Interview with Sean O’Connell, Author Of 'Bruce Willis: Celebrating The Cinematic Legacy Of An Unbreakable Hollywood Icon' (2024)

October is National Book Month and Novelpro Junkie has a great read for you to check out especially if you' re a Bruce Willis fan or just a film fanatic in general. The book will also make a great birthday or holiday gift. Here is the Amazon synopsis of "Bruce Willis: Celebrating the Cinematic Legacy of an Unbreakable Hollywood Icon" by Sean O' Connell:

Celebrate the legacy of Bruce Willis's career in a book the Los Angeles Timescalls "a thoughtful guide."On a nondescript Wednesday morning in the waning days of March 2023, one of the biggest movie stars on the planet called it quits. No press conference had been organized, the Hollywood trades received no advance notice, and there was a conspicuous lack of the fanfare that usually accompanies such bombshell announcements. Instead, the news that Bruce Willis was retiring from acting came in a simple statement on his ex-wife Demi Moore’s Instagram page—along with the tragic news that Willis was suffering from aphasia, a cognitive disorder that subsequently worsened to become frontotemporal dementia.
It was a sad conclusion to the storied career of a man who had at one point been the highest-paid actor in Hollywood. That career is the subject of Sean O’Connell’s definitive survey of Bruce Willis the actor, the cultural icon, and the man. Here, O’Connell compiles exclusive, original interviews with directors who have worked with Willis, as well as film critics and journalists who have analyzed his career, into a celebratory compendium. It also features the author’s analysis of Willis’s films, his career arc, and the industry that made him a star. And it includes capsule reviews of every Bruce Willis film, making this a complete handbook to a true American original.

1. Why did you decide to start your book with the retirement of Bruce Willis due to aphasia instead of his origin story?

I assume that someone eventually is going to write a biography like a traditional biography, where they go back through his childhood and the things that led him to acting. I find those books to be kind of dry. A lot of times you want to skip through the childhood and teenage years, just get to the points where you know the talent, the actor or musician or whoever you're reading about. Primarily, I wanted to go right to his career. I wanted to get right to why we know Bruce and why he's important to us. The reason why I started with his retirement is because that was the moment when Demi Moore announced that he was going to be stepping away from acting, that I realized how much I was going to miss him as a performer.
I was a huge fan of his. I always look forward to whatever movie he had coming out. There was always a bunch of movies in development that I thought he was interesting as a consideration for. So, to hear that he was done kind of hit me. It made me pretty sad, and I wanted to step back from that and try to figure out why did that bother me? Why? What did I think we were losing? And it comes through in the book and that I really kind of thought we were losing one of our last great movie stars.
This is a guy who thrived at a time when the industry was very different, did things his own way, took some big swings, had a few big misses. one of the last names that would be above a movie that would make people go, “Yeah, I'm going to go see the new Bruce Willis movie.” Doesn’t really matter what he’s doing in it. I just want to go see him. And I don’t think we have that anymore.

2.What was your writing schedule when you wrote this book?

Any chance I got, essentially. I work a full-time job. I'm the managing editor for an entertainment website called Cinema Blend. So, the good news is, I'm kind of immersed in this writing community. Anyway, you know you're right all day, but you have to strike while the iron is hot. Anytime an idea comes to you, I was constantly refining the format of the book. I break Bruce Willis's career down into different categories based on genres, his science fiction films, his action films, his comedies. I just went to where my brain went, like if my brain was into one of his comedies, I just pursued that. I would watch the movies that were part of that segment. I would try to spot trends into different things that he was doing in those films, where they fell in his career, and what I wanted to say about them. I often found that the things that I thought I wanted to say changed a lot as I watched these movies again and formed new opinions about them. Then you start to write half the book, and then you start to think—"Oh, well, this is going to dictate and change what I'm about to say about this other movie”. So, you have to turn yourself over to the process and sort of let it take you where you want it to go, while still keeping a firm grip on it.

3.What was your favorite chapter to write and why?

