Did you have to train or work out for it?
Bruce Willis: “Well, I try and stay in shape for most of my films. I got in as good a shape as I could for this, but I still got beat up. These stunts were a lot easier twenty years ago (laughs).”
Did you get hurt on the set?
Bruce Willis: “A couple of times, yeah. I picked up some stitches.”
Justin, did you improvise any lines?
Justin Long: “Yeah, there was. They always wanted us to do a bunch scripted, but the script was sort of in a constant state of flux so there was definitely… Bruce, you did it too. There was a lot of that going on. In those moments of sort of like extreme, I'm always scared for my life, it's kind of hard to stick to [the script]. You kind of have to bring something a bit more natural. Some of the dialogue was not exactly solidified.”
Len Wiseman: “Yeah, there was a lot of that.”
Justin Long: “I'm just surprised he left a lot of it in. I was really, really surprised.”
Len Wiseman: “A lot of them, actually. What both of these guys did, a lot of the comedy is really just you get there on the day and the script is a road map, but then just the energy of what comes out of that day, different ideas and things. A lot of it made the movie.”
Bruce Willis: “But also, we didn't shoot the film in sequence. Very few films are shot in sequence and had we shot the film in sequence, we might have stuck a little bit closer to the dialogue. But we had to shoot alternate takes of almost every scene in case the scene that we didn't shoot, that was going to be schedule a month from now, turned out to either be in the film or not be in the film.
There was one scene, the scene that had to do with Kevin Smith, that we called the Warlock scene because that's the name of his character. We only had Kevin Smith for three days and it was a really locked in three days. Anything that we didn't know if it was going to be in the film or not, we said, ‘Just put it in the Warlock scene.’ So by the time we got to Kevin Smith's scene, it was a nine page scene. Fortunately, we had shot enough of the film that we knew what we needed from that scene and what we didn't need from it. Kevin Smith actually helped us write a lot of that scene.”
Len Wiseman: “That was a challenging part to go back to that other question. I mean, to shoot a film so out of sequence.”
Bruce Willis: “Was not the best way.”
Len Wiseman: “One of my favorite parts of Die Hard, when people ask me like, ‘What's your favorite action sequence?’ and it comes down to a shot in Die Hard 1 that I had never seen before in any kind of action film. When you're down on the ground and shooting at the guy running at you and it pops the guy in the knees. He gets popped in the kneecap and then he falls forward. He doesn't go through the glass, just his head goes through the glass.”
Bruce Willis: “That was a great stunt.”
Len Wiseman: “I'd never seen anything like that.”
Justin Long: “I've seen that in real life.”
Do you still have some scars from the previous movies?
Bruce Willis: “Yeah, I’ve got scars from every one of them. See this one? I just got that from getting kicked in the head by the stunt girl who was doing the stunts for Maggie Q. It’s good that I got it here because had she kicked me a half second later, she would have taken my eye out. So, yeah. It was an accident and for the kind of stuff we’re doing in this film, we were lucky that more people didn’t get hurt. Big stunts in this film.”
How have the stunts changed since the first Die Hard?
Bruce Willis: “The recovery time (laughs). Recovery time is a little longer. I call them kids but they’re not kids, they’re in their ‘30s, but these are guys who were kids when the first Die Hard came out. They kind of grew up watching those stunts and they’ve taken it to a much bigger level. They’re doing things I’ve never seen anybody do. Obviously, safety and all, but jumping from building to building and doing crazy dangerous stuff.”
