We could have been celebrating our “Doomsday”.
According to Bill Pullman who played U.S. President Thomas J. Whitmore in “Independence Day”, the blockbuster alien invasion movie was originally called “Doomsday”. But all that changed, thanks to Pullman’s delivery of the rousing “Today, we celebrate our Independence Day” rally cry.
The actor tells CinemaBlend that director Roland Emmerich and co-writer Dean Devlin were fighting with 20th Century Fox over the movie’s title when it came time to film President Whitmore’s speech. Pullman explains the filming of the speech got moved up in the production schedule so Emmerich and Devlin could make a case for the name change to Fox.
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“I think it was gonna be ‘Doomsday‘. It’s what Fox wanted, and it was a title that was typical of the time [for a] disaster movie. They really wanted ‘Independence Day’, so we had to make the speech really good,” Pullman, 66, recalls of the late-night shoot.
A few nights later after the scene had been assembled in a rough cut. Pullman explains, “Dean came to my trailer, and he said, ‘Do you wanna see it?’ … So he popped in the VHS, he showed me the cut of the speech, and I went, ‘Holy Mother, they have got to name this movie “Independence Day”‘. And they did.”
The July 4 speech is still relevant nearly 25 years after the movie was released. Recently, Pullman called out Donald Trump over super-imposing his face on his own in a deep-fake video meant to look as though he was giving the speech.
“My voice belongs to no one but me, and I’m not running for president — this year,” Pullman reacted to the altered clip, via The Hollywood Reporter.
