Masterclass: Directing Action for a Global Audience – A masterclass with Renny Harlin

Renny Harlin is the outsider who made it. A Finnish filmmaker who arrived in Hollywood with a suitcase and a relentless work ethic and built a career directing some of the most commercially successful and visually ambitious action cinema of the last thirty years. Die Hard 2. Cliffhanger with Sylvester Stallone. The Long Kiss Goodnight with Samuel L. Jackson and Geena Davis. Cutthroat Island, shot partly at the Malta Film Studios water tanks. Deep Blue Sea. A body of work defined by one consistent challenge: how to maintain clarity, emotion, and authorship inside large-scale cinematic machinery.

This masterclass is a direct, candid, and practically useful examination of craft – how action becomes storytelling rather than spectacle, what it takes to direct at scale, how the globalisation of film production has changed what directing requires, and what it takes to sustain a filmmaking career across decades of commercial and technological change. Harlin talks as vividly about what went wrong as what went right, and he brings the same energy to a conversation that he brings to a set.

The session is in conversation with Steve Weintraub, Editor-in-Chief of Collider – who has interviewed Christopher Nolan, Steven Spielberg, and virtually every major filmmaker working in Hollywood today. This is a craft masterclass, with an audience Q&A that is specifically invited to bring the specific and the technical.

Don’t miss open air screening of Cutthroat Island Thursday 25th June at 8:30pm | Counter Guard (Fort Ricasoli):

A romp of a swashbuckler film, Renny Harlin’s 1995 pirate adventure stars Geena Davis as Morgan Adams, a fearless female pirate who reluctantly gets help from William Shaw (Matthew Modine) as they face deadly rivals on a mission to find a hidden island that contains a magnificent treasure. A famously troubled production that has developed cult status, the film partly shot on Malta, using Fort Ricasoli, Valetta and Mdina, including Corte Capitanale and Greek’s Gate.

Introduced by the Director, Renny Harlin