Vous trouverez ci-joint un document en anglais reprenant le Q&A promo sur Le Jour d'Après (sortie mondiale 28 mai, sortie France 26 mai) avec le réalisateur Roland Emmerich et le producteur Mark Gordon lors de leur tournée européenne.

Site officiel du film: www.thedayaftertomorrow.com

THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW
Q&A WITH ROLAND EMMERICH AND MARK GORDON
February 18, 2004


MARK GORDON: Take off your coat and stay awhile. Okay, hello how are you. Thank you for having us, we’re very excited to be here. We’re going to show you some footage, there’s actually three sections of it and the first thing I wanted to let you know is that this is a work in progress and what I mean by that is that although the cut is for the most part dramatically what you're going to see in the film, we are still working on the visual effects, a lot of what you see is 50% there. So just know that when you see these effects shots, they are not finished yet. The music that you're going to hear is temporary; we haven't scored the movie, we actually start scoring the picture next week in Los Angeles. What you're also going to see is directly out of the AVID so it might appear a little bit grainy but just know that the movie will be finished properly when you see it in the theatres and this is again still a work in progress. Before we show you the series of clips that we would like you to look at, let’s just talk for a little bit about how you came upon the idea for the movie and then we’ll share a few other things and set up the first clip then come back and talk a little bit more. Do you want to take off your coat now?

ROLAND EMMERICH: No. No.

MARK GORDON: No. okay.

ROLAND EMMERICH: Maybe later. About three years ago I read a book called the “Coming of the Global Super Storm” which is pretty much a like kind of the scenario and at that time I kind of thought well it would make probably for a great movie but is it really… is it really going to happen like that and then I started to research a little bit, I brought another writer onboard and I brought Mr Gordon onboard.

MARK GORDON: Thank you.

ROLAND EMMERICH: We did a lot of research and realised all of a sudden that as fantastic as it may sound, this is really a scenario that is possible and the amazing thing about it is it starts with extreme weather all over the world and while we were shooting this movie you know, a lot of these events started to happen, you know there were extreme floods. There was a lot of unusual weather activity ….

MARK GORDON: Roland actually said that if we didn’t hurry up and release the picture we would be making a documentary.

ROLAND EMMERICH: Anyhow so, that said, in the first clip all these kinds of weather events are leading to a dramatic climate shift. The climate flips over in one giant storm into an ice age. The first clip we will show is one of those big letter events---like tornadoes in Los Angeles because also the weather pattern shifts and what happens in the mid-west all of a sudden happens in California. That is the first scene we are going to show and then after that we will explain a little bit more about the story.






MARK GORDON: before you look at the first images, obviously what we wanted to show you (because we’re only showing you 18 minutes or so of footage) is very spectacular and we’ll talk a little bit about this in the Q and A presumably, but one of the things we’re excited about aside from the spectacle and aside from what the movie is about thematically is that we think we have a movie with great characters and a great story. Even though what you're going to see today is primarily spectacle and visual effects we’ll give you a sense when we set up the next clip and we talk about it in the Q and A. If you are interested about the characters and the story which we think are really at the forefront and these effects, as spectacular as they are, are the backdrop for the movie and they're not what the movie is about perse, but they're the backdrop for the characters’ story. So let’s look at the first one and then we can talk a little bit more…

MARK GORDON: He’s very talented, this is his first picture and you’d never know it but it’s pretty amazing for a guy who’s just making his first movie.

ROLAND EMMERICH: It’s all about the producer…

MARK GORDON: Yes, yes that’s what you kept telling me when we were shooting. So Roland is going to talk a little bit about the next clip, we’ll take a look at that and you’re still wearing your coat.

ROLAND EMMERICH: Yes it’s getting cold. So, the movie is basically about a father who fears a little bit--you know, he has problems with his son. He and his wife are divorced and his son is kind of living with the mother so….

MARK GORDON: He feels like he hasn’t spent enough time with the son.

