Roland Emmerich, Anyone?

File under: Things I Never Thought I'd Be Doing

...interviewing bombastic disaster movie king, Roland Emmerich!

And just when the interview was getting good, it ended! I had a million more questions I wanted to ask him like: Does Vanessa Redgrave even breathe dramatically when the camera is off?; Were all those male royals and their bastards in Tudor England really full lipped ginger pretty boys or was that just a casting preference for Anonymous (I couldn't tell them apart!)?; 10,000 BC ....what the hell?; Why have I never been invited to the über gay parties at your LA estate?; Was directing 90s muscle hunks Dolph Lundgren and Jean Claude Van Damme in Universal Soldier (1992) on set as fun as watching them be brain-dead super soldiers onscreen? (Hey, it was fun in 1992. Don't judge!)

P.S. I know that you're not supposed to like Anonymous, but I had fun watching it. Sometimes big bold cheesy underlining, playing to the balcony if you will, is JUST right for ridiculous conspiracy theories like "Shakespeare never wrote a word!". Sometimes you just want to hiss at hunchback villains dressed in black and swoon with lusty queens who go weak at the knees for poets.

Comments

[joy]

I really liked the whole ensemble work, especially Rhys Ifans, David Thewlis (great old-age makeup!) and Mark Rylance.

[Brian Mullin]

Hi Nathaniel - I had no idea Emmerich was openly gay.....

I must say though that 'Anonymous' and the hype around it are getting me REALLY upset. I haven't seen the movie yet, and feel really conflicted about giving it any money. I hate the fact that it's giving such a big platform to a completely illegitimate theory about the authorship of the greatest body of literature ever written. Why do I care so much? Well, I just hate the elitist snobbery which says that a humble man of the theatre, a glove-maker's son, could never have known enough of the world to have written these works of genius. To me, Shakespreare's plays are so timeless because they are works of imagination and because as a writer he was so able to transcend all kinds of class boundaries and to imagine such a broad spectrum of society...

I spent years studying Elizabethan theatre history at Oxford and absolutely no serious academics give credence to the conspiracy idea. Emmerich can make vague claims about a 'literary establishment' suppressing the truth, but that's just ridiculous. Why would it be in their interest to do so?? Surely they'd sell more books if they told his version of events. The problem is that his version is just completely unfounded.

You can say (as it seems Emmerich sometimes does) that it's only a movie, who cares? I didn't get worked up about the dubious history of The Da Vinci Code... But then Emmerich goes around trying to get schools to show his 'documentary' about the controversy. Have you read this criticism by Columbia professor James Shapiro?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/opinion/hollywood-dishonors-the-bard.html

Seriously, the Shakespeare-denier theories are on the level of the anti-evolution arguments and they show a similar disregard for scholarship and serious history -- mixed with a healthy dose of classism, too!

Sorry to get all worked up - I just feel it's important that everyone hears this perspective :)