It seems very long ago, but there was a time when Roland Emmerich wasn’t a household name. The name is synonymous with the destruction of Earth now, and always will be, but go back a few decades and he was just another working director who made mid-budget movies that most people don’t feel very passionately about. Making Contact? Moon 44? Okay, we’ll give some love to 1992’s Universal Soldier only because it still sorta rocks, but I bet when you first saw it you didn’t think much about who made it. Same for the 1994 sci-fi flick Stargate, a title most of us still probably associate with the TV spinoffs than the actual movie. So during the beginning of 1996, when the movie of the summer looked to be an epic alien invasion spectacle called Independence Day, the legion of us who were excited were thinking, “This looks awesome… it was directed by who?!” So how did a 40-year-old director from Germany whose most notable movies were Universal Soldier and Stargate come to direct one of the biggest movies of all time? Kick the tires and light the fires, because we’re going to uncover what happened to Independence Day.

We actually do have Stargate to thank for planting the earliest seeds of Independence Day. While they were doing the press rounds for the movie in 1994, Emmerich and his co-writer, co-producer Dean Devlin were constantly asked if they believed in aliens, since of course they were a major part of Stargate’s plot. Emmerich’s answer was usually no, surprisingly enough, but he admitted he found the topic a fascinating one. In an offhand remark, he said something along the lines of, “imagine if you woke up tomorrow and there were gigantic spaceships hovering over all of the Earth’s major cities”? He then turned to Devlin and said he believed they just inadvertently came up with the plot of their next movie.

From there, the two decided to embark on writing an epic-scale alien invasion movie the likes of which hadn’t been made in Hollywood in years. Both Emmerich and Devlin lamented that most alien invasion movies saw the evil intruders attack smaller locations like a farm or small town in a small-scale way; or inhabit human being bodies in an attempt to replicate them. They hadn’t seen a jumbo-sized alien attack, nor had they made what Emmerich would call a “big entrance” announcing their arrival. The duo wrote the script for Independence Day in a little over three weeks during a vacation to Mexico. Once completed, they sent the screenplay out to the studios, and a bidding war ensued. Twentieth Century Fox ended up on top, offering the filmmaking team $7.5 million plus a percentage of the profits. The movie was immediately greenlit after they accepted the offer, and pre-production ramped up just as quickly.

Stargate had been an under-the-radar hit, grossing almost $200 million off a $55 million budget, but for their much bigger movie Emmerich and Devlin were only given a budget of around $71 million; which doesn’t sound too bad, of course, but not the massive sum it might seem in 1996, when budgets reaching $100 million were becoming more and more common. It was Emmerich’s first time working for a studio as well; Stargate was made outside the studio system and bought by MGM, which eventually tinkered with the film a lot, much to the director’s chagrin. Now he was beholden to executives from the get-go, which threatened to be a headache for him.

According to Emmerich, many of the film’s roles were written with specific actors in mind, such as Bill Pullman as the president, Mary McDonnell as his wife, and Jeff Goldblum as a tech nerd who helps save the world. The role of Steven Hiller, a fighter pilot who is ostensibly the lead of the film, was supposedly written with an African American in mind, but no specific actor. At one point, the role was offered to Ethan Hawke, who read the script and, thinking it was laughable, turned it down, only to regret it later. Will Smith, fresh off of Fresh Prince and Bad Boys, nabbed the role, which ended up being a huge boost to his career, though initially the studio didn’t want him because he was an unproven commodity overseas – even at one point telling Emmerich that a black man in the lead would not be good for foreign sales. Emmerich won that battle, obviously. The role of Jimmy Wilder, Steven Hiller’s wisecracking buddy and surefire “first to die” candidate, was originally handed to Friends star Matthew Perry, but Perry dropped out right before shooting began, leading Emmerich to find an unorthodox replacement in the form of crooner Harry Connick, Jr., who proved to be just as adept at improv as Perry.

While the alien panic movies of the 1950s certainly come to mind while watching ID4, it was the Irwin Allen disaster films of the ‘70s that truly inspired Emmerich and Devlin. Those movies were ensemble pieces featuring a dozen or so main characters, all of them trying to survive some massive threat, who have to come together in order to vanquish whatever terrible thing is threatening their lives. Hence the filmmakers were secure in not needing an A-lister at the front of the movie; they figured a solid cast would carry the entire film. Well, them and the alien attacks on the cities themselves.

According to Emmerich, the film was always supposed to be titled Independence Day, but there was a problem: Warner Bros. owned the rights to that title, not Fox. Not willing to budge for fear that Fox would re-name their movie something generic and uninspiring – Doomsday apparently being one possibility – Emmerich and Devlin wrote the big “Today we celebrate our Independence Day” speech that opens the third act because they knew the studio would have no choice but to acquire the title, because how could you not call it “Independence Day” at that point? On the same page, the film would almost certainly have to open on July 4th weekend around the globe, which was also important because another alien invasion movie – Mars Attacks – was scheduled to come out in August. Beating that movie to the punch was integral to the success of ID4, so when Fox made it official they were releasing during the July 4th weekend of 1996, Mars Attacks had no choice but to move to December, giving the Emmerich movie plenty of breathing room.

