Movie Trivia

The scene in which Gruber and McClane meet was inserted in to the script after Alan Rickman (Hans Gruber) was found to be proficient at mimicking American accents. The filmmakers had been looking for a way to have the two characters meet prior to the climax and capitalized on Rickman's talent.

The original poster for the film did not feature Bruce Willis likeness, just the building. The producers originally thought it might deter non-Willis fans from seeing the movie. Posters were later altered after the early box office success.

Alan Rickman's feature film debut.

The addresses and phone numbers depicted on the LAPD dispatch's computer for the Nakatomi plaza management are the actual numbers for management of Fox Plaza, where the film was shot.

The German that the terrorists speak is sometimes grammatically incorrect and meaningless. In the German version of the film, the terrorists are not from Germany but from "Europe". This has been fixed for the Special Edition VHS and later home video releases. The only instances of incorrect use of German are Alan Rickman's (Hans Gruber) lines.

One cop says that John McClane (Bruce Willis) "could be a fucking bartender for all we know". Prior to becoming a well-known actor, Willis was a bartender.

In the German version, Hans Gruber's name is changed to Jack Gruber.

In the German version the names and backgrounds of the German-born terrorists were changed into English forms (mostly into their British equivalents): Hans became Jack, Karl became Charlie, Heinrich turned into Henry etc... the new background depicted them as radical Irish activists having gone freelance and for profit rather than ideals. (This led to some odd plot holes in this movie and continuity problems with Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995); there, the villain is considered to be the brother of Hans Gruber, yet he's German.) This was because German terrorism, especially by the Rote Armee Fraktion (the Red Army Faction), was still considered a sensitive issue by the German government in the 1980s.

The line "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker!" is used in all Four Die Hard movies (this one, Die Hard 2 (1990), Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995)), and Live Free or Die Hard (2007), although a gunfire masks the 'fucker' part in the latest installment). It also translates in Urdu to "here eat this"

In this film, Hans Gruber mocks McClane, telling him that this time "John Wayne does not get to walk off into the sunset with Grace Kelly." Willis responds, "That was Gary Cooper, asshole," in an obvious reference to the western High Noon (1952).

The terrorists arrive in a truck that is green with a white top with "Pacific Courier" on the side. In Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995), the truck that gets caught in the blast outside the Bonwit Teller store is a green truck with a white top, with "Atlantic Courier" on the side. Also, in Speed (1994/I), the airplane that gets blown up at the end is green with "Pacific Courier" on the side. This is an in-joke from production designer Jackson De Govia, who was part of the crew for all three movies. Ironically, "Pacific Courier" translates to mean "Bringer of Peace".

This was based on a book by Roderick Thorp entitled "Nothing Lasts Forever" - a sequel to another book entitled "The Detective", which in 1968 was made into a film starring Frank Sinatra. Coincidentally, Bruce Willis made his movie debut in The First Deadly Sin (1980) walking out of a bar as Sinatra walks into it.

Bruce Willis received a then unheard of $5 million, a fee that was OK'd by Rupert Murdoch. Bruce and Demi Moore tied the knot at the Golden Nugget hotel in Las Vegas during this shoot, Moore having recently broken her engagement to actor Emilio Estevez. Little Richard presided over the ceremony and former brat packer Ally Sheedy was a bridesmaid.

Anthony Peck plays 'Young Cop' in this film ("Something about a double-cross"). He later plays the cop 'Ricky Walsh' in the second sequel, Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995).

Richard Gere was considered for the role of John McClane.

Don Johnson and Richard Dean Anderson, both established action stars in television, were considered for the role of John McClane.

The scene where McClane falls down a shaft was a mistake by the stuntman, who was supposed to grab the first vent, as it originally was planned. He slipped and continued to fall, but the shot was used anyway; it was edited together with one where McClane grabs the next vent down as he falls.

Director Trademark: [John McTiernan] [teddy bear] McClane has a teddy bear for his family. Jack Ryan takes a teddy bear home with him at the end of The Hunt for Red October (1990) (it's the same bear).

Director John McTiernan found it necessary to smash cut away from Hans Gruber's face whenever he fired a gun, because of Alan Rickman's uncontrollable habit of flinching from the noise and muzzle flash. If you look at Rickman's face when he shoots Takagi, you can see him wincing.

It is often said that Bruce Willis's lines during the scene when he pulls the glass out of his feet were ad-libbed. Indeed, it is said that upon learning this, Terry Gilliam cast Willis as the lead in Twelve Monkeys (1995). However when comparing the original script, it appears that Willis only veered very slightly from the original written dialog.

