Among all the exploding buildings, Patrick Tatopoulos’ standout creature design formed the basis for one of Independence Day’s most pivotal scenes.
In the summer of 1996, the most striking image emanating from cinemas was that of an alien spacecraft blowing up the White House. Placed at the end of the trailer for July’s Independence Day, it was one of the most ingenious teasers made in the 1990s. There are no lead actors; instead, there are famous landmarks bathed in shadow. Spielbergian shots of crowds on the streets of Manhattan, all looking up at something in the sky, just off-camera.
Then, in the dying seconds, the pay-off: city streets engulfed by fire. The White House, viewed from a low angle, dominated by an unfathomably huge alien craft hovering above. A beam of light shoots down and the building vanishes in a pulsating fireball.
Studio executives at 20th Century Fox initially baulked at the idea of showing the White House explode in the trailer. Director Roland Emmerich was so insistent on it, however, that he had two teasers made – one with the exploding White House, one without. Sure enough, it was the latter that eventually appeared in cinemas and on TV, and, released on the 3rd July, Independence Day eventually became the highest-grossing film of 1996.
As advertised in the trailer, Independence Day was a crowd-pleasing fusion of alien invasion sci-fi and disaster movie – two genres that had been unfashionable for years by the mid-90s. Emmerich was far from the first director to blow up iconic buildings – Earth Vs The Flying Saucers did it three decades earlier – but for a generation of young cinema-goers, Independence Day felt like something new. Its sense of scale, all-star cast and earnestness endeared it to global audiences, even if critics were scathing about its flimsy characters and ripe dialogue.
Independence Day became so well-known for its panoramic scenes of destruction – which were widely copied afterwards – that some of its other, genuinely striking design elements are easily overlooked.
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In the middle of all the mayhem, Emmerich and co-writer Dean Devlin take a break from the invasion unfolding outside and take us into the depths of a science lab in the Nevada desert – this is Area 51, a military facility that has long been a source of fascination for ufologists.
There, archetypal mad scientist Dr Brackish Okun Brent Spiner), attempts to dissect an unconscious alien invader literally dragged to the premises by Will Smith’s cocksure pilot, Hiller. As Okun and his team slice and probe at the alien with their scalpels, its head and part of its torso split open to reveal a smaller creature inside. The outer body, it turns out, is a kind of biomechanical suit of armour, presumably built (or perhaps not – more on this shortly) to protect its more diminutive pilot.
It’s an ingenious idea, reminiscent of HR Giger’s work on Alien, not to mention Japanese anime and manga such as The Guyver. Interestingly, the Matryoshka doll-like alien wasn’t described in the script, and the design came about almost by accident.
Its creation was the responsibility of production designer Patrick Tatopoulos, who went off and drew two different ideas for the invaders – one a riff on the more traditional ‘grey alien’ of UFO lore; the other more exotic and aggressive looking. Tatopoulos showed the sketches to Emmerich, who liked them both – it was then that the director had the idea of hiding one inside the other.
“I drew each one of them, showed them to Roland Emmerich and he said, ‘Well, I like both of them. We’re going to use both of them,’” Tatopoulos told Cinefantastique magazine in 1996. “And that’s how we came up with the idea of nesting one creature inside the other.”
The organic design of the alien also went on to influence the look of the stealthy ‘attacker’ craft that Will Smith’s pilot dogfights against elsewhere in the film.
“If you look carefully at the top of the head of the small alien,” said Tatopoulos, “it’s almost an exact replica of the look of the attacker craft [alien attacker saucer] from the top as well. This flow of design came almost on its own. And we wanted to do something more organic.”
For the alien’s pivotal scenes in the finished film, a full-scale, eight foot-tall puppet was built, which could be controlled by cables. A second suit, designed to fit over a stunt performer, was used for shots where the alien starts throwing scientists around the room.
Tatopoulos also built a small (roughly 12 inch-tall) rod puppet; “You can make this thing look like it’s running full-speed on the screen,” Tatopolous explained in a 1996 behind-the-scenes documentary. “You get much more life to it [than CGI]. CGI still doesn’t convince me as much as a rod-control puppet. Maybe in the future we’ll be able to do it with CGI. So far, it hasn’t been convincing enough.”
In the same documentary, Tatopoulos revealed that he’d come up with a sort of backstory for the aliens: in his imagination, the smaller, smarter aliens somehow subjugated a species of less intelligent creatures that lived on their home planet. “It’s a living creature that the smaller alien uses to travel through space,” Tatopoulos said. “They take those big, dumb but very powerful aliens, they open them, and then they just fit in there.”
It’s somehow even more nightmarish than the notion that the outer alien is a type of bio-armour grown in a lab.
Given that it appears on the screen for only a minute or two in the film’s final cut, an immense amount of thought and effort went into making the alien look and feel like a living creature. Among the more eye-popping effects work elsewhere in the film – most of it practical, and still impressive today – Tatopoulos’ fleshy alien is overshadowed somewhat.
It’s arguable, though, that Independence Day wouldn’t have worked had the aliens not looked so menacing. The sequence kicks off the film’s second half, and immediately raises the stakes: in it, we learn that the aliens can control other lifeforms telepathically, and more pivotally, that there’ll be no bargaining between the invaders and humans.
“Can there be peace between us?” asks Bill Pullman’s President.
“Peace?” the alien hisses through the throat of the luckless Dr Okun. “No peace.”
In a film that constantly juggles scenes of mass destruction with outright goofiness, the whole alien sequence gives Independence Day a welcome, even vital jab of horror.
