The director of the original Die Hard and the new Rollerball talks about why he chose to do another remake after The Thomas Crown Affair, how he ended up not doing Basic Instinct 2 and what he did to get the beach-bunny quality out of Rebecca Romijn-Stamos.
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So the airplane engine is on fire," recalls John McTiernan, "and the only way to put it out is to head straight down and hope that the flames go out before you hit the ground and that you have time to pull out. At 14,000 feet, you head down. You pull out of the dive at 2,500 feet. The plane's damaged now and it won't hold altitude, so you land on a two-lane highway, between tractor trailers." McTiernan, who directed the first and third Die Hard movies, isn't describing a stunt for Bruce Willis's character. He's talking about the price he paid for being a hands-on filmmaker who insisted on personally scouting his own locations. After the near-crash just recounted, McTiernan didn't return the faulty plane angrily to its owner and vow never to fly again. He went out and bought his own plane, which now sits nearby, ready to take him back to his Wyoming ranch. This is the plane McTiernan used to search down the ideal Caribbean house for Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo's sexiest scenes together in The Thomas Crown Affair. It also got him the perfect Canadian spots for his new film, Rollerball.
McTiernan's aerial adventures are an apt metaphor for his Hollywood career. The Die Hards, The Hunt for Red October and the earlier Predator marked him as a talented, gutsy high flier. With Medicine Man, The Last Action Hero and The 13th Warrior, he came close to drilling a hole in the earth with his propeller. In the last two years, McTiernan has taken off again at MGM, a studio which had trouble getting A-list directors until he got there and made The Thomas Crown Affair a hit.
McTiernan has a gruff manner that suits his less well-known profession--cattle rancher--better than his Hollywood gig. But the same toughness that makes him the rare director who can speak with authority about mad cow disease led him to take on the huge risk of Rollerball, his remake of the '70s movie that starred James Caan. With its cast of wannabe stars Chris Klein, LL Cool J and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, a visual style that partakes heavily of MTV and an updated plot that gives new meaning to the term "extreme sports," Rollerball enters the summer megapicture derby with McTiernan's hopes riding on it.
MICHAEL FLEMING: After having your engine burst into flames, why in the world would you continue to fly around scouting your own locations?
JOHN McTIERNAN: It's faster, more effective. Early in my career, I did a film that was supposed to be in the jungle. We had a hideous time, stuck in this piece of woods on the west coast of Mexico. Problem was, during the dry season in this area, the leaves turn yellow and fall off, just like in New Hampshire in the fall. The person who'd done the scouting insisted he checked all over Mexico and this was far and away the very best place. Only after I was in the middle of the movie, dealing with a forest that looked like a bald chicken, did I discover that the reason it was the only place that worked was because it was the only place where he happened to own several condos. He had people from the movie working on his house. I've just never trusted a location manager since.
Q: At the most basic level, what was it about Rollerball that made it interesting for you to do?
A: A lot of movies are radio plays with visual aids, the way television used to be. Rollerball is entirely visual, completely different from anything I've done before. We just got a count of the number of shots--it's nearly 9,000. Five to seven times what has ever been put into a movie before. Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange has about 470 shots.
Q: The Thomas Crown Affair and Rollerball are both remakes. What's the appeal from your point of view of doing a remake?
A: Films are market-driven now. Anything with Mel Gibson or Russell Crowe, that's a movie. Almost anything based on a 1960s television show, that's a movie. One of the other ways to make it easier to market a film is to remake a movie, because then it already has presence. The executives can look at it and feel they know what it's about. The marketing people can look at it and say, "I know what that is. I know how to sell that." That gives you a huge leg up. Also, doing remakes has given me the freedom to not have to get a $20 million actor in a movie. There are five $20 million actors that everyone in the entire industry is chasing. It's a pleasure not to have to queue up in that line. And the extraordinary power that those people have, plus the organizations they have around them, tend to turn their movies into advertisements for them. There will not be a funny line or a courageous moment anywhere, in any draft of the script, that doesn't wind up coming from the star's mouth.
