In a recent interview, John McTiernan says he has “3 possibly 4 pieces that I would like to do” as a new action movie.
John McTiernan is an action legend. He is the director who gave us Predator, Die Hard, The Hunt for Red October, Last Action Hero, and more—so many classics, which makes it such a shame we haven’t had a movie from the man in nearly 25 years.
While speaking with Forbes, McTeirnan said he does have a few ideas for another action movie. “I have 3 possibly 4 pieces that I would like to do, I don’t know whether I will,” he said. “Maybe I’ll have enough strength and energy. Or not.” If and when these movies do get made, McTeirnan said they would be financed independently because “there’s no studio left.“
“Why can’t you tell a difference between a Toyota, or a Volvo or a Peugeot, or a Ford or something manufactured in Korea? Because they’re all the same marketing,” McTeirnan said, comparing the movie industry to the car industry. “They all make exactly the same cars, they’re identical. Because none of them are car makers, they’re in the money business. They guarantee to bring the most money back to the owners that they work for. That’s exactly the same situation in the film industry.“
McTiernan’s last two movies, Rollerball (2002) and Basic (2003), were critical and commercial failures. “I gave up working on bad movies, the last two films I made were terrible. I hated working on them,” McTiernan said. “I knew they were bad, I was hired to fix them, and then they wouldn’t let me shoot that. And they wouldn’t let me shoot what I had fixed. They had just used me to tell the studios that I had fixed it for them. Anyway, I decided I wasn’t going to fix someone else’s bad movie.“
McTiernan also spent years in a legal battle after he was charged with providing a false statement to an FBI investigator regarding his hiring of private investigator Anthony Pellicano to illegally wiretap Charles Roven, the producer of Rollerball. He ultimately served time in prison and declared bankruptcy.
Forbes asked McTiernan if he had considered making a movie out of all the stories he gathered during his time in prison. “It’s funny, I hadn’t thought about it as a movie but as a book that I will publish eventually. Stories of the guys I met, it changed my political outlet completely,” McTiernan said. “Prison movies are not fun, not for anyone, really. It’s very very difficult to make an entertaining movie out of that. So I’ve never been really drawn to it.“
A few years ago, McTiernan was set to direct Taut Ceci Foxtrot, a sci-fi action film starring Uma Thurman and Laurence Fishburne. It was about “a group of rebels who set out to kill the oligarchs and military thugs that terrorized a war-torn planet in the remote Tau Ceti solar system.” Unfortunately, it didn’t happen.
