Steven E. de Souza

With the holidays here, thoughts naturally turn to the true meaning of Christmas: how a grizzled New York cop can save a bunch of hostages – including his estranged wife – from terrorists who’ve taken over a Los Angeles skyscraper. But what about the films that cinemas’s finest action movie inspired? In the spirit of the season, we asked Die Hard screenwriter Steven E de Souza to separate the true McClanes from the McLames... ‘Long before the Die Hard Singularity™ occurred on October 23, 2000 – the day a producer asked me to write a script they described as ‘Die Hard… in a building!’ – the ‘Die Hard in a [blank]’ has come to mean a subgenre of film in which a lone underdog hero fights overwhelming odds in a confined space, with time running out and innocent lives in the balance: in short, your classic three Aristotelian Unities of Time, Place, and Action, as promulgated in 1514 by Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478–1550) when he wrote: ‘Molti esplosioni e bang bang significano molti profitti e fortuna!’ By dint of my screenwriting services on the first two Die Hards, Time Out has asked me to weigh on the ‘Die Hard-iness’ of some of the better-known examples.  In keeping with the assignment, they will be graded on a scale of 1-5 Twinkies (Sergeant Al Powell’s favourite snack).  To avoid any presumption of bias, I will be judging on originality of plot, hero, villain, and venue, rather than how well they stack up to the admittedly impossible standard set by my own two ventures into th