After tackling the first Die Hard movie, I have a controversial opinion that I think Die Hard Two is better than Die Hard with a Vengeance. And I've spoke to a lot of different Bruce Willis die-hard fans, who will sometimes make the argument that Die Hard with a Vengeance is the best of all the movies, even better than the original—and I think that's ridiculous. I think a lot of it has to do with when you saw it. If it (Die Hard with a Vengeance) was your first Die Hard movie, if it was your introduction to the franchise, then maybe you end up liking it more.
So, instead of just giving Die Hard part two and Die-Hard part three their own chapters, I wanted to pit those two films against each other, and prove why I think Die Hard part two is the superior Die-Hard film. And these are the sections I'm going to use to break them down and compare and contrast them against each other. I had the most fun with that chapter.

4.Which chapter did you find challenging to write and why?

Probably the one about “TheBonfire of the Vanities”. That's a that's a colossal mistake on Bruce's part. But, the more I researched it—and it's been covered pretty wildly—the more I realized that although Bruce gave a really good performance in a movie, everything else was a little bit miscast. Tom Hanks was the wrong choice to play that role, Melanie Griffith was the wrong choice to play that part. Brian De Palma, the director, was the wrong guy to take on that project. It was a massively successful book, and Hollywood just thought they would figure out how to adapt it very easily, but some things work better on the page.

There was too much ground to cover in that chapter. I wanted to talk about why the movie failed. I wanted to write about the bigger picture, about how it was received. But then I also had to drill down and just say, “Well, what did this do for Bruce? You know, was it the right move for him at the time, did how much blowback Did he suffer? He probably got.” It was like the one, two punch of Hudson Hawk and The Bonfire of the Vanities. The film made him the butt of something like late night humor. But Bruce never really lost his luster. He was always a star. He could very easily go back to the action genre and do something like The Last Boy Scout or Striking Distance, and his audience was right back following him. So, he wasn't Teflon. He definitely took some criticism, but writing about The Bonfire the Vanities was pretty challenging. I wanted to find out what went wrong, and then to almost exonerate Bruce and say, “Hey, even though a lot of people made mistakes in this movie, maybe Bruce didn't make as many as people think he did, because I think he's pretty good in it.”

5.Your book clearly showed that you did extensive research on Bruce Willis’s career, was there any subject you wanted to add in the book, but for some reason, didn’t make it in the final draft?

I would have liked to have spoken to more directors. I got a chance to interview Quentin Tarantino, who worked with him on Pulp Fiction. I spoke to Rian Johnson, who worked with him on Looper. I spoke to M. Night Shyamalan, who worked with him on The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. They all had amazing things to say about Bruce. And maybe that would have been the case, maybe every act, maybe every director who worked with him would have had high praise for him, but a lot of directors were pretty hesitant to go on the record. Bruce is a very private guy. This is a very delicate subject with his illness. Nobody really wants to say anything, one way or the other, for fear of what's going to happen to him coming online. So, I would have preferred a few more interviews, but I did go into this project really feeling like I didn't want it to be interview-driven. I wanted it to be analysis-driven, where I really took the time to watch everything that was in his filmography and reach my own conclusions, and then if I needed a couple of stories told to fill in some of the gaps of the narrative, then I reached out to some of the directors that I know. But, maybe a few more directors I would have loved to get on the record.

6.In one word, how would you sum up your overall experience writing the book on Bruce Willis’ Legacy?

Daunting. Daunting is the one word I would use. It was a much bigger task than I anticipated going into it. I'd written two books prior to this point. The first book was about the release of Snyder cut movement, which was this fan-driven movement to get Zack Snyder's Justice League released. It was a little bit of like a breaking news story. I was kind of like following the events of it right up until the point where the movie actually did get released. So, the book had some timeliness to it. Then I decided I was going to write about Spider Man's Hollywood history. That book is called "With Great Power", and it covers 10 live action movies, the two animated films, tracing the history of all the people who worked on the Spider Man franchise, that's fine, still doable. And I love those movies, and I'm pretty versed in them. Bruce has 110 feature films, and it was like, “whoa, I'm what did I bite off here? How much time is this going to take?” Once you're in it, you realize you can't skip anything. You have to analyze all of the films that he made and try to figure out how you're going to fit them into the puzzle pieces that will form this book that you're writing. So, I'll go with daunting, but at the same time, I think for anybody out there who's interested in writing a book, you have to pick a topic that's going to be a broad interest to almost anybody. You could write a niche book about something that that is appealing to you, but if you don't have a large enough audience out there, it's not going to go very many places. It might satisfy the small audience that you're trying to reach. When I wrote about Bruce, I've realized that he has a global fan base, and they're responding pretty well to the book.

