McTiernan Speaks About Comic Book Movies

John McTiernan has been attending this year’s ‘FEST’.  And at the event he gave a speech and fielded some questions.  McTiernan was asked for his opinion on comic book movies.  Below are the questions and answers.

How do you see this division between blockbusters and author films?

American blockbusters are like comics, you have directors who are not film authors, they can’t read, someone shows them a comic and it looks like a film to them. They do it for completely different reasons than most directors who enter the film world for cultural reasons. Shakespeare comes to mind, who said that actors are chroniclers of the time, and we are in the same business, we do it for the same reasons. People who make those comics hope they have a money making machine, if they make one film and it makes money, they will make 40 more, exactly the same, until the tank empties, and then someone else comes along and brings something new, and everyone calls him a genius. But that’s not the main function Shakespeare was talking about 400 years ago, that’s the difference.

There is something very filmish about the comics, graphic novels and comics are art…

Graphic novels, yes. Marvel comics…not so much.

I was lucky that Arnold wanted to go home, he said: “You know, I’ll shoot for another day or two…” We were in a real jungle back then, not in a resort where there are casinos and other stuff, it was a tiny town with one restaurant that we occupied. I needed to finish the film in two nights and that was a good thing beacuse the script was full of garbage that got pushed to Predator 2, the scenes on the space ship… Terrible stuff I wanted to get rid of, so it was a blessing from heaven. Arnold wants to go home, too bad. The producers were pulling their hair, and I told them to relax, that I’d think of something. I wrote the scene that same evening because I knew where we would shoot it, I could visualise all the frames, I built the scene inside my head. One night we were shooting with Arnold, and the other with the monster, the scene was already edited in my head, so the frames came together naturally.

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Years later, I could do the same thing in The Thomas Crown Affair, on purpose, there was this whole sequence where he was stealing the second painting, a bunch of stupidities stolen from other films. The chief of studio trusted me because I had already made Hunt for the Red October for them. I told him I didn’t like all that and asked him if I could cut those 25 pages, he told me ok, just finish the film. So I made up the whole sequence with the hats, it had been roiling in my head for a while, and I had already planted the seeds of the idea throughout the film, which led to that ending. The real test whether those 25 pages were important – I had a cop asking another: “How the hell did he do that?!”, and the other cop just shrugs. The audience doesn’t care, they got their answer, who cares! And it worked perfectly, the audience really didn’t care, they cared far more about the love story than about the mechanics.