By Die Hard With A Podcast
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If you're going to talk Die Hard, you cannot avoid the meme/debate over whether or not it's a Christmas movie. We discuss why it is (and okay, a few reasons why not), but more importantly, why we care about the question in the first place. What does Christmas mean to us, and how do pop culture traditions factor in? Let us know what you think! Drop us a line at [email protected], or visit our site at www.diehardwithapodcast.com
Almost a decade before there was Die Hard, there was Nothing Lasts Forever. While it sounds like a lost James Bond film, it's actually the book that Die Hard was based on. That's right – Die Hard was based on a book. Roderick Thorp was a crime novelist who met success with 1966's The Detective, which first spawned a movie adaptation, and then a sequel: Nothing Lasts Forever. Simone and special in-studio guest Daniel Walker (who is special because he actually read the damn book) discuss the life of Roderick Thorp, the origins of Nothing Lasts Forever, and how the movie aligns with – and deviates from – the book that inspired it.
Let us know what you think! Drop us a line at [email protected], or visit our site at www.diehardwithapodcast.com
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Holly Gennaro McClane: portrayed in Die Hard by Bonnie Bedelia, John McClane's estranged wife reflects the conflicts and contradictions facing women at the time the film was made – and even still today. She's a working woman, a mother, and a wife. But there’s no consensus on whether she’s also a damsel in distress, or if she – like so many other conventions that Die Hard challenges – goes beyond your typical 80s action movie female lead.
Let us know what you think! Drop us a line at [email protected], or visit our site at www.diehardwithapodcast.com
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Full Episode Transcript
Welcome to the podcast, pal.
My name is Simone Chavoor, and thank you for joining me for Die Hard With a Podcast! The show that examines the best American action movie of all time: Die Hard.
Welcome to the fourth episode! A lot has happened Die Hard-wise since the last show. I want to get to everything, so I’m just going to jump in with a big thanks to Paul Scheer and the How Did This Get Made podcast. He recommended the show on one of his mini-sodes, and I’m stoked he likes the show, and took the time to give it a shout out. I’m still not sure how he heard about this show in the first place, but however he came across it, I’m glad he did!
Also, a couple of weeks ago I went on a spur-of-the-moment road trip to Los Angeles to see the Los Angeles Historic Theatre Foundation’s screening of Die Hard, which was followed by a Q&A with both screenwriters, Jeb Stuart and Stephen E de Souza, hosted by Jeff Goldsmith of Backstory Magazine. Now, the entire conversation is available to listen to and there’s a link in the show notes. Aaaand you can hear me at about one hour, twenty five minutes in, because you know I just had to ask a question. Although it was really hard just picking one. Anyway, go listen to the whole thing because it’s absolutely fascinating. I learned so much. I literally sat in the audience with a notebook and pen and took notes like it was for school. One of the funniest things was, this was Jeb and Stephen’s first time being interviewed together, which I could not believe. They talked about the process of writing Die Hard, but also talked about their writing habits in general. I’ll bring up just one tidbit I learned that they shared in the Q&A. So, when you go through Hans’s gang, only two of them survive: Theo, and the pretty French dude who’s trying to run away with an armful of bearer bonds before McClane knocks him out. I’d just never kept track of all the gang members like that before. So, I think, if they’re gonna do a sequel anyway, they should bring Theo back. Just sayin’.
Finally, I got two books in the mail the other day that I’m excited to dig into. The first is Die Hard: The Ultimate Visual History by James Mottram and David S. Cohen. I had that book on pre-order the moment I found out about it, and it’s a huge tome that covers all of the Die Hard movies in detail, with these pieces put in between the pages – kind of like a pop-up book, but nothing… pops – it has storyboards, sketches, script pages, and my favorite, an envelope of photos taken to use as props in the film.
The second is the book John McTiernan: The Rise and Fall of an Action Movie Icon by Larry Taylor. Larry contacted me on Twitter and kindly offered me a copy of the book, and I can’t wait to read it for deeper insight on Die Hard’s director.
Okay, a few more pieces of business. You can always contact me and share your thoughts on Die Hard and this podcast by...
There’s also a Patreon for the show – it takes an incredible amount of time to put this together, so any contribution helps me to offset the cost of creating it, and is a real vote of encouragement.
Shout out to our new contributors, Heather and David. Thank you so much!
You can also support Die Hard With a Podcast by leaving a review on iTunes. With more starred ratings and written reviews, the show becomes more visible to other potential listeners, so please share the love and let me know what you think!
All right. On to our main topic.
When we first see Holly Gennaro – or Holly McClane – she’s walking through the Nakatomi Corporation’s Christmas party, which is already in full swing. But she’s completely focused on a stack of papers in her hand as she brushes past her partying coworkers. She has shit to get done.
And that’s mostly how I think of Holly. She’s a woman with shit to do. And not Ellis, not Hans, and not even her husband John can distract her from doing what needs to get done.
Holly Gennaro, as portrayed in the movie by Bonnie Bedelia, turns out to be the character who most split people’s opinions. There’s no consensus on whether she’s a damsel in distress, or if she – like so many other conventions that Die Hard challenges – goes beyond your typical 80s action movie female lead. She’s characterized as cold… and warm. Strong… but not having an agency. A good wife and mother just doing her best… or a woman trying and failing to have it all. Even I go back and forth on these.
As one of the very few women in Die Hard, Holly Gennaro McClane comes to represent changing societal roles that had mostly been left to romantic comedies. Holly’s portrayal as a working woman, a mother, and a wife reveals the conflicts facing women at that time – and the conflicting viewpoints of the culture around her.
Let’s start as we did with our examination of John, and go into her character as written in Roderick Thorp’s 1979 novel, Nothing Lasts Forever. She’s a totally different person, I think even more than how John was changed from the page to the screen. Retired former detective Joe Leland – who would later become John McClane – goes out to Los Angeles for Christmas to visit his daughter, not his estranged wife. Stephanie Gennaro – Steffie – is a divorced mother of two and an executive at Klaxon Oil. We see her through her father’s eyes, and it’s not a pretty picture. She’s sleeping with Ellis, and she’s been doing coke. Which I guess you would expect from someone sleeping with Ellis. It’s also reeeally awkward that her dad is putting thought into who his daughter is sleeping with. Also, there’s this: “Leland thought she looked tired. For years she had been five pounds too heavy, and now it looked like ten. With cocaine in her life, he had to be glad to see that she was still eating.” Yikes.
The events of the book transpire pretty much as they do in the movie. The employees are held hostage by terrorists – real terrorists in the book, not thieves – and Joe / John gets away and begins taking them down one by one. But when we get to the final showdown with Joe and the terrorist leader Anton Gruber, there’s a big, big difference. Spoiler alert for the book: Steffie goes out the window with Anton. So yeah, the book is kind of a downer.
Movie Holly, thankfully, is a much less tragic character. In Jeb Stuart’s draft of the Die Hard script, this is how Holly is introduced.
She turns into:
That’s the Holly we know. And the Ellis we know, unfortunately.
There’s a movie goof I’d like to point out. For all the drama over which last name Holly uses, if you look at the name on her office door, you can see that it’s misspelled. On her door it says “H. M. Gennero” with a second E instead of an A. I just thought that was amusing. Maybe McClane would have been easier to spell…
According to Die Hard: The Ultimate Visual History, casting for Holly’s role was part of a larger strategy of casting warm actors with a lot of depth to balance out Willis’s tough cop. Casting director Jackie Burch chose Bedelia, a New York stage actor who had won a Golden Globe for playing Shirley Muldowney, the first female hot rod racer in the 1983 movie Heart Like a Wheel. Bruce Willis liked Bedelia being brought on board. “Bruce thought that Bonnie would be wonderful; he had enormous respect for her as an actor, and he was so right!” said director John McTiernan. “She was again completely a working-class lady, but solid and honest as the day is long – and that is who he [McClane] would have as a wife.”
We actually don’t know all that much about Holly. Like with John, we meet her without a lot of exposition of her background; we have to pick up the context clues. We don’t know anything about how she met John, how she got her job. It leaves a lot of room for us to speculate – speculate about her history, and therefore what her motivations are in the film. Holly’s roles as a working woman, a mother, and a wife allow us to project our own feelings and beliefs onto her, so I’m actually not surprised that the people I talked to ended up with very different assessments of her. It’s also worth noting that there’s a cultural gap between how she was viewed in 1988 versus today, so we need to constantly ask ourselves, is this what the film is trying to say, or is that what I’m taking away from it?
The thing we’re most sure of when it comes to Holly is that she is a powerful, high-ranking working woman inside this large corporation. She works hard, and has been rewarded for her efforts. She’s got a corner office, a secretary of her own, and...
[CLIP - DIE HARD - ELLIS - SHOW HIM THE WATCH]
Holly tries to downplay her success to John, since it’s already a sore spot in their marriage. But she’s still wearing that watch, and she doesn’t mask the fact that she has even higher ambitions.
[CLIP - DIE HARD - HOLLY - I HAVE AN EYE ON HIS PRIVATE BATHROOM]
Katie Walsh, film critic for the Tribune News Service and LA Times.
KATIE WALSHI think that it’s nice to see Holly in a executive role. I think a lot of times, you have like films like 9 to 5 where the working women are more secretaries, or they start as secretaries and they move up to something better. I think it’s nice to see the way that, she says, “I had an opportunity and and I took it.” And we don’t have to really explain how Holly got there, we just understand that, you know, she’s obviously a valued member of the team, Takagi really likes her, she’s doing a great job. And so I think that it’s kind of nice to see that there’s an effortlessness to her success . And I think that’s a bit of an anomaly, otherwise I think 80s movies were constantly showing how women had to like, struggle and get to that role.
In the films of the 80s, we can see the intersection of corporate culture and second-wave feminism play out on screen. Unsurprisingly, it’s a mixed message. We applaud the ambition of women escaping the “pink collar ghetto,” as they call it in Nine to Five. In that 1980 film, Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin, and Jane Fonda are secretaries who are held down, underestimated, and harassed at the office – until they kind of by accident take out their boss. After holding him hostage at his home for weeks, he escapes and returns to the office, only to see that while he was gone, the three women made changes that drastically improved the morale and performance of his workers. In 1988’s Working Girl, Melanie Griffith plays Tess McGill, a woman driven to improve herself and grow her career as she works for a coldly calculating executive played by Sigourney Weaver. When her boss is laid up with an injury, Tess takes over her office, her home, her wardrobe, even her boyfriend, and uses them to execute her own business plan. Which is actually pretty creepy if you think about it. But she’s the hero of the story, so her chutzpah gets rewarded when she’s given a job by the executive she had been pitching. In these films, we see likeable women with low-ranking office roles climb the corporate ladder to success, and we applaud them for their determination.
But there’s also the reverse. Women who are already high-powered businesspeople are forced to reckon with their desire for a family, and end up taking a step back from the workplace. In 1987’s Baby Boom, Diane Keaton is made the guardian of a baby girl when a distant relative dies. She’s a busy executive – with the biggest shoulder pads there could possibly be, they’re more like helipads instead of shoulder pads – and at first she refuses to take responsibility for this child. But of course, something inside her melts and she bonds with the child and quits her job – something unthinkable at the beginning of the movie – to devote herself to raising this girl… and to creating a nice little business of baby foods, too. Now, the 1983 film Mr Mom focuses more on Michael Keaton’s character learning to deal with being a stay-at-home dad after losing his job, but we also see his wife, played by Teri Garr, return to the workforce. She’s met with immediate success – but in the end, her lecherous boss and her desire to be with her family pushes her to scale back her time at work. In these films, we can’t say that these women are punished for their ambition, but we do get the message that these women are wrong. They’re wrong to focus on their careers, and once they realize what’s really important – raising a family – that’s how they can get their happy ending.
Adam Sternbergh, novelist, contributing editor to New York Magazine, and pop culture journalist.
ADAM STERNBERGHI think it’s also not a mistake that the movie uses this kind of marital discord around the idea of a husband and wife dealing with the fact that the wife has a powerful career, or a more important career than the husband. That was also very much of that moment in history and it was, you know, around the same time that movies like Mr Mom were coming out. And you know, America, to some extent was at the cineplex was grappling with this idea that women are successful, and they’re in the workforce and traditional roles are changing. And you know there was this idea in the movies that this was this incredibly new and novel thing, this sort of ascendant woman in the workplace, and the men around her are all trying to deal with the fact that, whoa, she’s got responsibility and she’s got a real job. Bonnie Bedelia is a great actor and was sort of perfectly cast in Die Hard, so I think that she has a sort of gravity that I think some of the other sort of similar characters in the other movies don’t have. And I think they handled it well in the movie. You know her relationship with Mr. Takagi is sort of established early on, that she’s this trusted lieutenant of his. So I think even in her smaller role you take her seriously in a way that you never quite manage to take Melanie Griffith seriously in Working Girl.
Women in these executive roles are judged for “trying to be a man;” some do try to take on characteristics coded as masculine in order to sort of disguise the fact that they’re a woman. You know, if women are perceived as weak, then she must not display emotion, she must be even tougher than the men around her. Unfortunately this can backfire, as a woman controlling her emotions is often seen not as stoic, but as cold.
KATIE WALSHYou know, I think it’s interesting, the way they portray the essential conflict of their relationship, which is that she wants a high powered career, and he clearly has an idea about more traditional values in their gender roles and their marriage, taking his name, that sort of thing. But I think Holly has kind of toughened herself to exist in that world. And so she has kind of like, I mean as we see her at the party and stuff, it’s like she has to put on this front a little bit of, I’m tough, I can hang with the boys, nothing bothers me. So she’s a little bit colder and more brittle in a way. And I hate to describe a woman that way, but she does have like a hard shell a little bit throughout the movie. And John is more like nakedly emotional, or at least we see him being more nakedly emotional about the situation.
Sasha Perl-Raver, writer, correspondent, and the host of FX’s Movie Download.
SASHA PERL-RAVERI have in my head Joan Cusack wearing a power suit with giant shoulder pads and a huge Aquanet bang wave, and Reeboks on top of nude tights. But the working woman of the 80s was somebody who had to have it all, she has a great career, she had a great sex life, she wasn’t afraid to let you know about it. She’s Sigourney Weaver. But not Ripley Sigourney Weaver, she’s Working Girl Sigourney Weaver. She’s a working woman in the 80s. Was a little brash, a little bit ball-busting, and usually had to be taken down a peg. Like it tended to be more of like the villain character than the hero. Like I’m thinking of Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Mannequin. In Mannequin she’s trying to do the corporate takeover and she’s overpowering and she really needs to be one of the people that falls in like a vat of tar at the end. All of those women sort of in the end, it was their drive that ended up being the hubris.
SIMONE: Does Die Hard do that with Holly?
SASHA: Of course they do that with Holly. She had to come all the way across the country and drag her children and leave her husband? You deserve to be held hostage in Nakatomi Plaza.
When we talk about working women of the 1980s, the first thing to come to mind, even before the sexual politics, is the fashion. Maybe the fact we think of the fashion is already gendered because we’re talking about women here, but it’s a powerful image. As we’ve heard, there are iconic pieces that come up over and over again: shoulder pads. Big hair. Bright eyeshadow. Power suits. White sneakers over nude hose.
