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, and keeping him limited to a location where he can't leave, he can't go too far away from it, has 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 analyze.
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 that 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 hellbent 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, had the problems originally, but is 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, it'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.
03:02He's saving his wife.
03:03And for the course of it, he's saving all these other people and he's an incredible hero, but why is he really so hellbent and, and, and desperate and passionate about what he's doing is because his wife is there.
03:16It's about the wife.
03:18And 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.
03:26Um, and, and actually when you think about it, like very few movies nowadays do this cause it 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 or, 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, but, 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 because it's emotionally so strong that it works.
04:10And the audience doesn't stop to think about the reality of it really.
04:13And it's when, when they talk to each other by a 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, but it was emotionally so important that they connect.