“I’m in”: The movie that only took a minute for Bruce Willis to sign up to
As one of his generation’s most successful and celebrated actors, Bruce Willis brought life to an impressive range of strong characters. He is perhaps best known for his role as New York City police detective John McClane in the Die Hard franchise. The action movies featured Willis in his most associative setting as the stoic hero, with a little bit of light comedy thrown in for good measure.
Before the first Die Hard movie arrived in 1988, Willis had enjoyed a climb to prominence with a role in the television show Moonlighting. The ABC comedy-drama was a crucial step in Willis’ career, but Die Hard set him on the action-hero trajectory. Picking up on Willis’ abilities in the action and comedic spheres, Quentin Tarantino sought the actor to portray boxer Butch Coolidge in his mid-1990s magnum opus Pulp Fiction.
Willis was instantly impressed with Tarantino’s comic strip-inspired script of dark comedy and gratuitous violence. He initially asked the filmmaker if he could play the part of Vincent Vega. However, Tarantino had already cast John Travolta for that role, so he offered Willis Butch. “Quentin, the shortest sentence in the Bible is ‘Jesus wept’. The shortest sentence in Hollywood is ‘I’m in.’ And I’m in,” Willis replied.
Pulp Fiction catapulted Willis to new heights of fame, enhancing his image as the tough guy. Over the next decade, he made a seismic appearance in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, injecting some variety into his portfolio. After the millennium, Willis was, once again, earmarked for a collaboration with Tarantino, but this time, another director tapped his shoulder: Robert Rodriguez.
In the early 2000s, Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller began planning a movie adaptation for the latter’s neo-noir comic series Sin City. Rodriguez and Miller invited Tarantino to direct the classic drive-to-the-pits scene. Given his involvement in the project, many people assume that Tarantino suggested his Pulp Fiction star for the lead role of police officer John Hartigan. However, this was not the case.
Speaking to the BBC in 2005 following the premiere of Sin City, Willis revealed that he hadn’t heard anything from Tarantino when Rodriguez showed up with a tape. The actor had never met Rodriguez before but agreed to watch a three-minute tape of Sin City footage since he is a big fan of film noir and comic books.
After hearing that Rodriguez and Miller were interested in casting him in a Sin City adaptation, Willis invited them to his house where they could watch the preview. “It was kind of a test of the technique they’d come up with, featuring Josh Harnett,” Willis recalled. “My partner called me and said, “Robert Rodriguez has an idea, and he wants to show you.” I said, ‘Have him come up to the house, and I’ll take a look at it.’ He brought Frank Miller with him and had it on a little DVD.”
The actor had been working late nights on another project and recalled having just woken up when Miller and Rodriguez arrived. “I was kind of half awake,” he continued. “About a minute in, I hit pause and said, ‘Whatever happens after this, in the next couple of minutes of this scene, I just want to let you know I’m in!’ Then we watched the second couple of minutes of it. It’s just amazing – I could talk for hours and hours about it and still not do it justice.”
Sin City mainly received positive reviews following its arrival. Alongside Willis was a star-studded cast, including Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Jessica Alba and Benicio Del Toro. Also crucial to the movie’s success was a unique neo-noir lens. Most of the movie was shot in black and white, using state-of-the-art technology to render some objects in colour for dramatic effect. “It’s very film noir,” Willis noted. “Robert’s using a brand new technology to get that look across on film – it’s remarkable to watch.”
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