Jan Harlan is the nephew of the film director Veit Harlan and the younger brother of Christiane Kubrick, who was married with director Stanley Kubrick from 1958 until his death in 1999.

In 1968, Kubrick asked Harlan, as a German speaker, to accompany him to Romania to organise army scenes for the film.

[2] Harlan acted as Kubrick's executive producer for Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), and was an assistant to the producer for A Clockwork Orange (1971).

[3] In 2009 he assisted Alison Castle, a Taschen editor, in creating the book Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made[4] and gave a talk about the Kubrick Napoleon archives at Cambridge Film Festival in September 2010 with her.

[5] He is the nephew of the German filmmaker Veit Harlan, best known for his work during the Third Reich including Jud Süß (1940), an antisemitic propaganda film.