DEAUVILLE, FRANCE – SEPTEMBER 08: Director John McTiernan poses for photographers during the 40th … [+] Deauville American Film Festival on September 8, 2014 in Deauville, France. (Photo by Francois Durand/Getty Images)
Getty Images
John McTiernan, the legendary director of Last Action Hero, Die Hard and Predator, is being celebrated at the festival of the French Cinemateque in Paris this week. The festival is a dream for many movie lovers and the perfect occasion to discover or rediscover some of McTiernan’s best movies on the big screen.
The theater was packed for the opening night and the screening of Last Action Hero, presented by John McTiernan himself. “Well, here I am, another destroyed American, come to you from the belly of the beast,” said the director after a rapturous round of applause. In his speech, McTiernan was referring to the current deep political divide in the U.S.
He added: “It is with terrible shame to find oneself, at this age in life, actually living in Casablanca, the movie.”
With a grave voice that resonated inside the silent auditorium, McTiernan later ended his speech by a powerful and bleak observation of the geopolitical state of the world, referencing the song War by Bob Marley.
He said, “That until such dishonorable, deceitful and disgraceful men no longer control the path of any nation, there will be war, there will only be war. That until such monsters and secret policemen and fantasists of apartheid, are as abandoned and disgraced as the National Socialists, there will be war. There will only be war. And I don’t know what else I can tell you.”
McTiernan may not have made a movie in over 20 years, but his impact on the action genre in the 1980s and throughout the 1990s is indisputable. The visionary director is also well-known for mastering the art of dynamic camera movements, by using his camera as the actual narrator of his films.
Arnold Schwarzenegger and Austin O’Brien are given instruction from director John McTiernan during … [+] the production of the film ‘Last Action Hero’, 1993. (Photo by Columbia Pictures/Getty Images)
Getty Images
I sat down with McTiernan this week, inside one of the theaters of the Cinemateque, to discuss his career and some of the cult movies he made. I asked him to talk about the theatrical experience and how important it was for him to watch a movie on the big screen, as well as his opinion on the significant impact streaming platforms may have on theaters in the long run.
He said, “It’s a significant thing, and it’s a significant thing politically. It’s actually pretty well documented that the experience of seing a drama, a movie, a play, in a group of other people, is a completely different experience than seeing it alone. Enormous numbers of hormones exchanged and all sorts of information that goes in between people in the audience. It will happen again, we have not watched the end of the agora, the public space.”
He added: “The main reason is that this is not the first time it’s happened. It happened in the 1950s when television happened. But then, the film companies were in the hands of filmmakers who fought for their industry. They got wide screen, they developed much better colors, better sound, all sorts of things to create an experience that one couldn’t have at home, and they got another half century out of the industry because they fought. But they were filmmakers. And now, the people who run the studios are just over serious for the money. And they don’t know how to fight, for one thing, and they have no personal stake in it, because they’re not filmmakers. They’re money managers. But someone else will create a new industry that happens publicly.”
McTiernan’s relationship with studios and Hollywood in general got worse when he was working on his last two movies, Rollerball (2002) and Basic (2003). The filmmaker never shied away from mentioning how hurtful these experiences had been.
WESTWOOD, CA – MAY 18: Director/Producer John McTiernan, actor Bruce Willis, actor Samuel L. … [+] Jackson and producer Andrew G. Vajna attend the “Die Hard: With a Vengeance” Westwood Premiere on Mann Village Theatre in Westwood, California. (Photo by Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)
Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
He said, “I gave up working on bad movies, the last two films I made were terrible. I hated working on them. I knew they were bad, I was hired to fix them, and then they wouldn’t let me shoot that. And they wouldn’t let me shoot what I had fixed. They had just used me to tell the studios that I had fixed it for them. Anyway, I decided I wasn’t going to fix someone else’s bad movie.”
McTiernan also gave up working with big studios that also blacklisted the director years ago, when he served a prison sentence from 2013 to 2014, after being accused of lying to the FBI in a wiretapping case. At the time, McTiernan had hired Hollywood’s famous private detective Anthony Pellicano, to spy on Rollerball’s producer Charles Roven.
Once again, McTiernan never refused to talk about this case or never hesitated to share his opinion on the judicial American system. He said, “I realize that most of what we’ve been told as children are fairytales. There is no such thing as trial by jury. It’s all nonsense. It’s all lies.”
In prison, McTiernan interviewed many of his fellow inmates to gather their stories and testimonies. He said, “What happens is that the prosecutor blame them for something, and they don’t have the money to fight. If they fight they will destroy their families, they would be without a home. So what do they do? They pled guilty. They have no choice. I had a choice, I spent $4 million and I still couldn’t get a trial. They told me if I insisted on a trial, I would spend 20 years in prison. But that’s what goes on.”
