The “object from space hurtling toward earth” movie is a rich tradition in modern cinema. Movies like Armageddon, Deep Impact and to a certain extent, Don’t Look Up all delve into the nuances of an extinction-level event and how we’d deal with it.
Moonfall is the latest entry into that premise. The story involves something mysteriously knocking the moon out of its orbit and sending it hurtling (you guessed it) to earth. The movie stars Halle Berry as NASA executive Jocinda and Patrick Wilson as astronaut Brian Harper.
John Bradley (Game of Thrones) plays a conspiracy theorist, and the trio has to figure out how to convince everyone A. it’s happening and B. how to stop it from doing so.
In a recent interview with comicbook.com, director Roland Emmerich (Stargate, Independence Day) revealed just how challenging it was to film a disaster movie with a real-life pandemic going on all around him.
“I made it through the pandemic, which was naturally a problem for us because all of a sudden there was 5.6 million additional costs. So, we had to slim down the movie quite a bit. But, we never ever cut anything out of the script. We had to shoot everything faster … It’s one of these things where you can shoot a movie faster and faster. That means I shot more or less the movie in 61 days. I had no second unit.” He added, “These days, I’m just kind of doing it all myself, and I have fun doing it. Yeah. And then we even cut like three or four or five days out.”
In terms of casting, Emmerich said he didn’t have anyone specific in mind except maybe one particular actor.
“No, we actually didn’t write it for anybody. I always had a secret flame on the back of my mind, Patrick Wilson. Then we kind of thought, ‘Oh, it would be cool to have Halle Berry in the movie.’ It was the first two. Then John Bradley. I just had a nice Zoom call with him. And from that moment on, he was my favorite.”
Emmerich said he makes the movies and then tries to get them sold, something that’s obviously more work.
“And then it’s pretty much, because we’re doing these movies now since Midway, we do them as we are the studio. That means we go sell a movie in Cannes. Then put all the money together and whatever we can get and then more or less make the movie. This one was quite big. It was 138. That’s a lot of money … I like it like that, because we are the studio. Yes, we have American distribution. We have Chinese distribution. We have pretty much a worldwide distribution. We do it all ourselves. It’s a little bit more work, but it makes sense.”
Moonfall releases in theaters on Feb. 4.
