John McTiernan, American film director Die Hardhas not given up hope of making another film 20 years after his last production, he said in an interview with AFP, while criticizing a film industry in the hands of “managers” who are “running to ruin.”
Q: During your speech at the Strasbourg European Fantastic Film Festival, you said that you had three film projects in mind, including a western. When will that be?
A: “I don’t know. Maybe never, we’ll see.”
Q: What is blocking you?
A: “Money. About twenty years ago, all the American movie studios were bought out by much bigger industries. Now, the people who run the studios are no longer film producers. They are managers. They don’t care what they produce, as long as it makes money. That’s why for the last twenty years, they’ve been making adaptations of comics. They can’t make movies about rich people, but they’re not going to make movies about poor people either. So they came up with a solution: make movies about things that aren’t human. Every genre lasts about six or seven years. Westerns: six, seven years. Thrillers: six, seven years. Every fad has lasted six, seven years. And they’ve been making comic book adaptations for twenty years! It’s not because it’s popular, it’s because it’s a political solution for the managers who run the studios.”
Q: But studios have always been owned by rich people, right?
A: “No, no, no, no, no. They were owned by film producers. Sure, they made a lot of money, but they weren’t that rich. They weren’t billionaires. All of Kubrick’s films had a message, you can’t make films like that anymore. Now the industry is really going to ruin. Because of Covid, nobody goes to the movies anymore. It happened before, in the 1950s, when television came along. The people who ran the studios were film producers, so they fought. They made new films, big screens, much better sound, splendid colours, and all that. People went back to the movies and it worked for 50 more years. The people who do that now are just managers for the rich.” There’s no difference between them and a cotton plantation owner in 1850s Mississippi. All they’re going to do is suck the brands dry and go somewhere else.”
Q: And you haven’t had the opportunity to make films in a more independent framework, with smaller budgets?
A: “No projects have worked. We were going to do one when COVID hit. I have one or two that look like they might work, but it’s a lot harder to finance independent films. But I hope it works.”
Q: When did you do Die Harddid you feel that it was going to turn Bruce Willis into a superstar?
A: “No, we didn’t know anything about it, obviously. Neither did the studio, because he had made a few films that didn’t work. And just before the film came out, they took him off the bill…”
Q: What kind of actor was he?
A: “He wanted to bring freshness, honesty, good acting. In the movie business, there are so many scenes that have been played countless times. People will play them exactly the same way, over and over again, because they’ve seen them played that way. Bruce (Willis) always refused to do that. He always looked for the essence of a scene and found a new way to play it.”
