Blank Check with Griffin & David - Die Hard with Kevin Smith

Episode Date: February 25, 2024

Thirty-six floors. Thirteen (fake) terrorists. One perfect action movie. Kevin Smith - who was in a Die Hard movie AND directed Alan Rickman in DOGMA -  joins us again for a supersized episode on McTiernan’s signature film. We’re getting into Bruce's wine cooler commercials. We reveal the surprising Shakespeare play that influenced McTiernan’s direction of this story. We’re nerding out about the spatial and organizational PERFECTION that makes it such a classic. And we’re paying loving homage to two screen presences whose careers ended tragically too soon.  This episode is sponsored by: Factor (factor.com/check CODE: CHECK) Mubi (mubi.com/howtohavesex) Join our Patreon at patreon.com/blankcheck Follow us @blankcheckpod on Twitter and Instagram! Buy some real nerdy merch at shopblankcheckpod.myshopify.com

Come out to the coast, we'll get together, record a few podcasts. That's good. Thank you. That's good. Thank you. You need a little Zippo. I got a little lighter. Come on, I'm in a vent.

Do you want to, you're up though. You're so quiet. At that moment, he's pretty quiet because he's talking to himself. I mean, look, here are the other options. Okay. I mean, imagine I'm reading a bloody sweatshirt. And this is another one of my infamously good impressions. Now I have a podcast.

Ho, ho, ho. Yeah, there's a lot of pretty famous lines in this movie, Greg. Yeah, Yippee-ki-yay, I don't... Potty-ki-cast doesn't really feel like a thing. You just had an adverse reaction as if you tasted bad food. It's like someone you know did smelling salts over my nose putty kai cast okay yeah no good job it's my favorite line in the movie uh which the one you did the uh you know come down to the coast love a few laughs

this is one of those movies i mean i just i think about this film so much as just like the textbook sort of case study in how do you make someone a movie star right sure how do you take someone who's an actor or even a tv star and make them undeniably a movie star and there are like 15 moments in this movie that being one of them where you're like this guy just his stock just shot up 10 with that one line reading sure he's got he's got the secret sauce yeah yeah and and they know how to frame him how to use him and all of that i want to our guest should start talking right away yes to be clear he needs no introduction he's leaning all the way in i'm waiting for my moment i i didn't want to interrupt because you guys were in a flow but

i have a suggestion enter the title after hearing those attempts. Try hard. Well, that is Griffin Newman. Basically my energy overall all the time. Good God. You tried hard. I tried hard. A vengeance.

I did. I did. I came in spitefully. I never saw this movie without him being a movie star to me. That's the thing. I didn't have that experience of like, oh you know like which maybe our guest did i i have to assume you watched the transformation let me tell you kids yeah i am 53 years old watched the entire arc yeah of bruce willis's career so first time i notice him

of Bruce Willis' career. So first time I notice him is, of course, like most people, in Miami Vice, where he plays like a bad guy. Sure. I also notice him in an episode of the new Twilight Zone called Shatterday. Okay, so you were like pinning this guy early.

He was, yeah, popping for you. I'm telling you, you can jump on YouTube and watch, just enter shatter day his performance is is fantastic that run of twilight zone which was done in the 80s long after rod sterling had passed was like maybe two seasons a really strong run of episodes and he popped from that as well and then right i guess on the heels of that he got david addison now i watched moonlighting with my mom every week. I think it was like 9 o'clock on Wednesdays or Tuesdays or something like that.

And fell in love with this guy. My first impression of Bruce Willis as David Addison on Moonlighting was, oh, he's a TV version of Bill Murray. And Bill Murray came from tv but he had graduated to become you know peter bankman or he was exclusively a movie star at that point yes yeah so he was the um the the leading man who uh in terms of that character um meet be it the the bill murray archetype or david addison the original man child yeah um who would not grow up those characters infected my work those characters from the 80s infected my work from the 90s so randall brody banky they're all the children of of um winger from stripes played by bill murray and david

addison from moonlighting like i loved i love the character and i love the performance so much and bruce was from pensgrove new jersey he's from many places because he's military born in germany but but kind of a jersey hall guy, quietly. I don't feel like he is talked as much as a Jersey guy. In the Jersey framework. But I think that is key. I trade on Jersey as a currency. Yes.

I have my entire career. Yes. He does not. I had to dig that. I mean, I knew that myself. And when I met him for the first time on the Live Free or Die Hard, on the Die Hard sequel,

that was one of the things we talked about i was like the pride of pens grove and he was real taken aback he's like that's right i am a jersey boy but he wasn't born there right i think he was born on a military base in germany right because his uh right his mother was german and his dad was a soldier and right and then they they moved to jersey when he was like a little kid. Right. And then he was there until he moves to Hollywood basically. Right. Or that's right. No, he goes to New York. He goes to Philly and New York. Oh yeah. You're right. He bartends. He was a bartender. He knew Linda Fiorentino.

Like when I worked with Linda Fiorentino on Dogma, she's just like, Oh my God, me and Bruce used to bartend together. Um, that was before i'd ever met him i mean that that's pretty cool like imagine the two energy walls yeah yeah that that's that's cool to imagine but also think about it what are the chances that two people behind a bar both go on to like yeah like movie startup like genuine movie right obviously l, like, still, like, you know, in blockbusters that people love forever. Get a job at that bar, is what I'm saying. It's also one of those things.

It's like, right, that's like the joke. You go to the bar and it's like, well, I'm not really a bartender. I'm an actor, right? But I feel like I've heard accounts from people who went to that bar where it's like, you walked in there and you knew this guy was going to be a star. from people who went to that bar where it's like you walked in there and you knew this guy was going to be a star even when he was struggling to get work or he was getting work but it wouldn't stick or whatever he was kind of like a legendary this guy's just got charisma bouncing off of him dude riz as as the kids used to say 10 minutes ago arguably riz up from birth he was riz up he was a riz riz up and out of control um And that's what we're here to say. You got to remember kids, like a lot of people, of course, Bruce Willis, Die Hard, and yes,

naturally, the movie career. But Bruce was so huge that one career couldn't contain him, and he became a music sensation. Yes. He recorded two albums under the name of Bruno. And those albums, well, the the first one particularly dropped right around the time that i was learning to drive my friend ernie o'donnell um who runs the yeah yeah mod castle cinemas in our movie theater uh he was the first one of us to drive this big old scout and stuff and so he had like put in a custom cassette player the whole vehicle is this big old piece

of shit but the cassette player is cherry and brand new however it busted with a bruce willis tape in it so that was the only tape we listened to for a long time it was bruno constantly yeah bruno constantly but we didn't care because we like absolutely adored bruno that's the thing i i think i don't know if ernie went to the second album but i bought the second album as well what What Don't Kill You Makes You Strong. Was that the Return of Bruno? No, Return of Bruno is the debut. Return of Bruno is the debut album

that has Jackpot on it. And what was the... Respect Yourself. Respect Yourself was the big single. And it was huge. It wasn't like, oh, let's indulge this guy as an actor and he likes to sing now. That song was huge. Played on MTV constantly and whatnot. It was't like, oh, let's indulge this guy as an actor and he likes to sing now. That song was huge.

Played on MTV constantly and whatnot. It was a big radio hit as well. So there was a moment where that dude had TV, movies, wine coolers,

and music. Yeah. Why? Seagrams. Golden wine coolers. Seagrams. Golden wine coolers go look it up

on YouTube I've got it I've got it right here yep note for note on the porch but it is it is that fascinating

thing and I think I don't know it's like Dave and I were too young to experience this in real time right but as like culturally obsessed

dudes we're like growing up watching Die Hard at our own coming of age and then digging in and being like, what was the context for Bruce Willis in this moment? Like we understand all of this from a distance, but you're sort of like the version of this happening today

is so different because there are 8 billion outlets. There are social media. There's so many different kind of like branded partnerships where you're just like, no, there were strict gatekeepers in each of these positions and a limited amount of slots. And Willis had been trying to break through for a

while, and then when it hit suddenly, people are like, we'll take you in any form we can get. We want as much Bruce Willis in the culture as possible. We became inundated, man. It was just all Willis all the time, but nobody complained. People were well

into it. That was good times. And he was very earthy. You know what I'm saying? This is the whole thing. He was not to the manner born. The bartender part of his mythos was laid in there thick. And so

he was very man of the people which also helped his his ascendancy but i think the key factor and he is something he should be shouted out for because in this era it was very difficult and very few made the leap he started in the medium of television which puts your face into everybody's home. This was an era where, like, it was not uncommon for 20 to 30 million people to watch a show or something. And why go to the movies and pay when you can get Bruce Willis to home for free was sort of the line of thinking that would trap people on television. There were TV actors and there were movie actors. And very seldomly did one successfully leap to the other but

he would him robin williams and bruce willis were two of the first in the 80s that made that jump so successfully that most people don't remember they came from television yeah but like when we were making goodwill hunting name drop uh robin williams said like we were as we were making Good Will Hunting, name drop, Robin Williams said, like, as we were going into the bar in Toronto to shoot, the people across the street going, Mork, Mork. And you're like, this is like 15 years after Mork. And I was like, Mork, man, you can't hear that anymore. He goes, I hear that all the time. I was like, really? But it was so long ago.

I would imagine it would be like, good morning, Vietnam. And he goes, TV makes you family. And I am family to, like, a lot of these people. And it was a very revelatory thought. ago i would imagine be like good morning vietnam and he goes tv makes you family right yeah and i am family to like a lot of these people it was a very revelatory thought because i've never been a tv star i've never been a movie star but i've got peripheral experience with each but this was like somebody who like more for more blew the up and then that dude was able to successfully parlay that into a movie career thanks to george roy hill and the world according to garb yeah bruce willis like for this era it should have

gone no better than like moonlighting for him and a series of tv movies and stuff like that well i mean he yes skyrocketed out and we know why right yeah it's i mean it's this film is just the perfect why this film well i look i want to introduce the show introduce the show because i think you teed this up perfectly i want to throw out this one anecdote i was i was re-watching the movie this morning with commentary mctiernan talked about how many times he turned this movie down and this is one of those great like kind of miracle movies where everything could have gone wrong and so nearly went wrong and all the pieces come together perfectly at the last second but tiernan turned it down a bunch of times every other actor

turned it down bruce is the last guy on the list but the time mctiernan finally says yes to the script they were they'd he'd turn it down they'd it, they'd send it back to him, he'd go no. They'd turn it down, rewrite, send it back to him, no. And he's like, the draft I finally said yes to was because on page four

they had written in the detail that when Argyle picks him up at the airport, he says, it's my first day driving a limo and he goes, no worries, it's my first time riding in one

and then cut to he's sitting shotgun up front with the limo and he went this is the guy i want to build a movie around this tells you everything you need to know about this type of guy and the audience is going to like him immediately if he refuses to sit in the back of the limo you just you gave me fucking chills dude like because i'm just remembering that moment and going like you're're right. Like the connectivity and think about it. When I see this movie,

I'm what? 17 years old. Um, coincidentally, plug, plug. I see it in the movie theater. I now own the Atlantic,

the Atlantic cinema and Atlantic islands back in the day. Now it's my castle cinema. So when I, like I was just there doing shows this weekend, I was in the same theater where I sat in the back of the theater and the, like one of the campaign, the marketing campaigns is it will blow you in the back of the theater and the, like one of the campaign, the marketing campaigns is it will blow you out the back of the theater. Yeah.

Um, and we were in the back and it did like blow us away, but, um, I going to see it in real time when it actually opened, this was like a guy who I loved on TV, but the whole world didn't necessarily think of him as like this is a flyer making him this guy is definitely not at some guarantee a huge risk yeah yeah and it was

like for them i think if i remember the story correctly he they got him like you know moonlighting had just happened the first season or something like that maybe the second season but he had a small window to shoot. He was the one that was available. And his agents were able to get him real money. Five million bucks. We'll talk about that. We'll get into all of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that was a big deal.

I'll follow your lead. This is, after all, a podcast about Fomagra. Thank you, Griffin. It's called Blank Check with Griffin and David. There you go. I'm David. I'm Griffin. I flipped it up in that case. I gave you the space to say it first. It's fine.

It's a podcast about directors who have massive success early on in their careers, say, making Die Hard as their third movie ever. Die Hard. An early Die Hard. Yeah. And are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion projects they want. Sometimes those checks clear, and sometimes they tie a fire hose around their chest and swing outside of a building as it's exploding baby. It's pretty fucking cool. Yeah.

Yeah, this is Die Hard. We're talking John McTiernan. What's the miniseries called? It's called Pod Hard with Avenge Cast. Right. Our guests today returning to the show, writer, director, filmmaker, raconteur,

podcaster, movie theater owner, and co-star of Live Free or Die Hard, Kevin Smith. That's true. I texted you some... I'm here because

I've worked with Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman. This is true. Yeah. I texted you some months ago, and we were just texting back and forth,

and I said, by the way, gotta get you on Blank Check again. We're doing McTiernan. just texting back and forth. I said, by the way, got to get you on blank check again doing McTiernan. And similar to last time where I said doing Raimi, I didn't even suggest anything to you. I just said, here's the platter. I'm curious to see what you take to. And you said, you know, I was in a diehard movie and I did direct both Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman.

And I went, look, I'm very aware of all this. I didn't know if that made you too close to want to talk about it, but I certainly would love to hear you get into this. And I've heard you so many times over the years talk about how totemic this film was for you and those two guys and their careers. And yeah, and you have so many different perspectives around this film. I, I talking about, I mean, granted I do have like, I, I aggregated from fan to professional who got to work with the two stars of the movie.

But first and foremost, I was, before I was a filmmaker, I was just a movie guy. I just loved movies. And so this was one of the movies I loved and like everybody. And, um, it and um it i just loved it enough that later on in life when people were like uh what do you want to put in a thing i was like what about what about that what about that what about them so it's i'm i feel like this if anyone's like oh he's gonna roast will this isn't what that's about at all. Like, I'm here to testify as both fan and filmmaker who later worked with the two giants that made this movie. But honestly, if I could have worked with anybody who worked on Die Hard, it might have been McTiernan.

Like, he is the unsung star of this movie. Everyone talks about Bruce. Everyone talks about Alan Rickman. This was the movie where most folks, unless you were from the UK, discovered Alan Rickman. Oh, yeah. This is his first movie role, period.

That's what's insane, is he had done a tremendous amount of theater, both in the UK and on Broadway. He had done a little bit of TV, but mostly British TV. And this is his first movie, period. Talk about another film that perfectly sets someone up

for the rest of their career. Makes them iconic immediately. Well, I mean, acting comes down to choices, right? It's a job of choices. An actor, as you know, is like, I'm going to choose to say it like this.

And you hope it lands in a way that connects with the audience, makes them forget that all this is bullshit and for a moment they buy truth and reality in it so the job literally comes down to choice this guy made some of the most interesting fucking choices you can while making pretend particularly with the i mean across his entire career yes but definitely with hans gruber. We had seen big bads and Euro trash villains in movies before for years. This dude took a completely different approach

where there were moments where you're like, I kind of like him better than the real guy, the hero. He's charming as fuck. He's got the riz. He's also riz'd up. They should have called him Alan Rizman. You kind of... If he didn't shoot, fuck. He's got the riz. He's also riz'd up. They should have called him Alan Rizman.

If he didn't shoot, not to dive right into it, and we can pull back, but if he didn't shoot Joe Takagi, you would 100% be rooting for them to get away with it. Like, yes, you don't want anyone to die, and you want John to get him. Everyone can win. But right, you'd be kind of like,

I kind of want them to open the vault and get the money is there an inside man ending like fuck this company especially in this day and age don't you think if they tried to do die hard now the audience would be like yeah because he shoots joe and you like joe yes you he's like two scenes with that guy but you're kind of like this seems like a good guy and he shoots him so callously that's enough for you to be like well I don't but it's another smart story calculation of like McTiernan knows that's the one thing that's gonna make you oh no 100% and yeah well I want to ask you about McTiernan yet Kevin did you ever interact with him over the years like never it's kind of on the downs swing when you're on the upswing i guess yeah there is a dga you know the director's guild and you would imagine like oh you guys all hang out

and sit around and smoke cigars i imagine it being like the snl five timers club where every great director is there with a smoking jacket right um having been they dragged me into the dga years ago i didn't join the dga for years in the beginning of my career because i for some reason i felt like hey man i'm an indie outsider and also like robert would jump in and out like whenever they would let him do a thing he was like well i'm quick tarantino too all the miramax guys were kind of dga resistant yeah it just didn't like it didn't there was no to me like i met with the head of the dga east and west because they were like trying to get me to join this is like 2000 i

want to say four or something like that and um you know they were like you you're deep into your career look at all the movies you've made like it's kind of weird that you're not in the dga and i was like yeah that's i mean i i don't know i made it this far without i came from any film like i you know i kind of doing my own thing then they were like this is the money that you left on the table that you would have made if you'd been part of the dga from your second phone call and it was it was it was a substantial it was seven figures and you know i was like wait what where'd that money go and they're like not to you um so i eventually joined heaven yeah honestly only this year did somebody explain to me that i

have a pension because the dga yeah because i was talking about we were getting ready to make um this summer at that movie theater at spot gas and we made a movie called the 430 movie we got a um waiver um during the strike to shoot so while we were shooting this flick I was talking to Liz Destro who's my producer along with Jordan Monsanto she produced the two of them produced like the last four movies and stuff and I was like well if we have any troubles I'll just you know jump out of the DJ and she goes you can't do things like that like you're too close to a pension. I was like, what pension? And she's like, well,

when, what do you think that money that you pay in the DJ was for? And I was like, I don't be a member of a secret society. And she's like, no, that is your pension. Yeah.

I was like, I don't know the smoke, the aforementioned smoking jacket. But, um, she was like, no, Kevin,

like you being in the writer's guild, you get a pension. You being in SAG, you get a pension. You being in the DGA, you get a pension. Cause we don't work in a traditional world. Like most people that work for a company get a pension when they retire. So they set these things up. This is what your guilds are for, you know, to look out for you in your old age. And that, none of that had ever processed prior. Again, I came up through indie film. So like

that, that just felt very like corporate structure to me. But now that I'm a 53 year old man, I came up through indie film, so that just felt very corporate structure to me. But now that I'm a 53-year-old man, I'm like, do you mean I'm going to get free money in 10 years? This sounds amazing. And they're like, it's not free money. It's money you've been paying into this thing. This is the bargain we made. Structured piggy bank.

But back to the point, never met John McTiernan at all these DGA meetings that we never went to. And I wish I would have. I mean, we all know he got into trouble at one point. Yes. Later on. He had a little trouble.