Holly’s look is very much in this vein, but also more sophisticated – just as her character is, compared to those who came before her. According to Die Hard: The Ultimate Visual History, costume designer Marilyn Vance conceived Holly’s look to convey professionalism and power, using browns and pinks that complemented Bonnie Bedelia’s hair color and skin tone. A business suit was never an option. “She was a softer character,” says Vance. “But at the same time, she had a very important position, so her clothing, to me, had to be suede and leather and something more sumptuous. And it was the right time of year for that because it was Christmastime.” Vance shopped for Holly’s clothes at Saks Fifth Avenue, then had the studio’s costume department use them for inspiration when creating the character’s wardrobe. “The whole idea was for her to be strong but not tailored,” says Vance. “She’s soft as a person but she still means business.”
And let’s not forget the importance of Holly’s Rolex. Given to her as a reward for her hard work, it’s symbolically sacrificed at the end of the film, as John unclasps the band so that Hans loses his grip on her and falls from Nakatomi Tower. The symbolism is pretty heavy-handed. The thing that represents her corporate life must be released so that she can keep her family life. And, you know, her life-life. But at least there’s ambiguity about whether or not she’ll give up her job at the end of the film. Concessions are made: losing the watch, Holly using the last name McClane – and we’ll talk about that more in a minute – but she doesn’t also declare that she’s quitting her job and moving the family back to New York.
One more thing about the watch. Jeb Stuart, Die Hard screenwriter, has a nitpick. He says: “Anyone who’s ever owned a Rolex knows that watch isn’t gonna just open. It’s a sealed clasp! I brought that up at a production meeting and everybody looked at me like I was insane.”
Now, I’ve never owned a Rolex, but if someone wants to send me one so that I can test this out myself, you are more than welcome to.
But more than just looking the part, Holly is a natural in the workplace. She’s a good boss, making sure the work gets done, but also looking out for her employees, whether it’s sending her secretary Ginny off to enjoy the party, or negotiating better treatment for her fellow hostages. Even Hans has to acknowledge that.
[CLIP - DIE HARD - HANS - MR TAKAGI CHOSE HIS PEOPLE WELL]
Reed Fish, director and screenwriter.
REED FISHYeah, I think Holly was portrayed pretty sympathetically. I mean, maybe not in the context of the late 80s where it’s like some affront that she’s going to use her maiden name. But you know, she was a good boss, right? She had a pregnant assistant she was always looking out for her. And she was someone who seemed to put her team members above herself, you know she was in a situation, a hostage situation, and she seemed to be looking out for everyone else before her. So it’s pretty sympathetic.
Holly’s office is decorated with the trappings of one of her other roles: mother. Images of her children play a pivotal role in the plot of the film, even if they barely appear in the movie themselves. Pictures of her and her kids fill the shelf behind her desk. In frustration, Holly slams one family portrait facedown on the shelf, hiding the only evidence of her marriage to John from Hans. And Hans finds that portrait when reporter Richard Thornberg interviews little Lucy McClane on TV – Holly’s horrified face at seeing the McClane children on camera gives her connection away. For his part, John spends a moment looking at pictures of his kids in his wallet, a reminder of the way things used to be, and how he’d like them to be again.
We never actually see Holly with her children. This makes sense narratively, as pretty much the entire movie takes place at her office just as the Christmas party starts. It’s hard to say how Holly is as a mother, but we do get a short scene with her on the phone with her daughter Lucy.
[CLIP - DIE HARD - HOLLY - ON THE PHONE WITH LUCY]
Holly’s tone becomes warm, and she smiles to herself as she talks to her daughter. She’s comforting and reassuring without promising too much – after all, Holly doesn’t even know if John will make it home for Christmas.
The ability for Holly to work a demanding job while still having children is a dilemma faced by working women in a way that working fathers never seem to worry about. It also speaks to class and racial divisions, where we must acknowledge that Holly is extremely privileged to even attempt to have it all. Holly relies on her housekeeper Paulina to watch her children while she’s at work. It makes me think about that scene in the awful, awful Sex and the City 2 movie where Charlotte and Miranda complain about how hard motherhood is when they both have full-time help, and they cheers their Cosmo cocktails in honor of the “women without help.” Yeah, thanks Sex in the City 2, thanks for that shoutout from two women having cocktails at a resort in Abu Dhabi. Die Hard of course doesn’t go in depth on this issue, but we get a glimpse of it.
[CLIP - DIE HARD - HOLLY - ON THE PHONE WITH NANNY]
KATIE WALSH
I also think it’s interesting to think about her relationship with her nanny. And how upper class working women often rely on women of color and that type of domestic labor in order to both have kids and be in the working world. So there are multiple industries and levels of classes that are going on in the sense of, how do I be a working woman and be a mother and be a wife, and it’s sort of like, one’s gotta go for Holly, and she’s gonna be a mom and she’s gonna be a working woman but she can’t really be a wife. So you see that struggle, and I think at one point she says to the nanny, “What would I do without you?” and it’s such a small moment but it really illustrates that you really can’t be everything to all people at all times in those roles.
Die Hard’s emotional arc for its lead character, John, hinges on his relationship with his wife. Now, we know Holly is a good employee and boss. We think she’s probably a pretty good mom; it’s hard to tell but we don’t have anything totally contradicting that. But Holly as a wife – this is where she most obviously can’t have it all. By prioritizing her other two roles, Holly shirks her role as a wife. She leaves John behind, even leaves his name behind. Holly’s use of her maiden name becomes a particular sticking point in the film.
[CLIP - DIE HARD - JOHN - YOU DIDN’T MISS MY LAST NAME]
Then again, John doesn’t sound like he was a supportive husband.
[CLIP - DIE HARD - JOHN AND ARGYLE - GREAT JOB TURNED INTO A GREAT CAREER]
So, should we be blaming Holly? Is she putting herself and her career first, and dragging the kids along with her? Or is she doing what’s best for her family, and leaving John behind because he’s not going to support her in the way that she needs?
ADAM STERNBERGHIf you think too much about their marriage, though, it seems quite problematic. Like, she’s moved with the kids across the country and he stayed in New York. The movie doesn’t really explain why he would do that; it quite seems – at least to a modern perspective, it seems quite a dramatic choice for him to just refuse to move with his kids, and be separated from his kids. But again this is the sort of time period between like, on one end, Kramer Versus Kramer, and on the other end Mr. Mom and movies like that, so obviously there was a lot of issues that were being worked out in the movie theaters about men and women and families and who was the head of the house, and how we were going to like work that all out together.
One way to get a read on what the movie is trying to say about Holly is to see how she compares to her husband. As the couple fights, whose side do you take? Is she treated more sympathetically, or is he? Opinions are split.
Ed Grabianowski, pop culture writer and horror and fantasy author.
ED GRABIANOWSKII think the intent was to make Holly a little less sympathetic because I think in that era, the whole working woman image and the idea of it, a woman who puts her career before family is somehow neglecting her responsibilities or something like that. I guess it depends on how tied you are to the idea of a traditional family. So I think anyone who is is going to find Holly very unsympathetic, and anybody who’s more interested in feminism and equality among men and women is going to find Holly more sympathetic. So overall I find Holly sympathetic, but I definitely understand where John McClane is coming from. And I don’t feel unsympathetic towards him, because I don’t think like, he didn’t set out to do anything bad. He just reacted shittily to a situation that happened to his family, that wasn’t necessarily what he wanted. And that happens to people, you know, like regardless how you feel about family structure in general, like just stuff happens to your family and you’re like, I don’t know how to deal with this and sometimes you fuck it up and you have to go back and fix it. And that’s what John is doing. I guess in that way, it sort of comes out a tie.
[CLIP - DIE HARD - HOLLY - I KNOW WHAT YOUR IDEA OF OUR MARRIAGE IS LIKE]
The fact that we don’t know what John and Holly were like at the beginning of their relationship can leave you wondering how they were even together in the first place.
SASHA PERL-RAVERIf you say that opposites attract, I get that, but I don’t think that opposites marry and have children and are then suddenly torn asunder by a move across the country, or whatever other things are the reasons that they actually broke up. I think that they – she is too no-nonsense to have been with him for as long as she was. She seems to me a very pragmatic woman who would not have taken his stuff, and they would not have gone to the altar. Unless it was like, a Las Vegas 36-hour situation. They make no sense to me. What do you think?
SIMONE: I think they probably got together, they were younger; there was probably some hot chemistry. You know, they’re both attractive and there’s passion; they seem like passionate people. And then they actually get married and have kids and she shifts that passion to the career. And they don’t talk about the reasons for taking this job but I would have to assume, at least she’s telling herself she’s doing it for the sake of her family, that this will help take care of them or something. And just drifts apart from John and they sort of evolve as people on their own. And so when you see them later, they’ve already moved far apart.
SASHA: And I always assumed she took the part because she was sick of dealing with this workaholic, New York City police guy who was always off with his trigger finger like at the ready, and she just wanted to have a nice, stable life so she got the job working for the Nakatomi Corporation so she could provide for her family and not have to worry about him. Or maybe! She was always afraid he was going to get himself killed on the job, so she pulled away to protect her heart and had to make sure she didn’t have to live on like a widow’s severance or whatever. What’s that called?
SIMONE: It’s not like a pension. Like a benefit?
SASHA: Whatever the death benefit would be. Maybe that’s what it is. Maybe she always knew that he was too wild. And she just wanted to make sure – she, she seems very stable. Very stable.
It’s true that at first glance, John and Holly seem like opposites. But at their cores, they’re both very determined – and stubborn – people.
Scott Wampler, news editor at Birth. Movies. Death., and host of the Trying Times podcast.
SCOTT WAMPLERI think it’s complicated, to borrow some terminology from social media. I think that Holly is – I think that they’re both career people, and when you have two people that are that invested in their careers and then they have kids, shit gets complicated. Holly’s thing is that, you know, she got moved out to LA for a job, or she chose to move out to LA for this job. I can’t fault her for that. I also can’t fault John McClane for being mad that she pulled up roots and took the kids out there. I can imagine not being thrilled with that either. So I think it’s sort of a draw in terms of who my sympathies would lie with more. And I also think they’re both a little dickish in their own ways. In this sense, I do believe them as a couple. And I can see what attracted them to one another. You know, on a physical level, and just on a worldview level. You know?
REED FISHI think that that whole Holly-John dynamic, but for me it felt like very just unreal? Because it didn’t seem like someone in her position would be with someone like him. And maybe it’s one of those things where their lives were, you know, when they first got together ten years ago their lives were much different, and then her career took off. But like I never really saw what the deal was, why they would ever be together, and why, say, anyone would ever want to be with John McClane romantically whatsoever, at all. ‘Cause clearly he is not someone you’d want to be married to, in my opinion. I feel like the dynamic between Holly and John – there’s good tension there, but I just didn’t find the relationship all that believable. It didn’t seem to me that she would be with him. I really have to do some mental gymnastics to figure out the scenario where those two characters would have gotten together and gotten married and had kids.
These unanswered questions about the couple’s past leaves us unsure about their marriage’s future. But there are clear signs that both hope for a reconciliation – they just need to get out of their own ways first.
When Holly calls her housekeeper Paulina, she tries to play it cool, but you know she wasn’t intending on using that spare bedroom if John came home. She likewise tries to act disinterested with John himself, not let on how bad she wants him...
[CLIP - DIE HARD - HOLLY - I HAVE THE SPARE BEDROOM]
… Until, of course, she finally opens up.
[CLIP - DIE HARD - HOLLY - I MISSED YOU]
And John has to blow it by picking a fight with her, right at that moment.
But we know that John loves Holly. He spends the entire movie putting his life on the line for her. At the end of the film, we don’t know how their marriage will fare once they get home. But at least for a moment, we get a happy ending.
[CLIP - DIE HARD - ARGYLE - RUN INTO EACH OTHER’S ARMS]
John and Holly exit Nakatomi Tower together, holding each other, happy to be safely reunited. When John introduces her to Al Powell, Holly takes a turn.
[CLIP - DIE HARD - HOLLY - HOLLY McCLANE]
This one line always ends up at the center of analyses of Holly’s character. What does it mean? Is Holly going to give up her career and go back to being primarily a wife and mother? Is she just in a particularly generous mood because she just escaped with her life? In my personal opinion, I believe that because John introduced her to Al as Holly Gennaro, using her own preferred name, with no hesitation, that she felt it was time to make a concession. And if both John and Holly are willing at long last to make concessions, they have a future together.
Well, if we ignore the sequel films, anyway.
Another way to try and analyze how Die Hard treats its female lead is to compare it to other action films. So: Is Holly considered a damsel in distress?
After our analysis of her character, we can tick off some pros and cons.
Let’s say Holly is a damsel in distress. Well, she…
But what does Die Hard do differently?
And she gets a lot of great moments in the film. The film totally does not discard her or disregard her. She is very strong in her own right and gets to – and is quite instrumental as to how the whole thing plays out too. Which in hindsight might not seem like a big deal, but at the time it also felt like a break from the sort of standard action movie foil, heroine, damsel, exactly.
Whether or not Holly is a damsel in distress leads us to our final question of this episode. Is Die Hard a feminist film? Yeah, okay, that even sounded funny to me. I’m gonna go ahead and say “No” here. I think that a film has to be doing more to actively challenge the patriarchy and promote women’s rights and explain women’s issues to be called feminist. But I do think that Die Hard was working a little harder than other films at the time. Die Hard is elevated above all other action films of its time in nearly every aspect: story, acting, the craft of the film. And I think in so doing, it put a little more thought into Holly too. Her character, with all her positive attributes and flaws, achieves a level of humanity that many other films deny their female leads. As we discussed in the last episode, what makes the character of John McClane such a beloved hero is his humanity. It makes sense that his wife would have her own humanity shine through, too.
In our next episode, we’re going back to the beginning. We’re going to take an in-depth look at Roderick Thorp’s novel Nothing Lasts Forever to see where the seeds of Die Hard were sown.
Thank you to our guests Ed Grabionowski, Sasha Perl-Raver, Scott Wampler, Reed Fish, Adam Sternbergh, and Katie Walsh. Be sure to check the show notes on the website to learn more about them.
Thanks again for joining me, and yippee-kai-yay, motherfuckers!
The high-quality talent of the team that brought Die Hard to the screen is well-recognized. But to many, the secret ingredient to the movie's success was Bruce Willis and his portrayal of John McClane, an everyman police officer from New York, trapped in Nakatomi Tower at exactly the wrong time – and without even shoes on his feet. McClane takes on the role of reluctant hero to save his wife and the other innocent hostages, and defeat German terrorist-thief Hans Gruber. The McClane character has stuck in audiences' memories ever since, and sparked a change in how action heroes are characterized. So what makes John McClane so special? How much of it is his character, how much of it is the influence of other legendary heroes before him, and how much of it is Willis bringing the role to life?
Let us know what you think! Drop us a line at [email protected], or visit our site at www.diehardwithapodcast.com
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Full Episode Transcript
Welcome to the podcast, pal.
My name is Simone Chavoor, and thank you for joining me for Die Hard With a Podcast! The show that examines the best American action movie of all time: Die Hard.
