Interview with Finnish Film Director & Producer, Renny Harlin of Die Hard 2
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Short filmTranscript
00:00I want to come back around to chapters two and three 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 celebration 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, because it's limited to one location.
00:25It's McClane fighting for the love of his family.
00:28Like, from vengeance, with a vengeance on, he's a disgruntled drunk who doesn't really, he's not connected to his family.
00:35Like, the fact that McClane is fighting to save his family is, to me, what the connection of the familial roots of the first one,
00:44and keeping him limited to a location where he can't leave, he can't go too far away from it,
00:48has always been why I argue that Die Hard 2 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.
01:03But I think that that's exactly what I was talking about, replicating the experience, which you so intelligently analyzed.
01:10It's the environment.
01:12It's that he's forced into this thing.
01:13And more than anything, it's about the family.
01:16It's about, about his wife.
01:18It's like, I get goosebumps when I talk about this, because it's like, you're so, you know, you're hitting the nail right on the head.
01:27That this was, this was one of the, well, there were two disagreements I had with Bruce when doing that.
01:34One was that he had just become a movie star.
01:39He had done Moonlighting for 20 years, but now he had become a movie star.
01:43And he, he was hell bent on making Die Hard 2, a serious movie, like a real dramatic, serious action drama.
01:52And I spent countless days of just talking to him about replicating the experience.
02:00The audience loves your blue collar cop who is in love with his wife.
02:06Had the problems originally, but he's now in love with his wife.
02:10And, and he's an everyman and has a sarcastic sense of humor.
02:16That's the character the audience loves.
02:18And you can now just like say like, he doesn't crack any jokes anymore.
02:21He's just serious.
02:22It's like, that was one big disagreement.
02:24And the second one was regarding the family and like, well, I don't want to, I want to, I don't want to, you know, go, go too deep into, into personal opinions and, and, and things.
02:37But, but he was not so convinced that this, this family aspect was so important in the second.
02:45And it's integral.
02:46It's integral to his character.
02:48I kept telling him and everybody is that the whole point why this movie will work is that he is not saving the world from a nuclear disaster.
03:01And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and desperate and passionate about what he's doing is because his wife is there.
03:16It's about the wife and that's why when they finally get together in the end and they hug, it's like, that's it.
03:22It's not about like, yeah, we avoided a nuclear disaster.
03:26And, and, and actually when you think about it, like very few movies nowadays do this because it's like, you take any giant action movie.
03:35It's like, people are just always like racking their brain.
03:38Like, what are they going to do?
03:39They're going to spread anthrax everywhere in the universe.
03:41Or, you know, it's, it's the biggest, biggest nuclear weapon that is going to blow up the whole universe and, and that kind of stuff.
03:47Or it's a meteorite that is going to destroy the world.
03:50But, but, you know, when you can make it about the characters and, and people root for them and relate to them, that's, that's, that's gold.
03:59And I, I, I had to, I had to fight for some of the scenes like, like, and this, you know, it's an example of a scene that works.
04:07It's because it's emotionally, it's so strong that it works and it, the audience doesn't stop to think about the reality of it really.
04:13And it's when, when they talk to each other via phone, Bruce is on a pay phone and she's on kind of an air phone in the, on the plane, which, you know, I guess today you could do anything.
04:24But in those days, it's like a complete impossibility.
04:28But the audience thought it was emotionally so important that they connect.