Nothing to do with Die Hard, but almost sounded Die Hard. It was a little Die Hard. It was a group, grouparian. Yes, there was. There was a Hans on approach, so to speak. But I never met him. he is the unsung star of this movie i don't think in many other hands this movie no is the same as the and it's i believe me i'm not taking anything away from the screenwriters but it was steven de souza how many people wrote this yes although people are credited and well jeb stewart and steven de suza are the big writers yeah yeah right and and being

it being the 80s probably went through a lot of writers hands that they're not even credited and stuff but it feels to me as somebody who's been doing the job for 30 years and i know um i'll set aside this disclaimer last time i was on blank check man like i got to meet the audience afterwards and my socials and stuff. And they were very generous and lovely, you know, but the compliments were like, you know, I always thought this guy was a fucking idiot. It was that kind of thing. So, you know, any any boost, any plug is a boost. So I was never like, well, I wish the compliments are better than that. I'm happy to make a convert.

Sure. was never like well i wish the compliments are better than that i'm happy to make a convert sure um so that all being said just to kind of lay out there for the potential cine east audience um meeting mctiernan uh for me would have been an education because this is a guy who i feel in my i've been doing the job for 30 years but you may not like the movies I've done. In my yeoman-like opinion, I feel like he shaped the movie. I feel the presence of the author, the director as author, in a way that you feel on, like, you know, Zucker Brothers movies in the back, Shyamalan movies. movies in the back shamalan movies uh you know just it was that specific touch mct as they call them that made die hard what it was that element that you pointed to early on where he read in the script he was like he's gonna sit up front i know how to do this that's the story yeah yeah that's

pretty amazing i mean when you think about predator where he had a lot of influence and he's a crucial part, but like that's a Schwarzenegger movie, right? It's a Schwarzenegger movie and he's fighting in real time to get the respect. He's dealing with the fucking jungle. He's dealing with special effects. This one, it's like, this is not a Bruce Willis movie or an Alan Moore. You know, those guys are not power. They're not clouty enough. And like, it is a Joel Silver movie.

Right. Or whatever. You know, like, that is a big personality. But still, like, he has a lot of muscle now. Like, he can, yeah. Not only that,

like, Joel Silver, arguably the biggest name at this point attached to the movie, but also Joel Silver is going, like, I just was in the jungle with this guy,

a predator. He's a little bit, right. I respect what he does. I saw how this worked out. I want to be in the McTiernan business. That's a smart bet. And a thing that we found interesting about covering McTiernan is so often now I'm saying to people,

we're doing McTiernan next and they're going, who's McTiernan or like, what else did he do besides diehard? There is this weird degree of him being a little bit anonymous. And I often find as well that people will assign his movies to other directors they'll be like i thought tony scott directed that right right the other big i mean he had like a you know he had like a penny marshall one two yes three hits in a row that define the culture and like it's not too far from die hard that we get to

hunt for red october right it is his first movie is nomads and then it is predator die hard hunt for red october in a row yeah and they're like yeah the three movies that people still i mean other than of course the cinema podcast three movies that are still talked about by kitchen sinkers people that like don't live and breathe entertainment like oh it's on tnt i'll watch that or i'll spin that on netflix in four years he makes those 87 he makes them right away and and in his attitude when he talks about these things and i it's been fascinating because it's not like there is this degree to which he's publicly a little bit anonymous but he still does tons of interviews he records like new commentary tracks

and whatever. I've been trying to read as much and watch as much and listen to as much in prepping these episodes. And he speaks very transparently about everything. But he's also got that like

old school studio director sort of like John Hawks. They pass me a script. If I think it's OK, I shoot it, you know, and his decisions are very intelligent and thoughtful and big picture. And he understands every capacity of what each element of the medium can do and how to use it for his own storytelling and all of that. But he's also very unpretentious about all of this, which I think his lack of self mytholog own auteurship perhaps like feeds into it.

But yeah, this movie is it is really, yes, quietly his star vehicle as much as it is a Willis and a Rickman star vehicle. Who would be this modern day equivalent? Like you can't go like, oh, Chris Nolan, because Chris Nolan, like, generates a lot of his own material. It's Christopher McQuarrie, but in a weird way. Yeah, like McQuarrie... But Chris McQuarrie's also a writer. Jean called Sarah a little bit,

but he never quite got to, like, the, you know... No, when I hear, like, Chris McQuarrie doing these hours-long Empire Magazine podcast interviews after each Mission Impossible movie comes out, when you hear him break down his process,

it feels very similar to the way McTiernan talks about his understanding of how an audience is going to track things in real time, which is the main thing both of these guys are concerned with. Nothing they do is for flash or showy for the sake of trying to make, call attention to their own style. Show off their skill as a filmmaker.

It is like, what do I need this audience to understand or feel in this moment? And what is the most elegant, effective, and entertaining way to do that? And let me also take you back to that era when marketing a director was not a priority you knew some directors names of course like george lucas steven spielberg you know clint eastwood went from actor to director kevin costner when he did you know when he also did the transition generally speaking

no studio was like let's put the filmmaker out there to talk about it so they never really sold the filmmaker that was something that feels like it started in the late 80s, early 90s. Really came from indie film culture where you don't have stars in a movie. So who is going to go out and promote your movie? Who best to speak about it than the filmmaker who had enough passion to get it made in the first place? And so during the 90s, you start to see the ascendancy of the director as a personality and that's the era that i came up in so he doesn't he comes in up in late 80s when a studio director is like who directed i don't know it doesn't matter there is a star nothing on this poster that's

like from the director of predator or anything like that right they could they could put that on there you know that it's not even i wouldn't imagine they put his name on there but from the director of predator feels like a pretty good marketing tactic yes yes and no though but predator is a very distinct sci-fi yeah they might be worried with this they're like we don't want anyone thinking there's lizards and shit and predator is you know predator was designed as a B picture. Sure. But, you know, a skillful B picture as Arnold was in this transition point of his career. Die Hard is intending to be an A picture. It's a summer blockbuster.

It's Fox's summer blockbuster. But this is a high end stake of an action movie. Part of the way it was marketed in the era as well and they didn't go very far with this but i distinctly remember the cell was um probably most of the audience not overly familiar with the erwin allen disaster movies of the 70s right but they had passed and gone out of vogue but there was a piece of marketing at the beginning of die hard that it will blow you out the back of the theater that was about the power yep of of the story itself and and there they there was a likening to disaster movies which hadn't been in vogue in a while but there's a bit of towering inferno to

the idea of him like being up and up in nakatomi plaza and stuff so you could see the kind of parallel was there but they didn't deep dive with that very much because if i remember correctly by week two it exploded and became what it is well there was i mean incredible segue you don't even realize to the the beginning the origins of this movie but there is the really telling thing where the first poster was it will blow you away and it was the building and bruce's face wasn't on it and his name wasn't on it because they were a little worried are people going to take an action movie seriously if it's got the wine cooler guy's face they were really heavy on this building is like 40 stories tall guys like there's gonna be action all over it like they were really hitting the building and

then like week one week two into release they were, print up new posters, Bruce's face next to the building. We're selling Bruce. You could see, like, somebody, like, almost like the marketing exec toy meeting in Big. Yes. Where he's like, what's fun about a building? Right. Like, so they were like, let's put a guy's face in the building. We need to care about the guy i

think when they put his face in the building by that point the movie had been out and people were like who's willis is wonderful and they were like yeah put him on the post right they were selling the thing that people were already buying they were adjusting the marketing to what was popular all right roderick thorpe detective turned novelist he wrote a book called the detective got turned into a movie of Frank Sinatra in 1968. Yeah. In the 70s, Thorpe writes a sequel

called Nothing Lasts Forever, right? That's the name of it? Yes. Inspired by? Inspired by The Towering Inferno. Basically sets,

you know, like, what if my guy is in a towering building? Because the book is Glass Inferno. The movie comes out the same year

the book is finally published. It's unclear which one he was inspired by drafting off either way it was like maybe it's time for me to do a sequel to my book that sold well and was turned into a movie part of the emphasis is they already made a movie with a big movie star if i write a sequel they'll probably option it right away which he was right about and he was drafting off of this kind of exploding building disaster movie thing seems to be popular that what if i put my character in a setting like that and terrorism is like uh you know a hot plot in the 70s like what if you had to deal with terrorists and his book is explicitly terrorism his book is not robbers pretending to be terrorists yeah his book is you imagine the

protagonist of this film being a frank sinatra type, much more of a kind of hard boiled, angry, you know, sad noir type cop in a straight up. He's got a shoot down terrorist setting. I tried reading the book. Yeah, it's a perfectly serviceable airport thriller. Sure. I tried reading the book. Yeah. It's a perfectly serviceable airport thriller.

Sure. I did not realize how much of what I like about this movie is not in the book at all. Yeah. Outside of truly just one guy trying to fight the guys in the building. And think about this, kids. That's what an innocent time it was. Yeah. In the 70s and the 80s where people were like, you know what they'll pay to see in a movie theater? A big building.

Big building. This building is so tall. Very tall building. You're never going to believe how big our fucking building is. I guess like the 60s and the 70s, there was an explosion of architecture. Yeah, there's skyscrapers everywhere. Probably the invention of the skyscraper. So they're like, let's use that.

That's a cheap effect. People are gawking at them. It's free art direction. You're like, suddenly these things have been built in our real world that look like movie sets. Why not build movies around them? So, all right. So Fox gets the rights. They made The Detective.

Supposedly, Sinatra was at least given the courtesy phone call of like, hey, do you want to do this movie? Yeah. He says, I am old and I do not want to do this movie. Well, there are two stages of it. I mean, there's like... There's a 70s call and then there is the nominal contractual 1987 call of like hey 70 year old frank sinatra you want to do die hard and he's like no the first time i think he says i'm i'm too old and i'm too rich but it speaks to like this guy drafts on the trend of towering inferno writes the quick cash-in sequel sells

it immediately they go to Sinatra. Sinatra's like, no, thank you. Movie's just dead. And now you're just like, there's this right, they own this thing. It's just a pile. It's in the pile on the desk. It's low priority.

Lawrence Gordon, producer of this film, along with- Predator. Was the executive on Predator, sorry. Yeah. Josh, you know know works at fox he revives this project in 87 he brings in jeb stewart who is like a guy who had a development deal do you know jeb stewart at all i don't i don't really know what jeb stewart ended up

a mountain like what else he did he did that movie leviathan exclamation mark after his name jeb jeb oh he wrote the fugitive okay yes yeah sure uh with david toey he wrote some you know he wrote a lot of action movies that's pretty wonderful it it feels like or it looks like and and having been in the business for a while i guess i know it is like you know if you do something well and it makes money they're like hey that's the person and that person they go to until the thing doesn't do well or until there's a new flavor of the month and then they go to that person over and over again david kept seems to have had a really good run of that really good david kept seems to be like the go-to guy yeah i think he's uh he's reliable right you know

whatever um but you basically have this this thing they own the rights to sitting on a desk for like a decade. And then Lawrence Gordon is going like, we have open slots in our schedule. Here's the book. Right. It's truly a thing of like, we need to plug in this type of movie in this season, this type of movie in this season. What do we have? It's often, you know, now it's things are so like big IP based. But these studios just look and they're like, what have we already spent some amount of money on

so we can make back the investment of whatever the original rights buy was? So Stewart is struggling to write, you know, to adapt this book. Do a pretty straight adaptation. He's got two kids. Yeah. He says one day he was like driving to the studio to write,

working all night, coming back stressed out. He got in a huge fight with his wife. He gets in the car. He's driving from Pasadena back to Burbank. He almost crashes into what he calls a refrigerator box, like a giant cardboard box on the road, right? Pulls over to the side of the freeway, his heart is pounding. And he's like, that would have been it. Like my wife would have never heard from me again. We ended on a fight. that would have been it like my wife would have never heard from me again we ended on a fight and he's like that's what the movie's got to be it's got to be someone my age yeah who just got in a fight with his wife basically and then this shit happens before he gets to apologize to her i mean it's it's an even better thing that he latches on to there i mean the aha moment is so incredible and it's like the first spark of like something great in this idea because none of that is in the book um yeah but it's like well not just that's what the emotional setup of the movie is but i can reverse engineer from this who the character should be which is this is a guy who gets on a plane and flies to la all that way just to apologize and then in the moment his ego gets

in the way and he can't do it. And he fucks up with the one thing he was trying to do and then finds himself in the middle of an action movie. And the whole thing is like, how do I survive this to get to the other end of this and not have this be

the greatest regret? And now think about it. That's become a trope. Yeah, it's the most obvious trope in the world now, right? Yeah. But at the time, it was novel. We were all like, that's become a trope. It's the most obvious trope in the world now. Right. Yeah. But, but at the time it was novel.

We were all like, Oh, yeah, they're five and a five. Like it starts as like this domestic drama. Yeah. In the midst of which a terrorist incident explodes. That doesn't turn out to be a terrorist incident at all.

It's a movie that keeps turning every few minutes where you're like, I know where this is going. Wait, I don't know where this is going. Now I know. No, wait, I don't know. Well, and you talking about how this is a movie that's not only still studied by film dorks like ourselves, but also by like kitchen sink people. There's the third column, which is this is still a movie that executives try to replicate. And certainly for the 10 years after this, it was like the movie that everyone was trying

to replicate. But people go like, how do you make a John McClane style hero, a Hans Gruber style villain? And how do you set the right emotional stakes in a movie like that? And the thing that Jeb Stewart talks about is that like he was like hot shot out of film school, shoots out to Hollywood, gets these development deals. And then it's like three years later, he's sort of just been stuck in the hamster wheel. And he keeps getting jobs that don't follow through. Nothing's getting made.

Nothing's getting finished. He's somehow like successful and in debt. And now he's married and has kids and he's feeling all this pressure. And it's like the frustration that leads to his fight with his wife on that night is in the midst of him trying to crack this script off a sort of like whatever paperback thriller that then like explodes into this emotional regret which he then feeds back into the script like the pressure of him knowing he needs to make this movie work creates the stakes that gives him the stakes of the story in a way that I think is kind of beautiful. The shooter is Jan de Bont, right?

Sure is. Yeah. How interesting that the best of the diehard, let's not call them knockoffs, but the children of diehard. Yeah. Diehard on a bus. Speed was directed by the guy that shot diehard. That's how obsessed the studios were with this movie that they were like, get us anyone

who was on set and understands what the recipe was that made that movie work. Okay, so look, Jeff Stewart turns into the script, gets a green light. Joel Silver comes aboard, sits him down and says, nothing personal, but you're going to get fired. You are fired. This has nothing to do with the script. I love the script, but I don't know you. I got to make a movie and I got to make a a movie fast so this is how it's gonna be right because it's an immediate fast track of like he hands in his draft with this emotional backbone and they go like this

movie has a release date eight months from now my favorite green light you have no director you have no star it's going my favorite thing is that joel silver is like your script's pretty good by the way but why doesn't the building blow up at the end and jeb stewart's like well i don't know i mean like if it blows up didn't john mclean fail like isn't that a problem and joel silver's like i don't give a fuck if he failed no one cares you don't spend money to come to the theater and not see a building blow up and jeb stewart's like he is right like that is what he brought to the table he was like no no the movie's got to have explosions in it. Like, was actually a good note. So Jeb Stewart is still working on rewrites with Silver. They're trying to get a director attached.

I mean, this is like, right, moving train because they have this summer slot where they want something like this. The first guy they offer the movie to is Verhoeven. Yeah. Sort of hot off of Robohoeven. Yeah. Yeah. Sort of hot off of RoboCop. Yeah, yeah, you're coming off of RoboCop.

Yeah, that makes sense. And Jan de Bont had shot so much of his Dutch work that it's like, that's kind of the mood they want to bring to this. And yeah, McTiernan says he just wasn't the first choice. We know Verhoeven was the first choice. I don't know if they offered it to everyone else. Yeah. But obviously,

Silver likes McTiernan. And Fox does, and Gordon does. He's proven himself to all these guys. McTiernan keeps reading the script and sends it back saying, this is not fun.

I don't want to see a cop shoot terrorists. I don't want to spend a year of my life immersed in a story like that. Like, I think McTiernan's thing, which is what transforms the movie, it's what you're talking about, Kevin, is he's just like, terrorists are not entertaining, robbers are entertaining, can we make them robbers, can we make this movie fun?

Like, can we have humor here, and can we have, like, an ensemble of characters that are interesting, rather than just, like, he just fucking wastes terrorists, like, on floor after floor the commentary the word he kept on using was joy like in all these meetings i was like there has to be joy in this movie or else it's a bummer and he very wisely pinned like terrorists bum people out yeah yeah they just bad vibes they make you think too much about like the larger political machinations of our bad world and if the solution to them is a rogue hero going in and shooting them all even if that's maybe like a net positive it's not fun to watch it's like haunted um and and he like makes this whole spiel to joel silver who's so antagonistic and he's like silver to his credit was like you're 100 correct on this i'm not fighting you on this at all make them robbers they come up with the hook of

they're robbers trying to present they're terrorists. Right. And then, yeah, he sees the sort of kernel of who McClane is in that limo exchange, but then goes like,

we need to bring a guy in to do a pass and bring that to the forefront. That's Steven D'Souza. That's when D'Souza comes in. The humor. Right. So who so who brings de souza is it joel silver it's mcturnan and but the two of them i guess yeah yeah and de souza had written on predator yeah and i mean mcturnan just says that he is funny and has an ironic sense like basically that's who they want uh you know de souza says he also just was being brought into

like kind of like they had walked they walked through the building through the sets uh and figured out just how the geography of set pieces would work like you know what where can he fight who when basically uh because the original didn't have that. So he did this on-location specific stuff once they knew where Nakatomi Plaza was. Right, because Nakatomi Plaza is one of the Fox buildings. So they know they have this building at their, like, this free resource, basically. But yeah, all of this is evolving very organically and very quickly. We're writing to circumstances now. We're writing to our

understanding of the layout of the building and we're writing to the taste of the director like think about how old school this entire project came together there was a book the book was bought by a studio sat for a while then it was assigned to a writer somebody read that script like hey we might have something here let's give it to another writer and then they put it in or before that in the hands of the director the director had very specific ideas about why he didn't want to direct it which then shaped the movie he would eventually agree to and then further shaped by his tastes essentially we're living in a culture of cinema culture that was deeply informed by john mctiernan going like i think it should be this yeah like he made the movie the action movie that he wanted to see that he found interesting that he found like oh let's put joy in it like there's something you don't

see in these fucking movies let's put irony in it did it feel that way when you saw like do you have a memory of that like of you being like damn this movie's like fun like you know 100 100 i remember going into that theater and i convinced friends to come with me right um it was you know it came out right around the summer at that point mostly everybody wanted to go to snake lake and drink and stuff and i was was like, no, man, this movie is supposed to be good. Die Hard. They're like, I don't want to go to the Sears movie. Everyone called it the Sears movie because the only reference to a term Die Hard prior to that movie was Sears had their battery. The car battery was called the Die Hard, which I believe is where they stole the title from.

