by Mike Reynolds
photos by Douglas Curran

Director Renny Harlin on the set of Driven © 2001 Champs Productions, Inc.

The young Harlin had already shown a flair for entertaining by writing stories, staging plays with neighborhood kids or doing puppet shows. "I just realized that the film camera was a way to combine all those things." The kids who were once his audience became actors in his early films. "In those days there was no editing equipment or anything like that, so you had to edit in the camera, you had to think of your angles and shots and shoot them perfectly."

As much help as there was from his mother and to some extent his doctor father, he was expected to follow them into the world of medicine but fate stepped in. A bout of pneumonia and a long stay in hospital resulted in a long-lasting after-effect, "I got a real phobia of hospitals. The smell of medicine makes me shiver. I just said no way (to a career in medicine)."

That medical phobia came back again to haunt him while making his latest film. "There are scenes in Driven involving hospitals, and they were the most difficult for me to complete. I was physically ill, no question about it, I felt claustrophobic ... panic! We were in a real hospital in Toronto and whenever I had a chance I would walk out, or go to an open window, to get away from the set. I shot the scenes as fast as I could. Even location scouting at the hospital was horrendous to me."

Another earlier experience also affected Harlin. After discovering that Finland did indeed have a university where he could study film, he got himself accepted and became the youngest student to ever enter the program. But the emphasis on theory proved to be of little interest to the young man who already had countless 8mm productions under his belt.

Harlin went out into the "reel" world, approaching a local advertising agency that surprisingly, gave him his first professional job. "It was a 20-minute industrial video for Shell Oil about lubricants for heavy machinery. They needed it for some conference or convention use," he explained. "I, of course, tackled it as an epic of history and studied the items that I needed to talk about and wrote a completely fictional story with a plot. The lead was this very sexy girl."

Upon receipt of his epic both the agency and Shell offered Harlin positions but he turned them down. However, he agreed to direct more for both companies in between making commercials for other clients. "I was working day and night doing commercials and I felt I was learning so much more than sitting in film school." It came as no surprise that he officially quit film school at the end of the second year.

"I think I was 21 when I won a best short film of the year award and based on that I started writing and directing for television. I did nine 45-minute films in a year and then I got bored. It was rigid, government-owned television and I just felt people lacked inspiration and motivation there. It felt like a job, so I left and started writing feature scripts and trying to get financing from the Finnish Film Fund."

All his submissions were returned with a 'thank you for your interest. Your writing is interesting but we find it too commercial.' Harlin suggests that the government probably only directed money into projects meant to be "art" and concerned about social issues, "not meant to make money." Obviously Finland's government was not going to fund a Renny Harlin project.

Disillusioned once again, Harlin met with a friend who had expressed a desire to make movies. Both sold their respective businesses, "took loans, used our credit cards and came here."

Neither of them knew anyone in Hollywood or about the complexities of doing business in town. Looking back, Harlin is amazed and perplexed at, "how I was able to make it; it was definitely due to the fact that I was completely ignorant to any workings of this town. I literally went knocking on people's doors."

They couldn't find an open door but went ahead on their own film anyway, "We ran out of money after we had shot for two or three weeks but we were able to cut together 20 minutes of the film (called Arctic Heat then, later released as Born American). We put it on videotape and sent it to every address we could find. One sunny day we got a phone call from this company called Cinema Group ... that was our lucky break ... somehow our tape got to them. We sat down with the Completion Bond company, explained all our plans--though we didn't know what we were talking about --and they agreed to give us half a million to complete the film. That was the first break--it went nowhere!"

Harlin and his friend really thought they had made it, "because there was an ad in the paper for Born American with our names on it." The duo moved to Hollywood permanently. "We lived behind the Chinese Theatre and thought that was fantastic."