ROLAND EMMERICH: Enough time with him. The father is a scientist and he is always somewhere in Antarctica or somewhere. At the beginning of the movie, he realises there are certain events he had predicted by actually studying something which happened 10,000 years ago and all of a sudden there are similar signals. So he starts warning people about this and more and more realizes that this thing is coming even faster than he ever expected. Parallel to that he sends off his son you know to this school in New York and all of a sudden realizes that he is in grave danger and at a certain point you know he tells him get the fuck home.

MARK GORDON: Just like that. As a matter of fact, exactly…. Get the fuck home.

ROLAND EMMERICH: Anyhow, so he, that’s the next clip. He knows there is this huge storm coming and he wants to get his son home. The son is by that time like kind of with a group of other kids you know in…..

MARK GORDON: In Manhattan.

ROLAND EMMERICH: They're looking for a driver to take them out of New York and planes and trains are already not operating anymore and there is like so much water in the streets…

MARK GORDON: And there you have it.

ROLAND EMMERICH: There you have it.

MARK GORDON: Okay, we’ll be back in a minute, thank you.



MARK GORDON: We’ve got him to take off his coat. He’s comfortable now so now we can really talk to these people because you’re relaxed and comfortable.

ROLAND EMMERICH: The visual effects of this sequence are not finished yet so I will just say that.

MARK GORDON: They look pretty good though. Not bad.

ROLAND EMMERICH: A work in progress.

MARK GORDON: Not bad.

ROLAND EMMERICH: Water is obviously the most difficult. The next clip is about what is at the core of this like movie. Dennis Quaid who plays like Jack, a paleoclimatologist. He has to convince the American president that they have to evacuate America.

MARK GORDON: The northern states.

ROLAND EMMERICH: No the southern states.

MARK GORDON: No the northern states to the south.

ROLAND EMMERICH: Yes. But at the same time he knows that the northern states cannot evacuate anymore because it’s too late for them. So what he does, well, he wants to go to New York while everybody else is going south because he wants to rescue his son.

MARK GORDON: I think you’re right about that the southern states, I remember now.

ROLAND EMMERICH: You know it’s kind of like…

MARK GORDON: It’s confusing to me, we’ve been working on this a long time.

ROLAND EMMERICH: Maybe too long.

MARK GORDON: Southern states.

ROLAND EMMERICH: Anyhow so basically that’s the emotional part of the movie, how there’s a man who has a difficult relationship with his son and he goes through this powerful storm in the north just to rescue him. At the same time we see how the son with a small group of people tries to survive in the New York Library and the only way they can get heat is to burn books. So that’s the next clip and then we’ll come back.

MARK GORDON: Thank you.









MC: Thanks everybody. So the way we’re going to do this is we’ve got around 25-30 minutes and first of all I’m just going to ask Mark and Roland some questions myself and then really it is up to you. It’s over to you at that point. So if you’ve got any questions you want to ask them…well I say any questions, I guess questions about the movie is what you’d prefer. Just stick your hands up or wave at me or shout at me and we’ll get a microphone over to you, we’ve got three microphones around the room and then everyone can hear you and we’ll get the questions going. But first of all I’d just like to ask you some questions myself actually. Well firstly I should say how amazing does this movie look, absolutely brilliant, and it’s 28th of May we’re looking at for its release?

MARK GORDON: Yes.

MC: A global release date.

MARK GORDON: Correct.

MC: What was the thinking behind that then, why have you done it the same everywhere?

MARK GORDON: Well you know if it doesn’t work out at least we’ll get a big weekend out of it you know! Actually, I think that there are a lot of reasons: we’re very excited about the movie obviously and because it’s a story about a global event among other reasons we thought it would be great to open the movie all over the world and we do feel very strongly that the picture works well…and the Fox people have great faith in the picture which we’re excited about so… among other reasons that’s one of them.

MC: 28th of May then.

MARK GORDON: Yes.

MC: That’s the date. Now I want to talk to you Roland about disaster movies first of all because you are a big fan of making them and watching them as well. I hear. What’s the buzz with you then with disaster movies? Why do you like them so much? What’s your favorite?

