Renny Harlin (born Renny Lauri Mauritz Harjola, 15 March 1959) is a Finnish filmmaker who has worked in America, Europe, and Asia. He is known for directing films such as Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger, Deep Blue Sea, and Cutthroat Island, the latter of which has the distinction of being one of the biggest box-office bombs of all time. Harlin's film Cliffhanger (1993) received three Academy Award (Oscar) nominations.
Harlin's films have grossed over $520 million in the United States and over $1.2 billion in the worldwide aggregate box office, making him the 151st highest-grossing director in the global film market as of October 2022, and the most internationally successful Finnish filmmaker in terms of revenue.
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Early life
Harlin was born in Riihimäki, Finland. His father was Oiva Harjola (formerly Harlin), a chief physician at Riihimäki Hospital, and his mother was Liisa Koskiluoma, a nurse. Since 1987, Renny's surname has been Harlin, his father's original surname. Renny has a half-brother, Veli-Pekka Harjola, who competed at the 1984 Summer Olympics in sprint canoeing.
Career
Early years
After studying at the University of Art and Design Helsinki, Harlin started his career in the film business in the beginning of the 1980s, directing commercials and company films for companies like Shell. Later, he worked as a buyer for a Finnish film distributor and met fellow Finn Markus Selin in Los Angeles in 1982. They became friends and started writing a screenplay called "Arctic Heat", which later evolved into Born American, with Mike Norris in the leading role. They secured financing from the U.S., and in 1986, Born American became the most expensive Finnish film ever. It opened in the U.S. in over 1,000 theatres. By 9 July 1986, he set up his own production company with partner Selin, Larmark Productions, with the first two projects going low-budget, and it was a Los Angeles-based production company.
Harlin moved to Los Angeles and got a job from Irwin Yablans, who offered him a script of Prison to film. The film was made with a low budget and distributed with only 42 copies. In the same year, 1988, he got a job from New Line Cinema to direct A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988) after meeting producer Robert Shaye, who at first did not want Harlin to direct the film. It became the highest-grossing film in the series until the 2003 release of Freddy vs. Jason, and its budget was seven times greater than the original A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Breakthrough and the 1990s
After the success of The Dream Master, Harlin was set to direct the science-fiction thriller Alien 3. He was attached to the project for a little over a year, but left due to creative differences with the producers.
The comedy The Adventures of Ford Fairlane and the action thriller Die Hard 2 were edited simultaneously and released a week apart in 1990. The former flopped, but the latter was a commercial success. Harlin achieved critical acclaim the following year when he produced Rambling Rose through his own Midnight Sun Pictures for director Martha Coolidge. The film won Best Feature at the 1992 Independent Spirit Awards and earned its star and Harlin's then-partner Laura Dern a Best Actress Oscar nomination at the 1992 Academy Awards.
Harlin, Selin and a number of other businessmen founded the indoor amusement park Planet FunFun in Kerava, Finland, in 1992, which included everything from a tropical park to a cinema park, the latter of which Harlin also gave his own special stamp to by loaning his film sets and props to special theme rooms. The park also hosted sports competitions and filmed television series. However, Planet FunFun was short-lived, closing in 1995.
1993's action thriller Cliffhanger was Harlin's first film with Sylvester Stallone. Harlin's career suffered a blow with the pirate adventure film Cutthroat Island in 1995, which starred Harlin's then-wife, Geena Davis. Cutthroat Island was one of the biggest box-office bombs of all time, losing $147 million and leading to the bankruptcy of Carolco Pictures. Harlin did go on to have moderate success with Long Kiss Goodnight, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Davis in 1996, and the science fiction horror film Deep Blue Sea in 1999.
2000s
Harlin wanted to direct a movie based on Formula One, but unable to secure the rights, he instead directed and produced the film Driven in 2001, based on the American Champ Car series.
Harlin took over directing the action mystery film Mindhunters when the original director Peter Howitt dropped out, but the release was delayed by studio conflicts. Harlin went on to re-shoot a more traditional horror version of Exorcist: The Beginning (2004), after the studio was unhappy with the version cut by director Paul Schrader, which was more of a psychological drama. Mindhunters was released in the US in 2005.
Harlin directed the WWE Studios action movie 12 Rounds, starring John Cena. It was released in March 2009. In 2009, Harlin directed an independent war film in Georgia. The film, 5 Days of War, was a story about the 2008 war between Georgia and Russia in the region of South Ossetia. The film included real-life figures, including Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, played by Andy García.