This is episode three of the show, and I wanted to thank you all again for the amazing response we got for the last episode. I’ve been having a lot of fun talking with people about Die Hard for the podcast. First of all, the fact that people get SO EXCITED to talk about Die Hard and have SO MANY thoughts on it gets me so amped up. I’m telling you, if you’re socially awkward like me, just ask somebody what they think about Die Hard and you can have an amazing conversation for an hour and feel like you just made a new friend. Some of the folks I’ve talked to are friends I’ve had for years, and then sometimes they recommend their own friends, like, “you gotta talk to this guy, he fucking loves Die Hard,” and some have been people I’ve cold-emailed or cold-Tweeted who say yes to talking to a perfect stranger because they get to talk about Die Hard and have someone actually listen to them. And we just get to be big nerds about something we love, and it’s amazing.
And also, now everyone knows how much I love Die Hard and everyone’s sending me Die Hard things they see on the internet and I’m loving it. Like I’m a pretty easy person to figure out; if you see something that’s Star Wars, or tiki, or horror movie, or Nine Inch Nails, or pizza, or kitty cat-related online, that’s gonna make my day. But now people know that Die Hard is one of my Things I Like, so they’re passing along the best stuff. One thing a friend sent me was this sketch by the comedy troupe Baroness Von Sketch, where this lady is at a party, complaining to her friend that she can’t meet guys, and her friend says she knows a trick. She stands back and says “OH MY GOD I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU HAVEN’T SEEN DIE HARD,” and then alllll the dudes come flocking. I almost died. Except now I know why I’m single, because clearly I’m doing the EXACT OPPOSITE. But that’s okay, I’m having too good of a time lady-splaining Die Hard to you all.
Speaking of lady-splaining… I’ve had such a great response from ladies who are excited to see themselves represented in this genre. Die Hard gets thought of as a bro movie. And I am definitely not a bro.
I got an email from a listener, Cindy, who says: I also really wanted to express how exhilarated I am that you are of the womanly persuasion. I am also a woman who loves Die Hard, and I know there are plenty of us out there, but that's not the popular perception. I've dearly wanted the perspective of other women who actually enjoy the film--it seems like millennial women are either turned off by the lone-hero-cop narrative, which I understand, or see Die Hard as the ultimate annoying dudebro movie, which is frustrating. It warms my heart, like literally makes it feel all fuzzy and nice, that this podcast exists, with a woman helming the way.
Yes, girl. I absolutely feel you. And I wanted to give two quick shouts to two other women who are doing some exciting work.
Maggie Serota wrote a piece for Spin magazine titled, “How So I Married an Axe Murderer Wrecked One Writer’s Vision, Lost Several Stars, Bombed at the Box Office, and Became a Classic Anyway.” So I Married an Axe Murderer is another favorite movie of mine – Mike Meyers is so, so funny, and I have immense nostalgia for the 90s and also love any movie set in the Bay Area. Maggie wrote the piece for the movie’s 25th anniversary, but also because it’s one of her all-time favorite movies. There’ll be a link in the show notes; go check that out.
Also, Amy Nicholson, who you know from the podcasts The Canon and Unspooled, is doing an 8-part series called Halloween Unmasked for The Ringer podcast network, which is all about, obviously, the movie Halloween. I love horror movies, but Halloween was never one of my favorites, so I’m letting Amy take me away in her deep dive on the film. The podcast premiered on October 1st, so catch up on the first three episodes now.
So, if you want to send me funny links and memes about Die Hard, or if you have other suggestions for female film critics’ works, drop me a line!
And if you like this show, kick me a buck or two on Patreon. Patreon helps to offset the cost of doing this show, not just in pure dollars and cents, but for the sheer amount of time this podcast takes to put together. This is my first solo project, and although I have the wonderful, amazing support of my guests and fans, it still takes a lot of time researching, writing, recording, and editing.
Shout out to our contributors… Cindy, who sent that lovely email earlier, and Paul! And special thanks to Paul for his support, as his encouragement means a lot to me on this particular project. Thank you so much!
You can also support Die Hard With a Podcast by leaving a review on iTunes. With more starred ratings and written reviews, the show becomes more visible to other potential listeners, so please share the love and let me know what you think!
All right. On to our main topic.
When we last left off, we talked about Die Hard’s place in the 80s action movie ecosystem. How it was molded by the conventions of the genre at the time, but also how it broke the mold – and improved upon it. There was a lot that elevated Die Hard beyond a conventional, empty, popcorn-chomp of an action movie. There was the amazingly neat and efficient script, the gorgeous work of cinematographer Jan De Bont, the genius of John McTiernan’s directing. But to many, the secret ingredient was Bruce Willis and his character of John McClane.
So what makes John McClane so special? How much of it is his character, and how much of it is Willis bringing the role to life?
Let’s take a step back. Before we figure out why McClane is an iconic action movie hero, let’s talk about what makes a good hero in any story.
There’s been so much written about the Hero’s Journey, and archetypes and, well, I’m no Joseph Campbell. I think, for our purposes, we can really really really simplify it down to this: a hero is someone who is undergoing some sort of ordeal, and who is someone we root for. We root for them because we relate to them in some way, and view them with a mix of admiration and sympathy.
To contextualize things a bit, let’s look at The American Film Institute’s 100 Greatest Heroes and Villains list. Now unfortunately, our John McClane didn’t make the list (although Hans Gruber came in 46th on the Villains list). But let’s look at the top 5:
1. Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird 2. Indiana Jones 3. James Bond 4. Rick Blaine, Casablanca 5. Will Kane, High Noon
All men from different backgrounds, but who fall within our definition of hero. Further on in this episode, at least three of these heroes come up in comparison to John McClane. So, even though John himself doesn’t make the list, him being compared to Indiana Jones, Rick Blaine, and Will Kane on the regular, means he’s doing pretty all right.
In order to root for our hero, the audience needs to see themselves in his shoes – or lack thereof. Someone who’s perfect is unrealistic, unbelievable – and really, don’t the people who pretend to be perfect kinda bug you? But a hero with flaws, a hero who’s the underdog – we want to see them overcome their obstacles.
JEREMIAH FRIEDMANI’m Jeremiah Friedman, and I’m a screenwriter. Mostly working on the film side of things.
I don't know if you can set out to create an iconic movie hero. I mean I guess you can set out to create an iconic movie hero. Some of it feels like, you know, a little bit of like lightning in a bottle. I think, you want something that hasn't been seen before, and that feels emotionally relatable to people. They feel like they get that guy or that woman, and they just want to root for them. And I think that the original Die Hard, if we're going old school and not 2-3-4-5, what makes McClane so compelling is he's such an underdog you can root for the entire movie, and you just feel like he has the whole world against him.
Sasha Perl-Raver, writer, correspondent, and the host of FX’s Movie Download.
SASHA PERL-RAVERSo I think that the best heroes have to be both heroic and flawed. I mean, I think about everybody from obviously John McClane, but even to Alexander Hamilton in the Hamilton musical, you’ve got somebody who is exceptional but has this one thing that is inevitably also their downfall. When you think of even Murtaugh and Riggs in Lethal Weapon – Mel Gibson’s character, the fact that he’s so broken, he’s on the verge of psychosis. He is a great cop and an excellent fighter and has all this combat training, but also comes from this incredibly fractured place, is what makes him really interesting. I think that heroes in general have to do the things that we wish we would do, say the things we wish we would say, and somehow manage the impossible. But they have to be somebody who you either want to emulate or relate to. I think those are all the key characteristics that make a great hero.
First impressions are incredibly important, especially when meeting our hero for the first time. John McClane went through several iterations from his beginnings on the pages of a novel to the script to the screen. Let’s take a look at how McClane is introduced to us.
In the 1979 novel Nothing Lasts Forever, written by Roderick Thorp, John McClane is actually Joe Leland, a retired cop turned private detective. Far from the handsome 30-something McClane we get in the movie, Leland is an older man – if you’ll recall, Frank Sinatra was offered a chance to reprise his version of Leland from his previous film The Detective – and Sinatra was 73 years old at the time. He turned it down.
The book opens with him in the back of a cab on the way to the airport… aaand the cab has just crashed in a snowy fender-bender. There’s little physical description of Leland in the book, although we’re told he’s a “mature man” – and it makes sense, given that he’s trying to make his flight to Los Angeles to see his grown daughter and her children. But we quickly learn what kind of man Leland is. After his cab gets in an accident, Leland’s instant dislike for the driver of the station wagon his cab has hit mixes with his anxiety about missing his flight. The other man is a racist bully who tries to push the cab off the road as they try to leave – and holy shit, Leland just goes ahead and pulls his gun on him so he and his cab driver can make it to the terminal on time. But far from being a badass, Leland immediately regrets his impulsive action, and is left shaken as the adrenaline leaves him. He makes his his flight, and strikes up a flirtation with the stewardess, Kathi – spelled with an “i.” He kisses her (it’s okay, his ex-wife is long dead), and gets her number so they can meet up later. It’s actually kind of sweet.
In the script and on the screen, we meet John McClane already at the end of his flight. On the page, he’s described as “mid-thirties, good-looking, athletic and tired from his trip. He sits by the window. His relief on landing is subtle but we notice.”
The businessman next to him takes this opportunity to offer his advice about taking off his shoes and making “fists with his toes,” as we all remember. The plane finishes taxiing, and they begin to disembark.
In the first draft:
McClane is calm and reassuring as he flashes his badge and heads off the plane – after helping a lady with her bags.
In the shooting script, he’s a little more relaxed, a little cockier.
McClane is definitely more of a rascal here, a funny guy, a ladykiller. While the bit with the stewardess is pretty much cut out of the final film, let’s listen to how this scene plays out.
[CLIP - DIE HARD - McCLANE ON THE PLANE]
There’s a lot of work being done in these opening moments. It’s part of what’s so, so good about the Die Hard script. In under two minutes, we learn a lot about John McClane.
The very first thing we see is something that comes up over and over again when discussing McClane’s character: he’s vulnerable. He’s afraid of flying, and it’s noticeable enough that the guy sitting next to him feels the need to reassure him, offer him advice.
There are so many other ways that McClane could have been introduced. We could have seen him in the cab ride to the airport. We could have seen him deep in conversation with the stewardess. We could have even seen him already in Los Angeles, or even alllll the way back in New York before he even began his trip. But here, we cut right to the chase, and are shown the most important things we need to know just as the main action starts.
John McClane’s vulnerability is probably the number one character trait that comes up when discussing him. But a close second is his being “a guy.” He’s a guy, he’s a dude, he’s an everyman. He’s someone you know; he’s someone like you. He’s relatable.
JEREMIAH FRIEDMANHe's not super jacked up, he seems more like an ordinary guy more or less. And he's got relatable issues. He's got a problem with his marriage, he kind of fucked up his marriage. He's got this blue collar job that seem pretty routine, he's going to be crashing on a friend's couch. He's kind of a fish out of water, which is a big part of the movie too. He doesn't feel anything like Los Angeles as Los Angeles as portrayed in the movie. He's right at the Christmas party, he's uncomfortable in the limo. Everything that gets thrown at him is outside of his comfort zone. And you are very much with him the whole movie. So you're kind of along for the ride and on his side to a certain extent.
We’ve all been there. We’ve all hated flying, we’ve all argued with our significant others, we’ve all been at parties we don’t want to be at. We’ve been John McClane. And so when John is faced with extraordinary circumstances, it leads the audience to put themselves into John’s place and wonder what they would do. According to Vulture.com, “Die Hard is rightly situated as a visceral experience because John McClane becomes such a direct surrogate for the audience; it becomes a ‘what would you do’ scenario, and an exercise in improvisation. John McClane is a street cop, flying through this thing by the seat of his pants, just like we would.”
Scott Wampler, news editor at Birth. Movies. Death., and host of the Trying Times podcast.
SCOTT WAMPLERAnd, as you already pointed out the weakness that John shows during that first movie in particular, and the fear and the indecisiveness, all of that is key to making him and every man character, but also key to making him relatable to the audience. You can absolutely imagine yourself in John McClane shoes. He definitely does some heroic shit. He does some shit that I would probably be too cowardly to do. But, also like put in that position where you're running on adrenaline, I could feasibly imagine myself doing a lot of the stuff that John McClane does. Not beating up any like six-foot-five Russians, definitely, you know, but like the other stuff. You know, he’s wiley, he thinks on his feet, he’s a smart guy. He’s clever.
REED FISHI’m Reed Fish, I’m a director and screenwriter.
I feel like John McClane, to me, was not an emotionally relatable character, but I feel like in the predicament that he was in, it was relatable to me because I felt like, Oh, you know, if push came to shove I could probably do those things too. Where in a typical Schwarzenegger movie, like in Predator or something, I don't think there was ever a moment where I was like, Oh yeah I think I could do that. So I feel like John McClane is a proxy for someone who, you're like me and you think you're witty, you think you're clever, you think you're smart. Well, I certainly I could outsmart Hans Gruber. Well except I'm bigger so I don't think I could have fit in that air shaft.
SIMONE: Well it's a lot easier to picture yourself like I can probably move a panel on an elevator shaft, but I don't think I could wrestle a helicopter out of the sky.
REED: Yeah, yeah, basically. And I remember in Commando, Schwarzenegger jumps off the airplane as it’s taking off, and jumps into a swamp. And you’re like, okay – not that you think he could do that, but you think yeah, I’m not going to do that. So I would have just been on the plane to South America.
As we mentioned previously, that relatability comes not just through John looking and acting realistically, but also because he’s not a perfect person. He’s fucked up.
SCOTT WAMPLERI think John McClane’s kind of an asshole, you know, but he’s a loveable asshole, you know? When John McClane is an asshole to people, they kinda had it coming. You know what I mean? Like particularly in the case of the terrorists, but also him giving sass to Ellis, or whatever. He's definitely more of a dick to his wife and he needs to be. But also just to speak as a devil's advocate here we don't – we could some of their backstory, but we don't know everything that happened between John and Holly up until that point. I'm sure he has his own reasons to be mad, and I'm not here to judge them. But he strikes me as a likable guy. Definitely a guy I would get a beer with. I would love to ask this guy about his history and his stories. He’s personable. He’s an asshole, but he’s personable.
REED FISHJohn McClane is kind of a dick. And I was quite struck by that, just how much of a dick he was in the setup of the movie, in terms of the relationship with his wife and his non-existent relationship with his kids. He's not someone I really wanted to succeed. I did not find him sympathetic. But, that said, once it gets going, and he's ingenious, and he's clever, and obviously Bruce Willis at that moment had quite a lot of charisma, by the end, you are pulling for him. Even though for me, it was kind of bittersweet because you're like, oh, he's such a dick.
And here’s the thing: John McClane knows he’s a dick. And he hates himself for it, and he can’t get out of his own way. As John McTiernan and Bruce Willis worked on the character, they came to the realization that at his core, John McClane is a man who does not like himself very much, but is doing the best he can in a bad situation.
SASHA PERL-RAVERIn 80s action movies, again, like Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, that self-loathing is something that propels these characters to do something beyond themselves, which is sort of interesting. Like, I am not good enough to survive, so all of these other people should survive instead of me. Because any normal rational human being would not do the stuff that John McClane does, except that he feels he is not worthy of anything else. Until he jumps off the roof and ties the fire hose around his stomach and says please don't let me die. That's the one time where you're like, Oh, he doesn't have a death-wish, he's not a complete maniac, he’s still trying to get through it. But yeah, the self-loathing is I think a great character trait.
But the key to John’s success within the plot is his flaws. The very characteristics that drive his wife, his captain, the LAPD down on the ground completely crazy are the ones that undo Hans Gruber and his plan.
