Die Hard

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What went wrong, what went wrong, what went wrong, what went wrong, what went wrong, what went wrong, what went wrong, what went wrong, what went wrong, what went wrong, what went wrong, what went wrong, what went wrong, what went wrong?

What went wrong?

What went wrong?

What went wrong?

What went wrong?

What went wrong?

What went wrong?

Right as a striking actors are fighting suits, so demanding budget cuts.

Someone wants an ECP in awesome.

Devil Foster's wife just found a false hoot.

Can we do this down and spillwork is crowning lynchers, compounding cobalt, a lounging baby?

It might be a psycho.

And Terence Malik is staring at a bird.

Don't know where to stop.

woman.

The ghost is killing proofresh of the omen.

We're never covering the greatest showen.

Countains are pounding yonder, month shouting tongue.

Who thought cats had an Oscar shot?

Oh, ho, ho, and happy holidays, dear listeners.

Wow.

It's that time of year, the most wonderful time of year, when we have to talk about what is a Christmas movie.

It just is.

It just is.

I'm one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here as always with Chris Winterbauer.

And Chris, what are we talking about today?

Lizzie, I'm so excited that we are discussing my favorite Christmas movie.

It is a Christmas movie.

We'll prove to you that it's a Christmas movie.

It's very clearly a Christmas movie.

And that is, of course, Die Hard.

But Lizzie, before we do that, because it is the holiday season, in the spirit of Christmas or Hanukkah or whatever you celebrate, I got you a little something.

I'm so excited.

I love presents.

I have it.

Can I open it?

You may open it.

Okay.

What it...

Wait, you got me multiple somethings.

Yeah, there's.

Is one for David?

One's for David, one's for you.

Lame.

They're both for you.

Sure, they're both for you.

Oh, it's a mug.

Okay.

It's a mug.

Oh, it's great.

That's one.

You got to open open the next one.

Okay, well, the first one is a mug of Alan Rickman from Galaxy Quest.

Dr.

Lazarus.

We'll keep it forever.

For the record, I didn't get Chris anything.

Nope.

It's just like any other Christmas.

Just kidding.

Oh,

these are great.

It is Bruce Willis and the air shaft from Die Hard.

These are amazing.

So, Lizzie, those are drawings

by this incredible artist, Brian Bazdaka.

His website is www.briandrawsmovies.com.

So, Brian actually caught our episode on Galaxy Quest.

He sent me a picture of the Alan Rickman mug, and I thought it was incredible.

And so, I asked him if he would do a die-hard mug for the release of our episode.

So, that die-hard mug is an official what went wrong tie-in, technically.

Oh my god, it's so good, right?

So, guys, go to www.briandrawsmovies.com and get your Bruce Willie in an air shaft mug, A-S-A-P, because it's awesome.

And thank you, Brian.

It's so great.

Yeah, and he has a ton of other movies, I mean, so many movies.

The Birdcage, Ghostbusters.

He just did The Fall Guy.

He's done so many movies that we've covered, so many movies we're going to cover.

There's a great big Lebowski one.

Check it out.

And it's not just mugs.

He's got all sorts of prints available as well.

So thanks to Brian for this fun collaboration.

Yes.

And that is Brian Draws Movies, and that's B-R-I-A-N, not B-R-Y-A-N.

Thank you, Brian.

All right, guys, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Lizzie, this is a podcast about how it's nearly impossible to make movies, let alone a good one.

And I think this is a very good one, and it was nearly impossible to make.

This is not just a Christmas classic, it's a what went wrong classic.

I'm really excited to talk about it.

But before we get there, I'm assuming you'd seen Die Hard before.

What were your thoughts upon First Watch and Rewatch?

I have seen Die Hard many times.

I always knew that I enjoyed it.

It's one of those movies that I feel like you mostly saw on TNT, that they would start, you know, playing it on repeat around Thanksgiving.

But watching it now in full as an adult, this is a perfect movie.

It's absolutely perfect.

It is a perfect action movie.

It's a perfect Christmas movie.

I just couldn't help thinking the whole time that like we really don't make movies like this anymore.

And I wish that we would.

I loved it.

I loved it.

I love Alan Rickman, the ultimate villain.

I love that Russian ballet dancer who somehow escapes a neck chain situation inexplicably.

And I love Bruce Willey.

All right.

Well, before we begin, guys, we need to give a huge thank you to our patrons who selected this movie in one of our polls.

Guys, if you're interested in helping decide what we cover in the future, join our Patreon.

For a dollar, you can vote on movies that we cover.

For $5, you can get an ad-free RSS feed.

And for $50, you can get a shout-out like the ones that are going to come at the end of this episode.

Of course, I also need to shout out my two favorite sources for this episode.

Die Hard, The Ultimate Visual History by James Motram and David S.

Cohen.

This is a really, really, really cool, not hokey, not kitschy book.

Includes an incredible amount of information about the behind the scenes of the film, storyboards, diagrams, photographs.

It's a really well-made, beautiful coffee table-style book, but with a ton of information.

And then, of course, The Last Action Heroes by Nick Desemlyon, tons of interviews.

There's a lot of fun stuff about this movie.

As always, Lizzie, let's talk details.

Die Hard is a 1988 action film directed by John McTiernan, written by Jeb Stewart, his debut screenwriting credit, actually,

and Stephen E.

D'Souza, based on the 1979 novel Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorpe.

The film stars Bruce Willis, or Bruce Willey, as he's colloquially known, Alan Rickman, Bonnie Bedelia, Reginald Vell Johnson, and many more.

Produced by Charles and Lawrence Gordon, Lloyd Levin, Beau Marks, and Joel Silver.

Distributed by 20th Century Fox, the IMDb log line reads, A New York City police officer tries to save his estranged wife and several others.

Like a hundred hostages.

And he does.

Taken hostage by terrorists during a Christmas party at the Nakatomi Plaza in Los Angeles.

Period.

End of story.

That's the movie.

It's perfect.

It's perfect.

Also, Christmas is in the goddamn log line.

It's a Christmas party.

There's literally, we were watching this and immediately David was like, okay, they're using jingle bells in the score from the very beginning.

Like, there's, there's no question.

Why is this even an argument?

Who started this?

The bearer bonds are like snow that come down.

Whose drunk uncle started this?

Somebody at a table just wanted to fight.

That was it.

I agree.

Die Hard, Lizzie, is, of course, so synonymous with the action genre now, as you've mentioned.

TNT repeats growing up.

It's hard to imagine that at one point, it really felt like a film no one wanted to make or see.

And yet it kind of was.

So how did a first-time screenwriter, a TV comedic actor, and his theater kid villain make arguably the most influential action film of all time.

And more importantly, Lizzie, what went wrong?

David, Q, an action stab.

All right, we got to start with the screenplay, of course.

And much like John McClain, our story features an unexpected hero, and that's Jeb Stewart.

Jeb Stewart.

It's 1980.

He's 25 years old.

He's two years out of college.

And he's working as a tennis pro in South Carolina.

Okay.

He's from Arkansas and all he wants to do is be a writer and nobody cares.

He gets rejected by every publication he sends his writing into.

Bear in mind, he doesn't want to be a screenwriter.

He just wants to be a writer.

It actually got to the point where his father, who was a minister, and his high school sweetheart, who he'd married, staged an intervention.

They said, Jeb, you're not going to be a writer.

You got to find a career path.

And it can't be teaching tennis and it can't be writing oh no the two things he loves i know so they send him to take a two-day aptitude test at a university in north carolina basically it's this phd student who's running this test that will tell you you know it's like those things our parents or maybe you took in high school that says you're going to be a carpenter because you said i like wood and that's as sophisticated as it gets so he takes the test and at the beginning of the second day the phd student comes up to him and he says amazing news it's we're only one day through, and you have tested off the charts to be, any guesses, Lizzie?

A screenwriter.

A florist.

Well, that's nice.

What a lucrative career.

I know.

So Jeb, depressed, is sitting in the waiting room, flipping through a magazine, and it's the Hollywood issue of Time magazine.

And it includes this article about a screenwriter who'd been working for 10 years and made $250,000 a year despite never getting a movie made.

Okay.

Which happens all the time, right?

You're doing rewrites for the studio, developing projects, and they just never get green lit.

So Stewart thinks, quote, wow, there is a career predicated on failure and I've got that down path.

I love Jeff Stewart.

He is great.

So he decides he's going to go to film school.

This is all happening in real time, by the way.

He's in the waiting room.

at this University of North Carolina.

And the only school that is relatively close to him that has a program that's still accepting applications, he can find is Chapel Hill, where he did his undergrad.

And the application is due the next day.

So he tells the PhD student, I can't finish this aptitude test because my wife's father is gravely ill.

And then he gets in the car, drives five hours back to South Carolina, and he tells his wife the amazing news: Honey, I've scored off the charts to be a screenwriter.

Wow.

So

he gets back in the car, drives five hours to North Carolina, cajoles some last-minute recommendations from old professors.

He gets his application in and he gets accepted to do his master's in, I believe, screenwriting or film at Chapel Hill.