During the next year life became less fantastic. "In the beginning we had six credit cards between us, in the end they had all been clipped by people that wouldn't accept them. Finally, we had one credit card left and the only store we could go to was a liquor store in Hollywood. We bought all our groceries from that liquor store and that's how we lived the last few months until that card was taken away also. Now we were tens of thousands of dollars in debt to the credit card companies and we had not a penny of cash and that's when my friend just gave up and went back to Finland. I was too embarrassed to go back as a complete failure and I stayed and made a living by writing film reviews for some obscure newspapers in Finland and literally, truthfully, lived for a year on five dollars a week and didn't have a car ... didn't have anything! I lived in a garage in North Hollywood and then, miraculously, Irwin Yablans saw Born American somewhere and said, 'Who's this director and how much did this film cost?' He had discovered John Carpenter, so he decided that I'm his next John Carpenter and hired me to do this movie called Prison. The company that produced it went bankrupt, then it wasn't released. Again, when I thought it would open the doors, everything seemed to stop."

Fate lent a hand "somehow, miraculously, a couple of people from New Line Cinema saw Prison and said, 'It's interesting, who made this?'"

Harlin had about five meetings with Bob Shaye and was able to convince them to hire him for Nightmare on Elm Street IV. "It really took persuasion, because Bob Shaye thought I was this Finnish guy who was going to ruin their franchise!"

As the Nightmare door opened so did another--he joined the DGA and contends it "was the greatest moment of my career. I drove past the DGA building all the time and just dreamed of the 'Directors Guild,' it's where all these famous directors I admire have been. Then, when I was basically approached by the DGA, I just couldn't believe I could be a member and took great pride in that." Since then he has come to look to and rely on, "the support of the DGA, it's a good thing to have." Harlin recalls attending a recent meeting, "and it was a very exciting, uplifting, powerful experience, to sit with your fellow directors who all do the same job and many of them are really very, very successful directors. It was one of my first experiences with a large group of directors talking about our everyday problems and concerns and how things work. It was a great thing, to be able to get together with colleagues like that and I look forward to participating more in those type of things."

Harlin (right) discusses a scene with Stallone.

The duo developed the script over two or three years and even though Driven has finally hit screens, Harlin still admits to some surprise, as there's been a "reluctance by studios — by any movie company," to make the film. Everybody had the same answer for them. "People don't want to see car racing." According to Harlin, "everybody turned us down, except, finally, Franchise Pictures. Even then, because everybody felt it was such a risk, we made the movie with a very limited budget and under pretty tough conditions. This is not a $100 million movie or even an $80 million movie," he reveals. "We had to shoot it in a limited time. We had to use the real racing world as much as possible and give it scope."

Harlin believes the reason he got through the whole experience was because of his intimate knowledge of motor racing. "I knew probably more about this than my crew or my actors--with the exception of Burt Reynolds, who has actually owned his own racing team." He also knew what he wanted to eventually see on screen and enough about CGI technology to get some things that are impossible to get traditionally. "I was really determined and well-planned and that way we were able to blend together the real races and the fictional stuff we shot."

Racing cars at high speed and integrating actors, stunt people and crew into that environment meant there was a safety factor. "You are always pushing the limits, it's just your job, you're trying to make it better, more exciting and more different than people have seen before and the responsibility is all on your shoulders regarding the safety and well-being of everybody." Harlin believes the people he hires make the situation easier. "You have to rely on those people. I call it casting the crew, instead of hiring. I interview and meet a lot to people to build the right kind of chemistry. You can make this as spectacular and exciting as is humanly possible (but) how do we do it safely? They know I'm not going to yell at them or push them or ask them to take risks--but at the same time they will give me their best."

Making a film about car racing meant there was always consideration toward that very, very fine line between disaster and success in that "anything can happen. We have rain scenes, all kinds of extreme racing sequences, driving up to 200 miles an hour, several cars on the track at the same time and I'm trying to get some bits with actors in the cars and they're open-wheel cars, which means if those wheels ever touch, the velocity is so huge that the car goes airborne immediately." With all those aspects, along with the number of cars and kinds of rigs used, Harlin was always terrified about the possibility of something going wrong "because the most simple, normal thing can go wrong ... then what do you do?"

