John McTiernan and the language of film

John McTiernan feels like a gentle soul. Sitting across from me in the lobby of the hotel, he’s as quick to smile as he is to flare up when he remembers something that agitates him. He’s also deliberate with his words. Even as he goes off tangent, it never feels like he’s doing so to avoid the issue. Context is key, and McTiernan has plenty to provide.

He’s visiting Helsinki as a guest of the Night Visions Film Festival. It’s a celebration of his body of work, which to this day remains unrivaled in the world of action cinema. McTiernan is a fascinating figure, and despite sitting with him for over an hour, it feels like only minutes.

More about Tiernan’s visit and schedule at the festival can be found here.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

There’s a quote of yours from years ago that has stuck with me, which says: Authoritarians are low-status, angry men, who have gone to rich people and said, give us power, and we’ll make sure nobody takes your stuff. 

That’s exactly what it is, and that is what authoritarians do. 

I wanted to ask about this anti-authoritarian aspect of your films. Did that come from growing up?  

Absolutely. It comes from my family, who were Roosevelt liberals. My great-grandmother was a politician and part and parcel of the coalition building that Roosevelt learned in. He was the governor of New York before he ran for president, and my great-grandmother was a country democratic chairman.  

She spent her time going to the Lithuanian halls, the Italian social centers, and the Polish community centers, to all those people, preaching this one idea: That all of us on the outs have more in common with each other than any of the rich people who own all this stuff. 

So, why don’t we stop being mad, and stop hating each other, and realize that together we have a lot of power? That was the essence of their coalition building. They learned how to do it in upstate New York. My great-grandmother was part of that. Ideologically, it is perfectly respectable. The whole idea is that the difference between people is cultural. Skin color is ridiculous, it’s nothing. 

Was that something that you wanted to put into your films? Something that said ‘fuck you’ to people who were standing in the way of progress? Like creating a Muslim action hero in the 13^th Warrior. 

Culture is very rapidly fixable and bridgeable. So yes, it was. I knew I was making a hero that was a Muslim, and I was quite happy about that. I knew that I would even have him pray. It turned out it’s a wonderful prayer, I think. “For all that I have failed to do.” It has stuck with me in my memory. 

I was quite happy also with going against – and I got some shit in the press at the time about it – the whole ‘no black admirals’ thing. Fuck it. I didn’t care if there were black admirals or not. Back when we did Hunt for the Red October, there actually was one black admiral at the time. Now there are many. But you see, before it can happen in reality, it has to happen in the imagination. Putting it in a movie gives everybody permission.  

So, they start to think: Well, why wouldn’t you have a black admiral? What the fuck, you know? James Earl Jones was always seen as the most upright man in the in the country. He was the wisest, most dignified man in the entire United States. The entire world.  

I knew at the time that I was staging a scene where this black man gives a bright young white guy an order, and the guy simply takes it like an order and says yes, sir. It isn’t particularly notable now, but it was notable at the time, and it was notable enough that I knew I was doing it. I knew that I was specifically doing that job, and that we had never seen that before.

Now, no one even notices it. It’s a perfectly reasonable thing. 

But you asked about my anti-authoritarian and anti-aristocratic attitudes. 

I did, yes. 

I knew the Irish side of my family had in effect been driven into the sea. Into exile by the English aristocracy. The potato famine is nonsense. It’s propaganda. Yes, there was a potato blight in the 1830s and 40s. But that wasn’t why Ireland was depopulated. The only reason that potato blight was significant was because less than half of the land was still in Irish hands, being used to grow food for human beings.

The height of the potato famine — in one year — 400,000 people died. Ironically, that year, exactly 400,000 tons of oats were exported from Ireland, from English-owned property in Ireland, to feed horses in England. So, there was no potato famine. There was genocide.  