Then he doubles down and he moves with his wife to California to attend Stanford's screenwriting MA program.

So he gets another master's in screenwriting at Stanford.

He wins the Nickel Fellowship in screenwriting, which was not associated with the Academy yet.

It was the year before it was associated with the Academy.

It actually started at Stanford, oddly enough.

And money is crazy tight because he has been in school for four years now.

Yeah, as a screenwriter.

I know.

And so he has $120,000 in student loan debt in the mid-1980s, which would be $300,000 now.

I bet his wife is thrilled.

She is not.

She's also pregnant with his first child.

So through this this MA program, he meets Ernie Lehman, Ernest Lehman.

He's a six-time Oscar-nominated writer.

You know his work if you don't know his name, Westside Story, The Sound of Music, Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe, North by Northwest, many more.

He tells him, I'm broke.

And Lehman says, write an action movie or a thriller.

They do well overseas because you don't need that many subtitles.

So he writes a script called Going West in America.

It's a crime thriller about an FBI agent tracking his son's kidnapper, but his son is born two months early.

Not the FBI agent, Jeb Stewart's real-life son.

And Lizzie, the hospital bills add another quarter million dollars to his debt.

No, no, no, no.

$250,000 added.

Added.

I thought it was total and my sister said, no, no, no.

Added.

So

unbeknownst to Stewart, Julian Blaustein, who is an accomplished producer, but also the head of the MA program and his advisor, he produced The Day the Earth Stood Still and a bunch of other movies.

He sends the script going west in America to Ben Benjamin, a real person, an agent at ICM International Creative Management.

Benjamin likes the script and invites Stuart down for a meeting.

He says he goes into this room and all these agents are saying, oh my God, this is the best script we've ever read.

Blah, blah, blah.

It's so amazing.

And Jeremy Zimmer walks in.

He's an agent there, and he says, I don't think we're going to sell this script.

It's got problems in the third act, and it's a little dark, but it's a great calling card and it'll get you tons of work.

So Stewart says, This is my guy because I agree with him.

The script is not perfect.

It needs work.

He's been his agent ever since.

And I like that story because I like good, good agent stories.

It reminds me of Peter Jackson's manager in Lord of the Rings.

If you guys don't remember, loyal representation.

We love it on this show.

Absolutely.

So, Lizzie, Stewart says, I need work.

Any work.

I will do anything.

So, they get Going West optioned.

He gets a little bit of money for a rewrite, but it goes into development hell.

So, Zimmer helps him get a four-picture deal with Disney.

Amazing, right?

Four-picture deal.

Yeah.

Well, it was a four-picture deal for the WGA minimum, which basically meant that Disney could milk him for four scripts at like $30 something thousand dollars per script.

And remember, he's got hospital bills and he got his wife pregnant again.

Jeb,

what are you doing?

Lizzie's face as her brain leaks out of her ear right now.

Oh, his poor wife.

I know.

So it's early 1987.

She's pregnant with their second child, and he has this window of non-exclusivity with Disney.

It's basically six weeks out of the year where he can also work on non-Disney projects.

And he says, Zimmer, for the love of God, get me something to pay the bills.

So Zimmer calls producer Lloyd Levin, who's the head of development for Larry Gordon of Lawrence Gordon Productions at Fox.

If you guys don't remember, Lawrence Gordon, huge, prolific producer, Field of Dreams, would end up doing Water World, which we did an episode on.

He says, Lloyd, I need something for my client.

And Levin says, Look, we've got this adaptation of a book called Nothing Lasts Forever that's going nowhere fast.

How quickly can your client turn around a draft?

So Zimmer calls Stuart and says, How quick can you be?

And he's like, I can be so fast, I'm starving.

He literally said, I would have taken the Dead Sea Scrolls if they offered it to me.

So, all Stewart has to do, Lizzie, is transform this awesome, dynamic book about a down-on-his-luck cop just trying to save his wife on Christmas, right?

Yeah.

Wrong, because nothing lasts forever is a dark, nihilistic, mostly interior dialogue-driven story following a 60-year-old man named Joel Leland, who's a private detective divorced as he tries to save his daughter from German terrorists, although it was still set on Christmas Eve.

But more than anything, it's a detective story, Lizzie, and it's also a sequel, technically.

So novelist Roderick Thorpe, like Jeb Stewart, was a no-name kid with dreams of being a big writer.

He'd won some awards in high school and college, but then he ended up selling cars.

He worked at a haberdashery, selling hats, founded a catering company, but most importantly, he worked at his dad's PI agency.

And so in 1966, he published The Detective,

a book about a guy named Joe Leland.

He's a World War II pilot turned detective.

And that book sold 300,000 copies and got turned into a movie in 1968.

Lizzie.

It doesn't have like Frank Sinatra in it.

Frank Sinatra.

Yes.

Plays Joe Leland.

Exactly.

The film was, you know, modestly successful.

And then in 1979, he was inspired by a dream he had after watching The Towering Inferno from 1974, which you can obviously see the influence of that movie on Die Hard.

And he publishes Nothing Lasts Forever, which is a sequel to The Detective.

And this time, Joe Leland is in his 60s, and he's working as a security consultant.

So

not a lot for Stewart to relate to, you might say.

So Stewart makes some quick changes.

Joe Leland became John McLean.

Here are some details from the book that Jeb had to rework.

Stephanie Gennaro works for Claxon Oil, not Nakatomi Corporation.

The building is still overtaken by German terrorists, but they're not thieves.

They are actually German terrorists in this instance.

And it's revealed that everybody in the company, including Leland's daughter, is corrupt.

Leland kills the terrorists one by one, right?

But you're about to say Leland kills his daughter.

Hold on.

One by one.

Many of the terrorists are young women.

And the group is led by a man named Anton Gruber.

And I think the inclusion of women in the terrorist group group is very much an allusion to like Patty Hearst, the Simonese Liberation Army, or the Weather Underground, for example, that they had female members.

In the end, much like the end of Die Hard, Gruber holds a gun to Gennaro's head, and Leland shoots him in an attempt to save his daughter, but both Gruber and Gennaro fall out of the building and die.

And then Leland finishes the job the terrorists set out to do by throwing $6 million in cash out the window, effectively disillusioned with the world, and it just ends on this really dark note.

And Fox says, Great, they bought the rights before he'd even finished the manuscript.

And this iteration of the film, obviously well before Jev Stewart was involved, actually managed to attract a very well-known actor and director.

Now, Lizzie, aging action hero, 60s, 70s, 80s, also a director, steely, steely stare.

I'm drawing a complete blank.

Clint.

Oh, duh.

Sure.

Clint Eastwood was attached, according to some sources, to direct the film, but it never came to be.

And Stewart needed to figure out a new fresh angle on the movie fast.

He was actually working on two projects during this time, another job at Paramount, and then he would go to Disney during the day.

So basically, he was writing 24 hours a day, and he just couldn't crack the script until fate intervened.

And Lizzie, I'd like to play you a clip of Jeb talking about what gave him inspiration for Die Hard.

And I was trying to really adapt the novel.

And,

you know, in my personal situation, I had a fight with my wife one night.

My office was down at Disney.

I was living in Pasadena.

And instead of apologizing, I get in the car and I take off to go back to my office.

was nearly in an accident, pull over to the side of the road, and suddenly I realized that's that's diehard.

It's not about a 65-year-old man who comes to LA and drops his daughter off the top of a building.

It's about a 30-year-old guy who has a fight with his wife and he should have said he's sorry because bad shit can happen after that.

And so for me, you know, the movie just sort of takes off from that particular part.

He buries the lead a little bit too.

I read a different interview.

I didn't have the audio for it.

A refrigerator box fell off the back of a truck and he thought there was a refrigerator in it and he couldn't break in time and he drove through it and it happened to just be cardboard.

Oh my God.

Yeah, which is terrifying.

So he really thought he was going to die.

I'm going to die.

And the last thing I said to my wife, we had a fight.

And so that night, Stewart goes home.

He writes 30 pages.

He's never written an action film before.

He wrote a thriller, but he's never written an action film before.

And by June 24th of 1987, he had a first draft.

He sends it into the studio on a Friday, goes to Carmel with his family.

He comes home on Sunday.

He's got a voicemail from Saturday.

The project was greenlit.

First draft of his first studio assignment.

Project gets green lit 24 hours later.

That's nuts.

Did they have to make this movie?

I mean, I'm sure it was good, but what, how?

Let's talk about it.

So Fox sets a budget at $28 million, which ain't nothing.

No.

With a summer 1988 release.

They just got a first draft in the summer of 1987.

What's happening?

Well, Fox had a a bit of a hole in their schedule, roughly the shape of Arnold Schwarzenegger's broad shoulders.

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So in 1985, 20th Century Fox had released Commando.

In 1986, they'd done John Cameron's Aliens.

And in 87, they again made a movie with Schwarzenegger with Predator.

But going into 1988, it seems like they didn't really have anything on the slate.

And now, the summer action blockbuster was a relatively new phenomenon, and the competition was heating up.

Warner Bros.

had Steven Seagal's masterpiece, Above the Law.