ROLAND EMMERICH: My favorite is The Poseidon Adventure but what I like about disaster movies is also the idea of very normal people in extraordinary situations and have to you do things they normally wouldn’t do. I used the same idea for Independence Day. I almost viewed the alien invasion more as a disaster so it’s the same story in a way—of normal people having to triumph in an ordinary situation and I can simply like that.

MARK GORDON: It makes for great drama.

ROLAND EMMERICH: It makes a great drama. A very little story sometimes becomes important when disaster strikes and everybody asks himself “what should I do?” before the end of it. When the world ends, what would you do? And a lot of people suddenly see what’s really important in life.

MARK GORDON: I actually don’t think it’s what would you do. I think it’s where will you be. That’s really the… is that what you were thinking?



ROLAND EMMERICH: No. No.

MARK GORDON: Sorry. I’m just confused again.

ROLAND EMMERICH: I will be not in the theatre.

MARK GORDON: You’ll be in Mexico right.

ROLAND EMMERICH: I have my house in Mexico because I bought that for a reason.

MC: Are you not good with watching your own movies because I noticed you were not watching these clips or is it just because you’ve seen the material so many times.

ROLAND EMMERICH: I just cannot watch my own movies. …with an audience it’s terrifying for me to, for example, test the film.

MC: Now this time in terms of the disaster movie it’s a global ecological disaster. It’s not just like a boat sinking or, you know, a tower block on fire. You’ve mentioned the book that influenced you. How much scientific fact are we looking at with this film?

ROLAND EMMERICH: Well there is a lot of scientific research put into the writing of this film. The only difference is that for dramatic reasons we made the amount of time in which things happen much shorter. But we have actually been surprised lately because there are a lot of articles in the newspapers and magazines which read more and more like our movie. There was an article in Fortune magazine of all magazines which told about how the Pentagon has now more or less ordered their think tank to forecast what they would do in the event of a global climate shift leading toward another ice age. And they described what is leading to this ice age which is exactly the story in our movie. So that’s cool.

MARK GORDON: But we did a lot of research.

MC: So on the end credits then there's going to be a list of scientific advisors and presumably what Palent… what was it?

MARK GORDON: Paleoclimatologists.

MC: Paleoclimatologists I wanted you to say it.

MARK GORDON: Can you all say that paleoclimatologists? It’s hard to get that out. The fact is that we really did do a lot of research and had a lot of consultants for the scientific accuracy of the movie and obviously for dramatic purposes, as Roland said, we had to truncate and shorten that to make it one big storm. But all of the things that happen in the movie have happened before the last ice age and the weather events that occur are things that are believed to have led up to that event. So for dramatic purposes we accelerate the time period but it is all based on scientific fact.

MC: So the last time you worked together I think was with The Patriot.

MARK GORDON: A big favourite here if I recall.




MC: Brits getting beaten in the war which was 2000, four years ago.

MARK GORDON: Is that how long…

ROLAND EMMERICH: Yes that’s when we needed a rest.

MC: Is that what you’ve been doing since? Has it the four years been working on The Day After Tomorrow?

ROLAND EMMERICH: Yes, first I had to take a year break and then, it was actually during The Patriot that I found the book. We were the shooting in North Carolina, and we constantly had these hurricanes coming in and I was religiously watching the weather channel and at the same time I found in the hotel bookstore this book “The Coming Global Super Storm” and started reading it and I said, well this would make a great movie but I had no idea that I wanted to do it yet and then you know one day I read another article which was very simply called “Is There A New Ice Age Coming?” and I said hmmm…

MARK GORDON: It sounds like a movie for me.

ROLAND EMMERICH: Exactly, it sounds like a movie. So anyhow, I wrote the script for one year alone which was a mistake because….

MARK GORDON: It wasn’t so bad.

