Roland Emmerich’s favourite movie of all time: “They always triumph”
Long before he became known as blockbuster cinema’s pre-eminent ‘Master of Disaster’, it was clear from the very beginning of his career what type of filmmaking Roland Emmerich was going to dedicate his career to above all others.
His first solo directorial effort after he co-helmed Franzmann with Oswald von Richthofen came on German sci-fi The Noah’s Ark Principle, which he followed up with technological fantasy horror Joey, horror comedy Hollywood-Monster, and sci-fi actioner Moon 44, making it perfectly clear that he wasn’t interested in telling small-scale, intimate stories with serious dramatic stakes.
Carrying on in the exact same vein, Emmerich continued rising up the Hollywood ranks by orchestrating Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren’s Universal Soldier and Kurt Russell’s Stargate, both of which became highly profitable and established the filmmaker as being a safe pair of hands when it came to explosive bouts of extra-terrestrial escapism.
Needless to say, that served him very well when Independence Day became the second highest-grossing release in history behind only Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park when it conquered the box office in the summer of 1996, and it was fitting he’d reached his apex on an alien invasion flick that placed him within touching distance of his idol, especially when spoke so highly of Close Encounters of the Third Kind in an interview with A.Frame.
“This is my favourite movie,” Emmerich said. “When you look at all my movies, it’s always normal, regular people in extraordinary circumstances. And they always triumph. Because these are very big stories and I think if they don’t triumph at the end, you have not made the right movie. Somebody like Richard Dreyfuss, who plays this electrician, if he doesn’t walk into the spaceship at the end, you haven’t done your job.”
Not only did Emmerich return to otherworldly shenanigans in Independence Day sequel Resurgence and the preposterous Moonfall, but that recurring theme of everyday people triumphing against insurmountable odds was prevalent in his dismal Godzilla, Mel Gibson’s one-man-army historical epic The Patriot, disaster duo The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, Die Hard clone White House Down, and real-life war story Midway, as well as the most historically inaccurate movie ever made in 10,000 BC.
Ironically, when he decided to get serious and try to ground one of his features in something he believed to approximate facts, Emmerich was dragged over hot coals when conspiratorial period drama Anonymous flopped thunderously and was needled for failing to convincingly explain its director’s belief that William Shakespeare was a fraudulent plagiariser.
In microcosm, then, the overwhelming majority of Emmerich’s filmography can be traced directly back to Close Encounters of the Third Kind in one way or another, which just goes to show the all-encompassing influence Spielberg has held over cinema for decades.