Universal had the criminally underrated Midnight Run, and TriStar looked ready to blow everybody away with the double whammy of Stallone's Rambo 3 and Schwarzenegger's Red Heat.

They had nothing.

And here comes this diehard script and they're like, it's great.

It's like a Shane Black script.

It's fun.

We can plug Stallone in and we'll, you know, mint money off of this thing.

You know, we're in the middle of Cobra and Rambo and Rambo 2 and Rambo 3 will come out in 88.

So They turned to the tag team of Lawrence Gordon and Joel Silver.

So Silver used to work for Lawrence Gordon.

Have you heard much about Joel Silver, producer?

Not a ton.

I mean, I'm familiar with the name, but.

He's like a famously extravagant, large man who's rumored to have worn his pajamas around the lot many times.

Love that.

We'll get into some of his antics on this film.

He'd gotten his start under Gordon at his company, and at this point, he's on a publicity tour in Europe for both Lethal Weapon and Predator.

which had come out in 87.

So he's on a friggin' hot streak right now.

So Gordon pulls Silver in.

They're going to produce Nothing Lasts Forever.

That's the working, you know, the title at the time because it's the book.

And Silver comes in with big ideas from the get-go.

Some of them great, some of them maybe not so great.

So first off, he comes in and he tries to fire Jeb Stewart.

So no, the guy who you green lit the movie off of based on only 30 pages.

Here, here, I actually like Silver's explanation, even if I don't agree with him.

Quote, within five minutes, Silver said, it's nothing personal, but you're going to get fired.

You are fired.

This has nothing to do with the script.

I love the script, but I don't know you.

I got to make a movie and I got to make a movie fast.

This is how it's got to be.

So he felt that he needed someone he could trust to turn things around quickly because they were under such a tight production schedule.

But Lawrence Gordon kept Stewart on the project for at least the next few months, probably recognizing he was fast and good and cheap.

Right.

I was going to say, like, what you've learned so far is that he did this for pennies on the dollar very quickly and that you all greenlit it after 30 pages.

So sorry, Joel, but not on board with that.

So Stewart would eventually be supplanted or supplemented by Stephen IdeSouza, who was a Silver collaborator.

We'll get to him in a little bit.

Now, Silver did have some...

I think really good ideas that helped the movie, including a new title.

So it's from Silver that we got Die Hard.

And by from Silver, I actually mean it was from Shane Black because it was the title of a script he was writing that would become the last Boy Scout with Bruce Willis in the early 90s.

And Silver was like, yeah, I'm going to need that Die Hard title, Shane.

And I don't know what, I don't know if he bought it off of him or if he, you know,

just took it and gave him something else.

But that's where Die Hard comes from.

So everyone loved it except author Roderick Thorpe.

He was upset that his novel's name was being replaced by a brand of Car Battery.

If you didn't know, Die Hard is a car battery band.

Not familiar with cars or batteries, so no.

Jill Silver told him to shut up.

He said, quote, the best thing that ever happened to your book is this movie, end quote.

I don't think he's wrong.

He apparently also came up with one of the film's most iconic set pieces, and that is, of course, blowing up the top of the Nakatomi Tower.

Yeah, big moment, very explosive, lots of fire.

Stewart says, I don't want to do this.

I don't want to show John McClain failing.

I don't want to allow innocent people to die.

And Silver says, quote, that's not my problem.

My problem is I'm not going to make somebody pay $12 for a movie ticket, stand in the rain in Westwood for two hours outside the theater, and then the top of the fucking building doesn't blow up.

That's your problem.

End quote.

He is right about that.

So Stewart adapted a scene from the book in which Leland escapes gunfire by wrapping himself in a fire hose and jumping from the roof.

And again, I love that sequence.

It's so over the top and it's so fun.

It's very mission impossible before Tom Cruise Cruise was throwing himself off of off of buildings.

It's great.

It's very tense.

I agree.

Plus, Stewart didn't have to figure out how to blow up the top of a building.

That was the director's job.

And they had somebody in mind who'd spent the last year or two blowing up Detroit.

And that is, of course, Dutch director and what went wrong alum, Paul Verhoeven.

Great.

Lizzie, do you know what movie he was fresh off of in the late 1980s?

Is it RoboCop?

It is RoboCop.

Oh.

But Verhoeven passed.

I I don't know if he was involved in Total Recall yet, but that would become his next movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

So Silver goes to Predator director, who he just worked with, John McTiernan.

And John McTiernan said, I'm good.

And passed.

And passed.

And passed again.

Because making Predator was...

terrible.

We're going to cover it likely early next year, you guys.

I don't want to spoil it, but let's just say shooting a sci-fi shoot-'em-up in the jungle with a half a dozen roided-out dudes was not a great time.

But more importantly, McTiernan wasn't nearly as bullish on the script as everybody at Fox seemed to be.

There were some problems with the script that would be fixed with McTiernan's input.

As he said, the hero was, I don't know, a super cool, suave, asinine gentleman.

It was standard TV movie superhero fair, end quote.

So McTiernan really pushed for for McLean to be an everyman in this movie.

And it really seems like that shift really started with McTiernan.

Stewart aged him down.

McTiernan pushed him toward he can't be a superhero.

He has to just be a normal guy.

And makes total sense given the way that they're pushing the movie anyway.

Also, he's a New York cop.

It's not like.

Yeah, he's not a commando like every other guy in the 1980s.

So yet somehow he also is.

Yes, no.

By the end, absolutely.

Plus, he didn't like that the villains were politically motivated terrorists.

He thought terrorism was depressing, not entertaining.

So he wanted to change that to make them actually thieves in the end, which I think is fun.

Use the terrorism as a front, but really you're after the negotiable barrel bombs.

It's great.

That's something else that I love about this movie is like, there are so many ways that they could have cut corners, and they actually don't.

Like, all of the terrorism stuff and their plot, for the most part, it makes sense.

Like, what they're trying to do makes sense.

Right.

When he calls for the release of the other prisoners and he's like and of sri lanka and the guy looks at him he's like i read about them in time yeah it's amazing so funny it's really good

so silver and gordon keep calling mctiernan and he finally agrees if he can change the script to his liking he'll do the movie and remember they have no time at this point so they say no problem go for it so Here are some of the changes that I thought were really fun that Mctiernan made to the script.

One, McLean sat in the front seat of the limo in his version to show that it was his first time riding in one, makes him more down to earth.

As I mentioned, the terrorists are not actually terrorists.

They're just thieves.

Right.

They just want the money.

Exceptional thieves.

Yes.

Klax and Oil became Nakatomi Trading.

They say it was not intended to take a shot at Japan, but instead reflect current anxieties about Japanese companies buying American companies and buildings.

The Tiffany building in New York, the Exxon Building in New York, Union Bank of California and LA had all sold to national Japanese corporations.

And of course, Sony was about to make its big move into Hollywood as this was all happening.

And most interestingly, McTiernan was really romantic about the script.

And I think he really wanted to maintain the husband-wife relationship.

He said he viewed the story as a Midsummer Night's Dream style story.

It takes place over, quote, one festival night, Christmas, during which all the princes become asses and all the asses become princes.

And in the morning, the two lovers are reunited and everyone goes back to their regular lives, but the world is better for the crazy thing that happened on that midsummer night.

Yeah.

Wait, one thing though.

So this is this whole movie heavily centered on Christmas, but we are not releasing it at Christmas.

We are releasing it in the summer.

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah.

And nobody is like, this, all right.

Nope.

Okay.

It's all good.

That's just, it is, we need a summer tent pole blockbuster.

And it's going to be Christmas themed and here it comes.

Great.

Absolutely.

Because it takes place in LA, so there's no actual snow.

So it's fine.

That's true.

Yeah.

So Stewart spoke very highly of McTiernan and his approach to modifying the script and said that it made working for Silver much easier.

McTiernan was his shield.

He basically had to explain to Joel Silver why scenes or moments were important and how he'd make sure they were cinematic because Stewart had written in, I think, a lot of good emotion into the script.

Of course, Lizzie, as we've discussed, a director is nothing without his crew, and McTiernan brought in some amazing department heads on this movie.

I noticed a what went wrong alum.

Why don't you tell me which one you noticed?

I noticed Senior got scalped by a lion, Jan DeMont.

Oh,

Mr.

Devont was eager to jump onto this film, and then he was eager to yell at John McTiernan all the time when he thought he was fucking it up.

He also did a Helen Hunt in Twister.

Of course.

What a man.

Jan DeBont, noted madmen, What Went Wrong alum, director of Twister, cinematographer of Roar.

And director of Speed, yes.

Yeah, of course.

Which we haven't covered yet, but yes, director of Speed, came in to shoot the film.

And he and McTiernan agreed they wanted to make it much more grounded and less slick than the action films of the 80s that had come before Die Hard.

Which it is, and which it does make it a lot more timeless, I think.

I agree.

So they were adding lens flares, which at the time DPs were trying to avoid.

They shot with vintage lenses.

They went handheld for a lot of the movie, which was kind of unheard of.

