Indian Express 16.11.2009
Disaster Management
What’s your fascination with destroying the world?
I’m a filmmaker, I like fictional stories. I take a lot of inspiration from documentaries, from real-life survivors of disasters. A lot of qualities in us only come out in the face of disaster.
What was the idea behind 2012?
We wanted a peg on which to hang our contemporary Noah’s Ark fable and came across a book about the Mayan Calendar when we were researching a different project. The Mayan calendar is set to reach the end of its 13th cycle on December 21, 2012, and after that, there’s nothing.
Is this your biggest production?
2012 ended up being an enormous production, even by my scale. Every page of the script was a scene where one wondered just what I had in mind, because it seemed so ambitious, so huge. But on the set, I was never pulling my hair out.
How visually different is it going to be compared to your earlier spectacles Independence Day and Day After Tomorrow?
It was more of a challenge than ID and DAT. Also a little nerve wracking as a result. 2012 has the largest number of effects of any of my films, for sure, there are about 1300. For example, the first image that came into my head for 2012, which also ended up being the teaser - is the water coming over the mountains of the Himalayas. The sequence is an extraordinary piece of cinema - visually stunning and terrifyingly real.
John Cusack is a very unlikely hero of a disaster movie.
I was interested in him as a father. No matter what has happened he still wants to do the best that he can for his family because, in the end, that is the most important thing. And even though he has let them down in the past, he will be there for them when it counts. He fit the part perfectly.
Was getting finances tough?
People who read the script said this is undoable. And I said, but we’ll do it. I think it’s worth doing it because when you have something where you have an adrenaline rush, you are nervous about it, and that’s good.
New York and Los Angeles are cities often destroyed in your films. Which one is it this time?
Well it’s a global film. Twisters razed LA in The Day After Tomorrow and aliens did the honours in Independence Day. I wanted the world to be connected through this film. In fact there is a strong Indian connection in the movie where the US government is warned by leading scientists where the problem is discovered.
Haven’t you thought of sequels to your earlier blockbusters?
Not with the earlier films but the plan is to have a TV sequel to 2012 - that it is 2013 and it’s about what happens after the disaster. It is about the resettling of Earth. Harald Kloser (co-writer) and I came up with the idea and we have the luxury of having a producer on the film, Mark Gordon. We said to Mark, “Why don’t you do a TV show that picks up where the movie leaves off and call it 2013?” I think it will focus on a group of people who survived but not on the boats; maybe they were on a piece of land that was spared or one that became an island in the process of the crust moving.
