Steven Strait as D'Leh in 10,000 B.C. Courtesy of Warner Bros.

READ MORE: 10,000 BC review

As the director of blockbusters like Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, Roland Emmerich is no stranger to telling epic stories with the help of bold visual effects. But his most recent effort is so ambitious that he had to wait more than a decade for CGI technology to catch up with his imagination. 10,000 B.C. depicts the dawning of modern mankind in an extraordinary and often brutal realm — and it promises to be nothing short of a spectacle. A young mammoth hunter embarks on an odyssey to save the one he loves, confronting prehistoric predators, harsh environmental elements, and evil forces along the way. Emmerich discusses how the movie came to be, why he feels prehistoric times were less brutally violent than modern times, and how he's different from fellow directors Mel Gibson and Michael Bay.

How did this project start? Were you just fed up with car explosions and big frozen waves?
Not fed up. I always look for new challenges, new things, but actually this movie reminded me a lot of [Emmerich's 1994 film] Stargate. In fact, a lot of the crew had also worked on Stargate, and they noticed this too. The last act does have a lot of similarities. I have been dreaming up this movie for 15 years. So it was not something new for me.

Why has it taken 15 years?
I first came across a documentary about prehistoric man living among mammoths and saber-toothed tigers. These animals and their environment made a big impression on me. Also, I'm a big admirer of Jean-Jacques Annaud's film Quest for Fire. I began to think this may be the time to do a movie where you can recreate these animals in a really lifelike way, but I was hesitant because the technology was not really there yet.

And then when I saw Monsters, Inc. — a totally different type of movie — the way they handled the monsters' hair made me realize that they finally had the right software to do this project. That's when I got serious. I pitched it to my old friend Harold [Kloser] and we started to write it. Then The Day After Tomorrow came along, so we put it aside for a while. And then we returned to 10,000 B.C. again and finally got it made.

What's the story of the movie?
It's the classic hero myth about a young man who has to rise to the occasion to save his people and the world. The structure of the story — evil people capture the hero's loved ones and he must follow after them — is common, like in The Princess Bride or Star Wars. But this is a novel setting and fresh take on it.

What is the appeal of making a movie set in prehistoric times?
People haven't seen it before. Our take on prehistory — how they hunted mammoths, the first farmers, the building of the pyramids — is very well researched and includes all the newest findings from historians.

I made the movie because I'm always looking for new worlds. And when I saw that documentary, I thought about how this is a new world nobody has ever seen. Yes, you have seen it in Jean-Jacques Annaud's film, but a lot has been discovered since he made that movie. There is a lot of new evidence that people were much more developed than we originally thought.