While he wowed audiences with the visual effects in the modern day settings in the blockbusters "Independence Day," "Godzilla" and "The Day After Tomorrow," director Roland Emmerich faced a stark irony in getting his latest epic, "10,000 BC" to come to life on the big screen.

Essentially, the writer-director-producer was stuck in the middle of a back to the future catch-22: To bring to life a film set in pre-historic times, Emmerich had to wait for technology to catch up. After all, you can't have a film about a mammoth hunter with no realistic-looking mammoths to hunt.

"It's a technical problem because these animals have hair -- it's like finding the holy grail of visual effects. Hair is the most difficult thing to do," Emmerich said in a recent @ The Movies interview. "I wanted to make this movie about seven or eight years ago, but after the visual tests, I knew we were not quite there yet.

"It's all about technology these days," Emmerich added. "To me it's about having a high level of quality and you really have to give people their money's worth. And my visual effects supervisor Karen Goulekas and I wanted to make sure we could pull it off."

Emmerich said he knew he could start grooming his ideas with the release of a beast of a film in 2005.

"When I saw 'King Kong,' I knew I could do it. I admit that I was little bit jealous that I wasn't the first to do it," Emmerich said, laughing. But that's not to say that he didn't get some satisfaction with his own mammoth creations.

"King Kong's hair is very short and a mammoth's hair is long -- the longer the hair the more complicated the shot is," he beamed.

Opening in theaters Friday, "10,000 BC" chronicles the plight of D'Leh (Steven Strait), whose world is thrown into turmoil when the beautiful Evelot (Camilla Belle) is kidnapped by a band of mysterious warlords and slave raiders.

Determined to save Evelot, D'Leh leads a group of hunters who travel far through lands unknown, battling such prehistoric predators as massive mammoths and saber tooth tigers on the way. But their biggest battle lies ahead with the discovery of an advanced civilization where great pyramids dominate the landscape.

While Hollywood has produced its fair share of period pieces, Emmerich was surprised by the relatively few times of late that movies about the Stone Age were produced.

"In the '50s and '60s, there were quite a lot of these films, but then nothing really until Jean-Jacques Annaud's 'Quest For Fire,'" Emmerich said, referring to the director's 1981 adventure drama. "It was the first kind of earnest approach to re-create it. Then there was 'Clan of the Cave Bear' (from 1986) with Daryl Hannah, and that was it, pretty much."

With the production of such epics so few and far between, Emmerich, despite an impressive track record, had his work cut out for himself when pitching the idea.

"To be honest, it was a very tough sell because the studios these days get incredibly nervous about these big movies," the German-born director noted. "That's why you see so many sequels and comic book movies because they seem like a sure bet. Everything original and different is not such of a sure bet."

But, Emmerich, added, a filmmaker shouldn't ever give up the idea of making big movies with uncharted themes. He or she simply has to make some adjustments to get it done.

"What I do with these original ideas is just work within the confines of the normal budget," Emmerich said. "I'm always 20-30 percent less expensive than others. Plus, I was lucky and fortunate enough that my movies before this were successful. Since my movies tend to make money, I think that is the only reason '10,000 BC' got made."

Also to Emmerich's advantage was not having a heavy actor payroll, and he said concessions were made to casting relative unknowns as long as the film had the visual flair that he's previous work demonstrated. Still and all, Emmerich was determined to make certain that "10,000 BC" wasn't all about the effects, but the human emotion that holds the story together.

"I always have a very simple rule of numbers -- I only allow 300 or 400 really big visual effects shots," Emmerich explained. "Compared to these days, where some movies have 1,200 visual effects shots, that's quite a small number. True, the effects shot I do are higher quality because I spend a lot on them, but having fewer visual effects shots leaves room for character development."

And in the case of "10,000 BC," that character development was especially important because, no matter the fact that the film is set in the Stone Age, it's still a story that people can relate to.

"What I discovered early on were that the people of '10,000 BC' had to be modern and exactly like us," explained the 52-year-old filmmaker. "At first, the story was only about a mammoth hunter, but it was just not enough for us. After I Googled the words '10,000 BC' on the Internet, I discovered this fascinating theory that some people believe that the pyramids were not built by the Egyptians, but much earlier, like 12,000 years ago."

Ultimately, the theory gave Emmerich a much bigger sandbox to play in when broadening the scope of the story.

"I thought, 'How perfect is this?' I can have the clash of a Stone Age culture and a much higher developed culture," Emmerich enthused.

But just because their culture was more developed than D'Leh's, didn't automatically qualify them as more civilized people, Emmerich added.

"I showed that people of the higher developed culture were evil, and out of that concept came this idea that the person from the Stone Age culture has to be the hero that unifies," Emmerich said. "There are a lot of heroes out there who divide, but not many heroes that unify."