‘Die Hard’ Director John McTiernan Says The future of Filmmaking Is “Independent Financing”
In a recent interview with Forbes, John McTiernan, the director behind Die Hard, The Thomas Crown Affair and Predator, expressed dismay at the state of Hollywood.
McTiernan, who is no stranger to controversy, after spending time in the slammer for spying on his Rollerball provider in 2013, managed to overcome the controversy and make Hollywood films again.
But he has noticed a change. As expected of an old school director, McTiernan is a supporter of theatrical releases:
“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, or 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.”
Now that movie production companies and even studios have been swallowed up by media conglomerates, McTiernan plainly states, “there’s no studio left, really.”
McTiernan says the previously diverse studio system has been homogenised like the car industry.
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.”
McTiernan, like Martin Scorsese before him, believes the focus on comic book movies is the problem.
“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.”
For McTiernan, the antidote is independent financing, which he believes is necessary for individual filmmakers to bring unique stories to the screen.
It’s not an easy model, though. Brady Corbet admits he’s made no money out of directing The Brutalist, despite the film earning Best Picture at this year’s Academy Awards.
