With mere hours to go until the two decade wait is finally over, Flickering Myth has been getting ready for the new alien invasion by speaking to the cast and filmmakers behind Independence Day: Resurgence. Scott J. Davis got to chat to new recruit Jessie Usher about the film, his memories of the first film and his “close encounters” with blue screen…
When it was released in 1996, Independence Day smashed box-office records, grossing over $817million worldwide. While many flocked to the cinema to see it, Usher says he didn’t see it first time round: “I don’t remember seeing it in 96 but I can remember watching the film was around 9 to 10 years away. I was confused by what was happening! There was so much stuff happening, aliens were destroying everything, everybody’s all panicked but it looked cool. It catches you from the moment you start watching it.”
Usher is a still a relative newcomer to Hollywood, with his most high-profile role coming in 2014’s When the Game Stands Tall as well as Starz television series Survivor’s Remorse, neither of which prepared him when working with blue-green and CGI for the first time: “It was different… It took a little bit of getting used to at first and it was kind of hard to wrap your head around everything that gets thrown at you when you do a CGI and blue screen. Basically when you walk on set there’s nothing there! The there’s all these people kind of coming up to at different times and Roland explaining where everything is going to be… Some would come over at say “don’t step there, that’s a cliff!”
As much as Resurgence is a sequel to the original, it also acts as something of a reboot/refresh with many of the original actors (namely Jeff Goldblum and Bill Pullman) returning while handing off the reins to the new recruits, which also include Liam Hemsworth (The Hunger Games) and Maika Monroe (It Follows), and Usher says all the new additions stepped up to the plate for the sequel: “Liam and Maika really brought it too! Everyone was super prepared and really ready to go. It felt like a passing of the torch so we have a lot of the original cast taking their responsibilities and almost handing them off to this new cast so you see the growth and evolution within this film… and we paid a lot of attention to the relationships that have been built in the last twenty years.”
His director, Roland Emmerich, has been here before with such massive films and when asked about working with him of the film Usher’s said “Incredible!”
You can listen to the full audio from the interview below (our apologies for the sound quality in places as it was done on two mobile phones across the Atlantic!)
Independence Day: Resurgence opens on June 24th. Read our review here.
Originally published June 22, 2016. Updated June 30, 2023.
