Prison, says John McTiernan, director of Die Hard, Predator and The Hunt for Red October, wasn’t as tough as he expected. “It was a former college campus in the upper midwest, no bars, no barbed wire, nothing. The only thing that was a little weird was that the locals, if they saw you on a crosswalk, would speed up and try to hit you.”
McTiernan served 10 months in Yankton, South Dakota, between April 2013 and February 2014, before being released to house arrest for the rest of his sentence. He was convicted of lying to the FBI as part of the prosecution of private detective Anthony Pellicano for illegal wiretapping; McTiernan was accused of hiring Pellicano to tap the phones of Charles Roven, the producer of the 2002 film Rollerball, with whom he was in dispute. McTiernan’s stint in jail represented a remarkable fall from grace for a director who had been Hollywood A-list; after he left prison, he filed for bankruptcy. It is now 20 years since he directed a film, the badly received action-thriller Basic starring John Travolta in 2003, and far longer than that since his 1990s heyday.
This week found him at the Neuchâtel International fantastic film festival in Switzerland, where he is on the jury for the festival’s international competition. Now 72, McTiernan, is happy to talk about his jail time. No, there weren’t ankle tags, he says. The prison operated on an “honour” system: if you went wandering, you were trusted to come back. Far from “disintegrating”, as his wife told the Guardian in 2013, McTiernan says in some ways it was “great”. “I had worked as a carpenter all through college so they put me with the carpenter crew. I spent my whole time, the whole summer, up on these big old Victorian houses, tearing off roofs and putting new roofs on, with my shirt off in the sun, just like I was back in college.”
McTiernan isn’t at all what you expect from an action movie veteran. Fiercely critical of what he calls “gun pornography”, he dots his conversation with references to Shakespeare, likening Die Hard to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He says that being in Neuchâtel, watching four movies a day, reminds him of when he was a young cinephile studying at the American Film Institute watching French New Wave movies and being tutored by his mentor, the Oscar winning Czech film-maker, Ján Kadár.
Although he gravitated toward action movies, McTiernan didn’t just make films about white guys with big muscles. He takes pride that in The Hunt for Red October, he cast a black actor as a US navy admiral. “I got shit for it. What I wanted to do was have James Earl Jones who everybody believes is the most upright, honourable man in the country, to give instructions to a bright young white kid, a white officer, and have that officer snap ‘yessir’.” He also points out that the hero of his 1999 movie The 13th Warrior, the traveller and poet Ahmad ibn Fadlan (Antonio Banderas) was Muslim.
This observation brings him back to his own experiences with the US justice system. The way he tells it, when the FBI agent called him out of the blue in 2006 to ask if he had hired Pellicano to tap Roven’s phone, he had no idea who he was talking to. “I thought he [the agent calling] was a reporter. When Arnold [Schwarzenegger] became a candidate [to be governor of California] I got dozens of phone calls from people pretending to be one sort for law enforcement or another, fishing for some pile of shit about Arnold. You have to talk to them because if you don’t, they say ‘so and so has no comment.’”
McTiernan feels he was “just roadkill” in the Pellicano case. But he says that he was given an insight into the way he believes the government regularly abuses its power. He quotes Nelson Mandela’s remark, “No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails.” In particular, McTiernan says the non-white prisoners were discriminated against and humiliated and that 90% of “the black and brown guys” in prison alongside him “were not criminals”. “They were just local kids who, if they had anything to do with the local drug industry at all, they were working at the only thing where they could make more than working at McDonald’s.”
McTiernan spoke to around “250 guys” when he was in prison and “snuck the interviews out”; he plans eventually to publish this material. “Their stories were amazing, just sickening and shocking. The war on drugs in the United States is really just [racist] Jim Crow [law]. There is no Republican party, it is the Confederacy, simply the Confederacy … the war on drugs is a disenfranchisement programme. In the South and in some of the border states like Missouri, 30% of the black and brown men can never vote for the rest of their lives.”
It’s not the conversation you would expect to have with McTiernan; he is far keener to talk politics than action stunts. We briefly discuss Bruce Willis who was diagnosed with dementia last year. He says that Willis still recognises him. “He knows I am a friend but he doesn’t know why.” McTiernan says many of his old pals stuck by him when he was in prison. “Alec Baldwin was wonderful, Arnold was wonderful.” He doesn’t name those who turned their backs on him. “I may work again,” he says although he sounds doubtful about the prospect. One project he is persevering with is sci-fi thriller Tau Ceti Foxtrot, to which Uma Thurman is attached and which he first tried to get off the ground before Covid.
His last two films were “just nightmares,” he says, of Rollerball and Basic. Even the films that went well were stressful. McTiernan always seemed to be at the heart of the storm, with crazy deadlines to meet and studio bosses to placate. “You’ve seen Ford v Ferrari? It’s entirely about the movie business. A film director is like the [racing] driver. He isn’t the one who makes the engine work or makes the car go fast. It’s a whole team of other people. But somewhere in there, you need this madman who will try to control the whole machine. It’s something they say in the movie several times: ‘Every now and then the driver just doesn’t make it out.’” McTiernan, it seems, was one who did.
