Not Retired, still Extremely Daring

NEW YORK --- “I want everybody in the Philippines to come out and watch Red. If you don’t go and see it, I’m coming down there and knock on your door. I’m knocking from door to door until everybody comes out.”

That “threat” comes from no less than Bruce Willis, probably the world’s most durable star who simply refuses to die hard despite the myriad attempts to wipe him, rather his character, from the face of the earth. He’s incredibly indestructible, a two-legged cat with more than nine lives who dodges bullets with the gracefulness of a Dancing With the Stars contestant and who emerges from an explosion unscathed with not a single strand of hair out of place. Well, he doesn’t have any, although he did have a headful when he was discovered 35 years ago for the hit US TV series Moonlighting as private detective David Addison. The New Jersey native who studied in Montclair State College’s theater program has chalked up an unchallenged body of work since then, including all genres, from drama (M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense in which he plays a compassionate child psychologist who takes care of a kid who sees dead people), romance (The Story of Us), suspense-thriller (The Fifth Element), comedy (as the voice of the wised-cracking infant character Mikey in the two Look Who’s Talking flicks) and a mind-boggling record of action blockbusters topped by the Die Hard quadrilogy in which he immortalizes his signature role Detective John McClane.

The only other drama Bruce has done with M. Night Shyamalan is called Unbreakable and that aptly describes the man and the actor --- unbreakable.

In RED, based on the DC Comics cult-favorite graphic novel by Warren Ellis and Cully Hammer, Bruce plays Frank Moses, a former black-ops CIA agent who is now living a quiet life alone until one day a high-tech squad shows up intent on killing him. With his identity compromised and the life of Sarah (played by Mary Louise Parker), a woman he deeply cares for, endangered, Frank reassembles his old team in a last-ditch effort to survive. Brace yourselves for Die Hard-class action in which it’s the bullets getting out of Frank’s way instead of the other way around. Didn’t I just tell you that the man is not about to die hard?

Directed by Robert Schwentke (The Time Traveler’s Wife, etc.) and produced by Summit Entertainment (distributed in the Philippines by Pioneer Films, opening nationwide simultaneous with the US playdate on Friday, Oct. 15), RED also features a formidable cast that includes, among others, Helen Mirren and John Malkovich as former top agents of CIA, newcomer (from New Zealand) Karl Urban as CIA’s younger high-tech hit man, Richard Dreyfus as a wealthy man who builds a greedy fortune out of lucrative government contracts, Ernest Borgnine as a man whose life’s work is to guard CIA’s most valuable secrets and the honorable Morgan Freeman (fondly remembered for his role as Nelson Mandela in Invictus) as the senior member of the RED team.

It’s autumn here and soon the leaves will start to fall, and this very early Wednesday morning as I type this piece, the City That Never Sleeps seems to be lingering in sweet slumber. Bed weather, you know, since it has been drizzling the past four days and New Yorkers are bundled up in thick jackets as they trudge the avenues under black umbrellas on their way to work.

Sunday last week, still groggy with jetlag from a 20-hour Cathay Pacific long haul from Manila, I sat with other international journalists from around the world for a preview of RED at a private screening room at Park Avenue, 15 blocks from Radisson Hotel (at Lexington and 48th Street, the favorite of Batangas Gov. Vilma Santos and husband Sen. Ralph Recto because fellow Batangueño Alan Trambulo, a true-blue Vilmanian, works there).

Bruce’s “threat” turned to be an empty one; he didn’t have to do it. In RED, the old reliable Bruce, pushing 56, is still at it, in tip-top shape, invincible as ever, even if, as he conceded during our first interview in Tokyo in 2007 for Die Hard 4.0 (Live Free or Die Hard), “I don’t bounce as well off the concrete floors as I used to; I went through ‘Ouch!’ moments doing Die Hard 4.0, something I didn’t while doing Die Hard 1.” But, up to now, he happily added, “I was relieved when I did my scenes on Take 1 and I recoiled when we had to do a Take 2.”

Monday morning during the one-on-one, at a function room in Four Seasons, the first thing I asked Bruce was what the title means. Simple, he said: RED stands for Retired Extremely Dangerous.

I told Bruce that in a sense, he’s different from his character Frank Moses because he’s not retired and might never be but is similar to him because, as I’ve said, he’s extremely daring and, that’s it, extremely dangerous where his nemesis is concerned.

“Correct,” confirmed Bruce. “It’s hard to predict the future but I don‘t see myself retiring.”

What convinced him to sign up for the project?

“There was something really fresh about the concoction of this project and that intrigued me. There is a caper element to it, a comedy element to it, a romance element to it and a big action movie element to it. But underneath all that there is the notion of loneliness and feeling left out and being kicked off the team because you’re too old to play the game any longer. I just found it all to be a really interesting cinematic recipe.”

In the Tokyo interview, I asked Bruce how he usually prepared for his roles, specifically John McClane in the Die Hard series, which call for life-threatening stunts.

In RED, Bruce works with an all-star cast that include (from left) Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich and Helen Mirren

“Well, I always want McClane to look like he could still take whatever was thrown at him, so I would undergo a rigorous training regimen for several months before the shoot. McClane is older and so am I, and that’s part of the fun of returning to the character. But I also realized that there is a benefit in getting older. You pay attention and you acquire some wisdom.”

Although realistic, Bruce was optimistic.

Asked how long would he be doing “extremely daring” roles, he broke into his characteristic quiet smile.

“Until I’m 80 and beyond…if I live that long.”

Maybe because he and his RED co-stars had been doing interviews for several days now, including guesting on TV shows, Bruce was visibly tired and not as talkative as he was during the Tokyo junket, but engaging nevertheless.

Of course, in this as well as in other junkets, it’s a big no-no to delve into the stars’ private lives; in Bruce’s case no matter how strong the temptation was to find out how he felt about the rumor that Ashton Kutcher, the husband of Bruce’s ex-wife Demi Moore in a May-December relationship, was seeing another (presumably younger) woman.

Many people are incredulous about the live-and-let-live set-up among Demi and Ashton, and Bruce and his own new love, with them bonding like extended families, even going on trips together.

“It’s hard for people to understand,” Bruce had said in a magazine interview. “We go on holidays together. We raise our kids together ---we still have that bond. Demi is the mother of my children and Ashton is the stepfather of my children. I’m thrilled that Ashton turned out to be such a great guy. I love Demi, and I know that she loves me.”

I mentioned in passing that I saw traces of Die Hard in RED and Bruce nodded.

“My character still kills people but not without any reason. He does it for self-preservation and for love of country.”

But there’s a little difference.

“Filming RED was a little bit like Christmas morning,” smiled Bruce, maybe recalling that in one Die Hard, the action ends on Christmas Day. “It has an all-star cast from theater, film and television, and the characters they are playing come one after another as the action goes on. You know, every 10 minutes, you get to open a new and different present. ‘Oh my gosh, I got a shiny new bicycle named Helen Mirren’ or ‘There’s my super-duper Super Crane Morgan Freeman’ or ‘Hey, look everybody, I got a new Transformer John Malkovich’ or ‘Wow, a cool new train set with Richard Dreyfus engine.’ It was crazy, crazy fun.”

Well, what else can I say but, “Advance Merry Christmas, Bruce Willis. Many happy returns at the tills when RED opens nationwide on Friday, Oct. 15.”

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