Die Hard With a Podcast: Episode 01 - The Making of Die Hard (2024)

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Sep 6, 2018

There's no better place to start than at the beginning – so, forthe first episode of Die Hard With a Podcast, we're taking a lookat the making of Die Hard. For a film with so manyincredible stunts and huge explosions, it's hard to believe it'sbased on a book – or is technically a sequel to a 1960s FrankSinatra flick. On this show, we go from acquiring the rights to thestory, crewing up the film, writing the script, casting its stars,and rolling at the Fox Plaza building in Los Angeles. Learn whyDie Hard was fully expected to flop, why Bruce Willis'ssalary was so controversial, and how exactly they pulled off Hans'sfall from the 30th floor.

As we kick off this limited series, let us know what you think!Drop us a line at diehardwithapodcast@gmail.com,or visit our site at www.diehardwithapodcast.com.

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Full Episode Transcript

Welcome to the podcast, pal.

My name is Simone Chavoor, and thank you for joining me for DieHard. With. A! Podcast! The show that examines the best Americanaction movie of all time: Die Hard.

This is the first episode of this new podcast! It’s been a kindof crazy labor of love, putting the show together. Over a year ago,I started a podcast called Black Mass Appeal with the help of someof my friends. That show is about, shall we say... alternativereligions... and it’s been a ton of fun to put together and I’velearned so much doing it.

But now, I’m starting on a new project about something else Ilove.

I can’t recall exactly when I became a die hard Die Hard fan. Ithink my story is probably pretty typical; falling in love with themovie as I watched it at home on VHS, or badly censored on TV. I doremember that when I moved to Los Angeles in 2006 to take aninternship on the Fox lot, I never got over my excitement atdriving past the Fox Plaza building – Nakatomi Tower – every day. Igot a gray sweatshirt and a red Sharpie to make my own “Now I havea machine gun, ho ho ho” costume for my Christmas party. I attendedthe Alamo Drafthouse’s “Nakatomi ‘88”-themed screening in SanFrancisco. And yes, I became one of those annoying drunks who’d goon at length about why Die Hard is a Christmas movie after a coupleof co*cktails.

After yet another friend asked me for quick notes on whether ornot Die Hard is a Christmas movie in order to settle an officedebate, I sat down with a (couple) glass(es) of whiskey, rewatchedthe movie, and hammered out a four-page, fully-cited essay on thematter. (Which you can read on the website.) Yes, this is how Ispend my Friday nights.

But the fact that I did that made something abundantly clear: Ilove Die Hard. I have a lot to say about it. And I want to shareit.

So here we are! This podcast is going to have nine episodes thateach explore different aspects of the movie. We’ll look at actionmovies of the 80s, we’ll look at our heroes and villains, how womenand minorities are portrayed, and why Die Hard is so popular again.There’ll also be a BONUS episode… You can find out more about thatin just a minute.

So, before we dive in, a little housekeeping. Die Hard With aPodcast will release every other Thursday, wrapping up right beforeChristmas. If you want to get in touch...

Finally, if you like this show, kick me a buck or two onPatreon. Patreon helps to offset the cost of doing this show, sounless you have a vault with $640 million in bearer bonds you canopen up for me, pledge a little bit on Patreon.

There are some cool bonuses you can get, like stickers,ornaments, and the bonus episode – and you can even help decidewhat you want the bonus episode to be on! So check that out, andpitch in if you can. And if you can’t – the best thing you can dois just listen and tell your friends. Leave a review on iTunes –that helps put this show in front of more people, so everyone canget in on the Die Hard love.

All right, on with the show.

For our first episode, I thought what better place to begin thanwhere Die Hard began? So: this is the story of how Die Hard gotmade.

The novel Die Hard doesn’t seem like one of those movies thatstarted out as a book – there’s a lot of explosions in the movieand all – but it did. In fact, it started out as a sequel, to botha book and another movie.

In 1966, writer Roderick Thorp wrote a novel called TheDetective. It was an adult take on the cop genre, with the maincharacter, private investigator Joe Leland, taking on a gritty caseof supposed suicide that leads him to uncover murder andcorruption.

