"Screenwriters Jim and John Thomas on the origins of "Predator":" "( John) Our parents read to us a great deal when we were young, and that included some of the classic mythological stories starting with the Brothers Grimm, the fairy tales." "Those were our favourites." "We were fascinated." "( Jim) We've always had an interest in mythology." "There've always been creatures or characters like the Predator." "There's the Cyclops, the Minotaur, Goliath, the Grendel in Beowulf." "They always represent the darkness." "The original conceit of the story was" ""What would it be like if human beings were hunted by dilettante hunters, the way humans hunt big game in Africa?"" "In exploring that, we tried to use all the elements of hunting that we knew about:" "Stalking, mimicking the calls of its prey and choosing the most dangerous species." "The most dangerous species for an extraterrestrial hunter would be humans." "The most dangerous humans are combat soldiers." "Stalking was where the whole camouflage idea came from because hunters use camouflage to stalk everything else." "We completed the screenplay in September '83 and sold it in early '84." "The process we used then, and have always used, is to just start spitballing ideas." "We build an outline from that." "Then a more extensive outline to the point where we've pretty well fleshed everything out." "One thing that was very important to us, and it has been in anything that we've done, is knowing what the ending is." "The ending is like the punch line to ajoke." "If you have a good payoff, you can have a lot of fun with how you get there." "We wrote the whole screenplay sitting out at the beach." "We'd stick an umbrella out there and just work." "( John) There was a writer who lived next to Jim" " Ernest Thompson, who wrote On Golden Pond." "We used to look up about four storeys at his ivory-tower condominium." "Meanwhile, he'd be looking down at us while we're both scribbling away." "( Jim) He finally couldn't stand it one day." "He came down and told us how jealous he was... ( John) That we were sitting out there on the sand and he was stuck up there in his office!" "The screenwriters discuss the research they conducted:" "( John) We researched the structure and operating parameters of a Special Forces team:" "What kind of aircraft and tactics they would use, how they would leave the aircraft, if they would parachute or do what we chose - a quick-line rappel which has been used since Vietnam - and lastly, their combat techniques when they're attacking a much larger force." "We learned a lot from guys who we'd known who'd been doing this." "Also from people who we knew that were involved with the Central Intelligence Agency." "We picked up some ideas of the operations that the CIA had been detailing and running over the years in Central America." "( Jim) At that particular time, there was so much stuff going on in Central America." "If this had been before that, it would have been Vietnam." "( John) We were hearing reports that US advisers were down in that area but that was being kept very quiet." "Since that time, we've learned a great deal, that there were American Special Forces down there operating." "( Jim) We were told on deep background that American Special Forces had actually engaged Russian advisers, who were Russian Special Forces, in combat." "( John) They were also using the C-130 gunships at night." "During the day, the advisers would go in and locate these camps." "Then at night, the gunships would come in and annihilate those places." "That was all secret, but it's since been revealed." "Editor Mark Helfrich on the helicopter sequence:" "(Helfrich) Looking at Predator again, the only thing I thought was too long was "Long Tall Sally" playing in the helicopter scene for ever." "I thought "God, this is going on a bit. "" ""Maybe we don't need so many shots of the helicopters flying through the air. "" "I had a lot of cool helicopter shots, so I wanted to use them." "I guess I was influenced by Apocalypse Now that day." "Casting Director Jackie Burch:" "(Burch) I'm brought in after they know they're making the movie." "All we had was Arnold." "When I read the script, the first thing I evaluated was that I needed actors who had been Vietnam vets so they could survive in the jungle." "At the time, there was a play out about Vietnam - that's where I found Richard Chaves." "As for Jesse the Body, his agent Barry Bloom called up and said "You've got to meet him. "" "I said "Can he act?" "I really like good actors and I don't like lunkheads. "" "He turned out to be a doll and a good type for this movie." "He was physically great for this." "And he did really well when he read, which was important to me." "What I like to bring to action movies is really good actors." "You can'tjust have the same formula for every action movie and expect it to work." "Each one has its own special needs." "Die Hard was a totally different kind of action movie to cast." "I needed an intellectual heavy, while Reginald Veljohnson added warmth and played off Bruce really well." "With Predator, they were good actors and good survivors." "I went after people who had had military training to make it more realistic and easier for the production." "( Jim Thomas) I know Jesse Ventura was a Navy SEAL and did a couple of tours in Vietnam." "Richard Chaves had been there." "He was with the 101st Airborne, so a lot of memories came flooding back." "That definitely influenced the cast." "Bill Duke hadn't had combat experience." "Carl Weathers was a great athlete." "He'd played in a professional football league." "He's a consummate professional, he really picked up on the element of the tortured CIA agent." "Mac and Blain were a team within themselves." "In interviewing people, we found out there are relationships that develop like that." "There are things like flasks or cigarette lighters with emblems with the campaigns they were involved in." "Those things become almost like totems." "They're handed around and dealt with with great respect because of where they came from and the price that was paid to earn them." "Stunt Coordinator/Second-Unit Director Craig Baxley remembers his first impressions of John McTiernan:" "(Baxley) He was very confident." "Seemed to have a lot of great ideas." "And as a good filmmaker, it's wonderful to have ideas but you also have to know how to execute." "Baxley cites working with the helicopters:" "We only had those helicopters for four days." "Two days for first unit and two days for second unit." "John had to do one thing:" "Bring the helicopters in, and get the guys out." "As we all know, filmmaking's not a perfect science." "Sometimes it's about making the right choice." "He shot with the helicopters for 3½ days, and they were leaving that day." "With helicopters, you usually want to do your aerial work in the morning before the winds come up, especially down there." "I got the helicopters around 12.00." "We shot all