Die Hard
Die Hard is a 1988 American action film directed by John McTiernan and written by Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza, based on the 1979 novel Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp. It stars Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, Alexander Godunov, and Bonnie Bedelia, with Reginald VelJohnson, William Atherton, Paul Gleason, and Hart Bochner in supporting roles. Die Hard follows a New York City police detective, John McClane, who becomes entangled in a terrorist takeover of a Los Angeles skyscraper while visiting his estranged wife during a Christmas Eve party.
Stuart was hired by 20th Century Fox to adapt Thorp's novel in 1987. His first draft was greenlit immediately, as the studio was eager for a summer blockbuster the following year. The role of McClane was turned down by a host of the decade's most popular actors, including Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. Known mainly for work on television, Willis was paid $5million for his involvement, placing him among Hollywood's highest-paid actors. The deal was seen as a poor investment by industry professionals and attracted significant controversy towards the film prior to its release. Filming took place between November 1987 and March 1988, on a $25–35million budget and almost entirely on location in and around Fox Plaza in Los Angeles.
Expectations for Die Hard were low; some marketing materials omitted Willis's image, ostensibly because the publicity team determined that the setting was as important as McClane. Upon its release in July 1988, initial reviews were mixed: criticism focused on its violence, plot, and Willis's performance, while McTiernan's direction and Rickman's charismatic portrayal of the villain Hans Gruber were praised. Defying predictions, Die Hard grossed approximately $140million, becoming the year's tenth-highest-grossing film and the highest-grossing action film. Receiving four Academy Award nominations, it elevated Willis to leading-man status and made Rickman a celebrity.
Die Hard has been critically re-evaluated and is now considered one of the greatest action films of all time. It is considered to have revitalized the action genre, largely due to its depiction of McClane as a vulnerable and fallible protagonist, in contrast to the muscle-bound and invincible heroes of other films of the period. Retrospective commentators also identified and analyzed its themes of vengeance, masculinity, gender roles, and American anxieties over foreign influences. Due to its Christmas setting, Die Hard is often named one of the best Christmas films of all time, although its status as a Christmas film is disputed.
The film produced a host of imitators; the term "Die Hard became a shorthand for plots featuring overwhelming odds in a restricted environment, such as "Die Hard on a bus" in relation to Speed. It created a franchise comprising the sequels Die Hard 2, Die Hard with a Vengeance, Live Free or Die Hard, and A Good Day to Die Hard, plus video games, comics, and other merchandise. Deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress, Die Hard was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 2017.
Plot
On Christmas Eve, New York City Police Department Detective John McClane arrives in Los Angeles, hoping to reconcile with his estranged wife, Holly, at a party held by her employer, the Nakatomi Corporation. He is driven to Nakatomi Plaza by a limo driver, Argyle, who offers to wait for McClane in the garage. While McClane washes himself, the tower is seized by German ex-radical Hans Gruber and his heavily armed team, including Karl and Theo. Everyone in the tower is taken hostage except for McClane, who slips away, and Argyle, who remains oblivious to events.Gruber is posing as a terrorist to steal the $640million in untraceable bearer bonds in the building's vault. He kills executive Joseph Takagi after failing to extract the access code from him and tasks Theo with breaking into the vault. The terrorists are alerted to McClane's presence, and Karl's brother, Tony, is sent after him. McClane kills Tony and takes his weapon and radio, which he uses to contact the skeptical Los Angeles Police Department. Sergeant Al Powell is sent to investigate. Meanwhile, McClane kills more terrorists and recovers their bag of C-4 and detonators. Realizing Powell is about to leave, having found nothing amiss, McClane drops a terrorist's corpse onto his car. After Powell calls for backup, a SWAT team attempts to storm the building but is counterattacked by the terrorists. McClane throws some C-4 down an elevator shaft, causing an explosion that kills some of the terrorists and ends the counterattack.
Holly's co-worker Harry Ellis attempts to negotiate on Gruber's behalf but is killed by Gruber when McClane refuses to surrender. While checking the explosives on the roof, Gruber encounters McClane and pretends to be an escaped hostage; McClane gives Gruber a gun. Gruber attempts to shoot McClane but finds the weapon is unloaded, and he is saved only by the intervention of other terrorists. McClane escapes but is injured by shattered glass and loses the detonators. Outside, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents take control. They order the power to be shut off, which, as Gruber had anticipated, disables the final vault lock so his team can collect the bonds.
The FBI agrees to Gruber's demand for a helicopter, intending to send helicopter gunships to eliminate the group. McClane realizes Gruber plans to blow the roof to kill the hostages and fake his team's deaths. Karl, enraged by Tony's death, attacks McClane and is seemingly killed. Gruber sees a news report by Richard Thornburg on McClane's children and infers that he is Holly's husband. The hostages are taken to the roof while Gruber keeps Holly with him. McClane drives the hostages from the roof just before Gruber detonates it and destroys the approaching FBI helicopters. Meanwhile, Theo retrieves an escape vehicle from the parking garage but is knocked out by Argyle, who has been following events on the limo's CB radio.
