For director Roland Emmerich, there’s no point in making a movie unless it’s BIG. Actually, his films aren’t just BIG but epic, in every aspect from story and scope to visual effects. In his successful 15-year Hollywood career, this former painter from Germany has had the audacity to put Egyptians in Space ('Stargate'), create pissed-off aliens to destroy Earth ('Independence Day'), and fast-forward global warming to kick humankind’s cumulative butt ('The Day After Tomorrow'). So for Emmerich’s next act, he’s going back in time…way, way back in time, to '10,000 B.C', where the colorful director puts his spin of the Stone Age.
Of course, always keeping in mind that this is an Emmerich production, '10,000 B.C.' is hardly a staid romp like 'Quest for Fire'. But it does center on a quest; that of mammoth hinter D’Leh (Steven Strait), whose great love Evolet (Camilla Belle) is abducted by a marauding band of warlords. He embarks on a hero’s journey across deserts and forests, facing mammoths and saber-tooth tigers, to find his love being kept in a fortress of the technologically advanced Lost Civilization.
Meshing history an sci-fi, Emmerich admits the film has definite connections to his previous work. “I think '10,000 B.C.' is more like 'Stargate', but I think I try to make every movie different,” the director explains. “With this, on one hand I had the chance to do historical stuff, and on the other hand fantastical stuff. It’s an odd hybrid between reality and fantasy.”
For this film, Emmerich says the initial idea stemmed from real history. “The story was triggered by a documentary about how people hunted mammoths,” he reveals. “One one hand, it made clear that humans hunted mammoths, but also I was amazed how little we know how people actually did it. So that’s how it started. But I pretty soon realized if you make a pure mammoth-hunter movie, that is too small a movie for me. But then, years later, I read a book called Fingerprints of God by Graham Hancock, and I learned about the Lost Civilization theory, where the pyramids may have been built much earlier than we all thought, and that’s when it clicked in my head. I thought, ‘Why don’t I combine these two things, and then I have a movie.’ I started working on the script, and here comes '10,000 B.C.'”
“In both Stargate and this movie there is somebody who pretends to be God,” he says about a core theme in the film. “It fascinates me. In this case, it’s someone that knows much more about technology and uses it to make people believe he is a god. In Stargate, it was more of a hybrid alien that pretended to be God. This time it’s much more down to earth, but also the idea of the movie is that there are three different steps of civilization—the hunter/gatherer, then the first farmers, and then the first high civilization with technology on the level of the Egyptians. You realize that higher civilization doesn’t mean they are good people. They try to use all the other civilizations for their purposes, and that’s the idea of the movie, that clash of these cultures makes the conflict.”
That combination obviously pumped up the scope and stakes, but it also added a multitude of headaches for the director. “With this movie, if I would have known how difficult it would have been, I probably would not have made it,” he chuckles a bit wearily. “I am an eternal optimist, but it’s not easy. I think you have to have a certain enthusiasm and optimism; otherwise you probably would not do it. I talk to other directors who feel the same way. You tell your yourself it’s easy and perhaps the visuals will take two and a half years, and in your head, if you were to make that clear, you’d probably think, ‘Can’t I find something that only takes a year and a half?’”
Why so long for the visuals? Emmerich explains that a central sequence in the film shows ancient man, in the form of D’Leh’s clan, actually hunting a pack of mastodons in all their impressive, very hairy glory. “At the beginning alone we have a six-minute sequence of mammoths, and they have a lot of hair,” he chuckles. “I really wanted to make this movie five or six years ago, so I did some tests from the work of other movies, but I felt the [CG] wasn’t ready yet. Then, funny enough, I saw [Pixar’s] Monster’s Inc., and I saw the hair there, and then I knew it was time. Computers always have to crack certain things, so it’s a combination of software and how fast you render it. The first breakthrough was making dinosaurs come to life, but they have skin that is very easy to render. Mathematically, there is no problem. But then there are things like water, which is a much bigger problem, because there is an interactivity that makes it complex. Animals have come along slowly over the years, but hair was the last holy grail of physical objects. It’s even more complicated because it has to react to the movement of the animal. So I know there had to be some software written and the natural advance of computers getting faster, but then we still had the problem of figuring out how to do it!”
“All the animals, like the saber-tooth tiger and the mastodons, they had to be developed over a year,” he continues. “If you don’t develop them right, then the whole pipeline doesn’t work. It was a big challenge because, we had worked it out to be 16 hours for one frame to render! That’s just not possible, so we were thinking, what can we do? What we did was find out that you only need half of the hair, and it still look the same way, so that was a relief. We cut it down to six hours for one frame, but still, that is six hours! You render, but if you have to render it again, that’s a disaster!”