Adam Sternbergh, novelist, contributing editor to New York Magazine, and pop culture journalist.
ADAM STERNBERGHIf you were to renumberate his flaws, he’s very stubborn. But then in a sense all the things that are presented as personality flaws in the beginning like his sort of pig-headedness and unwillingness to capitulate to his wife’s career decisions and things like that, they end up sort of being qualities that help him prevail because he’s just so ridiculously persistent against these terrorists.
Yep. Just being annoying is enough to start unravelling the calm, cool, collected terrorists.
So I mentioned last episode that I created a Die Hard D&D character alignment chart, because I am a huge nerd. It actually ended up being pretty helpful as I looked more into McClane’s character.
So, in case you haven’t played Dungeons and Dragons before, a character alignment chart is chart that categorizes the “ethical and moral perspectives of player characters, non-player characters, and creatures.” It helps you create a character, and gives you guidelines to how a character will behave and react to new situations. If you look at it, it’s nine squares in a three-by-three grid. Each square has a character in it along with their alignment, which is determined by where it sits on the rows and columns of the chart.
The first row is “lawful.” Using the third edition of Dungeons and Dragons rules, lawful “implies honor, trustworthiness, obedience to authority, and reliability. On the downside, lawfulness can include closed-mindedness, reactionary adherence to tradition, judgmentalness, and a lack of adaptability.”
The second row is “neutral.”
The third row is “chaotic.” This “implies freedom, adaptability, and flexibility. On the downside, chaos can include recklessness, resentment toward legitimate authority, arbitrary actions, and irresponsibility.”
Switching directions, the first column is “good.” Should be pretty self-explanatory, but, just in case, it “implies altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of sentient beings. Good characters make personal sacrifices to help others.”
The second column is “neutral.”
The third column is “evil.” This “implies harming, oppressing, and killing others. Some evil creatures simply have no compassion for others and kill without qualms if doing so is convenient or if it can be set up. Others actively pursue evil, killing for sport or out of duty to some malevolent deity or master.”
Whether or not you ever actually play D&D, I really recommend learning more about character alignments. It’s not a perfect system for creating deep, complex characters, but if you’re a writer or just a fan of storytelling, it can unlock some interesting insights.
I categorized John McClane as “chaotic good.” But Simone, you say, John McClane is a police officer! Shouldn’t he be lawful? Well, not really. He’s a police officer, yes, but we know he doesn’t always play by the rules.
[CLIP - DIE HARD - TONY AND JOHN - YOU’RE A POLICEMAN]
We know that John improvises, taking in the situation as it lies and creating ad hoc solutions just to get through, moment to moment. He doesn’t have a long-term plan other than to vaguely somehow rescue Holly and the other hostages if possible. That John is also characterized as “good” is pretty obvious. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone if he doesn’t have to, and he wants to protect his wife and other innocent people. Even if those people aren’t exactly on his side.
[CLIP - DIE HARD - JOHN TRIES TO CALL OFF THE FBI]
So how does this make John the perfect guy to defeat Hans Gruber. Well, Hans is “neutral evil.” The neutral comes from Hans having no loyalty to anyone other than himself. He’s not technically on the side of the law, but he’s also not an agent of chaos. To lend some perspective, Deputy Police Chief Dwayne T Robinson is Lawful Evil (he follows the law but in so doing fucks things up and is a total dick about it), and Karl is Chaotic Evil (he’s a wildcard, willing to disobey even Hans if it’ll get him the revenge he’s after). Hans has planned this Nakatomi takeover down to the minute. He knows everything about the building, the vault, Takagi…
[CLIP - DIE HARD - HANS FINDS TAKAGI]
… and he knows step by step what needs to be done to pull off this heist.
[CLIP - DIE HARD - HANS - I PRESENT THE FBI]
Hans has accounted for everything.
Except for one thing.
[CLIP - DIE HARD - JOHN - I WAS INVITED BY MISTAKE]
John McClane is something Hans could have never, ever predicted. I like to think that somewhere, Hans had a guest list of the entire party and had checked everyone out to some degree. But John wasn’t expected to come. Hell, even Holly wasn’t sure that John was coming – his showing up was a surprise. So the one thing that Hans couldn’t see coming, the thing that Hans doesn’t know how to predict, is the thing that completely blindsides him. John’s chaotic behavior, a liability in his marriage and everyday life, is just what’s needed to bring Hans down.
[CLIP - DIE HARD - JOHN - JUST A FLY IN THE OINTMENT]
Plus, it drives Hans – and Karl, too – completely crazy.
JEREMIAH FRIEDMANThere’s kind of the external stuff. Like at the beginning of the movie, he’s going with a very clear mission, he’s a man on a mission, he’s a guy who wants to get his wife back. And he has no interest in any of this Nakatomi terrorism crap. And then to get his wife back, he has to deal with Hans and all these people. But he also has to overcome his own thing, which is kind of part of the genius of the movie, which is what makes him such like a difficult, crappy husband is also what makes him so problematic for Hans. He’s kind of relentless, and he stubborn, and he’s belligerent and all these things that make him – you know, in that fight scene in Holly’s office in the middle of the Christmas party, and she leaves and he knocks his head on the bathroom wall, and starts ragging on himself – and he knows he’s the problem, in a sense, but he can’t help himself. And he becomes the problem for Hans in a way that we all love. And part of the fun of that movie is he’s not just killing guys, he’s getting inside, he’s pissing them off. You know there’s the moment when they send Karl and some people after him, and then Karl comes back and destroys the bar cart, and Holly’s like, “He’s still alive.” And her secretary is like, how do you know, and she’s like, “Only John can make somebody that angry.”
But okay: John’s only skill isn’t making people mad. He’s a veteran police officer, and as he demonstrates, he’s a pretty good one. We see him putting together the clues.
[CLIP - DIE HARD - JOHN - FAKE IDS AND EUROPEAN CLOTHING LABELS]
Katie Walsh, film critic for the Tribune News Service and LA Times.
KATIE WALSHAnd then you get John McClane, who’s just like – kind of just a guy. He’s a normal, everyday guy; he doesn’t have special training other than being a cop. He uses common sense and he’s not like a special forces guy he’s not a military dude. He’s just like, I’m just using my everyday knowledge of being a cop and applying that to this situation. So, in many ways he does fit the mold of this singular hero who’s resourceful and thinks on his feet and has, you know a specific set of skills, but it’s not so outside the realm of everyday possibility.
SIMONE: He doesn’t have the Liam Neeson “set of special skills.”
KATIE: No, no. You’re not like, Oh my god, this guy was in the special forces, you kind of look at him and go, you know, this guy is just a really good cop who happens to be very physically gifted and resourceful.
Something I read that I really, really loved is how even though John is armed with a machine gun (ho ho ho), he uses it as so much more. From the blog “Another Angry Woman”:
“And yet, in John’s hands, the primary function of the gun is not as a weapon. There are more instances within the film of John using the gun as some sort of tool than as something to kill or hurt people with... John is far more creative in his use of firearms. In his hands, a gun becomes a multitude of useful objects as he displays the kind of creative thinking that neurosexists like to term ‘feminine’ as opposed to the logical, analytical male approach. The gun, wielded by John, is a device for allowing escapes as a rig and a thing to get back into the building, as well as jamming a fan. It is also repeatedly used as a last-resort communication device, shooting to make noise and draw attention, shooting to direct a crowd away from explosive death.”
John McClane, even though he’s presented as a tough, macho New York City cop, actually ends up subverting macho stereotypes throughout the film. In our last episode, we talked about the hulking meat-trees that starred in other 80s action movies. John McClane is already different in that, while masculine, he’s not masculinity on steroids. In fact, it’s the macho posturing of the forces around him: the LAPD and the FBI versus the terrorists, that creates a stalemate that forces McClane to act.
JEREMIAH FRIEDMANOne of the moments I always like to think about and talk about when I'm talking about the movie, is what he jumps off the roof when the roof blows up. When he gets up there – first of all, he’s forced to jump off the roof ‘cause they're shooting at him and he's going to die. And before he does it, he's terrified and he says a prayer to God to please don't let him die.
[CLIP - DIE HARD - JOHN - ON ROOF]
And it makes him so human, and you've never really seen that and that kind of character before. He's not just doing it because he's a badass, he can do this. He’s doing it because he has to do it. And that's kind of the beauty of the movie. He keeps getting forced Into doing things he does not want to do. And he keeps trying to get out of it, in a way. But he's kind of, the movie plays with all the Western stuff, the Roy Rogers, he's the cowboy he's got to get the job done. But he's scared, and he's vulnerable, and he's angry, and he has very human reactions to the crazy things that are happening around him. So the aspirational quality I think is that you would be able to be a smart and brave and as tough eventually as McClane is. And you would die as hard as he does. I would go out in the... I wouldn't be Ellis, but I would go out pretty quickly.
John – and the movie Die Hard itself – gets compared to cowboys in Westerns a lot. As Deep Focus Review puts it, “McClane is established as a newly envisioned but classical Western hero — an Easterner ‘goin’ out West’ to tame the frontier. Gruber, McClane’s nemesis throughout the film, even points this out later by referring to McClane as a cowboy.” And John is a cowboy, in a lot of ways. An honorable sheriff type, trying to save the townspeople with nothing but his wits and his grit. According to the site Script Secrets, “He is a cowboy: an individualistic man whose character is earthy and grounded in reality.”
[CLIP - DIE HARD - HANS - GARY COOPER]
And there it is. Even while he’s a cocky, swaggering cowboy, one of the cowboys John McClane resembles most is Gary Cooper’s Will Kane in High Noon, who was already an in-genre subversion of the cowboy trope. In High Noon, Will Kane learns of a dangerous enemy coming back into town in a mere couple of hours. It’s a man who he once sent to prison, who is now free and will certainly try to seek revenge. At first, Kane attempts to flee with his wife (played by Grace Kelly), but he feels compelled to end this threat to his life, and the safety of the townspeople. So he comes back to face him… but discovers that the townsfolk won’t help him. Kane is left alone to face Frank Miller. And he’s afraid. He’s visibly desperate and afraid. But with no other choice, he shows down with Miller and his gang, and – with a little assist from his wife – he takes them all out.
McClane’s fear and vulnerability was the biggest twist in the action movie genre at the time. From Deep Focus Review again: “McClane is not an impervious robotic warrior carved from the template of the action movie gods. Embodied by Willis with pitch-perfect humanism, McClane bleeds, cries out in pain and emotional desperation, and has imperfections that become his trademark. One of the film’s most memorable characteristics is how much physical punishment McClane endures and how such wear amasses on him through the course of the film.” Or how wear doesn’t amass through the film – by the end of the movie, John’s lost his shirt alongside his shoes, and heads into his final confrontation with Hans almost stripped bare.
SASHA PERL-RAVERGirl, what isn’t broken inside of John McClane? His marriage is broken, the smoking is broken, the bare feet - the bare feet is such a great example of a character whose vulnerability you just can't avoid. He obviously has a lot of interpersonal stuff going on with his wife, with his family, with wanting to save all these people. Also with just wanting to be good at his job. But you don't like the physical embodiment of it, as you see him get more like, cut up and bloodied, as he's running through the glass to get to exit, all of that stuff is such a great way to make the character somebody who you're like, “Oh, I see that.” I wonder if the movie got made now, if they would have allowed him to get his bloodied up as he does. Because he looks messed up by the end of the film, as well he should.
JEREMIAH FRIEDMANAnd that’s part of the fun of the movie. You watch him – they really put him through the ringer. He gets the crap beaten out of him in that movie, in a way that doesn’t really happen in the sequels as much. That’s kind of fun – you feel like he’s running this gauntlet, and at the end, when he wins, he earns it. He earns the right to kill Hans and save his marriage, because he’s really been put through hell by this entire experience. And again that goes back to the making him human: he’s bleeding, and he’s tired, and he’s angry and frustrated, and he’s reacting like a heightened human being would react as opposed to just a cartoon movie hero.
The obvious physical manifestation of John’s vulnerability is his cut up feet. John was caught by surprise by the terrorist takeover, in the middle of a quiet moment when he is practically defenseless. But it’s his emotional vulnerability that makes us feel for him. And how the filmmakers show John’s emotional vulnerability is nothing short of genius.
Deep Focus Review: “Some of McClane’s best moments are by himself as he talks himself through the situation. Whereas stone-faced lone heroes had machine-gunned their way through countless bad guys in action movies before, McClane just an average cop, after all, not even a super-cop... In this unpolished treatment of McClane, and the character’s ability to make observations about his own situation, he becomes instantly ‘real’ when compared to his unstoppable counterparts.”
[CLIP - DIE HARD - JOHN - WHY DIDN’T YOU STOP THEM]
KATIE WALSHYou know, I love when he’s talking to himself when he’s alone in the building, and I think the script as kind of brilliant in the sense that he gets the radios, and so he can talk to everybody. They're all in different spots in the building, But he can talk to Al, he can talk to Hans, he can talk to all these different people. And that really keeps the story moving, and it also lets us understand him as a person and the way he presents himself. So I think that the way that they function the radios in that whole thing is so brilliant in terms of storytelling. But I also love when he’s just talking to himself, and he’s like “No, John, why didn’t you stop them, John.” And you can tell, he’s kind of got like anxiety or something, he’s, you know. Like, that's what I would say to myself if I was in that situation. “Aw, darn it, why did you do that?” So you relate to him in that way ‘cause you are getting some insight into his psyche. It’s not like you can’t understand him. You totally understand him.
One scene in particular is the perfect example of John’s physical and emotional vulnerabilities intersecting.
[CLIP - DIE HARD - JOHN AND AL - BATHROOM]
To quote Empire Magazine, “McClane has narrowly escaped a gunfight and holes up in a bathroom to remove shards of jagged glass from his shredded feet. As he does so, McClane has a heartfelt back-and-forth with Reginald VelJohnson’s Al Powell, an LA flatfoot with whom he has forged a brotherly connection over a walkie-talkie. As their dialogue exchange continues, McClane — alone, badly injured and afraid — breaks down and starts sobbing. [In] Willis, audiences were suddenly confronted with a recognisably vulnerable hero who didn’t have all the answers, who didn’t laugh — or stoically squint — in the face of danger or death. Sure, he cracked wise, but his humour felt organic, a defence mechanism to keep him sane. Here was a hero who made Arnie and his muscle-bound ilk seem antiquated.”
John’s relationships with other people are what keeps him going. His trying to ensure Holly’s safety is his sole motive throughout the movie. The thought of her helps him to push through his fear and pain. But it’s also his walkie-talkie relationship with fellow cop Al Powell that gives him the extra, in-the-moment support to stave off despair.
SASHA PERL-RAVERWhat is the most important vulnerabilities that he has, is his yearning to be back with his wife. The relationship he has with Bonnie Bedelia, wanting to keep her safe, wanting to make sure that the mother of his child is okay, that’s huge. But also I love the relationship he has with Al, I think that's really, really special, and the way that he's able to latch on to this voice through the radio and they have such a strong bond and connection, is really beautiful. It’s bromance the way we wanna see it. Dudes supporting other dudes in this great way.