Due to the tourist interest in the Fox Plaza building in L.A., people are now forbidden from taking photos outside the building.

For the shot where Hans Gruber falls from the top of the building, Alan Rickman was actually falling from a 20-foot high model. He was holding on to a stunt man and falling on to an air bag. To get the right reaction, the stunt man dropped Rickman on the count of two, not three.

The building used in the movie was designed by William L. Pereira, and was one of his last projects before his death in 1985.

The odd looking gun that Karl uses in the film is a Steyr AUG, an Austrian made assault rifle.

Bruce Willis was the fifth choice for the main character. It originally went to Arnold Schwarzenegger, then Sylvester Stallone, then Burt Reynolds, then Richard Gere before Willis got it.

Hans Gruber is named after a mad scientist's henchman in the spoof spy film Our Man Flint (1966). "Hans Gruber" is also the name of the doctor Herbert West studied under while in Switzerland in the beginning of Re-Animator (1985).

The title in Spain was translated into "Crystal Jungle" and in Poland into "The Glass Trap". In 1988 there were no skyscrapers in Poland, and they were commonly perceived as exotic "houses made of glass" due to windows covering the whole building. It is worth to notice, that Polish title sounds and fits to this movie very good in Poland, while original title is hard to translate correctly (it would sound like: "It is hard to kill him" or "He dies slowly"). The same titles are used for the sequels (although the meanings have no relation in the sequels).

The Hungarian title is "Give your life expensive", the title of the sequel is "Your life is more expensive", and the third part is "The life is always expensive"

There are two FBI Agent Johnsons and a Harvey Johnson who were characters in the film. This is an in-joke aimed at co-star Reginald VelJohnson.

During the FBI helicopter attack, Special Agent Johnson (Robert Davi) says, "Just like fuckin' Saigon, eh, Slick?" Agent Johnson (Grand L. Bush) replies, "I was in junior high, dick-head." In real life, Davi and Bush are 18 months apart in age.

Bruce Willis personally recommended Bonnie Bedelia for the role of his estranged wife.

The Helsinki Syndrome mentioned in the film is a reference to the real-world Stockholm Syndrome. Why it was changed in the film is unknown. Coincidentally, the newscaster incorrectly informs his viewers that it refers to Helsinki, Sweden (Helsinki is actually in Finland, while Stockholm is in Sweden).

When the bomb in the elevator shaft blows out the side of the building, the effect was accomplished by (a) collecting virtually every camera flashbulb of a particularly powerful type in the Los Angeles area and wiring them on the outside of the actual building to simulate the flash, and (b) by superimposing a shot of an actual explosive blowing a hole in the wall of an all-black miniature of the building at the appropriate location.

The fireball in the elevator shaft was shot with real pyrotechnics using a miniature shaft; the camera speed had to vary over the length of the shot because otherwise the fireball would appear to change speed as it moved up the forced-perspective model. The effects people weren't sure exactly at what rate to vary the speed, so they rigged a manual variable-speed control and did several takes changing the speed at different rates and then picked the one that looked best.

John McTiernan was originally going to make Commando 2, but Arnold Schwarzenegger turned the role offer down. Commando 2 was transformed into Die Hard (1988) and Schwarzenegger was the first actor offered the title role, but he again declined. Eventually Bruce Willis would get the part after Sylvester Stallone, Burt Reynolds, and Richard Gere were all offered the role.

The music cue when Powell shoots Karl at the end of the film was actually an unused track from James Horner's Academy Award-nominated score for Aliens (1986), another Fox film. Specifically, the music was originally intended for a scene near the end of the film, in which Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) battles with the alien queen on board the Sulaco. Instead, an earlier music cue was reused, leaving the cue available for this film. A second music cue, scored by John Scott for the film Man on Fire (1987), was also used. The music can be heard when McClane and Holly meet Powell at the end of the movie.

The bridge shown in Takagi's office is a work of Frank Lloyd Wright for the Bay Area in 1949.

In the making-of featurette, director John McTiernan revealed that a vast majority of the exterior shots of the building showing explosions were real, full-scale explosions set off in and around the actual building.

The entire Nakatomi building was supposed to be managed by a supercomputer and the scenes where McClane is trapped in an office and Gruber orders the windows to be shot out are supposed to be the computer room. The large dark object is the computer, modeled after an ETA-10 supercomputer. It is a model and a bit larger than the actual computer which was thought to look too small. The fiberglass model was later used by ETA as part of the marketing for the ETA range of supercomputers.

Hart Bochner's line "Hans... Bubby!" was ad-libbed. Alan Rickman's quizzical reaction was genuine.

