AFTER making several films in which whole cities or worlds are destroyed, Roland Emmerich may be viewed as assuaging his guilt with his latest offering.No, it's not like that," says the director of Independence Day, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow and the upcoming apocalypse movie 2012.
He produced Trade, a small film about sex-slave trafficking from Mexico to the US.
When you start having success with a certain kind of movie, Hollywood wants you to make more of them," he says. "Nobody wants to make something like Trade; my agents, the studios, they want to have me doing the big ones because they make profits from them, but if I only made those big ones I would lose my sense of what filmmaking is about."
Trade is a tricky proposition. Its portrayal of a 13-year-old girl's journey from Mexico City to an internet sex-slave auction in the US is grisly and exploitative. Emmerich agrees it is hard to balance the message with entertainment, although he believes director Marco Kreuzpaintner got it right.
It's a fine line and you can never really know if you hit (it)," he says. "It's an interesting mix of commercial elements and showing how ugly it is."
Emmerich and co-producer Rosilyn Heller were tracking the stories written by The New York Times Magazine journalist Peter Landesman and heard of one concerning the illegal international trade. Landesman's story was particularly notable, though, because it brought the story home, says Emmerich: "These are atrocities happening right under the noses of Americans."
Not that the film "had the impact we had hoped it would have in America", he adds, despite a standing ovation at its Sundance Film Festival screenings. Yet the more vengeful thriller Taken, with its similar subject matter, attracted much attention and surprising box office results.
That's just the nature of these movies. You can't expect them to be the next Slumdog Millionaire," he says.
But in a way it's a good movie because it shows this is going on. I don't think there are any dark forces at work but I'm not sure Americans are as inclined as other people in the world to see reality."
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