When we shot "Stargate," he [ Jaye Davidson] came up to me at one point and said, "I don't like shooting movies," and I said, "Why?" "Too many people stare at me." I said, "Then you're totally in the wrong business."

There's not really much destruction in New York besides the weather and it's a natural force so it's not like any destruction. But LA gets leveled (laughs). That's my comment to Hollywood.

I would say, when it comes to comedy, I think Matthew Broderick was great.

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.

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.

I'm doing a much smaller movie. It's set in Germany and it's a totally different subject matter. I'm trying to break it up.

It's just one of those things. Everybody wants to do it, but it's really difficult. People had to wait for "Indy 4" for a decade, and the reason is because of the people involved.