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
In the late 1980s, Harlin was attached as the original director of Alien 3, developing the film for a year before departing from the production due to creative differences.
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.
In August 1992, Harlin had lined up Warriors of the Rainbow to be his next film following Cliffhanger, reteaming with producer Mario Kassar. The script was written by David Williamson and John Briley and focused on Greenpeace, specifically the early 1970s work of Robert Hunter. "My life's mission is to make that movie," Harlin stressed to Variety. "I hope it will attract a name star. I want to make movies of substance–that will entertain and make people think." He wanted to cast both John Lithgow and Dern for undisclosed parts in the film. At the time, he planned to follow it up with a film for Warner Bros., The Original Gangster, which deals with black L.A. gangs in the 1960s and with one of the founders of the Crips. Richard Dilello was writing the script. Harlin dubbed the story as one about "making peace instead of violence." Approximately $1.3 million in development costs was spent on Warriors of the Rainbow, despite never going into production.
In March 1993, it was reported that following the success of the Western Unforgiven, TriStar Pictures had reentered development on an 18-year-old screenplay Hell and High Water, with Harlin directing and John Patrick Shanley hired to rewrite. The post-Civil War drama is a fictional tale of the first white men to travel down the Colorado River. It was originally written by Franklin Cohen under the title Running the Wild Big Red, which had been optioned in 1974 by David Brower and David Foster and then sold to Columbia Pictures. Over the next two decades, screenwriters Walter Newman and Paul F. Edwards wrote various new drafts to no avail. It was tentatively scheduled to go into production in August 1993, but this never occurred.
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.
