Roland Emmerich is famous for his blockbuster disaster movies, which feature mass destruction and heavy action sequences. The German director’s latest addition to his repertoire of high budget disaster flicks is Moonfall, which was released in the United States on Feb. 4. The space film which stars Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson and John Bradley received a mixed to negative critical reception. While Emmerich may have directed action films like Independence Day, 2012, The Day After Tomorrow and Godzilla, the director isn’t a big fan of shooting action scenes.
While discussing his new film with MovieMaker, Emmerich admitted he prefers shooting character-driven scenes to the large scale action sequences that he’s renowned for.
When you look at all my movies, there’s not much action in them. There are big action sequences, but there’s not much action. I actually don’t like much to shoot action. I prefer to get the action out of the way really fast.
Emmerich believes he achieved a perfect casting with Moonfall, and on the topic of preferring to shoot characters and their interactions with one another, the director had this to say:
I love working with actors, because they have, most of the time, very simple problems. Ask yourselves, what is the character’s problem? Then you say, oh, who could play them?… Most of the time it’s only two or three actors that could play [a character]. It’s sometimes really tough because you try to cast exactly the perfect people, which happens to be a real boon in Moonfall. In Moonfall, I have to say, we got exactly the right cast, even down to the smallest person.
Moonfall is currently showing in U.S. theaters.
