{"id":19332,"date":"2022-07-28T11:01:49","date_gmt":"2022-07-28T09:01:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiotimes.com\/?p=1687011"},"modified":"2022-07-28T11:08:10","modified_gmt":"2022-07-28T09:08:10","slug":"john-mctiernan-on-die-hard-i-didnt-set-out-to-reinvent-the-action-movie","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/rss_feed\/john-mctiernan-on-die-hard-i-didnt-set-out-to-reinvent-the-action-movie\/","title":{"rendered":"John McTiernan on Die Hard: \u2018I didn\u2019t set out to reinvent the action movie\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By Morgan Jeffery\n \t\t<\/p>

Published: Thursday, 28 July 2022 at 12:00 am<\/p>

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In the 1980s, muscle-bound titans like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone dominated action cinema \u2013 for the most part, they played unflinching, untouchable super-men, quick with a pun and even faster with gun.<\/p>\n

The arrival of Die Hard<\/a> in 1988 changed all that, but looking back now, director John McTiernan \u2013 on a hot streak having just completed work on another action classic the previous year, 1987\u2019s Predator<\/a> \u2013 insists he wasn\u2019t looking to reinvent the genre.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wasn\u2019t trying to reinvent it at all,\u201d he tells RadioTimes.com<\/a>. \u201cI was just trying to make a decent movie.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

McTiernan will revisit Die Hard tonight<\/a> (28th July) as part of the inaugural London Action Festival, taking to the stage for a Q&A following a screening of the movie at London\u2019s Royal Geographical Society. Reflecting on the film after 34 years, he recalls making one demand early on that he felt would help set it apart from other examples of action cinema.<\/p>\n

\u201cI did, I suppose, insist on one thing \u2013 the deal that I struck with [producer] Joel Silver when we started the movie was to set the political tone. It was the first thing we did, because he\u2019d sent me this script about terrorism and I don\u2019t like the idea of movies about terrorism \u2013 it\u2019s something I don\u2019t want to participate in.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo I said, \u2018Look, can we make these guys [the villains led by Alan Rickman\u2019s iconic Hans Gruber] robbers instead?\u2019 and he had enough courage and skill with the studio that he actually pulled it off.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it was with its protagonist that Die Hard truly flew in the face of convention, giving us in Bruce Willis\u2019s flawed, everyman hero John McClane the first of a new breed of action hero. \u201cThe movie starts with a kid [De\u2019voreaux White as Argyle] who\u2019s on his first day driving a limousine, and he doesn\u2019t know how to do it, and his first fare is a guy who\u2019s never ridden in a limousine before,\u201d says McTiernan. \u201c<\/span>So the two of them ride in the front seat of the limousine and that\u2019s how the movie starts. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cEverything actually follows from that, like the movie\u2019s attitude toward all the law officials \u2013 who are all jackasses \u2013 and the other heroes, like Reggie VelJohnson [playing Al Powell, a middle-aged LAPD Sergeant who becomes McClane\u2019s unlikely ally]. It <\/span>was supposed to be a common man\u2019s hero story. That was intended right from the beginning.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

Die Hard \u2013 which famously sees Willis\u2019s McClane stand off against Rickman\u2019s Gruber and his goons across one long night in a high-rise office building \u2013 was loosely adapted by writer Jeb Stuart from Roderick Thorp\u2019s 1979 novel Nothing Lasts Forever, but according to McTiernan, the film had \u201cno script\u201d when principal photography began in November 1987, with only 30 pages of finalised material.<\/p>\n

This didn\u2019t intimidate the film\u2019s director though, who insists that despite the lack of a complete screenplay, he and the production team had a clear vision of what the final product should be. \u201cIt was nice to make a movie where there was very little script but we knew where we were going,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s terrible if you have a script but you don\u2019t really know where you\u2019re going, which is how most movies work.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This meant that many of the film\u2019s most famous lines of dialogue were, in fact, dreamed up on set.\u00a0\u201cBecause we had, in effect, no script, it turned us loose to do all sorts of stuff. In the scene where Bruce is crawling through this aluminium duct, he started coming up with ideas and saying things while we were shooting, and then we\u2019d all try to think of more, like \u2018Can you think of a one liner for here?\u2019 \u2013 I think Bruce came up with the line, \u2018Now I know what a TV dinner feels like.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe also had<\/span> a good, fast writer in Steve de Souza \u2013 he was fantastic and could just <\/span>very rapidly turn out stuff, so we all to some extent got into it. We all just thought, \u2018Hey, look, the worst that can happen is we won\u2019t put it in the movie.’\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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