Where to watch Independence Day (1996)

Trivia & production notes

• Roland Emmerich conceived the film's core concept during a 1994 promotional tour for Stargate when a reporter questioned his belief in aliens, prompting him to imagine 15-mile-wide spaceships hovering over Earth's major cities.
• Emmerich and Devlin wrote the screenplay during a month-long vacation in Mexico, and Fox greenlit it just one day after submission.
• The U.S. military withdrew support for providing personnel and equipment when producers refused to remove references to Area 51 from the script.
• The film required over 3,000 special effects shots, a record at the time, with the production favoring practical on-set and in-camera effects over computer-generated imagery to save money and achieve more authentic explosions.
• The model-making department constructed more miniatures for this film than any previous film had ever used, building models of buildings, city streets, aircraft, landmarks, and monuments including a 30-foot destroyer spaceship and a 12-foot mother ship.
• The White House destruction sequence required a 10-by-5-foot miniature that took a week to plan and used 40 explosive charges to film the destruction scene.
• Dean Devlin based the character David Levinson on Christopher Weaver, founder of Bethesda Softworks, who consulted on the film's scientific accuracy.
• Bill Pullman and Dean Devlin added the line "Today, we celebrate our Independence Day!" to the president's speech immediately before filming, a decision made to help convince Fox executives to use the title rather than the planned alternative title Doomsday.
• The production reused White House interior sets from The American President and cockpit sets from Broken Arrow and submarine sets from Down Periscope and Crimson Tide.
• Russell Casse's character was originally written to attempt his suicide mission in a stolen biplane after being rejected as a volunteer, but test audiences responded so positively to this version that producers reshot the scene to show his acceptance into the official flight and his use of an F/A-18 instead.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Independence Day (1996 film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.