Adam Baldwin

’INDEPENDENCE DAY’ REVISITED

iF takes a look back at 1996’s ID4 with its creators and crew to reflect on the now classic science fiction tale of evil aliens who came to conquer Earth.

As we head into the July 4th weekend, it’s time to transport everyone back to the summer of 1996 when the era of the new mega-blockbuster was ushered in by INDEPENDENCE DAY (aka ID4). Directed and co-written by Roland Emmerich and produced and co-written by Dean Devlin, it reinvented the alien invasion epic for a new generation featuring Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum and others fighting nasty aliens from outer space before they destroy us for good.

The image of the White House blowing up (this was pre-911 times) was an audacious and bold move and lent the film one of many iconic images creating a phenomenon (complete with lines around the block) not seen since the original STAR WARS was released in 1977. In fact, the boxoffice tally by the end of its domestic run was $306 million (and over $800 million worldwide) which if you adjust for inflation outperforms most of this summer’s like-minded brethren.

iF Magazine recently caught up with the filmmakers, actors and productions executives who made ID4 such a such a huge success to jostle their memories about this seminal film eleven years later.

ADAM BALDWIN (actor, Major Mitchell): One of my favorite memories of shooting INDEPENDENCE DAY was watching Jeff Goldblum and Judd Hirsch perform the Jewish DEATH OF A SALESMAN on the Boneville Salt Flats in 140-degree sun. We were out in the middle of nowhere, delirious with heat exhaustion, sweating, and these guys start vamping the play. It was hilarious.

I also remember doing the scene where the alien is shot through the glass in the lab and his tentacles are flapping everywhere. The P.A.’s are out of frame flapping these tentacles around and Roland keeps yelling "Faster! Faster!" in his German accent and these poor P.A.’s shoulders are ready to fall off. Roland is laughing his head off and keeps them goin.! My memory of Dean on the set is that he always made sure my uniform was crisp. "We gotta make you look like a real soldier here," Dean would say. Dean has always treated me like a brother. I also remember thinking when I shot the coke can off the spacecraft in the film, in my presumptuous actor knowledge about military, I said, "Dean, you’d never shoot a gun off in a building like this". Dean said, "Just do it! People will believe it." and low and behold, people come up all the time and say, "you’re the guy that shot the coke can in INDEPENDENCE DAY."

WILLIAM FAY (Executive Producer): I went out to dinner with Roland and Dean a couple weeks after STARGATE opened to discuss their new project. They pitched the entire story to me, which I thought sounded amazing. Even more impressive, they said "The movie is going to be called INDEPENDENCE DAY and will open on July 4th, 1996 — still 20 months away —which is a Thursday, giving us a five-day opening weekend." The guys had really done their homework, but they hadn’t written a word of the script yet. The best part is when I asked "What kind of timeline are you thinking of?" They said, "Well, we’re going to Puerto Vallarta for five weeks to write the script, then it’ll take a month or two to get it set up, and we’ll start shooting in the summer." In my head I’m thinking, "it never works that way. More likely it’s going to take a few months at least to get the script right, then a month or two to get it set up if we’re lucky, so maybe six months from now we’re actually in pre-production. Of course, they finished the script in FOUR weeks, not five. The Tuesday after they got back, the script went out; Wednesday, we had offers from six studios; by Friday we had a deal with Fox which guaranteed a greenlight and a start of pre-production the following Monday. If that’s not a record in Hollywood, it at least ties the record!

DEAN DEVLIN (Co-Writer/Producer): Roland and I wrote the script incredibly quickly in Mexico in what was the best experience I ever had in script writing. We spent the entire time laughing and getting jazzed about what we were up to. When the script was finished, every studio in Hollywood wanted it and bid for it. The first to make a bid and to ultimately win the project was Fox. Our experience with Fox making the film was without drama or conflict. It was a rare partnership where everyone involved saw the same movie and enthusiastically pursued the vision.

TOM JACOBSON (President of Production at 20th Century Fox in 1995): I had met Dean and Roland right after STARGATE. Someone had sent me the film Roland did in Germany called MOON 44, which I thought that was pretty impressive. I also saw STARGATE and loved it. I had them come in and Dean and Roland told me they were working on a movie, but they wouldn’t tell me what it was. That turned out to be ID4. So they went out and wrote it, I got sent the script, read it that night, loved it and talked to my boss Peter Chernin who loved it and we called Dean and Roland and knew we wanted to make it. I talked to their agent, and said, "get over here, we want to make a deal." That was whirlwind day and I think one of the reasons they wanted to go with Fox, was because the studio had a history of classic science fiction films from STAR WARS to ALIEN and even THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL.

