How Chinese finance and Woody Harrelson’s heft saved Midway, war movie by blockbuster director Roland Emmerich that Hollywood studios wouldn’t touch
- Director of Independence Day, 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow couldn’t interest Hollywood studios in US$100 million World War II film, so he turned to China
- Woody Harrelson signing on to play admiral who led Pacific Ocean battle persuaded the likes of Dennis Quaid, Patrick Wilson, and Luke Evans to join the cast
Usually in the Hollywood narrative, it’s America that saves the day.
The Battle of Midway was a major turning point in the war. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour in Honolulu in December 1941, the Americans retaliated, to devastating effect, six months later, bombing a major fleet of the Japanese Imperial Navy near the Midway Islands in the Pacific Ocean.
“When you analyse it, it’s a very simple story,” says the 64-year-old Emmerich, who has wanted to bring the narrative of the battle it to the big screen for the past two decades.
In the late 1990s, when he was one of the hottest directors in Hollywood after single-handedly reinventing the disaster movie, he took the idea to the late John Calley, then head of the Sony-owned studio Columbia-TriStar, with whom he had just made Godzilla.
“I walked into his office and said, ‘Can I pitch you something for five minutes?’ I told him about Midway and said: ‘What an amazing story. Everything is perfectly there. I want to do that.’”