A weary and battered McClane finds Holly with Gruber and his remaining henchman. McClane seemingly surrenders to Gruber and is about to be shot but grabs his concealed service pistol taped to his back and uses his last two bullets to wound Gruber and kill his accomplice. Gruber crashes through a window but grabs onto Holly's wristwatch and makes a last-ditch attempt to kill the pair. McClane unclasps the watch, and Gruber falls to his death. Outside, Karl ambushes McClane and Holly, only to be shot dead by Powell. Holly punches Thornburg when he attempts to interview McClane. Argyle crashes through the parking garage door in the limo and drives McClane and Holly away together.
Cast
- Bruce Willis as John McClane, a New York City police detective
- Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber, the ruthless leader of the terrorists
- Alexander Godunov as Karl, Gruber's second-in-command
- Bonnie Bedelia as Holly Gennaro-McClane, a high-ranking Nakatomi executive and John's estranged wife
- Reginald VelJohnson as Al Powell, an LAPD sergeant
- Paul Gleason as Dwayne T. Robinson, the LAPD deputy chief
- De'voreaux White as Argyle, John's limousine driver
- William Atherton as Richard Thornburg, an unscrupulous TV reporter
- Clarence Gilyard as Theo, Gruber's tech specialist
- Hart Bochner as Harry Ellis, a sleazy Nakatomi executive
- James Shigeta as Joseph Yoshinobu Takagi, Nakatomi's head executive
Production
Development and writing
The development of Die Hard began in 1987, when screenwriter Jeb Stuart was in dire financial straits. His script purchased by Columbia Pictures had been abandoned and a contract at Walt Disney Pictures was not providing him with sufficient income. Stuart had six weeks between contracted work so his agent Jeremy Zimmer contacted Lloyd Levin, the head of development at the Gordon Company, a producing arm of 20th Century Fox.Levin asked Stuart to work on an adaptation of the 1979 novel Nothing Lasts Forever written by former private investigator Roderick Thorp. Thorp had been inspired to write Nothing Lasts Forever by a dream he had—in which armed assailants chase a man through a building—after watching the 1974 disaster film The Towering Inferno. Fox had adapted the book's 1966 predecessor, The Detective, for the 1968 film starring Frank Sinatra as NYPD detective Joe Leland, and purchased the sequel rights before Nothing Lasts Forever had been written.
Levin gave Stuart creative freedom as long as he retained the Christmas-in-Los-Angeles setting; the concept, he considered, would provide an interesting aesthetic. The film was pitched as "Rambo in an office building", referring to the successful Rambo film series. Producers Lawrence Gordon and Joel Silver hired director John McTiernan because of his work with them on the successful 1987 action film Predator. McTiernan agreed to direct on the condition that the film would have "some joy" and not simply contain "mean, nasty acts", seen in other terrorist films.
Stuart began working 18-hour days at his office at Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, which left him exhausted and "on edge". After an argument with his wife, he went for a drive and saw a box in his lane; unable to avoid it, he was forced to drive over it and discovered it to be empty. According to Stuart, he pulled over on the side of the freeway, his "heart pounding". From this, Stuart conceived a central theme of the story of a man who should have apologized to his wife before a catastrophe. He returned home to reconcile with his wife and wrote 35 pages that night. To shape the McClanes' relationship, Stuart also drew upon the marital problems of his peers, including divorces and ex-wives reverting to use their maiden name.
File:Disney studios burbank team disney building buena vista.jpg|thumb|alt=Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California.|Jeb Stuart wrote his initial draft in his office at the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California.
John McClane was named John Ford initially, but 20th Century Fox felt this was disrespectful to the deceased director of the same name. Stuart chose McClane as a "good strong Scottish name", based on his own Celtic heritage. He described the character as a flawed hero who learns a lesson in the worst possible situation and becomes a better, but not a different, person. Having no experience writing action films, Stuart drew on his experience writing thrillers, focusing on making the audience care about McClane, Holly, and their reconciliation. As Stuart pitched his story to executives, Gordon interrupted him, told him to complete a draft, and left the meeting. Stuart finished his first draft just under six weeks later.
Stuart credits Levin for helping him understand Nothing Lasts Forever. He adapted many sequences faithfully, including a C-4 charge being thrown down an elevator shaft and the book's central character, Joe Leland, leaping from the roof. However, the novel is told entirely from Leland's perspective, and events he is not present for are not detailed. Its tone is also more cynical and nihilistic: Leland visits his drug-addicted daughter at the Klaxon building, and she dies having fallen from the building alongside villain Anton Gruber, who is using naïve male and female guerrilla soldiers to rob the building because of Klaxon's support for a dictatorial government. This made their motivations less clear and Leland more conflicted about killing them, especially the women. Leland is written as an experienced older man working as a high-powered security consultant. Stuart rejected the novel's tone for being "too sad", and believed an older action hero—Leland being over 60—was nonsensical. Stuart created new material for scenes when McClane is not present, expanding upon or introducing characters: he gave Powell a wife and children, allowing him to relate more closely to McClane; and Argyle, whose novel counterpart disappears early in the story, is present throughout Stuart's draft, supporting McClane by broadcasting rap music over the terrorists' radios. Among the script's original characters is the unscrupulous journalist Richard Thornburg.
A fan of prominent Western film actor John Wayne, Stuart was inspired to carry a Western motif throughout the script, including cowboy lingo. He befriended a construction superintendent at the under-construction Fox Plaza in Los Angeles, allowing him access to the building to gain ideas on how to lay out the characters and scenes. He delivered the finished screenplay in June 1987. It was greenlit the following day, in part because 20th Century Fox needed a summer blockbuster for 1988.