2010s and move to China
Harlin next directed the 2013 film Devil's Pass, set in Russia's Ural Mountains and loosely based on the Dyatlov Pass incident in 1959, when nine experienced hikers were found dead. Harlin then directed The Legend of Hercules, which opened in theatres on 10 January 2014. One of two Hercules movies released in 2014 – the other being Hercules, starring Dwayne Johnson – it was critically panned and was a box-office bomb.
Harlin directed the 2016 action comedy film Skiptrace, which starred Jackie Chan alongside Johnny Knoxville and Fan Bingbing. He then directed the 2018 film Legend of the Ancient Sword for Alibaba Pictures, based on a Chinese role-playing video game. The film was a box-office bomb, grossing only $1.25 million against a budget of $11 million. More recently, his film The Misfits received U.S. and international deals.
In 2021, he was selected as jury member at 11th Beijing International Film Festival.
Unproduced and upcoming films
Prior to moving to Hollywood and filming Born American, Harlin claimed he started his own production company and wrote twelve feature-length screenplays which were then all turned down by the Finnish Film Foundation. "They were sent back to me, and they said that they were too commercial for them," he recalled.
From the late 1980s and going into the 1990s, Harlin was attached to multiple projects at Carolco. Among them were Child of the Dragon, a starring vehicle for Brandon Lee written by Barry Beckerman about a leader of a Chinese student rebellion who comes to America to rescue his sister, and Sandbox Club written by Tom DeCerchio.
Harlin was interested in making a biopic about fellow Finnish personality, composer and national hero Jean Sibelius. Die Hard 2 used Sibelius' Finlandia in a crucial scene, but the Sibelius movie was eventually directed by Timo Koivusalo in 2003.
Harlin's original plans as the director of Alien 3 was to explore the planet that the xenomorphs are bred from; stressing to his collaborators, "We can't have another movie where you have more machine guns and more flame-throwers and again the aliens are attacking a place. I want to go to the original planet and find out, 'What are they? Why did nature create these things? Are they really bad? Do we just view them as something bad because of the environment that we've experienced them in?'" He worked on the script with Walter Hill and several other writers for over a year at Fox, pressured to deliver a film "that would be compelling and stand up next to Jim Cameron and Ridley Scott's versions." Ultimately, Harlin was unsuccessful in coming to terms with the studio about what film to make and quit the project. He opted to alternatively direct The Adventures of Ford Fairlane as a refreshing change of pace; "I had spent a year in this dark, dungeon-y Alien world, and I read the script and it was all like rock and roll and comedy and action and L.A. and sunny beaches and parties and I said, 'Oh my God, this is exactly what I need at this point.'"
By 1989, Carolco had acquired a Florida-based hurricane epic that would later be known as Gale Force, budgeted at $40 million. The project began with a screenplay by David Chappe, and Harlin signed on to direct in a $3 million deal. By mid-1990, the film was publicly announced, with the Los Angeles Times noting it would follow the release of Die Hard 2. Harlin initially worked with a draft by Joe Eszterhas, which he described as "a very erotic, very suspenseful thriller in the style of Key Largo," while Eszterhas framed his version as "a film noir mood piece." The studio subsequently brought in multiple writers, including Lawrence Konner, Mark Rosenthal, Henry Bean, Robert Avrech, Richard Tuggle, and Dean Devlin, before returning to Chappe's original concept about a man defending a coastal town from contemporary pirates during a hurricane. Sylvester Stallone, who remained attached in the starring role throughout development, was reportedly more concerned with the action scenes rather than the evolving script. By the time the project was shelved, Carolco had spent an estimated $1.75 million on script development alone; and $6 million overall, with pre-production expenses included. In October 1991, Harlin and Stallone were reassigned to Cliffhanger. Harlin later lamented never getting to make Gale Force, noting that it "would have, in essence, made Twister many years before Twister." While both he and producer Daniel Melnick indicated interest in revisiting the project, it ultimately never entered production.
Personal life
Harlin was married to actress Geena Davis from 1993 to 1998. He had a son, Lucas, with Davis's personal assistant in 1997, which prompted the divorce. Since September 2021, Harlin has been married to fitness athlete and school teacher Johanna Harlin (née Kokkila). They have a daughter, born July 2022 and a son, born April 2024, both in Miami, Florida.
Harlin lived in the United States from the mid-1980s until 2014, when he moved to China. After Harlin finished the shooting of the Finnish film Reunion 3: Singles Cruise in 2020, he moved to Sofia, Bulgaria. He holds dual citizenship in Finland and the United States.
