I think sport in general affects what people see in movies. I always try to explain to people in Hollywood that we have to make movies more like sport because, in sport, everything can happen and it's so much better than movies in some ways.

I try to put in every one of my movies some sort of message. I don't want to overdo it, because I don't want people to get annoyed by it, but it's good to have a message.

I'm only a stupid filmmaker.

Nobody makes movies bad on purpose.

There's a rule in Hollywood: stay away from water and stay away from snow, and I had both.

Everybody knows that the industrialized nations are the worst offenders.

Dean [Devlin, Emmerich's partner on "Independence Day"] and I always said that we'd only do it when we had a really good story that excites us both, and we have the story written. And we've had it for a year and a half, two years. So we've been ready.