Let’s face it, when you go see a Roland Emmerich film, what you see is what you get. You either like his mega-budgeted movies of destruction or you don’t. Nevertheless, his films (“2012”, “The Day After Tomorrow”) tend to make a ton of money and his upcoming effort “White House Down” is another big budget blockbuster that hopes to replicate that success. But, judging from his interview with Empire, it sounds as if Emmerich is looking to go into a completely different direction with his next film and it actually sounds pretty interesting.
The film in question is about the Stonewall riots that happened in New York City back in 1969. A police raid took place at a gay bar called Stonewall Inn, where many homeless gay people adopted as a shelter, and much to the surprise of the police, they fought back. “It’s one of those civil rights movements, like Rosa Parks, and very little is known about it,” Emmerich said to the magazine about the event, one of the galvanizing moments of the gay rights movement.
Emmerich’s movie would specifically be about “these crazy kids in New York, and a country bumpkin who gets into their gang, and at the end they start this riot and change the world,” as described by Emmerich himself. “It was the first time that gay people had shown the police that they should take them serious. And when the riot police came – this has always been fascinating for me – these kids formed a chorus line and sang, ‘We are the village girls, we wear our hair in curls!’ It was such a cool thing.”
Playwright John Robin Bates is currently working on the script, so we’ll see how this turns out. This isn’t the first time Emmerich has been interested in things not exploding, having helmed 2011’s Shakespeare conspiracy theory thing “Anonymous,” but this would definitely be his first taking on a real life event, with some serious dramatic importance. Moreover, Emmerich is ready to ditch the hundreds of millions of dollars his movies usually get, and make it for “$12-14 million” — another gear change from the usually effects heavy filmmaker. Could we one day see Roland Emmerich as an Oscar nominee? The mind reels….
