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" Published in the June/July 2012 issue Five tiny pears on the tray in front of Bruce Willis. A couple of bottles of water, too. And these five pears. A setup from the hotel. Really small pears, small enough that all five pears would equal the bulk of one really hefty Bartlett from the Piggly Wiggly. He fusses with them throughout the conversation. He eats them each and all, doesn&amp;#039;t offer to share. With a lot of time in between each one. Five times he voids his bladder. Five urinations over a little more than two hours. The bathroom is at the other end of the hotel suite. From the moment he excuses himself to the one where he sits back down again to talk about his movies, Bruce Willis stares into the palm of his hand, texting someone. This pattern inadvertently becomes the structure of the afternoon, as the subject changes every time he returns. It&amp;#039;s fair to think the act of excusing himself, of having a pee, might be masking his opportunity to communicate with his wife, the model Emma Heming, who is out-to-here pregnant at this moment.  &amp;quot;All I want right now,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;is to be with her, to stare at her belly.&amp;quot; When he sits back down after the first urination, Willis begins again in earnest with the business of his life \u2014 assessing the upcoming Bruce Willis summer box-office deluge that might be his biggest ever, unraveling his delight in fatherhood, asserting and reasserting that he is simply happy and that he will not advertise any other part of himself or his life. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m happy every day,&amp;quot; he says. This he repeats many times, as if to assert that there&amp;#039;s no conflict in him and thus no story. It might be five times. Maybe more. Also fair to note: When he returns each time, the phone disappears. He&amp;#039;s all business. And yes, five movies this year. Like any movie star \u2014 and if Bruce Willis isn&amp;#039;t, who is? \u2014 at any given time, he&amp;#039;s got five features in the can: Wes Anderson&amp;#039;s Moonrise Kingdom, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, The Expendables 2,The Cold Light of Day with Sigourney Weaver, and Rian Johnson&amp;#039;s highly anticipated Looper, a return for Willis to visionary science fiction. Next year? The fifth Die Hard, which began shooting this spring. Five times this afternoon he gives the Bruce Willis stare, hard and scaly, eyes narrowing, stinging out a sigh without a hint of an inhale, as if pained by the depths of the dumbness of it all. He does not laugh, not audibly. But he quite often smiles the Bruce Willis half-smirk, lips pinched together, his iconic twist-screw grin. Bruce Willis knows when he&amp;#039;s giving the Bruce Willis treatment, too, showing exactly what he thinks of his agenda for this afternoon. And five rules of fatherhood. That&amp;#039;s what Bruce Willis comes up with in the end. At fifty-seven, he&amp;#039;s been a father three times already, with a grown-up set of daughters to show for it. He&amp;#039;s ten days from the birth of his fourth. He probably has more rules. Rules matter, after all. But in the end, Bruce Willis settles on five. Before the first urination, he tells me about his morning, offering me a window into his conflict-free, drama-starved daily life. Up at 8:30. In the kitchen, he eats eggs. &amp;quot;Eggs and spinach,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Always eggs.&amp;quot; He then twists his arms around his wife, whom he will text throughout the day. He steps around and between the contractors, there to build out for the baby, filling his hallways with their neatly trimmed-up cans of paint, buckets of joint compound, weirdly pristine drop cloths. He climbs in the car and drives to the gym. Contractors. &amp;quot;Those guys have been promising to be finished for weeks now,&amp;quot; Willis says. He will throw them out when he gets home. Hurry up. Life is about to change. He is a preparer, a controller, a captain. After the gym, he pauses to consider what he will say in this interview. He is that considered, that deliberate. &amp;quot;I had to think about what I won&amp;#039;t say,&amp;quot; he says in the hotel, &amp;quot;as much as considering what I think is important about the work of these movies.