They also set up their own FX department to figure out how to make the movie and they were very organized. I remember a very specific moment, where they were going to take a specific shot and produce it. Dean calling me up one day saying they had something to show me and wanted to let it speak for itself. So he came over to office and it was just me, and he popped the sequence in. It was three shots looking down one of the concrete canyons of New York after the Empire State Building had blown and it was a rolling tidal wave of destruction, with a guy sitting in cab, and he turns around and we see what he’s seeing. It was this roll of chaos and devastation and it was awesome. It was 20 seconds long, but I was literally blown away. It’s very impressive when filmmakers have a vision and they show something that excites the studio and an audience.

PETER WINTHER (Associate Producer): I remember that I was working on the [Renny Harlin directed] movie CUTTHROAT ISLAND in Thailand when I got a call from Roland and Dean saying that I had to come back immediately to work on this alien invasion movie. I told them that I still had four weeks to go on the shoot and that I would need at least a couple weeks vacation after that. Dean said that they needed me now and that once I read the script I would change my mind. I said I was on a remote island — Ko Pee Pee Lei — so I didn’t know how they were going to get me a script. The Internet wasn’t a possibility at that point. I got off the phone and figured that was that. I went back to shooting a big pirate battle and when I returned to my little hut at 4 a.m., there was an ID4 script sitting on my cot. I still don’t know how it got there and Dean will never tell me. He’s just one of those guys that gets shit done, especially when you say he can’t. It’s probably the most important lesson I’ve learned from Dean. In any case, I picked up the script figuring I’d finger through it a bit, but read it sometime after I’d slept. I never put it down until it was done. I walked out of my hut, told Joel Michaels and Renny Harlin that I was going home — hopped on a Thai police boat and never looked back. It was one of those scripts that you just KNEW was going to be an unforgettable LIFE experience, and I wanted to be part of it. It was and it still remains one of the proudest moments of my career.

PATRICK TATOPOULOS (Co-Production Designer): Initially I had started by designing two different concepts of the creatures for Roland and Dean to react to. Each concept being quite different from the other. Roland liked both of them which raised the question, what do we do then? Drop one of the two? No way! Two minutes later Roland decided to combine the two aliens into a new conceptual idea. Fitting one alien into another with one acting as a sort of protective suit for the other. That was the final concept for the aliens. The accidental situation created a better concept at the end, thanks to Roland Emmerich.

VOLKER ENGEL (Visual Effects Supervisor): We had a prep time of only six weeks before we started shooting. Three or four months would have been nice. Co-VFX supervisor Doug Smith and I had never supervised a film of that scope before, I was 29 when Roland called me up in Germany and asked me to join the team. We worked with several small and medium size VFX post-production houses that did not have a reputation for feature film work. They had mostly done television. The upside — they really wanted to prove they could do it. And they did. While other shows pushed their deadlines left and right for weeks and even months, because the visual effects were not ready, we had to deliver on time or we would have re-named the movie THANKSGIVING DAY. July 4th was a date set in stone.

FAY: The end of the first full week of shooting was in Utah. That Sunday we had organized a crew baseball game, in which I managed to break my leg sliding into second base. So the entire film I was walking on crutches with a cast on my leg. Roland soon figured out that if he didn’t want to talk to me, all he had to do was walk away quickly.

DEVLIN: The making of ID4 was a magical experience. I know that sounds trite, but it’s true. Filmmaking, while ultimately rewarding, is usually a grueling process filled with euphoria and depression. This film, however, was only joyous.

ENGEL: One day in editorial, I watched the cut of a reel with Roland. It showed a stuntman from the back being blasted away by an explosion. Roland asked the second unit director if they also shot a reverse angle of the guy. They had not. I jokingly suggested that I could do it. A couple of hours later I was in costume on the set and had Joe Viskocil’s special effects crew blast me backwards via air pressure. My only close-up in a movie so far.

The visual effects of were a team effort of hundreds of skilled artists. Four of us in a supervising capacity received an Oscar for our contribution, but I would like to especially mention our Model Shop Supervisor Mike Joyce and his incredible model-building crew who saved the day more than once during the shoot. My eternal thanks go out to Roland and Dean for trusting me and giving me that chance.

FAY: The quantity and complexity of the visual effects was probably the biggest challenge. As we did not have a lot of money for effects or anything else for that matter, we didn’t work through one of the large major effects houses. Since the shops we could afford could only do a small part of the work, we ended up with seven or eight different places all doing a major amount of work on ID4. We ended up renting a motor home that our effects team could drive from one place to another so they could do their meetings as they drove down the road from one shop to another. I remember [digital effects producer] Tricia Ashford telling me toward the end that we had used a total of 27 Terrabytes [27,000 gigabytes] of information to build our effects; that’s not such a big deal any more, but back then it was unheard of.

