Yes, it might be pretty hard to believe it’s been more than 25 years since Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich found the budget to make Stargate, the sci-fi fan favorite that went on to spawn multiple shows that aired for audiences on cable. Years later, Devlin still has fond memories from the making of the now-iconic film, but in a recent interview Stargate’s writer revealed one really hilarious thing he really wish he could change about the 1994 film.
For someone who is already familiar with Stargate even the slightest, they might already know that much of the film was created using practical effects, including large sets and more, though some limited CGI was used at the time.
However, given the budget of the flick was not as big as they probably would have liked, sometimes the film had to resort to some janky methods to get the scope it wanted, as Dean Devlin hilariously revealed.
“As big as it was, I think we would have made it bigger. I think we would have made the cities bigger, I think we would have done more set extension. I think things like that, just to give it lusher. When you saw all the extras lined up, most of those were sticks with costumes on. Today, you would actually just digitally insert them, add thousands of people and make it amazing. Then, we had about 300 extras at the front. And then everything behind them was sticks with wardrobe stock on top of it,” said Devlin.
Making a ragtag group of extras look like a small army’s worth of characters would not be such a ridiculously hard feat today, thanks to the beauty of VFX, however, it was not as easy then to achieve the same effects. It took an army of men and women and lots of creative minds to achieve the effects that Stargate had.