Q: Has that happened in your films?
A: Sure, though I try to discourage it. And I've made a number of movies with guys who weren't megalomaniacs. You could say to them, "What are you trying to do, be all alone here?" And they might hear you.
Q: James Caan did the original Rollerball after The Godfather, when he was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. Chris Klein has starred only in a few goofy teen comedies. Is he the next Keanu Reeves?
A: He'll be pissed at me for two or three years if I say yes to that question. We used to tease him about that, we'd ask him what it was like to star in Speed--"Chris, did you jump from the bus yourself, or use a stuntman?" Or we'd tease him about his older brother, Keanu. We could always get his goat with that. He'd brood for two hours. Chris was perfect for Rollerball because he's an absolute, straightforward American boy, without an agenda or a cool bone in his whole body. He's as earnest as Jimmy Stewart, so that when he finally gets angry, you believe it.
Q: Looks like you gave Rebecca Romijn-Stamos more to do than she had in X-Men, where she played a blue villain who didn't speak.
A: They painted her up, and left her waiting nine hours a day for the chance to stand somewhere and say nothing. This movie changed her. I tried to kill the Southern California beach bunny in her. I gave her black hair and lots of makeup, and I scarred her face. She did this whole number on me--that I had this emotional block, I was afraid of a beautiful blonde woman and couldn't talk to her until I made her more accessible. But that smiley beach-bunny quality disappeared. I eventually found out that many times at the end of the workday, she left the scar on and went out with it to clubs in Montreal. She was fascinated by how people related to her differently. I know I got a better performance out of her because of it.
Q: Before doing The Thomas Crown Affair with you, Rene Russo had lots of thankless girl roles alongside male stars like Mel Gibson, John Travolta, Clint Eastwood. Why did you cast her?
A: Well, there are usually two levels of what an audience knows about a character--the specifics of the character, and the specifics of the actor. The Thomas Crown Affair was about this really tough cookie of a woman who falls in love. So I didn't want a tough cookie, I wanted a woman that the audience knew is deep down inside a doll. Then I wanted to put the tough-ass clothes on top of her. Most of the work went into helping Rene become that tough person.
Q: How did you toughen her up?
A: We concentrated on very tiny and yet very significant things. In dealing with men, Rene had little gestures of deference and of dispelling confrontation, like lowering her eyes. We had to go piece by piece, pick them out. I'd tell her, "So what if he doesn't like what you're going to say? So what if he yells at you? Why do you give a shit? Stare at him. If he has a problem, it's his, not yours." I also took her--well, sent her--to a madam who ran a whorehouse because that woman had 30 years of experience teaching women to be hard-nosed with men, to be someone who can't be embarrassed or made to blush.
Q: I was surprised Rene Russo agreed to appear nude. Was that part of dropping the shyness?
A: Sure. It scared the hell out of her. I did it in places where they weren't having sex, which is the part I liked about it--the conceit of having a woman play a scene in a whodunit where they're talking about the plot and she's standing there topless and she doesn't care.
Q: Rene Russo matched up well with Pierce Brosnan. Did you test them together?
A: No. I knew. And the two of them trusted me. And the studio trusted me. They had wanted several flavors of the month for the girl. But this man is supposed to be 40-something years old with $100 million, and he's supposed to, for the first time, let his guard down for some girl who's 19? I said, "What are we doing, Sabrina?. Can we get a woman who's near his age?" They trusted me. Funny, I just went through a similar experience with Sharon Stone and Benjamin Bratt, and in the end, she wouldn't trust me.
Q: You're referring to the casting of Basic Instinct 2, which at one point you were going to direct, right? You wanted Bratt opposite Sharon Stone, but she wouldn't approve him--what did you see in him that she didn't?
