Director Roland Emmerich calls James Cameron ‘overbearing’

Roland Emmerich had some strong words for fellow director James Cameron during a panel at Comic-Con on Friday, July 26.

Emmerich, promoting his new Peacock series Those About to Die, appeared on stage with Training Day director Antoine Fuqua for Collider’s Directors on Directing event.

Back in the early Nineties, Emmerich was attached to reboot the camp sci-fi classic Fantastic Voyage (1966), which depicts a crew in a tiny submarine injected into a human body to battle with corpuscles.

However, after Cameron was brought in to assist with the project, Emmerich lost interest. “It was a little bit like, James Cameron is very overbearing, and so I at one point just gave up,” said the director. “Because it’s like, is it your movie or my movie? And that’s what happened.”

Emmerich explained that his take on Fantastic Voyage was only in the “very beginning stages” when he decided to step back. “Because I said, ‘Gosh, why is he so overbearing?’

“Look, I’m going to have to say, I do my stuff, and when I cannot do my stuff, I’m like totally not interested. It’s as simple as that. So when someone else wants to say something to me and is more powerful than me, I drop out.”

This isn’t the first time Emmerich has criticized Cameron’s input on the project. In an interview with Empire in 2007, the German director revealed more details: “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.”

Emmerich took issue with Cameron setting the film in the future and giving it a militaristic feel. “I said why have you put this in the future? I said let this happen now. It’s so much more cool and fun when we can say to a normal person from now, ‘well we’re going to make you microscopic and put you in some submarine which we will shrink down and you have to do this stuff inside a body.'”

He continued, “There were two submarines in the body. It was like a Navy SEALS film. And then the president of production at Fox – me and my partner and him all go surfing together – says ‘Well, will you do it with a page one rewrite and we won’t start until you’re happy with the script?’ So then I said yes. The key is I won’t do it unless it’s going to be a good movie.”