Behind the Scenes of Die Hard 2. Featuring Bruce Willis, Director Renny Harlin, Famed Stunt Coordinator Charlie Picerni, Stuntman Dwayne McGee and Bruce Willis Stunt Double Keii Johnston. Property of 20th Century Fox
I like how Bruce Willis was concerned for the other actor's safety stating he'd feel better if the guy had a pad on his back to absorb the blow from the golf club.
Because they HAD TO. You couldn't just throw entire scenes at a computer department back then out of laziness, if you wanted to film something you had to actually do it physically with real people, sets and models and blend them properly to make it look good. Now CGI is actually incredibly expensive but film-makers throw entire scenes at a CGI department basically because they can't be bothered doing it properly and it saves time and money so they can crank out more and more trash but make more money that way. Technology is amazing and can be used to make most things better, but unfortunately our civilisation does not actually operate on that principle despite many of our delusions that it does.. our whole way of living is based on profit and corruption not the actual improvement of things. If film-makers used modern technology to improve their model work, CGI to enhance actual real life stunt work without making everything just look like a computer game then it would be amazing. Unfortunately the vast majority of film making now is purely done for ease of profit and quick turnover, so the great masters of old are almost entirely gone. Nearly all Hollywood film scores now are given to these companies set up by Hans Zimmer to crank out sausage factory film scores that all sound like Hans Zimmer.. so the great master classical composers of the movie renaissance are pracitcally no more. Just another example. Hell, I watched the original Jurassic Park again recently after over a decade and wow the CGI in that still looks better than most of what we get now in movies with enormous budgets.. why? Watch the T Rex scene for one. Because they put a huge amount of care and effort into the CGI as it was so new and vital back then, they carefully blended it in with shadow, rain and other things as well as masterful model/animatronics work and didn't overdo anything. They put a lot of attention into the detail and used the CGI only for what they literally were incapable of doing any other way and put all their efforts into making it look as real as possible.
Very interesting. Love getting a look into just how hard, what an otherwise quick-n-simple scene is. One gets an idea of how the scenes are planned, sort of a glimpse of the thinking that needs to happen before something like this can even begin to be filmed. The testing and rehearsing. Often without rolling\filming cameras running. Very Cool stuff indeed. Thanks for the upload.
+Saint Nick Too true. It was the Rocky movies that first invented the idea of rehearsing fight scenes as if you were rehearsing dialogue. That way, the fight looked better and more fluent on camera. That's why when you watch older movies from before the 70s, their fight scenes suck, and starting in the around 80s you started to see a whole new ball game of onscreen punch outs. Nowadays however they go crazy with all this ninjutsu and mma shit that's filmed so fast you can't make it out haha.
You're a little off, Doug Masters. Fight scenes, like dance scenes were well choreographed before '80s movies. For example, "Three Days of the Condor" has an intense close quarters fight.
However bad the story and the plausibility of the events being depicted are, the effects, stuntwork and action setpieces are truly staggering. And Willis is addictive.
Story isn't bad at all, and this franchise isn't known for plausibility. Siskel & Ebert even consider this movie as the best of the series. I personally don't agree, but it's my favorite among the sequels.
It's just a dumb action movie, not a work of art.. I swear if the first Die Hard hadn't been so particularly tight and memorable a movie the second one wouldn't get anywhere near as much hate. If Die Hard 2 had been another movie with a different title but basically exactly the same it wouldn't get trashed anywhere near as much as it does. Die Hard 2 isn't that bad for what it is, it just could never live up to the unusual success of the original. And frankly Die Hard 3 gets way too much praise, it ripped off various other movies such as Dirty Harry for many of it's main plot devices. I also find it just doesn't feel like a Die Hard film, it's a fun action movie but it just feels like a different kind of random action film that's using the Die Hard title.. and actually when I looked into it I found out that's exactly what it was, it was supposed to be another movie all together and the script just got stolen and mildly altered to be a Die Hard movie.
Austin Dyer it was a script initially for lethal weapon 3 that was altered and made into die hard 3. As for DH2 In terms of how good it was, I personally love this film, yeah the story is made of Swiss cheese, the Villain isn’t that memorable but the action sequences and set pieces along with Willis make it work good
Your comment tells me that you don't actually know that much about what a director does in a late 80's Hollywood picture... what he does before the shoots, what he does after the shoots, all that stuff. Just because he isn't Paul Verhoeven who's running back and forth screaming when the making of crew is present, that doesn't mean he's "not doing much". This is a stunt-heavy scene! He let the stunt team pros do their job!