The Nakatomi tower is actually the headquarters of 20th Century Fox. The company charged itself rent for the use of the then unfinished building.

A full 18 minutes elapse before the movie's first gunshot.

Much of the script was improvised due to the constant screenplay tweaks that were being made during filming.

Bruce Willis was also shooting "Moonlighting" (1985) concurrently which accounts for why nearly all of McClane's scenes take place at night. Willis would shoot his TV series during the day and then come to the Fox lot in the evening to work on "Die Hard".

The movie's line "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker." was voted as the #96 of "The 100 Greatest Movie Lines" by Premiere in 2007.

Bruce Willis filmed "Die Hard" while starring in the TV series "Moonlighting" (1985). By the time the series ended, "Die Hard" was available on VHS. In one of the last "Moonlighting" episodes, Willis and a love interest are seen walking past a video rental store while an employee is tearing a "Die Hard" poster down from the window.

John McTiernan turned the script down several times. He felt it was a nasty piece of work. When he was finally persuaded to take on the assignment, he was able to lighten some of the film's darker edges.

The scene where Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman meet up was unrehearsed to create a greater feeling of spontaneity between the two actors.

Beethoven's Ode to Joy is the music theme of the terrorists. This was the idea of director John McTiernan. Hans Gruber, the terrorist leader, even hums it at one point in the movie (while he is on the elevator with Mr. Takagi). Music composer Michael Kamen at first thought it was a "sacrilege" to use Beethoven in an action movie, telling McTiernan: "I will make mincemeat out of Wagner or Strauss for you, but why Beethoven?" McTiernan replied that Ode to Joy had been the theme of the ultra-violence in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971). Kamen, a Kubrick fan, then agreed.

In the spring of 1987, producer Joel Silver and director John McTiernan attended a performance of the play Dangerous Liaisons, in which Alan Rickman played the evil Vicomte de Valmont. Immediately, Silver and McTiernan realized they had found Hans Gruber.

In the wonderfully excruciating scenes where John McClane is required to run through a multitude of glass shards in his 'bare' feet after Hans has his men shoot out the glass partitions in the computer room, 'Bruce Willis (I)' is in fact wearing special 'rubber' shoes designed to look like his own bare feet. One can in fact see this if looking closely as his feet appear quite unnaturally large in some of these crucial 'barefoot' scenes.

The firearms used in "Die Hard" are, as in most action films, real firearms modified to function with blanks. Although modern small arms ammunition is intended to have minimum muzzle flash, director John McTiernan wanted vivid, "exaggerated realism" in the muzzle flashes. Weapons specialist Mike Papac hand fabricated some blanks that were so powerful that the standard firearms modifications weren't workable. Papac had to specially modify the firearms involved. Special Effects Coordinator Al DiSarro said of these blanks that 'in the world of blanks, there are loads that are not so loud and loads that are deafening', and these were deafening. These blanks did cause some cast members, notably Alan Rickman, to flinch. Furthermore, normally most sound effects come from a studio library of sound effects. Sound designer Richard Shorr didn't want to use these clips as modern sound equipment would show their age, as some of them were recorded in the 1950s. To resolve this and further the "exaggerated realism", the sound crew took the appropriate firearms to a firing range in Texas and recorded them being fired with live ammunition.

Bruce Willis took the role of John McClane after it had been turned down by Robert De Niro. Willis had just been turned down to play the Charles Grodin role opposite De Niro in Midnight Run (1988). Ironically both Die Hard and Midnight Run eventually opened the same weekend.

SPOILER: For Alan Rickman's death plunge down the side of the skyscraper, Rickman actually dropped 70 feet onto an airbag against a green screen. Director John McTiernan had to jump first to convince Rickman to do it.

SPOILER: The Roderick Thorpe book "Nothing Lasts Forever," which serves as the basis for this movie, was actually a sequel to the book and film The Detective (1968), with Frank Sinatra as Joe Leland. Surprisingly, few of the book's details are changed. Originally, a much older Leland (changed to McClain) was visiting his daughter, Steffie Leland Gennaro, who worked for the Klaxxon oil company. Takagi was originally a VP of sales named Rivers. Harry Ellis, Al Powell, and Dwayne Robinson were essentially the same, but the FBI was not involved. Hans Gruber was originally Anton "Little Tony" Gruber, while Hans was Karl's brother. The purpose of the terrorist takeover was to allow the West German radical group to uncover an illegal arms shipment Klaxxon was making to a Chilean dictatorship. Finally, in the end scene (which was Christmas morning at 10 AM), Anton Gruber is shot by Leland and falls out the window, also catching a finger on Gennaro's watch, but in this case he pulls her out the window to her death.