The novel was turned into a movie of the same name in 1968 by20th Century Fox. The film starred Frank Sinatra as Joe, and thefilm did decent box office while Sinatra’s performance was wellreviewed.

Over a decade later, in 1979, Thorp wrote a sequel to TheDetective with the express intention of turning it into anothermovie for Sinatra. The book was called Nothing Lasts Forever (whichsounds more like a James Bond movie if you ask me). In it,now-retired Joe Leland goes to visit his daughter – not his wife! –at her high-rise office in Los Angeles at Christmas. While he’sthere, terrorists take over and… a lot of the rest is the same isthe movie. Kinda. We’ll get into that on another episode. Anyway,it’s kind of like how author Michael Crichton wrote The Lost Worldexpressly to be made into a sequel to the movie Jurassic Park, orThomas Harris wrote Hannibal to be a made into a sequel for theSilence of the Lambs. (You’ll come to find out that Silence of theLambs is another favorite movie of mine…)

Buying the rights According to Thorp, future Die Hard associateproducer Lloyd Levin showed the book Nothing Lasts Forever tofuture producer Lawrence Gordon. Gordon took one look at the cover,with a burning skyscraper and circling helicopter, and said, “Idon’t need ro read it. Buy it.” So, 20th Century Fox bought themovie rights to this novel, too.

Now, Die Hard was actually produced by Silver Pictures, theproduction company founded by mega-producer Joel Silver in 1985.20th Century Fox ended up being more of the distributor. (At somepoint in the early 80s, before Silver Pictures picked it up, therights to Nothing Lasts Forever were actually owned by ClintEastwood, who had intended on starring in the movie himself.)

Joel Silver was just coming off of a hot streak of iconic 80saction movies like Commando, Lethal Weapon, Predator, and ActionJackson, and he was able to pull from the talent behind thosemovies to put Die Hard into production.

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The crew Silver offered the gig to the director of 1987’sPredator, John McTiernan. Back in 1985, McTiernan had turned downdirecting Commando, and he almost turned down Die Hard, too. Infact, he tried a couple of times to turn it down. McTiernan saidthe material was just too dark and cynical for him. (And if you’veread Nothing Lasts Forever, you’ll totally get it. That sh*t isbleak.) Eventually, he came around because he came up with a plotchange that would “lighten things up.” “The original screenplay wasa grim terrorist movie,” he said. “On my second week working on it,I said, 'Guys, there's no part of terrorism that's fun. Robbers arefun bad guys. Let's make this a date movie.’ And they had thecourage to do it.”

So instead of terrorists, McTiernan’s bad guys would be pullingoff a heist. “I liked the idea of imagining what would happen whenone of those Baader-Meinhof types got tired of fighting his andothers’ political battles and decided to show them what a criminalis,” he said.

McTiernan also changed things up with inspiration from anunlikely source: Shakespeare. The original story took place overthe course of three days, which was way too long. Now, borrowingfrom the structure of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the entirely ofthe plot would transpire over a single night.

To hammer out the story, writers Jeb Stuart and Steven de Souzawere hired. Jeb Stuart wrote the original script, and Steven deSouza was responsible for a lot of the on-the-fly revisions thatwould take place during shooting.

Die Hard was Jeb Stuart’s first film credit if you can believeit, and after Die Hard he later went on to write Another 48 Hours,Fire Down Below, and the really really amazing The Fugitive. DeSouza had previously written 48 Hours, Commando, and The RunningMan, and he would go on to write Die Hard 2, Hudson Hawk, Ricochet,Beverly Hills Cop III, Street Fighter, and Judge Dredd. Basically,these are the guys to go to for action thrillers.

The cast But who to go to to be the star of this actionflick?

Contractually, because Die Hard is technically a sequel to TheDetective, the role had to be offered back to Frank Sinatra… whowas 73 years old at the time. Fortunately, Sinatra decided he was“too old and too rich” to be running around making moviesanymore.