It was just after the Wolfe Tone rebellion that the English decided to depopulate Ireland. There were 7 million people in Ireland, and then there were 2 million people left in 1870. It was not an accident; they didn’t all just go because they were wanderlust, and they wanted to go to some other place. They were driven out by English acts of by a deliberate depopulation. They did the same thing in Scotland. You know, the Scottish population dropped by three quarters or more. Starting in 1745, bonnie Prince Charming and they developed all these gimmicks with the law to disposses people. As soon as somebody was driven out of a house, they would knock the house down so no one can come back. 

It’s the same thing the Israelis have done in the West Bank for 40 years, trying to drive the Palestinians out. It’s techniques that the English developed.  

So, that was half of my family. I always had a certain resentment against English wealth and the English ruling class from that.  

My daughter spent some time investigating, and it turns out that my mother’s family were dairy farmers in England. Out of the 53 people who survived the passage on the Mayflower, my mother’s family has descended from two of them. I suddenly realized that everyone I’m descended from was driven into exile by the English aristocracy. They were forced to start over at the far end of the world. 

So, my anti-authoritarian attitudes, yes, they’re deep and serious. I’ve always been aware of them, and I’ve always pursued them. 

Knowing all that, would you say that there was a particular pleasure in casting Alan Rickman, a very upper-class Brit, as a villain, who is famously sent off in a spectacular fashion? 

That’s just work. It was just technology. In the film, he’s German, so he wasn’t English, but even so it was just simple filmmaking technology. The hero we had was Bruce Willis. That’s what the film is about: He’s a working-class hero. That’s the essence of who he is. So, okay, the villain’s got to be upper class. It isn’t brain surgery. This is straightforward. It’s perfectly obvious that’s what we had to do once we had Bruce. You know, you have to match the violence, and the fact that we stumbled into Alan Rickman meant that we were enormously lucky. 

You’ve mentioned somewhere that you would liken Die Hard to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

Absolutely. 

I’m really fascinated by that. Can you elaborate on it? 

I knew what I was doing there; I was turning it into Shakespeare.  

I mean, most action movies are filled with toxic masculinity and just a lot of hatred and anger. I turned the Die Hard script down three, four times. You know, they kept sending it to me, and I said, I don’t want to make that movie. I went to them finally and said, look, I will make the movie, but here’s what I’m going to do it. So, because Predator had been successful, they trusted me. I rewrote Predator at the beginning of it, and they didn’t trust me. They didn’t let me do it. But they trusted me now. 

I didn’t tell them this. But I knew what I was doing.

The building is essentially a Shakespearean comedy. That’s the architectural form. It’s a Shakespearean company. Many things about it are very similar to Midsummer Night’s Dream.  

So it happens on a festival night. There’s a crazy event that turns the world upside down. We have basically a panorama of an entire society, from the Groundlings, the Yeomanry, and up through the dukes and the knights and the princes.

This crazy thing happens, whatever it is. You’re from a Nordic country, you have Midsummer Night’s Dream every year, when everything goes crazy. So, all of society changes places and Orban knaves begin to behave like knights. All the princes behave like knaves and there’s this wild swirling crazy night.  

Then, in the morning, the true lovers are united, and society gets back together and puts everything back in place, and everyone is happier and healthier for what happened in that craziness. That was my model. I couldn’t share it with the studio because they thought I was crazy.  

I don’t know, I had a misspent youth. I spent too much time reading Shakespeare. I mean, that was simple technology to me. It wasn’t like some crazy shit that I was coming up with. The part I told them was I want the movie to have some fun in it. Not this angry, mean stuff.  

It’s like this. You know, they had this thing where the hero was just so cool. Butch, suave, bullshit. He rides in a limousine to the site of this action movie. Because the writers or somebody thought that limos in California were a new thing at the time. So, they put that in; and I pissed on it.  

