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Bruce Willis And 'Die Hard 2’s' Renny Harlin Had ‘Two Disagreements’ While Filming The Sequel, And I Agree With The Director On Both
Cinema Blend
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21/03/2025
Interview with Finnish Film Director & Producer, Renny Harlin of Die Hard 2
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Short film
Transcript
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00:00
I want to come back around to Chapters 2 and 3 in a second, but I have to detour here.
00:04
I have a book coming out on June 11th, and it's about Bruce Willis and his career, a
00:09
celebration of his filmography.
00:11
And I have to tell you that Die Hard 2, in my opinion, is the only true Die Hard sequel.
00:17
It's the only one that legitimately feels like the original film, the original McTiernan,
00:23
because it's limited to one location.
00:25
It's McClane fighting for the love of his family.
00:29
From Vengeance, with a Vengeance on, he's a disgruntled drunk who doesn't really, he's
00:33
not connected to his family.
00:35
The fact that McClane is fighting to save his family is, to me, what the connection
00:41
of the familial roots of the first one, and keeping him limited to a location where he
00:46
can't leave, he can't go too far away from it, has always been why I argue that Die Hard
00:51
2 is the best sequel in the franchise.
00:55
And I couldn't agree with you more.
00:58
I don't want to put down anybody else's movies, but, and that's not my intention.
01:04
But I think that that's exactly what I was talking about, replicating the experience,
01:08
which you so intelligently analyzed.
01:11
It's the environment, it's that he's forced into this thing, and more than anything, it's
01:15
about the family.
01:16
It's about his wife.
01:19
It's like, I get goosebumps when I talk about this, because you're so, you know, you're
01:25
hitting the nail right on the head, that this was one of the, well, there were two
01:32
disagreements I had with Bruce when doing that.
01:35
One was that he had just become a movie star, he had done Moonlighting for 20 years, but
01:42
now he had become a movie star, and he was hellbent on making Die Hard 2 a serious movie,
01:49
like a real dramatic, serious action drama.
01:54
And I spent countless days just talking to him about replicating the experience.
02:00
The audience loves your blue-collar cop who is in love with his wife, who had the problems
02:07
originally, but is now in love with his wife, and is an everyman, and has a sarcastic sense
02:16
of humor.
02:17
That's the character the audience loves.
02:18
And you can now just say, like, he doesn't crack any jokes anymore, he's just serious.
02:22
That was one big disagreement.
02:25
And the second one was regarding the family, and like, well, I don't want to go too deep
02:34
into personal opinions and things, but he was not so convinced that this family aspect
02:42
was so important in the second one.
02:45
It's integral, it's integral to his character.
02:48
I kept telling him, and everybody around, is that the whole point why this movie will
02:56
work is that he is not saving the world from a nuclear disaster.
03:02
He's saving his wife, and for the course of it, he's saving all these other people, and
03:07
he's an incredible hero.
03:08
But why is he really so hellbent and desperate and passionate about what he's doing is because
03:15
his wife is there.
03:16
It's about the wife, and that's why when they finally get together in the end and they hug,
03:21
it's like, that's it.
03:23
It's not about like, yeah, we avoided a nuclear disaster.
03:28
And actually, when you think about it, very few movies nowadays do this, because you take
03:34
any giant action movie, it's like, people are just always racking their brain, like,
03:38
what are they going to do?
03:39
Are they going to spread anthrax everywhere in the universe, or it's the biggest, biggest
03:44
nuclear weapon that is going to blow up the whole universe, and that kind of stuff.
03:47
Or it's a meteorite that is going to destroy the world.
03:50
But when you can make it about the characters and people root for them and relate to them,
03:59
that's golden.
04:00
I had to fight for some of the scenes, like, and this, it's an example of a scene that
04:06
works because it's emotionally so strong that it works, and the audience doesn't stop to
04:11
think about the reality of it, really.
04:14
And it's when they talk to each other by a phone, Bruce is on a pay phone, and she's
04:19
on kind of an air phone on the plane, which, you know, I guess today you could do anything,
04:24
but in those days, it's like a complete impossibility, because it was emotionally so important that
04:31
they connect.
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2:41
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