DIE HARD Director John McTiernan Talks About How the Film Became a Christmas Classic

If you ask any fans of the 1988 classic Die Hard, they will tell you that the action film is indeed a Christmas movie. The film takes place during an office Christmas party in a Los Angeles office building. John McClane, played by Bruce Willis, teams up against Alan Rickman’s German terrorist Hans Gruber, who has taken McClane’s wife and her co-workers hostage in Nakatomi Plaza.

In a recent interview with the American Film Institute (via CinemaBlend), the film’s director, John McTiernan, talked about the film becoming a Christmas classic, and he explained that he actually based some of the film’s themes on the Christmas movie It’s a Wonderful Life:

Specifically, the Pottersville sequence. Which is what happens when the evil banker gets to do what he wants in the community without George getting in the way to stop it. And it’s the clearest demonstration and criticism of runaway, unregulated cowboy capitalism that’s ever been done in an American movie. It was imagination then, but now, if you go out in most of the country, it’s the life people live.

So McClane is the George Bailey of Die Hard. He went on to say that when first discussing making the movie, the most important aspect to him was to make McClane a relatable, working-class hero. He added:

Everybody, as they came to work on the movie, began to get, as I said, this idea of this movie as an escapee. And there was a joy in it. Because we were all the scratchers on the side of the king’s tomb. We had changed the content. And that is how Die Hard became… we hadn't intended it to be a Christmas movie. But the joy that came from it is what turned it into a Christmas movie. And that's really the best I can tell you about it.

Fans definitely took the Christmas setting and ran with it. I know the film is many people’s favorite Christmas movie! I support that. Anything that is set at Christmastime that makes you happy and maybe strikes you with a tinge of nostalgia definitely qualifies in my book.

Is Die Hard on your list of Christmas movies to watch every year?