Principal photography began in July 1995 in New York City. A second unit gathered plate shots and establishing shots of Manhattan, Washington, D.C., an RV community in Flagstaff, Arizona, and the Very Large Array on the Plains of San Agustin, New Mexico. The main crew also filmed in nearby Cliffside Park, New Jersey before moving to the former Kaiser Steel mill in Fontana, California to film the post-attack Los Angeles sequences. The production then moved to Wendover, Utah, and West Wendover, Nevada, where the deserts doubled for Imperial Valley, and the Wendover Airport doubled for the El Toro and Area 51 exteriors. It was here where Pullman filmed his pre-battle speech. Immediately before filming the scene, Devlin and Pullman decided to add "Today, we celebrate our Independence Day!" to the end of the speech. At the time, the production was nicknamed "ID4" because Warner Bros. owned the rights to the title because of a film from 1983 which is also called "Independence Day". Devlin had hoped that if Fox executives noticed the addition in dailies, the impact of the new dialogue would help them to win the rights to the title. Pullman had stated in a 2020 interview that Fox had otherwise been aiming to use "Doomsday" for the film's release to match with other disaster films of the time, and Devlin and Emmerich had hoped the impact of this speech scene would help win Fox over to the "Independence Day" name. The right to use the title was eventually won two weeks later.