Is Christmas in Die Hard enough to make a Christmas movie?
Video screenshot by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper / CNET
Die Hard, the 1988 action film starring Bruce Willis, is not about Santa or elves, but it still appears on several lists of the top Christmas movies. Of course, the film is set at Christmas time – and you can even make an unofficial purchase shirts and fancy faces touting Christmas Party Nakatomi Plaza 1988. But is it really a Christmas movie? The film’s director, John McTiernan, interviewed the American Film Institute about what exactly he and producer Joel Silver had in mind, and strap in, as McTiernan has a complex thought process about the whole thing.
McTiernan’s interview is difficult to summarize. He talks about everything from fast food to how art helped bring down the king of France to his strong feelings about the last four years in American politics. But his comments on Die Hard show that the film shifted in focus from its original script.
At first, “Die Hard was a terrorist film, and it was about those horrific terrorists who came into … Valhalla capitalism,” McTiernan said. “And it was really about the hard face of an authority stepping in to put things right again.”
But McTiernan did not want to make that film, he told Silver. It was inspired by the classic 1946 Christmas film, It’s a Wonderful Life, specifically the scene in which the hero George Bailey discovers that his Bedford Falls town has become a sleazy Pottersville. He wanted, he said, “a film in which the hero was a real man, and the people of the authority – all important people – were represented as a kind of fool.”
Changing that focus made a big difference, McTiernan said, lending it a sense of nostalgia that the filmmakers were getting away with something
“We didn’t expect it to be a Christmas movie, but it was the joy that came from it that turned it into a Christmas movie,” he said.
And it goes on to draw a link between the terrorists in the film and current events in the United States.
“My hope this Christmas is that you will all remember that there are low-ranking, angry authors who went to rich people and said, ‘If you give us power, we will make sure that anyone your stuff, ‘”he said. “Those things you gather with power [are] means to intimidate us, means to shut us down so that we do not kick them to the side of the road and (let) the good people of the world go ahead with building a future. Merry Christmas, and I hope we have a better year. “
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