Willis reprises his role as John McClane, a New York City detective and a guy you always want on your side when pushed into a corner. Long co-stars as a hacker who helps McClane figure out who’s behind an attack on America’s infrastructure.
Bruce, your character is a very protective father. Can you relate to that aspect of his personality?
Bruce Willis: “I can relate to it but that’s just kind of overly dramatized in the film. My relationship with my daughters is a lot more upfront than that. What we’ve done as parents is to try to send the girls out into the world with as much information about what those 16 and 18-year-old boys are thinking. We asked Justin…”
Justin Long: “And 28.”
Bruce Willis: “And 28 year old boys and 52 year olds boys are thinking and hopefully [shouting to jet overhead] that’ll keep them safe. But, yeah, it’s just dramatized in the film. Actually, the character of Lucy McClane was not in the original draft of this film. It was an idea that kind of came to us as we went along. Mary Elizabeth Winstead really did a great job in this film and brought a lot of her own kind of McClane-isms to the film and helps out in a way towards the end of the film that is both funny and is a McClane-ism.”
This film touches on terrorism and the Internet. Are you computer literate? Do you email or do your kids help you?
Bruce Willis: “My children help me with all my computer needs. I think of myself as somewhat savvy on the computer, but any problems I have on the computer I just ask my 13 year old daughter. She does a couple of tricks and then all of a sudden the computer is working again.”
Bruce, how did you get hooked up with Len Wiseman?
Bruce Willis: “I don’t know. I can’t really remember what I was doing last week so to answer a question about something that happened a year ago... I’m just kidding. I remember. You know what? I just sat down with him and my daughter, Scout, actually told me that even before I met Len, before we sat down to talk about doing the film, my daughter, Scout, turned me on to Underworld. We sat up one night watching it and I thought it was great. It just so happened that a couple weeks later Fox asked me to sit down with him, and it was a pretty easy choice to make.
We both had similar ideas about and similar goals as to the kind of Die Hard we wanted to make. It’s really easy to sit here and talk about the film now because it really did turn out great. …The film rocks. It’s actually one of my favorite Die Hards. We both wanted to make a – to stay away from the CG aspects, which would have been a real easy thing to do with a film like this, to try to compete with every other CG film that’s out this summer.”
What was the most challenging aspect of directing this type of large scale action film?
Len Wiseman: “The scale of it wasn’t so much the problem. I found that it was honestly more fun to have the ability and the toys to use to do the action the proper way and all that, so that was fun for me. I guess the most challenging would be because it is part of a trilogy and one that I’m very close to. The biggest challenge I would say is that I kind of have two responsibilities, I thought. One is to direct the film, the other is to watch it as the fan that I am. So I’d always look at it that way as that’s my biggest challenge when I’m in meetings. When I’m talking about the script, in every aspect of it, is this going to be the movie that I want to see because I’m only doing it because I’m a fan. Honestly, that was the biggest challenge. The other stuff was just… You know, there can be headaches and they can be challenging but for the most part it’s fun to blow s**t up.”
Bruce Willis: “It’s the most fun.”
Len Wiseman: “It’s the most fun. It really is fun. That’s fun. So that was the biggest challenge for me.”
Bruce Willis: “It was a tough shooting schedule, too. It was a really bizarre shooting schedule.”
Justin, how much of a challenge was an action-packed film for you?
Justin Long: "I had never done a movie like this. It was just crazy for me to see how long and involved all these stunts and sequences were. You see the movie, you sort of forget what you're doing. You forget what the means to the end is or what the end is going to be. And then you see it and all those weeks and weeks of waiting and setups and da da da, just fades in seconds of film. These scenes that I freaked out about where I was doing push ups and trying to get in character to deliver all these lines, they're just like, ‘Bah,’ and then cut to another guy and back to me, going ‘Bah!’
I have a friend who works on the show CSI: Miami. I was freaking out about the character and he said, ‘You're not going to have time to look good or bad. It's just going to be like a quick shot of you going Bah and then that's it.’ So it's amazing, just considering all the time, and you guys are probably used to it but I had never done a movie like this and it was overwhelming to be a part of it. Then you see it and it's like, ‘That was really fast. It was over.’”
Page 2: The Story, the Past Die Hard Movies, and the Possibility of Die Hard 5