The film began shooting in the summer of ’95 in New York City; the filmmakers wanted to complete the explosion of the Empire State Building and the ensuing carnage first for two reasons: One so they could show the cast and execs what the film’s biggest setpiece would look like, therefor getting them excited for the finished product, and two so the studio could ramp up the marketing campaign for the movie, which would prove to be incredibly important to its success.

Much of the rest of the movie was shot, well, all over. Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, New Jersey, New York and California – a massive production overall that took approximately three months of filming. While Emmerich’s A-unit shot actors and extras, a huge team of special effects artists toiled away in L.A. over the elaborate VFX that would bring the film’s aliens and their destruction to vivid life. While CGI was in the midst of taking over Hollywood, the ID4 team was determined not to rely too heavily on computer generated images; money being one factor, of course, but the other concern being that models and practical effects would bring tangible weight to the chaos. Hence, when you see the White House get blown to smithereens? That’s an 11 foot wide model that took a month to create and about three seconds to blow up. Cameras were set up 10 feet away from the miniature and filming at 300 frames per second to slow down and enhance the power of the image – which certainly became the defining image of the ad campaign later on.

When the streets of L.A. and New York are enveloped by flames after the aliens’ massive attack? Those are eight-foot wide, twenty-feet long upright miniatures hanging from scaffolding, with flames from a blowtorch going up them while a camera shoots the devastation from above. Of course, CGI would have to come into play during post-production to enhance and compliment the practical effects, but a surprising amount of the movies memorable images – from exploding buildings to fighter jets to the aliens’ mother ship – were hand-created by talented artists.

Speaking of fighter jets, initially the film had the support of the U.S. Government, who was willing to lend the filmmakers whatever they needed – equipment, uniforms, vehicles – during shooting. But upon reading the script, they bristled at the mention of Area 51, which becomes an important location in the movie’s second act. The government asked the filmmakers to remove mentions of the infamous base from the script, and when their request was declined they pulled their support, leaving the filmmakers on their own to unearth the many military props they needed.

Emmerich and Devlin’s script is legendarily not exactly the stuff of genius, but they got a lot of assistance from their talented cast, especially Goldblum, who improvised plenty of his character’s dialogue. Apparently he and Judd Hirsch, who worked with old-age make-up to play his father, came up with much of the dialogue during their scenes together. Similarly, Goldblum and Will Smith, who have a small but important amount of screen time together, did plenty of ad-libbing on their own too. But it wasn’t always fun for Emmerich; the sequence toward the end where Smith and Goldblum are in their hijacked alien spacecraft and look with wonder upon the inside of the mother ship took hours upon hours to shoot – why? Because they wouldn’t stop goofing off. Based on an Entertainment Weekly article from ’96, that sequence of the duo simply looking out the windshield took 12 hours to film because they couldn’t keep it together; they had apparently gone stir crazy in the claustrophobic set. It got so bad that after the 12 hours, Emmerich decided to stop filming at around midnight so they could pick it up the next day. I sure wish we had that entire gag reel to watch…

Production was completed in the fall of 1995, and then the job of getting the film into shape by July commenced, not an easy job considering they had approximately 3,000 effects shots to complete, at the time a record in the movie business. Towards the end of post-production the filmmakers became aware that they needed to add even more carnage to the finale, particularly around the destruction of the alien ships, so they asked Fox for some more money to hammer home the deaths of the film’s antagonists, which the studio agreed to. The film’s post-production lasted until only a couple weeks of the movie’s release.

The question then became, were people going to care about this flick? Will Smith, Bill Pullman… Randy Quaid, really? Fox’s marketing department made it so you couldn’t avoid the massiveness of the product. An infamous Super Bowl commercial showing the White House exploding helped catapult the movie into the public’s consciousness, in fact, it gets credit for being one of the first movies to truly capitalize on using the Super Bowl to promote itself. After that ad, everyone suddenly knew what Independence Day was. As July neared, you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing an ID4 ad; you have to remember all those billboards and subway ads, right?

After a bevy of impressive test screenings, it certainly seemed to be clear that the movie was poised for success; even Steven Spielberg thought so, going on the record right before its release as saying he pictured it becoming the number one movie of the year and guessing it would make anywhere from $250-300 million at the box office.

He was pretty damn close. It made $306 million in North America alone, enjoying another $500 plus million overseas; at the time, it was the second biggest movie ever next to Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. It went on to win three Oscars for visual effects and sound, and ultimately spawned a sequel, which came out twenty years later.

Back to Spielberg for a moment. Not long after ID4 came out and blew the roof off the box office, the director invited Emmerich and Devlin to the set of The Lost World: Jurassic Park. He was a fan of their movie and told the duo that with Independence Day, the pair had reinvented the summer blockbuster, that the business would never be the same afterwards. It’s curious to think on those words some thirty years later and wonder if he was right. To be fair, it surely had a seismic effect on the way movies are advertised, and it might also be safe to say we never looked at visitors from another planet the same way again. And you know what, cheesy and somewhat dated as it is, it’s still an impressive achievement, a classic blockbuster in every way.

A couple of the previous episodes of the show can be seen below. To see more, head over to our JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!