Director Roland Emmerich is batting about .500 the last ten years as a director. He’s had two pretty good movies (The Patriot and Independence Day) and two that were not so great (Godzilla and The Day After Tomorrow.) But, as we noted in August, Emmerich is planning a remake of the 1960’s sci-fi crapfest Fantastic Voyage about a miniaturized crew and submarine sent into a human body to fight off what is killing it.
Emmerich spoke with Empire Online about his involvement with the project, which is pretty longstanding. He states, “I was attached to this project 15 years ago with [former producing partner] Dean Devlin and then we gave it back because we wanted to do some other original projects we had developed. Then James Cameron came in and worked on the project. Two years ago Jim called me up and said ‘Roland I want you to look at the script for Fantastic Voyage – it’s not there yet’. And he sent it over and I hated the script.” It seems that Emmerich didn’t like that the screenplay set the event in the future. “ I said why have you put this in the future? I said let this happen now. It’s so much more cool and fun…” He also didn’t like that there were two subs sent into the body. I guess that’s just a little too ridiculous.
Emmerich was eventually given the go ahead to oversee a complete rewrite. He said “The key is I won’t do it unless it’s going to be a good movie.” He didn’t have these strong scruples prior to making Godzilla, I guess. The National Treasure writers are taking a crack at the script so you can expect to see this sometime in the medium future.
