John McTiernan was once the king of the Hollywood action blockbuster. The director earned a reputation for making some of the best big screen spectacles of his day, with “Predator,” “Die Hard,” “The Hunt For Red October,” and “Die Hard With A Vengeance” all to his name. However, he hit a major bump in the road in the early 2000s with two major flops — “Rollerball” and “Basic” — failures that were compounded with legal and financial trouble that has essentially curtailed his career since. But as an Academy member, he still sees pretty much everything, and what Hollywood has to offer these days hardly impresses him.
In an interview with Premiere (en Francais, and Google translated), the director had tough words for one of the most acclaimed films of last year, George Miller‘s “Mad Max: Fury Road.” The picture was praised for its intense, astoundingly choreographed action scenes, but McTiernan was hardly moved.
“Pffff … corporate product,” he scoffed, though he added that he liked the first “Mad Max” and “Babe.”
As for the current churn of comic book movies coming out of Hollywood, again, McTiernan is not a fan. “…these are films made by fascists,” he stated, adding: “Comic book heroes are for businesses.”
“Captain America…The cult of American hyper-masculinity is one of the worst things that has happened in the world during the last fifty years. Hundreds of thousands of people died because of this stupid illusion. So how is it possible to watch a movie called Captain America?” he added.
However, just to be clear, McTiernan isn’t a total crank about everything in Hollywood, saying that Joel Silver (who produced “Predator” and “Die Hard”) “will always produce real action movies.” And weirdly enough, the director is a huge fan of Ben Affleck‘s “Argo.”
“He did something incredible. And he was a better actor than in all his other films. Normally when a filmmaker gets to the screen, it’s the opposite. He put aside his ego, he began to act like a hero in a John Ford film… And it’s very different from his other roles. There is something about him that a lot of people find annoying. This arrogance, coldness… It disappeared in this film,” he said.
By this point, you might be asking why doesn’t McTiernan put his money where his mouth is and go make another movie? Well, that’s the plan. It will apparently be a female led action movie, shot in Europe, with minimal dialogue, making it easy to produce both English and French language versions (the film is being backed by a French producer). And according to Ouest France, the story will revolve around an orphaned child and a woman, with McTiernan dreamcasting Cate Blanchett for the lead.
The script is ready, but the project isn’t a go just yet. So until cameras roll, McTiernan will have plenty of screeners to watch, and likely plenty of opinions to go along with them.
“corporate product” ? the guy made a career out of that!
This is a bit confusing because McTiernan made some of the most hyper-masculine movies of the 80s and 90s. I’m still a huge fan, regardless of whether he likes superhero movies or not.
Exactly – I think his grapes are somewhat sour as he’s totally out of the game at this stage.
There are definitely similarities between John McClane and your average superhero, but I think McTiernan is concerned less with hypermasculinity in Captain America than the genuinely fascist undertones in the typical comic-book movie.
There’s been a lot written about it already, but to summarize: superheros are (usually explicitly) super-human, and they triumph through brute force; their enemies are usually either other superhumans or evil, corrupt human beings that must be defeated physically. That’s a significant contrast to the narrative in Die Hard, where Our Hero is battling American ignorance and hubris as much as he is fighting the terrorist/thieves themselves, and his allies are very much the Everyman.
I’m surprised too, though, by McTiernan’s dismissal of Fury Road. That movie, I think, had much more in common with Die Hard than Captain America.
“Corporate product” is not a phrase I’ve ever heard associated with Mad Max Fury Road, but I guess there’s a first time for everything.
If I have to guess, I think John is probably alluding to the studio execs-directed re-edit after the initial focus group testing. Rumors were swirling last year that the finished product is markedly different from Miller’s finished piece.
Very ironic – considering that McTernan’s ’80s classics were the result of the ‘high concept’ era of movie making – the very essence of corporate product. Yes, he wrestles with intelligent themes in his movies, but isn’t work like ‘The Last Action Hero’ the very epitome of the same ‘corporate product’ he’s trashing now?
Violence in entertainment media and its influence of violence in society has been thoroughly studied. In the US, in Japan and elsewhere, it appears to be the case violence in the pop-culture media like video games and movies has no bearing on the experience of real violence in the real world.
Over the last two decades we have had the development of very realistic violent video-games – which are much more involving than movies, TV and comic-books. One would presume – if you thought like McTiernan – that from tens of millions of people playing violent video games, that we would have had rising rates of violence in the US.
Rather, what we have experienced has been a drastic and steady decline in violence, all the while a diet of violent video games has gone up.
The perception of violence in society, due to the ability to rapidly and selectively broadcast and see events around the world through the internet, has certainly gone up – but that is not reflective of the actual experience of violence by the vast majority of people. Violence is down, though our perception of violence is up.
And so some people have made the case – convincingly – that using things like video games, comic books and film to “live out” one’s violent compulsions might actually lessen violence in the real world.
Japan, for instance, has a profoundly violent pop-culture, but is perhaps the safest country in the world.
Sad to hear of a formerly great film maker now pissing all over his old stomping ground. You can argue the merits of superhero movies, but his dismissal of the recent Mad Max makes him sound like an embittered and clueless fool. I can only hope these comments were somehow taken out of context.
Cate Blanchett in an action film. Get the fuck out of here. She should play the orpahn’s carer, like in Cinderella.
I was searching for info on McTiernan today and this remark made me laugh. The poster who made this two years ago could never have imagined Cate Blanchett as Hela in Thor:Ragnarok, very MUCH an action movie and exactly the kind of product McTiernan was inveighing against. The irony!
I used to love McTiernan, but my …. how he’s fallen. Fury Road was better than every movie McTiernan directed (barring Die Hard and Predator – his one true classic). And if he watched the latest Cap America movie, he’d realize just how wrong his assessment of super-hero movies being “fascist” is …
Again, this almost a necro post at this point but I was distracted. Which movie is his “one true classic,” Die Hard or Predator? (I tend to think both fit the bill.) And I think that The 13th Warrior is greatly underrated as well. McTiernan has a certain sensibility as a director that would not be out of place here in the late twenty-teens and I’d dearly love to see him crank out a few pictures if he can tone down the grumpiness and get along with today’s producers.
But it’s exactly that role in Ragnarok I was referring to. I think. Or some other shit she was in that I cannot remember.