With the end of the Mayan calendar coming, 2012 is the talk of the town these days and movie director Rowland Emmerich (Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow) is cashing in on the hype with 2012.

TeenHollywood sat down with Rowland and the cast of 2012 for a little Q & A.

TeenHollywood: Everyone, what are your personal beliefs about 2012 and if you believe it might be the end of the world, what would you want to be doing?

Roland: I may go skiing.

John: I will try to get on Roland’s trip, be on a mountain maybe. That book, ‘The Return of Quezalcoatl’, I think is probably more in line with what I think [about the Mayan prophecy for 2012], which is that there will be a shift in consciousness.  That seemed more like what I thought was going to happen rather than the actual
End of Days.

Chiwetel: I don’t ski unfortunately.  An avalanche is something to worry about.  I will spend it kind of quietly I think, with family and friends, and hope for the best. I don’t have a real opinion about 2012.  Like John says, hopefully a shift in consciousness or something like that. It does feel like things are converging and something has to change.  Maybe it will start around that time.

Amanda:  Yeah, I’m kind of a hypochondriac and I worry a lot about a lot of things.  I’m going to try not to worry about it too much.  That’s sort of my philosophy and that was my philosophy for the new millennium as well.

TeenHollywood: Is this the most physical film you have ever done and what was it like working on set? What was there to look at?

John: Yeah, this was a pretty action-packed show, but it wasn’t really any different from a lot of other films in a way because it was amazing production design.  Usually you have the entire set built and then in back of the set will be a green screen.  But there is a massive production design when you walk onto a set.  At the end when we’re in the mountains, would be a huge glacier field with flooring underneath and then blue screens in the background.  So we always were acting with regular sets, it’s just that the backgrounds would be digitally enhanced.  And Roland’s got a whole army working so effortlessly you could come in and just kind of do your acting job.  But yeah, there was a lot of running, jumping, tumbling. You’ve got to stay stretched out or you’ll definitely pull a hamstring for sure.

Chiwetel: Yeah, I got off pretty lightly being part of the government.

John: (points at him) The brains.

Chiwetel: Yeah, the brains.  I had a couple of days of fun water work but that was more or less it.  I was slightly envious not to get to work on the shaky floor, it looked pretty cool.

Amanda:  Roland is really thoughtful about this kind of stuff.  I remember, I have a two year old and we were shooting long days in a tank, we were in the water, and I guess I had kind of had it a little bit.  Sometimes I start to get deluded that I know something that the first AD or the producers just haven’t thought through.  I went up to Roland and said ‘Why are we moving through tanks?  We need to go back to the other set and go back to the tanks again.’  Roland was like ‘Well, do you want to be in a tank for two days in a row?’  I was like ‘No.’  I realized that was why, so he’s incredibly humane.

TeenHollywood: Roland, you got to destroy a lot of major landmarks in the movie. What were you especially excited to destroy in the film?

Roland: (laughs) Well, it’s not like I walk around ‘oooo, I could destroy this’ or ‘I could destroy that’.  It always comes out of the story. Jackson Curtis (John’s character) lives in L.A. and I live in L.A. and everybody in L.A. talks about ‘the big one’ where California sinks into the ocean so we just decided to do that. That was a great starting point.  And Yellowstone National Park got put into the story too. Sometimes it’s born out of something interesting. Like we’re destroying the Sistine Chapel.. ‘we’re already there so why don’t we have the church fall on people’s heads’?

John: (laughs) I think he’d like to destroy every Western icon in the film. And be careful if you are standing outside of a church.  It may fall on your head.

Roland: Yeah. The message is ‘never pray in front of a big church’! (laughter). And the White House, people said, ‘you can’t do this and not destroy the White House’. I thought, ‘just do it in a different way’.  At the time I was reading a lot about the Kennedys and when I was a kid I visited old warships in the Chesapeake Bay and they had just launched the JFK carrier there. Then there was a big wave in the film so I said ‘okay JFK comes back to the White House!’

For the full interview go to TeenHollywood.com.