From his feet to his emotions, from his relationship with his wife to his battle with the terrorists, John McClane’s story is a perfect example of external and internal conflict aligning. As Script Secrets puts it, “But what makes Die Hard into a superior script is the nexus between the Villain's Plan and the Protagonist's character arc... What makes John McClane the perfect protagonist for Die Hard is that the external conflict forces him to confront and solve an internal conflict, leading to a single solution which solves both problems and brings peace to the protagonist. It is only after he faces and conquers this internal conflict that he becomes strong enough to take on Hans (his external conflict) and rescue Holly and the other hostages. Without the external conflict from Hans' Plan, McClane would not have been forced to resolve this problem, and their marriage would have ended. The resolution for the external conflict and internal conflict intersect, creating a strong, organic plot.”
Shannon Hubbell, editor-in-chief of LewtonBus.net.
SHANNON HUBBELLAnd also, beyond the fact that he just happens to be there in the building, and he wants to get the bad guys and he wants to save all the hostages, he's there for an emotional reason. He shows up having screwed up his relationship with his wife. And he wants to save her. He has an emotional connection to what he's trying to do. Going back to Under Siege, Segal's character in that is just a cook who used to be a Navy Seal. And he just happens to be in the ship, and there's no real motivation for him being a total action movie bad ass other than him just naturally being an action movie bad ass. So yeah, McClane is extremely relatable. He wants to save his wife, he wants to preserve the relationship with his wife. And also by extension his kids and whatnot. He's a person who happens to be pretty damn good at killing people.
SIMONE: Well you know the best arcs are the ones that we are on the outside what's happening on the inside. So he's literally fighting to save his wife.
SHANNON: Yeah, absolutely.
JEREMIAH FRIEDMANAnd I would say the closest he comes to really arcing is the bathroom scene, when he’s pulling the glass out of his feet, and he’s on the radio with Karl – er, Al, not Carl Winslow… He’s on the radio with Al, and he kind of gives up and starts thinking that he’s not going to make it out. And he takes responsibility for the failure of his marriage. I think that’s pretty much an arc. I mean, he’s able to get someplace emotionally he wasn’t able to get earlier in the movie and from that, he kind of earns the epiphany of “what was Hans doing on the roof?” And then he goes up to the roof and there’s the C4 and all that stuff.
But even with the impeccably plotted script and carefully built character of John McClane, the role could have easily fallen flat without that third element: the actor. (Or Fifth Element, heyo.)
Remember, they wanted to cast pretty much anyone BUT Bruce Willis as the lead for this movie. They looked at everyone from Schwarzennegger and Stallone to Don Johnson and Richard Gere to Burt Reynolds and Robert De Niro. In the end, they took a huge, five million dollar gamble on Bruce Willis. But it worked.
ADAM STERNBERGHBut I think if you were to watch Die Hard and Raiders of the Lost Ark side by side, there’s something about the Indiana Jones character that seems a little bit more well-rounded than the John McClane character. But at the same time, you know, you might even say that about watching Casablanca or something like that. I mean, there’s many actors and many great characters in Hollywood history where the lead performance is essentially the actor’s extraordinary charisma carrying it, and it’s not something that any other actor could have brought to the role. And so sometimes I think you know, lightning just strikes and you end up with the right person in the right role and so in many ways I just feel like John McClane was, like, Bruce Willis; he was the embodiment of whatever it was that people loved about Bruce Willis, this kind of irascible, indefatigable charm that he had.
SASHA PERL-RAVERI think that Bruce Willis certainly is a better actor. And is therefore better able to get the pathos across, and able to really deliver the lines without feeling like you learned them phonetically. Which is something you get a lot of in Schwarzenegger's early performances and even later performances.
SCOTT WAMPLERWell I also think Bruce Willis is an asshole but not a lovable one. I think the Bruce Willis at that point in his career, though, is not the Bruce Willis that we know today. You know, he was still humble, he started out as a bartender. I think Bruce Willis, when he made Die Hard, even though he had been on Moonlighting and was still kind of hot shit at that time, was – he hadn’t developed the full Bruce Willis ego that has sort of come to define him in his later years. People knew who he was because of Moonlighting, and a series of very entertaining Bartles & Jaymes commercials that I would encourage all of your listeners to go find on YouTube. That will make your fucking skin crawl with embarrassment.
[CLIP - BRUCE WILLIS SEAGRAM'S COMMERCIAL]
But, you know, he was not a Stallone or a Schwarzenegger. He wasn’t even a Van Damme. He was a guy. He was just a dude. And still doing Bogart a little bit. He’s still got that earthiness to him.
SHANNON HUBBELLBut also before die-hard established him as an action hero, much like Kurt Russell in Escape From New York, That was the first action role for Kurt Russell. He was in Disney movies before that. He was in The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes. And then John Carpenter put an eye patch on him and some tattoos and told him to growl. And now he's an action star. And it was kind of the same thing with Bruce Willis. He was more of a comedic actor as I recall, before that. Again tying in with the idea of McClane being more relatable, everyman-ish action hero, having someone who's completely not associated with the action genre before that, really makes that character work. He's just a dude. He's just a balding dude.
KATIE WALSHBut yeah, he’s charming, he’s funny, he’s a better actor. He’s got the gift of gab. It’s a different star persona and it’s a different acting ability, completely.
John McTiernan has said something similar. “Bruce is most endearing when he’s being a smart-ass. That’s the essence of his stardom is somebody’s pointing a gun right between his eyes and he goes, ‘Oops.’ That irreverence is what we seem to love about him.” Willis even improvised the “Hi, honey” at the end of the movie.
[CLIP - DIE HARD - JOHN - HI HONEY]
As Empire Magazine put it, “It’s testament to Willis that he not only thwarts Gruber’s heist, but also Rickman’s own audacious attempt to walk away with a multi-million dollar movie. Willis’ performance in Die Hard is hungry and committed, redolent of a man visiting the Last Chance Saloon, and it worked handsomely, turning him into a bona fide megastar. What’s more, his McClane — a likeable mix of working-stiff neuroses, desperate heroics and wise guy sardonics — changed the face of action heroes forever.”
In the end, Bruce Willis’s John McClane gave us someone to root for. All of the character’s influences, from reacting to other action heroes to Gary Cooper to Bruce Willis himself, create someone who is… a human. And no matter what extraordinary things we see onscreen, telling human stories is where film is most powerful. It’s why Die Hard rises above its peers – all thanks to John McClane.
In our next episode, we’ll take a look at John’s wife Holly. Whether she goes by Gennaro or McClane, Holly’s role as a working woman, a wife, and a mother brings forward the changing role of women in 1980s film.
Thank you to our guests Jeremiah Friedman, Sasha Perl-Raver, Scott Wampler, Reed Fish, Adam Sternbergh, Katie Walsh, and Shannon Hubbell. Be sure to check the show notes on the website to learn more about them.
Thanks again for joining me, and yippee-kai-yay, motherfuckers!
Every film is both a product of its environment, and a rebellion against it. Artists (and audiences) search for something new and fresh, but cannot escape the world as it exists around them. Die Hard is no exception. While Die Hard is often marked as a turning point in American action cinema, we must first look at the state of action cinema as it existed before 1988. What does a “typical” 80s action movie look like? What artistic and societal pressures shaped that mold? And in what ways does Die Hard break it?
As we kick off this limited series, let us know what you think! Drop us a line at [email protected], or visit our site at www.diehardwithapodcast.com.
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Full Episode Transcript
Welcome to the podcast, pal.
My name is Simone Chavoor, and thank you for joining me for Die Hard With a Podcast! The show that examines the best American action movie of all time: Die Hard.
Thank you to everyone who listened to the first episode of the show! It’s been so fun to get this podcast off the ground. Everyone’s been really awesome and supportive, from the listeners to the experts I’ve been talking to for the show. Starting in this episode, we’ll hear from filmmakers, film critics, and pop culture writers to get their perspectives on Die Hard and what it means as a part of film history. I’m excited to introduce them to you later in the show.
If you want to share your thoughts on Die Hard and the things brought up on the podcast, reach out!
I’ve been trying to post lots of additional photos and facts to the social media accounts in particular. My favorite so far was a Dungeons and Dragons character alignment chart I made for Die Hard. McClane is Chaotic Good, Al Powell is Lawful Good… You’ll have to visit the pages to see the rest of who’s who on the chart.
And if you like this show, kick me a buck or two on Patreon. Patreon helps to offset the cost of doing this show, not just in pure dollars and cents, but for the sheer amount of time this podcast takes to put together. This is my first solo project, and although I have the wonderful, amazing support of my guests and fans, it still takes a lot of time researching, writing, recording, and editing.
There are some cool bonuses you can get, everything from shout outs on the show, to stickers, ornaments, and the bonus episode – which is TBD, because you get to vote on! So check that out, and pitch in if you can.
Shout out to our contributors… Rob T, Jason H, and Saint Even! I hope I’m saying that right. Anyone who’s listened to my other podcast knows that I can’t pronounce half the names I come across. It’s amazing how good you think you are at pronouncing things until you get in front of a mic... Thank you so much!
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All right. On to our main topic.
Every film is both a product of its environment, and a rebellion against it. Artists (and audiences) search for something new and fresh, but cannot escape the world as it exists around them. Die Hard is no exception. While Die Hard is often marked as a turning point in American action cinema, we must first look at the state of action cinema as it existed before 1988. What does a “typical” 80s action movie look like? What artistic and societal pressures shaped that mold? And in what ways does Die Hard break it?
But before we talk about 80s films, let’s talk about… 70s films.
70s cinema was a time when shit started to get real. After years of glossy studio pictures, filmmakers wanted to show things as they really were. And with Vietnam, Watergate, the oil crisis, rising crime in cities, and so much more, things were… fucked up. And the movies made then reflected that. They were dark, pessimistic, gritty, bleak. No happy endings to be found here. Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver are two of the most 70s-ish depressing-ass movies that I like to point out as an example of this.
[CLIP: MIDNIGHT COWBOY - I’M WALKING HERE]
With that mood in mind, let’s drill down into some specifics.
[INTERVIEW: ED GRABIANOWSKI
I’m Ed Grabianowski, and I am a longtime writer; I’ve written for sites like io9 and How Stuff Works and a whole bunch of others, and I also write horror and fantasy fiction.
If you go back to the 70s, there weren’t really movies in the 70s that were just like action movies, like that you would just define as action movies, to the extent there were later. You instead got sort of different sub-genres; you had sort of like cops and robbers movies with gunfights and car chases, and then you had like martial arts movies with lots of fist fights and sword fights.]
Within this general movement, a few particular genres stand out. There was a lot going on in 70s film as the studios’ creative control was usurped by a new wave of auteur filmmakers. Now of course, there were lots of popular genres in this moment, all important in their own ways, like science fiction, horror, spaghetti Westerns, blaxploitation films, kung-fu movies. You can see some through lines from then, to the 80s, and into Die Hard in particular.
But for our discussion today, we’re going to focus on three: disaster movies, paranoid political thrillers, and rogue cops and vigilantes.
Let’s start with disaster movies.
[INTERVIEW: ED GRABIANOWSKI
And then you had the disaster movie subgenre, which was a huge trend for a while, and that was more based on spectacle and the visuals of a disaster happening. And also interestingly tended to be more ensemble casts.]
After all, As we discussed in our first episode, Die Hard was directly inspired by one of the best-known disaster movies of the 70s: 1974’s The Towering Inferno. These movies featured people going about their business – attending a party, trying to catch a flight, taking a nice little cruise. Then BAM! A fire starts, a bomb goes off, a tsunami hits. These disasters, some natural, some natural-with-the-help-of-man’s-hubris, and some entirely man-made strike large groups of people, who we quickly learn are totally expendable. We follow these thinly written characters in multiple plot lines as they try to escape, survive, or stop whatever calamity is going on. In the process, the audience gets to experience their peril... which usually includes a bunch of explosions.
The Towering Inferno boasts an all-star cast that includes Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Faye Dunaway, and Fred Astaire. Our main characters are at a dedication ceremony for the new Glass Tower, the now-tallest building in the world. (As an aside, I work quite close to Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, which is currently the tallest building in San Francisco and the second-tallest west of the Mississippi. The fictional Glass Tower in the movie is taller than both of those by 500 feet. And every time I look at it I think about either The Towering Inferno or Nakatomi Tower, and neither of those are things you want to think about on your lunch break.)
While at the ceremony, a fire breaks out on the 81st floor, trapping the people above. A group makes it to the roof for an attempted helicopter rescue, but the copter crashes and sets the roof on fire. After many thwarted attempts to escape, Steve McQueen and Paul Newman use plastic explosives to blow up the water tanks on the top of the building, flooding the floors below and putting out the fire. [CLIP: THE TOWERING INFERNO TRAILER] It’s easy to see how novelist Roderick Thorp could see that movie, dream about it, throw in some terrorists, and come up with the seed of Die Hard.
As the Watergate scandal unfolded, the paranoid political thriller came to the fore. We’re talking Three Days of the Condor, Parallax View, and obviously All the President’s Men. These are films mostly centered on an individual uncovering a government conspiracy, and trying to either expose it or just escape with their life. But, fitting with the general mood of American cinema at the time, things usually don’t work out too well for the protagonists. Spoiler alert – in these films, usually the big bad government conspiracy gets away with it, leaving the heroes either dead or defeated. The individual, no matter what knowledge they’re armed with, is helpless against the faceless cabal that keeps the populace in line. To put it bluntly, the government is all-powerful and all-knowing, and you, the lone citizen, are fucked if you go against them.
[CLIP: ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN TRAILER ]
The final 70s genre we’re looking at as a direct influence to Die Hard is the “rogue cop” or “vigilante” movie. The protagonists in these films are also lone individuals, but of a different stripe than what we’ll see later: they’re the anti-heroes. They’re deeply messed up in some way. They’re the cop who doesn’t play by the rules, or the everyman who gets pushed too far by society and turns to violence. Death Wish, Dirty Harry, The French Connection. These movies manifest the existential dread of audiences who feared social upheaval, economic instability, and rising crime in cities. And then they offer the wish fulfillment of being able to buck the rules and do things your way – no matter what the police chief says. [CLIP: DIRTY HARRY]
As Ed pointed out earlier, the 70s didn’t have what we consider a blanket “action movie” – as you can see, the genres we just talked about had action in them, but it wasn’t the defining characteristic of the movie. If the word “action” was used to describe a movie in generic terms at all, it was usually paired with the word “adventure” to convey something more fantastic and epic. But moreover, the action in these films was, well… kind of a bummer. Violence and destruction were used to emphasize the more troubling aspects of our society. Even if these scenes were exciting, they were heavy. They were serious.
So what tipped these old genres over into a new kind of film at the start of the decade?
[INTERVIEW: ED GRABIANOWSKI
It just sort of happened. There’s – yes, people – there’s this sort of gestalt like, let’s take elements of all these things and make something that just embodies all of that. And that became the action movie.]
Audiences were transforming from Steven and Elyse Keatons into Alex P. Keatons. But in addition to a transition from Carter and the recession to Reagan and a “greed is good” economy, the film industry in particular had new pressures and opportunities that ushered in a new era of filmmaking. David Bordwell, Professor of Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, sums it up: “With the new attractiveness of the global market, the demands of home video, and increasingly sophisticated special effects, the 1980s brought the really violent action movie into its own.”
Bordwell amusingly closes his exploration of 80s action movies with one, lone sentence: “I save for last the obligatory mention of Die Hard, the Jaws of the 1980s: a perfectly engineered entertainment.” Guess that statement stands on its own...