“But it was not only the visual effects. We shot on two continents, and we shot 95 percent outdoors. It was just incredibly difficult. There was also a weird mix or super-reality/photo-real animals, because everything had to look real. But on the other hand, parts are fantasy, so how do you explain this to people? We were constantly asking how that would look, so we did a lot of research. And it was good that we shot in Africa, because there is still Stone Age culture existing, so we looked at a lot of African tribes and how they built their huts, and that helped us a lot.
“And then on top of that, there was reinventing the Egyptian society without it looking Egyptian!” Emmerich says, referring to the last-act revelation of the Lost Civilization, which was shot in the desert sands of Africa. Replete with massive pyramid structures, fire and weaponry, the director explains, “these are the people that started building pyramids, but then they died out. We had to figure out how there people looked. They had to have some Egyptian elements, but not really, so there were a lot of difficulties there. And for the ending, I fought very hard to build an outdoor model in Namibia in the same area where we had our sets standing. I felt if we had built this whole construction site of the pyramids in the computer, it would not be as good as a model. Warner Brothers was naturally super concerned, because with a model shoot, you are relying of the weather, and there were fog banks coming in. And then I was concerned that a huge SpiderCam shot would start to wobble, but what we did was imitate a helicopter movement over the model of gigantic size and then populated it with digital people, movements and mammoths and the likes, and it really looks fantastic. Everyone that sees it says ‘Wow!’, and that’s what I wanted! This is the first time I am really happy with every visual effect shot I have in the movie. We all pulled it together, but sometimes there are moments where you do say, ‘Why?’” He smiles.
Answering his own question, Emmerich says it comes down to imparting a message with his films, which on the surface seems a bit absurd when the belts and whistles make it so easy to squash any subtle intent. But the director asserts, “I am always drawing parallels to everything I am doing. I think you have to, because the movies are for people. I was accused worldwide of being a super-patriot after The Day After Tomorrow, and I am not! I had to tell the world, ‘I am not.’ And this time around, and since then, I have realized you have to be relatively up-front with your message, without hitting people over the head. So in general, I always try to put in some message or theme which is understood by people today. With '10,000 B.C.', it’s about a man who has to unite and not divide. Everybody has to take a different level of responsibility, and some people have to take very big responsibilities—those we call leaders, so that was the main thing I wanted to say.”
And Emmerich is quick to point out that the film only works if people buy the grand love between D’Leh and Evolet, which is why he chose to cast Strait and Belle, who are still relative unknowns. “I has a meeting [WB], and I said ‘I can’t see a known actor running around,’ and they totally got it. The movie is imagined so it’s not like 'Troy' or anything historical where you want Brad Pitt. This is about Stone Age people. When you look at the only other Stone Age films, in one ['Clan of the Cave Bear'] they used Darryl Hannah and it didn’t work, and the other was 'Quest for Fire', where they also used unknowns. I used that as an example about whether you can buy into something or not. Also, I love to discover people! [Strait and Belle] are the right people for these parts.
“I think they fit very well together and though, they have very little screen time together, when they are together, they fit. Both are very young but are also already really good actors. I was looking for some sort of innocence, but on the other hand, especially with Steven, they have to grow throughout the movie and become something else—people who can lead.”
And for his part, Strait knows exactly how big an opportunity this film is for his career. With memorable but small turns in Sky High and The Covenant, the actor sees his time spent on '10,000 B.C.' as the ultimate master class. “It was an amazing opportunity for me, not only to learn, bit to have a great time doing the work. Taking a character that starts the film in such obscurity, because he is an outsider and isn’t liked and doesn’t like others, either, and then transforming him by the end into the leader of an army that is adored is a major transformation. It’s a coming-of-age story in extraordinary circumstances, and about what one would do for love.”
And aside from character, Strait says he was just dumbfounded watching Emmerich create on such a massive scale. “Roland’s such a lovely man. There’s a grace about the way that he orchestrates productions of this size with such ease. He’s putting all these pieces together, with these massive things, and yet keeping such an amazing vision. What I took from him was that no matter how large the obstacle and how much they are pushing against you, he just rolls with it.”
And this is perhaps the greatest compliment of all for Emmerich, who prides himself on a work ethic that actually makes the epic possible. Already moving on to his next fantastic voyage (which is literally a remake of 'Fantastic Voyage'), Emmerich says of '10,000 B.C.', “I hope they like this world, because I really started to like it. It’s a totally new thing, and that’s what I’m most proud of, that it’s something we haven’t seen before.”
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