It's very, very rare you find something really original and also because a lot of original stuff, most of the time has no chance, because it's so expensive to make something famous or put it in people's head that it's the one to see, it's like awareness has to be almost like at 80% or 90% if you make an expensive summer movie and that's very hard to do with anything an the White House naturally is in itself some sort of a trademark.

When you find something where you can give people a message and still make it an exciting movie, you get very, very excited about something. You probably even work harder than you normally do.

It's still the White House exploding [in "Independence Day"]. It was just so provocative, and no one had ever done it before. I remember when we shot it, how everyone was excited.

I knew that Jaye Davidson would not last because of that. I really liked him and thought he had incredible screen presence and talent, but I knew that he would not stay in that profession.

Do not fear. Some things will never change.

I always try to convince people that there has to be a lot of material about the subject matter, so they created a couple of pieces. One is about doomsday prophecies.

That one [in "2012"] was different because it was all CG, getting washed away by water. In "Independence Day," everything was still done in models, built in a certain scale out of plaster, and packing tons and tons of little explosives and charges in there. We had a second one in case it didn't work the first time, but it worked the first time.