The writer of Die Hard and Commando, Steven De Souza, expands on Bordwell’s point about the global market. He says, “I would argue that the genre of an ‘action movie’ is a completely false creature. There is no such thing as an action movie. All movies have action. ‘Action movie’ is a term that was invented in the ‘80s. I think Commando may have been the first one in 1985. They noticed for the first time that a handful of American movies were making more money overseas than in America. This had never happened before. Commando made 60% of its money overseas and 40% in the US. Action speaks louder than words. You don’t need to read the subtitles to know it was a bad idea to kidnap Arnold Schwarzenegger’s little girl. I disagree with the idea that there is such thing as an action movie, but we are stuck with that term now.”
Well, if we’re stuck with that term, let’s go with it. So: what makes an action movie?
In the 80s, “physical action and violence [became] the organizing principle, from the plot, to the dialogue, to the casting.” That’s according to academic reference site Oxford Bibliographies.
Picture your typical action movie poster. There’s probably some kind of aircraft or ship or ground vehicle, maybe a hot lady kinda small and in the corner there… there’s definitely a bunch of fire… And standing tall in the middle, our hero. And he’s probably holding a gun.
The lone hero is one of the defining characteristics of what we think of the stereotypical action movie. But he – and it’s almost always a “he” – is different than our “rogue cop” of the 1970s. The 80s action star was a one-man army, alone more powerful than the hordes of henchman thrown up against him. Our hero might have a sidekick or lead a small team, but in the end they’re either ineffectual and/or expendable – by the end of the film, it’s our protagonist who takes down the bad guy by himself.
The action hero inhabits his body, not his mind. His powers come from physical strength (and firepower) instead of cleverness. I mean, when we meet Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando, we see multiple shots of his biceps before we even see his face. As IndieWire put it, the heroes are “obscenely pumped-up one-man fighting machine[s]... outrageously entertaining comic-book depictions of outsized masculinity.”
[INTERVIEW: ADAM STERNBERGH
My name is Adam Sternbergh. I’m a novelist and a contributing editor to New York Magazine and a pop culture journalist.
80s action films, as we think of them now, they’re very excessive, they’re all about a sort of oversized machismo and enormous guns and enormous muscles and enormous explosions. Which was very exhilarating, but I think even by the time Die Hard came out, was starting to feel a little bit tired, and there was a hunger for action film fans – certainly myself, I would have been about seventeen or eighteen, for something a little bit different.]
[INTERVIEW: SCOTT WAMPLER
My name is Scott Wampler, I’m the news editor at Birth. Movies. Death. I’m also the host of the Trying Times podcast.
The first word that’s coming to mind is “sweaty.” When I think of action movies in the 80s I think of, you know, dudes that are super cut up, they look like condoms filled with walnuts, and they’re always glistening with sweat. And usually there’s a dirty tank top involved, or maybe some camo pants.]
[INTERVIEW: SHANNON HUBBELL
My name is Shannon Hubbell, I’m editor-in-chief of LewtonBus.net.
I’d say action films of the 80s – I mean, it’s obviously dominated by Schwarzenegger and Stallone, and so a lot of the larger action films are centered around big, burly, unstoppable killing machines. Just barely human. Other than Terminator, that kinda thing doesn’t yank my chain. But also, you have things like, say, Escape from New York – smaller fare, different types of heroes, anti-heroes, instead of just hulking, machine-gun-spraying douchebags.]
Matrix and Dutch, Rambo and Cobra – these guys were far from helpless. Once pulled into a conflict by circumstance, our hero is unstoppable. It’s a reclaiming of agency that had been taken away by faceless forces in the 70s.
Our heroes’ incredible power is just that: incredible. I know this might be shocking news to you, but a lot of these 80s action movies are… unrealistic. After all, in Predator, Arnold escapes a thermo-nuclear explosion by just… running away. These guys are superheroes pretending to be regular dudes. Comic book movies weren’t so much a thing yet, although we did have that platonic ideal of a superhero – Superman – appear onscreen in ‘78, ‘81, ‘83, and ‘87.
But invulnerability is okay. That’s part of the appeal. We want the heroes that fight for truth, justice, and the American way to be assured of victory. This leads into another characteristic of 80s action: patriotism.
Now, of course, not all of our protagonists are American. Arnold definitely does not – er… can not – try to pass for an American, and neither can Jean Claude Van Damme. But most of our protagonists are not only American, but working-class, everymen Americans who are just trying to get by with an honest day’s work. Sometimes that honest day’s work involves special forces missions, but you know what I mean.
Adam Sternbergh explains.
[INTERVIEW: ADAM STERNBERGH
There was a sort of parallel ascent of the John Rambo paradigm, and Ronald Reagan. And Reagan was quite open about making references to Rambo, and I think Reagan at one point quoted the Dirty Harry line, “Make my day.” And there was a real sense in American culture that post the 1970s, post Jimmy Carter, post this national ennui or whatever people decided had overtaken the country, that America was being proud of being America again, and part of that was watching movies in which American POWs blow entire countries. And in fact the third Rambo movie is just sort of a ridiculous patriotism porn where he goes to Afghanistan and essentially single-handedly defeats the Russian Army in Afghanistan. That kind of action movie, I think if you look at it in a historical, sociological context, it made perfect sense for the national mood.] [CLIP: REAGAN AND RAMBO]
In other words, if America was in fact a shining city on a hill, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Carl Weathers were there to guard its walls.
Finally, the hallmark of an action movie is all the… [GUNSHOTS, EXPLOSIONS]
If you’re having a celebration of American masculinity and strength, what else are you gonna do but blow shit up? There was certainly a fetishization of weapons in the preceding decade. Robert Blake’s character Beretta shared his name with that of a gun manufacturer, and Dirty Harry gives a whole soliloquy about his .45 Magnum. But the films that followed had to be bigger. Louder. If the 70s were the decade of the handgun, the 80s were the decade of the automatic weapon. [CLIP: NOW I HAVE A MACHINE GUN, HO HO HO]
General explosions were also bigger and better, due to improved special effects technologies. The disaster movie of course had terrific destruction, but the buildings getting blown up were more obviously flimsy sets, if not just miniatures.
And to me, the differentiating factor that separates 70s action from 80s action, was that 80s violence and destruction was… celebratory. It was fun. It was generally free of consequence. Our hero can’t die, remember? And the bad guys he’s blowing away are largely faceless cartoon characters, a dime a dozen. It was perfectly okay to sit in a theater and shove popcorn in your mouth while large-scale mayhem unfolded before your eyes.
With these definitions in place, let’s go back and tick off the action movie characteristics that Die Hard shares.
Lone hero? Check. John McClane is almost totally alone, with only a walkie-talkie as a tether to the outside world. The LAPD and FBI are ostensibly on his side, but they’re certainly not working with him. John must face a whole gang of terrorists by himself to rescue his wife. We’re confident that he’ll achieve his goal, even if things look dicey sometimes.
[INTERVIEW: ADAM STERNBERGH
I mean, Die Hard was similar in the sense that it featured a sort of lone, male protagonist who’s battling against the odds, and if faced with a sort of intractable situation where he’s trying to fight his way out using his brains and brawn. An interesting parallel is the movie Commando, which came out just a couple years earlier with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he basically has 24 or 48 hours save his daughter from these evil military types. And he goes about breaking everyone’s neck and shooting a bunch of people and blowing things up, and spoiler: he saves the daughter at the end. And so in that sense, Die Hard was sort of a very familiar setup. It obviously was kind of ingenious setup because it launched its own mini-genre of movies, which was the “Die Hard in a blankity-blank movie.”]
Physical prowess? Mmm, not as much. John McClane isn’t in bad shape, not at all. He’s a cop, he can brawl. But he’s not one of those guys with “gleaming sweat [and] bulging muscles that couldn’t possibly exist without chemical enhancement... A bodybuilder’s fever dream, the sort of thing he might imagine after doing a mountain of blow and watching nothing but early MTV for 48 hours,” as the AV Club puts it.
[INTERVIEW: ADAM STERNBERGH
Everything else was moving in that direction, toward more invulnerable, more muscular, more explosive. And then Die Hard came along and said, what if a real, normal guy found himself in this situation? What would he do, and how would he prevail?]
Bruce Willis’s embodiment of a wisecracking cop caught in an extraordinary situation was a key factor in John McClane’s believability.
[INTERVIEW: SHANNON HUBBELL
On paper, just like describing Die Hard to someone, you can totally imagine Schwarzenegger playing that role, or Stallone playing that role. It’s the details and execution that makes it different. You have a character who is fallible, and hurtable and emotionally vulnerable, which is not something that comes across in a paragraph synopsis of Die Hard.]
John is a pretty regular guy. He gets tired, he gets hurt. In fact, his physical vulnerability in the original Die Hard is famous. [CLIP: SHOOT THE GLASS]
[INTERVIEW: ADAM STERNBERGH
From the very beginning of the movie, when he takes his shoes off at the beginning of the movie, you know, he’s in bare feet, he’s incredibly vulnerable and there’s this real sense that he’s this regular guy, who, there’s no way he’s going to accomplish this. He doesn’t even seem to believe it at the beginning. And it makes it so much more satisfying at the end of the movie when he does; he’s bloodied and he’s broken and his feet are bleeding. And that was just so different from that kind of Rambo, Schwarzenegger paradigm that had been established that had been so successful.]
When you watch an action movie, you get the thrill of watching a superman executing a perfect plan. But watching a normal guy making it up as he goes along in Die Hard, you start to wonder – what would I do in this situation?
We’ll get more into McClane’s physical and emotional vulnerability in our next episode.
Patriotism? Die Hard isn’t an explicitly jingoistic film. There aren’t American flags waving as soldiers fight to defend American values. But we do have John, a white, heterosexual, working-class dude as our hero. See, not only is John representative of the American way of life, he also reflects a tension between classes within America, as well as in relationship to other world powers. Our bad guys are an International House of Terrorists, including what Ellis calls… [CLIP: ELLIS EUROTRASH]
[INTERVIEW: ADAM STERNBERGH
I think there’s definitely some quintessential American ideas of class in the movie, and it’s not a mistake that the terrorists are not just Europeans but they’re all wearing turtlenecks and sort of beautiful European clothes and then there is a whole conversation in the elevator between Hans and Mr. Takagi about their suits and their respective tailors. And John McClane’s just a guy with a singlet on, running around like Johnny Lunchbucket. And I think at that particular moment in American history, that was a very resonant idea, again because there was this sense of America’s influence in the world being undermined – in particular by Japan, but just in general. American industry and this sort of notion of the blue-collar American economy was faltering in coming out of the 1970s. There was a sense that that was changing. So McClane is interesting, and I wonder if you made Die Hard now, if he would still be a New York cop, or if they would try to make him even more of a kind of heartland hero.]
It’s also worth noting the presence of another foreign “threat” in Die Hard. The Nakatomi Corporation represents a very real American fear in the 80s that the Japanese wouldn’t so much invade as they would conduct a hostile takeover.
Richard Brody of The New Yorker explains: “There’s another ethnic anxiety that the movie represents—the film is centered on the Nakatomi Corporation, headed by a Japanese-American man named Joseph Takagi, which is an emblem of the then widely stoked fear that Japanese high-tech businesses were threatening to dominate the American economy.”
At the time, the Japanese economy was booming thanks to post-World War II reconstruction and a strong manufacturing industry. Japanese corporations began buying American companies, starting with car factories, steel works, and media companies – industries that are held as quintessentially American. [CLIP: TAKAGI TAPE DECKS]
[INTERVIEW: ADAM STERNBERGH
It also has interesting strains of things that were happening in politics at the time, you know, the whole idea of a Japanese corporation that’s come to America and is a powerful corporation, and then the American inevitably has to save them. There’s a little mini-genre of 80s-era films that were sort of about America’s anxiety about Japan’s rising influence in the world. So I think a little bit of that is in Die Hard. You know, this sort of twist of having the terrorists be political terrorists who just turn out to be greedy robbers, was a little bit of a wink at the notion that all the other movies were about politics.]
As Adam points out, American fear of this so-called threat can be seen in more than just Die Hard. 1986’s Gung Ho is specifically about a Japanese company buying Michael Keaton’s character’s auto plant. The Back to the Future series (which kicked off in 1985) also has a few telling moments. [CLIP: BACK TO THE FUTURE ALL THE BEST STUFF IS MADE IN JAPAN] [CLIP: BACK TO THE FUTURE II McFLY’S BOSS]
In Die Hard, Nakatomi is positioned as not just another Japanese mega-corporation with more money than they know what to do with, but it’s also the company that is threatening to take Holly away from John.
Okay, onto our last action movie qualifier: [CLIP: GUNSHOTS, EXPLOSIONS]
Welp, I think it’s pretty safe to say that Die Hard has big explosions and over-the-top stunts. Lots of ‘em – and really good ones, too. They’re well choreographed and a pleasure to watch.
Plus, they keep their own sense of fun. Having your hero dispatch a bad guy and follow it with a quippy remark is a classic action movie cliche. [CLIP: FEET SMALLER THAN MY SISTER] But the difference is that Bruce Willis has the comedy acting chops to actually pull it off. Look, Arnold’s great at a lot of things, but line delivery ain’t one of ‘em. [CLIP: LET OFF SOME STEAM]
In the end, Die Hard is very much in the mold of traditional 80s action movies – and where it breaks that mold, is where it improves upon it. Hollywood’s been trying to recapture that magic ever since.
[INTERVIEW: SCOTT WAMPLER
I would say that it probably broke a general mold that had a hold on Hollywood for at least a decade. Outside of the work of say, Stallone, Schwarzenegger, who – you know, Schwarzenegger did a lot of sci-fi stuff, and Stallone – Stallone’s always been pretty ‘oo-rah American.’ But I think Hollywood as a whole, it definitely reformed the template, you know? There were shock waves coming off of Die Hard for at least a decade. You can still feel them.]
[INTERVIEW: ADAM STERNBERGH
I remember sitting in the theater and watching the movie and just being completely blown away by how great it was and how fresh it felt. That is really the thing I wonder if people watching it now can appreciate, is just how it felt like this gust of fresh air, given all the films that had come before. And those action films again, they were all tightly packed in in just like six or seven years in the 80s. It was a very sort of young genre itself. But this kinda came in and it was just a complete reinvention of what an action film could be, and John McClane was a completely different kind of hero, and it was so exhilarating.]
The elevated craft of Die Hard, from the airtight script to McTiernan’s direction to De Bont’s cinematography, to the performances of Willis and Rickman, took what could have been an unremarkable summer flick and turned it into a classic.
[INTERVIEW: KATIE WALSH
My name’s Katie Walsh. I am a film critic for the Tribune News Service and LA Times.
You know, you see enough bad action movies, and then you watch Die Hard, and you’re like, “This is so impeccably made.” The cinematography is gorgeous, there’s these amazing camera movements, and the lighting and all of the stuff that’s going on is just so perfect. And then you’re like, “Okay, this is a perfect movie.” I think cinephiles now are saying John McTiernan’s an amazing director, Jan De Bont is an amazing cinematographer, the craft that goes into this movie is impeccable, and it’s a very well-made movie; I think people are recognizing that.]
