Major news coming from Kevin Smith and Timothy Olyphant talking about Live Free or Die Hard, the fourth installment of the Bruce Willis action series.
Both Kevin and Timothy star together in the new film, Catch and Release, also starring Jennifer Garner; they also join back up in the Die Hard film, and they each talked about their roles at the press junket for Catch and Release.
Timothy plays the villain in the flick; he just got on set in Los Angeles, after production had been shooting in Baltimore and Washington DC. He describes his character as, "A guy who used to work for the government and warned them of this possibility and is now carrying it out. So, in its own right, it's a different character, a different villain; there's something that feels a little bit more unstable about a person who would do that kind of a thing. The ouch doesn't really match the pinch; it was a guy whose career was ruined and is now saying 'I told you so.' But it's a cyber-terrorist plot based on this article that was in Wired magazine a few years ago saying that as horrific and sad as it was seeing a building come down, the real threat to the country was cyber-terrorism. If somebody were to hack into that infra-structure, they could cripple the country in a matter of days."
He also says he hasn't been beaten up or blown up; "Not yet. But, I have a sneaky suspicion." Tim and Kevin really haven't hung out together on set because "It ends up on a blog, and how do you know if I'm straightforward or not straightforward."
As far as Kevin's role in Live Free or Die Hard, "I play a character that has a lot of depository dialogue; I'm the only person in Die Hard who talks, and doesn't shoot somebody. When I got there, I was like, 'Len, can I get a gun?' He's like, 'No.' But it's fun; it's that role in the action movie where you provide a bunch of information for them to head into act 3. They kind of get bits and pieces, and I kind of fill them in; my character gets talked about throughout - and it could all change. But the time they get in the editing room, they might be like, 'You suck, yank him out.' But as it stands now, in the script, and as I shot it, they talk about me a lot and then they meet me; and I provide a lot of information about the villain."
The writer/director takes a very lax approach to his character; he says it's easy to control his dialogue. "What's nice about working on those big, awfully expensive Hollywood movies, is they have so many writers, they don't even notice if you're one of them. So, I got there, and I wrote myself a one page monologue, and I got to deliver it; it was hysterical, they let me do it. Bruce Willis was like, 'Do it up, that was a good speech.' So, you do it, and they totally went for it; so that was kind of cool, and I got to give that speech in that movie. They were kind of riff friendly. There was one motto on that movie, and they kept saying it, which was, 'Keep it Die Hard.' So you didn't want to - you couldn't get in there and do a Jay and Silent Bob type monologue, but you had to make it germane to the movie. So I don't give a funny speech, I wind up giving a very paranoid, Joe Pesci in JFK type speech, which was fun."
Live Free or Die Hard is still shooting; it's set for a June 29th release. But first, you can check out Kevin, Timothy, and Jennifer in Catch and Release; that opens in theaters on January 26th, rated PG-13.
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