The man who brought Die Hard back to life

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United front: Len Wiseman with actress wife Kate Beckinsale

Hard man: Bruce Willis is back as John McClane in Die Hard 4.0

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Len Wiseman was 13 when Bruce Willis made his first appearance as the wisecracking, singlet-wearing cop, John McClane, in Die Hard. The excited teenage boy went straight home after seeing the film and shot his own version in his California backyard on the family video camera. His engineer father even rigged up a blood-squirting explosive vest for him, powered by a car battery.

Now, 20 years on, Wiseman has directed Die Hard 4.0 for the big screen. And this time, with a budget of $100 million, he got to play around with fighter jets and flying trucks instead of car batteries.

"Die Hard, Indiana Jones, and Lethal Weapon were the movies that really kicked it off for me in high school," says the director, now 34 and boyishly handsome. "I saw a making of Raiders of the Lost Ark documentary and thought: 'Man, that's the job I want to do.' And I absolutely loved the original Die Hard. John McClane is our best reluctant hero. He doesn't wanna be there, he's bitching all the time, he can be a bit of an asshole, a bit crude. We can relate to that, because we wouldn't want to be there either."

The long-delayed fourth movie features 52-year-old Willis on careerreviving form as an older, grimmer, balder McClane. It was Wiseman's decision to make use of his leading man's advancing years rather than disguise them.

"These days it seems we're being offered older teenagers as action heroes, and it's all wrong," he says forcefully. "Bruce just gets cooler with age, and he looks tough and kickass. So we made him a divorced dad, trying to control his teenage daughter. The only discussion was whether he should be bald or not."

Wiseman decided he should, which meant the famous McClane vest had to go: "It's there, under his shirt. But the combination of baldness and the singlet made him look like he was on death row."

As well as the character's age, Wiseman had to address the fact that McClane was now living in a post 9/11 world. "Whether the terrorists are criminals has always been a major part of the Die Hard franchise but I didn't want to use that to make some big political point - this wasn't the film for it," he says.

The meltdown of the computers running America's power, defence and banking systems engineered by the (American) villain Gabriel plays on 21st century paranoia, but is motivated by greed. And we only see the mayhem it causes - car pile-ups, communication failures - from McClane's point of view.

"Die Hard has always been about a contained, claustrophobic problem for McClane," says Wiseman. "That's why I put in a fight in an elevator, a car pile-up in a tunnel."

He adds that he and Willis had both excised identical passages of post-9/11 sentiment from the script before they met, particularly a scene where McClane walks into a police station and asks what he can do to help. "John McClane is not a hero who signs up to a mission," says Wiseman. "Thrown into a situation, he can become a hero, but he's a victim, not a volunteer."

Indeed. McClane was also preeminent among 1980s action heroes in the amount of punishment he absorbed, and Wiseman didn't let Willis off lightly this time, particularly in a brutal fight with martial arts star Maggie Q in a 4x4 lodged halfway down a lift shaft. "Bruce got kicked in the head by Maggie's stunt double and it sliced his scalp open. He needed 20-odd stitches, I think. So yeah, he got banged up a bit."

Wiseman tries wherever possible to stage stunts and fights "for real", without CGI - even in Die Hard 4.0's climactic battle between a fighter jet and a "big rig" articulated truck driven by McClane.

"It was great to be able to say, 'OK, we're gonna build a freeway on-ramp then blow it up,'" he says. "In one shot, the truck was supposed to pop up just a little bit when it's hit by the rocket. But in the first take it stayed on two wheels forever and just rode that way until eventually it fell over and off the freeway altogether. So I added in a shot of Bruce inside, trying to pull the truck down like you'd pull a horse down. Working with Bruce on stuff like that - on a character I'd loved since I was a kid ... that was the most fun."

Fun seems to be what Len Wiseman is all about. He grew up "a comic-book geek", obsessed with drawing and "usually lost in a private world of art", and after studying film used his talent with a pencil to winkle his way into directing.

"I'd been jumping on movies as the prop guy or drawing storyboards before I joined the art department on Stargate, Independence Day and Godzilla," he says. "When I was pitching the script for Underworld, I did 12 detailed production drawings, which the producers later told me made them feel more comfortable about going with a first-time director."

His drawings of Underworld's lead character, Selene, also won over Kate Beckinsale. "Kate originally turned down Underworld without reading the script," Wiseman says. "But then one of her family said, 'Look, you should read it - the director has gone to the trouble of drawing you as the character.' The pictures looked just like Kate, even though I drew them two years before meeting her. But the script called for a gorgeous vampire goddess, and the chances are that my idea of a goddess will look pretty close to the kind of person I fall in love with. I always say to Kate I was drawing her until I met her."

When the two did fall in love on set, Wiseman was married, and Beckinsale had lived for nine years with actor Michael Sheen, who was not only the father of her daughter, Lily, but also her co-star in Underworld.

Wiseman and Beckinsale have always insisted that nothing happened between them until they were both free. They married in 2004 (Wiseman gave Lily her own wedding ring for the ceremony) and relations between all parties are surprisingly cordial. "Len's a nice guy," Sheen once told me, "and we all get along - we have to for Lily's sake."

Wiseman and Beckinsale's amorous antics on the dancefloor after Die Hard 4.0's London premiere put paid to recent rumours that the couple had split. Indeed, not long ago, Beckinsale talked about wanting a child with Wiseman, when she can afford to take a year off. "The most difficult part of this business is the separation, because we're both working all the time," agrees Wiseman. "It's not as if Kate's a stay-at-home mom."

The answer would be to do another Underworld film together, particularly as Lily played the younger Selene in the second movie. "It's a great family project for us," agrees Wiseman, "and I'd be kind of interested in doing it in three films' time."

First, he's exploring a superhero movie and resurrecting a sci-fi script called Shell Game that he wrote before Underworld. And there's the very real possibility of another old project reappearing, for Bruce Willis has got wind of that teenage Die Hard rip-off that Wiseman made in high school.

"We were doing a scene, and I acted out for him how he should hold the gun, and I told him about making that movie in my backyard," groans Wiseman. "I'm kicking myself now, because he's twisting my arm to put it on the DVD. It's horribly embarrassing. I think only Bruce and my mom would be glad to see it on there."

• Die Hard 4.0 is out now.

 

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