John McTiernan, director of ‘Die Hard’: ‘My movies were quite patriotic, but being in prison changed my attitude’

In conversations about the golden age of Hollywood action fiy dicelms, references to one or more of the films of John McTiernan (Albany, New York, 74 years old) are inevitable. In the late glow of the 1980s alone, the director shot three back-to-back classics: Predator (1987), Die Hard (1988) and The Hunt for Red October (1990). After receiving a tribute in Paris from the French Cinemathèque, McTiernan visited Spain to collect the honorary award he received this year from the Sombra fantasy film festival. The veteran filmmaker is grateful for the successive career recognitions, but as he tells EL PAÍS, he’s far from calling it a day. As he revealed in talks organized by Sombra, more than 20 years after his last film, he is planning his return to the big screen, though he’s still reluctant to share many details. “I’m a little superstitious about talking about movies until we’re shooting them. I’ve had a couple of independently financed films that I was certain were going to happen and then didn’t. I’m just going to wait and see.”

It’s Monday morning and McTiernan credits his weariness to the marathon of the last 48 hours. Over the weekend he participated in two big public events in Murcia and Madrid, the cities that host Sombra, both of which were sold out and accompanied by a screening of Die Hard. The director generously responded to his fans’ questions, jumped into the eternal debate over whether the Bruce Willis film should be considered a Christmas movie (“It’s about a festival night, in the style of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, when all the important people become asses and the asses become heroes. So I pushed the Christmas thing”) signed posters and took photos with everyone who asked for one. At Madrid’s Spanish Society of Authors and Publishers, the location chosen for his interviews with the press, McTiernan soldiers on with the help of sips from his Coke, speaking slowly and never giving the impression that he is tired of talking about past achievements.

“You’re getting me very serious here, I’m sorry,” he says. What could have been the most uncomfortable line of questioning of the conversation has instead, aroused his passion: his 2013-2014 incarceration. “It changed my attitude toward everything. Physically, I had a great time. It wasn’t a prison, it was just a college campus in South Dakota. I got on the roofing crew, because I’d worked as a roofer when I was in college. I got to spend the whole summer up on roofs, like when I was 22,” he says. McTiernan was sentenced for having lied to the FBI during its case against Anthony Pellicano, who was known as the private investigator of the stars. The director initially denied knowing about Pellicano’s activities, a statement that he later retracted when it was proven that the detective stole a producer’s phone after McTiernan hired his services in August 2000. The events unfurled amid a creative struggle over Rollerball (2002), McTiernan’s biggest flop.

Finding business partners after a scandal of such magnitude is not an easy job. On the other hand, he’s not impressed by the state of the industry. “Most ‘blockbusters’ are comic books, and I don’t care for them. It’s just corporate product. There are no human beings in them, which is why we don’t have a human being in the White House right now,” he says. “The studios are now owned by large corporations. They make movies based on market research, and they all get the same market research. The people who used to run the studios were filmmakers. As much as they tried to pretend that they were only about money, they actually knew they were participating in the culture. And the ideas of the times, they all used to be in the movies. The overseers running the studios now are only concerned about money for the owners. I use the word ‘overseer’ specifically, do you know what that is? It’s usually used with cotton plantations [that were worked by enslaved people] in the South. The absentee owners would send overseers to watch their plantations and make sure that the cotton got to London.”

McTiernan gets emotional. He seems to be truly dismayed by all this. “Movies are one of the ways we educate our children. If for a whole generation, you make movies about superheroes, you’re saying that human beings are not worth telling stories about. And that’s a terrible thing to teach our children,” he says. The director’s own cinema is full of heroes, but he insists on their fragility, beginning with John McClane, Bruce Willis’s legendary character who spends the entirety of Die Hard getting beat up and risking his life. Many may have reflected on that vulnerability in 2022, when it was announced that Willis would be forced to retire due to frontotemporal dementia. “I saw Bruce about a year ago,” McTiernan says. How’s he doing? “He’s not well. He’s dealing with a very difficult thing. But his family is gathered around him, and they take very good care of him.”