In our next episode, we’ll dig in to arguably the most important contributor to Die Hard’s success: the character of John McClane, and Bruce Willis’s portrayal of him. So get ready, take off your shoes, make some fists with your toes, and join us next time.
Thank you to our guests Adam Sternbergh, Scott Wampler, Shannon Hubbell, Ed Grabionowski, and Katie Walsh. Be sure to check the show notes on the website to learn more about them.
Thanks again for joining me, and yippee-kai-yay, motherfuckers!
There's no better place to start than at the beginning – so, for the first episode of Die Hard With a Podcast, we're taking a look at the making of Die Hard. For a film with so many incredible stunts and huge explosions, it's hard to believe it's based on a book – or is technically a sequel to a 1960s Frank Sinatra flick. On this show, we go from acquiring the rights to the story, crewing up the film, writing the script, casting its stars, and rolling at the Fox Plaza building in Los Angeles. Learn why Die Hard was fully expected to flop, why Bruce Willis's salary was so controversial, and how exactly they pulled off Hans's fall from the 30th floor.
As we kick off this limited series, let us know what you think! Drop us a line at [email protected], or visit our site at www.diehardwithapodcast.com.
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Full Episode Transcript
Welcome to the podcast, pal.
My name is Simone Chavoor, and thank you for joining me for Die Hard. With. A! Podcast! The show that examines the best American action movie of all time: Die Hard.
This is the first episode of this new podcast! It’s been a kind of crazy labor of love, putting the show together. Over a year ago, I started a podcast called Black Mass Appeal with the help of some of my friends. That show is about, shall we say... alternative religions... and it’s been a ton of fun to put together and I’ve learned so much doing it.
But now, I’m starting on a new project about something else I love.
I can’t recall exactly when I became a die hard Die Hard fan. I think my story is probably pretty typical; falling in love with the movie as I watched it at home on VHS, or badly censored on TV. I do remember that when I moved to Los Angeles in 2006 to take an internship on the Fox lot, I never got over my excitement at driving past the Fox Plaza building – Nakatomi Tower – every day. I got a gray sweatshirt and a red Sharpie to make my own “Now I have a machine gun, ho ho ho” costume for my Christmas party. I attended the Alamo Drafthouse’s “Nakatomi ‘88”-themed screening in San Francisco. And yes, I became one of those annoying drunks who’d go on at length about why Die Hard is a Christmas movie after a couple of cocktails.
After yet another friend asked me for quick notes on whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie in order to settle an office debate, I sat down with a (couple) glass(es) of whiskey, rewatched the movie, and hammered out a four-page, fully-cited essay on the matter. (Which you can read on the website.) Yes, this is how I spend my Friday nights.
But the fact that I did that made something abundantly clear: I love Die Hard. I have a lot to say about it. And I want to share it.
So here we are! This podcast is going to have nine episodes that each explore different aspects of the movie. We’ll look at action movies of the 80s, we’ll look at our heroes and villains, how women and minorities are portrayed, and why Die Hard is so popular again. There’ll also be a BONUS episode… You can find out more about that in just a minute.
So, before we dive in, a little housekeeping. Die Hard With a Podcast will release every other Thursday, wrapping up right before Christmas. If you want to get in touch...
Finally, if you like this show, kick me a buck or two on Patreon. Patreon helps to offset the cost of doing this show, so unless you have a vault with $640 million in bearer bonds you can open up for me, pledge a little bit on Patreon.
There are some cool bonuses you can get, like stickers, ornaments, and the bonus episode – and you can even help decide what you want the bonus episode to be on! So check that out, and pitch in if you can. And if you can’t – the best thing you can do is just listen and tell your friends. Leave a review on iTunes – that helps put this show in front of more people, so everyone can get in on the Die Hard love.
All right, on with the show.
For our first episode, I thought what better place to begin than where Die Hard began? So: this is the story of how Die Hard got made.
The novel Die Hard doesn’t seem like one of those movies that started out as a book – there’s a lot of explosions in the movie and all – but it did. In fact, it started out as a sequel, to both a book and another movie.
In 1966, writer Roderick Thorp wrote a novel called The Detective. It was an adult take on the cop genre, with the main character, private investigator Joe Leland, taking on a gritty case of supposed suicide that leads him to uncover murder and corruption.
The novel was turned into a movie of the same name in 1968 by 20th Century Fox. The film starred Frank Sinatra as Joe, and the film did decent box office while Sinatra’s performance was well reviewed.
Over a decade later, in 1979, Thorp wrote a sequel to The Detective with the express intention of turning it into another movie for Sinatra. The book was called Nothing Lasts Forever (which sounds more like a James Bond movie if you ask me). In it, now-retired Joe Leland goes to visit his daughter – not his wife! – at her high-rise office in Los Angeles at Christmas. While he’s there, terrorists take over and… a lot of the rest is the same is the movie. Kinda. We’ll get into that on another episode. Anyway, it’s kind of like how author Michael Crichton wrote The Lost World expressly to be made into a sequel to the movie Jurassic Park, or Thomas Harris wrote Hannibal to be a made into a sequel for the Silence of the Lambs. (You’ll come to find out that Silence of the Lambs is another favorite movie of mine…)
Buying the rights According to Thorp, future Die Hard associate producer Lloyd Levin showed the book Nothing Lasts Forever to future producer Lawrence Gordon. Gordon took one look at the cover, with a burning skyscraper and circling helicopter, and said, “I don’t need ro read it. Buy it.” So, 20th Century Fox bought the movie rights to this novel, too.
Now, Die Hard was actually produced by Silver Pictures, the production company founded by mega-producer Joel Silver in 1985. 20th Century Fox ended up being more of the distributor. (At some point in the early 80s, before Silver Pictures picked it up, the rights to Nothing Lasts Forever were actually owned by Clint Eastwood, who had intended on starring in the movie himself.)
Joel Silver was just coming off of a hot streak of iconic 80s action movies like Commando, Lethal Weapon, Predator, and Action Jackson, and he was able to pull from the talent behind those movies to put Die Hard into production.
The crew Silver offered the gig to the director of 1987’s Predator, John McTiernan. Back in 1985, McTiernan had turned down directing Commando, and he almost turned down Die Hard, too. In fact, he tried a couple of times to turn it down. McTiernan said the material was just too dark and cynical for him. (And if you’ve read Nothing Lasts Forever, you’ll totally get it. That shit is bleak.) Eventually, he came around because he came up with a plot change that would “lighten things up.” “The original screenplay was a grim terrorist movie,” he said. “On my second week working on it, I said, 'Guys, there's no part of terrorism that's fun. Robbers are fun bad guys. Let's make this a date movie.’ And they had the courage to do it.”
So instead of terrorists, McTiernan’s bad guys would be pulling off a heist. “I liked the idea of imagining what would happen when one of those Baader-Meinhof types got tired of fighting his and others’ political battles and decided to show them what a criminal is,” he said.
McTiernan also changed things up with inspiration from an unlikely source: Shakespeare. The original story took place over the course of three days, which was way too long. Now, borrowing from the structure of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the entirely of the plot would transpire over a single night.
To hammer out the story, writers Jeb Stuart and Steven de Souza were hired. Jeb Stuart wrote the original script, and Steven de Souza was responsible for a lot of the on-the-fly revisions that would take place during shooting.
Die Hard was Jeb Stuart’s first film credit if you can believe it, and after Die Hard he later went on to write Another 48 Hours, Fire Down Below, and the really really amazing The Fugitive. De Souza had previously written 48 Hours, Commando, and The Running Man, and he would go on to write Die Hard 2, Hudson Hawk, Ricochet, Beverly Hills Cop III, Street Fighter, and Judge Dredd. Basically, these are the guys to go to for action thrillers.
The cast But who to go to to be the star of this action flick?
Contractually, because Die Hard is technically a sequel to The Detective, the role had to be offered back to Frank Sinatra… who was 73 years old at the time. Fortunately, Sinatra decided he was “too old and too rich” to be running around making movies anymore.
By not going with an older gentleman as the lead, the filmmakers were now free to explore new options for the lead role. Jeb Stuart describes how he discovered the core of the film:
"I had no idea how to make this into a movie," he said. After getting into an argument with his wife, Stuart said he got into his car and took off. "It's in the days before cell phones and literally the minute I got on the highway, I knew I was wrong and knew I had to apologize," he said. He wasn't paying attention to the road and ran into a refrigerator box. "I went through it at 65 miles per hour and, fortunately, it was empty," he explained. "I pulled over to the side of the road, my heart was pounding and I thought, 'I know what this movie is about!' It's not about a 65-year-old man... It's about a 30-year-old man, who should have said he's sorry to his wife and then bad shit happens." He went home and wrote 30 pages of the script that very night. Hopefully he apologized to his wife first.
When it came to casting the role of the now-renamed John McClane, the filmmakers seemed to try every male movie star in town. The part was offered to…
Sly Stallone, Don Johnson, Harrison Ford, Richard Gere, Clint Eastwood (as already mentioned), Burt Reynolds, Robert De Niro, Charles Bronson, Nick Nolte, Mel Gibson, James Caan, Paul Newman, and Richard Dean Anderson (yes, MacGyver!).
These actors ran the gamut from musclebound he-men to more sophisticated sorts. “When I first started working on it, they were talking about Richard Gere,” said John McTiernan. “The part was very buttoned down. He’s wearing a sport jacket, and he’s very suave and sophisticated and all that stuff. It was a sort of Ian Fleming hero, the gentleman man of action.”
But what all those actors had in common was they all turned the role down.
Going to Bruce Willis was seen as a desperate move in the film industry. After all, he was a *sniff* television actor, not a movie star. Willis was currently on the show Moonlighting, which was a comedy-drama about two private detectives. He had been in two movies by then as well, Blind Date and Sunset, but neither had been hits.
Still, Willis was a charismatic, charming actor. Demographic data from CinemaScore, an entertainment polling and research company, said that Willis was popular with audiences. And once again, producer Lawrence Gordon stepped in to take decisive action. Bruce Willis tells it himself:
“I know that Larry Gordon was instrumental in me getting the job. What’s that expression? Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan? Well, a lot of people take credit for my appearance in the first Die Hard, but Larry Gordon was really the guy. He lobbied for me. And then got them to give me an outrageous sum of money for acting in the film.”
It really was an outrageous sum of money. Willis was paid $5 million – more than almost any other leading man at the time. (Dustin Hoffman got $5.5 million for Tootsie, and Stallone got $12 million for Rambo III.) But multi-million dollar paychecks were usually reserved for only the biggest names in the business. Even then, the figures were only in the $2 or $3 million range. A TV actor getting this kind of payday sparked a legit panic among studios. In a New York Times article titled, “If Willis Gets $5 Million, How Much for Redford?,” writer Aljean Harmetz calls it “equivalent to an earthquake. The map of movie-star salaries must now be redrawn.”
In response, Leonard Goldberg, president and chief operating officer of 20th Century Fox got a little testy. He told the New York Times for that article, ''Die Hard hinges on the lead. We had a very exciting script and a team of producers who delivered Predator and Commando. We reached out for Bruce Willis because we thought we had the potential of a major film which is a star vehicle.''
But even after all of that, the reason Willis could even take the role came down to his Moonlighting co-star, Cybill Shepherd. Shepherd announced that she was pregnant – and because the pregnancy couldn’t be written into the show, Moonlighting producer Glenn Caron put the show on hiatus and gave everyone 11 weeks off.
At last, Die Hard had its star. Casting the villain to McClane’s hero was less fraught, but still a bit of a gamble. The role was originally offered to Sam Neill, but he turned it down. Then, in the spring of 1987, casting director Jackie Burch saw Alan Rickman playing the dastardly Valmont in the Broadway production of Dangerous Liaisons – a role which earned him a Tony Award nomination.
Rickman was known for theater, but, at the age of 41, had never done a movie. When he was offered the role of Hans Gruber, his instinct was to turn it down. He didn’t want to be a terrorist in an action movie.
Rickman said (no, I’m not even going to attempt doing Rickman’s voice here): "I didn’t know anything about L.A. I didn’t know anything about the film business… I’d never made a film before, but I was extremely cheap. I read [the script], and I said, 'What the hell is this? I’m not doing an action movie.' Agents and people said: ‘Alan, you don’t understand, this doesn’t happen. You’ve only been in L.A. two days, and you’ve been asked to do this film.'"
Of course, in the end, Rickman accepted the role.
Rounding out the cast were Bonnie Bedelia as John’s wife Holly, Reginald VelJohnson as Sergeant Al Powell, Paul Gleason as Deputy Police Chief Dwayne Robinson, William Atherton as reporter Richard Thornberg, James Shigeta as Joseph Takagi, De’voreaux White as limo driver Argyle, and a whole mess of big tall dudes as Hans’s gang of robbers.
While Hans is supposed to be German, Alan Rickman is British, and his right hand man Karl, played by Alexander Gudunov, is Russian. The rest of the crew was portrayed as more… vaguely international. That’s because there were chosen more for their intimidating look and height – 9 of the 12 were over 6 feet tall. And they certainly didn’t speak German – most of what they said in “German” was pretty much gibberish.
As a final bit of casting trivia, there are three Playboy Playmates in Die Hard. Kym Malin (May 1982) is the woman discovered having sex in the office when the terrorists arrive. Terri Lynn Doss (July 1988) is the woman who hugs someone at the airport. And Pamela Stein's November 1987 actual centerfold is the one on the wall of the under-construction building hallway.
The set Speaking of the under-construction building hallway – we have to talk about the set.
Now, back in 1975, Roderick Thorp saw the movie The Towering Inferno, and dreamed about a man running through a skyscraper chased by men with guns. It’s what led to the high-rise setting of Nothing Lasts Forever, and eventually Die Hard. If you’ll remember, the cover of the book, with the building on fire, was what convinced Lawrence Gordon to buy the rights, after all.
Call it coincidence or good luck or a sign of things to come. But 20th Century Fox was just wrapping up construction on their new office building, a brown steel-and-glass building at 2121 Avenue of the Stars in Century City, which would be named Fox Plaza. Or, as we know it better: Nakatomi Tower. It was production designer Jackson De Govia’s idea to use the building as Die Hard’s location.
Getting to use the building required extensive negotiations with Fox. They had to agree to no daytime filming, and no explosions (whoops). According to McTiernan, "We had to periodically run downstairs and apologize to the lawyer beneath us, saying 'we're about to fire machine guns; will you excuse us?'" The scene where the SWAT team’s armored vehicle knocks over a stair railing in the front of the building caused months of negotiations alone. But in the end, Die Hard got its location, and Fox not only got to showcase its shiny new headquarters – in fact, a lot of early promotional material featured only the building, and not Bruce Willis – but they charged themselves rent for the building’s use. That’s actually pretty common in the film industry. The bookkeeping in the movie business is… interesting.
The interior of the building was still incomplete, so any shots you see of under-construction offices were actually shot in the unfinished parts of the building. Other sets were constructed at Stage 15 in the regular studio lot. Using the half-finished areas allowed McTiernan and cinematographer Jan De Bont to place fluorescent lights in the ground and have half-finished structures in the foreground. The maze-like feeling of the offices and hallways was deliberate.
