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James Cameron has reacted to being labeled “overbearing” by Independence Day director Roland Emmerich.
During a panel with filmmaker Antoine Fuqua at the 2024 San Diego Comic-Con last month, Emmerich revealed that he lost interest in his planned reboot of the 1966 camp sci-fi classic Fantastic Voyage after Cameron was brought on to help.
“James Cameron is very overbearing, and so I at one point just gave up,” the 68-year-old German director said at the time. “Because it’s like, is it your movie or my movie? And that’s what happened.”
Asked about Emmerich’s choice words in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Cameron, 69, responded: “I’ve never said anything negative about Roland. But anyway: Yes, I’m overbearing. Damn right.
“When it’s a project where I’ve contributed to the writing, I might actually have an opinion on it,” he continued.
“I actually don’t even remember talking to Roland Emmerich about Fantastic,” Cameron said. “I remember the other directors that we worked with for months on end trying to develop that project. If I talked to Roland, it was for two minutes. I have a pretty good memory and I don’t remember that at all.”
When asked if the project was still in the works, the Titanic director vaguely replied: “Move on, that’s a non-story.”
The Independent has contacted Emmerich’s representative for comment.
At Comic-Con, Emmerich told the crowd that his take on Fantastic Voyage remake was only in the “very beginning stages” when he exited the project.
“Look, I’m going to have to say, I do my stuff, and when I cannot do my stuff, I’m like totally not interested,” the Day After Tomorrow director explained. “It’s as simple as that. So when someone else wants to say something to me and is more powerful to me, I drop out.”
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This isn’t the first time Emmerich has spoken critically about Cameron’s input on the project. In a 2007 interview with Empire Magazine, Emmerich said: “Two years ago Jim called me up and said ‘Roland I want you to look at the script for Fantastic Voyage – it’s not there yet’. And he sent it over and I hated the script.”
The Patriot director disagreed with Cameron’s decision to have the film set in the future.
“I said why have you put this in the future? I said let this happen now,” Emmerich said. “It’s so much more cool and fun when we can say to a normal person from now, ‘well we’re going to make you microscopic and put you in some submarine which we will shrink down and you have to do this stuff inside a body.’”
The original 1966 Fantastic Voyage, helmed by Richard Fleischer and starring Raquel Welch, Stephen Boyd and Jean Del Val, follows brilliant scientist Jan Benes (Del Val), whose revolutionary shrinking machine is used to shrink a submarine crew so that they can enter Benes’s body to save him from a blood clot.
