20 Things You Somehow Missed In Die Hard
13. A Meeting Of Minds
The first scene in which John McClane and Hans Gruber actually meet is one of the highlights of Die Hard, as it shows the mortal enemies actually getting to know each other, as if they could potentially be allies in different circumstances. Capping it all, of course, is Alan Rickman's fun American accent, which even takes McClane in for a time, so much so that the NYPD cop even offers Gruber a gun, mistaking the bad guy for an escaped hostage who needs it to defend himself.
The remarkable thing about this sequence is that Willis and McClane ad-libbed it, which helps to make it feel suitably authentic, drawing the viewer in to the point where they know that the two potential allies will have to turn on each other.
However, because he had injured his leg in jumping from a three-foot high ledge at the outset of this scene, Rickman stood in one place during throughout the sequence to conceal the fact that he was not only standing on one leg to keep the pressure off of his other, injured leg, but also to cover up a leg brace that he was wearing underneath his trousers for additional support.