Man of action, activism

In 1996, when “Independence Day” was the summer’s big hit, Roland Emmerich received an invitation to screen his film at the White House for Bill Clinton, who got a kick out of seeing a movie where his residence is destroyed by evil space invaders. When Emmerich was asked what the odds were of his getting a repeat invite after “The Day After Tomorrow” opens this weekend, he said, “Not good.”

The chief villain in the director’s new disaster film isn’t a bug-eyed alien, but a glum, white-haired U.S. vice president who pooh-poohs an approaching climatic catastrophe and bears a strong resemblance to, ahem, Dick Cheney. Emmerich says the actor, Kenneth Welsh, was chosen because he gave the best audition. “Someone told me, ‘Doesn’t he look too much like Dick Cheney?” Emmerich recalls with a grin. “And I said, ‘Maybe that’s a lucky coincidence.’ ”

20th Century Fox has gone out of its way to portray “The Day After Tomorrow” as more of a popcorn thriller than a consciousness-raising movie about a sudden climatic change that sends the world reeling into a new Ice Age. In fact, the term “global warming” is nowhere to be found on the movie’s website.

Apparently, Emmerich didn’t get the memo. In the course of an hourlong lunch last week, the 48-year-old German-born director ridiculed what he called the Bush administration’s approach to global warming, saying “abrupt climate change is the biggest threat the world faces and what does the government do? They try to keep it a secret!”

If Emmerich weren’t so slender and self-effacing, I would’ve thought I was talking to Michael Moore, not the director of such films as “Godzilla” and “The Patriot.” Emmerich is an unlikely crusader, especially for a major Hollywood director promoting a big summer movie. In fact, Emmerich is full of contradictions -- he seems as much a shrewd pragmatist as an outspoken activist. Most of his films have been escapist sci-fi fantasies, held in low regard by critics. Reviewing “Independence Day,” one critic called the film “spectacular, as in spectacularly bad.”

He admits he still drives a gas-guzzling BMW. On the other hand, Emmerich is also a loyal German Green Party voter who spent roughly $150,000 of his own money to participate in a program funded by Future Forests to neutralize carbon dioxide emissions generated during the film production by funding climate-friendly energy efficiency and forestry projects.”

“It’s not my nature to be outspoken. I’ve never been actively involved in the environmental movement,” he says. “But you can’t ignore what goes on in the world. Hollywood movies have always reflected our society, so what does it say about our culture that everything today is about franchises? That’s the problem with America -- there should be more Michael Moores making movies.”

A subversive spectacle

Emmerich says he embarked on “The Day After Tomorrow” after reading “The Coming Global Superstorm,” a fanciful thriller written by “Communion” author Whitley Strieber and talk-show conspiracy theorist Art Bell. Emmerich was intrigued by the story, which, like the movie, offers an exaggerated version of plausible scientific climate-shift scenarios. Eager to use some of the key incidents in the book, he spent a year acquiring the rights. Emmerich worked on a script for a year before bringing in screenwriter Jeffrey Nachmanoff to collaborate on the final version.

It was only after Emmerich and the film’s producer, Mark Gordon, had a finished script and a firm budget that they sought out a studio for financing. “No studio would ever develop a movie like this,” Emmerich says. “It’s way too subversive.”

Of course, when Emmerich’s studio suitors read scenes of Los Angeles deluged by tornadoes and New York submerged under a massive ice pack, they envisioned a blockbuster, not a message movie. Better still, budgeted at $125 million, with only Emmerich and Gordon as profit participants, the film was a bargain by summer-movie standards.

Although a number of studios bid on the film, Emmerich and Gordon opted for Fox, in part because they’d both had hits there -- Emmerich with “Independence Day,” Gordon with “Speed.” Fox was also attractive because, along with Warner Bros., it has the strongest worldwide distribution system.

Warners matched Fox’s deal -- Warners chief Alan Horn, an ardent environmentalist, even tried to buy half the film after Fox landed the project -- but the filmmakers went with the studio that needed the movie the most. “Fox only had one other big summer picture,” Emmerich says, “while Warners had lots of tent-pole movies, like ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Troy.’ We were worried we might get lost in the shuffle.”

