A mysterious force knocks the moon from its orbit and sends it hurtling on a collision course with Earth in Director Roland Emmerich’s sci-fi action-adventure, Moonfall.
Emmerich’s film finds the world the brink of annihilation and former astronauts Jo Fowler (Halle Berry) and Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) and conspiracy theorist K.C. Houseman (John Bradley) team up to save humanity. As they mount an impossible last-ditch mission into space, they discover that our Moon is not what we think it is.
On February 19, after the DGA membership screening in Los Angeles, Emmerich discussed the making of Moonfall during a Q&A moderated by Director Anna Foerster (Underworld: Blood Wars).
During the discussion, the conversation went to post-production practices and Emmerich revealed why he never watches a complete assembly of the film too early in the process.
“I have my own method. I watch it reel by reel. I watch one reel and work on that reel for two or three weeks and then I go to the next. I watch it all the way through when I’ve done with six or seven reels and then I have the guts do it. I remember when I saw the first cut of Independence Day, I wanted to kill myself. I thought, ‘this is never going work.’ It was like three and a half hours long. Never watch something that long. It just cannot be good. So watch it reel by reel and then you see the whole thing in one or two months and you can go from there.”
Emmerich’s other directorial credits include the feature films Moon 44, Universal Soldier, Stargate, Independence Day, Godzilla, The Patriot, The Day After Tomorrow, 10,000 BC, 2012, Anonymous, White House Down, Stonewall, Independence Day: Resurgence; and the movie for television Dark Horse.
Emmerich has been a DGA member since 1991.
You can listen to Emmerich's Q&A by clicking the podcast episode embedded below. You can find more DGA podcast episodes here.