The “bullshit” 1995 scene Bruce Willis shot against his will: “You’re not John McClane, fuck off!”
When he was at the peak of his powers, Bruce Willis was one of Hollywood’s highest-paid and most bankable stars, but the downside of his superstardom was that he could often be difficult on set.
It wasn’t as if he spent the best years of his career throwing his weight around on every movie set that he worked on, but he was known to throw his toys out of the pram on occasion, and in one of those instances, he benefited more from almost being sued than any actor in history.
When Willis almost single-handedly torpedoed the production of the never-finished Broadway Brawler in 1997, Disney threatened to take legal action against him. To avoid being taken to court by the ‘Mouse House’, he agreed to star in three films for the studio at a vastly reduced salary from his usual asking price.
While nobody gave much of a shit about The Kid, the other two pictures he made to dodge litigation were Michael Bay’s Armageddon and M Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, the highest-grossing release of 1998 and a cultural phenomenon, respectively, the latter of which earned the leading man a small fortune.
If the headstrong Willis was paired with an equally headstrong or combustible director, the chances of sparks flying were higher than usual. Terry Gilliam, who was initially hesitant to cast the actor in 12 Monkeys because he thought his face looked like an arsehole, devised a unique method of bringing him back down to earth.
During shooting on the sci-fi thriller, a simple scene on paper sees Willis’ James Cole kidnap Madeleine Stowe’s Kathryn Railly, and when he opens the boot of the car, she kicks him in the face. The former was supposed to hit the deck after taking a high heel to the mush, but for whatever reason, he was against it.
“He said, ‘I wouldn’t go down,'” Gilliam recalled. “I said, ‘Fuck off, Bruce! You’d go down!’ He said, ‘No!’, and that was one of the funnier moments. The stunt guy said, ‘Yeah, Bruce, you’d go down’, and he said, ‘No, I wouldn’t’. I said, ‘You’re not John McClane, fuck off!'”
Willis, ever protective of his action hero persona, was steadfastly against the notion of his character dropping like a sack of tatties, despite the film’s director and stunt coordinator telling him otherwise. After putting his foot down, Gilliam remembered that he “went off and sulked by a tree, and I just carried on shooting on without him, and finally he came back.”
Having taken some time to cool down, the Die Hard frontman agreed to shoot the scene as planned, which included him going down as written, albeit reluctantly: “OK. Yeah, I’ll do it. It’s bullshit,” he made clear to Gilliam, but on the plus side, that was the “only really difficult moment” the Monty Python alum experienced with the short-fused star.
