Pullman brings a consummate passion with a drive to investigate and bring to life the most potent choices and telling details in creating his characters on stage and onscreen.
Returning 20 years later to
Independence Day: Resurgence to play President Whitmore, that passion and drive informs and vitalizes his work shooting the film. That high standard poses challenges in shooting a film very different from the challenges of performing on stage in the theater. A film shoot requires multiple shots from different angles of the same scene. For instance, a conversation between 2 people requires 3 cameras from different angles and multiple takes. There is a long to mid-range shot of both characters and a mid-range shot of each character from opposite directions. Each shot may require multiple takes. As an actor in the shot, Pullman describes a need to achieve a balance for each take between “being present and quickly immersing yourself” but not “over-emoting”. He believes it is important to “surrender . . .do your best and hope everyone is investigating all the choices”.
Next up for Pullman after IDR is “LBJ”, a film about President Lyndon Johnson. Pullman will play
Senator Ralph Yarborough, rival to and conscience of LBJ. It is a role Pullman is looking forward
to with great anticipation . He is already preparing for the part, reading a biography of LBJ while filming IDR . As always, working hard to bring his work to life and perfect the details.
Just why do people love Independence Day and anticipate the sequel so intensely? Roland Emmerich called Independence Day a fairy tale, which is a story with supernatural or fantastic elements in which a character(s) are faced with a horrific problem or situation they have to deal with. If they fail, there will be grave consequences. To survive, they will have to draw on every ounce of strength, resourcefulness, humor, intelligence, cunning, determination, courage, in short, everything they've got. Independence Day, in addition to being a fairy tale, redefined the disaster movie in that the characters and their individual stories were at the heart of the tale. Fire engines flew through the air, streams of fire from alien spaceships torched cities all over the world, the White House blew up, but the real story was about the people facing this catastrophe and how they dealt with it using everything they had to survive.
Bill Pullman's take on the draw and uniqueness of Independence Day is that the story's focus was that “all of us are under attack. Earth [is] saved by the connection of all of us, [we] have to figure out a way to overcome” [the threat to us all].
So, in Independence Day: Resurgence, will President Whitmore overcome his own demons and his crippling isolation in the face of the new threat posed to the people of Earth by the aliens' return?
Will he fly again? Spread the word: Independence Day: Resurgence arrives June 24, 2016.
© 2015 Mary Cochrane-McIvor. All rights reserved.