It was not a popular term. It used throughout the culture die hard was a sears car battery so the first time people started hearing there's a movie called die hard they were like what does sears got to do with it so i had to convince friends who was shannon fury came with me ernie o'donnell came with me ernie o'donnell who now runs that theater he came with me and we sat in the back of the theater and i was able to get ernie to come with me because he also loved bruno we listened to the the return of Bruno album. That's where I learned to drive in Ernie's car. So we went in for Willis and Willis delivered and he was, you know, he

wasn't David Addison. Um, he was definitely more, more hardened. Uh, didn't, he was quippy, but not nearly as quippy as David Addison. he wasn't a wise guy wasn't the class clown um and so but he delivered and what he delivered in terms of like raw cinematic charisma suddenly you were like wow he can be more than david addison this is even cooler but there was like this moment of back and forth like who is that guy? The moment Hans Gruber starts fucking acting. The moment Alan Rickman comes into the picture, who moves, like Alan was a big fan of movement. You know, Bruce was the one that at least said to me,

it's a movie, we got to move. But Alan as a performer, like if you look at his entry into Die Hard, sweeping, low angle and just commanding presence as he moves. He doesn't walk normally. He walks in this assured, brisk pace. I mean, it's the thing that Harry Potter movies get mileage out of eight times in a row.

Thousand percent. The first time you see him enter a room in a Harry Potter movie, it's all about Alan's entrance. They basically get a gag out of his entrance in each film. Yes. And it was established probably here. But he was the one that like all the gallows humor. Yes, the fact that he did kill Mr. Takagi, which then made him a threat enough to not want to root for. The irony, the irony,

the like, you know, come out to the coast. We'll have a few laughs. Um, all of this made, made me as an audience member. And I know the people I went with feel like that's the way it would be. Like, that's how I would react. Like you never felt that going to action movies prior to that. You were looking at somebody like Arnold Schwarzenegger or sylvester stallone and you don't put yourself in their shoes die hard quite like batman as opposed to superman aquaman wonder woman you have a hero where you're like i could see myself like this is a victim of circumstance this guy and like he's doing his best and like he's a a monkey in the wrench if you will like he's identifiable in the way that most cinematic heroes weren't they were too far removed this guy you could be this guy david yes john mclean likes to die hard okay does he like to die hard or does is it hard for him to die? He's too good at living.

Yeah. That's sort of his issue, right? That's true. His Achilles heel is he is too good at staying alive. Okay. Killing him is hard. I feel like you should arrive at a point. You know what is hard, though?

Making several meals a day. That's true. I mean, yes, it's very hard. Eat hard is what? Food hard is my life story. It's hard to feed yourself, you know, and think of good things to cook and all this stuff. Factor. Yeah.

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I mean, you look at this being a corrective what you're saying this feeling very different at the time it comes out this movie is sort of like functioning as a response to the rise of schwarzenegger and stallone getting huge and becoming more and more super hero yeah right and i think they're in design trying to roll it back to dirty harry and they end up stripping it even further beyond that um but yeah i mean that was the thing they said they offered this to fucking every guy in hollywood right but clint eastwood paul newman and then richard gear right are the most interesting ones that they could talk to at the most in gear they're like that's what we were thinking about

like a suave sophisticated guy like not a muscle-bound guy like a guy who wears a jacket right like a and then like when they get willis that is i do feel like right more like okay well this is earthier like this guy's not because i wouldn't buy that with gear does have he's american gigolo you know it's different than david addison who does have a chip on his shoulder. You know, David Addison is this. I think you would have gotten humor from gear. Yeah.

Not nearly as much. I think he would have been way more interested in being who he was at that point, which was Richard Gere. It would have been a Richard Gere vehicle. He had a defined movie star persona, whereas Bruce had something to prove. And also Bruce is like emotion first. I mean, they finally, Moonlighting has just gone up on Hulu recently. Yeah. After being out of circulation for an incredibly long time because of music rights.

And now they finally sorted all of that out. It was like one of the later shows to get released on DVD once that was the craze. And then has been one of the last major to get released on dvd once that was the craze and then has been one of the last major shows to get on streaming and i had never really watched it before and it is insane just tuning in the first episode and being like this guy is fully like he's arriving fully made fully developed i cannot take my eyes off of this fucking guy. But relative to what he becomes as a movie star, there is, he has more vulnerability as David Addison

than even the Bill Murray archetype, right? Where people call Bill Murray out in his bullshit, but he remains a little undeterred. There's that weird balance of these guys having the smartest dude in the room energy and running circles around people

and some of the other characters being like, is he just like a fucking flim-flam artist? David Addison shows the cracks at times, right? And he shows his vulnerability and he gets afraid and he wants to win over Cybill Shepherd and everything. John McClane's a guy who's trying very hard

to not show any of that. I mean, Ben and I saw this movie in theaters about a month ago. And not to reduce it to like dumb meme speak, but it finally cracked for me what this movie in theaters about a month ago and not to reduce it to like dumb meme speak but it finally cracked for me what this movie is about and now i know the jeb stewart backstory of the the almost car crash but i was like oh die hard is men will literally do a die hard to avoid going to therapy it is a movie about men avoiding conversations right and you can track that onto McLean, Powell, and Gruber, where Gruber is like creating this entire false narrative of who he wants everyone to think he is.

This McTiernan thing of like, all of the terrorists should look like European male models. They should look like Armani models. They should be more like Richard Gere types, right? And McLean is a guy who like gets on a plane to have a conversation and then refuses to have the healthy version of that conversation and powell is like only able to process his trauma by talking to a stranger over a walkie-talkie right they both are right yeah yeah because they're not in the room together they can confess like feelings to each other right it's true and is powell in the book or a version of powell in the book that's a great question i i think like all these feels like a movie invention he feels definitely no he exists there is something of a trope to that character but not this clearly establishes

that trope but like when it when i was watching the movie it was not unfamiliar i was not like it's the first time i've ever seen something like this, where there's a guy up there and there's a guy in there and they're communicating. Like, but they really played the poignancy of that. As we know, like particularly at the end where they give pal his own moment to clear his deck after he gives his confessional mid movie where you're like, you know, these cops are not afraid to be vulnerable with one another. And so you get to see who they really are. And that your, your observation about Bruce in, in moonlight, his vulnerable David Addison is exactly on point.

He is hysterical in that show. And he is the comedic second banana of that show. Um, but when they allow David Addisonison these moments like you know there was an episode where his father's played by paul servino um and comes to the to to town um and it's involving a storyline where his dad's about to marry a woman that david feels that he had a one night stand with you know years and years and years ago, really emotional storyline. But they were able to take that and just make him, I mean, for lack of a better term, John McClane is way more macho, as we used to say in the 70s, than David Addison.

But all of David Addison is there. It's maybe David Addison 10, 15 years later hardened to a large degree. Yeah, and also, I mean, it's just, it's the thing that made Bruce so fucking effective as a movie star is just like there is an innate kind of sad weariness to him. There is this like heavy-souled quality

to him that cannot be completely covered up. And when he puts the charm and the riz and the humor on top of that, you get this sort of full meal. But there's always this feeling of like, there's something kind of broken inside this guy. There's a longing.

There's a thing he's struggling to express. I mean, yeah, Eastwood says, I don't get the humor, right? Paul Newman says, I don't want to shoot guns in movies anymore. I'm sick of carrying a gun in a movie. Right. Then there's a list of guys that's debated over

who the studio wanted, who casting wanted, who the team wanted. The point is, no one wants to be in it. That's the point. Here's the one guy they sort of dance with

a little bit, but it doesn't happen. And it gets to the point where it's like, this movie is a go picture. It is moving. It has been staffed up. They need somebody.

Bruce Willis is in this very fascinating transitional stage where moonlighting is still on the air. It's big. Bruce Willis is in this very fascinating transitional stage where moonlighting is still on the air. It's big. Everyone is having this feeling of this might be a guy who could make the jump from TV to movies. We rarely give people that shot. He has shot two films, both Blake Edwards movies. Only Blind Date has come out, which did OK. And I think everyone's take on that is like, that's a neutral. He didn't bomb, he didn't embarrass himself,

but it's not like he proved himself as a movie star. Sunset is the next one, which is really expensive and is shaping up for him. But if this moment they cast him has not been released yet. So they're looking at it. I don't know if you have a blind date take, Kevin. I don't know

if you saw Blind Date back in the day. Him and Kim Basinger. I remember the song. There was a song about a guy. Billy Vera and the Beaters, right? What would you think? You nailed it. Let You Get Away.

Oh, What a Night. Anybody seen her? They had a lot of songs in this soundtrack. I think it's anybody seen her. It's like, The red dress on. But I remember that movie. I saw it.

I was a huge Blake Edwards guy. Still am to this day. So SOB is one of my favorite fucking movies. So I did see it when it came out. And I'm not saying, it was Lesser Edwards, but it wasn't SOB, but very few things. Remind me his agent's name. David, it wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't SOB, but very few things are.

Remind me his agent's name. David, it's in the dossier. His Bruce, Bruce Willis's agent, Arnold Rifkin basically says, look, Arnold Rifkin became the, his producer and they made movies together for the next like 20 years. He's like, no one wants to be in this fucking movie. So you're giving me $5 million for Willis, which is basically the highest salary for an actor like Bruce Willis. It's one of the highest reported salaries an actor had ever gotten at that point.

Right. And his thinking was basically like, the first movie is a freebie, right? If they're testing you out as a movie star, if it doesn't hit, people go, well, transitional trying out. The second one can actually doom you. If you have two in a row that don't connect, you're fucked. They could feel that the second one wasn't going to connect and he is like we have them a little bit over a barrel because they can't get anyone for this yeah bruce has some marquee appeal but he's untested as a movie star and people don't know exactly where to slot him in as a movie star the one thing we can do as an insurance policy is get him the quote-unquote record highest salary

even if it's a record that even if it's for a second that's what he truly says like they'll they'll up someone else will beat the deal the next week but for that one day that way if the movie bombs they'll go well he did it for the money right it wasn't like you know warmed over returns at least bruce made like a healthy a tidy prof on you go back to TV you do a second show whatever the fuck it is it's kind of indefensible where you're like you wouldn't have done that 5 million bucks come on right

industry is furious because now they're like fuck what am I supposed to do give Tom Selleck 6 million dollars for three men and a baby like you know like have you set some benchmark it's just like what happened with Jim Carrey getting 20 when I was gonna say there's 10 years difference between the escalation is so wild from like five is seen as insane at that point in 10 years later it's 20 yeah it's multiplied four times you know schwarzenegger

gets 15 for last action hero because because they get bruce yeah they have to build out the supporting cast because of his fucking schedule it It's another fucking blessing in disguise. It is, yes. Where much like Back to the Future, they're like, we got this guy half the time. At a certain point in production, Moonlight will have wrapped for the season, but at least for the first chunk, we're going to be sharing him. They have him in the mornings and the days. So we got to build the supporting cast out. So we got to build the supporting cast out, which leads into McTiernan's insane read, which I had never heard before, that his take on this movie was you got to structure this and build it like Midsommar's Night Dream.

Alan Rickman had done. That's the reference? Yes, because he's like this classics guy, you know, like McTiernan studied drama at Juilliard. Yeah, he is a Juilliard guy. Yeah. And he said look i'm not like hitting it beat for beat i'm not trying to actually literally map on you know die hard to midsummer's night dream right but he said it's this idea of this one night where everything goes crazy and you establish this ensemble cast and then this guy's going to turn into a donkey

and this person's going to fall under a spell and this and that at the end you reset things back to normal and it's like how do you set up as many colorful characters in this sort of contained setting and then test them all and let their personalities all explode um rickman had been on broadway in liaison dance ruse um as valmont and they liked him in that. They have him audition. Rickman apparently is like, I'm not doing this. What is this shit? And his agents are like,

you've been in LA for two days and you got offered this job. Like, you do not turn this down. You are doing this. And Rickman is like, obviously changed my life. Like, you know, immediately changed his life. I mean, you worked with him.

His rep is very menschy. I mean, you know, obviously, He's, his rep is very Menchie. I mean, I, you know, obviously we, you know, he's not with us anymore and I do feel like everyone misses him so much, but like, what was, what was, what was Rickman like? Um, he did not disappoint. Um, you know, when I first saw him in the, uh, in, in Die Hard and fell in love with him as an actor, um. You know, I was, oh my Lord, I want to see everything this guy does after this. And I absolutely did. But never once, you know,

because this was years before I even thought about being a filmmaker. Never once was like, one day I'm going to work with that guy. Even when I started my career, I was not like, one day I want to work with him. Get me to Alan Rickman. I don't make movies like that. Then we had, you know, dogma.

And so I guess this is the story. And I just went over it recently with John Gordon, who was my exec at Miramax back in the day. And he went on to produce like David O. Russell's movies and stuff like that. He ran Annapurna for a while. I ran like Universal for a minute. But John Gordon, he didn't remember this when I told him the story. And then he was like, oh, my God, you're right.

And I said, this shows you what a life you've led, that you don't remember this story. So he calls me up and he goes, dude, we just had a meeting with Alan Rickman. And I was like, Hans Gruber? And he's like, yeah, man. We met with him about this Merchant Ivory project. I was like, how was he? Was he cool? he was very cool he's going but i have to tell you all he wanted to talk about was chasing amy and i was like what that's wild he was like yeah he was like we were pitching him this

merchant ivory thing and he said it sounds interesting but who made chasing amy i would like to know what they're doing next and they were like oh that's kevin he's making this movie dogma so john gordon when he called me and told me that i was like i was you know i was like oh my god the guy from die hard knows who i am i was excited alone for that but john was like what about him for metatron i was like oh god yes i was like yeah let's send him a script so we sent him the script for dogma and he responded like immediately a day after he got it he was like i'm not going to try to do the accent but he was like i absolutely adore this do you have a god yet and i was like somebody to play god i had

written that role for holly hunter who was wordless in piano and that's why there's like piano jokes and references but holly hunter had done a life less ordinary right with danny boyle a movie about killer angels he covered that recent on the podcast a very bizarre film and performance very bizarre film and because of that she was like i don't want to do another movie with angels and stuff so alan rickman is like do you have a god and i was like no right now we're godless and he was just like well i would like to ask my friend i think she would find this hysterical emma thompson and i was like yeah yeah go go ahead you want to give her a call yeah so for about two months emma thompson was god and don't she alan gave her the script and

they were besties and shit he was like you should come out and do this i'm gonna play the metatron you turn out to be god that'd be great and then i got this beautiful handwritten letter from emma thompson like saying that like you know i i was really looking forward to this but i'm i'm actually not i'm gonna have to uh drop out um as much as i love alan and the script uh and she was like i'm thinking thinking about having a kid. Sure. So, you know, I want to concentrate on that at the moment. Thank you so much. Hope we work together in the future, blah, blah, blah. So I was like completely, you know,

unsavvy in these days in terms of like the press, in terms of like, I'd say a thing and not think that like, oh, that's going to be newsworthy to somebody else. So hardly circumspect. I had a big fucking mouth. So I was doing an interview and I that like, oh, that's going to be newsworthy to somebody else. So hardly circumspect. I had a big fucking mouth. So I was doing an interview and I was like, oh, Emma Thompson was going to play God, but she wants to stay back in England

and try to have a kid. And then we got a phone call from Emma Thompson's agent, who was very, very sweet, but communicated the message of like, can you please not tell people that I'm thinking about trying to. I opened my door this morning. The entire British press was sitting in front of it with cameras asking me about this question. It's not like a variety scoop of like Emma Thompson circling motherhood as potential next project.

So he was you want to talk about a mensch. Yeah. Not only did he join the movie, but he was like, oh, let me bring along legend Emma Thompson with me. So even though she dropped out, he loved the movie and was with us every step of the way. He, one of my favorite moments on the set of Dogma was we were between shots and we're at the church

and I looked over and alan rickman was sitting next to jason muse and they were deep in conversation and i remember thinking what the fuck could these two have to say to each other like what common ground but rickman like absolutely loved me as he's like he's a true he was the one that used the phrase that i continue to use to this day alan said about jason he goes he is a true, he was the one that used the phrase that I continue to use to this day. Alan said about Jason, he goes, he is a true American origin. And he was oddly fascinated by him and stuff. So he loved hanging out with him. He loved the shoot.

We threw out Alan's back while we were making dogma because we put these wings on him with a big harness and levers in another room. And we kept opening and closing them. And it literally threw his back out, like to the point where he couldn't move. So there's a scene in dogma. We couldn't change our schedule where they all meet in this restaurant. He joins them and he slides into his seat in a very Alan Rickman sort of way. Yeah, right. But it was only because he could not fucking move.

His back was so bad. So he slides in. He was physically being slid. Yeah. No, he was sliding himself, but he was in physical agony and doing it because he couldn't move a quarter inch in any direction lest he'd be like and periodically through the take there were those moments you could just cut out and stuff but his entry he slides into chairs like going in style and as soon as he finishes the line somebody else starts talking then the raw footage alan goes

you would imagine he would have been like i fucking hate kevin smith and all his friends right but he maintained a friendship with us for for years me scott jason my wife chen like whenever he would come to the states he would find me he would either phone me or he would send me an email and stuff and whenever i went to england the same thing like when i went to england he would find me and be like we're taking you out to dinner. Him and Rima, his wife. And then when he was in the States, he'd be like, you owe me dinner. And we'd take him out.

So he, like, I remember one time I went to do a show at the O2 in London. Like one evening with Kevin Smith type thing. And he was like, can I go? And I was like, oh my God, do you want to? He said, yeah, I love going to your shows. People know who I am in the audience. And I was like, that's adorable. So they went to the show.

I did the show. And then it's outside of London. So we all jumped in the car service to go back together. I don't know if they'd taken the train or something to get there. But at that time, trains don't really go back. We were more than happy to go back with him and Rima. So he told me this adorable story. He was talking about the show and how people come up to him and stuff and talk about talking die hard talk about

metatron blah blah blah talk about you know the sheriff of nottingham yeah you know cancel christmas christmas so we're driving back and i was like so how are you doing he goes well i finally uh broke down and bought an apartment in new york he'd been doing a lot of shows he was directing the play um i am rachel cory he had been in um what was it past lives previous lives or something i forgot i went to the stomper thing uh yeah yeah so he was spent a lot of time yeah in new york and so he was like i finally bought an apartment i was like oh my god that's great man and he goes well not so great i said why and he goes well i bought an apartment in the same building where my friend lives and i was like well i would imagine that's really nice and he goes yes but my friend is ray

fiends and i was like i didn't i didn't know that you guys were friends he was going yes and we're trying desperately to keep all of this secret and i was like why and he's like because if the potter fans find out that snape snape and and Voldemort live in the same building, they will bring it down, you know? So he was absolutely lovely. And it took me years to understand that we were actually friends. You know, because the first time I was exposed to this guy,

I was like, he's an acting legend. And I always viewed him as this movie star, even when I got to work with him and found out he was a real human being and related to him and would hang out with him and stuff. And for years, I thought he was just being like British courteous, you know, by being like, well, Kevin's in town. I'll reach out to him. But it wasn't that. He just genuinely liked me and Jay.