ROLAND EMMERICH: Anyhow, I turned to Mark and he brought me together with this writer Jeffery Nachmanoff and I really liked him and then we started working together and that accelerated things and we did this all ourselves because I was always under the impression that a studio would never have developed this film because a studio would have asked you know who is saving the earth--who is saving this planet--and I wanted to make a movie where you know you cannot save it. I mean, you cannot stop an ice age but the only thing what you can do is save as many as you can and that’s the idea of the movie. So we did that and then we sent out the script to all of the studios and everybody wanted to have it so we were in a very fortunate situation to get an immediate green light and we ended up at the studio where we wanted to be.

MC: I know in the introduction you were saying that the special effects are amazing but there are characters in there so it is story driven as well. Let’s just talk about some of those actors and the characters. I mean I know it’s Jake Gyllenhaal up there I’m a huge fan or probably best known over here for Donnie Darko.

MARK GORDON: A wonderful actor, and sorry go ahead.

MC: Well just going to say one of the things I really like about him is he has a real sad look about his face and I’m really concerned actually that there’s going to be lots of gut wrenching moments when you know that sad look on his face he’s going to have people in tears because this is stuff going to happen to him.





MARK GORDON: We hope so, we hope that that gut wrenching face will be on at the gut wrenching emotional time and the happy face will be on for the happy face and the times when we had to adjust his face with visual effects because it wasn’t quite right and well he screwed up and got the scene wrong so we fixed it. Visual effects are an amazing thing, you can fix anything now with visual effects.

MC: That wasn’t actually Dennis Quaid was it?

MARK GORDON: No that wasn’t… that was a CG Dennis.

MC: So let’s talk about Jake first of all, how did you go about casting him?

MARK GORDON: You know, we had seen his work in some of the smaller independent pictures that he had done and actually I was over in London working and saw him in a play called This Is Our Youth which he was fantastic in and called Roland after having seen it and said you know I love this guy and Roland was excited about him, having seen his work as well, and he was our first choice. As a matter of fact all of the actors and this is one of the things that you're always supposed to say when you're talking to the press. Oh we always got our first choice, but in this case it’s really true. We never lie in Hollywood! But, but, both Jake, Dennis Quaid (who we were looking for the right combination of physicality and emotionality and intelligence to be able to play both a scientist but at the same time someone who had the physicality to be able to go off and rescue his son). He was the first choice for us to play that role. Sela Ward plays Jake’s mom and both Roland and I had always wanted to work with Ian Holm.

MC: Is he in it much?

MARK GORDON: He’s got a very big part. Yes it’s a big part of the story. So we were obviously, he was our first choice as well. So we were very fortunate in all those cases to get the first choice.

ROLAND EMMERICH: In the movie England goes first. I’m sorry about that, after The Patriot
I kinda thought…

MARK GORDON: Exactly, after the treatment we got there we decided it was time for a little payback, right Roland?

ROLAND EMMERICH: But they go down nobly.

MC: Stiff upper lip isn't it?

ROLAND EMMERICH: Exactly. They drink a last bottle of 12-year-old scotch. It’s true.

MC: Just before we go to questions from the audience I want to just talk about the destruction in this film because I get a real buzz out of seeing these famous monuments completely trashed. There is something great about watching that in the movies. I think that you probably enjoyed trashing that Hollywood sign.

MARK GORDON: Yes.





ROLAND EMMERICH: A lot of people wanted me to cut that out and I said only over my dead body. Because I have had to live in that town for 14 years and I don’t enjoy it…

MC: So how long do those special effects take because they look pretty mind blowing.

ROLAND EMMERICH: Oh we’re still working on them.

MARK GORDON: We’ve been working on some of these effects now for 18 months. Over a year.

ROLAND EMMERICH: No a year.

MARK GORDON: We’re not going to have an argument right here in front of these people are we? It would be very embarrassing. I’ll never work with you again! They're very difficult and Roland can address this but because of the fact that this is not a science fiction film where we’re in outer space it needs to be totally real and Roland had insisted when we started the process that these effects be photo real in order not to take us out of the film, take the audience out of the film. So we’ve been working very, very hard and if it’s not right we keep going back and doing it again and again and again because we really want to make sure that it’s totally photo real.

MC: Is that part of the process you really enjoy, the special effects.

MARK GORDON: Not anymore.

