With “Midway” coming to home video following a surprisingly stronger than expected cinema run, the film’s director Roland Emmerich has been out doing interviews and revealed to Cinema Blend that there’s another WW2 story he would like to tackle.
While “Midway” dealt mostly with the Americans involved in the major battle in the Pacific theater, the other story Emmerich wants to do is set on the German side of the war and the focus isn’t so much on a battle as on one key player – Erwin Rommel, also known as The Desert Fox.
A field marshal in the Wehrmacht, the popular military strategist and his superior tactics were key to the Nazi tank-led campaign in North Africa. Eventually, Rommel turned against Hitler and was involved in the failed coup that was ‘Operation Valkyrie’ (though the extent of his involvement is hotly debated) which led to him choosing suicide over a public trial in order to save his family. Emmerich explains his fascination:
“[He was] a guy who started as a military teacher, then was handpicked by Hitler to kind of become the guy who runs his personal security force, and then ends up being this kind of amazing battle commander in Africa.
And then at the end, he ends up kind of being against Hitler, and being part of people who want to assassinate him. It’s just an incredible journey of one man. On top of that he comes from an area where I came from, so that’s a little something which I’ve always been drawn to.”
A Rommel biopic has the advantage of tackling a known figure who hasn’t been portrayed on screen much, even Bryan Singer’s “Valkyrie” completely forgoed mentioning or including him, meaning there’s plenty of material to mine on screen.
Emmerich is currently at work on “Moonfall” and has lined up an adaptation of Blake Crouch’s best-selling sci-fi novel “Dark Matter”.
