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

Interview with Finnish Film Director & Producer, Renny Harlin of Die Hard 2

Transcript

00:00I want to come back around to Chapters 2 and 3 in a second, but I have to detour here.

00:04I have a book coming out on June 11th, and it's about Bruce Willis and his career, a

00:09celebration of his filmography.

00:11And I have to tell you that Die Hard 2, in my opinion, is the only true Die Hard sequel.

00:17It's the only one that legitimately feels like the original film, the original McTiernan,

00:23because it's limited to one location.

00:25It's McClane fighting for the love of his family.

00:29From Vengeance, with a Vengeance on, he's a disgruntled drunk who doesn't really, he's

00:33not connected to his family.

00:35The fact that McClane is fighting to save his family is, to me, what the connection

00:41of the familial roots of the first one, and keeping him limited to a location where he

00:46can't leave, he can't go too far away from it, has always been why I argue that Die Hard

00:512 is the best sequel in the franchise.

00:55And I couldn't agree with you more.

00:58I don't want to put down anybody else's movies, but, and that's not my intention.

01:04But I think that that's exactly what I was talking about, replicating the experience,

01:08which you so intelligently analyzed.

01:11It's the environment, it's that he's forced into this thing, and more than anything, it's

01:15about the family.

01:16It's about his wife.

01:19It's like, I get goosebumps when I talk about this, because you're so, you know, you're

01:25hitting the nail right on the head, that this was one of the, well, there were two

01:32disagreements I had with Bruce when doing that.

01:35One was that he had just become a movie star, he had done Moonlighting for 20 years, but

01:42now he had become a movie star, and he was hellbent on making Die Hard 2 a serious movie,

01:49like a real dramatic, serious action drama.

01:54And I spent countless days just talking to him about replicating the experience.

02:00The audience loves your blue-collar cop who is in love with his wife, who had the problems

02:07originally, but is now in love with his wife, and is an everyman, and has a sarcastic sense

02:16of humor.

02:17That's the character the audience loves.

02:18And you can now just say, like, he doesn't crack any jokes anymore, he's just serious.

02:22That was one big disagreement.

02:25And the second one was regarding the family, and like, well, I don't want to go too deep

02:34into personal opinions and things, but he was not so convinced that this family aspect

02:42was so important in the second one.

02:45It's integral, it's integral to his character.

02:48I kept telling him, and everybody around, is that the whole point why this movie will

02:56work is that he is not saving the world from a nuclear disaster.

03:02He's saving his wife, and for the course of it, he's saving all these other people, and

03:07he's an incredible hero.

03:08But why is he really so hellbent and desperate and passionate about what he's doing is because

03:15his wife is there.

03:16It's about the wife, and that's why when they finally get together in the end and they hug,

03:21it's like, that's it.

03:23It's not about like, yeah, we avoided a nuclear disaster.

03:28And actually, when you think about it, very few movies nowadays do this, because you take

03:34any giant action movie, it's like, people are just always racking their brain, like,

03:38what are they going to do?

03:39Are they going to spread anthrax everywhere in the universe, or it's the biggest, biggest

03:44nuclear weapon that is going to blow up the whole universe, and that kind of stuff.

03:47Or it's a meteorite that is going to destroy the world.

03:50But when you can make it about the characters and people root for them and relate to them,

03:59that's golden.

04:00I had to fight for some of the scenes, like, and this, it's an example of a scene that

04:06works because it's emotionally so strong that it works, and the audience doesn't stop to

04:11think about the reality of it, really.

04:14And it's when they talk to each other by a phone, Bruce is on a pay phone, and she's

04:19on kind of an air phone on the plane, which, you know, I guess today you could do anything,

04:24but in those days, it's like a complete impossibility, because it was emotionally so important that

04:31they connect.

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