It's a 70-pound Panavision anamorphic rig that Jan DeBont is carrying.

And he's like, this is fine.

I carried a lion during Roar.

Now, he and McTiernan butted heads a lot during the shoot.

Apparently, McTiernan later said, quote, Yanni is very opinionated and very certain.

We used to scrap like cats and dogs and terrorized the crew.

End quote.

Again, after being actually scalped by a lion, if you've not listened to our episode on Roar, go back and listen to it.

I think he maybe at this point, he earned it.

Absolutely.

And I think they clearly were happy with the result because McTernan eventually is the one who recommended him for speed.

That's true.

So there must not have been any ill will harbored.

And if anything, McTiernan must have recognized this guy should probably be directing.

But I think the movie looks great.

So great job.

Jan.

Production designer Jackson DeGovia, along with art director John Jensen, set designer E.C.

Chan, and assistant art director Craig Edgar, brought Nakatomi to life, and they had no time.

They came on eight weeks before production began, principal photography began.

Construction crews worked in three shifts.

Some people were working double shifts, and they were building 24-7.

And they needed to make everything sturdy enough for the stunts and the explosions because they were blowing up everything.

And I assume they're building this on a back lot.

Yeah, so most of this was shot on the fox lot, and we'll discuss the portions that weren't.

The biggest set in this backlot build was the $1.5 million Nakatomi Atrium, which is where the waterfall is and the main party is happening, and they blow it up at the end.

It was designed to look like Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water for two reasons.

One, evoke Japanese influence because it's the Nakatomi Tower.

Two, Joel Silver, big fan of Frank Lloyd Wright, owned two houses that he designed.

So

why not?

Costume designer Marilyn Vance was a prolific vet.

She'd worked with McTiernan on Predator.

She'd just done De Palma's The Untouchables, which the costumes are impeccable in that film.

Amazing coats, trench coats, suits, just Tommy guns hidden under everything.

Really like that movie.

And she's the one who came up, Lizzie, along with some input from Alan Rickman on McLean and Gruber's contrasting styles.

So she picked the wife beater for McLean because she didn't believe that he would wear an undershirt and a shirt on top of it.

And then she, along with Rickman, came up with the idea of the custom tailored Armani suit that he wears because the terrorists are financially motivated and sophisticated.

Right.

And it's such a good study and contrast between the two of them.

A classical education.

And then you have, you know, yeah, man, I'm Brutalis.

So funny.

On the streets.

Barefoot the entire time.

Yeah, exactly.

Doing the toe flexing.

Yes.

Son of a bitch.

In fact, Vance shrewdly convinced Fox to fly her out to Italy and France to shop for the terrorist outfits.

So those are all legit European threads.

Wow.

But of course, perhaps no one below the line was quite as accomplished as casting director Jackie Birch.

Lizzie, I'll read you a few of her credits.

16 Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Commando, Predator, The Running Man.

Wow.

So like the perfect combination of ensemble and action film work.

And a lot of comedy, yeah.

A lot of comedy.

And obviously, Paul Gleason is one of the funniest characters in this movie, who, of course, plays the principal in the breakfast club.

And he has some of the best one-liners in this thing.

Guess we're going to need a couple more feds.

Like, he's just so dead, Pan.

And I'm guessing, you know, that was a Jackie Birch hire.

But she had her work cut out for her.

Let's talk casting diehard, Lizzie.

If you had to guess, Do you think Bruce Willis was at the top of Fox's list for this film?

No, I think our sweet Bruce Willie was at the very bottom of the bargain basement.

Yep.

Bruce Willie once joked himself that he was Fox's 50th choice for the role.

That might have been too high.

Oh, no.

He was mostly known for moonlighting at this point, right?

That's right.

Yeah, we'll talk a little bit about what he'd done, but yes, moonlighting was absolutely what most people knew him for.

So the first offer, I'm not going to make you guess it because you'll never guess, went to Frank Sinatra, believe it or not.

I tell you what, Chris, and listeners, I am working on an episode that will be dropping in the new year that features a surprising amount of Frank Sinatra.

I would imagine.

And not so thrilled to hear his name come up here because he's a pain in the ass.

Yep.

Well, old blue eyes.

It was just an obligatory offer.

Apparently, there was a stipulation in his contract.

Because he'd starred in the detective.

Don't worry, Sinatra passed.

He said, quote, I'm too old and too rich.

Honestly, though, do we kind of want to see Frank Sinatra dragging himself around Nakatomi Plaza?

A little bit, yes.

Yeah, absolutely.

According to Jeb Stewart, next up was Clint Eastwood.

Okay.

But Jeb Stewart also said, like, I didn't really understand what they were doing because I just rewrote the movie for a 30-year-old and Eastwood was at least in his 150s at this point.

Yeah, East in his 40s.

And what Stewart said is that's when I realized the studio had no idea what movie we were making.

Right.

Which remained true through marketing, as we'll get to.

And also, they're doing the classic thing of assuming that you have to have a big name in the role in order to sell the movie.

Well, let's talk about some more big names, one of which is, I'm sure, in your research, Paul Newman, too old, Arnold Schwarzenegger, too huge.

It's like, I'm a normal New York City cop.

Yeah,

straight out of VM.

Jimmy Kaye, motherfucker.

I prefer Roy Rogers.

No, I am not one of the German German terrorists.

I am different.

Exactly.

I'm just a New York cop.

It's so ridiculous.

I mean, they'd have to flip it.

So it's New York terrorists and a good German cop.

It doesn't make any sense.

Sylvester Stallone, who kind of makes the most sense.

I don't think it would work because I don't think he's great with Wisecracks, as we learned.

Tango and Cash is a tough watch for that reason.

I still didn't hate it, but yes.

No, it's a fun movie.

It's a fun movie, but mostly because of Kurt Russell.

Yeah, he's not, he's not quick.

The wit is not quick with Stallone, even though he's great at a lot of things.

I love Stallone, and actually, Copland is like my favorite example of when he's amazing.

And it's kind of when he can lean into the perceived slowness or oafishness of his character and then subvert it.

You know what I mean?

At the end of the film.

Right.

Richard Gere.

I mean, I know he'd done an Officer and a Gentleman, but he's too much of a pretty boy for this, I feel like.

This one is the one that kind of made sense to me.

James Kahn.

It's kind of interesting.

Like, I don't think it works, but of these, I think it works the best.

He'd be so much angrier and scarier.

Let go of my fucking wife.

Yeah.

A lot more F-bombs.

Uh-huh.

Well, James Kahn agreed that he would have been too scary because he said, I read the script and this guy's running away for the first 25 pages.

And he passed.

Not James Kahn.

No, James Kahn just runs in and ends up like Sonny and the Godfather just gets shot a hundred times.

All right.

So, unlike the action films that had dominated the 80s, Rambo First Blood, notwithstanding, McClain didn't engage with the action in a traditional way.

At the beginning, he plays it smart, right?

He flees to the other floors.

He tries to reach the police.

He tries to escape.

He appeals to the authorities.

He connects with Al by throwing a body out the window.

The first terrorist he kills, which is not the ballerina, is entirely by accident.

Right.

He's not trying to kill him.

No, he's just trying to survive and then he breaks his neck on the stairs.

Yeah.

So it makes sense in a way that they would go to someone who was not an action star.

And in 1987, 32-year-old Bruce Willis was not even a movie star, let alone an action star.

So Lizzie, he'd starred in one movie, which was called Blind Date.

It was moderately financially successful, kind of a rom-com, actually has some shades of Bonfire of the Vanities in a weird way.

In this film, ironically, he plays a white-collar worker who works for a Japanese conglomerate.

So, odd flip to diehard eventually.

He was also known as the Seagram's guy.

Lizzie, I'd like to play you a little clip of Bruce Willis singing with that Bruno voice about Seagram's wine coolers.

Yes, hey, fella,

look here.

Seagrams, Golden wine cooler.

Seagles.

Golden wine cooler.

It's wedding is dry.

Golden wine cooler.

My, my, my, my.

Golden wine, cooler.

Me and the boys.

Lord, love, love, on a dance.

Golden wine cooler.

It's wedding and it's dry.

Golden wine cooler.

That ad is unhinged because I don't, I've never thought like a bunch of blue-collar dudes hanging out playing the blues on their porch are going to be drinking wine coolers.

You didn't think a bunch of white guys sitting in the blues drinking wine coolers?

There's a lot that's incongruous about that.

Also, he has so much hair.

Yeah.

Well, he was, of course, Lizzie best known for his turn as David Addison, private detective, opposite Sybil Shepard in the very popular TV series Moonlighting.

Now, Willis's casting in Moonlighting could be its own episode.

He was a no-name before the show.

He was one of two, or I read 3,000 actors who were read or considered by creator Glenn Gordon-Caron, who had to fight the studio through multiple screen tests to get ABC to sign off on Willis.

And the studio's concern was that they didn't believe that he and Shepard would have believable sexual chemistry, which ironically was the one thing that really drove that show was audiences totally believed they had sexual chemistry.

And when, so that had come out and he was already a big star by the time from that, by the time I'm talking about diehard.

