My Boring-Ass Life (Revised Edition): The Uncomfortably Candid Diary of Kevin Smith (82 page)

I say “
almost”
because the dialogue kinda sucked ass.

Granted, it’s an action picture — so you can’t expect it to crackle with scintillating back-and-forth. But there are action pictures, and there’s
Die Hard
: the single best action picture ever made, in which all the elements — cast, plot, performance, action, direction, score, look — were firing on all cylinders in such a way that few, if any, films have ever come close, before or since. John McClane, the cop who’s always in the right place at the wrong time, deserved better. So I did what any aspiring actor, hungry to land a part would do.

I rewrote it.

I didn’t change plot beats, mind you; just put my dialogue into a patois that’d sound a bit more natural coming out of my mouth, and added some better, more current jokes (emo/goth references, some MySpace nods, etc.). I printed out two copies, studied my lines, and shot over to Deb’s office, the location of which I was familiar with because it wasn’t my first visit there.

A month or so earlier, Deb had also thought I was right for a small part in
Evan Almighty
, the Steve Carell-centric follow-up to the Jim Carrey starrer
Bruce Almighty
. But either my audition blew or famously Christian Tom Shadyac didn’t want the
Dogma
guy in his faith-based flick, because they went another way. So heading into the
Die Hard
audition, pessimistic me was expecting much the same outcome.

In the waiting room, I ran into Kal Penn (he of
Harold and Kumar
fame) and Brad Renfo (he of
The Client
and drug arrest fame), both there auditioning for the role of Matt Farrell, the young hacker who becomes McClane’s sidekick in the picture. Brad and I ran some lines and chit-chatted about his road to recovery before he was called in to read, leaving me alone to mutter stuff like “Why’d you bring a cop into my command center?!” to myself. After twenty minutes, I headed in to meet Len Wiseman.

Len’s the kinda guy you wanna hate in a big, bad way: he’s a talented, good looking man. I’m a troll, right — but at least I’ve got the filmmaking thing going for me. Here’s a guy who’s got the filmmaking thing going for him,
and
he’s a pussy magnet (indeed, he attracted, then sorta-married, Kate Beckinsale). While you’re talking to Len, you find yourself wondering “Why isn’t this dude
in front of
the cameras?” Mercifully, he’s as insecure as the rest of us — something I discovered while we discussed how unbelievably harsh the TalkBacks at Ain’t It Cool News have been on our respective bodies of work. We concluded that we weren’t in an exclusive fraternity, as
everyone
gets trashed in the Ain’t It Cool News TalkBacks — so much so that the potential sting has been completely blunted by the stereotypical predictability of the over-the-top bad will and bile.

After about a half hour, I read for Len. It wasn’t particularly good, to my recollection, and Len was a bit surprised that I’d brought two sets of re-written sides to work off. But he humored me and let me do it a second time, after which we sat around, inside and outside of the building, bullshitting for nearly two hours about his wife’s genius performance in
The Last Days of Disco
, comic book movies, and our mutual affection for
Die Hard
. It was on that subject that Len lit up like Christmas. He was a die-hard
Die Hard
fan, insisting that he wanted to hone as closely as possible to the original in the series and honor it in tone, look, and sense of humor. As the guy who shot a sixteen millimeter, backyard
Die Hard
fan-film in his youth, he didn’t wanna be the cat who fucked up
Die Hard
. He was all passion and enthusiasm, his eyes lighting up whenever he talked about doing justice to John McClane. Len was good people, and it was pretty clear he was doing the job for the love, not the money (in truth, he took a pay cut to direct this flick). I don’t get the chance to talk to many directors, so even though I felt I’d totally blown the audition and revealed myself as a charlatan thespian, when all was said and done, I was still glad I’d gone.

Two months later, Deb called.

“I wanna give you your
Die Hard
dates,” she said.

“What?” I asked. “You mean, when the movie comes out?”

“When you’re working on the show.”

“Are you fucking
kidding
me?! I
got
that part?!”

