Renny Harlin has returned to Malta. The veteran filmmaker touched down on the island last week to attend the Mediterrane Film Festival, which screened his latest film, the shark thriller Deep Water, starring Aaron Eckhart and Ben Kingsley. But it was his 1995 action flick Cutthroat Island that originally brought the Finnish auteur to Malta, host of many blockbuster Hollywood productions, including the Gladiator and Jurassic Park franchises.

And he was stoked to be back. “Malta is the best-kept secret,” Harlin told Collider’s Steven Weintraub during a masterclass conversation on directing held inside the festival hub in Valletta last week. “People don’t realize how incredible this place is.”

The duo covered Harlin’s career from start to finish, ending their chat with a look ahead at Harlin’s next release, The Beast, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Joel Kinnaman, due for release in October. Penned by Umair Aleem, the film casts Jackson as a U.S. president who becomes trapped inside his heavily armored presidential limousine, aka ”the Beast,” during a coordinated coup by a hostile militia. To survive, the president must uncover the vehicle’s top-secret offensive capabilities and fight his way back to safety and his country.

“It’s a really unusual movie and quite a brilliant script,” Harlin told Weintraub and a capacity crowd, adding that the film opens with the “biggest action scene you’ve ever seen” straight when the lights hit the screen. “[The audience realizes] that we are in a world summit like a G7 meeting with all the world leaders, and there’s been a humongous terrorist attack. It’s never really explained who the terrorists are or what nationality they are or anything like that, but there’s been an attempt on the lives of several presidents. They have to get Sam Jackson into the Beast, which is his safe, bulletproof, explosion-proof vehicle and get him the hell out of there before he’s killed. And one thing leads to another.”

The film marks a fourth collaboration between Harlin and Jackson, who previously worked together on 1996’s The Long Kiss Goodnight, 1999’s Deep Blue Sea and 2007’s Cleaner. In The Beast, Jackson’s character is joined by a “badly wounded” Secret Service agent, played by Kinnaman. “It’s the story of these two guys in a car trying to survive, and I dare to say that it’s a very exciting movie, a very action-packed movie and a very unusual movie that has a very beautiful, happy ending,” said the filmmaker.

He also hopes it delivers a beautiful boost to Kinnaman’s career. “I’d like to think that this movie is really going to make Joel’s career,” said Harlin of the veteran actor whose long list of credits includes For All Mankind, Silent Night, House of Cards, Altered Carbon, The Suicide Squad, Hanna and the recent Imperfect Women. “People are going to be stunned when they see his performance.”

They may have a similar reaction to seeing the inimitable Beast vehicle, which Harlin clearly had fun experimenting with.

“It’s indestructible,” he explained. “No matter what missiles they send its way, they can’t destroy the car. They just keep going, and then it has some weapons that we’ll never know [about]. I don’t think anybody can prove whether it has these weapons or not, but this one does. … The president has never done anything but smoked a cigar in the back of the car so he doesn’t know how any of these things work. There’s all these computer panels and weapons and things that he’s trying to figure out how to work them and he can’t get in touch with the headquarters and he’s all alone there, so it just becomes this incredible survival story. This is my fourth movie with Sam, and the relationship between him and Joel Kinnaman is exceptional.”

As the casting process heats up to find a new 007, Famke Janssen, who starred opposite Pierce Brosnan in 1995’s GoldenEye, has recalled her nerve-wracking audition to land the part as Xenia Onatopp in the iconic James Bond franchise.

“I became one of three, maybe four, finalists, and I was flown to London for a screen test with Pierce Brosnan. I remember being so nervous because I’d never done a screen test in my life, and this was a Russian character with an accent,” Janssen, 61, explained during a masterclass conversation with Vanity Fair’s John Ross during the Mediterrane Film Festival in Malta last week. She landed the audition as she had been filming a role in Clive Barker’s Lord of Illusions for Bond studio MGM, and studio executives had been impressed with her dailies. “I didn’t sleep the whole night. … I just sort of surrendered, and everything [my acting coach Harold Guskin] taught me, I took with me. And the rest is history.”