The limo driver meeting Bruce tells him that it’s the first time he’s ever driven a limo, and our hero says, fine, it’s the first time he ever rode one. So, we cut to both in the front seat. Like normal people just riding together. They’re not acting out this pantomime of superiority. You know, I’ll sit in the back while you the servants are in the front. We’re both in the front because we can talk to each other!  

The other thing I said was there’s nothing fun about terrorism. No one has any fun with terrorists. You’re in the entertainment business. You want people who want to go to the movies and have fun, right? What are you doing with terrorists? Could we make them robbers? Everybody likes a good robber. Right? Whether you rooted for the robber or not didn’t matter. It’s fun. It’s the French Renard story. The Fox is always fucking up the farmer. The more he fucks up the farmer, the more fun you have with it. 

Joel Silver and Lawrence Gordon were gracious guys at the time. I don’t think anybody else would have the courage to do that. To say yes, okay, let’s make that change. At the time, there were no other producers who were good enough at their task. Ned Tannen would have done it. He was the head of Paramount. He had that sort of courage. But most of them don’t have the courage to do that, because they worry about making changes. But Joel did.  

Joel has always been a very difficult man to know. He’s a hard man to like. But he’s good at making movies. He’s good at movies and he has good judgment. And he has loads of courage.  

Steven de Souza was a really fast writer. He was really good at it, and he got the idea immediately. He understood the basic problem of using terrorists. There’s just no friggin’ joy. You can’t make jokes about terrorism. You can’t have any fun at all. These are not heavy stories; they do not have an overwhelming social message that just has to be cold no matter what. No, people go to this because they have fun. Well, you better let them have fun. Anyway, Steve had no trouble with it.

We were a bunch of people who were young and very ambitious. We knew that nobody in the world was doing this stuff at that time; and that there ain’t anybody better than us. We’re not geniuses, but we’ve got skills, and so, we have confidence. We started with only 30 pages, but we knew where we were going. 

That interests me, because as an autistic person, I don’t think I will ever have that kind of confidence. How — 

How is it that you’re autistic? What is it that it does to you? 

Among other things, I have a very hard time reading people. I can’t remember faces very well. I don’t recognize when somebody is bored with me if I’m talking or doing something. So, it makes it very difficult to connect with people. To read them or understand motivations. 

Wow. That’s interesting. I’m afraid of people.  

I moved from Los Angeles to one of the emptiest parts of Wyoming, which is the emptiest state in the country. Now I live on an island in British Columbia that has 2000 people, period. 

I’ve always been afraid of people. You have difficulty understanding what other people mean. 

[He smiles] 

I want to know. Did that confidence come naturally to you? 

I have confidence in filmmaking.  

I knew that of anybody in the world at my age, I was in the running for the top 10. At a certain point it becomes a case of “are you a little better than him or a little bit than him, blah blah blah.” I mean, I think Steven Spielberg is a genuine genius. And an outlier. I never thought of myself as an outlier, or a genius, but someone surviving on acquired skill, as opposed to some sort of gift of God. I never had any difficulty with that.  

I had enormous difficulty dealing with the politics of filmmaking. I could never figure out what was going on or what one should do. It seemed like there are an awful lot of people who are continually thinking about nothing but the politics of it. The ass-kissing and scheming to get their way up. I never understood any of that and didn’t know how to do it. I’ve had two wives who did. My first wife and my latest wife both understand it better than me.  

I can understand anything that is understandable. You know, I’m not Oppenheimer, but I’m one of the guys in the room. It’s that level of okay. 

Did you still have to work at it when you got into the field? 

My dad was a lawyer, but he lost his sight in the South Pacific. So, he took up music as something to do, and kept working as a lawyer, but he hated it. It’s very difficult for him, obviously. But he took up singing and used to go to these opera festivals. So, I was raised around the theater, one or another. Opera, in particular. You don’t know what the words are, it’s all about if it sounds right.

If it does, then good. It doesn’t matter what the words are. I don’t know what they mean, they’re in a different language.  