By not going with an older gentleman as the lead, the filmmakerswere now free to explore new options for the lead role. Jeb Stuartdescribes how he discovered the core of the film:

"I had no idea how to make this into a movie," he said. Aftergetting into an argument with his wife, Stuart said he got into hiscar and took off. "It's in the days before cell phones andliterally the minute I got on the highway, I knew I was wrong andknew I had to apologize," he said. He wasn't paying attention tothe road and ran into a refrigerator box. "I went through it at 65miles per hour and, fortunately, it was empty," he explained. "Ipulled over to the side of the road, my heart was pounding and Ithought, 'I know what this movie is about!' It's not about a65-year-old man... It's about a 30-year-old man, who should havesaid he's sorry to his wife and then bad sh*t happens." He wenthome and wrote 30 pages of the script that very night. Hopefully heapologized to his wife first.

When it came to casting the role of the now-renamed JohnMcClane, the filmmakers seemed to try every male movie star intown. The part was offered to…

Sly Stallone, Don Johnson, Harrison Ford, Richard Gere, ClintEastwood (as already mentioned), Burt Reynolds, Robert De Niro,Charles Bronson, Nick Nolte, Mel Gibson, James Caan, Paul Newman,and Richard Dean Anderson (yes, MacGyver!).

These actors ran the gamut from musclebound he-men to moresophisticated sorts. “When I first started working on it, they weretalking about Richard Gere,” said John McTiernan. “The part wasvery buttoned down. He’s wearing a sport jacket, and he’s verysuave and sophisticated and all that stuff. It was a sort of IanFleming hero, the gentleman man of action.”

But what all those actors had in common was they all turned therole down.

Going to Bruce Willis was seen as a desperate move in the filmindustry. After all, he was a *sniff* television actor, not a moviestar. Willis was currently on the show Moonlighting, which was acomedy-drama about two private detectives. He had been in twomovies by then as well, Blind Date and Sunset, but neither had beenhits.

Still, Willis was a charismatic, charming actor. Demographicdata from CinemaScore, an entertainment polling and researchcompany, said that Willis was popular with audiences. And onceagain, producer Lawrence Gordon stepped in to take decisive action.Bruce Willis tells it himself:

“I know that Larry Gordon was instrumental in me getting thejob. What’s that expression? Success has many fathers, failure isan orphan? Well, a lot of people take credit for my appearance inthe first Die Hard, but Larry Gordon was really the guy. He lobbiedfor me. And then got them to give me an outrageous sum of money foracting in the film.”

It really was an outrageous sum of money. Willis was paid $5million – more than almost any other leading man at the time.(Dustin Hoffman got $5.5 million for Tootsie, and Stallone got $12million for Rambo III.) But multi-million dollar paychecks wereusually reserved for only the biggest names in the business. Eventhen, the figures were only in the $2 or $3 million range. A TVactor getting this kind of payday sparked a legit panic amongstudios. In a New York Times article titled, “If Willis Gets $5Million, How Much for Redford?,” writer Aljean Harmetz calls it“equivalent to an earthquake. The map of movie-star salaries mustnow be redrawn.”

In response, Leonard Goldberg, president and chief operatingofficer of 20th Century Fox got a little testy. He told the NewYork Times for that article, ''Die Hard hinges on the lead. We hada very exciting script and a team of producers who deliveredPredator and Commando. We reached out for Bruce Willis because wethought we had the potential of a major film which is a starvehicle.''

But even after all of that, the reason Willis could even takethe role came down to his Moonlighting co-star, Cybill Shepherd.Shepherd announced that she was pregnant – and because thepregnancy couldn’t be written into the show, Moonlighting producerGlenn Caron put the show on hiatus and gave everyone 11 weeksoff.

At last, Die Hard had its star. Casting the villain to McClane’shero was less fraught, but still a bit of a gamble. The role wasoriginally offered to Sam Neill, but he turned it down. Then, inthe spring of 1987, casting director Jackie Burch saw Alan Rickmanplaying the dastardly Valmont in the Broadway production ofDangerous Liaisons – a role which earned him a Tony Awardnomination.