&amp;quot; It was not always so \u2014 the control, the deliberation. Twenty-five years ago, Willis stacked movie upon movie, so the list he left behind for a while, the path he created, looked haphazard: Blake Edwards&amp;#039;s Sunset, Hudson Hawk, The Last Boy Scout, all of them featuring lippy, leering, dopey heroes who slipped out of trouble with a ready-made set of taglines. Only John McClane, the perpetually off-duty cop, mumbling his own smart-ass narrative arc, arm-swung from the elevator cables he rode, stood out among these guys. Fact is, McClane, that patchwork of taglines, still lives \u2014 and soon will again. Were such decisions up to him, he says, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d call it what it is: Die Hard 5.&amp;quot; But he gets no say, so this time John McClane will live through A Good Day to Die Hard, which sounds like a Walmart sales motto for Kling-ons. No matter, he says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m glad to have John McClane. There is no turmoil about it for me. I eschew turmoil. I just try to go to work, and concentrate on coming home to my girls.&amp;quot; If the Die Hard rubric were the heart of it all, then Willis might really be an expendable. But in the years following the second Die Hard, Willis unquietly notched Pulp Fiction, Nobody&amp;#039;s Fool, 12 Monkeys, The Fifth Element, The Sixth Sense, The Story of Us, The Kid, Unbreakable, Sin City, Alpha Dog,Lucky Number Slevin. Sure, there were stinkers here and there \u2014 Perfect Stranger, 16 Blocks. But it became apparent during that string of quality that Willis is hyperconscious of what makes a good story, has a shrewd eye for people who know how to direct, and knows better than anyone what connects one of his works to the next. A dozen years&amp;#039; worth of demonstrated ball sack, playing characters who always seem utterly spun at the time their story reaches the audience \u2014 lost in time, destiny, culture, self \u2014 bee-stung everymen, hopelessly beyond the rescue of a simple McClane-esque smirk.  John McClane, first played by the childless Willis, 1988, stood alone. Many years later, Willis, deep into fatherhood, located himself by playing solitary men \u2014 several of whom, it should not go unnoticed, rely on relentlessly trustful children to guide them to rescue.  The second urination follows closely on the heels of the first. No more than a half hour between them. When he returns, he outlines what he prepared to say, which \u2014 of course \u2014 becomes his way of saying it. As he drove around town this morning, Willis rehearsed. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t have an ax to grind,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t have anything I want to say. I might have gone off once. I might have started in \u2014 Hollywood! With the &amp;#039;tough town, tough business, tough life.&amp;#039; Generating a little context for me and my turmoil. But I don&amp;#039;t have a tough life. I know that.&amp;quot; He&amp;#039;s speaking in a level voice, as if he were an FM radio tone, his dial set low, say 3.5, giving nothing away. So, for example, on the way to the gym, down some L. A.-canyon tumble, in this act of preparation, he says to himself what he will say once again in the celebrity interview in the hotel that very afternoon: &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m happy. Actively happy. I eschew turmoil.&amp;quot; This is not a discussion, of course. This is the Willis party line. What he will discuss is work. Which, when you think about it, is generally what men talk about most. He&amp;#039;s proud of his work in Moonrise Kingdom. He&amp;#039;s surprisingly great therein, although he claims he&amp;#039;s not an actor. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think I&amp;#039;m very good at it,&amp;quot; he says of acting. &amp;quot;But I like doing it, and a guy like Wes, even he&amp;#039;d say this movie was outside the body of his past work. And that was me. So I listened to what he was saying, and we got the work done.&amp;quot; As a sheriff and a kind of childless father, Willis plays the first-ever full-blown-adult Wes Anderson character to possess a true moral compass, one stripped of eccentricity, contrivance, fetish. Likable and unself-conscious, Willis quietly out-acts Anderson&amp;#039;s usual stable of pajama-wearing accents, unclipping real human kindness from the sherbet palette of the film, treating said kindness without pride, like something you might find in a desk drawer. &amp;quot;Storyteller,&amp;quot; he says of Anderson. &amp;quot;The movie is a kind of eternal children&amp;#039;s story. The kids adventure, the adults worry. But it&amp;#039;s a brand-new creation, and it felt very unusual to me.&amp;quot;  The Expendables 2 he will describe as an assembly of &amp;quot;old friends.