“You did. You’re the
Warlock.
”

I’d completely forgotten about it all, it was so long ago. I’d assumed they were already in production — which they were — and assumed, too, that a better actor (or rather, a
real
actor) had been awarded the role. Deb informed me that, after my meeting with Len, I was always the first choice for Warlock; they were just on such an insane schedule shooting back east that they hadn’t even thought about the LA-based stuff yet, much less made their casting calls. My shooting dates, it turns out, were two months away, in December.

Getting cast in any movie leaves you with this unparalleled feeling of acceptance; of being told you’re worthy in a way few things can. It’s not like when someone says “You’re good enough to fuck.” It’s not like simply getting hired for a job. It’s a golden ticket of sorts into a world you knew existed but never thought you’d empirically experience. When I was cast in
Catch & Release
, it was the first time since
Clerks
was bought at Sundance back in 1994 that I felt true professional elation.

And getting cast in a
Die Hard
movie blew that away. I was gonna become part of the
Die Hard
mythology, on par with Argyle the limo driver and Ellis, the coke-snorting White Knight. I was gonna get threatened by John Ma-fucking-Clane. But best of all?

I was finally gonna meet Bruce Willis.

I’d arrived at my appointed call-time of 7:30 on the Universal lot that December morning — perhaps the first occasion in years I’d ever been on time for anything, my wedding included. After I chucked my bag into my trailer, Michael Fottrell, the producer, came by to welcome me to the set, with a warning that “Things don’t always run on time around here. Well, they run on
a
time; just not
on
time.”

That’d be B.W. Time — and not simply because Willis is one of the biggest stars on the planet: it was truly Bruce’s world, since he was the only person in the cast or crew to have worked on/been in all three previous
Die Hard
extravaganzas.

A PA named Todd Havern escorted me to the makeup trailer, where Lori McCoy-Bell immediately gave me the geekiest hair-styling this side of
Revenge of the Nerds
, slicked flat to the point of being Alfalfa without the cowlick. I was, after all, she said, an internet nerd. I didn’t have the heart to explain that I was, in fact, a real, live internet nerd, and (despite my big bald spot) none of us really have hair issues anymore. Rather than make waves, I suffered the ‘do with a smile.

Said ‘do fascinated Justin Long when he took a seat in the chair beside me. The Man Who Would Be Matt (often identified as the “I’m a Mac” Guy) was an instantly likeable fellow with a quick sense of humor. I was familiar, of course, with his body of work from
Dodgeball
,
Galaxy Quest
,
Accepted
, and — since I’ve got a kid —
Herbie Reloaded
, but we bonded over a conversation about James Duffy and Will Carlough’s
Robin’s Big Date
— a short film that’d been in the Movies Askew film fest contest a few months back. In it, Justin played an awkward Robin to Sam Rockwell’s alpha-male, date-spoiling Batman, both replete with Halloween-grade costumes and masks.

We were in the midst of meet-cute bullshitting when a larger-than-life presence entered the makeup trailer. And I don’t mean larger-than-life in that Rip Taylor or Charles Nelson Reilly kinda way; I mean the larger-than-life that accompanies a man who brings a hush to a room without uttering a single sound.

But, of course, he said
something
...

“‘morning, kids,” smiled Bruce Willis. “Who’s ready to live free or Die Hard?”

You couldn’t have scripted a better or intentionally cornier greeting.

Everyone in the trailer offered the group hello, as Bruce came over to shake my hand.

“Mr. Smith. Welcome, welcome. Thanks for doing this.”

“Thanks for having me,” was all I could sputter.

“Lemme ask you this: why do they call Lindsay Lohan ‘fire-bush’?”

“Uh... I don’t know,” I replied, taken aback by the odd conversation starter.

Why’s he asking me, I wondered. Does he think I worked with or even know Lohan? Is he mistaking me for someone else? Who cares: Bruce Willis just asked you a question, Fat-Ass; fucking answer the man.

“Because she’s got red hair,” I asked in return, clearly indicating I was hazarding a guess. “Does she even have red hair? I’ve never noticed. If she’s a real redhead...”

“I was talking to him,” Bruce corrected, staring at my hair, indicating Justin, Lohan’s
Herbie
co-star.

While Justin provided the correct answer, I silently died a thousand deaths. What had I
done?
I’d foolishly assumed he had anything more to say to me than welcome pleasantries. And now he thinks I’m a jackass. Fucking great.