Heroes of the past, heroes of the present

“Courage in a superhero is pointless. But courage and perseverance in a real human being, when there’s a real chance that they lose… That’s a story,” McTiernan told 500-plus people gathered in Madrid’s Palacio de la Prensa one day earlier. He also discussed his other contribution to the saga, Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), its third installment. “I’ve always refused to do sequels. This one, I did want to do it, because there were so many people saying that a Die Hard film would have to be in a limited geography, like on a boat or a bus. So I was being a bit naughty when I decided it was going to be in all of New York City.

“I tried to make Rollerball in Russia, but the studio wouldn’t let me,” he says when the topic of that film is breached. “I wanted it to be that it was just a couple of Americans in this crazy place that they didn’t understand, a horrible circus where people kept getting hurt and getting killed, and they had no idea what people were saying because it was all in Russian.” Set in a futuristic Kazakhstan, the film — a remake of a 1975 movie of the same name by Norman Jewison — focuses on a roller-skating sport that dazzles the public with its extreme violence. The version that hit theaters was highly sanitized, having had more than a half-hour of footage cut and many scenes reshot after it was poorly received by test audiences. McTiernan had already lost control in post-production of The 13th Warrior, though he says he recognizes that movie’s final cut as the “director’s cut” and dismisses the idea of an alternative version. “When they said they wanted to change the film, I just stepped away. So they were very cautious about what they changed, they didn’t change anything. There’s one silly music cut in the middle of the horses that is badly done.”

Despite the problems he’s faced in getting a movie financed, McTiernan says that during the last 15 years, he’s stayed active in the industry as an uncredited script doctor. “It’s something they pay very well for. I would hire script doctors while I was working on a movie, like Larry Ferguson and Will Goldman, [now] that’s sort of what I do. Usually, a script doctor never asks for credit. He asks for a lot of money instead.”

He’s also working on a project outside of film, a book of interviews that he wrote while he was incarcerated, for which he spoke with “an awful lot of people” and that, he says, is currently in the hands of his lawyer. “I was very disturbed by racism. There were about 150 African American kids there. They weren’t criminals, they were just local kids who were trying to make money the only way they could. They had the choice of working at McDonald’s or working for the local [criminal organization]. White people get their drugs from the doctors, but poor people have to get their drugs through whoever. It seems like all of that is about taking away votes, because those kids can never vote again,” he says. “It’s all hidden. They catch a kid with some small amount of drugs or something, they can’t afford [good lawyers], so whatever the prosecutor says, happens, and they’re never allowed to vote again. Nixon started something called the War on Drugs, which is really just a war on Black people. Trump would not be the president if they allowed people to vote. Trump is the president of the Confederacy. He’s the president of the KKK.”

McTiernan, whose films from the ‘80s and ‘90s are regarded as symbols of Americana, couldn’t be more disgusted by the current president. For years, he and his wife have lived outside the country. “I have a picture of my grandfather standing on the front of a ship in Le Havre in 1918. And I have a picture of my father in Tokyo as a young naval lieutenant in 1945. He got a disease in the South Pacific, which caused [damage to] his eyesight. My daughter did a lot of research on my mother’s family, she found that they were just simple dairy farmers in England who emigrated to Massachusetts in 1620. So I’ve had people in my family who have fought in every war for the United States, ever. And we live in Canada! It’s disturbing,” he says. “You know? The creation and unification of Europe is the best thing that’s happened in a thousand years. There’s peace for 2,000 miles, much better standards of living, you don’t have as much money concentrated in the hands of very few people, which is what we have. That comes from the economy of the Confederacy, where everything was owned by the top 2%, and then everybody else had nothing. That’s what they’re building in America. All of my films are very positive, quite patriotic. But, as I said, [being incarcerated] changed my attitudes about an awful lot of things.”

— If you get to do another film, it wouldn’t be so positive, after all you have learned?

— It’ll be positive, but in another way.

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