Comic-Con 09: Emmerich talks Foundation

While at Comic-Con to promote 2012, director Roland Emmerich revealed more of his plans for adapting Isaac Asimov's legendary Foundation sci-fi novels.

"I hired the writer of Saving Private Ryan, Robert Rodat, to write it," explains Emmerich, before going on to say that he's got big plans for the series.

"We're developing three movies: Foundation, Foundation And Empire and Second Foundation.

"It took me a long time to actually wait for the moment where the rights were totally free and we got them all, it's like 11 books, and we own the title Foundation and also some of the robot novels and now we can really do these.


"Asimov wrote them as short stories, which he combined into the first book, and novellas and then the third is one novel. It's not one narrative, and you need one narrative for the film.

That was the tricky thing to figure out. But Bob is writing and he tells me it's a long script and I need to prepare myself!"

We'll all need to prepare ourselves - let's hope he keeps the world-shattering chaos to a minimum, eh?

Freelance Journalist

James White is a freelance journalist who has been covering film and TV for over two decades. In that time, James has written for a wide variety of publications including Total Film and SFX. He has also worked for BAFTA and on ODEON's in-cinema magazine.