The “Real” Conspiracy Theories Behind Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall

Roland Emmerich doesn’t really believe conspiracy theories, but he loves them. 

They’re all over the filmmaker’s work: The otherworldly beings who build the pyramids in Stargate. The ancient Mayan calendar that predicts the disintegration of the world in 2012. The conjecture, in Anonymous, that Shakespeare is not the real author of his plays. Then there is perhaps Emmerich’s most famous earth-shaking saga …

“As you know, I did the movie Independence Day, where we were strongly inspired by the whole Area 51 conspiracy,” says the director. To him, these secrets, rumors and cabals are their own kind of franchise. “When you have a conspiracy which a lot of people believe, you already have some built-in interest,“ Roland Emmerich says. ”You don’t have to believe them yourself… Most of the time I’m a skeptical person—I’m German after all.”

“You don’t have to believe them yourself,” he adds. “Most of the time I’m a skeptical person—I’m German after all.  So, I never quite buy into them, but I find them super interesting.”

About seven years ago, Emmerich stumbled upon something known as The Hollow Moon theory, a notion that the celestial body orbiting our planet and illuminating the night sky either A) is not a natural occurrence, or B) has a vast and secret interior life. Or, hey, why not both? Basically, when science disproved Jules Verne by revealing there could be no Journey to the Center of the Earth, that concept just relocated off-world. 

“I immediately realized, oh my God, this could very well be one of these conspiracies where you can have something really traumatic happen, meaning the moon is getting out of orbit and falling on Earth. But in the same time, you learn that the moon is not what you think it is. It’s always a cool way to get into a movie,” Emmerich says.

The Hollow Moon concept has been fueled by fanciful fiction, and just enough misconstrued science to keep things plausible. In his 1901 novel The First Men In The Moon, H.G. Wells imagined the rocky orb as a hive for enormous ant-like aliens known as Selenites. Edgar Rice Burroughs and Isaac Asimov each took a shot at imagining a dome-like moon that’s desolate on the outside, but brimming with civilization within. 

Then came a kernel of truth. In the 1970s, NASA’s Apollo program recorded a series of quakes on the moon, some lasting significantly longer than quakes on Earth. Clive R. Neal, associate professor of civil engineering and geological sciences at the University of Notre Dame, describes it this way on NASA’s website: “The moon was ringing like a bell.” The explanation? The water that soaks into the Earth serves as a kind of shock-absorber, and the comparatively dry, stiff moon amplifies the pulses instead. But never mind that—bells are hollow! The introduction of that phrase galvanized the preposterous.

Over the decades, fringe theories abounded that the moon could be a sentinel for extra-terrestrials who monitor us from above. Some suggested it may even be an armored spacecraft disguised as a solar body. The 2005 book Who Built the Moon postulates that futuristic time-traveling earthlings constructed it as a means of tracking the evolution of life without disrupting its course. 

“That was probably the first thing I read. And then I read a slew of other books, because in every conspiracy theory, there’s hundreds of books,” says Emmerich, who cowrote the script with Harald Kloser, his longtime music composer, and Spenser Cohen (2018’s Extinction.) “But at the end we decided to create our own theory because all the theories they were proposing in that book, or in other books… we didn’t quite believe.”

Emmerich’s goal isn’t to convince people his concept is real. Quite the opposite—he just wants it to be thrilling. “Most of the time, that’s the fun of it, because you don’t want to just take some theory out of a book and then write a script based on that.”

He is reluctant to reveal too much about his own outlandish explanation for the moon’s origin and history, what may be inside it, and what forces cause it drift out of its orbit and into a collision course with our own world. Those are mysteries for the film’s Feb. 4 debut.

What Emmerich can say is that Earth is in deep trouble on multiple fronts. One of the first people to realize this is Jo Fowler (played by Halle Berry) a former astronaut who tries to sound the alarm, but—as with many doomsday prophets—is largely dismissed until the situation becomes dire. “She’s the second in command at NASA. And she becomes the director through certain circumstances, and has all the weight of the world resting on her,” the filmmaker says.

Patrick Wilson plays another fellow astronaut, Brian Harper, who does believe her and volunteers to join her unlikely mission to avert the extinction. But he has a tumultuous history with NASA after a past mission failure. “His life is destroyed, but he’s the only one who ever landed a space shuttle without electronics, so he’s the perfect guy actually to do what they want to do,” Emmerich says.

They’re joined by a third true-believer, an actual expert in the mysteries of the moon, played by Game of Thrones actor John Bradley. “He’s an outsider who is actually the first one who finds out that the moon is out of orbit,” Emmerich says.

Bradley also brings comic relief. “What I like about him is, yes, he is funny. But on top of it, he has a lot of heart. When you saw A Game of Thrones, he also played a part, which was quite funny, but [also] very, very heartfelt. And that’s why we cast him.”

The danger approaches in degrees, so as the moon draws nearer, stranger and stranger things begin to happen. “The moon naturally comes very close to Earth, and we have all this gravity craziness happening on Earth,” Emmerich explains. “ At one point the moon slides over New York and pretty much rips out a couple of the tall buildings—and they’ll end up in the Rockies.”

That gives us the shot at the top of this story, of the Chrysler Building wrecked sideways amid the snowcaps rather than towering above Lexington Avenue. “That’s my signature thing anyway— famous buildings in places where they don’t belong,” Emmerich says.

Another image looks out over the vista of Los Angeles from behind the famed Griffith Observatory as columns of ominous black smoke rise into the sky. These aren’t crater hits. They’re the scars of rioting, fear and desperation.

“Naturally, society breaks down,” the filmmaker says. “If the people know the moon will crash into earth, the stock market would be gone in 60 seconds. It would be chaos in the streets.”

There are other side effects for coastal cities as the moon nears: “Tides get much bigger. They’re going inland and there’s flooding in L.A. and elsewhere.”

It’s through these ruined streets that a hobbled NASA reclaims a shuttle it needs to pull off the desperate mission. Endeavour, seen below being guided through Los Angeles on its way back to space, travels the same streets it once rolled down when it arrived in the city (for real) in 2012, where it was decommissioned at the California Science Center. 

In Moonfall, the shuttle has to get back into the air before the surface of the world is destroyed. “That’s the disaster element of the moon falling towards Earth. But alone, that would be not enough for me because I think, ‘Okay, it’s just another disaster movie.’ I’m excited that we have a story which goes far beyond the disaster.”

Emmerich just doesn’t want people to go too far in real life. 

“Our world, more and more, has become driven by conspiracy theories. Look at Qanon, look at all this stuff, the flat-earthers. It’s just incredible when you think about it,” he says. “When you have it about the moon, it’s so fantastic—I don’t think it will hurt anybody. It’s interesting for people to see. Qanon is hurting people. Anti-vaxxer conspiracies can hurt people, and actually may kill people.”

The moon can’t hurt you. Just make sure to keep your distance.

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