How Die Hard’s Nakatomi Plaza became cinema’s most iconic skyscraper  

With action classic Die Hard celebrating its 35^th anniversary this year, Thomas Hobbs turns the clock back to 1988 and asks what made the Nakatomi Plaza such a memorable film location  

Unsure about the box office draw of its unproven lead man Bruce Willis, 20^th Century Fox originally made the bold decision to scrap John McClane from the poster for Die Hard, opting instead for artwork that showcased the Nakatomi Tower, the postmodern Los Angeles skyscraper that sits at the film’s fiery core. The sweaty McClane, and his trademark bloody vest, were only added to the poster at the last minute after preview audiences reacted so rapturously to Willis’s iconic catchphrase: “Yippee Ki-Yay motherf***er!” that the studio realised it had a bona fide star on its hands.

Die Hard was – of course – a rip-roaring success. Boasting a brilliant ensemble cast ranging from Alan Rickman’s slithery East German terrorist, Hans Gruber, to Reginald VelJohnson’s Sgt. Al Powell, with his alarming Twinkie habit, and, of course, Willis’s wise-cracking off-duty NYPD cop McClane, it made more than $120m at the box office, earned four sequels and established Willis as the action genre’s most bankable and relatable action hero.

It remains a seminal action movie, and set during the festive season, an unlikely Christmas fixture. Indeed, every December, there are dinner table debates about whether it should be considered a Christmas movie and the best line other than “Yippee Ki-Yay… “ (my personal favourite is: “All the terrorists in the world and I’ve got to kill the one with feet smaller than my sister” is a personal favourite).

However, the film’s enduring appeal is not just down to a brilliant cast and storyline (McClane saving the day after terrorists storm the Japanese Nakatomi Corporation’s Christmas party and try to steel $640m in bonds). It is also down to the role played by its biggest star in literal terms: the 34-storey, 493 foot skyscraper Nakatomi Tower.

“Nakatomi Tower became instantly iconic as a movie location,” says Nick de Semlyen, the editor of Empire Magazine and author of The Last Action Heroes. “That’s largely down to how much creative carnage the makers of Die Hard managed to eke out of it. John McClane can’t get out the building, but can only race up and down, facing a mass of industrial perils, from a nightmarish air-vent system to shards of glass strewn across the 33^rd floor.”

The reason the film’s floor-to-floor chaos looks so raw and visceral is that director John McTiernan was allowed to shoot inside a real skyscraper, more specifically 20^th Century Fox’s very own Fox Plaza, now known as 2121 Avenue of the Stars.

The skyscraper was designed by the prolific LA modernist architect, William Pereira, in collaboration with two of his young colleagues, Scott Johnson and Bill Fain. It would occupy a site in Century City, about 10 miles west of Downtown LA, and was envisaged by the film studio as a towering new headquarters that symbolised the gigantic role Fox would go on to play in Hollywood throughout the 1990s. Yet, as it neared its official opening, the premises remained empty and the studio, perhaps wanting to cut costs, allowed McTiernan to film there exclusively.

Whether through aerial shots of the imposing church-like spire on the roof of Fox Plaza or simply by prioritising scenes that involved air conditioning air ducts, elevator shafts and unfinished floors, McTiernan makes dramatic use of just about every inch of the building’s interiors and exteriors. He doesn’t just throw McClane off the roof of the building with a fireman’s hose lead attached to his waist, he also makes him crawl through its innards, with this three-dimensional approach making the viewer feel a tangible connection to all the shiny surroundings. There’s an urban legend that the gunfire and explosions emanating from inside the tower during filming were actually so powerful that they could be heard across LA.

Remembered as much for its (deliberate?) continuity issues as action sequences, the film is visually playful in other ways.

“My favourite scene is when Hans Gruber, while in [Nakatomi Corporation boss] Takagi’s office, pauses to admire a model of a bridge on a tabletop,” says Christopher Hawthorne, former architectural critic at the Los Angeles Times and current Yale lecturer. “That bridge is a design by Frank Lloyd Wright, from the 1950s, for San Francisco Bay. It was never built. It’s a brief moment but a sign that the filmmakers were very attuned to architecture and design.”

Hawthorne argues that a big part of Fox Plaza’s appeal is, paradoxically, just how unspectacular it looks. “Fox Plaza is one of those late-modern skyscrapers whose streamlined form and lack of historical ornament give it a placeless look. It could be anywhere,” he adds. “That kind of anonymous architecture is always appealing to location scouts and movie directors, because they often need LA to stand in for somewhere else.”

However, for Empire’s de Semlyen, the glistening, slight corporate tackiness of the skyscraper (which later housed an office for Ronald Reagan) acts as a perfect narrative device, its slick modernism juxtaposing with the working class values of McClane, a man so obviously irritated by the neon sunsets of Tinseltown and longing for a return back to the simple pleasures of the Big Apple. “It works so beautifully because these corporate environs are the exact opposite of blue-collar New York cop McClane, who’s befuddled by the Nakatomi computer system and later shows his contempt for technology by turning a CRT monitor into a bomb.”

In the current era of superheroes, CGI and green screen, Die Hard’s lo-tech physicality and on-location scenes look even more striking today. “I love the slow, sweaty, claustrophobic stuff where McClane is wriggling through the Nakatomi air-vents: for my money, it’s action director John McTiernan at his absolute best,” says de Semlyen. “The scene where McClane plummets a few feet down a seemingly endless ventilation shaft, before frantically gripping onto a ledge by his fingertips, is pure cinema.”

The Fox Plaza also makes an appearance in 1999’s Fight Club, where it’s once again the subject of stylish cinematic destruction.

But the “Nakatomi effect” ripples much further, with single-location action movies popping up just about everywhere in the wake of Die Hard. “There’s Under Siege (a battleship), Sudden Death (an ice-rink) and Toy Soldiers (a school),” de Semlyen says. “Die Hard’ director John McTiernan likes to joke that he once heard a pitch for “Die Hard in a building”. That exact movie came to be not once but twice, in two films called Skyscraper — one starring Anna Nicole Smith, the other Dwayne Johnson. Neither is good.”

So, what about the Fox Plaza today? It is currently owned by the Irvine Company, a private organisation focused on real estate development, and is used as a traditional office, with lots of space for its architects to experiment with new designs.

When I visited Los Angeles last year and visited Fox Plaza as a film nerd with a car rental, I was struck by the building’s pink-tinged granite and splintered façade, which seemed to bounce light across the skyline. It was much nicer in reality than in the photos, more than justifying design critic Aaron Betsky’s description of it as “a kind of rampart protecting Century City,” but it was also hard not to look up without mentally bracing yourself to see Gruber flying out a window.

“It is impossible when travelling through Century City not to point up at Fox Plaza and say: “We’re gonna need some more FBI guys, I guess,” agrees de Semlyen. “It’s no exaggeration to say that Die Hard changed everything, inspiring a zillion inferior imitations. Fox Plaza is a vertical island in a sea of urban sprawl. But by using it, Die Hard gave us the most exhilarating skyscraper in movie history.”

And one of the most exhilarating movies, too.