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Today there's certainly no gun in sight, and he's wearing a few more layers, plus boots, a blue plaid flannel shirt and a navy wool skullcap. Then again, this isn't balmy Los Angeles. It's Hailey, Idaho (pop. 6200), and a sudden blizzard has socked in the northern ski town. Willis is on the cell phone. "The plan," he is saying, "is we're all gonna meet up at the theater."
It's Friday night in small-town America, a place where Willis feels utterly at home. He and Demi Moore, his wife of 13 years, now his ex-wife of more than a year, sought sanctuary in this remote place, moving here a decade ago. And it's here they now spend much of their time, sharing custody of thier daughters -- Rumer, 13, Scout, 10, and Tallulah, 8. Hailey is definitely outside the Hollywood spotlight. "I can go to the supermarket and not be hassled," says Willis. "I grew up in South Jersey where I could walk out my back door and be in the woods in two minutes. You can do that here. That's a great gift to give kids."
Though the world is kept at bay in Hailey, Willis remains open to change, professionally and personally. In his new film, Hart's War, he plays an American colonel, the senior officer in a Nazi POW camp, who struggles to do the right thing when a bitter racial conflict breaks out among his men. Willis, now nearing 47, talks with New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell about Hart's War, and about some of the battles he's fought himself.
"What I thought was right, and what I was about when I was 25 changed by the time I got to be 30, and it changes all the time," Willis says. One of the happiest developments: Willis can afford to give his children the great gift of his time. Conscientious almost to a fault, he asks a photographer not to take pictures of him smoking -- "I don't want the kids seeing that," he says. And he takes call after call from his girls, chatting easily: "Yes, honey," "Love you too," "Keep it a short trip, baby." As an actor, a father and a man, he seems to be doing everything his way.
Mitchell: Tell us about Hart's War.
Willis: It's about a World War II prisoner-of-war camp. I play a fourth-generation West Point graduate. There's a sense of dignity and honor to this guy. For most of the people in the film, the war is over. For my character, the war is still going on. Even though I'm in this camp, I believe that it's my duty to continue to try to fight any way I can.
Mitchell: The code of conduct seems to be important in a lot of characters you play.
Willis: When I first started, I was doing action pictures -- Die Hard, in particular -- and there's that hero's code of what you can and cannot do. But you can only play the hero so often. I'd watch other people's films, and I'd see bad guys and think, "Man, they can do whatever they want." It's nice to mix it up.
Mitchell: You didn't play the hero in The Siege. The plot for that film is eerily similar to the real events on September 11.
Willis: It's hard to fight a guy who is prepared to run into you, hang on to you, and jump off a cliff and kill you both. The war we're fighting has roots going back centuries. My own point of view is there's never been a better time for the free world to unite and say it's gonna stop now, we're not gonna take it anymore.
Mitchell: It's an interesting contradiction for you -- in your life you've stated an aversion to violence, but then there are these movies ...
Willis: One is a form of entertainment, and one is real life. I think audiences know the difference. Look at the news. Those are real dead people. Nobody walks out of my films, or any action film, thinking that someone actually got hurt. They know that for a couple of hours they're getting out of their own lives and escaping into a dark room where they flash light onto a white screen. For a long time, there was a big thing about how violence in films generates violence in real life, and I just don't think that it's true.
Mitchell: Let's talk about your politics, which aren't conventional for Hollywood.
Willis: Every year, hundreds of millions of dollars are brought into Washington and left there by special interest groups, who are trying to get their bills passed to help their companies. Until they take the money out of politics, I don't think anything's really going to change. There's a guy named Arlen Specter who ran for President a couple of years ago. In his campaign he held up an index card and said, this could be your tax return. One single card. I went, "Wow, that's it. That's right." It doesn't have to be this huge bureaucracy. I've been accused of being a staunch Republican, but in reality I have just as many Democratic ideas. I'm a Republican insofar as I believe in less government intrusion into our lives. And I also happen to believe in taking care of the needy, the elderly.
Mitchell: Are you a fan of President Bush?
Willis: I think he's doing a really good job. I'm glad he was smart enough to surround himself with really brilliant people. I'm glad Colin Powell is there. A lot of people don't like Dick Cheney, but I'd rather have a guy who's had experience.
Mitchell: You sound like a politician -- that's surprising from a kid who was so shy he found acting as a way to overcome a stutter.
