By George & Josh Bate
Over a career that has spanned 40 years, Renny Harlin has masterminded action favorites like Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger and was responsible for arguably the best shark movie of all time not made by Steven Spielberg. The Finnish director’s latest project – Deep Water – finds the director recovering from an ill-conceived prequel of The Strangers movies with a film that draws on his greatest strengths as a filmmaker and blends the airplane disaster genre he toyed with in Die Hard 2 with the shark terror he relished in in Deep Blue Sea.
Deep Water stars Aaron Eckhart and Ben Kingsley as pilots of a commercial plane en route from Los Angeles to Shanghai. An accidental fire in the cargo hold causes the plane to crash in an ocean, leaving the few survivors stranded in the middle of nowhere. If that wasn’t traumatizing enough, the survivors now need to contend with a frenzy of bloodthirsty sharks drawn to the wreckage.
The HoloFiles recently had the opportunity to speak with Deep Water director Renny Harlin and producer Gene Simmons (yes, THE Gene Simmons) about their new thriller, how making shark movies has changed in the 27 years since Deep Blue Sea, and making a movie that, as Simmons puts it, “is as much fun as I can imagine with my pants on.”
It’s rare that a filmmaker has the opportunity to revisit a rather niche genre after nearly 30 years, but Harlin does exactly that with Deep Water. In 1999, Harlin helmed the cult favorite Deep Blue Sea, proving that the limited genre of shark movies can encompass more than just Jaws. After joking that Deep Blue Sea is a “childhood favorite, because [he] was actually a child when [he] made it,” Harlin went on to distinguish the primary difference in making a shark movie in 2026 compared to 1999. “Obviously, technology always develops and changes,” Harlin described. “We spent $10 million on mechanical sharks on [Deep Blue Sea] and didn’t make the same mistake with this one. Obviously digital technology has developed a lot and so on.”
Despite the industry-wide shift away from practical effects and toward computer generated imagery, Harlin approached Deep Water with the same kind of character-first mentality that makes his films so memorable. “The basic thing that never changes is: it’s in the script or not,” explained Harlin. “It’s the story and it’s the characters. I like doing things an old school way. I think the audience can tell the difference when things seem weightless and gravity has no meaning and you use digital doubles flying through the air. So, in Deep Water, the people are real. The plane falls apart for real. The people are pulled out of the plane for real. So, in that sense, nothing has changed.”
Harlin elaborated on the importance of crafting a thriller that balances spectacle with intimacy. “If anything, I just try to pay attention to the characters and the personal stories more than ever,” Harlin remarked. “Because I think that’s why people go to the movie theater. They, of course, partially go there for the spectacle and for the action and all the big visuals. But what they really want is to feel something when they are watching the story.”
Having worked with the likes of Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Jackie Chan, and Geena Davis over the course of his career, Harlin found himself working alongside an unconventional collaborator in the form of Gene Simmons. The iconic bassist of Kiss produced Deep Water as the first film of his new production company Simmons/Hamilton Productions. Consistent with the eccentricity of his “The Demon” persona, Simmons approached filmmaking with the same maverick spirit that made his music career so successful.
“I’d like to say that I don’t want to be involved with anything that’s not extraordinary,” Simmons stated. “Why be ordinary? I don’t want to be usual. I’m loud. I take up more space than other people. I suck up more oxygen. I don’t want to be a regular person. And I think that’s the difference between alpha males, people with dreams, people with fire in their belly, people with passion. And that’s what makes amazing directors.”
After complimenting Harlin in stating, “I could never do in my wildest dreams what this man does, but I can be associated with it,” Simmons explained why Deep Water was the perfect project to kick off Simmons/Hamiltons productions. “Once you recognize that a script has legs, has quality, and, as they say, gravitas, is more than just action and reaction and thrills and chills, that it’s got people and the human condition, the sadness, the happiness, the mirth, all that stuff alongside with all the thrills and chills, you go, ‘I’m going to get involved in this.’”
Simmons and the creative team behind Deep Water assembled a stellar cast for the film, headlined by Academy Award winner Ben Kingsley and Aaron Eckhart. But despite the strong performers in front of the camera, the film hinges on the director overseeing the project, according to Simmons. “The great actors of the world are going to want to know one thing: who’s directing,” Simmons said. “They are not going to put their reputation and their lives on the line for some schmecklehead who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Renny Harlin? I’m in. It’s a director’s medium.”
Simmons rounded out the interview by expressing his pride in the film, having seen it multiple times already. “That’s as much fun as I can imagine with my pants on,” he said. If that’s not a ringing endorsement to go watch Deep Water, we don’t know what is.
Watch the full interview with Deep Water producer Gene Simmons and director Renny Harlin below….
