If you’re a male between the age of 1 and 100, then you love the movie Die Hard. Explosions, gun fire, terrorists, cheese one-liners, it has everything you need in an action film. You’ve probably seen it a dozen or more times. But do you know everything about the film? Here are 10 things you may not have know about the movie Die Hard.
10. McClane has a teddy bear for his family. Jack Ryan takes a teddy bear home with him at the end of The Hunt for Red October (1990) (it’s the same bear).
9. It is often said that Bruce Willis’s lines during the scene when he pulls the glass out of his feet were ad-libbed. Indeed, it is said that upon learning this, Terry Gilliam cast Willis as the lead in Twelve Monkeys (1995). However when comparing the original script, it appears that Willis only veered very slightly from the original written dialog.
8. Bruce Willis took the role of John McClane after it had been turned down by Robert De Niro. Willis had just been turned down to play the Charles Grodin role opposite De Niro in Midnight Run (1988). Ironically both Die Hard (1988) and Midnight Run eventually opened the same weekend.
7. For the shot where Hans Gruber falls from the top of the building, Alan Rickman was actually falling from a 20-foot high model. He was holding on to a stunt man and falling on to an air bag. To get the right reaction, the stunt man dropped Rickman on the count of two, not three.
6. Director John McTiernan found it necessary to smash cut away from Hans Gruber’s face whenever he fired a gun, because of Alan Rickman’s uncontrollable habit of flinching from the noise and muzzle flash. If you look at Rickman’s face when he shoots Takagi, you can see him wincing.
5. The addresses and phone numbers depicted on the LAPD dispatch’s computer for the Nakatomi plaza management are the actual numbers for management of Fox Plaza, where the film was shot.
4. The German that the terrorists speak is sometimes grammatically incorrect and meaningless. In the German version of the film, the terrorists are not from Germany but from “Europe”. This has been fixed for the Special Edition VHS and later home video releases. The only instances of incorrect use of German are Alan Rickman’s (Hans Gruber) lines.
3. The scene where McClane falls down a shaft was a mistake by the stuntman, who was supposed to grab the first vent, as it originally was planned. He slipped and continued to fall, but the shot was used anyway; it was edited together with one where McClane grabs the next vent down as he falls.
2. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Burt Reynolds, Robert De Niro, Richard Gere, Don Johnson and Richard Dean Anderson were all considered for the role of John McClane.
1. The scene in which Gruber and McClane meet was inserted in to the script after Alan Rickman (Hans Gruber) was found to be proficient at mimicking American accents. The filmmakers had been looking for a way to have the two characters meet prior to the climax and capitalized on Rickman’s talent.
Thanks IMDB
Check out 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Caddyshack as well.
Watch the Greatest Die Hard Parody Ever
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