I still have that sort of attitude towards dialogue. I don’t pay attention to what they say. I always got myself in a little bit of trouble, where I was ready to wrap a shot and go to the next one. The script supervisor would come over and say, you know, they used the wrong word. He called the other character the wrong name or something, and I never even heard it. Never even noticed it because I was paying attention to the sort of music of the words rather than the specifics of what is said.

Anyway, we’re talking about confidence. I never had any doubts about the physical work of filmmaking. I had enormous doubts and difficulty about politics and the social aspect of it, which in the end was determinative. 

You know, I got in a couple of situations. I guess because I didn’t understand the politics, and that led to terrible experiences that made me just not want to make any more movies. 

The last two movies that I did are hideous. In Basic, they had a script that was terrible, really flawed. It’s so bad and so obvious that the studio refused to make the movie. So, they got me to go in, and I told them I was going to fix the script. The studio believed me, and so, I fixed the script. So they said, okay, we’re gonna make the movie. Then, about eight days before start shooting, the producer announces now we’re going back to the original script! 

But wait, there’s one more step. They told me, if you attempt to tell the studio what we’re doing, we will sue you for commercial interference. My own lawyer said they’ll win. He said ‘you will owe them a hundred million dollars for all the money they didn’t make from this movie!’  

So here I am making a movie with script that’s a huge problem. If it doesn’t work, they don’t give a shit. I can’t even tell our bosses what’s happened. I have to go ahead and shoot the script. 

It was an appalling experience. Rollerball was similar. I just didn’t want to make movies again.

I don’t want to make bad movies. I don’t want to work with assholes that don’t give a shit about movies and don’t know anything about it, but somehow are in charge of it. 

I guess that’s held on to this day. It’s just not worth it. 

Yeah. That’s a lifetime decision. I don’t want to do this anymore. 

I’m perfectly content with fixing your bad script. I’m going to try to fix your bad script. But you’re not going to let me fix it? You’re going to sue me because I’m trying to fix your bad script? Go fuck yourself! Why do I need that? Why do I need to be in the middle of that? I’d rather go work at McDonald’s.  

Much of what I’ve done since then is as a script doctor. I fix other people’s bad scripts, and I don’t put my name on it. 

You mentioned earlier something that I wanted to swing back to. The toxic masculinity aspect of action films. I have an aversion to a certain kind of action film. Mostly because I’m tired of the alpha male bullshit. I’m tired of the gun porn. One of the things that I Iove about Predator is the fact that you have an entire sequence showcasing how futile and how impotent the guns can be. You mentioned finding people who understood what you wanted to do with Die Hard. Was that the same case with Predator, or something you had to hide at the time? 

You wanna know how that scene was developed? There was a junior executive at Fox who kept insisting that we need more pictures of guns firing. Constantly. I got this note from the studio. Because he was sitting in on the dailies, talking to my boss, trying to impress everyone with how much he knew. So, I got these notes about how we need more pictures of guns.  

Well, for one thing. I don’t just turn in a single shot. I turn out sequences. I’ve thought of an entire sequence through, and I know this shot leads to this shot. So, when somebody is just saying they’re going to start cutting in close-ups of gun barrels in the middle of this, it’s basically because they think they’ll make money as gun pornography.  

That was only the surface of how repugnant these notes were. The fact is, he was basically just a pornographer. He was fetishizing the barrels and the white smoke coming out. I mean, it makes you feel creepy just being involved in it. 

Anyway, I got that note three or four times, and I sent a message back to the studio that said: I will stage a scene where you’ll get all the pictures of guns shooting you could possibly imagine. So many that you’ll be sick, right? And then I never want to get another note about gun barrels. Okay? Is that a deal?  

So, I thought, naively, that I would control the meaning of the scenes, so that I could morally say it was alright. I staged it so that when they finished shooting, a guy comes running up, and the first thing anybody says is we hit nothing. Okay, so I thought I was morally off the hook with his gun pornography, because I had said guns are not the answer to everything. 