This has delivered. My God. He truly is the menschiest mensch I've ever heard of, basically. Scott, still to this day, Scott talks about, he he's like one time he just took me out to lunch and he's like and i was sitting there for two hours in the middle of that lunch i was like i can't believe hans gruber right talking to me like i'm a real human being like he was a guy he could talk he didn't just talk about movies he didn't never really talked about the business he would talk about the craft if he wanted to and stuff but he was he had such a great sense of humor.

Not a wicked sense of humor or something like that. He was just funny. And when you could make him laugh, you felt insanely powerful. There's some people in life where if you can crack them, you're like, oh, man. And Alan's laugh was so rapturously joyous and silent. He was very like. So you only heard the exhale he's such a fascinating figure to me because it's like he's 41 when they filmed this movie is that right it's got to be like a grown-ass man he's a grown-ass fully formed man 46

yeah he's like 40. Yeah, 41. I mean, there's that thing where you're just like, you know, it's not even... I re-watched The Gambler, the James Caan movie recently, and like, James Woods is in it for a scene as a bank

teller, right? And you're like, oh, it's weird to see baby, like, primordial unformed Jamesames woods but the moment when james woods fully comes into his power and has established what his movie persona is there's been footage of james woods floating around you know whether or not you've taken notice of this guy versus like this is alan rickman enters on screen a fully formed adult person and not only that like someone with complete command of his craft, even though he's working

in a different medium. It has this meta effect that I think helps the movie, even if you're watching it today, obviously, like we're of an age where we watch it already familiar with Alan Rickman and other things.

But there's something you have to imagine about like what you're saying. This guy just entering and being like, I got no read on this guy. This guy inscrutable i'm bringing no context from his previous performances which is what this character demands is who the fuck is this guy who walks like this who talks like this what is his plan what is his political agenda you know um but i feel like because this defines his thing so hard and then for the next 30 years of his career, he's doing variations on this.

He's doing, you know, Sheriff of Nottingham is very much. Can you play Hans Gruber in, you know, in old England or it's can you play with the persona? Can you twist it? Can you this or that? You know, Galaxy Quest, I feel like is mocking what the public perception of him was. And when he passed, there's so many stories that came out like the ones you were telling from people who worked with him who were like the dearest man, the most considerate, quiet, thoughtful. And it was like he kind of didn't have a public persona for so long as much as his work was so big and he was so known and people loved him,

it felt like, I feel like I as a fan was always worried, like, is he just kind of what he plays? Is he kind of haughty and aloof and sort of above it all? And then he plays it very well on screen,

but I never hear people telling me that this dude's a mensch. And then when he died, not only was there such a constant outpouring, but then they published his diaries, which were so fucking good. Yeah, they're incredible.

And are so, like, thoughtful and detailed. And he took these really detailed diaries while he was filming everything. And you're, like, looking into his process where I'm like, this is a guy who I just assumed, he's 40, he shows up in his first movie, he's like, I know how to act. Just give me the script, I learn the lines, it's presets. He doesn't in his first movie. He's like, I know how to act. Just give me the script.

I learn the lines. It's presets. He doesn't know how to hold a gun. He doesn't know how to be in an action movie. Like, he had to learn a lot, I think. But they are like, now that we have Willis, who's sort of more working class, he makes, an urbane villain now makes sense. Like, rather than a muscle bound villain or whatever,

like, you know, this guy who's sort of like intellectual and he's talking about, you know, suits and he's talking about, you know, like he's got this kind of like, you know,

classical music villain vibe. the terrorism thing of like this guy, the last thing he wants anyone to know is that he is a comment robber, right? He is embarrassed by the notion that he only is in it for gold how embarrassing is that he wants to put on this show of this is this is from coming from a political ideology i have a statement to make i have a point to make um but that helps that there's the sort of acting on top of acting in the character baked in he um the uh persona the hans gruber persona which as you mentioned a lot of people were like hey man can you do that can you do variation that can you do variation we weren't to the mundogman we weren't like give us hans gruber it was like more like just give us that voice

like you're meant to be the voice of god, and you have that voice, so go ahead. And so he's got some British irascibility, but he's very gentle, very well-spoken. And he's got this beautiful scene with Linda Fiorentino that's just touching as hell where he has to explain to her that she's like the savior and stuff. So naturally, of course, I wanted to work with him again and again and again. Only ever worked with him at one time right he was meant to play the role of will and holly which uh will farrell eventually got really jane bob strike back yeah that's a very different movie crazy yeah and here's why though it's predicated on something that happened there was another time that we were working together and then it didn't pan out. So we made the clerk's cartoon. Uh, if you've never seen it, yes, yes, Leonardo, Leonardo,

only six episodes. Leonardo Leonardo is the villain of the show. And I made the show with, with, uh, Dave Mandel who made, it was from Seinfeld, Veep, uh, white house cleaners, road was not road trip, but it was Euro trip euro trip yes you know scotty doesn't know um so dave very funny guy and so we created for clerks like a monty burns sort uh called leonardo leonardo um the town that everything takes place in was leonardo and the first episode is him opening quicker stop like across the street in this giant like mega mall so the character looks exactly like hans gruber it's drawn to look exactly like hans gruber because alan was like we were like alan will you play our bad guy and he's like i would love to do animation so i'm not going to

do this sorry so um he signed on we recorded like all the boys, Brian, Jeff, Jay. But when it came to Leonardo, we had to wait till Alan was going to be, you know, in the States and then do it all at one time. So he came in and like, we were all so excited. And me and Scott, of course, know him. But like Dave, everyone on the crew of the Clerks cartoon was like, oh my God, it's him. It's him. And so Alan was like, we showed him the designs and stuff. we're like so yeah man just take it away and alan goes um if you don't mind i really don't want to do hans yeah and i was like yeah i don't know but like

it's a cartoon so it's kind of you can get away with it and he goes no i can't get away with it he's going i'd rather if it's cartoon i'd rather do something i'd rather be because it does look just like him and specifically like grouper pitch perfect for that reason yes and so you know i'm like okay man like i trust you go for it and alan's performance of leonardo leonardo was a mimicry of ross perot then presidential canada one time failed presidential canada had an iconic voice yeah yeah we he did and and we have somewhere in the disney library because disney produced the show in the vault um in the vault somewhere is six episodes worth of Alan doing Leonardo, Leonardo, but sounding more like, Hey, you bars, you clerks, we're playing clerks.

Like it was crazy. Cause you'd see this voice coming out of his mouth and you're like, I didn't know he could do that sort of thing, but it just didn't match like what we had the character doing. And so we wound up, um, Dave Mandel, cause he worked on Saturday night live and because, uh, other stuff he worked on, he became, uh, friendly with, um, Alec Baldwin. And so Alec Baldwin came in and played Leonardo Leonardo instead. And he's basically doing his own Gruber impression, which we said, where he was like, what do you want? And we were like,

can you just do Hans Gruber? And he was like, okay. So he went for it. And then years later, I was on like Match Game or whatever Alec Baldwin was hosting. And, you know, backstage, the hosts usually come by and say hi and stuff. And he was like, Kevin Smith, lovely to meet you. And I was like, we met before.

You were in the Clerks cartoon. He goes, that's right. He's going, boy, I feel Hollywood. It must be nice to be able to forget gigs that you've done to have in my world every like clerks mall right like mall rats happened yesterday and i keep these things alive and milk them to death but the people i work with other than jason muse generally go on to other movies and wear a memory of one thing that they did, if a memory at all. And that dude's storied career, like he didn't he didn't instantly

remember. But when I said it, he said that he did. JJ, who does our research for the podcast. Yes. Put in a couple notes of editorialization, as he is prone to do in the research document he gave us. And one of them is just, he called out, I think it's a fascinating recurring thread as we've been doing all these McTiernan movies, that McTiernan seems to be somewhat driven by his distaste for what other action movies were at the time, right?

We talk about this being a movie that everyone sort of copies, that becomes the blueprint. And the commentaries I've been listening to that are recorded decades later, he talks about the ways in which he feels other movies, other filmmakers took the wrong lessons from what he did, missed the messaging of it. But there's that sort of feeling of like the the the obsession with infusing joy into this thing. Audiences don't go to... Right down to the ode to joy when they open the fucking vault.

Literal for him. He was like, that was sort of the mantra of the set. It wasn't me being clever. It was like, I want that constantly being repeated

over and over again. So there's this sort of like philosophy, the tone, the mood of what he thinks this movie needs to be in order for it to be enjoyable. But there's the other thing of here's this guy who like went to AFI, who worked in commercials for a very long time and basically spent a decade plus studying film

construction like a science, getting incredibly, incredibly technical about it. And he talks about how he was truly like, he would write up charts with shot lengths, just theoretically, like he was working on like a theorem of just like, would it work if a shot was this long and then you cut it this length and directionally one shot was this way and the other shot was this way.

He spends a lot of time being incredibly analytical and clinical about it to 10 years later when he's on the set of Die Hard. Almost all of this is unconscious for him. And you read about how much of this movie was vaguely improvisational, that when they start filming, the script is like 30 percent of what it ultimately ends up being. But there are pieces like, well, we have Argyle at the beginning picking him up. He's sort of the framework of the movie. The realization of, oh, Argyle needs to be the one who's perfectly placed to back up to stop the ambulance at the end of the movie happened mid flow. And when Ben and I saw this at Nighthawk with several rounds of drinks right before Christmas and people are like hooting and

hollering in the theater, the whole time I just kept on thinking to myself, like, it is frustrating how well organized this movie is. That was the term I kept on going back to of just like this movie is visually so well organized. It is narratively so well organized. It is like it's like watching someone on the fucking Johnny Carson show do a plate spinning routine. And you're like, there's no way he's going to be able to make it over to that plate in like it's like watching someone on the fucking johnny carson show do a plate spinning routine and you're like there's no way he's going to be able to make it over to that plate in time before

it stops spinning and you're just keeping track of all the plates in real time um and as you said a lot of it was like out of necessity of we need to make the other characters interesting enough that we have reasons to shoot them when we only have bruce for half a day right but re-watching it i was for how much this movie is a star vehicle taken by how many long stretches of this film there are where it really feels ensembley where mclean is just one of the characters i mean think about it you in a world where they have more access to Bruce Willis, you probably don't get nearly as much Ellis. No.

And Ellis, for a side incidental character, is so memorable and so well-drawn and performed that you're like, oh, when he goes, you're like, I mean, I get it for the story, but fuck, I like that guy. But because you liked him, you were even more invested. We invested we're like oh my god they'll kill guys like that like tough that he goes off screen yeah you don't even see it um yeah that performance who is that heart heart who later directed pcu in high school high your favorite yeah bizarrely i believe this

was his dad lloyd correct yes i'm not calling him out as a nepo baby but i think i remember his dad from his dad was lloyd bockner yeah who was either on dynasty yes i think dynasty he was on dynasty yeah he was on a million things he so he was a legacy this kid but oh my god he was magic i remember watching the movie in the theater and being like this guy's great mcturnan apparently had said to him like you're carrie grant like play this like you're the classy guy you're gonna be the opposite of willis and bockner was like no i want to be like on coke yeah like i want to be like coked up and mcturnan is like oh god no i hate that idea don't do that and bockner just starts doing it and joel silver just starts laughing and it's like

let him do this this is good like this is gonna work well it sounds silly but it's like this whole movie is being you know it's all driven by how do we make the building explode in a cool way right we're doing a thriller in a building we're calling back to erwin allen we're selling this poster that we have in our mind of the building exploding and mctiernan keeps on going back to like how do we make people care about the building? How do we make that fucking matter? Which is you need to care about the people in it. Doesn't mean you need to like everyone in it,

but you need to be fascinated by everyone. And everyone is so vividly drawn. And the first like 20 minutes of this movie, I guess it moves pretty fast. Maybe the first 15 are really set up everything on the board and he is quietly simultaneously both teaching you the geography of everything so invisibly right like all these kind of sweeping camera movements going in and out of rooms where you're just starting to be able to piece together in your brain okay i get it this room connects to

this room this floor is here yeah and also just very efficiently pinning every character in your mind where you're just like everyone has their thing it doesn't feel kind of gimmicky but you're just like everyone has a different look a thing that i think a lot of filmmakers overlook very often is just like hans Gruber's gang has 10 vividly visually distinctive people in it it's true none of them are going to get to talk that much but even the two Nordic Aryan guys have different vibes the brothers have different vibes you know and and picking Alexander Gudinov yeah you know who's known at this point of course mostly he's most famous as a dancer but he starts breaking in into pictures had he done he done

witness um i feel like that's he did witness yeah yeah oh witness what a wonderful movie that's right that's like first time they use him as a blonde goddess uh the best movie of a amish oh yeah one of their favorites that movie still said the gun this is the gun of the hand oh i love that fucking play i i love it it's the we will do it on this podcast obviously why do you think why do you think like a side note why do you think a witness hasn't been remade yet that is a great question because it is the easiest thing in the world yeah um and if i'm some chris pratt level star right who kind of is like i need a vehicle like it's like me and like you know fucking remake witness or you don't even have to remake it but just do that yeah i'm a cop there's a kid i have to protect him i have to go to the amish or i have

to go to some community like have you seen witness yes Witness? Yes, of course. Harrison Ford is John Book. Yes. Yes, of course, John Book. But I do think he's hell. He's hell at whacking, man. thinking that wasn't, I do think these things now often get reduced to like, they need a franchise, right? If you're managing someone who feels like they're on the cusp of movie stardom or trying to maintain movie stardom, it's like, give them a franchise that's going to keep the ball in the air, that gives them a safety net in between projects to go back and make another sequel to this. And those things are usually IP driven versus of, like, character calculation of a John McClane. A movie that's on its face, this film does not feel like it should be able

to spawn a franchise. It feels like this is a story and a character... This is a thing that happened to this guy, yeah. ...are so circumstantial. Well, I mean, how do you feel about

And then they use that in the marketing of two where it's like, how can the same thing happen to the same guy twice? Right. I mean, like, how do you feel

about die hard as a franchise because like vengeance is great the others are kind of you know it's sort of up and down and like it is weird that mclean keeps you know suffering at the hands of terrorists and evil villains and the other weird thing we should acknowledge is all four no let me get this straight the uh diehards two through four all start as uh independent scripts that are then retrofitted into this could be a good diehard sequel uh a good day to die hard is the only one that was actually explicitly written as a diehard sequel right right right right um and they go back and forth i mean which is weird i love i i loved him returning uh you know i was eager for more mclean so die hard 2 totally works for me and and still yeah like uh works for me

to a large degree um you know bringing back bill atherton you know uh putting him on the plane with her you know the fun little callbacks like that. But they still managed to tell an original story that like, you weren't like, oh man, this is a gross fucking grab at my dollar again. It's like, no, I buy it. Bad thing happened to this guy twice. And it also felt like, oh, they're going in the Irwin Allen theme. So they did a building.

Now they're doing an airplane. You know if it would not have been out of the ordinary if die hard 3 had been about an earthquake or something like right right right but um instead of course it went in a much more pulp fictiony direction that feels like pulp fiction informed what die hard 3 became right down to the repairing of well not pairing but two of the stars of pulp fiction being in the movie together but also like let's bring mctiernan back uh let's i mean we'll obviously cover this in its own episode yeah who was was was to renny harlan

that was harlan yeah correct yeah um and it doesn't have i mean i mean i take anything away from renny harlan again i love diehard too but it doesn't have the exact mix element that the first one had that very rarely does a sequel capture all the magic but yeah there's a you can feel a lack of mctiernan in that movie but not in a way where it's like it's unwatchable it's just you can sense that oh this is in somebody else's hands. David? Yes? I got a problem. I got a big, big, big, big, big issue. What's that? Well, when I'm looking for hand-selected, great

cinema from around the world, I go to Mubi. I go to our friends at Mubi. I pull up Mubi. We love Mubi! That solves that problem for me. Yep. I got an unrelated issue that I don't think Mubi can solve. What's that? I don't know how to have sex.

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is not really about how, like the sex being had is often actually quite complex and problematic. It's about difficult situations that evolve. It's definitely not a manual or anything like that. It's not an instruction manual, but it's a film that I would enjoy watching. It's a vibrant and authentic depiction of the agonies, ecstasies, and ride-or-die glory of young female friendship. It's a good movie. I've seen it.

I mean, it sounds like my kind of thing. BAFTA nominee for British Film of the Year. It was at Sundance. It was at Cannes. It's gotten incredible reviews. And it's playing in theaters. And it is a cool movie to see in theaters because it is very sensory. It is, you know, you are partying with these girls.

It's about this sort of crazy, sort of like overwhelming scene that they're in. So it's cool to be, you know, locked to a theater with it, obviously. Is Dr. Ruth still alive? I believe Dr. Ruth is still alive. I mean, I'm definitely going to watch this film. It sounds right up my alley, but I'm also just like, I got maybe got to tackle this other problem. She's 95, so you want to give her a call soon. But How to Have Sex is now playing only in theaters.

Visit mooby.com slash how to have sex, word to see showtimes and get tickets that's mubi.com slash how to have sex i'm going back to this like why doesn't someone remake witness question right which i know sounds like a side tangent but i do think it's connected to this where you're like this speaks to you know willis's agent at this moment being like you're you're in the zone you have the potential and careers uh being planned out with this sort of big picture understanding of like what are your innate qualities as a movie star that we need to bring to the fore and frame properly and also like what are the different aspects of your relationship with the audience that we need to nurture what do people like seeing you do and what are the things they haven't seen you do that we need to try

you know so there was like a willis persona but it was also almost always in a vaguely romantic context that was part of it to start this movie with a guy who's fucking up right right who is not charming the woman of the movie who is starting the movie in the doghouse fucking up and i also think it's such an interesting choice to start the movie with this guy basically trying to fight off a panic attack right yeah yeah make balls of your feet cover for it this other guy is initiating a conversation with him that he would not have. He seems uncomfortable that a stranger is talking to him. This guy is more at peace with himself.