Rickman was known for theater, but, at the age of 41, had neverdone a movie. When he was offered the role of Hans Gruber, hisinstinct was to turn it down. He didn’t want to be a terrorist inan action movie.

Rickman said (no, I’m not even going to attempt doing Rickman’svoice here): "I didn’t know anything about L.A. I didn’t knowanything about the film business… I’d never made a film before, butI was extremely cheap. I read [the script], and I said, 'What thehell is this? I’m not doing an action movie.' Agents and peoplesaid: ‘Alan, you don’t understand, this doesn’t happen. You’ve onlybeen in L.A. two days, and you’ve been asked to do this film.'"

Of course, in the end, Rickman accepted the role.

Rounding out the cast were Bonnie Bedelia as John’s wife Holly,Reginald VelJohnson as Sergeant Al Powell, Paul Gleason as DeputyPolice Chief Dwayne Robinson, William Atherton as reporter RichardThornberg, James Shigeta as Joseph Takagi, De’voreaux White as limodriver Argyle, and a whole mess of big tall dudes as Hans’s gang ofrobbers.

While Hans is supposed to be German, Alan Rickman is British,and his right hand man Karl, played by Alexander Gudunov, isRussian. The rest of the crew was portrayed as more… vaguelyinternational. That’s because there were chosen more for theirintimidating look and height – 9 of the 12 were over 6 feet tall.And they certainly didn’t speak German – most of what they said in“German” was pretty much gibberish.

As a final bit of casting trivia, there are three PlayboyPlaymates in Die Hard. Kym Malin (May 1982) is the woman discoveredhaving sex in the office when the terrorists arrive. Terri LynnDoss (July 1988) is the woman who hugs someone at the airport. AndPamela Stein's November 1987 actual centerfold is the one on thewall of the under-construction building hallway.

The set Speaking of the under-construction building hallway – wehave to talk about the set.

Now, back in 1975, Roderick Thorp saw the movie The ToweringInferno, and dreamed about a man running through a skyscraperchased by men with guns. It’s what led to the high-rise setting ofNothing Lasts Forever, and eventually Die Hard. If you’ll remember,the cover of the book, with the building on fire, was whatconvinced Lawrence Gordon to buy the rights, after all.

Call it coincidence or good luck or a sign of things to come.But 20th Century Fox was just wrapping up construction on their newoffice building, a brown steel-and-glass building at 2121 Avenue ofthe Stars in Century City, which would be named Fox Plaza. Or, aswe know it better: Nakatomi Tower. It was production designerJackson De Govia’s idea to use the building as Die Hard’slocation.

Getting to use the building required extensive negotiations withFox. They had to agree to no daytime filming, and no explosions(whoops). According to McTiernan, "We had to periodically rundownstairs and apologize to the lawyer beneath us, saying 'we'reabout to fire machine guns; will you excuse us?'" The scene wherethe SWAT team’s armored vehicle knocks over a stair railing in thefront of the building caused months of negotiations alone. But inthe end, Die Hard got its location, and Fox not only got toshowcase its shiny new headquarters – in fact, a lot of earlypromotional material featured only the building, and not BruceWillis – but they charged themselves rent for the building’s use.That’s actually pretty common in the film industry. The bookkeepingin the movie business is… interesting.

The interior of the building was still incomplete, so any shotsyou see of under-construction offices were actually shot in theunfinished parts of the building. Other sets were constructed atStage 15 in the regular studio lot. Using the half-finished areasallowed McTiernan and cinematographer Jan De Bont to placefluorescent lights in the ground and have half-finished structuresin the foreground. The maze-like feeling of the offices andhallways was deliberate.

