Roland Emmerich calls James Cameron ‘overbearing,’ Mel Gibson ‘very angry’

Roland Emmerich is mincing no words when reflecting on his past collaborators.

At Collider’s Directors on Directing panel with Antoine Fuqua at Comic-Con 2024, the Independence Day filmmaker discussed his experience working with Mel Gibson on 2000’s The Patriot. Emmerich had nothing but praise for GIbson’s acting abilities, though he mused that some of his performative gifts may come from real-life struggles. “At one point, he had to kill some English soldier, and he kind of just didn’t — it didn’t quite work,” Emmerich recalled. “So I said, ‘Get me a bucket,’ I filled it up with water and blood, and [I] said, ‘Okay, so hit it as many times as you can.’”

The bucket-punching strategy yielded tremendous results in Emmerich’s eyes. “It was like the best shot I ever did in the picture because all his emotion came out because I have the feeling he’s deep down a very angry guy,” he said of Gibson. “No, he is! Sorry to say that in public, but he is, and he has to sometimes release this anger.”

Emmerich also recalled being intimidated to direct Gibson, who had recently won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director for Braveheart. “I was really, really nervous,” Emmerich said, adding that he came into conflict with Gibson when casting his character’s son. “The first problem was I wanted to have Heath Ledger instead of another actor. And I naturally had to call [Gibson] and say I like the other guy more. And then he said, ‘Well, you’re the director,’ and hangs up on me. True story.”

Later, however, Emmerich said Gibson admitted that he was wrong. “Everybody else wanted to have the other guy,” he said of Ledger’s competitor for the part. “After three days, [Mel] actually told me, ‘You were right, and I was wrong because this guy will be a major star.’ And that tells you a little bit about Mel Gibson. Mel Gibson is such an intuitive person — he can joke in the last moment and put his finger in the slate and stuff like that and joke around, and then at the next moment, he breaks down crying. It’s amazing.”

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly’s free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.

Earlier in the panel, Emmerich received a pre-recorded question from filmmaker Louis Leterrier (The Transporter), who asked him about a long-gestating Fantastic Voyage remake — produced by James Cameron — that they’d both been attached to direct. “James Cameron is very overbearing,” Emmerich said. “To say the very, very [least]… and so I at one point just gave up because it’s like, ‘Is it your movie or my movie?’ And that’s what happened.”

Emmerich said he left the film in the “very beginning stages” of development because he didn’t enjoy collaborating with the Titanic filmmaker. “I kinda said like, ‘Gosh, why is he so overbearing?’” he recalled. “It was like, look, I’m gonna have to say, ‘I do my stuff,’ and when I cannot do my stuff, I’m totally not interested. It’s as simple as that. So when somebody else wants to say something to me and is more powerful [than I am], then I jump immediately off. I jumped out.”