This guy has figured out his own demons to some degree. Hey, this is what you do with your feet when you're panicking. And McClane's kind of like, okay, thanks, buddy. And then yet, still, the first moment he's alone, he's like, let me try out the thing that stranger told me. But then it's so cool cool he needs to be shoeless like that's why they do it right and this is the shit where the first 15 minutes you're like every element of this movie is somehow setting up three elements at the same time right or at the very least laying track conveying information i think about the the introduction of the digital sign-in screen

right which is like what are you accomplishing in this i know like this seems ridiculous like you know doing this business yeah right you're setting up a little bit of like this is how the nakatomi corporation works this is very modern this feels kind of hermetic this is the sort of influence of japanese culture onto our business that is like a rising sort of like consideration in the 80s. This guy, he's blue collar. He doesn't know from fucking touch screens. He doesn't get this. But also at the same time, you have the emotional beat of he's looking for his wife's name in there. He can't find it. Oh, it's under Gennaro. It's the maiden name. he's learning it in a show don't tell way and and then that for it to then play into like that's why they don't know that they're related and like you know it's brilliant you're seeding that later and you're just like this is such a good movie and i saw someone on our reddit asking this recently because we'll throw this term out but like movies that teach you how to watch them. Yeah. Right. And I feel like often that term is thrown out for movies that are like complicated, that have a sort of bracing or unconventional visual style or narrative structure, whatever. going to make an action movie with real emotional stakes and basically a Robert Altman-esque approach to tapestry of characters and subplots and different things you need to track happening

simultaneously in real time. Like, this is like Nashville combined with an Irwin Allen movie combined with a Dirty Harry movie. And there's just an efficiency to, you know, John McTiernan being 10 years on from, there was a point where I was academic and technical and scientific about it. And now it's in my bones. I don't storyboard it. I can show up on set and kind of work this out in real time. And I'm not looking to make myself look good. I'm looking to get this across as cleanly as possible and to keep everyone's

attention. And yeah, you just have these 15 minutes of like you're meeting argyle you're meeting ellis uh you're you're meeting holly you're watching this guy fuck up immediately followed by you know feet and balls on on the carpet and then it's like gunshot at maybe minute 15 maybe a little later than it's a long movie yeah it kind of defies a lot of the rules of these kinds of movies like i feel like a lot of diehard clones like what we're not allowed to be more than like 95 minutes long like we're not allowed to have like expansive casts like this one does 18 minutes is when they shoot the security guard sure so that's when like shit starts to unravel. Right.

But you already feel it. You know so much. And by then you've established your world. All the players, you know, are pretty much on the proscenium, have taken to the stage. I think about, you guys mentioned the feet thing. You didn't have to set up the feet. He could have just been getting changed and like it's an incidental thing that they don't spend a lot of time on. It could have happened. He could have not had his feet, his shoes on when the attack happens.

But how assiduously they deal with his feet to like really thread the needle. Like from the plane to the, you know, corporate offices where he's doing, you know, what is it with his feet? Making balls with his feet. Making fists with his toes. I keep saying balls, but it's fists with his toes. And so, once again, you're close on his feet, but it doesn't feel like foreshadowing. It's like, oh,

finishing a final thought from that plane thing. That's cute. That's cool. That's human. And it's only later on that you start to realize, oh, it was all set up for the moment where he's like, shoot the glass. that's cute that's cool that's human and it's only later on that you start to realize oh it was all set up for the moment where he's like shoot the glass like i remember being in the theater when when you're sitting in the theater and and this happens at any age but i was like 17 at the time i believe where you're like oh that's he he's gonna shoot the glass because

his feet are oh this is that badass that's smart i've never seen that in a movie before it that moment really didn't exist in mainstream movies part of that i'm certainly not saying that nobody ever did something smart in a mainstream movie but generally people with guns were just shooting at each other or like shoot the gas truck so it blows up but that guy going like shoot the glass because i noticed when I talked to them, he has no fucking shoes, so he can't run around. It's like so simple and brilliant. And it was threaded in the opening moments of the movie. There's nothing in this movie that isn't incidental, that is incidental or is whatever. You know what I'm trying to say? There are no accidents in this movie. Everything. Everything is painstakingly set up.

Right. And the setup in and of itself is entertaining enough that you go, well, this is just them trying to infuse humor or character, personality into these moments. You know, it'd be the obvious, laziest version of McTiernan's, like, let's make, let's put joy in this movie. It's just, we'll find ways to make scenes a little more interesting. But then they look at whatever the joy is and they go well what could that serve later what does that set up how could that put a character deeper in the hole um there's there's the i'm a dork who likes magic right and there's you are a dork i'm a dork who likes magic yes yeah and there's the type of magic trick

that is sort of dependent on the magician making you think that they fucked up the trick. Where suddenly the whole audience leans in and you're like, oh shit, I'm seeing the rare night where the guy fucking blows it in front of a crowd. And then you realize, oh no, the failure was a setup for the actual trick. Which I think this movie does a million times. Where you're like, the things I think it's setting up are actually often kind of red herrings such as such well such as the whole terrorism thing well obviously they're making you focus on the wrong thing for so much of the movie which is like the terrorism thing is brilliant because right it makes the villain smarter than they initially seem right you're like oh okay these

guys are running a con that's kind of clever clever. You're kind of, like, impressed by it. Yeah. It makes our police force, and especially FBI, who are obviously the comic geniuses of the film, them coming in late, just seem like incompetent morons, which I love about this movie. Like, you know, that, like, no one really knows how to deal with this in any significant way.

And the more it escalates, the worse we get at it. It's a classic post Vietnam movie thing where it's just like, yeah, America is completely ill equipped to deal with anything like this. Yeah. Um, those are my points. I think that's it.

I don't know. Is there a little Beverly Hills cop in the DNA of this movie? I think there is. I think that's key. Yeah. Predates this, right? Like it's,

it's, Hey man, this is a guy who don't belong in LA and he's in LA. I think there is. Sure. I think that's key. Yeah. That predates this, right? It does. Hey, man, this is a guy who don't belong in L.A. and he's in L.A. and because he don't belong in L.A., that's why he's the guy for the job. Totally. Yes. No, I mean, both of them are movies that basically have contempt. They're one good cop movies, right? Which people now look at with a little bit of itchiness. But they're movies that are like really looking at the absolute sort of like bone deep failure of our institutions at large. And then the only guys who work are the guys who basically see through the bullshit of everything else.

It's not that they're playing by their own rule book. It's sort of more that they function like they're thinking of things as human beings first and not as cops and not as procedure, you know, and that's so much of it is you see that they are man of the people, that they relate to people directly as human beings on a one to one level. But, yeah, it's it's so funny that like off of this movie there then becomes this like action movie Mount Rushmore that is, well, Schwarzenegger, Stallone and Willis. And they become, you know, the three buddies who are doing Planet Hollywood. And when The Expendables comes around, well, even if it's cameos, the movie is not going to have any value if you don't get those three guys in one scene together for at least a minute. And you're like, Willis is the opposite of everything they're doing.

Beverly Hills Cop happens similarly kind of by accident because Stallone drops out because he wants it to be tougher and bigger and bloodier and that they're like, fuck, this movie's a moving train. We have everything set. We got to plug someone else in, put in the unconventional guy, put in the guy who would never be in an action movie. The unconventional guy from television. Yep. Yep. And the guy you wouldn't imagine in this type of setting. And in both cases, they're hiring the guy for the comedy and the relatability and whatever. And they're surprising people by over delivering on. Holy shit.

This guy plays the stakes really well. You talk about the barefoot thing, right? Movies are weird to fucking shoot because you go wildly out of order. And as an actor, especially the less verbal the script is, the less dialogue based things are. It can be really fucking hard to track your character in this sort of disjointed, disorganized way. Action movies are that times a million because you have to shoot so many tiny little pieces. And especially a movie like this, where it's like he's going back to every room six times

there are scenes that on paper maybe seem very similar to a scene he's already shot three times how do you track the progression of this well one of it is we we know what his outfit is yeah and we can constantly you know vest and yeah play with the visuals of the amount of damage he incurs how dirty it gets how made up he is how how much soot, how much blood. That's a thing that grounds the audience in understanding where he is in the progression. But also, I have to imagine, grounds Bruce in that. And then every time they remind you, oh, yeah, and lest you forget, he's also barefoot. You have these moments where the movie kind of stops, where he has to take a breath and

look at his feet and pull the glass out. Yeah. Kevin? You said soot and blood yes when you were talking about him that i i only i just don't want it to go away please there was a moment in time where you know i worked with bruce as an actor in the in the diehard sequel live for your Hard, and then as the director of the movie A Couple of Dicks, which was then named Cop Out. At one point in the shooting of Cop Out, he goes, you're too close of me here? I said, yeah.

And he goes, you're not doing it right. I said, what do you mean? He goes, literally, it's me and Dave Klein. He goes, blood,

soot, sweat, dark. That's how you shoot bruce willis and i was like one more time and he goes blood soot sweat dark and he was like think about it and i did and i was like oh yeah he's like that's when i look my best and the other thing he for the audience at home you just gestured to the angles of your face while you were reciting that. Spectacles, testicles. Very, very specific. He mapped quadrants of his face with his hands to show where the blood, the soot, the sweat, and the dark went.

He's like, that's how I absolutely look my best. If you're going to shoot a close-up, you got to give me one or three of those elements. And then, the thing that he insisted upon, and I saw it over and over again while I shot the movie, and then it infected my work, and I still do it to this day, is throughout the shooting of anything,

he would be, he's on camera. And your off-camera person is generally beside the camera, he would be, he's on camera and you're off camera person is generally beside the camera behind the camera, delivering the lines as you're shooting Bruce's coverage. Bruce would always go to the person who was off camera. He'd be like, tilt the head while they were doing that. Get closer to the lens. And I would be like, what is that about? And he goes, lens is how you connect. He's going, I want my eye line as close to the lens as possible because that's me directly connecting with the audience. That's the secret. He always had the secret.

And so for the rest of my career after that, like everything I shoot him, I was like, can you get close? Can you just stand as close to the camera as possible so that the person off camera is not looking down the barrel at the camera, but close enough where the intimacy level completely changes. That's what Bruce Willis taught me. I'm sure you've experienced this as well. It sounds like maybe before, up until the point you worked with Bruce Willis. But there's so many times I've been on set, you're shooting coverage, and then the DP goes, this is going to sound strange. It's going to feel strange.

But actually, what would help for eyeline is if you look at this corner of the map box or you look at the C stand and they're going to stay where they are. And the voice is going to be coming from the other side of the room and your body is going to be tilted in the wrong way. But I'm telling you, it will cut together. And they're right on a technical level. They are right. It cuts together. I do think there's something you're missing. technical level, they are right. It cuts together. I do think there's something you're missing. And even if you can feel it, and even if you're going off the muscle memory of, well, I did six takes where I was looking at them and I kind of know what they're doing now. There is a difference. And what like is captured on camera is always the energy you're sharing with another person or with your environment or whatever it is. So much this movie is bruce alone from when the first shots are fired having conversations at a remote distance or talking to himself which is another thing that makes him a fucking movie star i would contend is this guy sells the notion of talking to himself so fucking well where it doesn't feel like a story cheat, where you absolutely believe, especially for a guy who is now reeling from

the frustration of failing to have the productive, mature conversation, right? We've seen him have fun. I guess, right? Like, if he gets there and says to Bonnie Bedelia, like, you know what, I'm an asshole. Like, you know, how about after this party, we go out and grab dinner?

And maybe she's like, you know, why are we going to the party? Let's leave now yes and there is no movie all that shit happens without them you buy it and it's it's sort of seated in the first moment of him doing the fist with his toes and he goes like fist with the toes who knew it works like you're like okay this guy does he'll take a mark upon stuff oh and he does talk to himself. That's true. That's true. He'll take a note. He'll sort of like, and it makes sense in kind of like a cop way of like, let me do the math.

What's going on here? What am I not putting together? As we all know, you know, internet education teaches us that like the smartest people talk themselves through tasks. Like, you know, it used to be a time where if you talk to yourself, people are like, what are you talking about? through tasks. It used to be a time where if you talk to yourself, people are like, what are you talking about? But they found that folks that literally narrate their tasks as they're doing it are far more effective at the task. It adds a level of cognition because hearing yourself speak,

your brain reacts faster, oddly enough, than just thinking a thought. So when you speak out loud and doing a thing like, I'm going to move that can. Right. Your neurons are firing faster than you just thinking, I'm going to move that can. I don't know how that works, but that's what I've found. It's the version of like, hey, remind me to take this with me when I leave. When you say that out loud to a friend and they're like, I'm never going to remember that. You're like, no, but the fact that I just said it to you means that I'll remember it versus if I just thought it to myself. But he plays it so well. You were calling out me being very quiet, my impression of him at the beginning.

But I think that's part of it is like, yeah, he's got a register and a pitch where you're like, this is the exact degree that this guy talks to himself out loud. I just and like, I don't think some of the, you know, other guys in this like the Schwarzenegger. So, I mean, I guess they sort of talk to themselves, but it doesn't feel natural like him. No, he's got the like fucking stupid, you idiot kind of yeah you're just quietly sort of doing the recap and then trying to think how to correct on the next then you'd be dead too asshole right you know like you'd think that any i mean this script made it obviously but like everyone would be like he spends the whole movie either talking to himself talking on a walkie-talkie like is that gonna work like it's kind of a challenge to throw in an actor yes and yes you're helped by the

fact that the rest of the cast is so winning that if you're not with him you're still with the movie yeah and as the stakes of the movie increase then every 10 minutes you're like right and he's fucking barefoot too doesn't have any goddamn feet like there are these things they keep on sort of pinning in i mean the the the establishment of the one undeveloped room that has the cutouts, the like Playboy pinups, right? Where the first time it's just the gag of like, oh, well, here's the kind of guy he is. He can't walk past it without doing a double take and looking at the naked lady. And then starts to become every time he's back through that office, he taps the picture.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're like, well, that's a funny character detail, but it's also reminding us, I know why this room is different from the other room. I remember where this room is. And McTiernan, the commentary is with him and Jackson DeGovia,

who is the production designer. And he said, McTiernan kept on saying to him, this is a jungle movie. Right. I don't want to think of to him, this is a jungle movie. I don't want to think of this as like a skyscraper movie. Right. And he's obviously coming right off of Predator.

And the thing that excited him most is like, you have the Nakatomi offices, which are really kind of garish and over-designed. And this idea of like, it was very Frank Lloyd Wright inspired. They've sort of bought these expensive art pieces and reconstructed them and everything and then you have all these like unfinished undeveloped rooms where he's just in this weird kind of like literal urban jungle of just steel beams and open walls you know what

the film was called in france and spain what the crystal jungle well isn't that interesting it is yeah i remember i had this on wait die hard was called the crystal jump yep but probably because die hard is not something that translates like like what is the what's the remember the episode of rick and morty where the dude you know the interstellar guy like is a huge dire fan he's like in my world it's called this it's called this right but that's another like example of that episode is all based on the idea of everyone referring to it as doing a die hard right right right where it's almost become like one of the great forms of storytelling uh die hard the title comes from uh last boy scout that shane black had

titled it didn't come from the battery well this is what they're saying that sure sure the studio was hesitant because of the battery right right to give it that title but last boy scout had been called die hard joel silver also had that script right was developing that gets made a couple years later and was like shane do you mind if i just take that title and place it over here instead um wow like you did live free or die hard that's a movie that's not a Die Hard movie until it gets turned into a Die Hard movie, like we said, right? Like, what is the... Is there a Die Hard, like, infrastructure at that point?

Like, are there people who are like, we're guardians of the Die Hard world? There isn't really, right? It's kind of the problem. No, the exact... By the time we're doing... And I say we because I was in the movie. By the time we were doing Live Free or Die Hard, it was the Fox flick and Hutch Parker was in charge of it.

But he hadn't been around when the earlier ones were made. Mick Tiernan didn't direct Live Free or Die Hard, obviously. That was Lenny Wiseman. So, you know, you're already kind of removed from the formula there's no kevin feige to the diehard universe that i saw except for bruce there was a moment i've told the story like a zillion times before but um when i first got to uh live free or die hard i was supposed to work one day and i wound up being there a week because there was like this kind of slow slash uh shutdown of sorts um going on between bruce and the studio they'd been shooting for months already and then they were finishing

in los angeles with stage-based stuff and my character the warlock had a fucking mom's hacker man yeah i was a hacker so um when we're when i get there um he's like i'm not shoot we're not shooting we're not doing this and he turns to me and goes kevin and i hadn't really i'd never met him before at this point. Like it was just on live fair die hard that we met, but I'm a massive like fan. And he turns to me as I kept, you know, basically we've been shooting this movie for like almost a year and every

problem we've ever had, we say, you know what? We'll do that in the warlock scene. So now you're the cleanup. Yeah. All of the narrative like issues basically yeah so he's like we need to like answer a lot of things that we left open until this moment in time and i don't think the scene does that and i was like well i i could i

could take a shot you went skip was a screenwriter but he was like you know you want to go off with skip and take a shot i was like uh sure man what do you want to say and bruce told me all the stuff he wanted to say and like all the stuff that would tie things up um you know about mr gabriel or whatever the hell and then i went off with skip to his trailer and we wrote a new version of the warlock scene i gave it to bruce and bruce was like this is great this is everything this is the scene i want to do we're shooting this and they sent it to the studio and i guess the studio was like whoa whoa whoa this has nothing to do with what we've been doing so far we didn't approve these pages blah blah blah so um we had stopped we were just waiting because bruce wanted to shoot the scene the studio didn't want to shoot

that scene len was caught in the middle um and in this standstill bruce had his personal chef make like chicken fingers for everybody and stuff chicken while we sat around barbecue and telling stories waiting to figure out what's going on and then i saw one of the like you know swaggiest hollywood moves i've ever seen in my life something that would come out of a script about making movies you know hollywood movies and so hutch parker is on a flip cell phone with bruce willis it's finally come to this head we're not shooting until bruce gets the answer he wants and so the studio and the person of hutch parker calls and you know we're all sitting around outside of his trailer and they're like studio touch and they give him the phone and he bruce is standing there

amongst us and so um he goes hutch uh so i want to shoot this scene as is and we don't hear the other side of the conversation right all we hear is bruce and he's like uh-huh he's like, uh-huh. He's going, yeah, but this answers a lot of the questions. Okay. All right. Hutch, let me ask you this. Who's your second choice to play John McClane? Right. Oh, yeah. Because that's what I thought.

Okay, bye. And he hung up, and we went and shot the scene that he wanted to shoot. So if there was any gatekeeper, it's the guy who'd been there for every diehard. It was John McClane. He was like looking to safeguard his character, make him consistent, you know,

keep things in a diehard world and stuff. But was also like, you know, knew exactly how powerful he was as well. Well, that's, look, to be fully candid, that is a movie I have a lot of struggles with.

But that, your sequence, I'm not just saying this. It being PG-13 is the thing I bumped into the hardest. Everybody did. Especially because he doesn't get to utter the full yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker. The gunshot cuts it off, I remember. That I think is a problem and i also think there's just like an era problem where a diehard movie needs to be of a certain size and the size of movies at that point in 2007 has gotten like so gargantuan and so the scale of it needs to be bigger and he needs to be hanging off the wing of a plane and driving cars into helicopters and stuff like that that feels a

little removed from the heart of who McClane is. I think Justin Long is funny in that movie, but I also think the dynamic is a little too much like here's a guy that McClane can bounce jokes off of versus you watch this and McClane has this interesting balance of like he wants to be weary above it all smart assy but there is this part of him that is like a mitch that that like yeah just immediately connects to anyone else who's reaching out to him as a real person you know and i feel like you could tell with justin you know since it's joel silver yeah um it's the the dna of the you know fast talking new to the franchise character probably finds the seeds and leo gets in lethal weapon yes when joel pesci joins and suddenly you know you're like hey i like my lethal weapon formula and they have this guy and you're like he really brings something to the mix he's funny funny as hell. And he's putting our characters on the back foot.