Getting footage from and at the racing circuits of the world meant getting access and the filmmakers first approached the Formula One organizers (the movie was originally about Formula One racing) but "they were impossible to deal with," says Harlin. So they turned to CART (Championship Auto Racing Team) who readily agreed. "They thought it would be great for the sport and gave us absolute carte blanche." The script was changed to accommodate CART, which only requested they "follow the safety requirements, really carefully follow their rules." CART got all their teams and sponsors to agree that the film crew would be a non-intrusive, fly-on-the-wall presence all season while shooting in the pits, on the circuit or from above by helicopter. "First, they were sort of suspicious, wondering what we would do to their sport but then they kind of learned we were serious and we created a lot of friendships ... it was great. Even the professional drivers freely contributed, from doing three or four laps for cameras before the race, to putting on a helmet or chatting with the actors."

The director faced a logistical nightmare--travel to five countries, including Australia, Brazil and Japan, over an eight-month period, shooting nine races and utilizing local crews. "I had no idea what the skill level and equipment level was." Not the least of his problems was acquiring permits and credentials. "At racetracks there's at least half a dozen credentials (required, in order) to get to different areas and we had to get every possible credential. Finally, we learned the whole system ... it was an educational process."

In addition to gathering everybody together, Harlin had to coach people on the etiquette of shooting at a race track, the safety requirements and what could and couldn't be done, "starting with such things as not to wear shorts on a race track because the cars use methanol, which is completely invisible when it burns. You could have the entire pit area on fire and people burning but you don't see it, that's why you are required to wear long sleeves and long pants, so you can at least see that the fabric is burning." Harlin would send memos to everybody about the danger and still find crewmembers turning up wearing shorts. "Silly little things like that happen and delay you another half an hour."

Educating everybody about everything and moving them as a unit, ensuring they don't get lost among the thousands of people there, while getting his shots at the right time and in the right place, was only part of the puzzle. Harlin also had to consider fitting his actors into real events and getting them to deliver their lines while explaining to them that if the upcoming scene was taking place during the start of a race, which might be two minutes away, they had to be ready in two minutes and there would be no retakes.

Capturing some track action entailed rigging cameras under the front and rear bumpers of the pace car to shoot the cars doing three laps. "But everything is logged, they have very limited hours to use the engines and tires and so on but they would actually do this for us. They would come right in front of our pace car, peel off and come back in front of it. We could only fit four-minute mags, I would have two buttons, two screens--rear camera, front camera. I would see somebody coming from behind, hit the button to start the rear camera then, when they passed, I would start the front camera. We would do that pretty much before every race. We would get there at 5 a.m. and start rigging the pace car. Every pace car was different, so we had to have all these elaborate rigs."

Stallone in a scene from Driven.

Harlin only had about $2 million to put toward use of CGI and realized it wouldn't be enough for the 200 visual effects shots he had planned. "We hired eight visual effects designers or animators, bought eight computers, put them in a room and started doing our shots. So now we have 630 shots in the movie for the same budget. They are the cheapest visual effects in a (recent) movie but they look terrific. There are some really amazing sequences."

To put movie audiences into the cockpit of the cars Harlin used a combination of CG technology, special cameras and lenses, including one he hadn't used before-- a Frazier lens. Resembling a bendable periscope, it allows positioning of the camera, literally, between the drivers' eyes, thus allowing the viewer to see what the driver sees. "It's kind of like being in a video game," suggests Harlin.

Seeking different and interesting angles Harlin conducted numerous video tests. "For the first time I had done lots of pre-visualization. I hired two guys who did animated storyboards. I would do my normal storyboards and say, 'build a sequence' and we would cut it together. We had the prototypes of the cars, three-dimensional models, in the computer and I could say, 'put the camera by the rear axle with a 28mm lens at this angle.' That was a great way of discovering how to make it look most interesting and dramatic. Just by shooting and seeing the results I discovered I really liked certain things--or that some didn't work as well as I thought they would. It was definitely a process of discovery, testing and planning beforehand."

