Independence Day and Day After Tomorrow director Roland Emmerich says he turned down a James Cameron draft for his upcoming remake of Fantastic Voyage because… it was set in the future?!
“Two years ago Jim called me up and said ‘Roland I want you to look at the script for Fantastic Voyage – it’s not there yet’. And he sent it over and I hated the script,” said Emmerich. “I said why have you put this in the future? I said let this happen now. It’s so much more cool and fun when we can say to a normal person from now, ‘well we’re going to make you microscopic and put you in some submarine which we will shrink down and you have to do this stuff inside a body’,” “There were two submarines in the body. It was like a Navy SEALS film.”
National Treasure scribes Marianne and Cormac Wibberley are currently hard at work on a page-one rewrite. I never had the chance to read the Cameron draft, so I have no sense of if it was good or bad. The only thing I have to go by is Emmerich’s past career. Sure, the guy made a couple fun sci-fi flicks: Stargate and Independence Day, but the rest of his filmography isn’t anything to brag about. This is the guy who made the 1998 America remake of Godzilla, Universal Soldier, Ghost Chase, and Joey.
So may-be Emmerich doesn’t have the best sensibilities. And Cameron clearly has a better track record. But I’m sure the writing team that wrote National Treasure 2 and the 2006 remake of The Shaggy Dog probably know better than the guy who wrote Terminator 2 and Titanic…. uh, yeah…
source: Empire
September 26th, 2007 at 2:39 pm
I had the same reaction. Maybe he should have a look at the glass house he’s living in… he comes off like a maroon with statements like that in view of his track record.
Yeesh,
Vic
September 26th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
Same here, Emmerich is in no position to bad mouth James Cameron, especially since a future setting is certainly a lot more interesting than a present setting.
September 26th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
I don’t mind resetting it to the present, but I do agree that tossing away a James Cameron script is suspect. Maybe they’ll keep a lot of the material in the rewrite.