[IMG:L]Harrison Ford is putting his Indiana Jones fedora back on; Sylvester Stallone successfully made a champ of Rocky Balboa again last year and has another Rambo mission on deck; and Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminated one last time before putting politics in his gunsights.
So with a generation of near-Geritol age action heroes back in business, it’s hardly a surprise that at 52, the youngest of the 80s blow-‘em-up superstars is also returning to his signature character with Live Free or Die Hard. But Bruce Willis was originally reluctant to resurrect John McClane.
“After Die Hard 3 I made the choice to take a break from doing action films for a while because I thought the genre needed to reinvent itself or be reinvented,” said Willis. “For a long time I thought I should just retire the Die Hard series undefeated because they’ve all done really well and have done well for Fox. I think that it brought an incredible amount of revenue to the studio, over a billion dollars. But you know what? I like taking risks. I like gambling and the potential to fail on this film was certainly out there but I can look at it now and tell you that it’s a great film. It really is. It’s a Die Hard film.”
He may be a gambler, but ultimately he took the risk for the fans. “One of the things that I always heard in my travels around the world was the same question: When are you going to do another Die Hard? And for a long time I thought it was just something people said, but once we actively started working on the script we got such a great response to it.”
The new film has McClane protecting a computer hacker (Justin Long) from cyberterrorists threatening Washington, D.C. in a plot that also puts the ex-cop’s daughter Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) in peril. “It just seemed like the right time. It was a good script and a bunch of different elements conspired to kind of bring it together. At a certain point, it’s just a leap of faith. I just had to say, ‘Let’s take a shot.’”
Willis was ultimately sold on the take offered up by the fourth film’s director, Len Wiseman, helmer of the Underworld films. I was pretty confident in the fact that if we got a good story that we could improve upon that which is what we ultimately did. But at the end of the day, when it’s the 11th and a half hour, you just got to say, ‘Here we go.’
He harbors no disillusions about how a poorly received fourth film could sully the franchise. “Look, it could’ve sucked. We could be sitting here trying to get you excited about it. The really rewarding thing is to know that we have a great film. When I first saw the first cut of this film, I was so impressed and relieved at the same time. It really is kind of counter-programming to what’s out there this summer.”
The cyberterrorism angle offered an opportunity the Die Hard franchise into the new millennium, but bringing Willis’ body back for heavy duty stunt work was no easy task. “Recovery time is a little longer,” Willis lamented. “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 and these stunts were a lot easier 20 years ago. I picked up some stitches.”
One of the film’s explosive sequences has McClane and his witness trapped in a tunnel as evil hackers send oncoming traffic hurtling at him from both directions, leaving Willis and Justin Long ducking an airborne sedan as two oncoming cars knock it out of the way.
“That car that you see flipping in the ad, that car is a real car flipping that they cabled up and got up on cables and I think they did it, I don’t know, six or seven times before they were happy with it. They were crashing cars.”
[IMG:R]Outside of Hollywood, age has not hindered Willis. “I’m having a ball. I think you have to. I do anyway, and I would suggest to you: Don’t take your time, don’t assume that you’re going to live forever. You have this day, you have today, so I don’t really spend my time looking back and I try not to spend too much time looking forward and try to be in this moment, being in the present. I think it’s something that I always was aware of and over the last 25 years I’ve probably forgotten it a few times, but since I lost my younger brother I’ve tried to focus on this every day, think about it a little bit every day.”
McClane’s daughter Lucy, first seen as a toddler getting harassed by news crews in the original film, is now a young woman with her own love life, and her papa faces down her would-be suitor with the same intensity that he aimed at the terrorists he’s taken down. Willis was amused when asked if McClane’s parenting style dovetailed into his own life as the father of three daughters with ex-wife Demi Moore.
“I can relate to it, but that’s just kind of overly dramatized in the film,” he said. “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.”
That said, the parenting tactics Willis admits to sound a bit extreme themselves. “I just tell them I want to meet them. That’s the only thing that I ask for. I just give them that look, that little look, and you know what? I always put one of them in charge. If they bring a little group of guys over to the house, they have a pool party or whatever, I’ll just say ‘Dude, what’s your name?’ and he says, ‘Sinjin,’ and I say, ‘Sinjin, you’re in charge. If anything happens to one of my daughters, I’m coming to you first and then I’m going to kill all your friends right in front of you and you’ll be last.’”
The oldest Willis daughter, Rumer, graduated high school last year and is now following in mommy and daddy’s footsteps. Willis and Moore made a rule that their kids could only appear in their films until they were out of school.
“She’s out in the world. She’s going into show business. She’s actually going to be doing a film this summer about an assassination of a high school president. It’s very interesting.”
The Willis girls also clue Dad into any of his latest film’s technological details. “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.”
[IMG:L]At a Hollywood party to launch the new BlackBerry Curve, Rumer said that new technology helps her keep up with her dad, when their crazy schedules keep them on opposites sides of the planet. “I send my dad a text, because he never picks up his phone!” she laughed, but added that the extremely cordial relationship between her parents and her stepfather Ashton Kutcher results in far more face-to-face conversations than some other fast-lane families. “We definitely communicate a lot and kinda just check in with each other, but are actually lucky enough to sit down and have family dinners, so that’s good.”
He may be old school, but Willis has never shied away from trying new things. He’s peppered his action blockbusters with indie sensations like Pulp Fiction, surprise smashes like The Sixth Sense, cutting edge pop culture cinema like Sin City and uncredited turns in movies like The Astronaut Farmer or Beavis and Butthead Do America.
“I get to do a lot of things. I have a really great life. I get to do small independent films. It seems to be accepted now but I was one of the first actors to start doing supporting roles in other people’s films. At the time my agents and the people who advise me thought that was a really bad idea but I get to do that now. I don’t mind it and it doesn’t keep me from doing big films like Die Hard 4 for the studios. So, I get to do both things.”
Whether there’s more adventure in store for John McClane or Willis takes another surprising turn in his career, he promises to improve with age. “I think I’m still learning how to act. I learn a little bit more about acting and about what I can do and how I do things with every film. It’s about the journey for me, not about any specific goal. When I stop acting I want to have as many different cards in my hands as I can get.
“I’ve done a lot of films and not all of them have worked,” he admitted. “Not all of them have turned out to be memorable films, but I tried hard in every one of them. I tried to do my best work in every one of them, but there are some that certainly I would hold out as being a little above the others.”
Live Free or Die Hard opens June 27.
