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.”