He was a known TV star by the time that film came out.

So he has this devil may care, cracking-wise screen presence, but not much easy had come for Bruce Willis.

He was actually born in West Germany, and he was then raised in New Jersey.

And he had actually turned to acting as a way to help his stutter.

He did a stage production and realized his stutter went away when he was reading his lines.

So like Roderick Thorpe and Jeb Stewart, his professional life was littered with stops and starts.

He was a security guard at a nuclear plant.

He did transportation for a DuPont chemical factory.

And of course, he worked as a private investigator very briefly and then was a bartender for many years, trying to get his acting career off the ground.

So, moonlighting is this huge break, but Willis is kind of like stuck in television, right?

He's trying to get into the movie business, but it's hard to transition from the small screen to the silver screen.

But according to casting director Jackie Birch, Joel Silver happened to be on a plane with Bruce Willis's agent at this time.

And so the agent got a copy of the script and slipped it to Willis, and Willis passed.

It's rumored that it's because he couldn't fit the production into his moonlighting schedule, which is when the producers got a huge miracle, miracle, which is Sybil Shepard got pregnant, which shut down moonlighting for 11 weeks, which opened a window of availability for Bruce Willis.

So it's like, hey, Bruce, come on, join in.

But he still hesitated because apparently Demi Moore, who he was dating and would soon marry, didn't like violent films.

Demi, you're going to go on to do the substance.

And G.I.

Jane and so many other movies.

Now, fortunately, Lizzie, his agent was able to leverage the situation into an offer that Willis couldn't refuse.

Willis's agent, smartly realizing what a bind Fox was in, demanded an outrageous $5 million fee for his clients' services.

Somehow, Die Hard needed Willis more than he needed them.

Lawrence Gordon took the offer to Fox chairman Barry Diller, who reportedly asked him, Are you out of your fucking mind?

Yeah.

The answer answer was that they were out of

time for reference i did read that schwarzenegger had been paid three and a half million for his turn in predator which was after terminator and commando so willis getting five for his first starring action role that's insane

It was unprecedented, and it actually rippled throughout Hollywood and caused a complete redrawing of the map of what Hollywood stars were going to be paid.

The New York Times ran a whole article on his paycheck.

They said, 20th Century Fox has paid Bruce Willis $5 million to star in a movie.

For Hollywood, the result is equivalent to an earthquake.

The map of movie star salaries must now be redrawn.

Apparently, Richard Dreyfus fired his agent the next day because he was pissed he couldn't get that kind of money and he had an Oscar.

Again, when I watch Richard Dreyfus trying to take out Alan Rickman in Yakatomi Plaza, yes.

We're going to need a bigger gun.

It wasn't just Fox that didn't believe in Willis.

Even moonlighting creator Glenn Gordon Caron, who'd gone to bat for Willis to bring him onto his show, said, they're going to laugh you off the screen.

That's a Schwarzenegger role.

Willis didn't care.

He started working out and attending AA.

Okay.

Couple other fun facts on casting before we get to our villain.

Holly Gennaro, played by Bonnie Bedelia.

Full name, Bonnie Bedelia Culkin.

Her nephews are Macaulay and Kieran.

Wow.

She'd won a Golden Globe for her performance as a drag racer in Heart Like a Wheel, and Birch wanted Willis's supporting actors to compliment him, wanting performers who gave depth, warmth, and credibility, which I think is interesting because the reason I think she's so good opposite him is actually because she's not that warm.

She's tough, just like he is, and she can kind of go head-to-head with him and with Hans.

She can.

I also like that she never doubts him, though.

Like, once she, as soon as she understands what's happening, there is no inkling that she thinks that he can't do this, which is really impressive.

I agree.

All right, Al,

Reginald Vel

who of course would be known for

Family Matters for years, but that happened after this.

He was ready to leave acting when Die Hard rolled around.

There were other much bigger names that were being considered.

Robert Duvall, Lawrence Fishburne.

Vel Johnson was living in his mom's basement and was considering transitioning to advertising.

And let's hear him talk about the audition process.

The actor that had that role, the role that I played, was supposed to be...

You can say it.

Can I say it?

You can say it.

It was supposed to be Gene Hackman.

Really?

Yes, it was.

But

something happened and he didn't do it.

And they decided to cast an unknown actor.

It was the last day of the casting.

And I went and came into the room, it was Wesley Snipes.

And I said, Wes, hey, he's cool, you know.

So he said, well, I said, well, you go first.

So he went first, and I listened at the door to him dishing.

I never told him that.

I love that.

Now you know, Wesley, I did that.

So Bruce Willis, he said, well, let's get that guy.

And he pointed me out, and that's how I got the roll.

But, you know, no one knows that.

He's so good in this movie.

Both Wesley Snipes and Gene Hackman do make sense for that part.

But I think what's so great about him is that he is

not as well known or established.

And, you know, this is his part is supposed to be a cop who has been off the street for many, many years and is sort of down on his luck and not confident in himself.

And he just really nails all of that.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think they do a lot of unexpected casting choices in this this film, and that's one of the reasons it works so well.

And of course, no one could have been less expected than Alan Rickman, literally, because this was his debut Hollywood film at 40 years old.

Yeah.

So

actually, 41.

So obviously, like, think bad guys from the 80s, right?

Like Schwarzenegger and Terminator, Rutger Hauer and Blade Runner, Dolph Lundgren and Rocky, or even some of the Smarmier guys like Brian Dennehy and First Blood, Kurtwood Smith and Robocop.

They are not dashing.

They are not debonair.

They're not Donning Armani.

Enter Alan Rickman.

He's 41.

He broke out only two years earlier in theater with his Tony-winning turn as Vécomte de Valmont.

I hope I got that right.

In a London theater production of Le Lais,

it's the Dangerous Liaisons.

Les Liaison Dangerous.

Perfect.

One of his co-stars claimed audiences left the show wanting to sleep with him.

I buy it.

He's pretty attractive.

We'll leave that there.

He was actually not even considered for the role that he'd won the Tony for when they did the movie adaptation because he was considered too obscure.

That's how obscure he was at this point in time.

Didn't he have a whole career before acting?

Yeah, I know.

He worked in graphic design for a while, and then I don't think he even went to acting school or

preparatory academy or whatever until his 30s.

So he'd definitely come to it late.

Total newbie to Hollywood.

But Jackie Birch, casting director, knows that he's perfect because in 1987, he'd read for a part in the Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jim Blushy Cold War buddy cop movie Red Heat.

Did you ever see that one, Lizzie?

Sure didn't.

Nope.

Me neither.

He didn't win that role, but when Birch read Die Hard, she knew he was perfect for Hans Gruber.

So she actually reached out to him, and Joel Silver had seen him in a play and also thought he was very good.

So they flew him to LA for an audition.

And the biggest thing they had to get over was that when he held the gun, he let his wrist go limp.

Do I heard it like this?

And so they had to fix that.

He tapes for the studio and producers.

Two days later, he gets the job.

And even though he was a newbie to Hollywood, he brought a lot of ideas to the table.

So he's the one who kind of reinforced the slick back look of Hans.

He basically says, I'm not going to get my hands dirty.

I've got these huge guys around me.

They're going to do everything.

Right.

He's also the one who more or less came up with the idea that he and Willis or McLean needed to be able to make each other laugh because the characters were written to be so cartoonish that they would have to find some humanity bouncing off one another.

And I really think that Bruce brought this blue-collar energy, which was true to his upbringing, and Rickman brought this classical education to his character, which was true to his upbringing.

And they just reinforced what was already there and really made it sing and kind of lifted it off the page.

Yes.

And also, I will say, because David and I had this discussion while we were watching it, I think Alan Rickman's accent in this is very good.

I feel like some people are like, oh, he barely sounds German.

He just sounds British.

But like having known some German people who learned to speak English in England, it's like kind of spot on perfect because it's not overplayed at all.

I read at least two

accounts from German speakers saying Rickman's accent is excellent in this film.

Because it is, it's just a hint.

And like you hear it periodically, but it's there.

And it's, you know, sort of an affectation across the whole thing.

Yeah, I agree watching it and I defer to our Germanic friends.

I'm going to, I'm going to share a story.

I'm sorry.

And David, you can obviously cut this out, but it relates to doing German accents.

So, Chris, as you know.

This is, I'm going to get in trouble for this one.

As you know, I went to acting school.

And I think maybe sophomore year,

our actual like final exam for a dialect class was that we had to use IPA, internet, the International Phonetic Alphabet, to translate a monologue and basically be able to like teach the class a specific accent using that monologue.

So I had chosen a monologue from the reader, which is obviously a German accent.

And when we got there, the teacher was like, great, pair up.

And so I paired up with one of my best friends, Chelsea Yakura Kurtz, who is of Japanese descent.

And she had chosen a monologue from Memoirs of Agesia.

And what we didn't know was that our teacher had a surprise up her sleeve, which was that you would not be presenting your own monologue, but in fact, you would be learning your partner's monologue.

Oh.