7.The Book-Inspired Movie Franchise “Die Hard” made Bruce Willis an international action movie star. Bruce had the opportunity to star in it because of the Moonlighting production delay. If Bruce didn’t star in this film, what other film do you think would have made him an international star?

That's really interesting. Maybe right after it (Die Hard), he did the “Look Who's Talking” movies, and he was known as the voice of the baby. The film showed off his comedic chops that would have propelled him a little bit farther. It's funny, I compare Bruce's career a little bit to Tom Hanks, who both were coming out of television at the same time. Tom Hanks had been doing Bosom Buddies while Bruce was doing Moonlighting. Tom Hanks did a couple of guest appearances on Family Ties. And when he got into films, he was doing straight comedies, Bachelor Party and Splash and movies like that, before people started to take him seriously. Bruce had to do Blind Date, and he did Sunset with James Garner. And then he wanted to do a couple more comedies, but Die Hard turned him into an action sensation. If Bruce didn't do Die Hard, I think he stays on a comedic trajectory. I think he has the type of career that maybe Bill Murray or Chevy Chase ended up having early. Bruce Willis could have been in Vacation, you know, Bruce Willis could have been in stripes, or Bruce Willis could have been a Ghostbuster. I think other projects that wanted to tap into him just being David Addison from Moonlighting would have surfaced. And I think he might have gone down a different career. It's just that Die Hard turned him into an action sensation. Everybody thought he was an action star, when really, he just wanted to be a character actor.

8.Which film do you think Bruce Willis should have won or at least been nominated for an Oscar?

Several. The Sixth Sense, without a doubt. In The Sixth Sense, everyone gets nominated. Tony Collette gets nominated, Haley Joel Osman, and they're both terrific, I don't say that they don't deserve it. M. Night gets nominated for screenplay, he gets nominated for Director, the picture gets nominated. And then Bruce doesn't. How can all those pieces of that movie fit and work and get Oscar nominations without him. I'm not even saying that he's like the heart and the core—I think Haley Joel Osmond is the heart and the core of the movie—but Bruce holds that entire film together. It's ridiculous to me that the academy didn't recognize him. Pulp Fiction is another one. Everyone in Pulp Fiction gets nominated, John Travolta, Sam Jackson, Uma Thurman, Quentin, writer, director picture. It's like people forget Bruce was even in it, and he held down a significant subplot in that movie. I think he deserved an Oscar nomination. And the last one is my favorite performance of his is 12 Monkeys. I think he's phenomenal in 12 Monkeys, which is a really heady sort of sci fi film, where throughout the course of the entire thing, you're unsure whether this man is a patient in a mental institute or somebody from the future who's being sent back to investigate a virus that might wipe out half the globe's population. You(viewer) have to be as confused as Bruce's character is, you're just as lost throughout the whole movie, and he grounds you in it. And of course, they give an Oscar nomination to Brad Pitt, who's chewing scenery and acting over the top, because that's what the academy likes to recognize. But Bruce is quiet, subdued, strong, and powerful, and he deserved the Oscar for that.


9.Bruce Willis is one of a kind, but in today’s Hollywood which actor or actress would you say has similar career moves to Bruce Willis?

Nobody. Currently nobody. There's a different breed of leading actor nowadays. It's Timothy Chalamet. It's Austin Butler. They're super pretty, they're talented, but they're not doing Bruce Willis stuff. The definition of an action star has changed. It's The Rock. It's Jason Statham. It's Vin Diesel. It's these guys who are bigger than the full gym body. Bruce was an everyman, regular guy. I think him, Harrison Ford, people like that who were like these believable everyday actors. I don't think that the industry is going to get away from that. I think eventually we'll come back around and find a couple of actors who also fit that mold. But, as of right now, the idea of a leading man is so exaggerated. You have to be larger than life, you have to be a superhero, in order to make a dent. Bruce wouldn't fly in that time, which is why, a little bit towards the end of his run, he was doing things like G.I. Joe Retaliation. He was doing the Red franchise. He was dipping into comic book and graphic novel adaptations, because that's what the parts were and he's so much better than that.

