There are, let's face it, any number of reasons to love the 1988 thriller Die Hard. Bruce Willis in a vest for one. Alan Rickman perfecting his nasty-funny bad guy credentials as terrorist-stroke-robber Hans Gruber, a leading lady (Bonnie Bedelia) who is actually past puberty, a hero (Willis as detective John McClane) who bleeds and hurts and seems believably human, inventive swearing, a pre-CGI sense of danger surrounding the stuntwork and a Christmas setting for five more.
Edward Ross has another reason. The movie's architecture. "One of the things I love about the film is how it uses its dull corporate setting in this really interesting and revolutionary way. Forced out of the conventional spaces of the Nakatomi Plaza by this gang of European criminals, John McClane worms his way into the building's infrastructure, turning a mundane high-rise into a weapon and a shield.
"Compared to action heroes like James Bond, who colonises his surroundings through technology, McClane is a hero much more at home with his environment – an urban explorer who rewrites the rules of how we interact with buildings in his bid for survival. It's made me want to crawl through air ducts in a way that no other film has."
For the moment though he's sitting in the cafe of the Filmhouse in Edinburgh talking about cinema and comics and how he's joined the two together.
Bruce Willis's best film (Pulp Fiction fans can go hang) is just one of the film's that features in Ross's new book Filmish, a smart, engaging comic book primer in film history and theory. Die Hard, which Ross will introduce in a special showing at the Filmhouse next week, turns up, as you might now expect, in the chapter on architecture in cinema, as do DW Griffiths' silent epic Intolerance, Taxi Driver, The Shining, Blade Runner, Inception and Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love (and that's only a partial list).
Other chapters look at technology in cinema, ideology, the body and the theme of time. Oh and Ross, our narrator, appears on a regular basis in various guises, including that of the Terminator, Indiana Jones and a John Carpenter alien (from another 1988 movie They Live, which is both a ropey B movie and a brilliantly astute vision of the world we live in now.)
Ross is, no great surprise, a former film studies graduate (Stirling University class of 2007; he studied English literature too) and it was while working in the Filmhouse that he first had the idea of combining his two childhood loves - cinema and comics – for a comic strip for the cinema's newsletter. From that he graduated to his own comic and now those comics have been gathered together and given a Hi-Def polish for book form.
The idea was he admits "kind of an accident". But a happy one. "The other ways film is commonly talked about is through text and video essays. I think what comics bring is a step back from the original piece but not such a far step back that you're just going to text. You're able to represent the piece and reinterpret it in a way. There are images that you wouldn't be able to achieve in text or video. You're able to explore different angles."
You also get an angle on Ross himself. Here's a film fan who clearly loves horror movies (though he admits since becoming a father watching gory horror movies has become more of a challenge) and isn't averse to the latest technological developments.
There's nothing new about the laments for cinema in the current fears about how CGI effects are changing what we see on the screen, he points out. There were similar laments with the coming of sound and colour after all.
Still, he accepts, there are dangers to the anything-is-possible cinema we have now. "I enjoy action and horror movies but when they throw the laws of physics to the side that doesn't do anything for me."
Ross is currently working with the Wellcome Trust on a science comic about sleeping sickness – further proof of the potential as comics as an educational tool of course (though there's nothing new about that either. Soldiers used to be given sex education comics, he reminds me).
But he'd like to do more Filmish comics given the chance. "I'd be interested in doing a chapter on representations of death, dying and illness," he says. "Probably the last chapter."
We will have to wait and see if Bruce Willis turns up in that one.
Edward Ross will introduce a special Christmas screening of Die Hard at Edinburgh Filmhouse on Sunday at 8.20pm. He will also be signing copies of Filmish (SelfMadeHero, £14.99).
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