Renny Harlin

Renny Harlin: The Finn Who Blew Up Hollywood

A doctor's son from the Finnish town of Riihimäki spent a year designing an *Alien* sequel set in a Kansas cornfield before Fox insisted on a prison ship and he walked. That was Renny Harlin at thirty, having directed exactly three features. Within two years he had made *Die Hard 2*. Within four, *Cliffhanger*. Within six, one of the most catastrophic box-office losses in the history of the medium.

Riihimäki to Los Angeles

Born Renny Lauri Mauritz Harjola on 15 March 1959, he grew up in a professional household — his father Oiva was chief physician at Riihimäki Hospital, his mother Liisa a nurse. His half-brother Veli-Pekka competed in sprint canoeing at the 1984 Olympics. He studied at the University of Art and Design Helsinki and entered the industry in the early 1980s the unglamorous way, directing commercials and corporate films for clients including Shell, and working as a buyer for a distributor.

The decisive move was leaving. In Los Angeles in 1982 he met the Finnish producer Markus Selin, and the two developed a screenplay called *Arctic Heat*. It became *Born American* in 1986, starring Mike Norris — at the time the most expensive Finnish production ever mounted, and one that opened in over a thousand American theatres, an unheard-of reach for a Finnish film. On 9 July 1986 Harlin and Selin incorporated Larmark Productions in Los Angeles. He adopted his father's original surname, Harlin, in 1987.

The Fastest Ascent in 1980s Hollywood

*Prison*, in 1987, was a low-budget picture that went out in 42 prints. It should have been a dead end. Instead it got him in front of Robert Shaye at New Line, who hesitated and then hired him for *A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master*. The budget was seven times the original film's; the result was the highest-grossing entry in the series until *Freddy vs. Jason* fifteen years later.

Then the *Alien 3* year, which produced nothing but reveals how he thought. Fox wanted *Aliens* again. Harlin pitched instead a journey to the creatures' home planet to establish whether they were "evil, horrible killing machines" or animals following survival instinct — and, alternatively, an Earthbound story in a Kansas cornfield. Told to make a prison ship movie, he said: "I'm sorry, I can't do this." A director with three credits turning down a tentpole is either arrogance or conviction; his subsequent career suggests both.

Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger

*Die Hard 2* arrived in 1990. So, a week apart and edited simultaneously, did *The Adventures of Ford Fairlane*. The Andrew Dice Clay vehicle flopped; the John McClane sequel was a large commercial success and established Harlin, at thirty-one, as a bankable studio action director. That same year, through his Midnight Sun Pictures, he did something nobody expected and produced Martha Coolidge's *Rambling Rose*, an intimate Southern drama that won Best Feature at the 1992 Independent Spirit Awards and got Laura Dern an Oscar nomination.

*Cliffhanger*, in 1993, began a working relationship with Sylvester Stallone and was a substantial hit, one whose reputation rests almost entirely on the sensation that the stunts are physically occurring in front of the lens. That is not incidental. Harlin's stated method, then and now, is to keep the danger real: shoot on locations, use practical stunts, avoid the soundstage, because "it's hard to get powerful performances out of actors when they're on a soundstage with a green backdrop." His instruction to himself on recent projects has been "let's not make another glossy, polished Hollywood movie."

He was also, briefly, in the theme park business: in 1992 he co-founded Planet FunFun in Kerava, Finland, an indoor complex with a tropical park, a cinema park and rooms themed around film sets and props. It closed in 1995.

Cutthroat Island

Then came the wreck. *Cutthroat Island*, released in 1995 and starring Geena Davis, whom Harlin had married in 1993, lost $147 million. It is routinely cited among the largest box-office failures ever made, and it took Carolco Pictures into bankruptcy. Very few directors survive an event of that magnitude with a career.

Harlin did. *The Long Kiss Goodnight* in 1996, again with Davis and with Samuel L. Jackson, did moderately well; the science-fiction horror picture *Deep Blue Sea* in 1999 was a genuine recovery. The marriage did not survive: he fathered a son, Lucas, with Davis's personal assistant in 1997, and they divorced in 1998.

The Long Second Act

The subsequent decades are a study in relentlessness. He made *Driven* in 2001 after failing to secure Formula One rights and settling for Champ Car. He took over *Mindhunters* when Peter Howitt left. He reshot *Exorcist: The Beginning* in 2004 after the studio rejected Paul Schrader's more psychological version — a job that guaranteed critical hostility before a frame was cut. He directed John Cena in *12 Rounds*, and *5 Days of War*, an independent film about the 2008 Russo-Georgian conflict with Andy García as President Saakashvili. *The Legend of Hercules* in 2014 was panned and bombed.

In 2014 he moved to China, made *Skiptrace* with Jackie Chan, and directed *Legend of the Ancient Sword* for Alibaba Pictures from a Chinese video game; it took $1.25 million against an $11 million budget. He relocated to Sofia, Bulgaria, after finishing the Finnish film *Reunion 3: Singles Cruise* in 2020, and has continued working steadily — an English-language *Inspector Palmu*, from Mika Waltari's Finnish detective, and a sequel to *The Postcard Killings*.

He holds dual Finnish and American citizenship. He has been married to Johanna Kokkila since September 2021, with a daughter born in 2022 and a son in 2024.

Why Renny Is Called a Genius

The word sits awkwardly on Harlin, and honesty requires saying so up front: he has collected Golden Raspberry nominations for Worst Director five times, for *Cutthroat Island*, *Driven*, *Exorcist: The Beginning*, *The Legend of Hercules* and *The Misfits*. No serious critical consensus calls him an artist.

What he does have is a specific and genuinely rare competence: the ability to stage large-scale physical action legibly. A great many directors can spend $100 million on explosions; comparatively few can make an audience understand, shot to shot, where every body is in space and what the stakes of the next second are. *Die Hard 2* and *Cliffhanger* work because the geography is clear and the peril is photographed rather than simulated. It is a craft skill — closer to engineering than to authorship — and Harlin's insistence on practical stunts and real locations is the discipline that produces it.

The other quality is not aesthetic at all. He absorbed one of the biggest financial failures in film history, a $147 million loss that killed the studio financing it, and kept directing for another thirty years. His films have grossed over $520 million domestically and $1.2 billion worldwide, ranking him around 151st among directors globally and making him by revenue the most internationally successful Finnish filmmaker there has ever been. Genius is the wrong word for that. Durability, and a very clear-eyed understanding of exactly what he is good at, is the right one.

Legacy

Harlin's actual achievement is easy to underrate because it is not on any single screen. He is the proof that a film culture the size of Finland's could produce someone who ran a Hollywood tentpole at thirty-one, and he did it by being reliably competent at a difficult technical job rather than by being fashionable. Three decades on he is still making action pictures on three continents, which in an industry that discards directors after one bad quarter is its own kind of remarkable.