Emmerich says he never worried about a Rupert Murdoch-owned studio imposing any political restrictions. His account of Fox’s hands-off approach offers an object lesson in the value of avoiding the studio development process. “When you control the film, they can only give you big discussion points, not all these line-by-line notes,” he says. “In fact, we got better notes because they looked at the big picture. It forces the studio to be your creative partner, not a destructive force.”

Warm reception

In the months leading up to the film’s release, Fox played something of a cat-and-mouse game with environmentalists. Fox denied requests for a premiere benefiting an environmental cause, saying the studio doesn’t do benefit premieres. The studio also said no to environmental group requests that it sponsor global-warming study guides for high-school students. On the other hand, the movie’s website offers links to various environmental groups and news stories about environmental issues.

Although activists were critical of Fox for not using the term “global warming” in its publicity or allowing the film to be associated with various eco-causes, once they began seeing the film last week they were full of praise for the picture’s bluntly pro-environmental stance, most notably a dramatic scene in which the U.S. vice president apologizes to the world for ignoring scientific warnings of a climate-change catastrophe.

“We’ve never avoided the content of the movie,” says Fox co-chairman Jim Gianopulos. “We simply wanted the thought-provoking aspects of the film to be experienced in an entertainment context, not as a political debate.”

Fox’s cautious approach to marketing the film is typical of most studios’ handling of hot-button issues. By and large, studios will do anything to prevent their movies from being portrayed as educational or politically charged, fearing they could suffer the fate of a film like Disney’s “The Insider,” which bombed at the box office in part because audiences decided it was a “60 Minutes”-style documentary, not a stylish thriller.

Josh Baran, a veteran independent publicity consultant who’s been helping environmental groups organize conscious-raising events around the release of the film, has seen this wariness in action. In 1997, Baran went to Sony Pictures, which was releasing the Brad Pitt film “Seven Years in Tibet,” and offered up the Dalai Lama for interviews. “They called back in a panic, saying, ‘We don’t want anything to do with the Dalai Lama. Pretend you never talked to us!’ ”

Although Disney’s 1998 film “A Civil Action” was based on a true story about a personal injury lawyer’s fight against a giant corporate polluter, the studio was furious when Baran lobbied journalists to do stories about the real lawyer and the parents of children who’d died from exposure to the pollutants. “If you looked at their trailer, you’d never know the film was about corporate polluters poisoning people’s families,” he says.

“Finally, a Disney publicist called and told me, ‘We have $60 million in this movie. We don’t care about dead children.’ ”

In recent weeks, Fox has started to embrace the environmental community, hoping “Tomorrow” can attract both rank-and-file moviegoers as well as op-ed page readers.

“Whenever we’ve shown the film to people, what they like the most is the message,” Emmerich says. “This film is a parable about how we’re slowly destroying ourselves. When you have scenes like we have in the movie, where an American politician admits he’s made a mistake and has to ask the Third World to rescue his country, I think that’s a pretty political statement.”

As a European, Emmerich admits he thinks America is on “a strange path” with its lack of action against global warming. “You don’t have to be an environmentalist to be angry,” he says. “I’ve been here 14 years and I’m flabbergasted that this government still hasn’t signed the Kyoto Treaty or introduced hybrid SUVs. Instead, even when 999 out of 1,000 scientists agree that global warming exists, and the one scientist who doesn’t agree is bankrolled by an oil company, you have an administration that listens to the one scientist, not the 999 others.”

Environmental activists who’ve seen the movie say “Tomorrow” could do more to further their cause than a mountain of scientific treatises. It’s a power of quiet persuasion you rarely see from today’s big Hollywood films.

“I wish I knew why people believe more in movies than anything else,” Emmerich says. “I just think that we, as filmmakers, should fight more for our beliefs. I don’t think directors are as dumb as the movies they make in Hollywood.”

Of course, after a movie like “Godzilla,” we could have said the same thing about Emmerich. But “The Day After Tomorrow” has a whiff of urgency about it; it’s a cautionary tale worth reflecting on after you finish your popcorn.