And so I did not get to do my German accent that I had worked so hard, but I instead had to do what was certainly a racially offensive Japanese accent from Memoirs of Agesia.

And Chelsea, I've never forgiven you.

And that's the end of my story on the German accent.

And what is acting school if not an opportunity to just be blatantly racist all the time?

Honestly, they give you a lot of that.

Yeah, they give you a lot of license.

All right.

So Lizzie, even though Die Hard was green lit off of a first draft, it was heading into production in the fall of 1987.

Very incomplete.

According to McTiernan, they had 35 pages of shootable script and did not know key details.

Like, they didn't know what the terrorist getaway plan was at all.

The ambulance.

Neither do you until the last like four minutes of this movie.

Well, we'll get into into that.

So by October, Joel Silver officially brings in screenwriter Stephen E.

D'Souza to lighten the script.

Look up his credits.

He's written a ton of action films and punched up a ton of action films.

He says he can write anything he wants as long as it doesn't require the crew to build any new sets.

So D'Souza meets with Willis.

He expands McLean's working-class background.

He then meets with Rickman.

He elevates Hans, makes him a little more arch.

One key addition.

Hippie Kaye, motherfucker.

Yes.

So D'Souza d'Souza claims the line stemmed from a chat with Willis about their mutual appreciation of the Roy Rogers show and Roy Rogers' movie King of the Cowboys in it he covers the Bing Crosby song that includes the lyric yippie I yo kaye Willis says we had a really adult conversation that was about what the proper way to say it was was it yippie kaiye or yippie tie i'm glad that i held on to yippie kaiye so that was a willis d'ouza special clearly although i will tell you not my favorite line in the whole movie I think the one that made me laugh the hardest was when he finally gets a hold of the emergency line to the police and the woman is like, sir, this is a line for emergencies only.

And he goes, no fucking shit, lady.

Does it sound like I'm ordering a pizza?

Also, a D'ASUSA line.

That one's great.

That one's good.

He also added ho-ho-ho underneath now.

I have a machine gun to the shirt.

He added the idea that the terrorists had to break seven locks to get to the vault to justify the movie's runtime.

And one morning, he got called back at at 2 a.m.

while they were shooting Willis crawling through the air vent because they were using a real air vent and it took Willis so long to crawl through it that they needed to add dialogue to the scene.

Oh no.

So D'Souza came up with, go to the coast, we'll get together, have a few laughs.

And then Willis came up with, now I know what a TV dinner feels like.

All great.

Willis also improvised the Hi Honey at the end of the film.

I really like that one as well when he comes in.

And Willis and Bedelia improvised a marital argument in front of D'Souza, which became the basis of their bathroom argument at the beginning of the film.

Wow.

Of course, no last-minute change was more inspired than the Bill Clay scene when Gruber and McClain meet face to face for the first time.

I love that.

Oh, no, don't shoot me.

Don't shoot me.

If you haven't seen Die Hard listeners, at this point, what happens is that Hans Gruber realizes he's come face to face finally with John McClain and he decides his best bet is to impersonate one of the hostages.

And Alan Rickman does a also pretty spot-on, like weird American accent.

And he's very like squirrely and like, you know, so like gross where he's been so sleek this entire time.

It's, it's his hair falls down in his face, everything.

Rickman had insisted that they be able to make each other laugh.

And D'Souza overheard Rickman speaking in an over-the-top American accent on set one day.

So he rewrites the scene, which existed, but it was between Willis and a different terrorist, Theo, who's hacking the safe.

So it who's American?

Yes.

So it changes the tone of the scene.

We'll return to that scene in a moment because the no-getaway plan thing has ramifications to that scene that are interesting.

Now,

there are some vague tensions on set, Lizzie, notably between Bruce Willis and John McTiernan around the blocking of the scene.

So you block a scene, that means you figure out where the actors are going to stand, then you light the scene, and then you bring the actors back in to shoot the scene.

But Willis would come back in once the scene was lit and he would say, no, I don't think he'd stand here.

I think he'd stand over here.

And he'd change the blocking.

And he did it over and over again.

And it would cause him to fall behind.

So Silver confronts Willis.

And according to McTiernan, Willis admitted that he was trying to avoid being backlit because his hair was thinning and he was really self-conscious about it.

Which, by the way, you can tell in certain shots of this that they have spray painted his hair on to this.

Just let him be bald.

Which he eventually does.

And he becomes arguably the first action hero movie star that's bald in American history.

And he looks great.

Silver reassured him, along with McTiernan, it's our job to make you look good.

Alan Rickman was also really nervous on the film.

Apparently, he at one point heard that studio executives were concerned about his acting.

According to Silver, there was worry that Rickman couldn't be the bad guy because he seemed too weak.

This was at the studio level, not within the production.

He did, of course, still struggle with guns.

Lizzie, he kept flinching or blinking when shots were fired.

Bang, bang.

But Silver and DeBont, actually, in particular, stood up for him, recognizing what a breath of fresh air he was to the genre.

He's great.

He's very funny and just, and also scary and evil.

We spoke earlier about how most of this shot on a back lot, but a lot of it was actually shot on location in a real skyscraper, which, of course, is the Fox Plaza Tower, which is right next to the Fox Studio.

You can come visit LA and see it.

But they did consider shooting this in Houston.

There's cheap labor, lots of buildings under construction until Jeb Stewart literally points from the conference room they were sitting in on the Fox lot at the Fox Plaza Tower and says, that's what I was looking at when I was writing this thing.

It seemed like the perfect fit.

It was commissioned to be Fox's corporate headquarters.

It was still under construction.

It was walking distance from the soundstage, but it was a working office space.

So they literally had to stop production from time to time to go downstairs and apologize to the lawyers that they were going to be firing machine guns again.

And there was a ton of concern about damaging the studio's new headquarters.

They flew in extra Spanish marble, literal tons of it, that matched the exterior of the building in case of any damage.

They had to build miniatures to do all of the explosions.

I mean, there's amazing videos online.

And if you check out that book, The Making of Die Hard, The Visual History, you can see all the photographs.

They built a 25-foot-tall miniature replica of the building for the top of building explosion scene.

They made a 20-foot forced perspective miniature for the chair bomb in the elevator shafts, which I also love that scene.

And the producers actually considered blowing out the office floor for that chair bomb scene, the actual office floor of the Fox Plaza because it was under construction.

Instead, they did a combo of special effects and visual effects.

They rigged the building with light bulbs to give the initial flash that you see.

They watered down the sidewalks outside to add more reflectivity.

They threw in some smoke and some pyrotechnics, and then they did the actual explosion on the scale model.

But Lizzie, they did do one thing for real.

Is there something in here that you noticed that might be dangerous the use of a particular vehicle especially in the 1980s in hollywood a helicopter a helicopter as we covered in the twilight zone movie they were shooting with helicopters which had just caused arguably one of the most horrific yeah incidents in hollywood history not only were they shooting in the middle of the city, but this was just a few years after the tragic deaths of Vic Morrow, Micah Din Lee, and Renee Shiny Chen after John Landis and his production violated labor law to work two child actors at night, allowed the helicopter to fly far too low, and as the National Transportation Safety Board later said, failed to establish direct communications and coordination between the pilot who was in command of the helicopter operation and the film director who was in charge of the filming operation.

Yeah.

So this is shortly after that.

John Landis' trial, I believe, had just ended.

Steven Spielberg had publicly disavowed him.

They got permits from the LAPD.

It took months to get all the planning done.

They have Vietnam-era Huey helicopters.

And McTiernan was not like Landis.

And he was hyper concerned about safety.

Joel Silver was not.

Jeb Stewart later said the LAPD told Joel Silver that they could not bring those helicopters in on the deck as it's written in the script.

Joel said, absolutely.

We will, of course, not do that.

We'll keep it well above 1500 feet.

Then to the helicopter pilots, bring them in as low as you possibly can.

Oh, no.

Which you can see in the film.

I mean, the shots are incredible.

McTierlin originally planned for three runs of the helicopters coming toward the building, but only ended up doing it once.

So that's the only take that you see in the film.

Yeah, I mean, it looks amazing, but that would be scary to do that right after what happened on the Twilight Zone.

Which he said, it wasn't long after that helicopter accident in the Twilight Zone, and that put the fear of God into me.

After the first run, I said, no more.

If something had fallen into the intake of the turbine, we could have had 75 people killed.

The shoot did have its accidents, and the actors did a lot of their own stunts.

So, Vel Johnson, Reginald Vel Johnson, actually did his car stunt scene because McTiernan didn't want to have it look too slick.

So, Val Johnson said, sure, I'll do it because he thought he was going to get fired if he didn't.

He did it in two takes.

He was fine.

Wow.

Alan Rickman suffered a terrible injury in his first shot on the film, which is after he addresses the group of hostages.

He jumps off a three-foot ledge, just down to the floor below, and he tore a ligament, it felt like, in his knee.

Went to the doctor.

The doctor said he was going to be out for six months.

They put a brace on his leg for the rest of the day to finish the scene.

He did it standing on one leg, but luckily, he just tore the cartilage in his knee.

So even though he was in pain, he could still work for the rest of the shoot.