Same thing they were able to accomplish, like with Justin's character, where they're like, you know, at this point, Die Hard, by the time they do live for Die Hard, we're how many years removed from the original Die Hard? 20. And even though it's very well known, of course, you know, as you mentioned, movies have gotten bigger and more bombastic. So they're hedging their bets by being like, let's get somebody in there to comment on the action, to heighten the annoying like third guy right intercepting a like perfectly honed duo act versus mclean has this weird like he is a lone wolf but it's kind of because he fucks up his own relationships he wants to connect to other people but he keeps on getting in his own way a little it is It is tough in Live Free or Die Hard that he is divorced at that point.

Right. And you're like, look, that makes sense. This guy seems impossible to be married to. Yes. But it's so, you know, the juice of Die Hard

is that they figure it out. Like, is that they're walking off together. That's when you see the secret weapon of Die Hard, the previously heretofore in this episode, unsung Bonnie Bedelia.

Yes. Like, that's, there's a reason you go on the journey and you give a shit about his love life because like all the power and intensity yes that she has to stand up to her husband in that scene and be like you know you got to remember when this movie was made it's not too far removed from mr mom right which was like a movie about, oh my God, women entering the workplace while the man stays home, or the man, you know, the woman is doing a job while the man is also doing a job.

So it was early enough for that to be a factor in the plot, where it's just like, well, here's something new. She got a job and she moved to the other coast. As you said, most other movies that are dealing with that, that is the central premise. And it's a comedic premise calling out how unusual that is versus this is part of just the table setting of the movie.

And it's one of the fundamental character flaws of McClane is that he clearly has struggled to adapt to this. Right. And like you, you look at their relationship and it would be so easy to make him just a piece of shit. Right. Right. In a way that would fuck up the movie at large to have him really step in it and do something horrible or set up a really bad sort of history of whatever in their relationship versus like this guy stopped doing the work. It is so clear. She plays it so well where she is so frustrated because all she wants is for him to show up and do the fucking end of Jerry Maguire speech where he's like, I figured it out. I figured it out. I've been a fucking child.

I've been a moron. I'm ready to show up and like reinvest in this marriage and fucking do my side of the heavy lifting. And instead, he keeps on just sort of stumbling over it. You know? And she's sort of like, I keep opening doors for you to step up to the plate.

And you know what's the, this is, Bonnie Bedelia is a great choice. Who was she? I don't have much of a sense of who she was before Die Hard.

Who she was for me before this movie came out was she was in a movie called Heart Like a Wheel. heart like a wheel yeah oh yeah she played the the race car driver right um so i i you know that that was in high rotation on the movie channel in the early days of cable so that's what i was most familiar with her from is presumed innocent before or after that i think it's that's uh like a year or two later that's 1990 i mean she had the one-two punch of diehard and presumed innocent and presumed innocent

is a fantastic you know alan j pakula twisty turny courtroom thriller where she you want to talk about a monologue she gets a monologue in the third act of that movie that's a stunner. She's so stealth, Bonnie Bedelia. You cast Meryl Streep, you cast Emily Blunt. You're like, you know what you're going to get and there's going to be great performance. But she is so stealth because nobody's expecting her to be the powerhouse. And I think that's why it was so smart to cast her.

I don't know if it was because she was huge at the moment or something like that, but it was a very human choice for Holly Gennaro, Holly McClain. He liked her in Heart Like a Wheel. Like, I think, you know, I had a lot of respect for her

as an actor. It is like, her and Reginald Bell Johnson, it's like you're not picking the biggest name. Yeah. Like, supposedly, the studio wanted Robert Duvall for Al Powell. Which, like, you're not picking the biggest name. Yeah. Like supposedly the studio wanted Robert Duvall for Red Noodle,

for Al Powell, which like, you're like, that's crazy. It overpowers the movie. Yeah. Um, but also he's picking these pretty warm actors,

you know, the moment you're paying Bruce Willis 5 million, you're not going to be able to pay. Well, that's another good point. I was going to say, I think it doesn't balance it. You've salary capped yourself.

Yeah. You're, you're moneyballing right now. So you've given a lot of money to that guy. So it's like, this guy was in a play I liked. He could be the main villain. Moneyball's a great analogy. It's like they've gotten themselves in this situation where they overspend on Willis so much they actually just have to cast for ability and type.

But they also need the pitcher who throws weird and that's why they can get him. You just need to cast for right ability and type they but they also need like the pitcher who throws weird and that's why they can get them like you know yeah like they are using sabermetrics where they're like don't think of this as a commercial calculation who fits on the poster think about what gets us on base we have to like al powell we have to hate hans she is fantastic she's you know her you know her maiden name is colkin and she's macaulay caulkins macaulay culkin's aunt uh which is funny i colkin dad are you serious sister she is the aunt right she's the sister of the colkins right yeah yes the uh notorious parent of the culkin which once you know it you really see it and like well now it rewrites history where I'm like, wait, all the Culkins are nepo babies? They're all Bedelia nephews?

Yes. The most insidious type of nepo baby. I had no idea, man. That's crazy. What a weird connection. When she was in the Parenthood show, which is 30 years later, where she's like the grandma. She's like the matriarch. Did you ever watch the Parenthood show? She's wonderful in it

But I was truly like where has she been? Obviously she's in Die Hard 2 That's kind of And Presumed Innocent You don't hear much from her She works throughout the 90s She's got credits You're right there's a bit of a slowdown in the early 2000s

I don't know i mean like the other big thing was she had done to salem's lot uh the uh steve sherman uh tv adaptation of that that's right she was on salem's lot with david soul yeah yeah yeah um but like her vel johnson even someone like paul gleason like i remember ebert's review which is kind of notorious is like there's too many like chiefs that which is kind of notorious, is like, there's too many, like, chiefs that we keep cutting to. Yeah. Because there are, like,

there's, like, sort of three of the same guy, right? Like, Paul... It sounds like such an Amadeus note, like, too many chiefs. Too many chiefs. Like, so there's, like, because there's Paul Gleeson, and then there's, you know,

Willie Matherton, who's not a chief, he's a reporter. And then, you know, you've got fucking Thompson and Thompson, Johnson and Johnson. Johnson, Johnson. You know, like, and it's like, it's a lot. But like, that's the point to me is like what Gruber is creating this like forest from the trees situation. The other movie that I think this film cribs from a lot in a really smart way is like, what if you turned Dog Day Afternoon into a full-on action thriller yeah no good call

right because it has that similar like three ring circus kind of thing you know you have a hero weaving between there's the sort of law enforcement there's the crime at the center you know there's the tension within the building and then there's the media right right there's the media. Right. There's the public. Like, think about it. Like, Inside Man, the Spike Lee movie, is kind of a version of this where Hans Gruber is the hero. Right. Yes. That's totally true.

And again, where the guy is like, people will be so distracted by the one crime, they won't realize the actual crime that I'm pulling off. I'm certainly not saying that's also a diehard movie. No, no, but it kind of is. I mean, it's sort of a smart version. version yeah exactly yeah but there's so much clever abstraction in

this movie where i mean it's i know we're jumping all around but it's like the moment where you're like is this one of the greatest movies ever made am i watching one of the greatest movies ever made is when hans and mclean come face to face and you watch hans gruber realize that mclean doesn't know who he is right that mclean slips into oh god he goes into his american accent which that sequence is so much shorter than i always remember you're always like okay this is an entire 20 minutes two minutes right but it's it's like a trick once again you talk about like a magic trick that this movie does over and over again which is it is teaching you the stakes the rules the relationships the geography so well but distracting you from what do the characters know

because we have this omniscient god view of the whole situation and what we're forgetting is every character has a specific sliver of their own understanding law enforcement gets this the media is reporting on it this way so the public thinks the story is this inside nakatomi plaza what do people think and then you have these moments where like you get to have the audience do the math in their head and go, oh, right, he wouldn't know what his fucking face is. Yeah. Gruber's taken stock of everyone

who's in the building because he knows it's just the holiday party. So if he sees a face that he hasn't seen by process of elimination, it has to be the cowboy. But McLean hasn't seen almost anyone at the party because he was going in just trying to talk to his wife, ignoring everyone at the party, being annoyed by all these phonies, you know?

Should we talk about the explosions? They're very good. I'm trying to think of like what else in Die Hard we need to touch on. Wait, let's hit the Bill Clay scene real quick. In the lore of the making of that movie, I seem to remember some sort of like, oh, we added that. Like it wasn't in the script. We added it because Bruce was like,

I don't have a scene with Alan. Yeah. That makes sense. Because when it happens in the movie, you kind of are like, really? Like, we've done a lot of movie.

Like, we're gonna have them meet now and have this whole, like... And that's why it is fast, I think. But it is crucial that they see each other before the showdown at the end yes okay you agree with me no i agree i think that scene works wholeheartedly yeah no it's like every 20 minutes it feels like this movie introduces it adds another layer onto the cake right where you're like powell maybe doesn't come in until minute 45, close to an hour. Like, it takes a while.

The Gruber's gang comes in around 20 minutes. The Johnsons aren't introduced until like an hour and 30 minutes in. They make me laugh so much. But there's such a delicate sort of Jenga tower being built as this whole situation gets more and more out of control. Yeah. I just, I mean, yeah. Just just robert davi saying like it's just like mom and the guy being like i was in junior high that guy is the best name what's his name

the other guy uh grand l bush oh it's the other actor that guy's great real name that's his real name i mean it's his it's his hollywood name at least i don't know and then who is it who is it rick overton is in the street? Is that right? Rick Overton. I can't turn this off. Is it Rick DeCommon? Rick DeCommon. That's it. That's it. Oh, the guy who's like, yeah.

He was a comic in the 80s. I saw him on a lot of stand-up stuff and they gave him the perfect kind of one scene comic relief sequence that seemed to have been necessitated by, like, we don't have Bruce Willis every day, so let's shoot a scene out here. Yeah, but there's also just, much like the Dog Day Afternoon thing, part of the fun for the audience is watching this situation somehow bleed and get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Talking about the sort of like film grammar of this movie right and it's sometimes cited as like the first movie to do

this it certainly gets credit for being like the first mainstream major studio movie to do this right but talking about the 10 years of mctiernan in the lab where he's trying to like experiment with the language of film and then reapply it in the least pretentious way possible. He was obsessed with the notion of cutting on movement. Which the dogma was, no obvious joke intended there, you cannot do that. You complete a camera move, the camera lands and stays in place for a couple of seconds for the audience to settle before you cut out of

it and it was much like when dw griffith was cutting from like one room to another people were like you can't do this audiences are going to vomit they will think they've transported through space there was this feeling of like you are going to physically disorient people not to like a crossing the line way but they will get ill if you cut on movement. You're going to Pikachu these people if you cut from one room to another. It is wild that people forget that Pikachu is the thing that gave everyone seizures

because it was like two years before Pokemon came to the U.S. It was its own news story enough to be later a Simpsons episode. There's a kids cartoon that gave people epilepsy in Japan. Right, you were like, it was Pikachu. Yeah, and Porygon, not to be nerdy, but, you know, he's fighting Porygon in that episode.

But, but, it was like... Oh, shit. I mean, just, you know... Deep cuts reveal right there. When McTiernan's at AFI, when he's making short films, when he's doing commercials, he had cut a lot of his own work. And, like, a lot of guys who work in commercials, they were like, this is my playground to test out things i can hopefully apply to movies later and he studied a lot how

does the human eye observe a frame how do i compose a frame so that they start looking over here and then when their eyes start to naturally drift over to this corner i'll move the camera over to link that up to the next story point i want i mean there's so much of this movie that's like you know you're you're following al powell on the ground and the camera pans over to the next story point I want. I mean, there's so much of this movie that's like, you know, you're following Al Powell on the ground and the camera pans over to the side of the building and you're connecting now. Okay, so he's here and there's that, whatever. But he also was-

There's that one shot, the one shot I always love where they're on the ground and they're looking up at the top of the building and you're just seeing flashes of light. Yes. Then you cut to the building and it's a full-blown firefight, louder than fuck,

dangerous as hell. But from a distance on the ground, it's just little flashes at the top of the building. The transitions are so good. Or there's one moment where Al Powell radios into, I guess, his superior

and the camera's like on tracks moving alongside with him. And then you catch in the background a police car turned over and you're like oh that's the collateral damage of the chase that is now happening right surrounding this like you're just very quickly getting seeded the stakes of all of this expanding but he was like this is my fucking playground to prove this point that you can do this and beyond that that's the way to make this. You were saying action movie. It's got to move, right? It's a movie. I want McClane constantly moving. I want the camera moving. I want to move through space. I think what happens in stuff like the guy in the

street who's like, all right, shut the power down. We're talking about cutting to the outside world. Yeah. Most of the people's reactions in Die Hardhard most of the characters across the boards don't track from any previous action movie which is why it works really well like in a real action movie like they're like cut that fucking cord and the guy's like aye aye sir and they do there's not this moment of like well i don't want to get in trouble for cutting everything and blah blah everything is humanized and everybody reacts in a way that is identifiable where you're like, yes, that would be the way I'd react as opposed to traditionally in movies. Everyone had the right thing to say, the right thing to do. You know, the script armor is covering them.

And this was not the first, but definitely one of the first in recollection where it felt like, OK, whatever they normally do, we're going to have them react like a real person would react. Absolutely. whatever they normally do, we're going to have them react like a real person would react. Absolutely. And also, like, none of these characters feel like plot functions,

even the ones who are, because they all are vivid, specific, and relatable enough to some kind of everyday human behavior that you're like, well, I could see a whole movie

of just this guy, right? Which then, like, Family Matters comes out of, why wouldn't you put this guy fucking tuesday nights at eight o'clock i want to see this guy with his family for freaking 10 years have him bring the same fucking uniform i mean i know that show is the oracle show or whatever you know like that's what it quickly became but like it was on for nine years family matters and the only reason it existed was as you said becomes the oracle show off of this is the basically the sergeant al powell

spinoff show let's just not pay the rights but get him as a cop at home sort of like world weary in the same kind of way but with a good heart yeah there was that one episode where he does the long monologue to urkel about shooting a kid just like a a diehard. You're like, oh yeah. I mean, obviously there's no way you could do it now. Like it's so objectionable that the redemption arc is like, oh, he can fire his gun again. This cop who shot a kid. Yes. Now he gets to go back in the field.

And like, there's not even a caveat in it of like, oh, he shot and wounded somebody. He like, you know, it's like, no, he killed somebody he like you know it's like no he killed a kid right that's the implication absolutely it is a 13 year old right yeah who had a water gun like they don't even really sugarcoat it i just have to imagine that the fox brass every year as this movie continues to play and continues to grow in like film history is just like what a fucking gift that it's a black cop and at the end of the movie he shoots the most aryan looking dude in the world because if you flip this this movie would just be like it's so hard to touch today it's it's it's it's it's um and it's wild to watch it and be like i still even with the 35 this is in the book it's like this is built all

the way back into the book al powell uh shooting the book. This is built all the way back into the book. Al Powell shooting the villain at the end is all the way to Nothing Lasts Forever, whatever the book is called. It's just wild that the movie gets you to the place where you're like, I want to see Al Powell

shoot again. It's making you root for that sort of cathartic release, but it is the thing of like, this guy just isn't processing his shit. Sure, yeah.

And mind you you it's in the denouement we've already been satisfied right as an audience the hero has survived the villain has been killed the building blew up we saw spectacle and so we're total denouement reunited with his wife you know she gets to punch william atherton yeah and then all of a sudden in the midst of all this you know, this guy's not dead. Oh, my God. He's going to get John McClane. Oh, he didn't.

Who got him? And you're like, oh. And it's obviously. Right. It's, you know, it's clockwork stuff. Yes. It's the thing that you forgot was still left on the show. Now it's clockwork stuff.

Now. Even when we saw it in the theater, though, it wasn't clockwork yet. So you were like no no i mean i'm i can only imagine like the theater exploding i wish you know i wish i could just go back in time watch these fucking movies let's take a moment to to sing the praises of william atherton please um because if i had had my way i would have worked with three people from diehard the role of uh of mr svenning from mall rat was written for william atherton and we sent it to him we sent it to him and he was like i don't want to play this role anymore but like he's sick of

being the tight ass kind of yeah sure sure but i think he meant i don't want to play this role anymore for this little amount of money because like a year later he did biodome and he did play that guy yeah and he like you know he's in the new ghostbusters this year right yeah he's coming back but it's michael rooker in mall rats right i mean you gotta go we got lucky as much as like our rebound was was michael rooker for heaven's sakes but yeah i i i loved bill laffington naturally because of this and ghostbusters the one-two punch and whatnot but like later on in my career i was like oh let's get the guy from diehard man well it's funny because like did you get that i mean he's so funny and he is the one guy in this movie who's coming in with the sort of like shorthand casting that we're saying this movie otherwise can't employ, perhaps because of budget.

Yeah. The second he's introduced, you're like, I get it. The newsman is Walter Peck. I have a cultural language for him. I'm like locked and loaded. You're like,

I know this man. This man has no dick. Exactly. I mean, he talks a lot about, he does have no, he talks a lot about how that really hurt him. People are yelling at that from cars and all that.

Children yelling at him from school buses all that children yelling at school because you realize and it bugs him yes he was the male lead in sugarland express spielberg's first theatrical movie he's spielberg's first leading man basically and then he found himself in this very lucrative corridor working in some of the most popular movies of the next decade but always playing the guy who the hero fucking hated. And the audience can't wait to see, get embarrassed. And it was just like the dickless thing was just such a clean handle of like for that to be the joke that everyone's going to repeat to you on the street.

But not only that, it's Ghostbusters. So it's not just drunk adults at bars, it's children. It's like five years pointing at you and saying, this man has no dick. That is pretty bad. We did in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, there's a running gag where people are screaming, Affleck, you da bomb and phantom, Joe. And Affleck, like years later, was like, oh, my God.

He's like, do you know now everyone actually says it? He's like, don't idiot. Strangers will scream at me. He's like, sometimes I'm with my children. They'll scream. Affleck, you the bomb and Phantom Joe. He's like, that's so funny, though, as a full circle moment, because like when you write the joke, the joke is that's not the thing that anyone would say to Affleck. If people are coming up to Affleck on the street, that's the last thing they'd be yelling at him.

And then by synthesizing it in the movie, it becomes the thing that ironically people say to him. I've never seen Phantoms. My entire cultural relationship to that movie is Affleck, you, the puppet, Phantoms. I would agree. Isn't there like Peter O'Toole in that? Yeah, Peter O'Toole in that? Yeah.

