[Photo provided to China Daily]

For the first time in his life, Harlin saw a large film set full of cameras, tracks and equipment. The most impressive moment for him was when a helicopter landed, and Siegel stepped out of it with a cigar in his mouth. The director walked to a chair with his name on it and sat down to be surrounded by obliging assistants before bellowing out the signal to start rolling: "Action!"

"At that moment I realized that's what a film director is, and it was the only thing I wanted to do," he says.

"It was not because he (Siegel) was so cool. It was because I realized that, as a director, you have the power to lead a group of talented people to create great entertainment."

Against the wishes of his parents, who had hoped he would become a doctor or an architect, Harlin painstakingly worked through a two-week examination-eventually outperforming hundreds of rivals-to be admitted to a film college in Finland.

However, he was disappointed to find that his classmates-eight in total-had no chance of raising enough money to shoot a film in Finland, a country with a population of around 5 million.

He dropped out of the academy, sending nine scripts to the government-backed Finnish Film Foundation. But they all failed to secure funding because they were too entertainment-driven.

Such government funding is usually reserved for art or educational films with in-depth themes in many countries.

At age 23, Harlin traveled to the United States. The journey taught him how to sell an idea, even without a completed script, and he used the newfound skill to fund his first feature-length film, Born American-which, at the time, became the most expensive film ever made in Finland.

However, it was a tough road. Unable to choke back tears, Harlin recalls that he and a friend borrowed around $500,000 to recruit a giant star, who failed to show up as scheduled, despite the fact that they'd prepared everything at the location, which had been expensive to rent.

"We were sitting in my friend's basement, crying. His wife was throwing all her shoes at me, roaring: 'Renny Harlin, you've destroyed our life!'" he recalls.

Quite dramatically, a shoe hit him in the head and triggered an idea: to use the sets, props and crew to at least shoot some action sequences.

So, he quickly arranged a flight to the US to hire three young, unknown actors and shot 25 minutes of footage, featuring explosions and gunfire, which he used to successfully attract a studio in Hollywood to finance the rest of the movie.