That's so embarrassing.

I know.

Now, he also agreed to do his fall at the end of the film.

So when you see him falling, there was a blue airbag underneath him that they replaced, but the airbag was 40 feet beneath him.

So they did a 40-foot free fall and they said that they would release him on three, but for one of the takes, they did three or four total, they released him on one instead.

And that's the take in the movie.

40 feet?

Yeah.

There's no way.

There's no way I would do that.

He said he wouldn't do it now.

He just had no idea what he was doing.

And he actually, there's a funny interview of him later saying, like, he basically volunteered to do it, thinking, what's the big deal?

And then he saw how high it was that he had to climb back up and do it again.

And he regretted it.

So for the long shot of Hans falling, where Paul Gleason says, I hope that's not one of the hostages.

That's stuntman Ken Bates.

He fell 318 feet from the Real Fox Plaza.

I thought it had to be because it's very clearly a person.

They're still moving like as they're falling down.

Yeah, he's on a descender, which is a harness and cable and pulley system.

You can see how it works really well on the fall guy.

If you guys have seen that film, Ryan Gosling does a descender in that one.

The ventilation shaft jump was performed by stuntman Key Johnson.

He was supposed to catch the first ledge, but missed.

And so they kept that take in the movie.

So that was actually an error that they kept in the film.

And then Willis actually rode the top of the elevator himself.

Wow.

Yeah.

Is that a real elevator that he was?

Yeah.

Oh my God.

Willis did a bunch of stuff on this film.

He wore prosthetic feet, like the Hobbits for a lot of his scenes.

You can actually see them in a couple of scenes.

And his most dangerous stunt was shot first.

That was when he wrapped himself on the fire hose and jumped from the building.

So it was actually a five-story jump off the top of a parking garage again onto an airbag.

And they covered his bare skin in gel to prevent him from catching fire because they were doing the explosion above him.

And he said when he landed, he thought everybody was going to come over and be like, you did so good.

But they all ran over terrified because apparently he came very close to missing the airbag.

And they thought their lead actor was going to die on the first shot.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

Again, Ken Bates did the long shot using a decelerator rig.

Willis also claimed that he lost hearing on the production, saying that he has two-thirds partial hearing loss just because there were so many gunshots and so many explosions.

They probably didn't know a ton about, you know, hearing protection at the time.

Now, it's been claimed that Willis worked simultaneously on Moonlighting and Die Hard.

He said maybe it was a day of overlap at the end of the shoot, but it was a really, really difficult production.

He's acting by himself for a lot of these scenes.

He actually asked Vil Johnson to come to set to read lines with him, just so he didn't have to do them alone.

But Pil Johnson actually said, like, when he had to do his scenes, Bruce

wasn't there.

But that is because Bruce was planning his wedding with Demi Moore in the middle of this production.

They actually got married.

during the production of Die Hard.

Wow.

McTiernan actually asked Dasa to add more scenes to give Willis a break.

So like Holly telling Gruber that people need to use the bathroom, that scene was added in during production.

Holly and John's children, shots of them at home, those were added in production.

And of course, like continuity was a nightmare.

Vance had 17 versions of Willis's outfit in various states of distress because they were not shooting it, you know, in order.

So they were constantly switching the tank top out.

And at some point, the Secret Service showed up because Ronald Reagan was planning on setting up an office at Fox Plaza Tower.

And they had to be like, hide the machine guns.

The Secret Service is coming coming right now.

So Fox needs a movie for summer of 1988.

They don't wrap filming until February of 1988.

So they have less than five months to finish the movie.

McTernan hires Frank Uriasti, who'd cut RoboCop, but it was their first time working together.

And McTernan sometimes felt like he was listening more to Silver than to him.

But to his credit, Uriasti said he was just trying to protect the movie.

And the studio was always saying it was too long.

And they always wanted to cut the first 19 minutes of the movie because the action doesn't start until basically 20 minutes in when the terrorists come up the elevator.

And they're like, Ah, can we cut some of the marriage stuff?

And he said, No, that's the only thing that's going to make people care about these characters.

Yeah.

So he fights to keep that in.

They bring in a second editor just to keep things moving.

It sounds like overall it was a collaborative, you know, process, if a little paranoid.

But Fox is panicking.

And they get another reason to panic when the MPAA gives the film an X rating.

For what?

The boobs?

No, no, that's PG.

The scene in which Takagi is murdered.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, they do show him getting his head blown off.

Yeah, so they recommended cutting frames.

It's been claimed that Silver told him to cut the frames, show it to the MPAA, then put him back in.

They did not do that.

And the Foley team actually had to remove sound effects they added of McClain removing the glass from his feet because the sound was too gross and it was like grossing people out.

That scene was also pretty graphic.

Now, we discussed the script changes and the ambulance at the end.

So Lizzie, as we've seen, the movie ends with this ambulance appearing in the back of the terrorist truck coming out and like, this is their plan.

They're going to escape in the ambulance.

Which is funny because so many terrorists pile out of that truck at the beginning when Alan Rickman comes out of it and there's no ambulance in there.

Well, yep.

And that's why they cut a scene.

So they didn't come up with the idea for the ambulance until they were already shooting.

They'd already shot the scene of the terrorists in the truck, and they'd shot a scene of the terrorists synchronizing their matching watches.

This is important.

So they cut that scene, but later in the Bill Clay scene, McClane figures out it's Hans Gruber because he recognizes that he has the same watch as the other terrorists he's killed.

So that gets cut from the scene.

And now all you have is McClain seeing the name Clay on the directory behind Gruber's head.

It's a bit tenuous, you know what I mean?

How it's explained, but you kind of have to just go with, like, oh, he just figured it out.

That's the way I read it.

Was I actually read that differently, that Alan Rickman had seen that, and that's how he knew to use the name.

And so it was like a confirmation.

So it kind of worked for me because at that point, I was like, oh.

I agree.

I think the watch would be more clear.

And there's also the thematic through line of the Rolex that Holly has been given, which obviously he takes off her hand when Gruber falls out the window at the end, signifying that she will give up her career for him.

No, I'm just kidding.

But yeah, they had to eliminate that to make things make sense.

So

the movie is barreling towards its release, and the marketing department is also freaking out because Willis's second feature film, Sunset, comes out in the interim.

It is not a hit.

The public learns about his $5 million paycheck and are furious.

He's in a public feud with Sybil Shepard.

No exact reasons are known.

Some people think they had an affair.

Some people say they both were big divas on the project.

Well, all I know about Sybil Shepard is that Martha Stewart hates her.

So if you can get in a fight with Bruce Willis and Martha Stewart, something's going on.

Well, yeah, some people say that Willis was frustrated by the schedule changes, which stemmed from her pregnancy, which I don't fully buy because that kind of allowed him to do diehard.

Regardless, Willis's reputation was at an all-time low, and audiences could not see him as anything other than a comedic actor.

They were even laughing and booing when his name came up at the trailer that the studio had put out before other films.

The poster, which featured Willis's face equal to the size of Nakatomi Tower, which is what's on like the DVD now, was the lowest testing poster that 20th Century Fox had put out to date.

So they ran a new version with the building big and Willis's face small, and some ads didn't even print Willis's name at all.

Wow.

Yeah.

But there were hints that they had something.

There was an internal screening at Fox with 15 executives, and it was a hit.

And the first sneak preview for a real audience got a standing ovation.

So Fox played it a little conservative.

It released on June 15th as a limited release and then went wide on July 22nd, 1988.

It earned a respectable $7.1 million its opening weekend.

Not a huge number for it likely went over budget.

So let's say a $30 million film would probably lose money.

Came in third behind Coming to America America and Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Great weekend.

Yeah, I would say.

But Bruce had legs.

It was never the number one film at the box office, but it spent 10 weeks in the top five.

Wow.

It was the biggest action film of 1988, the seventh highest grossing film overall, and brought in $140 million worldwide.

And of course, was a huge hit on VHS.

And Lizzie, it crushed Stallone's Rambo 3 and Schwarzenegger's Red Heat, also released that year.

And both of these guys must have been feeling the heat because Stallone reportedly visited Joel Silver on set to see what was going on, even though he'd passed on the role, and he even came to the LA premiere.

Schwarzenegger had a different approach.

According to Willis, they ran into each other at a restaurant called Ivy at the Shore after release, and Schwarzenegger said,

Willis, know why you'll never be an action star?

And Willis said, No, Arnold, why not?

And Arnold flexed his biceps and said, Toothpick arms.

I totally believe that story.

For sure.

According to Robert Davy, who played, or Robert Davy, I can't remember how you pronounce his name, who played one of the feds that says, reminds me of Saigon, eh, Slick?

He's the white fed.

He was a friend of Arnold's, and Schwarzenegger watched the movie with him and loved the movie.

So I think it was just good-natured ribbing.

And the three of them, by the way, along with Jami Moore, opened Planet Hollywood together in 1991.

Oops.

Yeah, so, well, we'll do what went wrong about that.

Die Hard, of course, ushered in a new type of action hero.