10.Which actor or actress do you think would benefit from reading your book to have similar success or a blue print that is similar to Bruce Willis’ career?

Austin Butler— Austin Butler could do he can do a lot. I've watched him do Elvis, and then he transitioned over to The Bike Riders. He's part of Dune. He's very malleable, he's very transformable. But I don't know if he's funny. You need to be funny, because Bruce was just sharp, but like when he walked into a room, he commanded it, but I'll still go with Austin Butler. I think that he's at the early start of his career. I think he could enjoy a career similar to what Bruce had, but I'll be really curious to see what choices he makes moving forward to see if he can break out of the mold that they're trying to force him into.

11.Are you planning on writing spiritual sequel, perhaps one that will focus on Bruce Willis’s former wife Demi Moore?

Right now, No. I'd like to leave that story for somebody else. I know that his wife, Emma hemming right now, who is taking care of him and doing a lot of stuff for his wellness, is going to write a book about their treatment, like the treatment plan that they have in place, and what it's been like to be a caretaker for somebody like him. I think that'd be a nice companion piece to the piece that I wrote, the book that I wrote is really just meant to work really well with a stack of Bruce Willis movies. I want people to be able to appreciate his career. I want people to be able to appreciate the work that he did. I want people to put my book down and go watch two or three Bruce Willis movies. I've had people tell me like, “Oh My God, I watched 12 Monkeys the other day because you talked about it in your book”. That's the greatest compliment in the world. People forget the number of movies that he's been in. There’s Oceans 12 in the CAMEO that he had, or The Whole Nine Yards where he was with Matthew Perry, or The Fifth Element, or Death Becomes Her. And all these other movies that get covered in the book. He's had such a wide-ranging career, and he showed off such tremendous range and talent that I just hope that the book continues to inspire people to watch his movies, and somebody can touch on his biographical stuff in another book.

12.If you were called to co-write a memoir for three Hollywood icon (besides Bruce Willis), who would they be?Oh, wow, that's a great question. Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks has had an incredible career. You would get to touch on so many different directors as well, too, that he's collaborated with over the years. Christopher Nolan. Nolan would be a really exciting one to dig into and to dig into his filmography. I think Jim Carrey. Jim Carrey would be a fascinating documentary or book to write about, because of his transitions from early comedy into the dramatic parts that he took on to now his artistic bent that he's trying to do. I think he'd be interesting as well, too.

13. Besides the Die Hard franchise, what are your top three Bruce Willis film?

Well, 12 Monkeys is definitely up there. Unbreakable is fantastic. I'm a comic book geek, and I think it's a really interesting spin on Comic book movies, and a way to get into that. And then I also love The Last Boy Scout. Last boy scout with a Shane Black script. Shane Black wrote Lethal Weapon as well too, which is another film that I'm a huge fan of. I like his chemistry with Damon Wayans a lot. It's kind of unapologetically 90s. It's kind of offensive, but it's got good action set pieces. It's over the top in the right way, and I think Bruce gives a really good performance as like a down-and-out detective who's trying to trying to stop these guys from taking over sports gambling in Los Angeles. So, The Last Boy Scout, Unbreakable, and 12 Monkeys.

13.Last question, if you were to meet Bruce Willis face-to-face what would you say to him?

I'd say, thank you... I'd say thank you. He doesn't need to hear anything about my opinions on anything. He's had a tremendous, tremendous career. I would just want him to know and to understand how important his work was to me and how entertaining I think that his films have been over the years. I know he dislikes press because press tries to pry into his personal life. And for a long time, he and Demi Moore were like the covers of all the tabloid magazines and all those gossip-brags were fascinated in his personal life. I have zero interest in any of that. I would love to thank him for 16 blocks and for Mortal Thoughts and for the Die Hard franchise, and John McClane in general, who I think is one of the most entertaining and fully formed characters that we've seen in the movie to date. So, more than anything, I would just like to tell him thank. And to let him know that there’s a global population out there that appreciate him for all he's done and loves his work.

Interview with Sean O’Connell, Author Of  'Bruce Willis: Celebrating The Cinematic Legacy Of An Unbreakable Hollywood Icon' (2024)
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