2012 Cast and Director Talk Mega-Disaster!

You've probably read or heard about the significance of the year 2012. The Mayans marked it as the end of their calendar, indicating an "End of Days" on Earth. Scholars differ as to whether this will mean a big shift in human opinion and consciousness or... hey, could be a super-duper, world-wide apocalypse that dwarfs every disaster (and disaster movie) we've ever seen!  

Director Roland Emmerich (of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow fame) chooses the "blow-everything-up-real-good" route with his ultra-disaster pic 2012. Since one of the film's major apocalyptic moments involves Yellowstone National Park becoming one big volcanic caldera, the studio sent TeenHollywood up to Jackson Hole, Wyoming on the edge of the park to get a feel of what stars John Cusack, Amanda Peet and "family" go through. Oddly, Mother Earth's weather didn't cooperate and your reporter never actually made it into the Park due to icy roads but, we got the idea!

Sitting in multiple layers of clothing and our UGG-boots in front of a big, gorgeous fireplace at a resort hotel instead of driving at top speed in an RV through Yellowstone while giant, building-sized lava "bombs" land all around us, we asked actors John Cusack (Jackson Curtis), Amanda Peet (Kate Curtis) and Chiwetel Ejiofor (Adrian Helmsley) what it was like on set and what they were really reacting to. We wanted to know what they personally believe about 2012 and what it's like bringing humanity, optimism and emotion to a big disaster film. We even asked director Roland Emmerich which world-famous landmark he most enjoyed destroying!   

TeenHollywood: Everyone, what are your personal beliefs about 2012 and if you believe it might be the end of the world, what would you want to be doing?

Roland: I may go skiing.

John: I will try to get on Roland's trip, be on a mountain maybe. That book, 'The Return of Quezalcoatl', I think is probably more in line with what I think [about the Mayan prophecy for 2012], which is that there will be a shift in consciousness.  That seemed more like what I thought was going to happen rather than the actual
End of Days.

Chiwetel: I don't ski unfortunately.  An avalanche is something to worry about.  I will spend it kind of quietly I think, with family and friends, and hope for the best. I don't have a real opinion about 2012.  Like John says, hopefully a shift in consciousness or something like that. It does feel like things are converging and something has to change.  Maybe it will start around that time.

Amanda:  Yeah, I'm kind of a hypochondriac and I worry a lot about a lot of things.  I'm going to try not to worry about it too much.  That's sort of my philosophy and that was my philosophy for the new millennium as well.

TeenHollywood: Is this the most physical film you have ever done and what was it like working on set? What was there to look at?

John: Yeah, this was a pretty action-packed show, but it wasn't really any different from a lot of other films in a way because it was amazing production design.  Usually you have the entire set built and then in back of the set will be a green screen.  But there is a massive production design when you walk onto a set.  At the end when we're in the mountains, would be a huge glacier field with flooring underneath and then blue screens in the background.  So we always were acting with regular sets, it's just that the backgrounds would be digitally enhanced.  And Roland's got a whole army working so effortlessly you could come in and just kind of do your acting job.  But yeah, there was a lot of running, jumping, tumbling. You've got to stay stretched out or you'll definitely pull a hamstring for sure.

Chiwetel: Yeah, I got off pretty lightly being part of the government.

John: (points at him) The brains.

Chiwetel: Yeah, the brains.  I had a couple of days of fun water work but that was more or less it.  I was slightly envious not to get to work on the shaky floor, it looked pretty cool.

Amanda:  Roland is really thoughtful about this kind of stuff.  I remember, I have a two year old and we were shooting long days in a tank, we were in the water, and I guess I had kind of had it a little bit.  Sometimes I start to get deluded that I know something that the first AD or the producers just haven't thought through.  I went up to Roland and said 'Why are we moving through tanks?  We need to go back to the other set and go back to the tanks again.'  Roland was like 'Well, do you want to be in a tank for two days in a row?'  I was like 'No.'  I realized that was why, so he's incredibly humane.  

TeenHollywood: Roland, were you determined to have some sort of happy ending?

Roland: You can't make a movie like this and end it where everybody is dead.  People get upset. In a sense, this is a modern re-telling of Noah's ark. There are survivors and, at the end, there is hope. That's exactly what we were looking to make. I'm also very suspicious of governments and it's an expression of that.

