Renny Harlin added Samuel L. Jackson profanity to 'The Beast'

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 9 (UPI) -- The Beast, in theaters Friday, stars Samuel L. Jackson as President Oscar Paladdin. Director Renny Harlin thought it needed something extra: more profanity.

Paladdin already says Jackson's famous expletive that begins with the letter M during the film. During a terrorist attack, Paladdin drives his armored limousine with injured Secret Service agent Taft (Joel Kinnaman) in the backseat.

In a recent Zoom interview with UPI, Harlin, 67, said he had the idea for Paladdin and Taft to discuss the profanity that was on Jackson's wallet in Pulp Fiction. The scene was not in Umair Aleem's script.

"Okay, how do we acknowledge this and how do we tell the audience that we know that it's Sam Jackson saying that word and we are in on the joke?" Harlin said. "It was a complete improvisation. We did it in one take."

The action and language landed The Beast an R rating. However, without the language, Harlin noted that PG-13 action movies today are still quite graphic.

"Once you have Sam Jackson in your movie, you're not going to get a PG-13 rating," Harlin said. "Even PG-13 movies get away with quite amazing action and violence in today's world."

Profanity aside, Jackson takes the national crisis seriously in The Beast.

"It's really about a President as a human being, in a situation where all the presidential things have been stripped away," Harlin said.

Renny Harlin's 30-year bond with Samuel L. Jackson

The Beast is director Renny Harlin's fourth collaboration with Samuel L. Jackson. Their first film together, The Long Kiss Goodnight, came out 30 years ago Sunday and Harlin says it formed the basis of a lifelong friendship.

"We had a fantastic time doing that and creating that character," Harlin said. "We had made this sort of an agreement that we always have to try to work together."

Kinnaman and Jackson filmed the limo portions of the movie in a soundstage. Harlin filmed the driving footage with a camera car.

LED screens surrounded the limousine. Each screen played the footage from the corresponding angle of Harlin's camera car.

"Between the set and the screens, we had another layer of actual action on stage with actors and stuntmen and extras and explosions and props and weapons," Harlin said. "The actors could react in real time to what was going on outside the car."

The projectiles and technology inside the car may not be accurate to government specs, Harlin said.

"I enhanced it a little bit," Harlin said. "Nobody really knows what the President's limousine is capable of."

The film begins mid-attack. Harlin said there was never a version with a calm prologue to set up the characters.

"The intention was really to make it a stripped-down action movie where you're dropped in," Harlin said. "You have to play catch-up."

Samuel L. Jackson's favorite role

Jackson calls The Long Kiss Goodnight his favorite role. He played private investigator Mitch Hennessey, helping amnesiac Samantha Caine (Geena Davis) investigate her past. They discover she was assassin Charlie Baltimore.

"It's stunning when Sam says that actually his favorite character is Mitch Hennessey," Harlin said. "It's also my favorite movie of the movies I've made. It just showed to me how versatile he is and how good he is with not just the action and not just the humor but also the emotional stuff."

They got along so well on that film that Harlin created a role for Jackson in Deep Blue Sea. Jackson plays an investor trapped in an underwater laboratory with its genetically modified sharks.

"We invented that role and it became actually very central," Harlin said. "He's the one safe thing that you can count on. The whole point became, what if you take that one safe thing out? Then what are you going to do?"

Harlin had to make another drastic change one month before Deep Blue Sea was released in 1999. Originally, Dr. Susan McAlester (Saffron Burrows) defeated her sharks.

Test audiences demanded she pay for creating the sharks in the first place. Using digital effects, Harlin had the sharks eat McAlester, leaving other survivors (Thomas Jane, LL Cool J) to defeat the sharks.

"We literally had test cards where somebody just wrote in big letters, 'KILL THE BITCH,'" Harlin said. "We make these movies for the audience and sometimes the audience tells us something that we couldn't anticipate."

Deep Blue Sea came out on 4K UHD earlier this year. However, the original footage has never been presented since the 1999 test screening.

"It should be restored just for educational purposes," Harlin said. "I think it would be super fun to have people see it one day."

Harlin directed another shark movie earlier this year, Deep Water.

"I'm a shark conservationist so I care about them but I think there are still stories to be told," Harlin said. "It's an environment that we don't really belong to. It's this unknown giant world where we are just little visitors."

Always a fan of female action heroes

Jackson is the hero of The Beast, but Harlin had an affinity for heroines long before The Long Kiss Goodnight. His previous movie, Cutthroat Island, also starred Davis, but his Hollywood breakthrough featured a heroic woman.

A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 4: The Dream Master introduces a final girl, Alice (Lisa Wilcox), who absorbs the abilities of her fallen friends in her dreams, so she can battle Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) in the end.

"Because of my mother, I've always believed in strong female characters," Harlin said. "Then movies that I loved like Alien and Aliens, so I wanted to have some of that Sigourney Weaver vibe in Alice."

Before falling asleep to face Freddy, Alice suits up with nunchucks, a taser and studded glove. Harlin calls it a suiting up montage "that was kind of like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando."

The nunchuck montage was set to "Anything Anything" by Dramarama, originally released in 1985.

"We had a very limited budget so we had to find new artists and cutting edge music," Harlin said. "I was really into the club scene in L.A."

Cutthroat and Long Kiss represented a rough patch at the box office in the '90s. However, Harlin says he still hears from fans discovering both movies. He also discusses his filmography in a podcast with his wife, Harlin House.

"A lot of people felt like it was ahead of its time in terms of what came after that with Angelina Jolie and every other actress doing their action movie," Harlin said. "You can't always count it in box office dollars whether the movie works or not."

Harlin's follow-up to Nightmare 4 was controversial for its views on women. The Adventures of Ford Fairlane was a starring vehicle for Andrew "Dice" Clay.

Clay's controversial comedy was provoking boycotts of shows like Saturday Night Live and The Arsenio Hall Show when he appeared. Harlin noted that Clay's standup persona was itself a character, and the film exaggerated his character further by acknowledging he was in a movie.

"Maybe it had touches of something like Deadpool or something because it was so different," Harlin said.