His question answered, Bruce said goodbye and headed off to his trailer, presumably to get his makeup done. This gave Justin and I enough time to run lines, so we grabbed some sides and went outside to smoke and pretend we were master hackers.

“Another rewrite,” Justin said, regarding his sides. When I expressed distress due to the fact that I’d memorized the old lines, he told me the secret to
Die Hard 4
was to never memorize your lines until minutes before the cameras rolled — as, every morning, there were always changes to the dialogue.

I poured over the new lines — hoping to Christ there wasn’t too much tech-no-jargon that I’d have to suddenly commit to memory — and immediately sensed something familiar about them.

“Oh my God — I
wrote
these.”

It was true: all the stuff I’d written for my audition had been included in the script. It was either the highest compliment, or the explanation as to why I was cast.

Justin and I spent an hour going back-and-forth with the new lines, rehearsing and re-rehearsing, until Todd appeared and said “It’s time.” He loaded us onto a golf cart and we motored over to the stage.

When I pictured Warlock’s basement as per the script, it was, at best, the size of the Connor’s basement in
Roseanne
. When I laid eyes on the Warlock’s basement set on the soundstage, it was, at the least, about half the size of a football field. There’s never been a basement this huge in the history of basements. Apparently, Warlock dwelled in the sewers, as there was enough faux exposed concrete, pipes, mold and mildew to support the shooting of six
Phantom of the Opera
sequels. If we’d had a basement in my parents’ house and it looked like this, I’d still be living there today.

And the décor! Adorned with a multitude of
Star Wars
-related and various geek-centric statues and props, the set betrayed all the earmarks of the twelve year-old me getting his hands on some plutonium, a flux capacitor and a DeLorean and traveling back to the future just to deck these halls. Complete with an old Asteroids kiosk, all the joint needed was a naked lady to be my dream room, circa 1982.

But there was something in there for future (i.e. present) Kev, too: a shitload of big screen monitors and superdrives, not to mention a gaming chair that made the
Enterprise
’s captain’s chair look like a port-a-potty.

And it was that chair that cost us an hour and forty-five minutes of blocking rehearsal.

I was delivered to Len at his director’s monitors, where I discovered he’d been doing some time-traveling of his own. But it wasn’t his bubbly, eager-to-shoot past self who I’d met months back that’d made the jump; the Len slouched at the monitors in front of me was the John-Connor-at-war-with-Skynet future Len — battle-scarred and world-weary. I didn’t have to ask what’d happened: the glee and zeal of landing the gig directing the next
Die Hard
had been replaced by the pressure and frustration of not only making a studio film that already had a release date, but also working with a movie star of galactic proportions. I arrived as Charlie Sheen in
Platoon
— bright-eyed and bushy-tailed; Len was Willem Dafoe — the seen-too-many-horrors vet on his third tour of duty, one necklace-of-human-ears shy of utter madness.

Blocking rehearsals are pretty straightforward. The actors figuratively walk through the dialogue and literally walk through the scene, figuring out where they’re going to stand and when they’re going to move so that the director and DP can plot where their cameras will go and how best they can capture the action. Considering this was one of the only scenes in
Live Free or Die Hard
in which nobody pulled a gun, threw a punch, or blew anything up, there was no action to capture: it was a ten-page, dialogue-driven scene. And since Len was always rolling, minimum, three cameras, I assumed we’d be out of it by day’s end. My contract had me locked in for a week, but there was no way something like this was gonna take longer than twelve hours, total.

“You like the chair?” Len weakly inquired, mustering a hint of that “I can’t believe I’m making a
Die Hard
flick” enthusiasm.

“I love the chair, sir.”

“I looked long and hard for it. It’s the perfect Warlock chair. So you’re going to spend the whole scene in it.”

“You want me to do everything from the chair?”

“Yeah. Warlock’s not the kinda guy who gets up and moves around a lot.”

“My kinda guy,” I offered.

“Justin and Bruce will enter, Justin joins you here while Bruce cleans up at the sink, then Bruce comes down here too, and you guys finish the scene.”