ROLAND EMMERICH: Well we set ourselves a really high standard and that’s sometimes a curse because you have to take shots away from companies and give them to other companies, which is always a little bit problematic. At the end you know you always have to make compromises so in a way I love visual effects but also I totally hate having to do them because you feel a little bit as a director you know like, how should I put it, it’s not in your hands anymore. You can only say yes or no but there’s a moment when you cannot say yes anymore because it has to be finished. So there are always the last 4, 5, 15 20 shots which are not actually….

MARK GORDON: We have what 400, roughly 400 visual effects, which is really not a lot of shots, I mean you know you all saw some of the stuff they're doing on I, ROBOT and I think there's over a 1,000 shots in that film. We only have 400 shots but they are very very complicated and some things that haven't been done before.

ROLAND EMMERICH: Also did everything CGI the first time, the whole New York stuff you saw, that was like all computer generated and it looks pretty photo real and I'm really proud of that.

MARK GORDON: We ended up spending about 3 months or so maybe more going into New York with a team of people.

ROLAND EMMERICH: An English company, Light Arts.








MARK GORDON: Light Arts. Basically, what they do is they read all the buildings and at the same time we take with lasers and then we also had lots and lots, thousands and thousands of photographs taken for texture all fed into the computer so we’re able to not just create New York but literally recreate it down to the inch of all of these buildings and their exact textures and colour and so on, and that hasn’t really been done before but it was the only way to do this and make it look real.

MC: Shall we do some questions from the audience then? I can’t really see very well because of those lights, okay has anybody got a question for Roland and Mark put your hands up and we’ll get a microphone over to you.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I love the music on the programme material. Who is going to do the music for the movie?

ROLAND EMMERICH: A friend of mine called Harold Klauser. He is an Austrian and he did the music for a movie I produced called The Thirteenth Floor.

MARK GORDON: He also did the music for a German mini series that was released in the US called The Tunnel. He is very, very talented and is obviously working on the music for the film now which we start scoring on Monday in LA (February 23).

MC: That’s always the last thing to be done isn't it, the score?

MARK GORDON: The effects are….

ROLAND EMMERICH: He has until the 15th of April for the last effect in the movie. A month huh.

MARK GORDON: Yeah coming up fast.

MC: Okay, any other questions? We have one down here at the front.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: It seems that you have made a quite political movie here, how do you expect for instance the American audience or even at high level in America, how would you expect…

MARK GORDON: I don’t think we’ll be invited to show this picture at the White House. Not this time.

ROLAND EMMERICH: Well it is a political problem and there’s a climate shift. The whole industrialized world, which is so arrogant, has to kind of move into a third world you know. That will be fun.

MARK GORDON: I think that for us what’s exciting is to have the opportunity to make a film that is both spectacular and entertaining, and at the same time has real meaning for us and I think for everyone. As an American, I feel uncomfortable about the attitude that the government has towards both the Kyoto Accord and the problems that we are having with the environment and the fact that we are putting more greenhouse gases and polluting the air more than any other country and more than most countries combined.



MARK GORDON/CONT’D.

I was reading in a newspaper article the other day that in actuality the American public seems to be concerned about pollution and about the environment and is doing what they can in terms of recycling and so on to try and solve that problem. Whereas the corporate world and the government is certainly less concerned. So obviously we hope that this will make some difference. I think that, that as we know, unfortunately or fortunately depending upon how you look at it, so many people get their history from movies, they learn about so many things from history and I think this is a wonderful film actually and I think this is a great example of the power of film because not that we want to hit the audience over the head with the message although it’s hard to miss it… but I believe that more people will hopefully come away having some sense of what we’re doing to the environment. This film has the potential to reach more people than all the documentaries and newspapers articles and magazine articles combined just because that’s the nature of film and what we do so it’s something that we’re excited about.

MC: Any other questions for Roland and Mark? We have one over here.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you, it seems to me though it would have been really important to pick the central character for the film to base it around him. Why Dennis Quaid because we haven't seen him in anything major, in a big block buster film since Inner Space. I can’t think of anything else that Quaid’s been in of this magnitude.

