In any case, his new movie is once again a spectacle like his other films, but this time, instead of a modern adventure, he’s voyaged back 10,000 years to tell his story. Here’s the synopsis:

In a remote mountain tribe, the young hunter D’Leh (Steven Strait) has found his heart’s passion – the beautiful Evolet (Camilla Belle).  But when a band of mysterious warlords raid his village and kidnap Evolet, D’Leh leads a small group of hunters to pursue the warlords to the end of the world to save her.  As they venture into unknown lands for the first time, the group discovers there are civilizations beyond their own and that mankind’s reach is far greater than they ever knew.  At each encounter the group is joined by other tribes who have been attacked by the slave raiders, turning D’Leh’s once-small band into an army.

Driven by destiny, the unlikely warriors must battle prehistoric predators while braving the harshest elements.  At their heroic journey’s end, they uncover a lost civilization and learn their ultimate fate lies in an empire beyond imagination, where great pyramids reach into the skies.

Here they will take their stand against a tyrannical god who has brutally enslaved their own.  And it is here that D’Leh finally comes to understand that he has been called to save not only Evolet but all of civilization.

So to help promote the movie, yesterday I attended the international press day as a representative of our partner website Omelete. While I was also able to interview stars Camilla Belle and Steven Strait, due to the movie coming out in a few days and time constraints, I won’t have the time to translate the interviews. However, you can click on their names for the audio as an MP3.

However, while you won’t get to read what the stars said, I do have the transcript for Director Roland Emmerich.

During the roundtable interview, Roland discussed the difficulties of making 10,000 BC and of course I asked many questions about his next “disaster” film 2012. In case you haven’t heard, Roland just made a deal for the film at Sony and according to Roland, “it will be very expensive, you see the whole world go to shit.”

What was also cool about talking to Roland was asking questions about whether or not he’ll get into 3D filmmaking or even digital filmmaking. He was actually quite funny and had a lot to say. While Roland does have a pretty strong German accent, I think you’ll understand everything he said. You can click here to listen to the interview as an MP3.

Finally, if you missed the movie clips that we posted a few days ago, click here. And with that...here's Roland.

Roland Emmerich: Hello.

Question: So how was this working in all these fabulous different locations? Did you ever worry about…especially in Namibia? Did you every worry about any kind of wild animals coming out of the jungle?

Roland Emmerich: No. When there’s a film crew you know all animals leave the…even snakes, you know they are like kind of by the noise from so many people they kind of run away.  But actually the most fun was actually finding all these locations, you know because…but I also have to say shooting there was not so fun because you never, ever count on something called weather.  And so it was nearly like kind of revenge of somebody because on the “Day After Tomorrow” we had like the worst luck with the weather. Really bad.  And for example, in New Zealand we said, “so how is this going here with snow?  Do you ever get snow in May?”  And they say, “oh well not really. The last 10 years we had hardly any snow, but once in a while a sprinkling because we have a saying here, snow in May doesn’t stay. Snow in June is too soon.”  I said, “oh that’s great.” And first day of shooting half a meter of snow.

Q: But you needed snow at least.

Roland: No, I didn’t. It was not planned so I was like actually---it was a blessing in disguise. We fought ourselves through it. I would never, ever dared to kind of like do scenes in the snow because we said we have enough problems, and then it was actually great for the look of the movie. It’s just at the end of the ice age look and it’s very, very cold and there’s a great contrast to Namibia.  In Namibia we had the problem was always morning fog. So we had to wait. It was always like the sun had to first burn away the fog.  When you shoot in winter and it takes 7-8 hours, not a good thing.

When you’re directing are you a storyboard person or are you the person to design on the fly?

Roland: You know what?  I do it always like I always do a storyboard and this time even did very, very detailed pre-vis and then when I shoot, I throw everything over.  Otherwise it becomes very mechanical and it will not work.  It’s also great for the actors so they can see a little bit the scene how it will unfold.  But then when you work with actors, they come up with ideas. You come up with ideas and you just wing it.

And with the film, were there any scenes that you cut out due to time or pacing or where there any…?

Roland: There’s only 1 scene we cut out due to pacing.  It was in the village. There was a scene where all these people hide on the rocks and we see how they’re all like kind of down.  That’s the only scene which was lost.