It was a pivotal moment for the franchise as Brosnan was stepping into the lead role for what would be his first of four 007 installments, and the first Bond film following a six-year hiatus. Brosnan took over from Timothy Dalton (and paved the way for Daniel Craig). It was also a coup, to say the least, for Janssen, a Dutch talent who started her career as a model before moving to New York to study creative writing and literature at Columbia University. Prior to landing the Bond gig, she had done only a handful of bit parts in films and TV shows, including Fathers & Sons (her breakout role), Melrose Place and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

“I grew up watching Bond movies because my dad was a very big fan of them,” continued Janssen, who was born in Amstelveen, Netherlands. “So I had seen what they were, but I also was very aware of how women were portrayed in that genre. As a Dutch woman coming out of a family of very strong women with female empowerment being something that was very [important to me], it’s really kind of colored my life in every way. I put so much pressure on myself in this role because I thought, I don’t want to be one of those women. That’s not how I want to start my career. I wanted it to be a launching pad for a career that has longevity where I can do different things. So, I worked hard.”

Speaking of, Ross asked Janssen about the steamy bathhouse scene during which Xenia and Bond face off in an encounter that is both flirty and ferocious.

“From the moment I got the part, I thought just thought, ‘I’m going for broke. I don’t care. I am going to give it my all and work as hard as I can on making sure this character is going to be as memorable as possible.’ So I threw myself into it,” she explained, adding that her fearlessness came as a bit of a surprise considering how she grew up “as a very, very shy” kid who would often run and hide under a bed when guests came over to visit. “That scene was very difficult but also very liberating.”

And also very painful.

“I did break my ribs during that scene, by the way,” she revealed. “The walls were padded, and Pierce was meant to throw me against the wall. I told him, ‘Pierce, it’s so hard to act out this pain so just throw me against the wall.’ He said, ‘No, no, no. I don’t want to hurt you.’ I said, ‘Don’t worry about it, the walls are padded.’ Famous last words.”

Brosnan then threw Janssen up against the wall, she says, at which point she sustained broken ribs, though it wasn’t until months later that she realized the extent of the injury. “I couldn’t speak at that point. They had to stop filming for a moment because they didn’t know what was going on. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t do anything. I didn’t learn, by the way, until I came back to New York — we shot for six months — that I had broke a rib. We just continued filming. They didn’t know.”

Janssen said that filmmakers had hired a “pseudo psychic person” to work on her body, and the specialist wasn’t able to determine that she had broken ribs but did have a vision of a particular filmmaker she would eventually work with.

“She predicted that I was going to work with Woody Allen, which is so crazy. She said, ‘I can see Woody Allen smiling at you,’ and then probably within a year or two, I worked with him,” said the veteran star who landed a role opposite Kenneth Branagh in the auteur’s 1998 film Celebrity.

Back to Bond. Janssen said joining the franchise also delivered a steep learning curve. “You learn very quickly from day one that there is a publicity machine behind a Bond movie that is like no other franchise, not even like the X-Men,” said the actress, who went on to play Jean Grey in that blockbuster franchise. “Over all these years, they know how to promote something. On our first week of filming — I hadn’t even been on set yet — they had a press conference for 800 [journalists] like a junket with round tables. It was with the British press and they’re notorious. I love you all but they are notoriously difficult. Right away, I was, like, ‘Oh my God, this is it. This is what we’re going to be dealing with.’ [I was playing] such a specific character who was a foreigner and I was being catapulted into this big machine. There was a whole stigma about it.”

Janssen said it was tough navigating “stigma to stigma” as a model-turned-actress-turned-Bond girl.

“I was, like, on my God, what am I doing to myself and my career? I kept having to climb out of every box I was being put in. After [GoldenEye] came out, it really put me in the spotlight in a way that I had never experienced, and it gave me visibility and choices,” she said, though she was very choosy. “I turned down everything that had a gun, that had a ‘this,’ that had a ‘that.’ I waited until this one project came along called City of Industry with Harvey Keitel, and that was the one I liked because it was down and out.”

Dawson’s Creek fans have been excited about the Katie Holmes–Joshua Jackson reunion at the heart of Holmes’ latest film Happy Hours since the first paparazzi photos emerged of the two actors walking down a New York City sidewalk.

But there was something broader that sparked Holmes’ idea for her latest work as a writer and director, which premiered earlier this month at the Tribeca Festival: the increased social isolation that many people have felt since the COVID-19 pandemic.

