You may know John McTiernan as the director of such beloved action movie classics as 1988’s Die Hard and the thrilling sci-fi movie Predator from the previous year. However, did you also know about the filmmaker’s more infamous reputation as a convicted criminal?
Don’t worry. It’s not like he tried to steal from an L.A. skyscraper by orchestrating a deadly hostage situation on Christmas Eve or anything like that. Yet, he was found guilty of some pretty shady activity that not only caused him to be ostracized from Hollywood but also from society as an incarcerated individual for a while. So, what could the somewhat forgotten director of the ‘80s hits listed above have done to wind up in this situation? Well, it actually involves a movie that most would agree is certainly not worth going to jail for.
The Story Begins With A Movie Called Rollerball
worst cinematic remakes ever made, having earned a tragic 3% on Rotten Tomatoes with critics condemning its incoherent editing, a storyline that lacks focus, and a complete ignorance of the original film’s fascinating satirical elements. It was not a hit at the box office either, raking in roughly $25.9 million worldwide on a budget of $70 million, according to Box Office Mojo.
This could have easily been considered a mere smudge on the filmography of McTiernan, who followed it up the next year with a movie about military training called Basic, and that would have been the end of the story. However, just a few years later, new scandalous information related to Rollerball came to light.
The Guardian recalls, John McTiernan had a dispute with Rollerball’s producer, Charles Roven, over how the film should be made. The filmmaker apparently took these disagreements to heart and, allegedly, decided to go to unlawful measures to do something about it.
In 2000, he reportedly hired a private investigator and notorious Hollywood fixer named Anthony Pellicano to wiretap Roven’s conversations to find instances where Roven made negative remarks about the studio executives or said things to others that were inconsistent with what he said to the studio, as detailed in the trial records. Just six years later, a federal investigation into the matter took place. However, it was not the illegal wiretapping per se that forced McTiernan to appear in court.
Variety, in February 2006, the FBI questioned John McTiernan about hiring Anthony Pellicano to wiretap Charles Roven’s phone conversations, and he replied that he had no knowledge of the situation. However, the FBI uncovered a conversation between him and Pellicano discussing the wiretapping assignment, which the private investigator had recorded himself. Thus, the filmmaker was subsequently charged with making false statements to a federal investigator the following April.
Seven years later, he ultimately surrendered to a 12-month sentence. On April 3, 2013, he was sent to the minimum-security Federal Prison Camp in Yankton, South Dakota, and, during his stay, received support from Hollywood stars like Samuel L. Jackson, whom he worked with on Die Hard with a Vengeance in 1995 and Basic, and Alec Baldwin, who played Jack Ryan in 1990’s The Hunt for Red October, which McTiernan also helmed. According to the BBC, McTiernan would be released from the facility the following February and was ordered to serve the remainder of his sentence under house arrest at his Wyoming home.
Robert Downey Jr. can serve 15 months in prison only to come back with “the greatest second act ever,” as his friend Anthony Michael Hall has described it, so can the director of one of the most beloved Christmas movies ever made (and, yes, I am talking about Die Hard, whether or not you agree it is a holiday classic).
McTiernan told Empire in 2014 that, while serving his prison sentence, he penned a potential sequel to his 1999 version of The Thomas Crown Affair, but that has yet to see the light of day. He also had plans to make a sci-fi epic called Taut Ceci Foxtrot with Academy Award nominees Uma Thurman and Laurence Fishburne, but, in late 2020, the filmmaker told Empire (via SyFy) that circumstances related to COVID stalled the project before it was ultimately scrapped two years later, according to Filmofilia. In March 2025, he shared with Forbes that he has three or four ideas for a new directorial effort in mind, but cannot say for sure if or when the now 74-year-old will make them.
Following John McTiernan’s legal troubles and John McClane actor Bruce Willis’ recent retirement in 2022 due to his diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia, the Die Hard movies seem to have taken on an almost bittersweet reputation. All in all, I have always admired McTiernan as an artist, especially when you consider how the original Die Hard was still being written as principal photography was taking place – there was an even argument about McClane’s signature catchphrase – and, yet, he managed to whip it into a bona fide classic with a only a few things that don’t make a lot of sense. I hope to see him return eventually with something that blows us to the back of the theater once again.