We Got This Covered: Mary Elizabeth Winstead is the only other actor here to have previously appeared in a Die Hard movie other than Bruce Willis. Were you ever encouraged to bring back other characters from the previous Die Hard movies for this one?
John Moore: Nah. Bruce has got a very sensitive goof radar, and nothing goofy is going to get past him, nothing cutesy. I’ll give you a very good example: the line “shoot the glass” was scripted, which was an obvious call back to the first movie with Hans Gruber. There was no way Bruce was gonna say “shoot the glass” and immediately he’s like “guys…” He looks up, sees the ceiling, and he physically does the action. So for real fans they’d be like “got it,” but he won’t do anything goofy like that. I think to recall characters just for the sake of that… Should mom be at the airport at the end and all that? No, it just didn’t feel real. Die Hard is realistic. John’s divorced, the wife’s not gonna be there, you know?
We Got This Covered: This is the first Die Hard that is not based on a book, an unrelated screenplay, or a magazine article. Were you comfortable going in a more original direction for this sequel?
John Moore: There’s a danger, but again thank god for Bruce. There have only been five Die Hard movies in twenty-five years. Can you imagine the number of pitches he’s heard? Die Hard in a Submarine, Die Hard in a Donut Shop, etc. The danger is that this character is so fucking attractive. I don’t know about you but I’d watch him play lawn bowls and find it interesting. But again thank god for Bruce because he just holds back, holds back, holds back until the story is good enough. So yeah an original script makes you a little nervous because it’s one step less authentic. It’s like when the Bonds stop being Ian Fleming novels and started being whatever we want. It’s also like with great designers when it stops being actually Valentino and it starts being one of Valentino’s stable of designers. We have to be careful that it didn’t just turn into an action movie with John McClane and keep it Die Hard.
We Got This Covered: Even when the action reaches ridiculous levels in the Die Hard movies, John McClane remains an everyman character who really anchors you into the action. Characters are really key to movies like these.
John Moore: That seems so obvious looking back now, doesn’t it? That all the studios were rushing out to create these figurative or literal supermen, and along comes this guy and he smokes and he drinks and cusses, and he’s the one who survives a quarter of a century of movie going. If age wasn’t a factor he would happily go on for another hundred years while the rest of them are just ashes in the wind.
We Got This Covered: I read that you shot A Good Day To Die Hard on film. Do you still prefer to shoot on film?
John Moore: I get angry about this I got to tell you. This is like the “when did you stop beating up your wife” question. Why wouldn’t I shoot a film on film? But people keep being mildly surprised and that’s really starting to make me worry.
We Got This Covered: Well I think it’s great that filmmakers are still shooting on film…
John Moore: But you see it’s that thing of, it’s like “wait, wait, wait, why wouldn’t we?” But we are losing. Let me give you a statistic: in 2008 Kodak ran 12 billion feet of print stock, last year they ran one. Four years, four years to go from 12 to 1? What do you think it’s gonna be like next year?
We Got This Covered: I hate to think…
John Moore: We ran out of film on this movie. Fuji called and said “we don’t have any more,” and I said “what do you mean you don’t have any more?” They said “no we literally don’t have any more film. We have to likecrank up some factory in Tokyo and hope that we get it running to make the stock.” It drives me nuts. It’s scary and we’ve lost. Film directors are being forced to be the R&D guys for electronics companies. Chris Nolan said it best, he said “I’m not fucking Sony’s R&D guy! Don’t ask me to fucking shoot Batman so you can sell 1 million fucking smart phone cameras! That’s not what I choose to do.” But were losing man and it’s really scary. Sorry to go off on one but…
We Got This Covered: That’s okay because I would like to see film stay around as do many of my friends. There are still things that you can do with film that you can’t do digitally.
John Moore: It’s like getting rid of a color. How do you pick one color to get rid of? Uh yellow? Getting rid of yellow? Yeah let’s get rid of yellow! Who’s voting to do that?
We Got This Covered: Marco Beltrami scored this movie as well as the previous Die Hard movie, and you have worked with him on many of your films. What is your working relationship with him like?
John Moore: He’s done all my movies but one. He will do them as long as we’re living and breathing. It’s joyous. It’s a very simplistic relationship. I just give him one reference, one piece, he goes off and sits up in the studio up in the mountain, and a couple weeks later he comes back with a score. It’s a lot of fun, and this time we went for a kind of 70s vibe. Lalo Schifrin was a big reference for us here and the Dirty Harry soundtrack. So you’re hearing instrumentations like triangles and muted harms and trumpets, and it’s very LA noir kind of stuff or Moscow noir I guess for this time. I think this is his best soundtrack and it’s one of those that you can actually listen to it at nighttime with a glass of wine and its music, it’s real music.
That concludes our interview but we’d like to thank John for talking with us. Be sure to check out A Good Day To Die Hard, in theatres this week.