Jackson De Govia said, “When I first read the script, I saw ajungle maze. It reminded me of the book High Rise by J.G. Ballard,in which a modern building becomes a tribal battleground. I wantedto make a building where that kind of action could take place. Whenthe building is a jungle, people revert to utter realism, which issavagery… There are entire sequences where McClane moves throughthe building not touching the floor, like a predator in a jungle.”Although you might think so with a quote like that, De Govia didn’twork on Predator with McTiernan. De Govia had previously worked ona variety of movies, including Red Dawn, so he did have someexperience with everyday folks fighting terrorists…

De Govia did carry a visual element from McTiernan’s Predator toDie Hard, though: both Schwarzenegger and Willis crawl throughwaterfalls during the action. You see, the lobby of the NakatomiCorporation’s office is a dead-on copy of the famous Frank LloydWright-designed house Fallingwater, complete with stone walls and,uh, falling water. De Govia was inspired by Japanese corporationsbuying up American institutions – something that was freaking outAmericans in the late 80s. He created a backstory where Nakatomibought the actual house and had it reassembled in their lobby onthe 30th floor of the building, waterfall and all.

Directing style Now, putting McClane under waterfalls, intoventilation ducts and elevator shafts, under tables, and swinginghim from firehoses certainly play to that guerilla-jungle spirit ofDie Hard’s set.

But the problem with a maze-like set is making sure the audienceknows where everyone is, and where the action is taking placerelative to the other players. Brad Bird, director of TheIncredibles and Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, analyzed DieHard for Rolling Stone magazine.

He said, “John McTiernan’s direction is an amazing piece ofintricate craftsmanship. What a lot of filmmakers have troublecommunicating is a sense of geography. For instance, one floor of abuilding under construction looks a lot like any other floor. ButMcTiernan put in little things, like a Playboy centerfold hung upby a construction worker. At first it seems like a visual joke, butit’s really there to identify that floor, so when Willis encountersit again, the audience knows exactly where he is. Many directorsalso shoot action very sloppily – they shoot up close and cutaround a lot and put in all these big noises to distract you. Butin Die Hard, you know where every character is every second of themovie. Things are going by at a fast clip, but you’re neverlost.”

This kind of dynamic but geographically-clear directing wasMcTiernan’s signature style, already on display in his previousfilm, Predator, as Arnold and his crew battle a literally invisiblealien in the South American jungle.

McTiernan is known for helping the audience understand therelative locations of people and things within a space by using asfew cuts as possible; instead, he keeps rolling as he pans thecamera from something on one side of the room to the other side ofthe room. For example, in Die Hard, when the building’s alarm goesoff and the henchman in the lobby acknowledges it, the camera movesfrom the alarm on the right to the henchman on the left, withoutcutting – just like you’re there yourself, turning your head tosee. You can tell he’s sitting just to the side of the blinkingalarm. Similarly, McTiernan will rack focus from something in theforeground to something in the background, or vice versa. Again,this creates a feeling of depth within a single shot and allows theviewer to follow where things are with their own eyes. It avoidsconfusion, and is in a way more efficient as you allow the audienceto track things themselves instead of having to explain thingsevery time.

Connecting these shots with a moving camera also keeps things,well, moving. The camera roams around, taking in the shot in anatural way, the way your own eye would. The objects and peoplewithin the frame are arranged to guide your eye (and therefore thecamera, as it mimics the movement of your eye) from one thing tothe next, leading you to discover important clues to the story.McTiernan says, “The camera isn't just moving for the sake ofkeeping it moving. The camera is an active narrator in a thriller.The camera has to tell you how to evaluate every piece informationyou get and put it into context.”

McTiernan was able to achieve this kind of visual storytellingwith the work of his supremely talented cinematographer, Jan DeBont. De Bont was born in the Netherlands and had quite a body ofwork already; McTiernan was already fascinated by what wasconsidered “European-style” camera movement, and had particularlyadmired De Bont’s work with director Paul Verhoeven in The FourthMan.

McTiernan was trained in this so-called “European style” offilmmaking, and it fits right in with what we’ve already discussedabout his style. You see, not only do McTiernan (with De Bont) movethe camera to naturally create a sense of geography, they alsoenhance emotion and tension with “unmotivated moves.” By moving thecamera (tilting, panning) and zooming in on someone’s face, theyheighten their expression. It’s just like when you’re in anuncomfortable or tense situation, and the first thing you do islook at everyone’s faces to understand how they’re reacting, so youcan know how to react, too.