TeenHollywood: John, what made you want to be a part of this film?

John: I think it was the combination of the project, the director, and the actors. It was nice to be wanted.  You get the call for Roland Emmerich's next movie and he wants you to do it.  That's a nice call to get. Then I read the script and I thought it was a real page-turner and very surprising.  By the end of the film I thought it actually got quite emotional and very tense.  I just thought it was a really good, big, epic movie all the way around. You have this scene where Rome burned and Paris fell.  How do you shoot that? Then California falls into the ocean. The story would get bigger and bigger.  The catastrophes got bigger, places where the characters are safe got smaller and smaller.  Yet, the movie actually got more intimate as it went along. There's just a scene in a car. I hadn't seen that in most action films.  Usually once the explosions start, the characters stop. I thought that was very clever. It was a terrific script and I was happy to do it.

TeenHollywood: Roland, you got to destroy a lot of major landmarks in the movie. What were you especially excited to destroy in the film?

Roland: (laughs) Well, it's not like I walk around 'oooo, I could destroy this' or 'I could destroy that'.  It always comes out of the story. Jackson Curtis (John's character) lives in L.A. and I live in L.A. and everybody in L.A. talks about 'the big one' where California sinks into the ocean so we just decided to do that. That was a great starting point.  And Yellowstone National Park got put into the story too. Sometimes it's born out of something interesting. Like we're destroying the Sistine Chapel.. 'we're already there so why don't we have the church fall on people's heads'?

John: (laughs) I think he'd like to destroy every Western icon in the film. And be careful if you are standing outside of a church.  It may fall on your head.

Roland: Yeah. The message is 'never pray in front of a big church'! (laughter). And the White House, people said, 'you can't do this and not destroy the White House'. I thought, 'just do it in a different way'.  At the time I was reading a lot about the Kennedys and when I was a kid I visited old warships in the Chesapeake Bay and they had just launched the JFK carrier there. Then there was a big wave in the film so I said 'okay JFK comes back to the White House!'

TeenHollywood: For the actors, did you have any references for all the destruction or were you just looking at nothing?

Amanda:  Do it John, come on!  We're looking at nothing, just a blue screen and....

John:  [Scottish accent, shouting] 'There's a huge donut flying around.  It's buildings, and sewage everywhere.'  He's screaming! This is  the most fantastic guy in the world. Best First Assistant Director I've ever seen in the history of cinema.

Amanda:  And you had a camera this close to you, it would be our close up, and obviously we were looking at nothing.  So he would have to narrate, basically bit by bit what we were responding to;  what tragic, enormous thing...

John:  He was Scottish, and Roland is talking as a German, so we had all these nationalities.  It was like an international theme park ride.

Amanda:  Roland is very good at calibrating.  He does really have a complete, cool, grasp on the genre.  It was very hard for some of us new people to learn to calibrate our responses to this incredible destruction.

John:  I was too tired to act but he had it all down. We had almost like a video game of what the plane would be going through, so you wouldn't really see all of this detail, but you knew that you were flying between these two buildings, or that a train was coming over your head.  So you knew the sequence and then you went from there. The planes and cars were all on hydraulics. There was an entire city block on poured cement, with fences, houses, cut outs of houses, lawns, and trees and everything.  The whole thing was on these hydraulics, a whole city block, with cars on it and it was just shaking and pulsating so it was a pretty wild set too.  It wasn't all just green screen and imagination stuff.   

TeenHollywood: John a lot of your characters are good-at-heart guys looking for redemption. Why?

John:  I don't know.  I think it's a combination of what people kind of view me as and what kind of roles they want to give me. There's usually not much drama in people that are really happy and well-adjusted.  Not a lot of conflict there and I'm definitely flawed so I'm sure it comes through in my characters, but I think it's just who you are.  It's kind of the human condition.  By expressing that, then it's usually okay. Most people are damaged.

TeenHollywood: Amanda, your character and John's are divorced in the film but you have to get together to save yourselves and your kids. You've worked with John several times before. Can you talk about your character's relationship with John's?