So, the assholes then said they now have to put it in every other movie. Then Joel Silver puts it in all over the Matrix movies. It’s been used in 20 movies since then! They have to put that scene in everything. That’s where it came from.  

I made it up because I was sick of the notes from the studio that were based basically just gun pornography. They wanted more pornography. 

I feel like you even tried to make that same point in The Hunt for the Red October. There’s that amazing shot of Alec Baldwin on the sub, holding his gun, as it angles to reveal the massive array of nukes. As if to say, sure, you’ve got a gun. They’ve got a bigger gun. It’s just going to keep going on and on. At least that’s how I read it at the time. 

It was sort of like that. It was also the only time we ever saw anything with the nukes. The whole message is about nuclear weapons, and, shit, there it is. The horror of nuclear weapons. 

There’s another wonderful quote from you about how you had watched Truffaut’s Day for Night for three days straight.  You were figuring out how films work, and you said that film is a chain that’s linear. Yet when it’s strung together, it feels like an experience. If you were to look back at the chain of your films, what would it look like? 

They’re all different.  

The thing about Day for Night was that I was trying to learn what a movie was. I figured, if I’m going to reverse engineer it, I got to know what the fuck it is.

It is a chain of images that in a particular order become a story that is entertaining. 

The standard script format is you have a bunch of dialogue and a block of print that has the things that people do, or what you see in it, and then you go back to dialogue. No one ever reads those blocks. They just read the dialogue. So, one thing I’ve done with my scripts, to get people to read the actual movie, I always made the action look like dialogue. 

So, they can’t help but read it. They don’t even have to read it. They just get it.  

It’s also very useful for the filmmaker, because then you know he has to do this, then you have to see this, and then this. So, it isn’t random access, the way a novel is a novel, where many things are going on at the same time. That audience is probably thinking about many things at one time.  

But in a movie, the audience is only thinking about one thing at a time. You try to put in more, and you have lost it. You must understand each step of the action. 

I do want to mention that my favorite scene of yours is one with no traditional action. It’s something that is very personal to me, and again it’s in 13^th Warrior.  It’s the whole part where Antonio watches the people and can’t make out what they’re saying. So, he sits and watches, and it slowly starts coming to him. Finally, they go to him and ask, how did you do this? And he just says, I listened. That was the first time where I felt I felt very seen, because I have to watch people all the time. I have to learn from that. 

I made up that sequence because it’s a cross-cultural thing just like in Hunt for the Red October. I did a similar thing there. Over and over, we changed languages, then changed it back. I had to do something like that in 13^th Warrior, because it had to be very, very foreign to begin with.

I had written it, or I wanted to do it, with Michael Keaton initially.  

It was basically an urban Jewish guy who goes off with these crazy barbarians. But then Michael did a movie just before that didn’t do very well. So now the studio suddenly didn’t want him. 

It became a very different movie with Antonio Banderas, because he was more serious. I had intended it to have a comic edge. This very urban, basically modern guy among these creepy guys, and then he would use that sense of humor all the way through. Antonio is very good with humor, but it’s a different sort of humor. He doesn’t do that wise-ass stuff.  

It became a much more earnest movie. It changed from a comic undertone of this modern guy looking at a bunch of very primitive Swedish guys and being completely repulsed by it. 

So, I had to do the earnest stuff with him listening and having them be shocked at how smart he was because he could figure out what they were saying. Because he paid attention. Then Beowulf tests him by asking him to write something down. Then Beowulf reveals that he’s smart enough as well. He remembered afterwards and could reproduce what Antonio wrote.  

Then, step by step, the Vikings realize this guy’s real smart. We should use him when we really go on the mission. 

It was sort of like Vonnegut, I guess. I want to get stories that are quite serious, but that have an ironic sense underneath it. Or an ironic narrator. That was what I intended. And I lost that without Michael.