6 Filmmaking From John McTiernan (Die Hard)

"He’s made some amazing films, he stands as an icon of a lengthy era, but I submit that John McTiernan is still an unfairly maligned filmmaker. He’s relegated by many to a position as merely a mindless action director, and maybe, yeah, Rollerball was tough to stomach, but there’s a reason why Die Hard is still used as the template in thousands of pitch meetings every year. Plus, the guy went to Juilliard (so he’s probably also an incredible dancer).

Those who dismiss him do so at their own peril and have clearly never heard the man speak about the craft of filmmaking. He knows a production truck’s worth of practical information and can condense it into lessons that make sense to all of us rubes.

So here’s a bit of free film school (for fans and filmmakers alike) from a man who started his studio career by having an alien attack Arnold Schwarzenegger.

A Good Idea Needs a Good Script (and Vice Versa)

“You see a lot of good ideas or well-written scripts that are bad ideas.”

Easier said than done, sure, but think back to the times you’ve returned to the theater lobby irritated by how the movie you just saw squandered a brilliant concept (one that you could have knocked out of the park!). There’s tension there. Movies like that naturally come packaged with the question “How could someone smart enough to come up with that concept not know how to do anything with it?” stapled to their one-sheets. The yang to its yin is the film that’s solid but built on a shaky foundation, and the same grating feeling comes with that ticket price.

There are two check marks to earn here: good idea, good execution. That combination is one of the reasons Die Hard is so beloved (and has spawned such a lasting series of films). An everyman fish-out-of-water fighting off witty terrorists with no escape but victory. It wasn’t a well-worn idea at the time, and the storytelling is so tight, and McClane is in such a state of suspended danger (even when he’s not being shot at), that the material remains compelling long after the appeal of the idea itself fades away.

And that’s really the bottom line. A good idea gets you the first 10 pages of a script, but where will the next 110 come from? What’s the second good idea, and the third, and the fourth that you can pile on top of the first to make something packed with goodness instead of something laboring under the weight of a single interesting concept?

We’re Wasting Our Time with This Filmmaking Tips Series

“You can’t tell filmmakers anything, no matter what stage of life they are in. If you could, they wouldn’t be film directors.”

Damn, I love this guy. Even if it means I should pack this all in.

Maybe for the sake of the column we’ll call this one “You’ve Got to Learn A Lot On Your Own Through Failure.” Yeah, that sounds good."

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Of course, he’s also given this advice:

“It’s the same thing of how you get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice. Also, I’d say get a hold of a video camera and just shoot as much as you can, of anything. If you have a script, get a couple actors together and shoot two pages from the script, then edit the footage on a really basic video editing program. It takes as long to develop a prose style on film as it does a prose style in writing, so it’s crucial to practice whenever and however you can.”