&amp;quot; He, Schwarzenegger, and Stallone, promenading around an airport terminal in [Croatia? Can&amp;#039;t hear him], through a steaming kettle of hot shells. Like hell, this sounds. A soundstage, ankle-deep in heat. &amp;quot;This kind of thing is inordinately difficult, fun in an inexplicable way,&amp;quot; Willis says. He knows he&amp;#039;s got a reputation as a gun enthusiast. He guards against any kind of enthusiasm during the interview \u2014 in fact, he reminds himself in his preparations to do so. Without segue, unprompted, he&amp;#039;s mouthing a caveat about the movie: &amp;quot;And safety first, yes. So that&amp;#039;s good. It&amp;#039;s always dangerous. But really ... &amp;quot; He squints when he says this one word, as if he once owned it: &amp;quot;fun.&amp;quot; In his car and in the interview, Willis avoids characterizing G.I. Joe: Retaliation. Probably because it&amp;#039;s about retaliation, and, well, G.I. Joe. He hopscotches a question about it, calling it only a &amp;quot;mixture of genres,&amp;quot; comparing it to 2010&amp;#039;s Red, the tale of fossilized CIA agents bit in the ass by their own retirement. &amp;quot;We were really trying to mix things up there \u2014 comedy, action, romance,&amp;quot; he says of the older movie. &amp;quot;We kept thinking one of these elements is going to disappear. But they all held up. We&amp;#039;re making another one this fall.&amp;quot; A sequel? Ideas for a title roll forth: Redder. Red Again. Green. Willis doesn&amp;#039;t bite. It&amp;#039;s not a sequel. &amp;quot;I got into the business before there ever were such things,&amp;quot; he says, almost reminiscing. &amp;quot;We just said &amp;#039;Let&amp;#039;s make another one.&amp;#039; We did that with Die Hard. &amp;#039;Let&amp;#039;s make another John McClane movie.&amp;#039; Now they don&amp;#039;t want to make a movie unless there are two sequels ready to go.&amp;quot; He pauses, considers. Perhaps he&amp;#039;s accessing the rehearsal from earlier, in the car. &amp;quot;And business being what it is,&amp;quot; he states, &amp;quot;that&amp;#039;s probably exactly how they should look at it.&amp;quot; He really wants to talk about Looper, the tale of a time-traveling corporate assassin sent back in time to meet, for lack of a better word (and avoiding a spoiler), his maker. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s better than anything I&amp;#039;ve ever done,&amp;quot; he matter-of-facts, as he cuts up the second pear. He legitimately likes the story, the product, the director. &amp;quot;Rian did an amazing thing. He conceived an original story. He wrote it, sold it, stuck with it, directed it, and finished it,&amp;quot; Willis says. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s just tough to do in this town. Someone always weasels into the process. That didn&amp;#039;t happen here. And if he never did anything else except that Herculean effort, he&amp;#039;d have made it in the business. Amazing. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s more than an original story. It&amp;#039;s a story people are going to talk about, and see twice. And argue about. I was arguing with myself about the story when I read it the first time. That&amp;#039;s all Rian Johnson, beginning to end. Great, great director.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s after the third urination, during the fourth pear, when Willis is asked to describe the morning \u2014 the house, the workout, the drive, the return to warn the contractors to hurry the f up. &amp;quot;Ordinary,&amp;quot; he says.  Normalcy can be revealing, he is told.  This provokes the first Bruce Willis stare down. A do-you-think-I-don&amp;#039;t-know-what-you&amp;#039;re-doing scowl, which softens when he is peppered with simple questions.  What time did you get up? 8:30. I went to bed at 1:00. My wife was up already. Was the room light? Sure. A lot of windows? One wall, all windows. What direction do they face? West. So we get the sunset. Dreams? Yeah. Shave? I went to bed at 1:00. Then what? Did you eat? Eggs. Eggs and spinach. Always eggs. Give me one detail. Getting up, going to work. That&amp;#039;s it. I spent some time preparing to speak to you. Willis details nothing about the workout, calling it only &amp;quot;the gym.&amp;quot; He&amp;#039;s going back at 4:00. The gym. It&amp;#039;s not a requirement. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s just me,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m coming off a phase where I allowed myself baked goods. I sought them out. I did not hold back on baked goods. So, the gym.&amp;quot; But it is a requirement, of course, though unstated by the man himself as such. &amp;quot;The day this job gets tough will be the day I can&amp;#039;t run. The day I can&amp;#039;t move quickly or knock somebody out \u2014 at least look like I knocked somebody out, convincingly. There is a limit. An end point. It&amp;#039;s mostly physical. So, the gym.