And about the story, did you make some kind of historical investigation?

Roland: Well, you know that was a very long journey.  It was just started 15 years ago.  I saw a documentary about mammoth hunting that interested me and I said this is a very, very cool idea for a movie. But then I worked with Harold on it and it was just a little bit one dimensional at first and then only when I discovered this theory of the lost civilization that I really thought, oh my God, I have a real good story now because it was like a travel in time, you know.  And that was kind of like for me the kicker and then we had more or less…I think it’s more a concept movie than it’s a historical movie.  But what we did you know all the animals and all the costumes and settings are all incredibly well researched, but, naturally, the story has a sort of fantastic or fantasy element to it.

You always had interesting…historic images to your writings something about Mayan civilization?  I read this on the internet, is that right?

Roland: Yeah, the Mayan calendar ends in 2012 that’s what it’s about.

What was the most challenging aspect of the visual effect work?

Roland: I actually attempted 7-8 years ago to make this movie and I did some research and we learned it’s not possible yet.  So we actually had to wait until now and I can tell you I’m really very proud of these visual effects because I convinced the studio to give us enormous amounts of time. You know for a studio it’s a big risk because not only it’s expensive it’s like they want to have 2-1/2 years. But I’m happy that I did it because it took nearly a year to build a mammoth in the computer. A year.  And then you have no shot. You have only like a turntable and some sort of software and then you apply this to the shot and that took another year. And when we had our first mammoths we were really, really excited about how it looked but there was good news and bad news. There was the good news, but the bad news it took 12 hours to render one frame. And I said, well what does this mean?  I said like anybody good in math?  We were really like with a calculator calculated that we cannot finish this movie in time so we had to do something.  It was really kind of funny because at one point we said, what could we do? What could we do? Then somebody in the room said maybe less hair. I said what?  Then we tried it out you know like 10% less hair, 20% less hair and we realized 40% less hair, you started to see it. So we did like 35% less hair. You know and that made it possible but we still I think 6-8 hours of rendering time per frame.  So we had to work really, really carefully that we rendered every mammoth’s extra and then what’s left sometimes the only way to not re-render, you know? 

The problem with the hair?

Roland: Yup.

I’m curious, the films are moving into the 21^st century with 3D filmmaking, with Chris Nolan doing some IMAX for “Batman”, as a director are you looking forward to taking some of these innovations into your future films?

Roland: I’ve always like tried to be on the forefront of innovation. I think that “10,000 B.C.” has the most real looking hairy animals you’ve ever seen. But for example, my new movie you know, I was asked do you want to do this in 3D and I said no, because I looked at the system Cameron developed for Avatar and for me the problem with 3D is I have to wear glasses, and I get roughly about ½ hour or 45 minutes into the movie I had a headache. And then I always say there’s no real composition. Everything is like in the room and I always have the feeling it’s a certain big object looks like models.  For example, in the T3 ride there’s like a huge truck coming towards you and it looks a model but I know it was real. So I’m very, very skeptical about…and also in the 50’s there was already 3D and this new 3D is the same just done digitally.  IMAX, I love because it’s just a bigger format and that is great.  Also, especially when you shoot digitally you can have it so that it’s like no grain, which I also really like.  I love for example digital projection.  I think it’s brilliant.

So would you consider shooting your future films with digital and going away from film and would you consider doing an IMAX—making a whole movie in IMAX?

Roland: Yeah, absolutely, because you can do this now with digital. I’m just a little bit skeptical shooting digital. I would only do this with a film like shot mainly on stages. For “10,000 B.C.” it would have nearly impossible.  Then they still have to come up with something to do slow motion.

I have one more question for you but it’s about “2012”.  You’ve made a lot of disaster movies. You’re famous for blowing things up.  How are you going to raise the bar with “2012” with blowing things up?

Roland: Well, its like I’m not blowing up anything there.

Okay.  I heard it was a disaster movie.

Roland: It is.

Right. So?

Roland: It will be a natural disaster.

Okay.

Roland: It’s not blowing up, it’s something else.  Explosives, right.  You put into a building or an alien shoots something in—that’s blowing up.

Right.

Roland: This time there’s no blowing up. It’s a natural disaster.  Well, actually yeah like a…I’m not saying it! I’m giving things away.

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