Jackson De Govia said, “When I first read the script, I saw a jungle maze. It reminded me of the book High Rise by J.G. Ballard, in which a modern building becomes a tribal battleground. I wanted to make a building where that kind of action could take place. When the building is a jungle, people revert to utter realism, which is savagery… There are entire sequences where McClane moves through the building not touching the floor, like a predator in a jungle.” Although you might think so with a quote like that, De Govia didn’t work on Predator with McTiernan. De Govia had previously worked on a variety of movies, including Red Dawn, so he did have some experience with everyday folks fighting terrorists…
De Govia did carry a visual element from McTiernan’s Predator to Die Hard, though: both Schwarzenegger and Willis crawl through waterfalls during the action. You see, the lobby of the Nakatomi Corporation’s office is a dead-on copy of the famous Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house Fallingwater, complete with stone walls and, uh, falling water. De Govia was inspired by Japanese corporations buying up American institutions – something that was freaking out Americans in the late 80s. He created a backstory where Nakatomi bought the actual house and had it reassembled in their lobby on the 30th floor of the building, waterfall and all.
Directing style Now, putting McClane under waterfalls, into ventilation ducts and elevator shafts, under tables, and swinging him from firehoses certainly play to that guerilla-jungle spirit of Die Hard’s set.
But the problem with a maze-like set is making sure the audience knows where everyone is, and where the action is taking place relative to the other players. Brad Bird, director of The Incredibles and Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, analyzed Die Hard for Rolling Stone magazine.
He said, “John McTiernan’s direction is an amazing piece of intricate craftsmanship. What a lot of filmmakers have trouble communicating is a sense of geography. For instance, one floor of a building under construction looks a lot like any other floor. But McTiernan put in little things, like a Playboy centerfold hung up by a construction worker. At first it seems like a visual joke, but it’s really there to identify that floor, so when Willis encounters it again, the audience knows exactly where he is. Many directors also shoot action very sloppily – they shoot up close and cut around a lot and put in all these big noises to distract you. But in Die Hard, you know where every character is every second of the movie. Things are going by at a fast clip, but you’re never lost.”
This kind of dynamic but geographically-clear directing was McTiernan’s signature style, already on display in his previous film, Predator, as Arnold and his crew battle a literally invisible alien in the South American jungle.
McTiernan is known for helping the audience understand the relative locations of people and things within a space by using as few cuts as possible; instead, he keeps rolling as he pans the camera from something on one side of the room to the other side of the room. For example, in Die Hard, when the building’s alarm goes off and the henchman in the lobby acknowledges it, the camera moves from the alarm on the right to the henchman on the left, without cutting – just like you’re there yourself, turning your head to see. You can tell he’s sitting just to the side of the blinking alarm. Similarly, McTiernan will rack focus from something in the foreground to something in the background, or vice versa. Again, this creates a feeling of depth within a single shot and allows the viewer to follow where things are with their own eyes. It avoids confusion, and is in a way more efficient as you allow the audience to track things themselves instead of having to explain things every time.
Connecting these shots with a moving camera also keeps things, well, moving. The camera roams around, taking in the shot in a natural way, the way your own eye would. The objects and people within the frame are arranged to guide your eye (and therefore the camera, as it mimics the movement of your eye) from one thing to the next, leading you to discover important clues to the story. McTiernan says, “The camera isn't just moving for the sake of keeping it moving. The camera is an active narrator in a thriller. The camera has to tell you how to evaluate every piece information you get and put it into context.”
McTiernan was able to achieve this kind of visual storytelling with the work of his supremely talented cinematographer, Jan De Bont. De Bont was born in the Netherlands and had quite a body of work already; McTiernan was already fascinated by what was considered “European-style” camera movement, and had particularly admired De Bont’s work with director Paul Verhoeven in The Fourth Man.
McTiernan was trained in this so-called “European style” of filmmaking, and it fits right in with what we’ve already discussed about his style. You see, not only do McTiernan (with De Bont) move the camera to naturally create a sense of geography, they also enhance emotion and tension with “unmotivated moves.” By moving the camera (tilting, panning) and zooming in on someone’s face, they heighten their expression. It’s just like when you’re in an uncomfortable or tense situation, and the first thing you do is look at everyone’s faces to understand how they’re reacting, so you can know how to react, too.
Production Die Hard’s principal photography began on November 2, 1987. The film had a surprisingly low budget of $28 million – it’d more than double that for the sequel. Once everything was in place, things had to move fast – 20th Century Fox wanted to release the film the very next year. That lead to a lot of making shit up as they went. A lot.
The script wasn’t even entirely done when they began shooting. The heart of John McClane was still a bit of a mystery. Sure, they knew Bruce Willis was not going to be playing McClane like he would have the hardened cop Joe Leland from Nothing Lasts Forever, but there was still something missing. It wasn’t until halfway through shooting that Willis and McTiernan realized that John McClane simply doesn’t like himself all that much. You know that moment where John argues with Holly in her office at the beginning of the movie, and he bangs his head on the doorframe after she walks out? That was a reshoot done way later, once they’d clued in to what makes McClane tick.
McClane’s sarcastic humor was also the result of on-the-fly rewrites. Bruce Willis said about shooting, “I remember that the script was in flux. It would change and they would rewrite scenes and we would come in and there'd be new scenes. I'll give you an example. The second biggest line in Die Hard was 'Come out to the coast, we'll get together, have a few laughs…' That line was written while I was in this mock-up of a ventilator shaft, trapped in there, I couldn't come out. In those days, a cell phone looked like a shoe box, they were enormous. And someone had to hand me a phone with Steven de Souza, the writer for the rewrites on Die Hard, and he'd tell me a line, they'd turn the camera on, we'd shoot it.”
There’s some debate about whether or not the biggest line in the movie was the result of improv or not. In a 2013 interview with Ryan Seacrest, Willis said that “Yippee-kay-yay, motherfucker” was “just a throwaway. I was just trying to crack up the crew and I never thought it was going to be allowed to stay in the film.”
Then again, writer Steven De Souza recalled the creation of that line a little differently. “Bruce and I grew up watching the same TV shows,” he said. “Roy Rogers used to say ‘Yippee ki yay, kids.’ So it had to become ‘Yippee ki yay, motherfucker’ in the movie. That line was from me. Whenever you think you’re writing a line that’s going to catch on, it never does. A lot of people, cough, Sylvester Stallone, cough, think they can invent them. The line you think is going to catch on never catches on and the audience decides what is the takeaway line.” Damn. De Souza shading both Willis and Stallone at the same time…
Aspects of Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber were yet to crystalize, too. The filmmakers wanted John and Hans to have a “mano a mano” meeting somehow, before the final showdown. When De Souza learned that Rickman could do a “good” American accent (which… No disrespect, but I think good is up for debate…), he put it together with the fact that up until this face to face meeting, John had only heard Hans, and speaking with a German accent, over the radio. So, Hans, searching for his detonators, runs into John… and pretends to be a hostage named Bill Clay who has slipped away.
To stay on this scene for just a minute longer: there’s a bit of a “controversy” where it’s not explicitly explained how John figures out that Hans is only pretending to be a hostage. How would John know not to give Hans a loaded gun? Well, in an earlier scene that was cut from the final film, everyone in Hans’s gang synchronizes their watches – and they’re all wearing the same watch – something McClane, as a cop, would have noticed as he searched the bodies of the bad guys he’d already snuffed. Steven De Souza says, “When Bruce offers the cigarette to Alan Rickman, Bruce sees the watch. You see his eyes look at the watch. That's how he knows that he is one of the terrorists.”
So supposedly this is some big plot hole caused by the cut scene. But if I can interject for just a second – and I can, it’s my podcast – I think that’s bullshit. It’s not a plot hole. We don’t need it spelled out for us how John figures out that Hans is one of the terrorists. John’s a cop, and clearly a good one – I mean, he’d survived that far into the movie, he’s gotta be pretty skilled. The audience can fill in that he caught something we didn’t. He can be smart; he can know things the audience doesn't know. He can notice the watches, or he can have a gut feeling, or he can just have the common sense to not hand a loaded gun to a perfect stranger in a really dangerous situation. Anyway.
When it comes to plot holes, there is one in Die Hard that is easy to miss, but is, in fact, logically inconsistent. Up until two weeks before the end of shooting, filmmakers still didn’t know how the gang was going to try to escape. They decided that the gang’s plan would be to drive away through the chaos of the inevitable disaster scene in an ambulance that was hidden in the back of the box truck they used to drive into the building. Not a bad plan… Except for the part where they don’t bring the ambulance with them at the start of the movie. If you look at Hans and company arriving at Nakatomi Tower in their truck, you can see the truck is way too small to contain another vehicle… and besides, it’s not there behind the men as they wait to unload. Whoops.
The stunts But then, we’re not coming to Die Hard to pick apart its continuity. We’re here for some action!
Die Hard employed 37 stuntmen, under stunt coordinator Charlie Picerni. Stunt doubles were used for many of the action scenes – this is Die Hard, not Mission: Impossible, after all. Things always have the potential to go disastrously wrong, and there were a few on-set accidents, but fortunately none were too grave. When McClane goes down the ventilation shaft, you can see him fall – and that wasn’t on purpose. The stunt man was supposed to grab the very first ledge within the shaft, but he missed – and editor Frank Urioste kept his fall in the final film, cutting back to McClane catching himself on a ledge way below the one he was supposed to grab.
One of Die Hard’s stunt performers is actually a Technical Academy Award-winner for his Decelerator System, which is a cable system that allows stunt performers to “fall” more safely from a higher height, and to be shot from any angle. Ken Bates explains his invention: “When we did Die Hard, I started using a device called a Descender, to do controlled falls. In other words, we do a controlled fall from anywhere up to 105 stories. The fall is controlled because you’re descending on a small cable. If the film is undercranked, it looks like you’re falling.” Bates clearly knew what he was doing with his Decelerator System, since he was the one who acted as Rickman’s stunt double during his fall from Nakatomi Tower. (He also doubled Bruce Willis when he leapt off the top of the building with a firehose.)
Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman did perform a couple of stunts of their own. John McTiernan recalled, “The first time we got to the point in a scene where you would insert a stuntman, I told Bruce he would only have to take it up to here, and he then could go sit down. He said, ‘No, I want to do it.’ And all of a sudden, you saw that New Jersey street kid in him come out. It’s not that he did anything dangerous, but it was a side that he had not shown us before.”
Bruce Willis explained why he was so game. “I think doing my own stunts whenever possible adds a lot to the production value of the film… John can get the camera close, because he doesn’t need to disguise the stuntman. But on a personal level, it satisfies the little boy who still lives in me who gets to shoot guns, kill the bad guys and be a hero while doing jumps and falls and swinging from ropes.”
McClane famously ran around Nakatomi Tower without shoes on, but Bruce Willis got a little more protection. He was given a pair of rubber feet to wear – they make him look a little hobbit-like, since they had to slip on over his own feet. You can see them in the scene when McClane jumps off the edge of the roof as the FBI shoots at him from the helicopter.
McTiernan and weapons specialist Michael Papac also dialed up the intensity of the stunt weapons for added realism. As in most movies, the firearms in Die Hard are real weapons that have been modified to shoot blanks. But these blanks were specially handcrafted by Pacpac. McTiernan wanted the muzzle flash to be exaggerated and the sound to be extra-loud. He got what he wanted, but not without a price. When McClane shoots a terrorist from underneath a conference table, the gun was in such close proximity to his unprotected ears that the bangs gave Willis permanent hearing loss. Willis said, “Due to an accident on the first Die Hard, I suffer two-thirds partial hearing loss in my left ear and have a tendency to say, ‘Whaaa?’”
The deafening blanks got to Rickman, too. Every time he fired his gun, Rickman would flinch. McTiernan was forced to cut away from Rickman’s reactions so his expression wouldn’t be caught on film, but you can see one of them right after Hans shoots Takagi at the beginning of the movie.
The most famous stunt in the movie is Hans Gruber’s fall from the window of Nakatomi Tower. We’ve already discussed how stuntman Ken Bates was able to pull off the actual fall, but it’s the beginning of the fall, where we see Hans’s shocked face in slow motion, that makes it so heart-stopping. That, of course, is actually Alan Rickman falling, although from not quite as high a height.
"John McTiernan had to talk Alan into doing that shot because even stuntmen will generally not fall backwards – they like to see where they're going," said visual effects supervisor Richard Edlund. For Hans’s fatal fall, Alan Rickman was to be dropped from 25 feet in the air, with a blue air bag below him and a camera above him to capture his expression. The camera was shooting at 270 frames per second to capture Hans’s plummeting face at a rate ten times slower than normal.
Rickman was understandably apprehensive about the stunt. It didn’t help that, legendarily, the crew told him they’d give him a countdown of three, two, one, go – and drop him on “Go” – and instead… they dropped him on one. Rickman wasn’t exactly happy with the crew for that surprise bit of acting motivation, but miraculously, they convinced him to do a second take. Ultimately, the crew’s prank (?) worked – the first take is the one you see in the film.
Release and reception Die Hard wrapped in March 1988, just four months before the film was set to be released. As the filmmakers got to work on post-production, the studio did not exactly demonstrate a lot of faith in the film. As mentioned earlier, the early publicity didn’t even have Bruce Willis on it; the poster featured the Fox Plaza building as the star of the show. The advertising campaign for the film was short, too – especially by today’s standards. In contrast, I think I saw the trailer for Mission Impossible: Fallout in front of every movie I saw for at least two years before it was released!
Everyone seemed worried. Test audiences rated the movie poorly, and “had no interest in seeing [Bruce Willis] dart around a skyscraper shooting terrorists.” The New York Times summer movie preview doubted Willis was “enough of a movie star to carry the film,” and Newsweek’s David Ansen was even more harsh, saying Willis was “the most unpopular actor ever to get $5 million for making a movie.” Film critic Roger Ebert gave it a mere two stars, and criticized the stupidity of the deputy police chief character, claiming that "all by himself he successfully undermines the last half of the movie."
20th Century Fox was convinced it had a flop on its hands. The movie was released on July 15th, 1988, in only 21 theaters in 20 cities, where it earned only $600,000 its first weekend.
But then… audiences liked it. They loved it. They kept coming back. In the second week, the movie expanded to 1,200 theaters across the country. After Die Hard opened wide, it started out in third place at the box office, taking in $7 million. From there, strong word of mouth took it to the top, where it lived in the top five for ten weeks. It only dropped into sixth place in October. Die Hard finished its theatrical run with $83 million domestic and another $57 million worldwide – completely making up for that $5 million paycheck Bruce Willis got. It was the seventh-highest grossing movie of 1988. It also enjoyed a long, successful run on home video – something we’ll talk about later in this series.
Not only was Die Hard a financial triumph, it received Oscar nominations for editing, visual effects, sound and sound editing. And it turned Bruce Willis into a star. The kind of star who’d later join Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone – the very action stars he essentially replaced – in opening up a chain restaurant themed on Hollywood celebrity.
And so, that’s the story of how Die Hard got made. There are certainly parts I’ve missed, or pieces of the story that have changed over time. Filmmaking stories sometimes take on the quality of oral histories, especially when the resulting film becomes a legend.
Throughout the rest of this podcast series, we’ll explore why Die Hard has become so celebrated among action movies, 80s movies, movies in general. I’m excited to invite you to the party with me. Come out to the show, we’ll get together have a few laughs…
Anyway, thank you for joining me. Happy trails, and yippee-kai-yay, motherfuckers.
The podcast currently has 6 episodes available.