While audiences can see cameras in cars during TV coverage of races, the quality for use in film isn't quite there, according to Harlin. "I would rig the cars with all kinds of little digital cameras and use (the footage from) those in some scenes (that) are almost dreamlike or documentarylike, in the film."

Harlin's approach to Driven was very different from other films. "I wanted it be very raw and very rough. It's very beautiful but I wanted the camera to be very imperfect and almost sort of shaky, sometimes going out of focus and almost giving it a docudrama kind of feel. That's why I was able to cut some digital camera stuff with the film."

In addition to capturing cars racing on the circuit, Harlin also included a night-chase sequence through city streets, shot over ten nights. "We did this really elaborate chase sequence in the middle of Toronto at very high speeds, again with limited money, so we could afford only 30 stunt guys and stunt cars. I had to get the idea that they were racing traffic on this four-lane city street. I had to create an illusion of huge traffic and keep shooting it again and again, switching cars to make it look like a bigger area than it was. We had something like 35 generators because, of course, our luck was that Toronto turned out to be an unusually dark city. In normal big cities you can shoot with available light at night but when we went to measure the light we discovered that Toronto had exceptionally low light levels, in terms of the streetlights, so we couldn't see anything! That turned out to be a huge problem and then we had to shut down the street (the biggest police lockdown ever in Toronto). We discovered they had street cars and the tracks were high, the race cars had about an inch of clearance, so those things made it a logistics nightmare and the safety issue was huge but it turned out really well."

Sylvester Stallone and Burt Reynolds.

Another "must" for Harlin is a choice of cameras. "My second camera operator is always a SteadiCam and 'B' camera operator. The SteadiCam is always there." Additionally, he's a great fan of Wescam calling it "one of my favorite toys" and the Techno Crane. "That's always one of those battles - how many days should we have the Techno Crane--I had maybe eight Techno Crane days (on Driven); I just love Techno Crane because you can get to weird places. We built this unbelievable rig, a camera car rigged with the Techno Crane driving really fast on these race tracks and craning between the two race cars, going from driver to driver, pulling back when the tires come together. The guys I had operating the crane did an unbelievable job. The speeds were all tied to the car but you're dealing with an extended 30- or 40-foot crane and you're swinging around and race cars are coming in and out, it was pretty interesting."

One sequence in the film centers around a race in the rain and Harlin suggests it was the hardest. "I've never seen (anything like) it in a movie. I wanted to show how extreme it is in high speeds and the drivers can't see anything. You take one of those construction types of cranes and hang rain bars from it. The crane covers an area about 80 feet by 80 feet, so the maximum we could afford, even for a couple of days, was five cranes - they are very expensive pieces of equipment! Plus, we had to truck in the water! You put in five of those back to back and have 400 feet of rain. The cars are traveling 200 miles per hour, so they go through that 400 feet in a second or two ... that's your rain! You start the camera when they hit the rain and two seconds later you cut the camera. You move the cameras around the track slowly. Moving the cranes takes a day and you have only four days to shoot the sequence. It's that kind of logistics. It's such a puzzle to get it done, you end up using a lot of areas with just a wet down and having our guys in the backroom add digital rain over the scenes. It works great but of course there are the safety issue. It's tricky; it looks crazy when they're driving that fast in the rain. I had to listen to my advisers and always I tell them just please make it safe. If there's a risk, or something you're not happy with, it doesn't matter, the idea is nobody gets hurt.

"Tires were another issue we had to deal with. We had 20 race cars with four tires. That's 80 and they wear out all the time. You have to have 80 slicks and 80 rain tires and that's just to start. They wear them out and break all the time, so you want to have at least four sets. Before you know it you've used 1,000 tires. No one's going to look at the film and say, 'look at those tires' but you've got to have them."

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