James Spader found
Dean Devlin and
Roland Emmerich's original script to be awful, and even had issues with the revised version. According to Devlin, Spader's main problem was with the dialogue: "There was one day where he wouldn't come out of his trailer until we rewrote the scenes.
Kurt Russell got very upset with him. He burst into his trailer and said 'What are you doing?' And James said, 'Come on, admit it. The dialogue is horrible.' Russell said, 'Of course, it's horrible. That's why they pay you a million dollars. If it was brilliant, you'd do it for free.'" Devlin said that things gradually improved: "The movie always had a [...] wink to all the science fiction fans about what we were trying to do and the kinds of movies we were referencing. Once they started to understand the tone, they started to really get it. When the movie was finished, both actors were really pleased with it. They were really happy, but I think it just took them a while to get where we were going with it."
