With one month to go before the opening of the 17th Strasbourg European Fantastic Film Festival, we are delighted to announce that the American director John McTiernan will be this year’s Guest of Honour.

The director of Predator will receive an honorary award for his outstanding career at the opening ceremony on Friday 20 September. A retrospective featuring a selection of his films will be shown throughout the Festival. He will also be holding a master class on Sunday 22 September, will present the two films in his carte blanche on Monday the 21st and on Tuesday the 24th will present his film Die Hard at an open-air screening at the foot of the cathedral.

A major director who revolutionised the way Hollywood made action movies, John McTiernan was born in Albany, New York on 8 January 1951. In 1985, he wrote and directed his first film, Nomads, a ghost story that introduced audiences to the actor Pierce Brosnan. He began working with 20th Century Fox and producer Joel Silver, for whom he directed Predator in 1987, which starred Arnold Schwarzenegger. In 1990, he adapted Tom Clancy’s novel The Hunt for Red October, a thrilling submarine movie starring Sean Connery, with whom he would work once more in his next film, Medicine Man (1992). In Last Action Hero (1993), again starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, he parodied his favourite genre with an ingenious use of mise en abyme. In 1994, he directed Die Hard with a Vengeance, a supercharged sequel to Die Hard, with Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson. In 1999 came the epic The 13th Warrior, with Antonio Banderas as an Arab ambassador who lands among the Vikings in the year 922. This was followed by two remakes, the masterful The Thomas Crown Affair, again starring Pierce Brosnan, and Rollerball in 2002, based on the Norman Jewison film, and with Jean Reno in the lead. His latest film to date is Basic, a military thriller with John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson.