Guys, guys, guys. As Gruber is telling McClane his name we see McClane looking at the list of people and the floors they are on. Clay Wm is on the 29th floor. The guard on reception at the beginning of the film tells McClane the only people left are the ones from the 30th floor.
See here at about 1:15.
Have you ever heard Kate Beckinsale, Nicole Kidman (film), Hugh Laurie (House) or Jaime Bamber (Battlestar Galactica) speak in interviews vs the characters they play?
You win. I never made that connection before. I mean, I understood McClane was checking the directory, but I never thought about the floor number, just the name itself. That’s bugged me for years in a low-key, only-while-watching-the-movie sort of way.
I’m an American, and when I smoked I held the cigarette that way all the time, though I held them the other way as well. So that wouldn’t necessarily a tell…
He didn’t claim to be attending the same party on the 30th?
But does the guard say the people from the 30th floor or on the 30th floor? It’s not unusual for companies to occupy multiple floors of a building.
Well, me too, but we’re cool. Somebody named “Bill Clay” is gonna be a dork.
A wizard did it.
Seriously! Remember, Gruber was actually Severus Snape, deep, deep undercover.
Oooh! I was wondering how he survived that fall.
Well, he did play paintball once.
But he must have missed 60 Minutes that week…
Just came in to say:
Mmmmm…Alan Rickman…<drool>
Charest grew up in a bilingual household; his mother’s side is Irish. Interestingly, his real first name is “John,” not “Jean.”
Speaking as an Australian, if your attempt at an English accent is easily confused with Irish or Australian then I’d say you’re doing a pretty horrendous job of it or your audience is embarrassingly clueless. Confusing Australian accents with New Zealand accents I can understand… but Irish or English! Ack!
I can see how Hans would easily fake an American accent given how easy it is to mimic, I don’t know whether that’s due to the vast quantities of American TV & movies shown throughout the world or whether it’s something about the accent itself.
Which leads to a Python-esque moment in the film, when Hans and his underling are chasing McClane and have the following exchange:
Hans: “Schiess das Fenster!”
Underling: 
Hans: “Shoot. The. Glass.”
I can switch between accents pretty well. So I didn’t use the same accent used when people mistook me for being from different places.
It’s the same with other languages I speak, I tend to pick up the tone of it pretty easily (while the grammar haunts me to no end).
I thought that was because the underling was unaware that McClane was barefoot, while Hans knew it already, from the meeting scene IIRC.
It’s actually “Schiess dem Fenster!”
I won’t defend the logic of a German giving an order to another (presumably) German and having to repeat himself in English to be understood, but he does at least speak grammatical German.
The only other point that has been brought up in the thread that I’d like to address is the security guard’s “They’re the only ones left in the building” line. I cannot hear that line anymore without wondering why McClane doesn’t go off on the guy.
“Oh, so telling me use the touchscreen staff directory dealie was just a way of getting me to jerk myself off for your amusement, I guess?”
No, he doesn’t. There’s no reason for the dative there.
“Schiess auf das Fenster” is grammatical.
I figured a security guard isn’t about to let someone in who has no reason to be there. He let McClane call up the info about his wife just to ensure that he did in fact know someone up at the party. If Willis had said, “I’m here to see Mrs. Crabapple” or something and it turned out she worked on the second floor, then I imagine the guard would’ve done some calling around. But since the person he mentioned worked on the 30th, he let McClane go on up. Of course, you could argue that the guard would’ve been aware that the Nakatomi limo was out at the airport to pick up Holly’s husband, I suppose. But, bottom line, the guard wouldn’t be doing his job if he’d just waved a stranger up to the party without even looking up.
By the way, if you really want to ruin Die Hard for everyone else, simply point out that there is no ambulance in the truck as the terrorists get out of it at the beginning of the film. Oops.