Bruce Willis attempted to spin the recent anti-Live Free or Die Hard buzz (i.e, that it’s been marginally deballed in order to earn a PG-13 rating and therefore may not be a genuine kick-ass Die Hard flick) by calling Harry Knowles at home a day or so ago.

Since the PG-13 brouhaha arose out of a Peter Biskind interview with Willis in the new Vanity Fair, Willis told Knowles that “his comments had been taken out of place and that Biskind focused on [the rating issue] more than he felt was justified, especially since at the point in which he talked to Peter about Die Hard 4, he hadn’t actually seen it yet.

“According to Bruce, he feels this Die Hard is right there with the original, and that if you didn’t know it was PG-13, you couldn’t tell, because it got him to the edge of his seat at least 6 times. Now, it might not have as many ‘fucks’ as in the past, but the action and intensity, he swears, is there.”

Willis once called me at home…13 and 1/2 years ago. He was pissed over an Entertainment Weekly article that I’d written (my sources were as good as they could’ve been) that said that his swaggering big-star behavior was largely respon- sible for shooting complications and added production costs on an action film called Striking Distance. He felt he’d been sand-bagged and called to vent (naturally) and maybe figure who my sources had been. I respected that he did this himself and didn’t have some flunky publicist call instead.