Amanda: I think that the way I thought was just that John's character was my one true love, and that I was really hurt by it (the divorce), and had gotten on with things and chosen a different path.  Once that person is your person then that's the end of the story.  That's how I saw it when I read it and obviously being with John makes it really easy to go feel that way.  I've always felt that way about working with John so it was really kind of easy. He really makes everything easy.

John: This whole film is full of characters who are trying to reconcile a relationship and get some kind of redemption because they know that time is running out.  I think that it really gets your imagination going as to who you would want to get straight with, who you want to be right with, and what you would do if you really only had ten more hours.  It was set up very well to do that and of course Roland is totally game to go for anything that expressed the characters.   You never get to do that in an action film. You just never get to work that way in a film of this scope so it was really fun.

TeenHollywood: This film is tapping into the paranoia about the end of days. So, is it a cautionary tale or just a cool popcorn movie?

John:  I think it taps into the paranoia all over the world about how out of control the world feels.  Everybody sort of knows what all the problems are, with global warming and all of those things. This smartly doesn't get into the politics of it, it just gets into the fact of what's important to you? What are your values and that
feeling you have when something bad happens that cuts through the B.S.  I think movies like this give you that sense without the real tragedies having to happen. I think that's maybe their function and why people like them.  They give expression to people's fears and you get a release and then a sense of humor, so there is something to the fact that at the end of the movie you can see that there are no more divisions between Russia and the United States, or China, and everybody is on the same playing field.  That's kind of a nice populous myth that we all wish one day could happen.

TeenHollywood: But do people really get together at times of great upheaval and look out for each other?

Chiwetel: People tend to in tragedies.  Obviously in recent tragedies that we see in the world now, people tend to find great unity in that, and I think that is one of the things that this story talks about.  I think you have to have a lot of optimism in humanity and people.  I think that is part of the story of this movie and what it's really kind of getting at; that there is an inherent good and these things bring that out.

TeenHollywood: We know Roland is great directing big effects films but talk about him as a director for actors.

Amanda: I have to say that I definitely emailed a couple of people before I agreed to do the movie, to make sure that Roland wasn't some kind of scary, sadistic kind of director.  All the reports back were kind of incredible.  Like 'He's the greatest man to work for.  He's so lovely, and gentle.' All things that seemed to be completely antithetical to being responsible for this kind of a scale production.  I think it is really incredible how intimate he is able to be, and how gentle, and he never loses his cool.

TeenHollywood: Any particular examples?

Amanda: I remember in particular John and I were doing the scene with our kids where we are on [a Soviet plane] and we were dressing them in their life vests and he just kept saying 'This is really about you and him and your relationship, and that you are finally parenting together in this final moment. Or what could be the final moment.'  So I'm here to say that he's just really incredibly smart and intuitive about very subtle things. He's a really incredibly smart director who is watching every little move.  In a good way.  

John: Usually there are directors who do the scale and scope thing, then there are directors who can work with actors.  It's very rare that someone is able to do both at that level.  He's earned the right to work the way he wants and he makes it, very much a family environment, it's just him and a couple of people.  So it feels like you've making a film with four or five people and just a really big crew.  He makes it seem very personal. There is also the sense too where you realize that the special effects are not going to matter in this film if we don't have the characters and the acting.  Whether that was learned from experience or if he always knew or whatever, however he got to that place he spends as much time on the characters as he did on the special effects.  

Chiwetel: Roland is really in control of his films and that's one of the things that I was always impressed by. You're working with a director who completely understands the mechanics of this kind of story. How it has to fit in perfectly to work.  These characters are dealing with things that are on such a massive scale, that to actually commit to them dealing with daily life at all is kind of a leap.  But a director who knows how to do that, and how to bring out that, and make it believable and honest, is really great.  Really special.  It was a really great experience.

TeenHollywood: Roland, what do you hope audiences will take away from the film.

Roland: These kinds of movies are really about celebrating life. It's about survival where regular people become heroes and I think people can identify with that.  They'll probably ask themselves, 'could I be as brave as Jackson Curtis (John's character)'?  That's what I hope people take home.  

TeenHollywood: John, if this really were to happen, would you want a lottery to see who is saved or just have all the big money people who financed the arks get to go?

John: No. I'd just tell everybody about it and let everybody just rush it! Go for it!