MARK GORDON: His agent is in the room he’s going to come over and whallop you. Come in George, kick his ass.

ROLAND EMMERICH: Well Dennis Quaid had a really huge success in America with The Rookie. That was a really really big success in America so that kind of pretty much put him back on the map but you know it’s not about that. If you were to have somebody a real star in that part you would know how it ends. It’s great when you only have to cast good actors because for a director it’s perfect. He can cast the actors he really thinks should be in a movie. Because they're all somewhat equal in this movie, you don’t know what is going to happen at the end and you’re left wondering. With Mel Gibson, for example, you’d kind of know who will win.

MC: Dennis Quaid has an everyman quality about him as well, hasn’t he?

ROLAND EMMERICH: Yeah exactly, that’s we like cast him.

MARK GORDON: I think he’s a wonderful actor. He’s not a movie star in the same way that Tom Cruise or Tom Hanks or Mel Gibson is but he certainly is a wonderful actor and we felt was perfect to represent this character.

ROLAND EMMERICH: Plus he was cheaper.

MARK GORDON: Exactly, it’s true, we didn’t have any money left after all those visual effects… there’s no money left to pay the actors so… we did the best we could.

MC: We’ve probably got time for one more question if there is a final question? We have one more right over there.





AUDIENCE MEMBER: Roland and Mark, the scenes look completely fantastic that we’ve seen, can you tell us which is your favorite scene in the movie and why you're most proud of it?

MARK GORDON: Should I? Should I go first? You know it’s a little scene in the film but my favorite scene is when Jake is taking off his clothes and the character played by Emmy Rossum warms him up.

ROLAND EMMERICH: Because Jake plays somebody who is really, really shy and he cannot tell this girl that he loves her and throughout the course of the movie you know he will finally tell her he has not told her yet.

MARK GORDON: There is something for me when they come together in this scene and I think it’s a combination for me of having been there when we shot the scene and watching the magic that I think ultimately comes on the screen, it just feels very real to me. It’s funny….as Roland says, it’s when they first come together and I think that their performances are great particularly Emmy’s. There's a vulnerability to both of these characters. It’s certainly not the most spectacular scene and it’s not necessarily the most dramatic but it’s one of my favourite scenes in the film.

ROLAND EMMERICH: I also like one character scene the most. It’s at the very end when Jake tells like Emmy that he really loves her. That’s my favourite scene.

MARK GORDON: That’s a great scene.

ROLAND EMMERICH: You know our visual effects scenes are the worst to shoot. It goes on for weeks and weeks and you only shoot pieces of things. So when you shoot an actor with dialogue, three days later in the editing room you can already watch it. That’s why I like to make movies. I love that. But it’s very, very hard to shoot visual effects sequences because they're la pain in the ass.

MARK GORDON: W talked about this earlier but I don’t think movies like this can work if you're relying on just the special effects to move the audience. I think what audiences and what we love is the story of these characters and the fact that we’re really taken in by their dilemma and it’s very emotional. There are multiple story lines where Ian Holm and the two men that he works with to help save as many people as possible in Scotland or some of the people that work with the Dennis Quaid character or Jake and Emmy, that’s I think what makes an audience fall in love with a movie and yes, the special effects are great and certainly those are the things that people often times come out of the theatre talking about, but I think they remember the movie and it feels good to them if the characters and the story make sense. So as much as we talked about the visual effects and as much as it’s obvious how difficult they are and the level of spectacle that the movie has with these special effects, it’s really about these characters and I think for us there are many many moments in the film that are moving and very heartfelt and there's not a special effect in any of those shots so I think we are probably most proud of that. Certainly the spectacle is great but I think that the emotion and the heart of the movie is what makes it, we hope, special.

MC: Well it looks special just from the 20 minutes we’ve seen. There’s another what, one hour forty of it to go?

MARK GORDON: The movie runs just under two hours.

MC: So May the 28th is the big day.

MARK GORDON: May 28th.

MC: Mark and Roland thank you so much.