Renny Harlin has a hard and fast rule for winning over actors on his movie sets: Preparation, preparation, preparation.
The veteran filmmaker sat for a masterclass conversation last week at Malta’s Mediterrane Film Festival in Valletta, during which he opened up on the creative process he’s leaned on to make nearly four dozen films over five decades while working with some of the biggest movie stars on the planet, from Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson to Sylvester Stallone and Val Kilmer.
“It’s all about preparation. Preparation costs nothing,” Harlin told moderator Steven Weintraub of Collider. But for Harlin, his prep goes beyond scripts and storyboards. He said he also learns how to do the grueling stunts his films require. “Whether I’m doing Cliffhanger in the mountains, Die Hard 2 in airplanes or Deep Blue Sea in water tanks, I learned how to mountain climb, I learned how to scuba dive, I learned how airplanes worked. Even for Cliffhanger, I learned how to fly a helicopter. For me, the preparation is the most valuable way to spend your time and that’s where you really make yourself ready.”
It had an added bonus of allowing him to win over some of the “toughest actors in the business, and I’ve worked with some really experienced and hard-nosed actors,” Harlin said. “That’s the way I won them over, whether it was Sylvester Stallone or Bruce Willis or Samuel Jackson or Sir Ben Kingsley and so on. Or, Val Kilmer, who had a reputation for not being the easiest.”
“But I’ve always managed to win them over by the fact that when I show up for the movie, I’m prepared and they can ask me any question about anything and I know exactly how these things are done technically and how they work,” Harlin continued. “I tell them exactly what equipment they need, how they need to use it, and I win their trust. It’s not a secret, but many actors are insecure because they put themselves out there. They go in front of the camera in front of the world and they expose themselves and many actors are also extremely intelligent. And if they feel that they know the movie and their character better than the director, then they tend to take over because they feel that their responsibility to protect themselves is to take control. That’s when you get those horror stories where actors run all over the directors and the whole thing ends up in chaos.”
He avoided chaos once while working with Kilmer on 2004’s Mindhunters, co-starring LL Cool J and Christian Slater.
“Bless his soul. We became good friends,” Harlin said of the legendary star who passed away at age 65 in 2025. “Val was famous for testing directors always because he was a Mensa member, a highly, highly intelligent man and very talented. His style was to test the director early enough [in the project] to see who was the smartest guy in the room. I think he was quite insecure also and felt that if he doesn’t feel like he can respect the director, then he has to take over because otherwise it’s going to be a disaster.”
Harlin then recalled a tense moment on Mindhunters, which followed a group of FBI trainees who are taken to a remote island for simulation training. Once there, they realize that they are being hunted by a serial killer. Kilmer played an FBI instructor named Jake Harris.
“We had shot one scene for one day already and everything went fine,” Harlin recalled. “Then it was the second day of the same sequence and I’m ready to say ‘action.’ [Val was] studying the script and he has [a pair of glasses] on and he’s looking at the script. The first assistant director said, ‘OK, we’re ready to go, everybody please take your places.’ Val goes to his mark and camera is ready to roll. He puts his script away, and he still has his glasses on. I said, ‘Hey, Val, just take the glasses off. We are ready to go.’ He looks at me and says, ‘No.’ I’m like, ‘What do you mean no?’ He says, ‘Well, I thought about my character last night and he’s really quite a studious type. I think it was a mistake that I didn’t have the glasses yesterday. So I got these glasses this morning and I’m going to wear them from now on.’”
Harlin was quick to say that they had already shot half of the scene with Kilmer not wearing glasses, so for continuity’s sake, he couldn’t all of a sudden be wearing spectacles. To which Kilmer replied, “‘Well, I guess then we have to reshoot what we shot yesterday, but I’m going to wear glasses from now on.’”
Harlin wasn’t having it. “I just went right to his face in front of everybody — cameras are ready to roll and the whole cast is there — and I looked him in the eyes and I said, ‘Val, take off the fucking glasses now.’ It was a test and he looked at me really seriously while everyone was on pins and needles, wondering if it was going to be a physical fight or what would happen. He took the glasses off and flashed that Iceman smile from Top Gun, and said, ‘It was worth trying.’”
