Interview: Roland Emmerich, film director

ROLAND Emmerich may not seem like the most natural fit for a period drama about William Shakespeare. Best known for blowing up the White House in Independence Day, freezing the northern hemisphere in The Day After Tomorrow and flooding the planet in 2012, the German director’s oeuvre doesn’t scream poetry and pageantry.

Look a little closer at his new film Anonymous, however, and it’s not all that hard to see why Hollywood’s pre-eminent master of disaster has decided to turn his attention to the Bard. With the film weighing in on the authorship debate in typically contentious fashion, it effectively explodes the world of Shakespeare – figuratively speaking – by presenting the Earl of Oxford, Edward De Vere (played in middle age by Rhys Ifans and Twilight’s Jamie Campbell Bower as the youthful earl), as the true creator of the work.

“I’m actually surprised people don’t think this movie is one of my movies,” chuckles Emmerich, sitting in a hotel room ahead of the film’s British premiere at the BFI London Film Festival. “It has a big idea and for me a movie has to have a big idea because it’s very hard to be heard in this day and age with all the new media and everything.”

There’s certainly not much chance Anonymous’s “big idea” is not going to be heard. Already this week there has been plenty of outrage from Shakespeare scholars and enthusiasts who object to the decades-spanning film’s somewhat elitist theory that William Shakespeare was a semi-literate actor from lowly stock whose name only ended up on the greatest works in English because De Vere’s noble status prevented him claiming credit for work he’d spent years writing.

Emmerich, who has already participated in public debates with academics, remains somewhat poker-faced about how seriously he wants us to take it all.

“I totally believe that the man from Stratford didn’t write the plays; I think that’s pretty much proven for me,” he begins. “And I do think Oxford is the most likely candidate. But until we find some play written in his handwriting, you cannot say 100 per cent that he is the playwright.”

The film, then, isn’t exactly a serious conspiracy thriller. This is not Emmerich’s JFK. “No, it’s a lot different from Oliver Stone’s film,” smiles the filmmaker, who says he made a decision early on not to limit himself to the facts. “This is a film. It has to work as a film, and I wanted it to be as Shakespearean as possible. That’s why we used relatively fringe theories.”

Indeed, the film is loaded with highly charged subplots that have been extrapolated from the plays and fused with both historical details and wild suppositions about the private lives of the Tudors. The end result plays like a grittier, more deranged cousin to Shakespeare in Love, one in which Oxford is not only the bastard son of Elizabeth I (who is played in the film by the esteemed mother-daughter team of Vanessa Redgrave and Joely Richardson), but her unwitting lover.

“If you know Shakespeare very well, you know there’s a lot of talk about incest and bastard children, so I tried to insert this into the story,” offers Emmerich.

Unusually for a Hollywood director making a historical drama, Emmerich seem to relish the fact that he’s upsetting so many people. It’s one of the reasons he wanted to make the film in the first place. “I was a little frustrated with the English literary establishment,” he says. “I think they feel that they own William Shakespeare, but all people of all opinions own William Shakespeare. Because of that, I felt that I had to stir up the pot a little.”

This populist, provocative attitude has certainly served Emmerich well in the past. He says he wanted to blow up the White House in Independence Day because he was frustrated with American politics at the time and reckons the controversial scene went over so well because a lot of Americans felt the same way.

This ability to charge ahead, fearlessly ignoring received wisdom, can be traced back to his film-school days in Munich. Refusing to follow his peers by creating a short-form graduation film, he made a 110-minute sci-fi epic about weather control and the space shuttle programme instead. It ended up being the most expensive student film ever made, but opened in competition at the Berlin Film Festival. “Everybody thought I was crazy and I nearly bankrupted the school. They’re still reeling from it today.” He laughs. “And then I left without graduating. It was quite radical.”

The glee with which Emmerich tells this story suggests he gets a kick out of the fact that his instincts frequently pay off. He famously put his job on the line when the studio were reluctant to cast Will Smith in Independence Day. “Fox was not that excited about casting an unproven actor who, on top of that, was African- American,” he says.

His penchant for apocalyptic disaster movies also reflects an ability to expect what the public will want to see, specifically in relation to collective fears over hot-button issues, be it global warming (The Day After Tomorrow), nuclear testing (Godzilla) or continental drift (2012).

The results may be corny, but their influence can be seen in a recent spate of end-of-the-world arthouse movies such as Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia and Jeff Shannon’s forthcoming Take Shelter. What does he make of these films? “I would say they’re behind the curve, baby! Because I have given up on that stuff.”

He’s given up making disaster movies?

He shrugs. “Yeah, why should I do it again? People will be bored. I want to do new stuff. I mean, I want to do an Independence Day sequel, but I never saw Independence Day as a disaster movie, I saw it as an alien invasion movie. But in terms of disaster movies, I would not know what I could bring to the table after 2012.”

Needless to say, he won’t have any involvement in the new Godzilla movie that Monsters director Gareth Edwards has been hired to make – though he’s full of praise for the up-and-coming Brit filmmaker and does have some advice for him: “He should stick with his own thing and not listen too much to the people who give him the money. He should trust his guts.”

Trusting his own guts, his next project will be The Singularity, a feature exploring the concept that the rapid advancement of technology will soon hasten the transformation of our species.

“It’s an up-to-date subject because it goes to the essence of who we are and where we are going,” says Emmerich. In other words: it’s another big idea, one given a lot of credence by a much-discussed Time magazine article that came out earlier this year.

He says: “I’ve been thinking about this stuff for four or five years so when I saw the Time article I thought, ‘Oh hell, we have to get going on this.’ You have to remain ahead of the curve because it takes so frickin’ long to do a movie.”

• Anonymous is in cinemas from today

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