When asked what she hoped audiences grappling with those feelings of loneliness and a struggle to connect emotionally could take away from the film, Holmes told The Hollywood Reporter that she hoped people would “feel a sense of compassion for themselves and others and a sense of hope and that we can have fun again.”

Jackson added, “And that love is possible; life is long; there’s no given path; there’s no shelf life, and you’re going to be OK. It feels like knowing that you can take a deep breath and be OK right now is more important than it’s ever been.”

In putting together the cast for the film, Holmes didn’t just rely on her familiarity with Jackson, she also looked to the actors she’d worked with in the 2024 Broadway production of Our Town. Castmembers John McGinty, Donald Webber Jr. and Sky Smith were all part of the company of the Broadway production. McGinty had also worked with Jackson on Children of a Lesser God, describing joining Happy Hours as a “natural progression.”

Webber recalled how he and Holmes “became close friends” through their work on Our Town, and he was intrigued at the prospect of working with her on a project she wanted to direct.

“I thought there’s no way that this incredible person, incredible actress, incredible everything is also going to be an incredible director. And it turns out she was also an incredible director. I think people will see in the film,” Webber said. “I’m proud of the things that she’s able to get out of us because I think she’s an actor’s director.”

Indeed, as Holmes explained in a post-screening conversation with the cast and Tribeca Festival director and senior vp, programming Cara Cusumano, she and Webber would discuss the progress of this film during their time on Our Town.

“After the death scene every night, we would chitchat on the stairs,” Holmes said, addressing Webber. “You really pushed me to keep going, and you’d be like, ‘How’d that pitch go? And I’d be like, ‘Waiting to hear,’ or, ‘We’re going to keep trying.’”

Earlier, in her introductory remarks, Holmes spoke about how the film reflects the value of interpersonal connections and community.

“This film was made in the spirit of what Tribeca Film Festival is all about. What you’re about to see is a beautiful community of artists who inspire one another and support one another and who said yes to this experience,” she said. “Collaborating is not only fun but also essential and quite magical. We had a truly magical time making this film. And I thank everyone for sharing this vision with me. … Tonight is about this cast and crew. I truly love each and every one of you and I really wanted the camera to echo the light in each of you. Josh, thank you for sharing this space with me again. You created the ideal creative experience for me years ago and again on this film. This film is about connection and reconnection and our individual experiences that shape how we come together.”

For other actors, like Joe Tippett and Jack Martin, who plays the younger version of Jackson’s character and is part of the ensemble cast of Hulu’s Not Suitable for Work, it was the script that drew them to what Holmes envisions as a trilogy in the spirit of Richard Linklater’s Before films.

“It was one of the best scripts I’ve ever read,” Martin said. “It was phenomenal. I love romance movies — they’re some of my favorite movies, that genre. And this was just beautifully written, very authentic dialogue, incredible relationships, it really moved me emotionally reading it, which is rare for me. And Katie’s such a talent; she’s so incredible. It was one of those things where every single day that I was a part of it was better than the last. Everybody was just so kind and generous.”

Martin, Tippett and castmember Chloë Kerwin all spoke to Holmes’ supportive approach as a director.

“She’s just so encouraging and makes you feel like you’re on the right track always,” Kerwin said.

And Tippett joked, “She knows how to talk to actors and convince you you’re coming up with all of the ideas when they’re really hers.”

McGinty adds of Holmes, “She’s like a collaborator really. She’s amazing because she’s so open to so many different ideas, and it wasn’t like there was one way to do anything. She would ask what my ideas were, how to bring the character into life and think about what it would look like on the screen. Every time I work with her I learn about her as a person, as a human, on an intellectual level, on every level. I’m just so grateful.”

But, the reunion with Jackson is still of the most interest to fans.

Webber offered a slight tease, “Everybody asks me, ‘Do they get together in the movie? Do they stay together?’ Without giving anything away, all I can say is it was a reunion that’s worth the wait.”

And castmember Constance Wu shared her thoughts on why people are so eager to see the Dawson’s Creek alums together again.

“History between two people, which is kind of what this movie is about, that’s something that you can’t fake,” she said. “There is such a richness to their history, even by virtue of the time that they’ve known each other. They saw each other grow up, and that is a beautiful thing. And to look at that and appreciate that is very worthy of the big screen.”