Don’t expect John McTiernan to be waiting in line for the next Marvel movie. The director best known for “Predator” and “Die Hard” was recently interviewed by Premiere France about his first film more than in a decade as well as the current state of the action genre. Den of Geek has translated excerpts of his conversation, with lines like “I hate the majority of [major studio] films for political reasons, I can’t really watch them. I’m annoyed the second they start” being typical of his thoughts on contemporary blockbusters.
Captain America in particular seems to irk the filmmaker. “The cult of American hyper-masculinity is one of the worst things to have happened to the world during the last 50 years,” he says. “Hundreds of thousands of people have died because of this idiotic delusion. So how is it possible to watch a film called ‘Captain America?!’”
READ MORE: Watch: 1-Hour Documentary ‘If It Bleeds We Can Kill It’ On John McTiernan’s ‘Predator’
Asked whether he believes the studios are “poisoning action cinema with their ideologies,” McTiernan is just as explicit: “All they’re making are comic book adaptations. There’s action but no human beings, they’re films made by fascists,” he says. “They’re making all the kids in the world think that they’ll never be important enough to have a film made about their life. And it’s a unique moment in the history of cinema, it didn’t used to be like this. A kid used to be able to learn how a man or a woman should act by watching films. Morals. Comics make heroes for businesses.”
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