Peter O'Toole is in it. Absolutely. There's just this, the moment that Jay's character like says, no, it's, they're having a conversation. It's Jay and Silent Bob

and Holden McNeil from Jason Ganey. And he goes, you know, Ben's delivery is pitch perfect because he's the one, I believe, that says it first.

He's like, they were talking about Good Will Hunting and he's like yeah i wasn't a fan and he looks over he's like but affleck was the bomb and phantoms yeah and yeah and jay's like word phantoms like a motherfucker so he signed his own death warrant by saying the line right he knew the joke is sort of more on the characters of why would that be the one and then the joke is intensified by being repeated over and over again. To that person's face. Right.

I have to imagine a lot of people think that it's a movie you made up for joking your movie. Right. It is such a forgotten film. When they discover there's an actual phantom, they're like, is he the bomb? Literally, that movie came out the same year that he was in Shakespeare in Love and Armageddon. Like, I mean, I assume it was shot before Good Will Hunting or whatever. I mean, it's the story I've told too many times on this podcast, but when I went up to Neil Patrick Harris and said,

I love your work and Undercover Brother, and he just turned to me and went, that one? He didn't say thank you. He went like, why are you saying that to me? Hey, man, he was the bomb in Undercover Brother. He was. Are there any other big... I mean, like...

The thing I want to say... Now I have a machine gun. I don't know, like... The thing I want to say about the camera movement... Go ahead. This is big, right? But he was just like, I'd have this argument with studios,

and they'd say it's impossible. And he's like, I've shot footage and cut it myself, and I know it's possible. I know's cutting on action yeah right he used the term that i thought was really interesting where he said you have to find sympathetic images you have to be aware of the images you are constructing individually to make sure they will feed into each other right and that you're thinking about the timing of how they process information but he was like the worst thing that could happen is you're filming the

movie. The studio's getting the rushes. They're looking at the footage, watching it without you while you're on set and going, this guy doesn't know what the fuck he's doing before it's cut together. And Katerin talks a lot about he basically cuts in camera in a way that can be a little confusing because he's not doing conventional coverage unless he's assembled it in the correct order. And he was like, I need to hire Verhoeven's guys because Verhoeven does this in his Dutch movies. And he did it a little bit in RoboCop. But he's like, get the editor of RoboCop, get DeBond. They're both fluid in this language.

Robocop get to bond. They're both fluid in this language. They'll know how to take my direction on set and process the images in editing so that they'll have my back because he's like the worst thing that fucks you is you have an editor who's not aligned with your vision. The studio watches the rushes and they go, are we crazy or are these bad? And the editor goes, yeah, this guy doesn't know what the fuck he's doing. Right. Then you're done.

Then they start to put the vice grip around you um and he said they were so worried about it that he didn't want to create a contingency plan where he didn't have movement in the shots but for the first like two weeks they did alternate takes at different tempos of movement where they timed out is it better if it's on like like a two five movement or whatever it is and then after two that is so deep cuts right there that's a commitment to storytelling on a movie that you wouldn't think no rather than just putting in that much thought giving up and being like yeah fine if the studio's being a pain about it let's just shoot coverage he was like two weeks in there was no pushback they were seeing the results and i was

hearing the edit that it was working that film was nominated for its editing at the oscars like editing is top notch but he gets into like i'm just trusting my judgment on this now i'm not doing the math he doesn't uh storyboard anything other than effect shots because he's like i work organically i see it in real time it's mathematical it's about the space it's about the people i i don't want to have to like lock myself into something and looking for these gifts that come out of the surroundings i mean the art direction in this movie is so fucking good because i talk about even i mentioned the the playboy pinup but there's so many little details like that where he like builds these spaces

with central objects so that he knows if i'm cutting quickly, if I'm moving around, you understand which room you're in or which side of rooms they're in because here's the fountain. Here's the art sculpture. Here's where there's the rebar or the desk or whatever it is, you know. But yeah, it's just it's like it is so impeccably constructed in a way that makes me borderline angry. Don't be angry. I watch this movie and I go like, I don't understand how anyone could have the clarity of thought to keep all of this straight and coherent, let alone entertaining on top of that, which then takes charm. that which then takes never never has so much effort been put into like telling essentially a make pretend story so much logic right to make it feel as real as possible and you know and i guess that's what we do in movies generally speaking but they kind of went out of their

way and we talked about before the screenwriting who knows what and blah blah blah somebody recently told me that that was the key to writing you know uh for the studio like writing huge successful studio blockbuster movies um it's all about information denial yeah like when your main character knows something when the audience knows something when the villain knows something and at all all, at any given moment, all three parties cannot know the same thing. Like there has to, if the villain is concocting something, such as in Die Hard, he's presenting himself as a terrorist, but really he's just a bank robber, that information is denied to us for a long time. But that information is known by the villain himself, and the information

is not known by the hero. And then we get that information before the hero gets the information is not known by the hero and then we get that information before the hero gets the information the hero doesn't even really need that information but we are informed at a certain point it's all about when you let people know something that one of the characters or the main characters do it was a real interesting breakdown where i was like fuck i wish i was a good writer because then i would just follow that formula and stuff. But it is that it made sense when I thought about, especially with like popular entertainment, you know, you talk about spending your hard money going to the movie theater on a Friday night and wanting the kind of experience you had with your friends seeing Die Hard opening weekend where the audience is like falling in

love with a real thing in real time and getting more and more excited by the moment the thing that's so electric are those aha moments where the audience fucking figures it out and especially if they figure it out a second or two before the characters do they start to feel like personally invested in what's happening right you know you're a collaborator at that point you're no longer just an audience member. You're kind of a collaborator with the story as well. Like, you're in on it at that point. And it's like a difficult trick to pull off of how do you make sure the audience understands

everything that's going on without spoon feeding it to them so that they feel clever and proud for putting it together and then being really excited at, oh, my God, I now know what the setup is. I understand what the stakes of this scene is now here's how things have now evolved or changed or devolved and then this movie constantly as you said just twists it like 15 degrees off of how you expect the scene to go somehow the worst thing is avoided narrowly or a worse thing happens than what you expected was the worst possible outcome and almost always it's because the person who is affecting that change is behaving like a real person and not a movie character. They are all better looking and more charming and shinier than the people we know.

But everyone in this feels like some relatable type of person you know. Yeah. relatable type of person, you know? Yeah. I mean, like, even down to, you know, Argyle or, like, characters that, like, Thornburg, you know, that you could just lift out of the script

with no trouble whatsoever. Yeah. You guys got your laptop open to information and stuff? Somebody told me this, and I don't know if it's true or not, but somebody said, we were doing the Blues Brothers recently

at Smod Castle Cinemas. We also did Die Hard recently, but interestingly enough, now that Disney owns Die Hard because they bought Fox, that's a movie that you can't... It's harder to screen. Yeah, it's way harder to screen. We did a Smod Castle experience.

That's where people buy out the movie theater and I host the screening for them and they bring like 20 friends and stuff. And they chose to show Die Hard. So it wasn't a public sales exhibition. So we were able to get away with it and stuff. But while we were doing a screening of Blues Brothers recently, somebody in the audience was like, raise their hand during the Q and A because that Smod Castle,

I get up and do Q and A's for movies. I had nothing to do with. And so in the Q&A section after Blues Brothers, somebody raised their hand and they're like, the kid who tries to steal the guitar from the wall in the Blues Brothers and Ray Charles shoots the wall

and he's like, go on, get out of here. They said, that's our guy. It sure is. Young guitar thief. Devereux White, I think is the name of the actor. they said that's our guy it sure is yes it is first screen role it is young guitar that's wild devereaux white i think is the name of the actor yes he's still around i mean that's like think about it like blues brothers and die hard to like very important movies in my life that kid was in both of them that's nuts it's pretty cool and he's really funny i mean him laughing you just got buck fucked on nationaled on national TV or whatever,

that's a sort of big triumph of my life, I think. Him laughing in the limo. Is he in Two? He is not? No. No. He's not. And he never returns.

No. I mean, he did movies. But not in a diehard. No. No. Because, like, Two has, you know, Bonnie Bedelia, William Atherton, Reginald Bell Johnson, right?

Like they bring some people back. Yeah. Three obviously kind of has this like Hans Gruber legacy is like their pitch for that movie, right? But they're out in New York. They're in New York. So they're on John's home turf.

It's an obvious pivot. Like that makes sense. And then after that, I just feel like they get bogged down for too long trying to figure out what another Diehard movie will be and then it's like well we just have to make one right but kids played by different actors yeah right right where you don't have the same sense of history i mean it is to go back to this question it's like this synthesizes the bruce willis movie so perfectly where it's like great audiences

want to see this a billion times i think part of like the struggle with diehard sequels for me is at a certain point you go what's the difference between a diehard three and a last boy scout right you know if the bruce persona has these sort of earmarks that are the same it's like the defining thing is the sort of the tapestry of characters it makes sense die hard 2 is like well fucking john mcclain can't exist in a in a vacuum outside of holly genero and and powell you know he needs those two that's the sort of like trifecta and then from that point on it just becomes like guy who doesn't do things exactly the way other cops would do them but i can't tend to be like alone in a situation for some reason involving guns.

Yeah. Yeah, it's diehard in airport, diehard in New York. Live free or diehard is sort of just like diehard with cyberspace. Yeah. Good day to diehard is diehard in Russia, right? Sort of. Yeah. At that point, like the FBI are kind of involved or the CIA or whatever.

I don't know. I've never seen that more than once. That's the Jai Courtney one, right once that's the jai courtney one right that's the last one and then there was this like supposed legacy sequel they were gonna do and they were gonna have flashbacks to like young mclean right and like have a new actor play i know about that one i know about that one because when we were making a couple of dicks aka cop out yeah yes um he was talking about that he was talking about next up he was gonna do a die hard movie which um he was really looking forward to because he set it up he's like i'm

i'll work in the beginning at the end yeah yeah i was like what do you mean he's like i spend the opening in the movie tied to a chair setting up the story and then the end of the movie getting out of the chair and kicking ass yeah so he's like the rest of it is going to be a splashback yeah to a young john mclean adventure in new york but who the hell do you care you know it's it's a curse i mean they didn't they didn't do that right like no no and the one with jai courtney is not that at all no jai courtney is still talking about it a couple years ago up until like his diagnosis was made public they were still sort of putting that out there but they had that problem with jay courtney too where it's just like i remember when they announced uh uh what that

one's good day to die hard the fifth one yeah right and there was sort of the the announced studio wish list of the 20 young actors they were looking at. And it was the most bizarre, like a list that included Shia LaBeouf and Paul Dano and Jai Courtney and Aaron Paul and just every possible direction of anyone who was between

the ages of 25 and 37. And it was so clear that they were like, we don't know how to replicate this. Do you cast a guy who seems like a movie star or is the point that you cast a guy who doesn't feel like an action star? And is there anyone who had that sort of in that's this current stage of their career has the Bruce charm that would be surprising applied to this

type of movie? Or do you cast the guy who now resembles more what Bruce has become? And it's like that's going to be twice as hard, 18 times as hard if you're trying to do it for McClane himself. But I'm also like, it is one of those characters where there is nothing, you cannot extricate this from him. You know, there's... I mean, I agree.

I don't think they'll remake Die Hard. You can't. I think you truly can't. He's a key man clause when it comes to that movie right and it's why people try to make you know the rock will make a movie like skyscraper where he'll be like i'm gonna try to make my die hard but i think people know that there's something sacrosanct about die hard itself and it's it's building blocks are so basic that you can rip them off without feeling like you're just doing a carbon copy,

because it's not. It's a very simple dish prepared with incredible ingredients. You're right. It's spaghetti al limon or whatever. You're just like, perfect. It's just like parmesan cheese, lemon, like oil. Like, that's all you have, whatever.

And it's telling that even at the point where they were like, Bruce is getting old, maybe the diehard movie is wraparound of him going i remember a younger adventure they still know they can't make a movie that doesn't begin and end with him and the moment it's now become public knowledge that he's not really in a condition to act that movie is done even if it was only going to be two scenes at the beginning in the end you cannot frame a diehard movie without him being the guy. And it is just part of that excitement of like, even when I'm watching this for the first time in the early 2000s and I'm already a Bruce Finn and I've seen him in the Shyamalan movies and I'm like, I like Bruce Willis a lot now. I want to go back and watch

the movies that made him a star. You feel that excitement. That's like listening to a band's breakthrough album, where even if you exist in the future where you know the outcome, you feel the energy of, this is clicking into place in real time. You can feel... Can we give some shout-outs to other strong work by the leads

that maybe people are unfamiliar with? For example, we all know bruce willis of course john mcclain many movies and stuff but have you ever fucked with bruce willis in the movie called mortal thoughts with demi moore i've never seen mortal thoughts is that where you met me it's that's bruce no no they were already a couple of alan rudolph but it's it's uh and who's the other actor, the actress? Glenn Headley, who's a great actress who died very young, which was very sad.

Yeah. What was it called? The Dirty Rotten Scoundrel. Yeah, it was in Dick Tracy. Give yourself some time to search out moral thoughts because you get to watch Bruce Willis,

like, act. First and foremost, Bruce Willis was an actor and then he became a movie star. But in that movie, he gets to act. Another movie where you get to see him act and you see the natural charm no gun in his hand or anything like that and in mortal thoughts he's playing a scumbag and also in this movie somewhat playing a scumbag as well but it's one of his best performances and i think

it's uncredited the paul newman movie nobody's fool he's so good amazing he is uncredited although steals steals the movie i assume he's uncredited for some contractual like you can't put me on the poster so just don't credit me reason or whatever he's great in that movie he is fantastic in that movie say again no no there was this thing with bruce willis i mean would sometimes sort of slip out in interviews where i think he loved the vast majority of the elements of being a hugely successful popular movie star right he loved the freedom the ability to make whatever movie he want to get movies greenlit whatever and then there were times it would sort of leak out interviews his frustration of the bigger i become as a movie star the further i start to get away from like

just being an actor. Yeah. And that there are certain roles the audience isn't going to accept me in. There are certain movies where if I sign on, the expectations are going to get out of whack. There's any movie I'm in

stops being small, even if the budget is limited. And if I do something like I want to make Breakfast of Champions, right, and that movie doesn't work, it is mocked at a level that is different

than someone else just trying to earnestly make a Vonnegut adaptation. You know, it's like, why did this action star do this? Another Alan Rudolph movie. Yeah. Another movie that Bruce came in

for, like, one scene, a cameo, and fucking destroys, absolutely slays, is Rick Linklater's Fast Food Nation. Incredible in that. And that's... Where he does the speech about

there's shit in the meat, just cook it. But that felt like he would understand sometimes uncredit me. Don't sell this movie on my name. It's not even a contractual thing. It's not an ego thing. I want to just be able to show up and for a day or two for one scene just serve this as an actor.

Just like dig in and do scene work and connect with my co-stars and in certain cases with something like uh nobody's fool it's like well i want to fucking work with paul newman right you know and robert robert benton as well yes he's an extra you can see him clearly on scene on screen in the verdict in the verdict yeah in yeah newman's final big monologue and you can just imagine that guy who's like a couple years away from finally getting his big shot he gets moonlighting like a year after that maybe just being like man my dream is to hold my own with that guy someday

yeah i'll i'll show up for a tiny part nobody's fool i want to fucking go toe-to-toe with newman and i think like willis i we love willis yeah i adore him he's one of my favorite movie stars ever that's my thing i'm like he has like half a dozen like 12 monkeys is my favorite willis performance yeah because he's just so like raw and emotional and sad but he's also kind of doing the action movie you know like, like, he's tough and he's strong. That's the thing he could do better than anyone else. Just, like, bringing that sort of level of weird, lonely sadness to genres

that you do not expect that from. And you wouldn't expect it from this guy, who seems like he could fucking make the whole world revolve around him. What's the, you know, obviously, like, Moonrise Kingdom. I mean, there's so many great performances the shamalan movies like that you like you said but yeah it's interesting

especially with diehard it's like he follows it up with so many movies two of his most famous flops are right after diehard right uh hudson hawk and uh bonfire the vanities ford fairlane oh the ford fair not ford fairlane that was the other guy ford fairlane is uh the dice man of course in director it is they're both brenny harlem right or no no no michael lehman did hudson hawk yeah that's right heathers did hudson hawk yes yeah that's right that's right i mean that's like hudson hawk's pretty good like hudson hawk is like fairly maligned it's also i think it was viewed as this like vanity project of like someone stopped bruce he's gotten out of control you watch it now and

you're like this is the weirdest vanity project of all time i wish our movie stars were making weird personal swings like this bonfrey the vanity is like everyone was like he's miscast in this i don't think he is i have always defended the character the character in the book was british the character the book was British. The character in the book is a totally different type. Right. And like he's not doing that. But I think he's funny.

It's Hanks who's lost at sea in that movie. That's just like, that's not a safe move. No, not at all. I mean, that movie is fascinating. He has this sort of like awkward stumbling period in the early 90s where some of them are hitting and his flops are really sticking to him. But all of them, the flops in particular are like interesting strategically and they speak to a guy who's like i've been waiting to have the opportunity to dig into stuff as an actor and i want to try some shit and i want to work with some interesting directors we got to start winding down

yeah we do uh we should we talk talk about the Christmas movie thing at all? Is it completely over-discussed at this point? It's definitely a Christmas movie. It's not a debate. That's because it came out in the summer, but instead of Christmas time. Well, what's crucial actually in our research is that the studio liked the Christmas vibe. They were like,

there's not a lot of Christmas in L.A. movies, and we like that. We like that this has the Christmas in L.A. thing going for it. It was like a specific thing set up from the beginning of like, this gives us a book, It's not some observation

that evil millennials came up with later. It was always there. And Christmas movies, especially the Shane Black variety, which I know this is not technically a Shane Black movie, but it's sort of,

you know, in his wheelhouse. People retrofit it into being a Tony Scott Shane Black movie when it's neither. But like, it's about like,

you know, you find your people like in Christmas movies, right?'s about like, you know, you find your people. Yeah. Like in Christmas movies, right? And you're in dire circumstances and you find your people. Like, you know, the- Well, and I think the loneliness-

That's what this is about. Of that sort of, oh, it's very Christmas. You step back. You have the Scrooge-like moment of introspection. What are the relationships I fucked up? Who do I want to be with? Who do I want to spend this with? It just heightens the whole feeling of this guy going there to try to have a conversation to fix a relationship and fucking it up.