BRENT SPINER (actor, Dr. Brackish Okun): Much like my character, Dr. Brackish Okun, I can barely remember anything from that long ago — or from yesterday for that matter. As I recall, at the time, I thought we were making a modest little sci-fi movie. After all, there were no stars in it other than myself. But one day on the set, Jeff Goldblum turned to me and said, "I think this is going to be really good". Joker that he is, I thought he was kidding. Well, $800 million dollars later, I’ve learned to take Jeff very seriously.

ENGEL: I went to see TWISTER with some of our artists several weeks before ID4 opened and two rows before me was this guy who totally freaked out when the ID4 trailer started. He stood up on his chair facing the audience and started screaming "It’s ID4!!! Can you believe it??? Oh my god, it’s ID4!!!" The audience went wild – and I got the first inkling of how high the expectation of people really was. The next day we all went back to work highly encouraged. People often tell me stories like "The other day I was channel surfing and some channel played ID4 – I was hooked and watched the whole movie again."

DEVLIN: When the film was finished, and everything through pre-production and production had gone without a hitch, we nervously waited for ‘the other shoe to drop’ but again, it was a golden project. People reacted phenomenally to our ad campaign, beginning with seeing the White House blow up on the Superbowl, which began a film advertising tradition which continues to this day.

TOM SERAK (Head of Worldwide Distribution at Fox in 1996): There is no greater thrill in the movie business then when you know you are about to have a huge hit. INDEPENDENCE DAY was that movie. From the time we ran the :30 second TV spot on the super bowl [where it said] "ENJOY THE SUPERBOWL, IT MIGHT BE YOUR LAST" we knew what we had. That was in January...waiting until July 4 to release the movie was both exciting and very difficult. The more we did with the movie the better it looked. Everyone at Fox was having fun and the audience knew we were. Everyone went along for the ride and what a ride it was.

DEVLIN: Then, finally, the film opened to record numbers with lines around the block. I remember being in a theater in Westwood California on opening day. There were beach balls bouncing around the room and the atmosphere felt more like a rock concert than a film opening. It was, from start to finish, a magical experience."

WINTHER: We had a tradition of all of us going down to Puerto Vallarta for opening weekend as Roland hated being in town for all the hoopla and pressure that that weekend entails. Instead he would spend the time smoking cigars and drinking margaritas down in Mexico and the studio would fax in the daily numbers. Back then, eleven years ago, there was no boxofficemojo.com or the open boxoffice reporting as there is now. So getting those numbers faxed in was truly an exciting experience. Only the studios had access to it, so we literally had no idea how the numbers were going to be. Anyway, Dean, Bill Fay and I stayed behind and rented a limo that took us to all the big theaters at the time, just to see how it was going. Thank God I brought my video camera! Every theater to our surprise had lines around the block! No one had seen this for many years and man was it exciting. I interviewed people who had been waiting in line for over two days, people coming in the theater, people inside the theater before the film started — it was like a freaking rock concert!. I interviewed people coming out as well. I had all these people say "thanks" to Roland for making such a great movie. We quickly cut something together and brought it down with us on Sunday to Mexico. We showed Roland the video and it was the first and maybe only time that I saw tears come to Roland and Dean’s eyes. It’s a pretty big thing for a German! I think it was emotional for Roland not only because of the success of the film and the gratitude of the people, the fans, but also because his dream was to come to America and become a big Hollywood Director. And for Dean, his dream was similar as a filmmaker and producer and he had a lot to live up to due to his father Don [Devlin] being so successful as well. Maybe this moment was when Dean knew that he was at the very least, an equal to his Dad. That’s just a theory however. In any case, at this moment both of their dreams were realized. It’s a great memory for me too as Dean and Roland have been and continue to be major influences in my life. I’m proud to be a small contributor to their accomplishment.

JACOBSON: I’m very, very proud of INDEPENDENCE DAY and you find these movies you’re professionally connected to loved the legacy of sci-fi at Fox, this is exactly the right movie and it was great having been part of bringing it together for Dean and Fox to see. When you’re a corporate executive, you’re coaching a team, but the team is it’s own thing, and the movie is really Roland and dean’s the presented a vision, executed the vision they budget and showed they can do it and they did it.

SPINER: I had so many wonderful experiences working on this movie. And, as with all movies, it’s the people you work with that make it wonderful. I had such great relationships with Roland, and Dean, all the actors, of course Joy Zapata who did my hair and Zoltan and Kathy the wonderful make-up artists who worked slavishly to try to make me unattractive. It will always be one of my favorite films in the Brent Spiner oeuvre. I only hope that next year when we begin filming, INDEPENDENCE DAY II-THE DAY AFTER THE FOURTH OF JULY, that we’ll make it as good, uh-oh, did I let the cat out of the bag?