Production Die Hard’s principal photography began on November 2,1987. The film had a surprisingly low budget of $28 million – it’dmore than double that for the sequel. Once everything was in place,things had to move fast – 20th Century Fox wanted to release thefilm the very next year. That lead to a lot of making sh*t up asthey went. A lot.

The script wasn’t even entirely done when they began shooting.The heart of John McClane was still a bit of a mystery. Sure, theyknew Bruce Willis was not going to be playing McClane like he wouldhave the hardened cop Joe Leland from Nothing Lasts Forever, butthere was still something missing. It wasn’t until halfway throughshooting that Willis and McTiernan realized that John McClanesimply doesn’t like himself all that much. You know that momentwhere John argues with Holly in her office at the beginning of themovie, and he bangs his head on the doorframe after she walks out?That was a reshoot done way later, once they’d clued in to whatmakes McClane tick.

McClane’s sarcastic humor was also the result of on-the-flyrewrites. Bruce Willis said about shooting, “I remember that thescript was in flux. It would change and they would rewrite scenesand we would come in and there'd be new scenes. I'll give you anexample. The second biggest line in Die Hard was 'Come out to thecoast, we'll get together, have a few laughs…' That line waswritten while I was in this mock-up of a ventilator shaft, trappedin there, I couldn't come out. In those days, a cell phone lookedlike a shoe box, they were enormous. And someone had to hand me aphone with Steven de Souza, the writer for the rewrites on DieHard, and he'd tell me a line, they'd turn the camera on, we'dshoot it.”

There’s some debate about whether or not the biggest line in themovie was the result of improv or not. In a 2013 interview withRyan Seacrest, Willis said that “Yippee-kay-yay, motherf*cker” was“just a throwaway. I was just trying to crack up the crew and Inever thought it was going to be allowed to stay in the film.”

Then again, writer Steven De Souza recalled the creation of thatline a little differently. “Bruce and I grew up watching the sameTV shows,” he said. “Roy Rogers used to say ‘Yippee ki yay, kids.’So it had to become ‘Yippee ki yay, motherf*cker’ in the movie.That line was from me. Whenever you think you’re writing a linethat’s going to catch on, it never does. A lot of people, cough,Sylvester Stallone, cough, think they can invent them. The line youthink is going to catch on never catches on and the audiencedecides what is the takeaway line.” Damn. De Souza shading bothWillis and Stallone at the same time…

Aspects of Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber were yet to crystalize,too. The filmmakers wanted John and Hans to have a “mano a mano”meeting somehow, before the final showdown. When De Souza learnedthat Rickman could do a “good” American accent (which… Nodisrespect, but I think good is up for debate…), he put it togetherwith the fact that up until this face to face meeting, John hadonly heard Hans, and speaking with a German accent, over the radio.So, Hans, searching for his detonators, runs into John… andpretends to be a hostage named Bill Clay who has slipped away.

To stay on this scene for just a minute longer: there’s a bit ofa “controversy” where it’s not explicitly explained how Johnfigures out that Hans is only pretending to be a hostage. How wouldJohn know not to give Hans a loaded gun? Well, in an earlier scenethat was cut from the final film, everyone in Hans’s gangsynchronizes their watches – and they’re all wearing the same watch– something McClane, as a cop, would have noticed as he searchedthe bodies of the bad guys he’d already snuffed. Steven De Souzasays, “When Bruce offers the cigarette to Alan Rickman, Bruce seesthe watch. You see his eyes look at the watch. That's how he knowsthat he is one of the terrorists.”

So supposedly this is some big plot hole caused by the cutscene. But if I can interject for just a second – and I can, it’smy podcast – I think that’s bullsh*t. It’s not a plot hole. Wedon’t need it spelled out for us how John figures out that Hans isone of the terrorists. John’s a cop, and clearly a good one – Imean, he’d survived that far into the movie, he’s gotta be prettyskilled. The audience can fill in that he caught something wedidn’t. He can be smart; he can know things the audience doesn'tknow. He can notice the watches, or he can have a gut feeling, orhe can just have the common sense to not hand a loaded gun to aperfect stranger in a really dangerous situation. Anyway.