A: I think he's going to be a movie star. He's got a thing right now where he's ingratiating, always playing smiling boys. Once he stops that, he's going to be a real tough cookie on film. He's a very good actor. He's six feet four inches tall, and great looking. He was fabulous in Traffic, spooky as hell. For a little bit he dared to stop being ingratiating, just stood there and occupied the space. He had the physical presence.
Q: What did you like about Basic Instinct as a project?
A: I had a notion to have it rewritten so the character was a young Spanish American or Cuban American. I wanted him seduced not by just the woman but by wealth and luxury he'd never before been exposed to. I was going to make him much younger than in the script. I left him as a psychiatrist, but not sitting in some office with a couch and a notepad. I wanted him working 100-hour shifts as a resident in a city hospital, dealing with drugs and all the things that happen to people who show up in an emergency room at 3 o'clock in the morning. The original had enormous mythic, psychological subtext. It's the Sphinx, a woman with the body of a lion who asks a man a question. If he comes up with the wrong answer, she eats him. That's Basic Instinct.
Q: Speaking of sequels, you've hatched many films that went to sequels you didn't take part in. After that terrific start to the Jack Ryan franchise in The Hunt for Red October, why didn't you take part in the sequel?
A: Patriot Games was a movie where the villains are the Irish Republican Army. Alec Baldwin, the original Jack Ryan, and I, while neither of us were sympathizers with the Irish Republican Army, were nonetheless of Irish descent and preferred not to make a movie that makes villains of our heritage. We pleaded with the studio to make the other Jack Ryan book, Clear and Present Danger, which was a much better script. Alec and I both wanted to do it and told them straight off we would. But the producer owned the book Patriot Games, and it was going to greatly increase his participation in the ultimate series if they made Patriot Games as the second movie. Are you Irish?
Q: Yeah, I am.
A: Well, there were things I didn't know about until I was nearly 30. But there were several people in my extended family it turns out I wasn't actually related to. They were Michael Collins's assassins who my grandfather took in and sheltered. For 50 years. They... [long pause as his eyes well with tears] ...I'm sorry, I hadn't thought about this in a long time. There was this one dear old man in my family who was most deferential--wouldn't step on a crack in the sidewalk. But when he was 13 years old, he dropped an egg basket full of grenades into the, lap of an English colonel. They got those young men out of the country so that the English could never find them. My grandfather would never exactly fess up about it, but I believe he sheltered a number of them.
Q: How about the second Die Hard? Why didn't you go along for the ride on the second one?
A: I didn't like the car. Later, the cast of characters changed, and I was very happy to be back for the third one. I actually prepared two sequels. One didn't happen because Fox was wrangling with Bruce over money. After we made Die Hard 3, the studio used most of the material we'd developed for the other sequel and turned it into Speed 2: Cruise Control. The ocean liner going on the beach and stuff? That's what we'd written for Die Hard.
Q: There was some controversy about Bruce Willis getting paid $5 million for the first Die Hard, when, following "Moonlighting," he'd had a couple of big movie failures.
A: In fact, two weeks before the movie came out, the studio changed the poster and took his picture off of it. Two weeks after the movie came out, they put his picture back on it. Profiles in courage.
Q: Was there a moment early on when you knew you'd hired the right guy?
A: Well, we built it for him. The hero role had been written for Richard Gere, I think, but we rebuilt the part for Bruce, to take advantage of who he is. Working-class New York. He's grown beyond this now, but he seemed very cocky then. In the wrong atmosphere and context, that came off as arrogant and difficult. If you make sure he's the underdog, though, that cockiness is an act of courage.
Q: Would you go back and do a fourth?
A: I'm neither hostile to the idea nor eager. But Bruce doesn't need to do another Die Hard. He's gone way beyond that.
Q: The Last Action Hero was a modest story overwhelmed by hype and the rush to make a summer release date. It got tarred as the first failure for Hollywood's then-top star Arnold Schwarzenegger. When you look back, is there something that could have been done to make it work?
