Emmerich on Foundation

Not content with merely destroying the world over and over again, Roland Emmerich’s next project after 2012 will feature destruction on an intergalactic scale, as he’s adapting Isaac Asimov’s FOUNDATION series for the big screen, a story which follows the fall of a galaxy-wide empire and those trying to stop it or save what they can.

While this in itself is not a new bit of news, recently Emmerich talked a little bit about the project, his vision for it, and why past Asimov adaptations haven’t gone so well.

“They kind of pretty much changed everything, and I think the fans hated the movie,” Emmerich said in a news conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo., last Friday, where he was promoting 2012. “So I didn’t want to do that. But on the other hand, the Foundation, it’s a similar problem, you know? There’s all these short stories, which then later got combined in a book.”

“There’s not one character going through, so Bob Rodat came to me and said, ‘I’m like a fanatic reader of … Foundation,’ and I … talked with him. … He said, ‘We have to consolidate the characters.’ And that’s what we did, and that’s what’s worked really, really well in the context. And I think that if Asimov … would have … conceived this as a science fiction trilogy or series from the very beginning, he would have done that, too. But he didn’t. … I think in spirit [the movie is] totally Foundation, but it has consolidated characters which go through the three movies.”

Emmerich talked about what inspired him about the series. “Well it’s the same thing that Asimov was inspired by,” he said. “Just the downfall of a great civilization and how you can stop it. And you cannot stop it, it’s just inherent. … As a civilization crumbles, it falls.”

And with that last statement, I think we’ve just discovered the driving philosophy behind all of Emmerich’s movies.