Emmerich has remained fairly mum about his next project Singularity, which already has a release date in May 2013, although it’s been known that it’s science fiction and he has said it’s about the melding of man and machine.

“It’s smarter science fiction. It’s more in the direction of Inception — it has a little more brain to it,” he told us during an exclusive interview.

With a title like Singularity and that general premise, one has to assume the movie has a connection to the work and writings of Ray Kurzweil (whom ComingSoon.net interviewed a few years back) and Emmerich admits that Kurzweil is his biggest influence for the movie.

The German director hasn’t met Kurzweil himself, but he hopes he’ll have a chance one of these days, claiming to be one of his biggest fans. “I’ve read his book, the first one, since 1990, which was called The Age of Intelligent Machines, and then I think the Age of Spiritual Machines, which came out 2000, is a book I bought so many copies of and I’m constantly giving them to people. When you come to my house for dinner, most people have walked out with that book,” he laughs. […]