“I had worked as a carpenter all through college so they put me with the carpenter crew. Far from “disintegrating”, as his wife told the Guardian in 2013, McTiernan says in some ways it was “great”. The prison operated on an “honour” system: if you went wandering, you were trusted to come back. Now 72, McTiernan, is happy to talk about his jail time. This week found him at the Neuchâtel International fantastic film festival in Switzerland, where he is on the jury for the festival’s international competition. ![]() It is now 20 years since he directed a film, the badly received action-thriller Basic starring John Travolta in 2003, and far longer than that since his 1990s heyday. McTiernan’s stint in jail represented a remarkable fall from grace for a director who had been Hollywood A-list after he left prison, he filed for bankruptcy. He was convicted of lying to the FBI as part of the prosecution of private detective Anthony Pellicano for illegal wiretapping McTiernan was accused of hiring Pellicano to tap the phones of Charles Roven, the producer of the 2002 film Rollerball, with whom he was in dispute. McTiernan served 10 months in Yankton, South Dakota, between April 2013 and February 2014, before being released to house arrest for the rest of his sentence. The only thing that was a little weird was that the locals, if they saw you on a crosswalk, would speed up and try to hit you.” ![]() “It was a former college campus in the upper midwest, no bars, no barbed wire, nothing. Prison, says John McTiernan, director of Die Hard, Predator and The Hunt for Red October, wasn’t as tough as he expected.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |