Top 18 Renny Harlin Quotes

This was in ’79. I got pretty restless there, sitting around with a lot of people sitting around smoking cigarettes and talking about films, but nobody really doing anything.

I went out to some advertising agencies and asked if I could do anything.

What I learned most was how to tell a story in 15 seconds or 30 seconds or 60 seconds – to have some kind of goal of what to try to do and make it happen in that time.

I learned a lot about how to shoot and how to put together sequences.

I loved cutting together simple commercials about margarine or soft drinks – all kinds of silly products – but I tried to make the commercials different.

At that point, the movie was called Wild Force. Everything fell apart, eventually – our financing completely fell apart – and we were never able to make that film.

You want to do something that shows some type individuality and talent and imagination – at the same time, you want to be truthful to the predecessors, because obviously the audience liked something about them and you have to replicate that experience to a certain extent.

Eventually, in ’84, we made a film for a little over a million dollars – with American actors that was shot in English – that was shown in Finland A little action film called Born American.

It proved to be pretty impossible to get funds for a feature film in Finland. It’s still small, but the film industry was miniscule at that point in the early ’80s.

I’ve continued to always keep in mind having a healthy does of that in Hollywood, now that I am part of the system and obviously have to follow the way the system works – you still have to have that crazy determination.

I decided that, somehow, I had to get out of there and go to Hollywood. I had never been to America.

I loved movies and went to see every movie I could in Finland.

I was making films when I was about 12 years old – Super-8 films.

I think the reason why we were able to actually get it made was that we were so extremely naive – we had no experience at all here. We didn’t even know that you were supposed to have an agent. We didn’t even have a lawyer. We didn’t know one soul.

I did some film reviews for small papers in Finland and things like that to be able to keep living here.

Actually, it was first a movie called Gale Force, which was a hurricane movie. That script never came together, and then the same deal was replaced with Cliffhanger.

You just never give up, no matter how hard the challenges are, and observe this world with a healthy dose of criticism and don’t just follow the herd like somebody else might do.

In Finland, getting a university degree is the first thing that you expect your kids to do.