Roland Emmerich

Roland Emmerich is a German-American filmmaker, trained at the University of Television and Film Munich beginning in 1977, and one of Hollywood's most commercially successful directors, known for Independence Day (1996), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), 2012 (2009), and White House Down (2013). He remained out only to friends while in German film school, fearing it would limit his ability to make the movies he wanted, but became more publicly open after moving to Hollywood at 33 and finding no openly gay directors working in big-budget action cinema. He directed Stonewall (2015), a dramatization of the 1969 Stonewall uprising, which was criticized for centering a fictional white Midwestern protagonist at the expense of the actual leaders of the rebellion -- trans women of color and drag queens; Emmerich responded to the criticism in subsequent interviews. In 2006 he pledged $150,000 to Outfest's Legacy Project for LGBTQ+ film preservation, the largest gift in the organization's history at the time.