&amp;quot;  The fourth urination follows. He returns, walking around the large hotel bed \u2014 it&amp;#039;s a nice Beverly Hills hotel, but the furniture is drabber than you&amp;#039;d think \u2014 phone in hand, gets his balls broken for having a small bladder, ticks out a laugh and says, &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t judge.&amp;quot; Why so much preparation for today? Why so little apparent fun in talking about his life, his work, the people he loves? This brings on the second Willis stare \u2014 eyes narrowed, brow wrinkled. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve been through enough of these,&amp;quot; he says. Just that \u2014 enough of these, not &amp;quot;enough of these to know.&amp;quot; Enough of these. Then he explains: &amp;quot;I get cranked up, I start talking about Hollywood and what&amp;#039;s wrong with what. Or politics. I might start in on Mitt Romney.&amp;quot; Romney? And with that one simple follow-up, Willis gets mildly cranked up. &amp;quot;Yeah, Romney. He&amp;#039;s just such a disappointment, an embarrassment. Chin up, hair up. He&amp;#039;s just one of those guys, one of those guys who says he&amp;#039;s going to change everything,&amp;quot; he is saying. &amp;quot;And he&amp;#039;ll get in there, and they&amp;#039;ll smile at him and introduce themselves: &amp;#039;We&amp;#039;re Congress, we make sure nothing changes.&amp;#039; He won&amp;#039;t do it. He can&amp;#039;t. Everybody wants to be Barack Obama. And what did he change?&amp;quot;  You think Romney&amp;#039;ll win? &amp;quot;No. Nah. I don&amp;#039;t really care.&amp;quot; Now Willis, who publicly backed the first Bush in his run against Clinton, gets wound up on the Republican candidate. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s just the Dash Riprock of the Republican party.&amp;quot; Then he laughs out of the corner of his mouth, leaning into his stare. Just like the old smart-ass Bruce Willis. This might be called the third Bruce Willis stare. Bruce Willis is not who he was once. He speaks cryptically about his years in New York, where he tended bar, looked for work, lived hard. He images the year in sentence fragments, without much good-old-days relish. Particular and metaphoric, the hint of mortality, the ghost of immortality. &amp;quot;There was a lot of dancing in &amp;#039;76, &amp;#039;78, in the &amp;#039;80s. A lot of dancing. The burn years. A lot of dancing. And for a while, working fit in with all that. Moonlighting \u2014 that wasn&amp;#039;t acting. It was people telling me &amp;#039;Let&amp;#039;s create a character who is you, so you can play him the way you are. The guy you are at night.&amp;#039; It was fun. Fun. It wasn&amp;#039;t tough, although I claimed it was. Maybe I made it that way. People wanted to assume I was fun. Like hardcore fun.&amp;quot; A pause. &amp;quot;I had no thought of death back then,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;None whatsoever.&amp;quot;  A young man&amp;#039;s thing. Willis nods, leans forward, and starts in on the final pear. He looks pleased. &amp;quot;First time I thought of death was when I saw my first daughter come out.&amp;quot; Cool revelation. A father&amp;#039;s lesson. Still, the story makes it seem as if the fun ended there. He isn&amp;#039;t having much fun now, at this moment. He is tolerating it. Where is the fun? &amp;quot;Now I&amp;#039;m fun, just with fewer people. I&amp;#039;m in love with my wife and my kids. I require very little. Friends come over, the kids come over when they can. We eat dinner. And I&amp;#039;m happy to play along with their momentum. I save it for them. This is it.&amp;quot; He&amp;#039;s got a cheek full of pear, and a cloth napkin in his hand. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m happy. This is how I&amp;#039;m doing. That&amp;#039;s my fun.&amp;quot; There&amp;#039;s the question he might expect: Which of your movies is your favorite? To which he answers: &amp;quot;I like a little movie I did in the early nineties called Mortal Thoughts. The part was hardly written, but I learned a lot making it. No one remembers it.&amp;quot; Followed by a question he might not: Is there anything you want? Again Willis falls back on the mantra of his own completion: &amp;quot;Got it.&amp;quot;?Is there anything you miss? This brings pause, at least. &amp;quot;Every once in a while I want to go to a diner. I want to go to Junior&amp;#039;s. Or Nate &amp;#039;n Al&amp;#039;s. A good, cheap diner. That&amp;#039;s an East Coast thing. Like the rice pudding in New York. So good. Only in diners. I search for it here, but it&amp;#039;s not the same. Though there&amp;#039;s a place on Fairfax. I can&amp;#039;t think of the name.