McTiernan has been considerably impacted by his time in prison and by the stories he heard there. I asked him if he considered using those testimonies for a future movie. He said, “It’s funny, I hadn’t thought about it as a movie but as a book that I will publish eventually. Stories of the guys I met, it changed my political outlet completely.”
We then spoke about the impact prison movies and classics such as Cool Hand Luke or more recently Sing Sing had on the audience, especially depending on the political climate.
If McTiernan was to make a comeback with a poignant prison movie, wouldn’t it be the perfect timing for him personally as well as politically speaking? He said, “Perhaps, possibly. It’s difficult, they made prison movies in the late 1940s and 1950s. The secret was that there was a political vogue in it, which made it ok, but you know why they really made it? They were cheap to make. The set, the costumes, everything is the same, you can shoot it in one stage, in 12 days. Done. There was an economic reason for it.”
He added: “Prison movies are not fun, not for anyone, really. It’s very very difficult to make an entertaining movie out of that. So I’ve never been really drawn to it.”
John McTiernan and Arnold Schwarzenegger on the set of ‘Predator’
20th Century Fox, The Walt Disney Company
So would his next movie be an action movie? He said, “Sure, I have 3 possibly 4 pieces that I would like to do, I don’t know whether I will. Maybe I’ll have enough strength and energy. Or not.”
McTiernan added that they would only be independent movies: “As I said, there’s no studio left, really.”
The director also compared the state of the film industry to the automobile industry. He said, “Why can’t you tell a difference between a Toyota, or a Volvo or a Peugeot, or a Ford or something manufactured in Korea? Because they’re all the same marketing. They all make exactly the same cars, they’re identical. Because none of them are car makers, they’re in the money business. They guarantee to bring the most money back to the owners that they work for. That’s exactly the same situation in the film industry.”
One of the reasons why McTiernan hasn’t done as many films as his fans would have wanted him to, is because the director refuses to make the same movie twice.
He said, “There’s never been a vogue in movies that lasted 30 years. They made Westerns for 10 years, 15 maybe. They made detective movies for 10 years, all sorts of vogues, one after another. Except, we get the comic books. And they make comic book movies for 30 years. And they make the same movies over and over again. Why? Because they’re not filmmakers running the studios, they’re here for the money. And they make whatever is most likely to be sellable for the largest group of people, which for a filmmaker who built the studio, would be shameful.”
He added: “The filmmakers all fought because they thought they were participating in the culture at the time, no matter how crude various heads of studios were. They silently knew they were participating in the culture and they were proud of it actually. People running it now are not participating in the literature of the time. It’s comic books, it’s garbage. They know it’s garbage, they don’t care. Well that is a structural problem.”
John McTiernan, Pierce Brosnan, Rene Russo on the set of ‘The Thomas Crown Affair’
Metro-Golwyn-Mayer
Moving on to his filmmaking process, I asked McTiernan how the use of music impacted his storytelling and helped him create some incredibly inconic scenes. For example, the use of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy in Die Hard, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro in Last Action Hero or yet again Sinnerman by Nina Simone in The Thomas Crown Affair, all elevated the build-up of the tension in these movies, but they also go hand in hand like a perfect choreography with the camera work.
McTiernan said, “It’s just a feeling, I don’t storyboard, I storyboard in my eyes. When I started making Die Hard, I had this secret idea that I was going to put joy in an action movie. I used that word, not happiness, but joy. Not humor. Joy. I don’t know why it was a secret melody I had in my head. And I found little places all over where to put it. I was doing it as a Shakespearian comedy, the style, the theatrical style of the piece.”
The first scripts McTiernan received did not hold his attention as he found them too dark and violent.
“The third time they sent me the script, I said, ‘Look, I’ll do this if I can do it like this.’ And it started with the hero, the detective who was this cool guy who arrives in Los Angeles and there is a limo to pick him up. It was about how cool he was, because he left in a limo! He says ‘I never rode in a limo before, I don’t know what to do.’ And the guy driving the limo says ‘I hate to tell you this but I never drove a limo before so I don’t know what to do either.’ And cut, they’re both in the front seat. Anyway I started humming Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. All the way through it.”
He added: “I started putting it in the movie. When we put it together, the choral from the 9th Symphony, I learned that the name of the piece of music was the Ode to Joy. And I was so humiliated because I didn’t know that. And I had been humming it through it all and didn’t know its name! But I found Sinnerman before I did Thomas Crown. I didn’t know what it was about until quite a bit later, that it’s a story of jail. And it says ‘Oh sinnerman, where you’re gonna run to’, and then it all somehow made sense to me. So I was lucky.”
Images are for reference only.Images and contents gathered automatic from google or 3rd party sources.All rights on the images and contents are with their legal original owners.