JOHN MEETS HANS AND THE NATIONAL ANTHEM

BILL HADER on DIE HARD and THE NAKED GUN

I have to pick two. Both took place in 1988, when I was ten. First was when my dad took me to see Die Hard. It was a packed theatre. And we were all on board with the movie from the beginning. And then came the scene when John Mcclane comes across Hans Gruber checking the explosives. Hans jumps down from the explosives and lands to find himself at Mcclane’s bare feet. He looks up and Mcclane has a machine gun in his face. The whole audience gasped. Then... Hans changes his accent and cries, “Oh! Please, God, no! You’re one of them!” The entire place went nuts. “NO!” “It’s him!” “Shoot him, Bruce!” Then Mcclane comforts him. And I remember my dad saying, “Oh, that’s great!” Up to that point, I’d had the experience of jump-scares or thrilling action sequences getting a huge response. But never from something like this. Every time I see the movie I get a little jolt from that moment.

The other is when Leslie Nielsen sings The Star-spangled Banner in The Naked Gun. It was one of the biggest laughs I’d ever heard in a theatre, maybe the biggest. And the laugh was on two levels: one was that Frank Drebin thought he could pose as the great opera singer Enrico Pallazzo and sing ‘Star-spangled Banner’ without fully remembering the lyrics. But the reason the laugh kept growing and growing in the theatre was that NO AMERICAN KNOWS THE LYRICS. We realised in that moment that we were all Frank Drebin! By the time we got to Drebin breakdancing as the umpire, we were done. The place was going insane. Only time in my life where I saw people legit fall in the aisles.