The inspiration behind Bill Pullman’s ‘Independence Day’ speech: “Obviously very derivative”
By the time the Independence Day cast and crew finished watching Bill Pullman’s soon-to-be iconic speech during a vital shooting day at Utah’s Wendover Airport in 1995, all the extras in the scene erupted in spontaneous applause and feverish screaming. It was the first evidence that the movie‘s creative team had that this speech had the potential to be something very special, and a wave of relief swept over producer/co-writer Dean Devlin.
Amazingly, Devlin had wanted to rewrite the speech before shooting but had run out of time. He was so worried about it, in fact, that before cameras rolled, he was convinced the speech would be a disaster. You see, while making the movie, Devlin and director/co-writer Roland Emmerich realised they needed a scene in which Pullman’s President Whitmore, a Gulf War veteran and former fighter pilot, rallied his troops before an all-out assault on the vicious aliens bent on destroying the world. However, they didn’t bet on quite how quickly it would need to be cobbled together.
Humanity’s counteroffensive against the evil extraterrestrials would take place on the Fourth of July, the federal holiday that allows every American to celebrate the ratification of the Declaration of Independence. This gave the movie its title and thematic resonance, so Devlin knew the speech had to be rousing and memorable. Ideally, he would have had weeks to craft it, but because Independence Day was a tight production and time was of the essence, he had to get something down on paper fast.
“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,'” Devlin told Complex in 2016. “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.”
Despite Devlin’s haste in writing the speech, he worked within specific guidelines. Before starting, he said to Emmerich, “It would be great if we could do a kind of a St Crispin’s Day speech,” referencing the seminal speech in William Shakespeare’s Henry V before the Battle of Agincourt. This invigorating address makes King Henry V’s soldiers, who are vastly outnumbered, feel like they can take on the world, and Devlin knew replicating it for Independence Day could have the same effect. Amusingly, though, Emmerich’s reaction was a withering, “Oh great. We only have to write a speech as great as the St Crispin’s Day speech. How are we going to do that?!”
Ultimately, despite Whitmore’s stirring oration being “obviously very derivative” of the St Crispin’s Day speech, Devlin managed to imbue it with enough modern relevance to the American public that they couldn’t help having their souls stirred. As Bill Clinton’s former speechwriter Michael Waldman told Complex, Hollywood has “often portrayed the presidents it wishes it had,” and this is exactly what Devlin did with Whitmore. In the movie, this is a president who is uncomfortable with the strictures of politics, so when he finally gets the chance to abandon compromise and half-measures by embracing his status as a wartime leader, he seizes it with gusto.
As previously mentioned, Devlin believed the speech contained all these elements, but he still wanted to refine them before it came time for Pullman to put it all on the line. So, on the day, when he dashed to set and realised Pullman was still working with the speech he scribbled down in five minutes, he “had a panic attack.” Devlin recalled, “This is a scene we were supposed to spend weeks on, and we just never got around to it. And when I got there, they were already rehearsing the speech.”
Nevertheless, in a moment of true Hollywood magic and to Devlin’s eternal surprise, being unable to overthink the speech turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Emmerich and Pullman, flying by the seat of their pants, went for it without trying to micromanage the situation, and it worked gangbusters. “I don’t think we were given a lot of direction,” Pullman remembered. “We were shooting nights, and so everyone’s a little bit woozy, but somehow everyone involved in that scene was on the money.”
Devlin, the most relieved man on set, recalled looking at Emmerich in stunned amazement when the speech went over so well, and both men exclaimed, “I guess this speech is pretty darn good.” Indeed, in a movie filled with incredible imagery, not the least of which is the White House being blown to smithereens by an alien death ray, Pullman telling America, “Today we celebrate our Independence Day!” is arguably its most iconic moment.
Incredibly, even that line was a last-minute addition thrown in because Fox had toyed with changing the movie’s title to Doomsday, and Devlin wanted to stack the deck in favour of his preferred title. Nowadays, it is indelibly associated with the movie, and the speech would feel incomplete without it.
