John McTiernan on Die Hard: 'I didn't set out to reinvent the action movie'

"I wasn't trying to reinvent it at all," he tells RadioTimes.com. "I was just trying to make a decent movie."

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

"I did, I suppose, insist on one thing – the deal that I struck with [producer] Joel Silver when we started the movie was to set the political tone. It was the first thing we did, because he'd sent me this script about terrorism and I don't like the idea of movies about terrorism – it's something I don't want to participate in.

"So I said, 'Look, can we make these guys [the villains led by Alan Rickman's iconic Hans Gruber] robbers instead?' and he had enough courage and skill with the studio that he actually pulled it off."

But it was with its protagonist that Die Hard truly flew in the face of convention, giving us in Bruce Willis's flawed, everyman hero John McClane the first of a new breed of action hero. "The movie starts with a kid [De'voreaux White as Argyle] who's on his first day driving a limousine, and he doesn't know how to do it, and his first fare is a guy who's never ridden in a limousine before," says McTiernan. "So the two of them ride in the front seat of the limousine and that's how the movie starts.

"Everything actually follows from that, like the movie's attitude toward all the law officials – who are all jackasses – and the other heroes, like Reggie VelJohnson [playing Al Powell, a middle-aged LAPD Sergeant who becomes McClane's unlikely ally]. It was supposed to be a common man's hero story. That was intended right from the beginning."

Die Hard – which famously sees Willis's McClane stand off against Rickman's Gruber and his goons across one long night in a high-rise office building – was loosely adapted by writer Jeb Stuart from Roderick Thorp's 1979 novel Nothing Lasts Forever, but according to McTiernan, the film had "no script" when principal photography began in November 1987, with only 30 pages of finalised material.

This didn't intimidate the film's director though, who insists that despite the lack of a complete screenplay, he and the production team had a clear vision of what the final product should be. "It was nice to make a movie where there was very little script but we knew where we were going," he says. "It's terrible if you have a script but you don't really know where you're going, which is how most movies work."

This meant that many of the film's most famous lines of dialogue were, in fact, dreamed up on set. "Because we had, in effect, no script, it turned us loose to do all sorts of stuff. In the scene where Bruce is crawling through this aluminium duct, he started coming up with ideas and saying things while we were shooting, and then we'd all try to think of more, like 'Can you think of a one liner for here?' – I think Bruce came up with the line, 'Now I know what a TV dinner feels like.'

"We also had a good, fast writer in Steve de Souza – he was fantastic and could just very rapidly turn out stuff, so we all to some extent got into it. We all just thought, 'Hey, look, the worst that can happen is we won't put it in the movie.'"

McTiernan says there was no sense at the time that any particular line of dialogue would become a catchphrase or be embraced by the audience, not even McClane's now-famous 'Yippee-ki-yay'. "Oh Lord, no. No, when you're in the middle of a movie, you never really know. The best you can do is have fun while you're making it."

Though having the film fronted by an everyman hero had been decided from the off, McTiernan recalls that much of John McClane's personality was again developed as filming unfolded – most notably, his habit of using wisecracks to hide his insecurities and fears, whether arguing with his estranged wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia) or fighting for his life against seemingly impossible odds.

"Much of that came from Bruce. We made this up, but it had a lot to do with actual Bruce – the character was a man who didn't like himself and so every bit of of wise-ass-ness was actually an act of heroism against the basic depression in him. He was kicking against how much he thought he was a loser – and when the audience saw that, they saw heroism in his wise-ass-ness, and they liked him."

McTiernan singles out Dutch cinematographer Jan de Bont as another key player in shaping the look and feel of Die Hard as we know it, even if the two had the occasional creative disagreement. "I saw him do a film with Paul Verhoeven and I just loved the camera work in that, so I went and found him and convinced the studio to hire him. We actually got on great, but we both have fairly strong ideas and we're also from very similar families, pretty tough families, so we would often scrap on set.

"At first, it terrified the crew. 'They're at it again, they're at it again!' – actually, we were doing fine."

In fact, McTiernan says de Bont was something of a kindred spirit on set, particularly during trying times. "The clearest thing for both of us was... we had to shoot. We were shooting on bloody Christmas Eve in this terrible, cold, parking garage, and it was chilly as hell, it was miserable. The crew kept disappearing – they'd go off and they'd come back with coffee cups, and I knew there wasn't coffee in there, right? Even the assistant director.

"I looked around at 3:30 in the morning and I saw all these people who had just graduated into Christmas. The only people who were concentrating on getting the work right at 3:30 in the morning were me and the goddamn Dutchman. That was what we shared. We understood each other completely. So the scrapping meant nothing because we both knew that the other was serious.

"I haven't seen him in a while. I should look him up."

Though critical reactions were mixed, Die Hard proved a huge success with audiences on its release in the summer of 1988, defying early expectations to become a box office smash – by comparison, the likes of Stallone's Rambo III and Schwarzenegger's Red Heat underperformed that same year. The public was hungry for something new in action cinema and, whether by design or luck, Die Hard was it.

The film spawned four sequels, with McTiernan returning for the third film in the series, 1995's Die Hard with a Vengeance – considered by most fans to be the follow-up which came closest to matching the original. "The second one [1990's Die Hard 2, helmed by Renny Harlin] just felt like it was repeating the same thing," McTiernan says. "The third one was a buddy movie [pairing McClane with Samuel L Jackson's electrician Zeus Carver to stop a bomb plot from devastating New York City] and that changed it. It had a very different feel."

The hardest part of making the threequel was, he adds, trying to deliver a new and different story without losing the sense of claustrophobia and tension that had been of the first movie's biggest selling points. "It was sort of like, 'OK, I need to make New York City seem like you're in one building' and I was excited by the challenge of that."

The original film, though, remains the one to beat – and though McTiernan says he "finds it very difficult" to watch his own movies, he's "far enough away from Die Hard now that it isn't painful".

"For the first 15, 20 years, all I see are the mistakes. I can't look at it. But Die Hard is... it's a very ambitious movie and I like that. It has a feeling of ambition. It feels like whole bunch of bright, young, energetic people who got turned loose by the studio – a studio which didn't know exactly what it was doing and just kept paying for things and we just kept going.

"That feeling of of ambition is in it and I like that and I think that's part maybe of why other people like it. The whole idea was: can we make a movie that's better than just a simple shoot 'em up? It goes right back to Aristotle – good stories are glue for a society, and our silly little work, because we were young and wildly ambitious, aspires to that. De Souza and Silver and Bruce and de Bont and so many of us, we were all part of that healing. So that's what I think about when I watch Die Hard."

Die Hard with a Q&A from director John McTiernan takes place on Thursday, 28th July at 7:30pm at London's Royal Geographical Society, as part of The London Action Festival. Buy tickets now.

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