Everybody that I know who works in films is out there working all the time. I got to see my friends last night from 'Oceans Thirteen' as they were passing through Chicago, bringing their film here." When Willis made the third "Die Hard" movie a dozen years ago, he pretty much said that was it; he was done with everyman hero John McClane and the whole save-the-world action genre.
But now he has something else to save: his career as a movie star whose face on a poster sells movie tickets -- and who is paid accordingly. So Willis has gone back to the well just as Sylvester Stallone did last year with "Rocky Balboa," his first "Rocky" movie in 16 years (and will do again next year when "John Rambo" becomes the first "Rambo" movie in 20 years). Now Willis just has to persuade everyone that the new "Die Hard" is as butt-kickingly awesome as 1988's first "Die Hard" (just named the "Greatest Action Movie of All Time" by Entertainment Weekly) and that it's far superior to the two sequels that followed.
The head-shaven movie star was wearing a tight orange T-shirt over his slim, muscular physique as he slouched in the downtown hotel suite chair and chatted casually and amiably. But with the clock ticking, he locked the focus on his key talking point: that "Live Free or Die Hard" rocks. This has been Willis' theme whether he's posting straight-talking, profanity-laced comments on the film-fan Web site Ain't It Cool News under the name Walter B (his full name is Walter Bruce Willis) or giving interviews to one mainstream media outlet after another.
For example, did he ever think something he uttered in a movie, such as the now-famous "Yippie-ki-yay ...
" from "Die Hard," would become a popular catchphrase? "No, I never try to predict things," he said. "Some of the things that we said are not in the new film; some of the fun things aren't in there.
I haven't seen the final, final cut yet, but I'm told that it's even better than the one I saw three weeks ago." Willis comes across as such a no-nonsense, good-humored guy that you want to take his word for it. Not that there was much choice, considering that only 25 minutes' worth of footage had been previewed before he arrived in town earlier this month; 20th Century Fox representatives said the movie still wasn't finished.
(The complete film since has been screened for critics.) The excerpts showed McClane saving a young computer hacking whiz (Apple ad guy Justin Long) from getting blown up by terrorists and a car-flipping chase and pile-up in a tunnel. Willis said he had seen a rough version of the whole movie, and, yes, he was pleased.
"The cut that I saw still had pencil drawings of some of the action from the end of the film," he said. "But they're still editing it right now and getting the final touches on it. It will be in the theaters June 27.
I'm happy with it, and I would be the toughest critic of this film if it wasn't good, if it didn't turn out as well as we all wanted it to." Willis has much riding on how "Live Free or Die Hard" turned out -- and, perhaps more important, the size of the crowds that turn out for it. Nothing is threatening Willis' alternate career as a character actor and ensemble player, which has led him to memorable appearances in films such as Robert Benton's "Nobody's Fool" (1994), Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" (1994) and Richard Linklater's "Fast Food Nation" (2006).
But it's those other, name-above-the-title movies that could disappear for Willis if he doesn't score with "Live Free or Die Hard." His most recent starring vehicles have been, dating back to 2004, "Perfect Stranger," "16 Blocks," "Lucky Number Slevin," "Hostage" and "The Whole Ten Yards." Not one of those hit the $40 million mark at the box office.
His last movie to top $100 million was M. "Any time you go back to your bread and butter, you have a lot riding on it," said Jeff Bock, box-office analyst with Exhibitor Relations. "This is really his last chance to be an action hero.
" Reinventing the genre Willis said his motivation in returning to his long-dormant franchise was that he'd been waiting "until the genre found a way to reinvent itself. I didn't know what I was waiting for, what I was looking for, until I sat down and started talking to director Len Wiseman about how he wanted to tell this story and how he wanted to take it back to real stunts and a real kind of smashmouth film, a kind of smashmouth 'Die Hard' film -- and at the same time bring it into the world of technology." This "smashmouth" point is one that Willis finds worth repeating.
Willis to Vanity Fair: "But we still have a pretty hard-core smashmouth film." Willis to Playboy: "Actually, it's more smashmouth, back to the first film." It's probably no coincidence that these comments followed much Internet fan dude carping about the PG-13 rating for "Live Free or Die Hard," in contrast to the R for its three predecessors.
The complaint goes that if the new one is reaching for a broader audience, it must be toned down. "We didn't shoot a rating, we shot a 'Die Hard' film, and it's just as hard-core as the first one," Willis said. So it wasn't a conscious decision to shoot the movie with a PG-13 in mind?
"No, we never thought about it," he said. "And that's not something that is decided upon when you start out." Yet Willis has said elsewhere that because a film gets an automatic R if a certain profanity is uttered more than two times, that word appears just twice in "Live Free or Die Hard.
" "That's the rule. That's the rule," he sighed. "I'm talking to your audience out there: If your criteria for liking a film or not liking it is how much I cuss in the film, then this may not be the picture for you.
But if you want to see a 'Die Hard' film that's an old-school action film, this is for you." Soon enough you'll know whether you can take his word for it. Bruce by the numbers Everybody that I know who works in films is out there working all the time.
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