When it comes to plot holes, there is one in Die Hard that iseasy to miss, but is, in fact, logically inconsistent. Up until twoweeks before the end of shooting, filmmakers still didn’t know howthe gang was going to try to escape. They decided that the gang’splan would be to drive away through the chaos of the inevitabledisaster scene in an ambulance that was hidden in the back of thebox truck they used to drive into the building. Not a bad plan…Except for the part where they don’t bring the ambulance with themat the start of the movie. If you look at Hans and company arrivingat Nakatomi Tower in their truck, you can see the truck is way toosmall to contain another vehicle… and besides, it’s not therebehind the men as they wait to unload. Whoops.

The stunts But then, we’re not coming to Die Hard to pick apartit* continuity. We’re here for some action!

Die Hard employed 37 stuntmen, under stunt coordinator CharliePicerni. Stunt doubles were used for many of the action scenes –this is Die Hard, not Mission: Impossible, after all. Things alwayshave the potential to go disastrously wrong, and there were a fewon-set accidents, but fortunately none were too grave. When McClanegoes down the ventilation shaft, you can see him fall – and thatwasn’t on purpose. The stunt man was supposed to grab the veryfirst ledge within the shaft, but he missed – and editor FrankUrioste kept his fall in the final film, cutting back to McClanecatching himself on a ledge way below the one he was supposed tograb.

One of Die Hard’s stunt performers is actually a TechnicalAcademy Award-winner for his Decelerator System, which is a cablesystem that allows stunt performers to “fall” more safely from ahigher height, and to be shot from any angle. Ken Bates explainshis invention: “When we did Die Hard, I started using a devicecalled a Descender, to do controlled falls. In other words, we do acontrolled fall from anywhere up to 105 stories. The fall iscontrolled because you’re descending on a small cable. If the filmis undercranked, it looks like you’re falling.” Bates clearly knewwhat he was doing with his Decelerator System, since he was the onewho acted as Rickman’s stunt double during his fall from NakatomiTower. (He also doubled Bruce Willis when he leapt off the top ofthe building with a firehose.)

Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman did perform a couple of stunts oftheir own. John McTiernan recalled, “The first time we got to thepoint in a scene where you would insert a stuntman, I told Bruce hewould only have to take it up to here, and he then could go sitdown. He said, ‘No, I want to do it.’ And all of a sudden, you sawthat New Jersey street kid in him come out. It’s not that he didanything dangerous, but it was a side that he had not shown usbefore.”

Bruce Willis explained why he was so game. “I think doing my ownstunts whenever possible adds a lot to the production value of thefilm… John can get the camera close, because he doesn’t need todisguise the stuntman. But on a personal level, it satisfies thelittle boy who still lives in me who gets to shoot guns, kill thebad guys and be a hero while doing jumps and falls and swingingfrom ropes.”

McClane famously ran around Nakatomi Tower without shoes on, butBruce Willis got a little more protection. He was given a pair ofrubber feet to wear – they make him look a little hobbit-like,since they had to slip on over his own feet. You can see them inthe scene when McClane jumps off the edge of the roof as the FBIshoots at him from the helicopter.

McTiernan and weapons specialist Michael Papac also dialed upthe intensity of the stunt weapons for added realism. As in mostmovies, the firearms in Die Hard are real weapons that have beenmodified to shoot blanks. But these blanks were speciallyhandcrafted by Pacpac. McTiernan wanted the muzzle flash to beexaggerated and the sound to be extra-loud. He got what he wanted,but not without a price. When McClane shoots a terrorist fromunderneath a conference table, the gun was in such close proximityto his unprotected ears that the bangs gave Willis permanenthearing loss. Willis said, “Due to an accident on the first DieHard, I suffer two-thirds partial hearing loss in my left ear andhave a tendency to say, ‘Whaaa?’”

The deafening blanks got to Rickman, too. Every time he firedhis gun, Rickman would flinch. McTiernan was forced to cut awayfrom Rickman’s reactions so his expression wouldn’t be caught onfilm, but you can see one of them right after Hans shoots Takagi atthe beginning of the movie.