&amp;quot; He chews for a second. &amp;quot;Good rice pudding. Very good.&amp;quot; He winces down on memory then, holds his hand out finger to thumb, as if pulling some unseen thread in the air: &amp;quot;My Aunt Helen used to make these big pans of rice pudding, leave them sitting around in the fridge,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I dream about those pans.&amp;quot; Then he corrects himself, pinching two fingers in the air in front of him. &amp;quot;She was my dad&amp;#039;s Aunt Helen, actually. After that, it was always out to the truck stop, get some rice pudding.&amp;quot; The suggestion is made: Let&amp;#039;s go to the place on Fairfax. We can still get rice pudding. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s the part I&amp;#039;m trying to avoid, the performance of this,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;People will say, &amp;#039;Look, now he&amp;#039;s eating his eggs. Look, now he&amp;#039;s leaving a tip.&amp;#039; Who cares? That&amp;#039;s why we&amp;#039;re not at a diner.&amp;quot; You know what? He&amp;#039;s right. &amp;quot;Willis blames all thepeeing on a long morning of fruit juice. He worries about the sugar. In the news that morning, there was mention of the possibility of taxing sugar. Willis hadn&amp;#039;t heard. More to the point, the idea seems to sicken him. This is the moment of the final Bruce Willis stare down. He winds a glare up in a smirk and a headshake; it&amp;#039;s too dumb to consider.  &amp;quot;Yeah, good luck with that,&amp;quot; he says.  The look is wilting and unfun. So the conversation turns to the unborn baby. The question here, thoughtless perhaps \u2014 Boy or girl, do you know? \u2014 proves perilous, and extends the glare. &amp;quot;We know that it&amp;#039;s going to happen,&amp;quot; Willis answers.  Maybe it&amp;#039;s the questions, but these answers clamp down enough that there&amp;#039;s a moment of silence then. The pears are gone.  So we wait it out.  &amp;quot;Sometimes I have to resist the urge to speak,&amp;quot; Willis says. &amp;quot;I learned it from dealing with my kids. That&amp;#039;s my number-one rule.&amp;quot; Rule in life? &amp;quot;It applies in life,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;But it&amp;#039;s more about being a father. I&amp;#039;d rather hear what they have to say. You learn more by listening. And this stuff is just a matter of not equating drama with actions that will help them. Teach them to shun drama.&amp;quot;  When asked for another rule of fatherhood, Willis leans back, rubs his hand on the surface of his freshly shaved dome, and, perhaps for the first time \u2014 after two hours, five pears, five glares, all those movies \u2014 he considers an answer right there on the spot. He takes a beat. &amp;quot;Take responsibility for when you are wrong,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;They hear you own up, and they learn to own up.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You have to give thema code,&amp;quot; he says, jumping right to a fourth rule. &amp;quot;Beginning with things like &amp;#039;Don&amp;#039;t bite people.&amp;#039; That becomes something like &amp;#039;It&amp;#039;s not okay to be mean. Ever.&amp;#039; That was our watchword when the girls were younger.&amp;quot; Willis&amp;#039;s fifth element: &amp;quot;I make them laugh. You gotta do the drool-take, gotta make them see that goofiness is still safe. You have to make them laugh at you.&amp;quot;  There will be no further thinking on these, just the beginnings of a ramble, the fun Bruce Willis emerging in the room. Because then, as if by plan but more likely by the beckoning of a text, just as he starts to enjoy talking, his wife arrives at the door, a half hour early, stunning in a knit maternity dress. Willis jumps up, three-hops his way across the room, and loosens everything about himself. &amp;quot;Babydoll!&amp;quot; he chirps. His voice cracks. &amp;quot;We were just talking about you. And how I wanted to see that belly.&amp;quot; Not true, the talking-about-her part. We were talking about the rules of his fatherhood, about their possibility and their practice. He&amp;#039;d started to laugh. Truth is, it had been two hours since he mentioned her belly. That he wanted only to look at it and celebrate. And now she&amp;#039;s in the room and the whole room is altered for him. It&amp;#039;s clear: Bruce Willis wants for nothing. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a14060/bruce-willis-interview-0612/>