Willis: I had a horrible stutter from the time I was 9 until I was about 17. I don't know if I was shy -- I mean, I had friends, I was elected student-council president. So I was popular in that sense, but inside I was really shook up by the fact that I couldn't get rid of this stutter. And then a miraculous thing happened when I was in high school. I was acting in a production of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. When I got onstage, I stopped stuttering. When I stepped off the stage, I started stuttering again. I said, "This is a miracle. I've got to investigate this."
Mitchell: So the stutter went away when you became the entertainer?
Willis: It was, yeah, I stutter, but if I can make you laugh, maybe you won't be so aware of it.
Mitchell: When did you realize you wanted to be a professional actor?
Willis: It wasn't until I got to Montclair (N.J.) State College, which had a great theater department. I did One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and said, "This is it, I'm home. This is what I want to do." I never looked back.
Mitchell: Does acting become a way for you to get out of your life?
Willis: Oh, yeah, and it's a cool thing. I don't know how well I would do at a job where I had to do the same thing every day, year after year. Every film is a brand-new character, a brand-new set of muscles, a brand-new test of "Can I do it?"
Mitchell: You've been through a lot personally the last few years. In the realm of "Can I do it?" do you still believe in marriage?
Willis: I think it certainly has its place if you're gonna have kids. There was a time when I said, "I'm not gonna marry." At least now I allow for the possibility. I don't know if it's gonna happen, but I haven't slammed that door shut and bolted it. You know, romance dies hard. It's what we're about as human beings. What I've come to understand better is the mythology of romance that is taught to us from the time we're kids, from books we read, films we see, songs on the radio.
Mitchell: You're a part of creating that mythology of romance.
Willis: Well, yeah, I'm part of the culture that propagates that mythology. But I'm talking about myself and what I've come to know about the mythology of love and romance. Here's an example: When you meet the right person, you'll know it instantly because there's only one right person for you. I don't think that's true. I think you have lots of different soul mates. The concept that someone steps off of a bus and you see them and bang, it's love at first sight -- well, what if you stayed in the store an extra five minutes and missed that bus? Does that mean you missed your soul mate forever? I also don't think that when you meet the love of your life, the work is over. Love and marriage is like a garden that needs to be tended every day.
Mitchell: In what ways has having children influenced your feelings about love?
Willis: When Demi was pregnant with Rumer, people said, "Having kids is gonna change your life," as if something was going to be taken away from my wife and me. The opposite was true. I was able to accept love more because kids bring that out in me. I would throw myself in front of a car for one of my kids. I'm not sure I would do that for anybody else I've been in a relationship with.
Mitchell: Are you close to your siblings?
Willis: Uh-huh. I lost a younger brother this past summer, but I'm very close with my sister and my other younger brother.
Mitchell: Was it a long illness?
Willis: From the time he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he lived only six weeks. There's no screen for it. It's a painful death. That's the bad side. The other side of it was everyone got to say goodbye to him. Most people are surprised by their own death, and for those who live on, there's a lot of pain when you don't get a chance to say goodbye. My family got that chance. And my brother Robert is now at peace.
Mitchell: Are celebrity marriages harder than most?
Willis: The tabloids predicted the demise of our marriage at least two or three times a year every year we were married. And it was a very public marriage. Did it make it any harder? No. Demi and I are as close now as we ever were. We talk three, four times a day -- about the kids, about what's going on for them. We still raise our kids together. There are a lot of examples that I've seen where there's a lot of resentment and hatred, where the parents don't talk and try to use the children as tools to get back at each other. We don't play those games. Our kids come first, and our kids' self-esteem comes first.
Mitchell: When did you move to Hailey?
Willis: I met Demi in '87, married, moved here a year or two later. I realized I didn't have to live in L.A. It's a pretty toxic place to raise kids. I'm a big fan of letting kids be kids as long as possible 'cause God knows they're gonna be out there in the world soon enough.
Mitchell: Can you talk about your efforts to guard your privacy?
Willis: I think the braking mechanism [on the press] has been removed. The tabloids can pretty much write anything they want, and you have to sue to get them to take it back. I don't need a retraction anymore. I don't need to set the record straight. I've given up trying to explain myself, trying to get people to understand what I'm really like as a man, outside of my acting. I could talk for a whole year and people wouldn't be that much closer to knowing who I am. I do my work as an actor. I enjoy trying to entertain people. It's a good job, now more than ever.
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