Writer-director-turned-burgeoning actor Kevin Smith was making press rounds recently for Catch and Release, and took some time to talk about his involvement in the fourth installment of the Die Hard franchise, Live Free and Die Hard.

“I’m the only person in Die Hard who talks and doesn’t shoot
somebody,” says Smith, somewhat predictably, of his role. “It’s that
role in the action movie where you provide a bunch of information that
they need to head into act three. …This could all change, mind you. By the time they get in
the editing room, they might be like, ‘He sucked. Yank him out.’ But as
it stands now, in the script and as I shot it, they talk about me a lot
and then you finally meet me. And I provide a lot of information about
the villain.”

“What’s nice about working on those big God-awful, expensive Hollywood
movies is that they have so many writers they don’t even notice if
you’re one of them,” Smith continues. “So I got there and I was just like, ‘I wrote myself
a one-page monologue,’ and I got to deliver it. It was hysterical. Like,
they let me do it. Bruce Willis is like, ‘Dude, that’s a good speech.’
And so, you know, they totally went for it. So that was kind of cool. …They were kind of
riff-friendly, but there was one motto they kept
saying, which was, ‘Keep it Die Hard.’ So you can’t get in there and do a Jay and Silent Bob-type
monologue. You have to kind of make it germane to the movie. So I don’t
wind up giving a funny speech. I wind up giving a very paranoid
Joe-Pesci-in-JFK-type speech, which was fun.”