And, you know, obviously run DMC, right? At the end. Well, yes. I mean, beautiful use of Christmas and Hollis. Yeah. Another shout out I want to give for Alan Rick alan rickman uh for a movie to watch if you haven't seen it have you ever seen a movie he did with madeline stowe called closet land no never seen never heard of that movie do yourself a favor and watch it's a two-hander just the two

of them in it but it was a movie that was i don't it wasn't sponsored by amnesty international but they were involved somehow because it's a movie about torture. And it's, it must have been a play. It's the two of them. And he plays multiple parts while being the same person. He's an interrogator who's trying to get her to confess to something or to break a political prisoner. and but it's shot very stylistically it's not like a a film that's kind of uh set in the almost in the real world she is the audience is kept as off center as she is the plot of the movie she's dragged into this thing and she has no idea what's going on and this dude's job is to break her and so in the process of the the flick he gets to play a few different characters in his attempt to break her down and break not just her spirit but her mind psychologically it's a fucking fascinating movie you can probably find it on youtube wow i want to watch this movie rickman apparently thinks of it fondly i mean like when i he was great in it when i think of rickman early

i think of truly madly deeply which is like a huge movie in britain obviously yes and beautiful movie this movie he did with polio steven polikoff who's a great british uh director called close my eyes which he's amazing and like he always the best thing about rickman is just that he always kept doing that stuff even while he's like also yeah he'll go to hollywood he'll do the big even even after die hard and after um robin hood it might have been before robin hood but remember he does a bit part in the january man wow he is uh kevin klein's painter friend who's very eccentric um and it's like it's a very non-showy part um but he's in it and he's absolutely memorable. That feels like a Ben's choice. I mean, absolutely.

It's a big Connor Ratliff reference point as well. I mean, that's the thing with him. It's like, Rickman never gave a bad performance. I think he is truly a guy, you will throw out that when's he bad sometimes. I mean, he's a good example for it. I mean, he was in one of the most notorious stage productions of all time which anthony and cleopatra with helen mirren which people were like the worst shit they've ever seen but obviously i didn't see that i didn't see that

yeah uh he was always good i've never i have not seen everything he's done but i have never found him less than incredibly interesting to watch and part of that is perhaps just the thing of like that guy basically lived a full life before he became a movie star yeah he was formed you know and he was just like and have a life outside of movies he wasn't somebody that whose life outside he's not some like defined by his job guy right yeah yeah showbiz guy yeah and similarly you know it's it happened for bruce at a younger age but they talk about like um what's uh uh glenn gordon karon what moonlighting creator's name you got it glenn gordon karon yes yeah he wanted bruce so badly and the network absolutely did not want him

and they just kept on testing more and more guys away from it the moment when it happened for bruce quote unquote like overnight was a little bit late you know he's a john ham type he gets famous in his 30s late 30s yeah yeah no you're right you're right or mid 30s i don't know how old he is can we do the box office game griffin or is there anything left on die hard i'm trying to think it's like it's an it's an impossible it's one reason it's great that ke Kevin's here because it's like what are we supposed to say die hard's good I know that already you know these these like canonical films are tough to find new life in right I think sometimes people expect us to be like oh great now finally the definitive die hard episode that blank checks getting to it that's like we're just gonna be two guys talking about a movie that rules for a couple hours. I loved it since I was a child. It's amazing.

The thing about this box office game is Die Hard opens limited on 21 screens. Expands the next week. But I don't want to do the next week because the next week Midnight Run comes out. And maybe we'll do Midnight Run someday. Kevin, do you have Midnight Run thoughts? I went to see that in a theater. Brought my friends. And it wasn't an obvious choice for us.

We were 18 years old, 19 years old or something. But I absolutely adored it. I was a massive Charles Grodin fan. I mean, that's the best. And watching De Niro, like nowadays, you know, thanks to the Fockers and shit and many other things. We've seen De Niro be funny. But that was one of the first times where you're like, this guy's fucking funny, man. Why didn't anyone ever use him in a fight?

He's very similar to McClane. This is kind of blowing my mind that those movies came out a week apart. And I'm like, they are both perfect textbook examples of the thing I think people get wrong so often in so many different areas.

Yeah, they're just two of the thing I think people get wrong so often in so many different areas. Yeah, they're just two of the most perfect films, in my opinion. Number one at the box office, however, on July 15th, 1988, Griffin, is a gigantic smash hit comedy with the biggest comedy star in the world. So it's an Eddie? Eddie Murphy.

Is it... It's not a Beverly Hills Cop sequel? No. Is it Golden Child? Not Golden Child. 88. 88. It's kind of his last... Oh, it's not a beverly hills cup sequel no is it golden child not golden child 88 88 it's kind of his last coming to america right it's coming to america yeah the last really great movie in that run yeah right yeah i really love that one yeah coming to america is great but i'm just saying like after that right you're then you're getting into golden child beverly three

you know you're getting into the golden child Isn't Golden Child before? Maybe it is. Yeah. Is it? Yeah, you're right. It is. No, I would say that's the end of the first Eddie movie star chapter. I include Golden Child in my golden era. Good era.

I remember going to see that and being like, because they kept this part of it hidden in the marketing. But it's like Eddie Murphy murphy fights satan he sure does i honestly wish they had fucking like marketed the movie like that but when i got into the theater it was an eddie murphy's movie so i was going anyway but during the movie i remember turning to ernie and being like he's fighting the fucking devil man this is amazing because i guess it's right a year after this is harlemights. Yes. And then another 48 hours. That's where he gets to direct. Eddie Murphy gets to direct that one.

He sure does. Eddie directs and then is like, I hate directing. I'm going to go back and make sequels to all my previous movies. Right. I'm going to do another 48 hours. I'm going to do Beverly 3.

Yeah. It shows you how directing can affect you from time to time where you're like, oh, no, I'm not doing that again. There's such a funny quote he has about it where people were like do you want to direct again he was like no it's a fucking terrible job i remember being on set and having like a art director come up to me and go which pillows do you prefer and i just went i don't know they're fucking pillows i don't care it's a job of of answering questions at the end of the day i mean a lot of things go into it but

you are the repository of every answer for every question anyone's going to have. They're trying to get the movie out of your head. So all day long it's people going like, fluffy pillow or stiff pillow? I think he liked the idea in theory of not having anyone who was boss over him. And then he was like, I actually hate

answering these questions and I don't really care to make the choices outside of my own part of the film. Right. Which you can do as a director. I don't really care to make the choices outside of my own part of the film. Right, right. Which you can do as a director. Totally. I don't get into the weeds

about pillows and shit like that. I always feel like, look, you got a department, it's yours. You get to make your movie. It's to me making my movie, so have fun. Go nuts.

As long as it doesn't fuck with my plot, like express yourself. Yeah. Number two, the box office is new this week,iffin maybe this is why die hard is limited um it is the final film in a franchise uh action thriller franchise okay so it's not it's not death wish it's not Death Wish. It's not Dirty Harry. It is Dirty Harry. I always thought none of them are in the 90s.

None of them are in the 90s. So it's the Deadpool. I always thought that was like 91. It's 88. I mean, he's pretty old at that point. Yeah, the Deadpool. Buddy Van Horn film. Liam Neeson's in it.

Yeah. Patty Clarkson is in it. Yeah. I've seen it. Jim Carrey is in it. Jim Carrey's in it. That's the thing. I feel like it has... Jim Carrey's in it yeah patty clarkson is in it yeah i've seen it jim carrey carries it that's the thing i feel like it has as well it gets mostly remembered for its supporting cast its most lasting legacy though is deadpool correct very much isn't it weird that that movie has that title but to think the uh dirty the final dirty harry movie coming out the same summer as the first Die Hard movie when Clint was the first choice. And if Clint's in the movie, the legacy for this film is probably it begins and ends as at, oh, that thing's like pretty well directed.

Yeah. But beyond the fact that Bruce transforms the movie, I think a lot of the discoveries don't happen if it's Clint and he's coming in going like, hey, this is who I am as a movie star. This is what happens in a Clint movie. At this point, he basically only directs his own films or works with his three guys. Yeah, with guys who are basically ghost directors for him. It's not the best Dirty Harry

movie, having watched them all. It's okay. Number three at the box office is a film we've covered on this podcast. It's a huge hit. Family film. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Been out for a month. This is pretty good, Eden, at the Cinemplex.

If you're within this month able to go see fucking diehard Roger Rabbit, Midnight Run, Coming to America. Yeah, exactly. this month able to go see fucking die hard roger rabbit midnight run coming to america yeah exactly i mean i saw i saw all three all four of those movies um in a theater at the movie theater i know um you know uh some other movies you could have seen that are not in the top five but bull durham great fucking movie love that you know uh well crocodile, well, Crocodile Dundee 2. Bad movie. We've covered all the podcasts. That film is insane.

Okay, so number four. It's a Disney film, an old Disney film. It's a re-release? Yes. Old. Is it Snow White? Slightly newer than Snow White. Song of the South?

No, not that upsetting. Less upsetting. Okay. Pinocchio? No. I mean, this is just you naming it. Dumbo. No.

These are all great guesses. Upsetting is the clue I'm trying to go off of here. This one always really gets me. This is my favorite Disney film of these. Bambi? Bambi. Okay. Upsetting in that way.

Yeah, emotionally wrenching. Yes. And just beautiful. I'm a huge Bambi guy. No, it's a beautiful movie. Afraid to show it to my kid. Number five is a comedy launch of a huge No it's a beautiful movie Afraid to show it to my kid Number five Is a comedy Launch of a huge star

Well he's already Sort of famous But this is his big moment Okay It's not an SNL guy No It gets him an Oscar nom Yes

He's not known As a comedy star now Oh it's Tom Hanks And Big There you go Man Another great movie You could have seen

Yeah I assume you saw Big as well I saw that in the theater as well I saw every movie You're mentioning This is I assume you saw Big as well. I saw that in the theater as well. Every movie you're mentioning, this is peak movie going for me. So I saw that as well. You saw Short Circuit 2 in a theater? That's number seven. I sure did.

You saw Arthur 2 on the rocks? Hey, don't say that. It's not a favorite. Yes. Number five is alive. You saw Arthur 2 on the rocks? Did you see that? I did.

I was a massive, massive Arthur fan. Hey, man. So I couldn't wait for Arthur 2 on the rocks. Did you see that? I did. I was a massive, massive Arthur fan. Hey, man. So I couldn't wait for Arthur 2. And boy, I was disappointed. Did you see the Corey Haim, Corey Helf, Feldman film License to Drive? Not in theaters, but I did see it on video. That is also in the top 10,

along with Crocodile Dundee 2, previously mentioned, which is a film that starts out with him fishing with dynamite in the Hudson River. You think... It's got maybe the greatest opening scene in the history of cinema.

You think you are in for a great time, and then everything else in that movie is terrible. We did Patreon episodes on them, Kevin, during deep pandemic lockdown. And we were like, you know what, they're all short. Let's knock them out. Let's, in one sitting,

just watch all fucking three in a row. And we watched one, and we were just sort of fascinated by how big these movies were, and we all fucking three in a row and we watch one and we were just sort of fascinated by how big these movies were and we're a little too young and we miss them and we're like let's watch them cold all three in one sitting first one we're like i get it it's charming it doesn't reinvent the wheel but it fucking works it's a crowd pleaser second movie starts with him fishing with dynamite in the hudson river we're like okay i think my man i think he knows he's playing with how's money now and then immediately turns into bad rambo yeah have you seen that that has almost zero jokes in it from that point on is just a bad revenge thriller yeah um that's it thank you kevin Kevin. I mean, like, we're going to wrap up, I think.

Kids, thanks for having me. Anytime. It's always a joy to sit around and movie geek out with both of you. You're the best. Get out of here. You guys know your shit, man. It's fun. You actually hear it.

This is the highest compliment I can make. I'm going to watch Die Hard tonight. Hell yeah. My favorite thing, Kevin, is when you pull out a, I'm already forgetting the titles, but when you're like calling out the deep cut Rickman Willis things. Closetland, maybe. I'm going to go watch that. This thing was good. I just, I love how much of an omnivore you are as a movie fan.

And I feel like. It's so weird. And you know what? It is on YouTube. It's on YouTube. You know, the fucking landscape, my man. I remember I was at. We were doing screenings of space, you know, the Edgar Wright series.

Edgar Wright. Yeah. So we did it out here years ago. This is right before Quinn went off to make. Inglourious Bastards. OK. Yeah. ago this is right before quinn went off to make inglorious bastards okay yeah so he's between um uh grindhouse yeah and inglorious bastards and in grant grindhouse i guess didn't make as much money as he hoped so he was a little down in the dumps and stuff so we're we're at the spaced thing and he's friends with edgar and so it's it's edgar simon, and the actress whose name escapes me at the moment. Jessica Hines.

Jessica, that's right. Jessica, who also has that wonderful scene in Shaun of the Dead where her party meets their party and stuff. It's so funny. So we did that. We showed a few episodes and I did Q&A with them and stuff and then opened it up to the audience and Quentin was there as well. So afterwards, this was at the Cinerama Dome, part of the arc light at that point arc lights gone but the arc light had this deck that you can go out near the bar and have like private events and stuff so afterwards we're all out there on the deck and we're sitting around talking it's me and simon

and um edgar and quentin quentin's getting ready to go over to Germany to make Inglourious Bastards. Like two days later, he's getting on a plane going to Germany. So as we're having this discussion, we're talking about movies and Simon Pegg said something like similar to what you said,

where he was like, man, Kevin, you know a lot of movies. And he wasn't part of the conversation. He was adjacent to the conversation, but it triggered Quentin in such a way where he turned to join the conversation i know movies like it was a challenge it wasn't that it was for it wasn't like hey i know movies too but it was him going kevin doesn't know movies kevin knows mainstream movies kevin knows star wars and all the big movies he's going he doesn't know everything and he really doesn't know obscure things and i was like well he's right i guess he's right but i so whenever somebody's

like you're an omnivore i always go like well he's the omnivore i just like well he he's got this like it seems this repository of like video movies and like crazy like italian b movies and all this stuff right right he's encyclopedic. And I've talked about this with you. Or he'll be like, oh, that guy did 12 episodes of fucking Matlock. And you're like, how the hell do you know that? Like, you know, like that shit. But I've talked about this with you, Kevin, that like you talk about movies all the time in the public sphere. You know, you're doing events at your theater and your podcasts and interviews and all these sorts of things.

and your podcasts and interviews and all these sorts of things. But very often, the things you get asked to talk about are your own films and sort of the big genres, the superheroes, the sci-fi, the things that people know, like Star Wars,

that you grew up with, idolizing. And the thing I love about having you on our show is that you start pulling out, like, forgotten 90s movie star dramas. Right. You know, which it's like, you know, you're an honor.

You like every type of film. I do. I'm a big fan. Have you guys ever done Michael Ritchie's career yet? No. We did a Fletch episode at Ben's insistence.

Yep. Yep. That's right. For the Bad News Bears, though. Yeah. Come on back. One of the greatest

American films ever made. Smile. Smile, another one. The Candidate, another one. That's really good. Bunny Farm, another one. The Candidate? Yeah, that's really good. Funny Farm? That's really good.

Another one. He's got a... No, that wasn't Michael Richie. Funny Farm was George War Hill. Oh, yes. Okay. Then I'll hold on to that. Yes.

No, Fletch is a big Ben Hosley movie. Fletch Lives? Not so much. Yeah. That one's not... But Fletch Lives has the one moment

that still makes me laugh to this day where their chant is as simple as scum, scum, scum. Go back from where you come. Just remember that you were trying to revive Fletch for like 10, 15 years. Yeah, yeah. I was involved for a minute there. We tried to buy the rights for Ben, but they outbid us. Those fuckers.

Ben wound up in the hands of... Did you like the Jon Hamm? I thought it was good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So did I. I just want them to make more of that. I was a fan of the books, the Gregory McDonagh books, as well as the movie.

So when they did that one, I was like, you know, that's exactly who Fletch was in the books. He was like, you'd want to fuck him. He was charming. Yeah, yeah. And every woman wanted him. And he was like, he had been in the military, so he was strapping.'d want to fuck him. He was charming. And like every woman wanted him. And he was like, he had been in the military.

So he's like strapping. So Jon Hamm like really felt like the incarnation of Fletch from the books. Our version, our take was gonna be more like he's a podcast producer. All right. And he is handsome, but like less of a Jon Hamm type. Funny, really funny.

Kevin, thank you so much. Such a pleasure, kids. Anytime you need me. And everyone else who's listening, you like movies, come down to Smart Castle Cinemas

in Atlanta, Conlands, New Jersey. We are working to put together an event. We want to do a screening hosting there. Hopefully this summer. Tried to do it last summer

and things didn't line up. But hopefully we'll be able to announce something soon-ish. And at the time this episode comes out, Masters of the Universe Revolution will have been out for a week or so. Sure. Which I'm immensely proud of.

Except it's posting into Feb. I think it's a great season. Griffin is absolutely fantastic as our oracle. As I talked about in the last episode when I was here, stands for our second season. He's, pun intended,

he's an absolutely magical oracle. Wow. But I think the whole season is so great, and I think the now 15 episodes that will sit together on Netflix are are really satisfying watch right in totality and hopefully uh fingers crossed we get to add five more i know teddy told me the the sort of season three arc as it's mapped out it's so good it is really really cool it's really

hopefully we get to do it yeah but if nothing else i got two action figures out of it so thank you for that you did man and you uh you i thank you because you gave him such heart and such soul. But when we were in the, I said it before on the other episode, when we were in the writer's room, we were like, let's just make Orko so cool that people want to get tattoos of him. And we've seen it. And I have seen many, or our Orko, not the Orko from Game and the Master Universe. I'll send you pictures when I see them out in the wild.

Your Orko, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So you did it. You did it. You connected. In spite of the fact that You're Orko. Yeah. Yeah. So you did it. You did it. You connected. Well, that was. In spite of the fact that I, you know, didn't necessarily. You're Orko definitely did.

That was my goal. But I was fighting very hard to try to get this role before I had access to see any scripts. And I didn't know if I was going to be trying to force a lot of emotion into a guy who still mostly just made magic tricks go wrong. And my job was made very easy by the way the character was written, the material you gave. I kind of just had to say the words and it worked.

You're fantastic. I don't want to say you're magical again, but I will. You're magical. Well, you're magical. We all agree Griffin is magical. David, you're magical. Thank you. And Ben, you're magical. Hell yeah. Jersey's on. Thank you all And Ben, you're magical. Hell yeah. Jersey's on. Thank you all for listening.

Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe. Thank you to Marie Barty, associate producer on the show, AJ McKeon, production coordinator and editor, along with Alex Barron, JJ Birch for our research, Pat Reynolds and Joe Bowen for our artwork, Lane Montgomery, the great American novel

for our theme song. You can go to blankcheckpod.com for links to some real nerdy shit, including our Patreon, Blank Check Special Features, where we'll be doing

a Die Hard 2 episode, a one-off to fill in the gap between the McTiernan entries, and also are doing our Terminator franchise commentaries right now. Yes, that's true. That is good.

Mm-hmm. That is good. Yes. I think it's good. And as always, it's a fucking Christmas movie. This is not worth debating. It just is.

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