The most famous stunt in the movie is Hans Gruber’s fall fromthe window of Nakatomi Tower. We’ve already discussed how stuntmanKen Bates was able to pull off the actual fall, but it’s thebeginning of the fall, where we see Hans’s shocked face in slowmotion, that makes it so heart-stopping. That, of course, isactually Alan Rickman falling, although from not quite as high aheight.

"John McTiernan had to talk Alan into doing that shot becauseeven stuntmen will generally not fall backwards – they like to seewhere they're going," said visual effects supervisor RichardEdlund. For Hans’s fatal fall, Alan Rickman was to be dropped from25 feet in the air, with a blue air bag below him and a cameraabove him to capture his expression. The camera was shooting at 270frames per second to capture Hans’s plummeting face at a rate tentimes slower than normal.

Rickman was understandably apprehensive about the stunt. Itdidn’t help that, legendarily, the crew told him they’d give him acountdown of three, two, one, go – and drop him on “Go” – andinstead… they dropped him on one. Rickman wasn’t exactly happy withthe crew for that surprise bit of acting motivation, butmiraculously, they convinced him to do a second take. Ultimately,the crew’s prank (?) worked – the first take is the one you see inthe film.

Release and reception Die Hard wrapped in March 1988, just fourmonths before the film was set to be released. As the filmmakersgot to work on post-production, the studio did not exactlydemonstrate a lot of faith in the film. As mentioned earlier, theearly publicity didn’t even have Bruce Willis on it; the posterfeatured the Fox Plaza building as the star of the show. Theadvertising campaign for the film was short, too – especially bytoday’s standards. In contrast, I think I saw the trailer forMission Impossible: Fallout in front of every movie I saw for atleast two years before it was released!

Everyone seemed worried. Test audiences rated the movie poorly,and “had no interest in seeing [Bruce Willis] dart around askyscraper shooting terrorists.” The New York Times summer moviepreview doubted Willis was “enough of a movie star to carry thefilm,” and Newsweek’s David Ansen was even more harsh, sayingWillis was “the most unpopular actor ever to get $5 million formaking a movie.” Film critic Roger Ebert gave it a mere two stars,and criticized the stupidity of the deputy police chief character,claiming that "all by himself he successfully undermines the lasthalf of the movie."

20th Century Fox was convinced it had a flop on its hands. Themovie was released on July 15th, 1988, in only 21 theaters in 20cities, where it earned only $600,000 its first weekend.

But then… audiences liked it. They loved it. They kept comingback. In the second week, the movie expanded to 1,200 theatersacross the country. After Die Hard opened wide, it started out inthird place at the box office, taking in $7 million. From there,strong word of mouth took it to the top, where it lived in the topfive for ten weeks. It only dropped into sixth place in October.Die Hard finished its theatrical run with $83 million domestic andanother $57 million worldwide – completely making up for that $5million paycheck Bruce Willis got. It was the seventh-highestgrossing movie of 1988. It also enjoyed a long, successful run onhome video – something we’ll talk about later in this series.

Not only was Die Hard a financial triumph, it received Oscarnominations for editing, visual effects, sound and sound editing.And it turned Bruce Willis into a star. The kind of star who’dlater join Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone – the veryaction stars he essentially replaced – in opening up a chainrestaurant themed on Hollywood celebrity.

And so, that’s the story of how Die Hard got made. There arecertainly parts I’ve missed, or pieces of the story that havechanged over time. Filmmaking stories sometimes take on the qualityof oral histories, especially when the resulting film becomes alegend.

Throughout the rest of this podcast series, we’ll explore whyDie Hard has become so celebrated among action movies, 80s movies,movies in general. I’m excited to invite you to the party with me.Come out to the show, we’ll get together have a few laughs…

Anyway, thank you for joining me. Happy trails, andyippee-kai-yay, motherf*ckers.

Die Hard With a Podcast: Episode 01 - The Making of Die Hard (2024)

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