A: [Long pause] I just shouldn't say. Obviously, who you work for has a lot to do with how things work out. Initially, it was a wonderful Cinderella story with a nine-year-old boy. We had a pretty good script by Bill Goldman, charming. And this ludicrous hype machine got hold of it, and it got buried under bullshit.
Q: That's got to be tough, when what's being sold isn't the movie you made.
A: Yeah, but in the end, I didn't even make the movie it started out to be. It was so overwhelmed with baggage. And then it was whipped out unedited, practically assembled right out of the camera. It was in the theater five or six weeks after I finished shooting. It was kamikaze, stupid, no good reason for it. And then to open the week after Jurassic Park--God! To get to the depth of bad judgment involved in that you'd need a snorkel.
Q; This came after Medicine Man, which was considered a disappointment...
A: It was a little art movie with Sean Connery that cost only $27 million. If the press hadn't defined it as an action movie, it probably wouldn't have been considered a disappointment.
Q; You'd had huge hits before The Last Action Hero. Did you carry that sting for a long time?
A: I went home and didn't want to talk to anybody for a year and a half. Stayed in Wyoming and did the hay. I had to lick my wounds.
Q: When you were ready to come back, did your recent failure really affect you?
A: Oh, of course it did. But see, I never perceived myself as being on top. What it did was accelerate the process of weaning myself from a kind of pious mentality, from the buzz. When I was younger and at the American Film Institute, there was a lot of gossip, and I had no difficulty understanding that 97 percent of it was bullshit and that I should ignore it. It's far more difficult to feel that way about large portions of the grown-up industry. I had to realize there are some things you can't control.
Q: One other movie that fared badly, The 13th Warrior, was based on Michael Crichton's book Eaters of the Dead. That film came out at the same time as The Thomas Crown Affair and you didn't promote it. Is it a sore subject?
A: Of course. What is this, a tour of my hard knocks and learning experiences? I feel like I'm having dinner with a fight reporter, with you talking about that bout with so-and-so. "You were doing pretty good until you caught one in the chin and got knocked out in the eighth. How'd you feel getting carried out of the ring?"
Q: It's OK to say "no comment."
A: Well, look. In an effort to get out of the "five fat fish" business--the hundreds of people lining up for the five people whose names alone will get a movie made--I made a deal with a star author, Michael Crichton. I probably shouldn't go much further here because I won't be saying nice things, and I don't feel like sobbing in my beer about this. It's a tough business. So what? Did anyone ever say it wasn't? All kinds of shit goes on. If anything, I've probably taken the hard knocks too seriously. It didn't do me any good. It's better if you just pay attention to your work. I'm beginning to get back some confidence that I lost.
Q: The original Rollerball was a polemic about the individual in a futuristic totalitarian society. Your film is set in 2005 and seems to be more about personal greed.
A: The studio originally had the remake set way in the future, but I thought, "Do you need to go 400 years in the future to make it plausible that some people get hurt so that others can get rich?" Nonsense. All you have to do is get it out of North America or Western Europe. Our economic system of entrepreneurial capitalism is spreading all over the world, and there's often an absence of a moral system that would put limits on what's done. In the movie we've got something like the WWF, with promoters who discover that their ratings and profits go up if they get a little blood on the track every week. A couple of American kids get caught in the middle of this.
Q: How happy are you with Rollerball?
A: I might be so far out there on Rollerball that this could be another time that I get my head handed to me. But lack of failure is clear evidence of either being an absolute genius or being a coward. I know Rollerball is exciting for me. I hope it's exciting for the audience. And it is enormously political. Someone said, recently, "This movie is about your Hollywood bosses." Wait till you see Jean Reno. The best villain I've ever done. I'm so fucking thrilled with him. He is hysterically funny and charming and terrifying.
Q: Better than Alan Rickman in Die Hard?. He set the standard for modern cinematic villainy.
A: For people in our industry? This man is more terrifying.
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Michael Fleming interviewed Joe Johnston for the July issue of Movieline.