'DIE HARD' HELMER'S TRICK WAS FINDING FEELING AMID HI-TECH

by Todd McCarthy

(Variety, July 27, 1988)

Hollywood - Although admittedly "obsessed" with the technology that helped make "Die Hard" one of the slickest, highest-tech action pictures to have arrived in awhile, director John McTiernan felt most concerned while making the $28,000,000 Fox production about drawing out all the possible humor and human elements.

"I felt fairly secure with the technology. The technical things were extrapolations of things I'd already learned, especially in 'Predator.' What I was trying to do was let it be warmer," McTiernan allowed. "The terra incognita here was, how do you let it be a little sloppy, how do you let some life into it? I know how to clamp something down, but in the process you squeeze all the life out of it. "

I wanted to be able to respond to what the actors would bring to it, to let it out of the box we'd created. I wanted to create an open atmosphere, and the atmosphere ended up being open enough for that to happen. Although the picture retains the lean and mean trappings almost automatically inherent in a suspense tale about terrorists, hostages and the battle for the latter's liberation, McTiernan confessed that, from the moment he became involved, "I wanted to make it a little more entertaining and less horrifying. I wanted to take it out of the newspapers."

The screenplay, credited to Jeb Stuart and.Steven E. de Souza and based on Roderick Thorpe's novel "Nothing Lasts Forever," "was a very serious script about battling terrorists who are there on a political mission. It's not really an entertaining subject. "In trying to lighten it up, we made the terrorists a little more upscale, and we fashioned Hans (the leader of the terrorists) differently once we had Bruce Willis. Originally, he'd been more downscale, a bit more typically an airplane hijacker type. I liked the idea of imagining what would happen when one of those Baader- Meinhof types got tired of fighting and others' political battles and decided to show them what a real criminal is and applied his expertise to this act," explained McTiernan.

Due to his desire for "as much apparent veracity as possible" in the picture, McTiernan was pleased that both Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman, who portrays Hans, executed some of their own stunts, but since the performers generally were well protected and attached to harnesses and other devices, he never worried much about them. "Most of my nightmares were not to do with anyone getting hurt in a stunt," McTiernan confessed, "because the precautions were so heavy. I was more concerned that a stupid accident might happen, that a crew member might fall off the building. "

Except for one huge set representing the lavish offices where the terrorists hold the hostages, virtually the entire picture was shot at the striking new Fox Plaza office tower in Century City at the foot of the Fox lot. [The-Kel] Building was at the time owned by the studio, which might easily lead to the assumption that cooperation for use of the location was a cinch. To the contrary, McTiernan claimed there was a state of constant "guerrilla war" between the film side and the real estate division. "The initial notion was to do the film there at the Fox building, although one real estate group in Texas offered to fly all of us to Dallas and let us use their building for nothing if we'd come there," revealed McTiernan.

Shooting at the studio's doorstep seemed to make more sense, but the director was astonished at the constant problems and excesses involved. "They made us pay an exorbitant rate for space that had already been rented but not occupied. It was outrageous and absurd. To drive the armored car up the steps, there was the possibility we would damage something, so they made us fly tons of marble in from Spain to sit in a warehouse here in case we stained some of the marble stairs in front. They said anything damaged would have to be replaced immediately, not a day or two later "

The more absurd they could make it, the happier they would be. Nothing happened, of course, and "they finally sold the marble. But it had been very expensive to fly in. "

It was only the real estate people who were impossible, and the movie executives at Fox consistently came to our rescue. Leonard Goldberg backed us up constantly. It's just that you can't go to Barry Diller every time there's a chip on the steps," McTiernan said.

Next up for the director is "Sergeant Rock," a World War II action drama starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, McTiernan's "Predator" topliner, who will portray a German-American fighting the Nazis. "Die Hard" coproducer Joel Silver will produce for Warner Bros. later this year from David Webb Peoples' screenplay.

 

 

Originally on KelClancy's Page - now not accessable