It set the stage for Jason Bourne, John Wick, the Everyman.

It's also, I think, a huge contributor to the Dunning-Kruger effect, which Lizzie is like our misconceived notion that we can do things that we can't, right?

We overestimate our abilities.

So, like, men who think they can fight bears, for example, or Mark Wahlberg, who thinks 9-11 would have gone different if he had been on the plane.

I always forget about that, and it blows me away.

If I was on that plane with my kids, it wouldn't have gone down like that.

There would have been a lot of blood in that first-class cabin.

And then me saying, okay, we're going to land somewhere safely.

Don't worry.

The film did receive overall mixed reviews at first, but it has been re-evaluated throughout the years as one of the greatest action films of all time.

It's the subject of a lot of interesting analysis, themes of masculinity, populism, failures of the state, bureaucracy, allusions to the Odyssey, many, many more.

Let's talk about the aftermath briefly, Lizzy.

Willis's career was set.

Despite hiccups like Bonfire of the Vanities, he was arguably the major action star of the 1990s.

As we mentioned, he's the first one to have gracefully transitioned into balddom.

McTiernan was similarly hot, although his career would more or less end a decade later with The 13th Warrior, a movie that we definitely have to cover.

I secretly like the movie.

I do too.

I think it's kind of a blast.

I think it's fun.

We owned the VHS and I watched it

all the time.

Antonio.

Rickman was, of course, on everybody's radar for every bad guy role available.

A couple of my favorites, Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, and eventually, of course, Harry Potter.

Vel Johnson landed on Family Matters.

Did not have to go into advertising.

Of course, since we can't have nice things, Die Hard did eventually become the ludicrous action franchise it so effectively subverted.

I like the sequels, though.

My wife laughed so hard at the tagline for Die Hard 2, which is die harder.

Yeah, die harder is incredible.

I do also like live free or die hard.

I do too.

But, Lizzie, since this is at its core the story of a man doing right by his wife, it's only fitting that we end with screenwriter Jeb Stewart, who, had it not been for a little or big white lie he told his wife regarding that aptitude test, we never would have gotten the greatest Christmas film of all time.

So, after 20 years of marriage, Jeb Stewart's wife, his partner, became very ill and he knew that she was dying.

And so not wanting any lies to be left between them, he told her that nearly two decades prior, he had lied about scoring off the charts for screenwriting and that he had actually been meant to be a florist.

And she just smiled and said that she knew

because after he left to go fill out his application, the administrator, PhD student, called the house and asked her if her her father was feeling better.

And when she had no idea what he was saying, he filled her in.

And over all those years,

through all of the master's programs and debt that he'd racked up, she'd never said a thing.

Wow.

Just like Mrs.

McClain in the movie, she never lost faith in him.

She didn't.

Only John could piss a man off.

That much.

So, Lizzie, that concludes our coverage of Die Hard.

I hope you enjoyed listening as much as I did looking into this film.

I did.

I loved it.

As always, we have to talk about what went right, and there's so much to choose from, even though so much went wrong on this movie.

Do you want me to go first?

I would love for you to start.

I have to go with Alan Rickman.

He's such a surprising choice for this, and he's just so perfect.

And I love how bitchy he is in this.

I just love him.

And I love that this, you know, brought him forward to be able to do everything from many other villain roles to Jane Austen in Sense and Sensibility.

He's a treasure that we lost too soon, obviously.

So Alan Rickman loved him.

I agree.

And of course, Galaxy Quest.

Yes.

One of my favorite roles for him and just one of my favorite movies.

Since you gave it to Rickman, I'll give it to Willis, his counterpart.

I,

you know, Willis, he's an interesting actor.

He's obviously got a complicated reputation over the years.

I think it's been softened a lot in recent years.

I think

he's most interesting when he lets down the facade, the bad boy, cool guy facade.

And I think what works so well about this movie is that that facade is really up for a lot of the first half of the film.

But he lets it down in key moments, like when he turns to the mirror and calls himself stupid for arguing with his wife and says, real mature, you know.

Yeah.

And then later when he admits that he was wrong and he's, you know, he never said he's sorry.

And

Willis, vulnerable Bruce Willis, I, I, I mean, I still think the sixth sense is an incredible performance.

It's an amazing thing.

And I think that, you know, there's something so kind of tragic about his arc.

Here's someone who came to film to help him speak and had to leave it when he lost the ability to speak.

And

now I'm going to get, you know, emotional.

My grandpa has the same thing that he does.

But, anywho, I think that this movie

only works with somebody who believes or can act as if they're invulnerable,

but then can reveal that they're really not.

And I think Willis is good when he's at his best, he can do that.

And he did this, he did that in this movie so effectively.

So, Bruce Willis, you went right and die hard.

Agreed.

Beautifully said.

There's one thing, listeners, that we did want to tell you before we sign off here and head into our full-stop supporters, which is that David and I are having a baby.

We don't know exactly when, because apparently these things come whenever they feel like it.

Some medieval medicine is telling us sometime around the beginning of 2025.

With that in mind, we are trying to make sure that we don't have any gaps in coverage for you all, but you may miss me on a couple of episodes.

We will have some guest hosts coming up in the new year, but then I'll be back.

I'll be back with a screaming infant behind me and I can't wait.

And there were so many opportunities in this episode, Chris, because you kept talking about pregnant people that I could have brought this up, but nope, just waited till the very end.

But that's it.

We appreciate your support and your patience.

And sorry, go ahead, Chris.

No, I was going to say, now you have to join full stop because

yeah, because there's another what went wrong baby being added.

Another baby.

Just like Jeb Stewart.

Just like Jeb Stewart.

Son of a bitch.

All right, guys, thank you so much for listening to this podcast.

Really, just truly, and your kind messages, it means the world.

We love making this show.

We want to keep doing it for years and years and years.

There are so many movies to cover.

Sweet, good lord.

We have a list of 500.

That's not an exaggeration.

So.

If you'd like to support this show further, of course, tell somebody about it, scream it in their face, do a Hans-Gruber impression, ask them where the detonators are.

If you would like to go a step further, leave us a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music.

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If you'd like to go a step further, join our Patreon, www.patreon.com/slash whatwentwrong podcast.

You can join for free.

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When at that tier, you can vote on movies that we will cover.

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And of course, for $50,

you will get a shout-out like these.

We've had a lot of good ones recently: Gremlins, Yoda, George Lucas, Bradley Cooper, Starsborn, and Lizzie, what are we doing today for the good people?

I've heard that Bruce Willis is in the house.

What?

I think it's Bruce.

Wait, I think it's Bruce and Hans.

Okay, sure.

I'll bust out my German accent from acting school.

Let's see if I can match Alan Rickman's.

Let's do it.

Willa Dunn, come to the coast, have a few laughs.

I heard it's your birthday.

Happy birthday to you!

Happy birthday to you.

Happy birthday, dear Willa.

Happy birthday to you.

Hey guys, she's 10.

That's why she gets the birthday shout-out.

If you're over 10, don't email us for a birthday shout-out.

That's right, we will only give birthday shout-outs to children, not adults.

Jerome Wilkinson.

I will assume that it is not your birthday.

Lance Stater, Nate the the Knife, Lena, Andrea, Ramon Villeneuver Jr.

It's a very difficult name to say in this accent.

Half Grey Hound,

good for you.

Chris Elner, Blaise Ambrose, Brittany Morris, I'm just a New York cop.

Darren and Dale Conkling, Yippie Kaye, motherfucker.

Jake Kellen, Andrew McFagelbagel, Matthew Jacobson, Grace Potter, Ellen Singleton.

I've said I've loved you a hundred times.

I've never said I'm sorry.

Jury Sri Samant, give me the detonators.

Scott Gerwin, Sadie, just Sadie.

Brian Donahue, Adrian Pang Carrier, Chris Leal, I'm losing it, Chris.

Get in there.

Kathleen Olson.

Leah Bowman.

I'm a fan of Roy Rogers myself.

Steve Winnebauer.

Don Scheibel, did you buy my album?

George.

Rosemary Southward.

Mark Dimitric.

Tom Kristen.

You asked for a miracle.

I give you the F-B-I.

Soman Shainani, please also give me the detonators.

And Michael McGrath, if you could hand over the detonators as well, that would be great.

Thank you.

All right, guys.

Thanks for sitting through that.

Wasn't our best work, but we're going to improve.

We are coming back at you in one week with a special below-the-line interview with Warren Drummond, an incredible storyboard artist who's worked with a number of directors that we've covered on this podcast, including John Singleton.

That's going to be releasing on December 23rd.

So, come back to check that out.

We will be dark on December 30th, and then we are back in action for 2025, January 6th, with what could be argued as kind of another Christmas film, Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, which is a crazy bonkers fun time.

Not for Tom Cruise, but it was a crazy bonkers fun time for all of us.

I'm very excited for that.

Again, return to normal programming January 6th.

We will see you then.

Happy holidays.

Happy holidays.

Ho, ho, ho.

Now I have a machine gun.

Go to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com.

What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer.

Editing music by David Bowman.

Research for this episode provided by Jesse Winterbauer.