Roland Emmerich is a German film director, writer, and producer, who primarily works in the Hollywood film industry. Emmerich is best known for making blockbuster disaster films and is heavily involved with the screenwriting and production of most movies that he directs. Openly gay himself, the director is an active supporter of LGBT rights.

Early Life
Roland Emmerich was born on November 10, 1955, in Stuttgart, West Germany. He grew up 15 kilometers from there, in a town called Sindelfingen. In the year 1977, Emmerich began attending University of Television and Film, Munich, where he claims that the movie Star Wars inspired him to learn direction. As a part of his final thesis, Roland Emmerich made a full-length feature film titled The Noah`s Ark Principle, which was screened at the opening of the Berlin International Film Festival in 1984.

Personal Life
Roland Emmerich is openly homosexual but revealed it only after he became a successful director as he didn`t want to be labeled as that "gay director". He claims that he hasn`t encountered many difficulties because of his sexual orientation and that most of the Hollywood industry is supportive of LGBT rights.

Emmerich owns a lot of unusual and controversial memorabilia, which he keeps in his homes in Los Angeles, New York City, London, and Stuttgart. They include an edited photo of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a homoerotic pose, a wax sculpture of Pope John Paul II laughing while reading his own obituary and a painting of Jesus Christ wearing a controversial t-shirt during his crucifixion. The director claims that these items aren`t reflective of his personal beliefs but that he`s a fan of art with a political twist.

Movie Career
After his film Noah`s Ark Principle was a hit at the 1984 Berlin International Film Festival, Roland Emmerich and his sister Ute Emmerich co-founded Centropolis Entertainment, a production house and they began making numerous movies. In 1986, he directed the fantasy film, Joey. Over the next few years, he directed several more movies like Hollywood-Monster and Moon 44, which were primarily screened in Germany. Moon 44 impressed audiences worldwide, and actor Sylvester Stallone began recommending the director to producers all over Hollywood. In the early 1990s, Hollywood producer Mario Kassar flew Emmerich down to the USA and the latter directed the 1992 movie Universal Soldier.

The year 1996 saw the release of the Emmerich-directed movie Independence Day, a sci-fi film which went on to be the first ever film to gross over 100 million USD in less than one week. Two years later, he directed Godzilla, which was a commercial success but a huge disappointment according to fans and critics alike. The turn of the century saw the German direct the 2000 American war film The Patriot, which was lauded by the critics. In 2004, he returned to directing disaster films with the movie The Day After Tomorrow. Four years later, he filmed 10,000 BC, a movie about a prehistoric tribe of mammoth hunters. The film did well commercially but was slammed by the critics.

In the year 2009, Emmerich directed 2012, an apocalypse disaster film based on the end of the world. The film was a huge commercial success and received largely positive reviews from fans and critics. After directing the 2011 film Anonymous, a film about uncovering whether Shakespeare was a fraud, Roland Emmerich directed the 2013 action thriller White House Down. Admitting that the movie was close to his heart, Emmerich directed Stonewall in 2015, a film about the Stonewall riots that resulted in the commencement of the gay liberation movement in New York. The year 2016 saw the German direct the sequel to Independence Day, Independence Day: Resurgence. His 2019 release includes Midway.