How ‘Independence Day’ almost lost its most iconic moment: “It was just a placeholder”
It might sound ridiculous to wish you could hark back to the days of the United States merely being a country that simply loved making everything as massive as possible and eating copious amounts of ice cream without worrying about it.
Rather than unilaterally invading countries and trying to collapse the world economy with a Wotsit-faced madman at the helm, but that’s exactly the emotion you get watching 1996’s Independence Day.
After all, we are talking about a good five years before 9/11 took place; when the USA still thought of itself as completely un-attackable, a land of milk and honey (and cheeseburgers) where Bill Clinton was humorously cheating on his Mrs in the Oval Office and the angriest person anyone had to worry about was Alanis Morissette singing about irony.
It was against that backdrop that anyone trying to invade America was the most fanciful idea imaginable, on July 4th of all days, and that it might come from an extra-terrestrial source, with only Will Smith able to save the nation and the world from certain doom, that Roland Emmerich made Independence Day.
Starring a cast packed-full of talent including Smith, Bill Pullman, Judd Hirsch and Jeff Goldblum, it was the ultimate disaster blockbuster, a flag-waving, ‘we’re the best country in the world’, chest-beating, punching aliens in the face smoking a cigar, willy-waving extravaganza of utter nonsense, that of course did monumental numbers at the box office as the yanks flocked to movie theatres to have their insecurities soothed by CGI explosions.
Smith, at the time, was right at the peak of his powers, long before he turned into some kind of new-age, comedian-slapping, shadow of his former self, and led the line superbly, a mix of wisecracks and ‘don’t worry, I’ll handle this’ machismo, and the supporting cast played every cliche note-perfectly.
Goldblum essentially reprised his Jurassic Park role as a concerned scientist urging caution, albeit in a curiously feline/overtly-sexual way, while Pullman was excellent as the under-pressure President of the United States, caught between worrying about his family and the country he’d sworn to protect goddamit.
And it’s Pullman who sums the whole shebang up toward the end of the movie, grabbing a loudspeaker for a seemingly impromptu speech to the assembled military that sounds worrying Trumpian in hindsight and ramps up the jingoism at play to a deafening level as he sends his brave troops into action to fend off those pesky, carnage-waging aliens.
It was a speech that was actually rushed through by the writers for no other reason than that they were under pressure to release the film before Tim Burton’s rival alien-invasion film, Mars Attacks, hit the big screen. As screenwriter Dean Devlin told Complex: “I said, ‘Let me kind of just vomit out something really fast now, and then we’ll spend a lot of time on it later and really rewrite it and make it perfect.’”
Elaborating, “So I went into the other room and literally in five minutes I whipped the speech out, put it into the script – we didn’t even read it. It was just a placeholder.”
Emmerich, the director, believed that the writers would change it later if need be, but Pullman did such a good job with it that it ended up in the edit verbatim. Emmerich added, “Bill is such a moderate man, and he totally knew in a weird way what he had to play. When we talked at the very beginning of the film, he said, ‘I am gonna play this a little bit like a John Wayne figure. Maybe a little bit unsure of himself, but at the end he’s very sure of what he has to do.’”
Of course (spoiler alert for a 30-year-old film), Pullman’s motivational words did the trick, Randy Quaid flew his plane on a suicide mission into the mothership, and America won the day in the end, just like they always do, except for the times they don’t, like Vietnam. And Iraq. And Afghanistan. And Iran.
