'Moonfall' director says sci-fi film offers perfect escape for movie lovers

German-born director Roland Emmerich doesn’t only make big budget blockbusters in which he revels in bringing Earth as close to total destruction as possible, but it’s for these films that the 66-year-old is perhaps best known.

Whether it’s the aliens of Independence Day, the climate change-induced Ice Age of The Day After Tomorrow or the fulfilment of ancient catastrophic Mayan prophecies in 2012 — Emmerich has made his name as the king of modern disaster cinema whose films have earned over $3bn (R45.8bn) in global box office to date.

Speaking from the US ahead of the release of his latest sci-fi, almost-the-end-of-the-world -as-we-know-it action adventure Moonfall, Emmerich says he had no plans to make another disaster film until a book that he read on the left-field ideas of megastructures intrigued him so much that he, together with longtime writing collaborator Harold Kloser, decided to write a script based on the idea.

That script has been realised as a typically edge-of-your-seat, polished piece of Emmerich action spectacle entertainment, in which two disgraced astronauts, played by Patrick Wilson and Halle Berry, must team up with an amateur physics conspiracy nut played by John Bradley to save the world after the moon shifts its orbit and sends the planet into chaos.

Moonfall was shot quickly, over 61 days, last year under Covid-19 protocols, an experience Emmerich describes as “less than ideal because I wasn’t able to really get close to the actors and direct them the way I like to and because I couldn’t do the thing I most like to do on sets, which is to have dinners and gatherings with them on the weekends, away from the set where we can relax and chat and discuss things in a more informal setting”.

Though his long experience at the helm of big set-piece action vehicles has taught him a few tricks about keeping to budget and deadline, Emmerich admits that “there are always things that come up that you can’t plan for. For Moonfall, when we tested the first cut we realised that we were spending too much time on Earth but audiences wanted more stuff on the moon so we changed the balance to give them that”.

Several of his films have dealt with alternative versions of scientific of historical facts — government cover-ups of extraterrestrial life in his two Independence Day films; time-travelling aliens who helped build the Egyptian pyramids in Stargate; Mayan apocalyptic prophecies in 2012; and a particularly wacky idea about the moon that’s pivotal to the plot of Moonfall — but Emmerich is quick to point out that his interest in these theories is  “purely because of the potential they have for making interesting drama”.

He’s surprised by the furious debate that the recent climate change satire Don’t Look Up generated and incredulous at the film’s central premise. “A comet is going to collide with Earth and we have six months until the end of the world? That’s way too much time. Also we have more than enough threats to the survival of the planet on Earth at the moment — just look at the millions of refugees in Syria and what’s going on there.”

Many observers of a film industry that’s been battered by the effects of Covid-19 restrictions over the past two years hope that big budget blockbusters will be the saviour of the movie business in the months to come, but Emmerich is sceptical. “In the US we opened in the same week as the new Jack Ass and that kind of thing has loyal fans and a younger audience who should be the ones coming to see my film.”

He says he’s “not sure that there’s really a future for films like this really. They’re just too expensive to make and it’s harder and harder to find an audience with the streamers taking over.” As to whether he’d ever consider making films for a streamer, at the moment he feels “that the kind of films I make are not for the small screen and I can’t see myself making content for streamers but you never know”.

He hopes that those movie lovers who make the effort to go to cinemas and see Moonfall “will be entertained and excited because that’s what these films are about really. They’re escapism and these days, we all need some escape.”

• 'Moonfall' is on circuit.