has kind of a realness, it becomes a real
kind of feeling because of that.
This is like kind of a chopper taking off
but the chopper is not taking off,
this is all blue screen here behind it
and there is real rain in the foreground
because we can, because it's like doesn't matter
for us, the camera does like this,
because of that, the chopper takes off.
This shot we labored forever, see,
this is all about how much water is in the foreground.
I labored forever on that, and I said
OK, a little bit more and then it was too much
and then I said make it a little bit less
because that's, even in CGI shots,
there's always a certain thing, is it real,
does it feel real or not real?
Most of the time, I'm shooting like stuff wider
so I can go in and make shakes and all kinds of things
because if you don't do that, your like
kind of movie shrinks and shrinks and shrinks
so when you shoot it a little bit wider
or like when you make it a little bit
wider then they can create this all
in real and then you can make little movements.
In old days, you know, like Stargate,
you had to build huge sets, you know,
I wouldn't do them anymore, I would like them
to just have everything what I need to kind of
do some closeups but then the rest, I would kind of do CGI.
Well it's like how you can make a movie look bigger
because of that, this will be the future of cinema
that you can create like enormously big scenarios
but actually only shoot in a relatively small stage.