John McTiernan

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John McTiernan (2014)

John Campbell McTiernan, Jr. (born January 8, 1951 in Albany , New York ) is an American film director and producer of action films .

life and work

His father, John McTiernan Sr., was an opera singer and often had his son take on small roles in his plays. After finishing school, he studied film studies at the New York art school Juilliard School and then took a position at the Manhattan School of Music . He was a fellow of the American Film Institute .

He gained practical experience as a director of over 200 commercials before he filmed his own screenplay in 1986 with the fantasy horror film Nomads - Death from Nowhere . His next two films, Predator from 1987 and Die Hard from 1988, were huge commercial hits, cementing his reputation as a director of action films with big budget and rather simple characters. Both established long-lasting brands, the latter turning Bruce Willis from star to superstar. Another success followed in 1990 with the submarine thriller Hunt for Red October .

In 1992 he tried with the ecodrama Medicine Man - The Last Days of Eden to get rid of the reputation of making only rather shallow films for a mass audience. The film flopped at the box office and so McTiernan returned to action films the following year, but the time of great success was over.

During the shooting of the film The 13th Warrior , which is based on the book “Eaters Of The Dead” by star author Michael Crichton , the two men quarreled: The result is a film which was not completed by McTiernan but by Crichton. McTiernan's career was slowed considerably by the conflict with Crichton, which he himself admitted: "The only director whose career is not damaged by working with Michael Crichton is Steven Spielberg ," McTiernan said in a 1999 interview with Focus Online , " For everyone else who has worked with him over the past ten years, it has been a horrible experience. ”The previous collaboration with Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to have been similarly problematic in 1992 with regard to the unbalanced result Last Action Hero . With his vision of the film, the director was ultimately unable to prevail against Schwarzenegger, then at the peak of his career.

McTiernan has been married twice and has two children with his wife Kate Harrington.

The director's last film to date was released in 2003. In 2006, McTiernan was on trial for deliberately providing false information to the FBI: The US Federal Police were investigating an illegal wiretapping conducted by private detective Anthony Pellicano against film producer Charles Roven , which McTiernan is said to have commissioned. In September 2007, McTiernan was sentenced to four months in prison and a fine of $ 100,000. An appeals court overturned the ruling in 2008, but the prosecution expanded the lawsuit and resubmitted it in April 2009. As a result, he was sentenced on October 4, 2010 to one year in prison and a fine of $ 100,000 (€ 72,000). McTiernan's attorney announced that they would take action against the verdict again. After the verdict became final, McTiernan served his one-year prison sentence from April 3, 2013, initially in the Federal Prison Camp in Yankton and under house arrest from February 25, 2014.

cinemamovies

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b Seeßlen.
  2. ^ So too Seeßlen.
  3. ^ Jail for "Die Hard Director" in: 20 minutes from October 5, 2010
  4. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/die-hard-director-john-mctiernan-683407