Bruce Willis’ performance that impressed Quentin Tarantino

When Bruce Willis made the leap from TV star to big time in motion pictures in 1988 with Die Hard He seemed destined for a long career as a blue-collar rake never seen in the movies. He had Cary Grant’s incorrigibility and Gary Cooper’s two powers, but felt more accessible than either of them. Willis was not erudite, nor did he try to be. God is not. His characters tended to be gruff brainiacs with moral compasses that showed true north, men who made their fair share of mistakes and spent the average length of a feature film redeeming them by going after bad guys who sinned with impunity. He played with good intentions and *** that we could identify with and maybe look up to.

There was, however, another Willis who I think was even more admired (I use the past tense because, although he is still very much with us, he sadly retired from acting). He was a real star actor. He wanted to go beyond himself and play flawed people who found salvation without an MP5 machine gun. He wasn’t averse to the role of an abusive scumbag (as he was in Alan Rudolph’s Deadly Thoughts ), and he wasn’t afraid to take the third bill as an alcoholic disgrace of a big-budget risqué journalist, as Brian de Palma’s Bonfire of the Vanities. Willis wanted to stretch, but parts and/or designs didn’t always work out. In a number of cases, they were a complete failure. Fortunately, after taking the brunt of a few non-action roles in the early 1990s, Quentin Tarantino gave him the role of Butch Coolidge in Crime Scene. As a feisty boyarist driven by honor and birthright, Willis was reckless perfection. There’s no way during Butch’s underground odyssey you’d think he’d survive, but as we now know, people of his hardy breed make it through Tarantino’s films. They are winning.

A brash filmmaker like Tarantino could confidently, and even rightly, argue that Willis’ portrayal of Butch was the star’s finest hour on screen. But on the question of Sky Movies to name his favorite films between 1992 and 2009 (which, at the time of the interview, spanned his film career), Tarantino agreed to star Willis in a very unconventional superhero film.

If Bruce Willis hadn’t contractually loaned the film to Disney as compensation the collapse of the unfinished “Broadway Brawler”, it is very likely that M. Night Shyamalan would never have had the clout to make a movie of his ilk like Unbreakable. But Willis, signing on to play a dead man in The Sixth Sense (you’ve had so much time to see that movie, I don’t want to hear it), helped Shyamalan get the green light to create his story about a man who, as the sole survivor of a major train derailment discovers that he is a superhero.

In the aforementioned 2009 interview, Tarantino called Unbreakable “one of the masterpieces of our time.” He thought it was a “brilliant retelling of the Superman mythology” and convinced his former co-star Willis to be singled out as “magnificent” as David Dunne, saying it was “Willis’ best film performance he’s ever given”. While I’ve always felt that Shyamalan oddly undercuts the film’s central metaphor (that Dan’s abilities are derivative of his marriage, starting with him surviving a train wreck with only his wedding ring on). Willis can’t dispute the “greatness in this comic book movie with a partial aesthetic of Tarkovsky’s film. We live for movies like this, and seeing a star like Willis make them possible. He misses it so much.