‘Die Hard’ And ‘Predator’ Director John McTiernan Blames “Literature Of Our Time” For The Downfall Of Hollywood, Calls Comic Books “Garbage”
There is no denying that Hollywood, the art form of film, and the culture around it as a whole have changed. However, it’s typically the older, more seasoned craftsmen (and women, in many cases) within the machine who tend to notice and acknowledge they have a problem. Age imparts wisdom, long story short.
John McTiernan is the latest veteran of cinema with a share of umbrage against the studio system to point out the flaws and failings of his field. At one time, he was the king of the action genre after certifying his reputation with Die Hard, Predator, and The Hunt for Red October.
Those days are far behind him, and not just because he allegedly lied to the FBI, landing himself in federal prison and tarnishing his rep. No, back to the internal issues facing film; though not helped by the winds of change, they are ultimately internal. Streaming, for example, represents change, and a challenge, but it’s nothing the studios haven’t seen before.
Speaking to Forbes, McTiernan began, “It’s a significant thing, and it’s a significant thing politically. It’s actually pretty well documented that the experience of seeing a drama, a movie, a play, in a group of other people, is a completely different experience than seeing it alone. Enormous numbers of hormones exchanged and all sorts of information that goes in between people in the audience. It will happen again, we have not watched the end of the agora, the public space.”
He continued, “The main reason is that this is not the first time it’s happened. It happened in the 1950s when television happened. But then, the film companies were in the hands of filmmakers who fought for their industry. They got wide screen, they developed much better colors, better sound, all sorts of things to create an experience that one couldn’t have at home, and they got another half century out of the industry because they fought.”
The director added, “But they were filmmakers. And now, the people who run the studios are just over serious for the money. And they don’t know how to fight, for one thing, and they have no personal stake in it, because they’re not filmmakers. They’re money managers. But someone else will create a new industry that happens publicly.”
He says Hollywood has become as predictable and homogenous as the auto industry these days to its detriment. “As I said, there’s no studio left, really,” McTiernan said.
“Why can’t you tell a difference between a Toyota, or a Volvo or a Peugeot, or a Ford or something manufactured in Korea? Because they’re all the same marketing. They all make exactly the same cars, they’re identical. Because none of them are car makers, they’re in the money business. They guarantee to bring the most money back to the owners that they work for. That’s exactly the same situation in the film industry,” he explained.
Elaborating further, he took a parting shot at the superhero genre. “The filmmakers all fought because they thought they were participating in the culture at the time, no matter how crude various heads of studios were. They silently knew they were participating in the culture and they were proud of it actually. People running it now are not participating in the literature of the time. It’s comic books, it’s garbage. They know it’s garbage, they don’t care. Well, that is a structural problem,” he said.
Dealing with the studios as they are (and have been for decades) left McTiernan blacklisted and disillusioned. “I gave up working on bad movies, the last two films I made were terrible. I hated working on them. I knew they were bad, I was hired to fix them, and then they wouldn’t let me shoot that. And they wouldn’t let me shoot what I had fixed. They had just used me to tell the studios that I had fixed it for them. Anyway, I decided I wasn’t going to fix someone else’s bad movie,” he recalled regarding his experiences directing Rollerball and Basic.
These experiences also left him disenchanted with the American justice system. Hiring a private investigator to spy on producer Charles Roven put McTiernan up against the Feds. He spent 10 months in prison and then served house arrest, a sentence that taught him a lot. “I realize that most of what we’ve been told as children are fairytales. There is no such thing as trial by jury. It’s all nonsense. It’s all lies,” he declared.
“What happens is that the prosecutor blame them for something, and they don’t have the money to fight. If they fight they will destroy their families, they would be without a home. So what do they do? They pled guilty. They have no choice. I had a choice, I spent $4 million and I still couldn’t get a trial. They told me if I insisted on a trial, I would spend 20 years in prison. But that’s what goes on,” he found based on firsthand interviews with inmates.
Although he has material for a movie, the 70-something filmmaker was never drawn to prison films and prefers to write a book. “It’s funny, I hadn’t thought about it as a movie but as a book that I will publish eventually. Stories of the guys I met, it changed my political outlet completely,” McTiernan stated.
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