those aerials and the rappelling sequence in a half-day." "Everybody disses TV, but had I not had - and I hate to say this - a TV second-unit crew that had worked so well together, we could not have accomplished it." "We only had one chance at the repelling sequence." "Film Journalist/Historian Eric Lichtenfeld:" "Prior to "Predator", director John McTiernan had directed only one feature, "Nomads"." "By 1987, however, Australian cinematographer Donald McAlpine was already well-established in his craft." "Here he shares his thoughts on the difference between working with an American director and an Australian one, and on working with an inexperienced director as opposed to an experienced one:" "(McAlpine) Directors are all obsessed people." "And they're all individuals." "The fact that they're born in the wrong place doesn't make a difference at all." "Note that McAlpine doesn't specify which is the "wrong"place!" "(McAlpine) As a surviving professional cinematographer, my job is to study the director and find out what he needs and what he doesn't." "My very un-politically correctjoke is that I've had more virgin directors than I've had virgin women." "McAlpine also claims that he enjoys helping young directors learn:" "John was the most precise director I'd ever worked with." "To compensate for his inexperience, he researched." "He knew in his mind almost every frame that would go on screen... and it did go on screen." "He was extremely well prepared." "He was very communicative." "We really had a ball." "Each day we'd drive back from location, which took about ¾ an hour." "We'd go through the successes and failures of the day, prepare for the next... and try to demolish a bottle of Scotch." "Predator was actually a flawed situation." "There's not much light on the jungle floor." "On the other hand, that adds depth." "Whether they're photographed by Don McAlpine," "Jan de Bont or Peter Menzies," "McTiernan's movies always feature powerful compositions." "In this shot, Dutch, Poncho and Dillon are all pressed to one side, rather than spread across the frame." "The image shows the commandos both blending with their environment and also under pressure from it." "As the movie progresses, vines and other objects will stab their way into the foreground between the camera and the characters, increasing the audience's feeling of claustrophobia as the commandos go deeper into the jungle and into danger." "( John Thomas) We did have a profile on each character:" "Where they'd been, background experiences they'd had, the kind of work they'd done." "I think in one of the early drafts, while Dutch was in a delirious state, he had a flashback to an embassy takeover that they'd done." "The movie is not just one genre or another." "It has elements of science fiction, horror and combat films." "In "Predator", the chief element of the combat film is the platoon itself." "In the cavalry westerns which preceded and influenced the combat film, one member of the group was often an Indian who had an intimate, almost mystical relationship with the landscape." "( John Thomas) You find that with Billy the Tracker." "Often, you'll find someone working with them who could be from the region." "Billy knew so much about the jungle." "He's well versed in how it operates." "The filmmakers exploit this device in a number of ways." "Here, they use it not only to establish Billy's expertise, but also to augment the movie's suspense." "Here, the drip-drip-drip sound expands our sense of space and with it our feelings of exposure, of vulnerability." "What makes "Predator" so satisfying is that it's equally committed to delivering suspense as it is action." "Editor John Link describes the relationship between action and suspense:" "I'm an old-fashioned guy, and I think one accelerates the other." "So when you play a long shot, and it plays and plays, then cut in and chop-chop-chop-chop-chop, I think it's sensational." "But you can't chop-chop-chop." "Look on television." "I mean, Jesus Christ, I keep seeing certain ads, I have no idea what they're about." "Go look at Bruckheimer's films." "You haven't got a clue where you are." "Jerry's a neat guy, but when you hire this director, whatever the hell his name is, he will not stay on one shot for more than five seconds." "Illustrating Link's point, the cutting employed when Billy finds the bodies is a counterpoint to the earlier, more lingering shots." "( Jim Thomas) The Predator is not so much of a monster." "He's a dilettante, a hunter." "This is just what he does." "( John) The creature was descended from a long line of a warrior society." "Obviously, he wasn't a game hunter, he was in this for trophies." "It has the same implications for his kind and his society as it does on our world." "We were trying to convey that it had high meaning for him." "( Jim) We realised that the more of the creature you reveal, the quicker the audience is liable to get bored." "The mystery is in keeping Jaws underwater, in Alien, keeping the visual down to a bare minimum." "We came up with the idea of layering the reveal of the Predator:" "First through his vision, then through camouflage, then by showing you what he actually looked like, then the final payoff was underneath the helmet that there was a living organic thing with a mind." "There was one shot that we were disappointed that didn't make it into the movie." "It was the very first reveal that there was this something out there." "Arnold's team was moving out of the jungle quietly and they'd camouflaged themselves." "As they pass by, they stir up this flock - I guess they're flocks - of butterflies." "One of the butterflies comes back and lands on a tree limb." "It fans its wings for a moment, then picks up and leaves." "The image of the butterfly stays on the branch, and then the branch moves." "It's the Predator's arm with the butterfly, camouflaging itself, reacting to it." "They shot it, but at the time they had to do it with an optical camera." "They thought itjust wasn't good enough, so it didn't make it in." "Co-Supervising Sound Editor Richard L Anderson:" "I was impressed when the guerilla executes the CIA guy." "Even though we're seeing it through binoculars, you hear the distance." "It's this relatively light little crack." "Like when you fire a small-calibre bullet." "In a way, it was more horrifying than a lot of movies where people get shot in slow-motion and their blood very artistically splatters in just the right place." "This looks like a snuff film, like McTiernan had tricked some poor actor into really getting shot!" "Stunt Coordinator/Second-Unit Director Craig Baxley:" "The guy who gets shot in the head, Steve Boyum, I got into the business." "I met him on Rollerball." "We were both the same age." "Co-Supervising Sound Editor David Stone:" "This was my first opportunity - thank you, Richard - to co-supervise a track." "I had just seen Platoon." "I was struck by how, in handling the military in the jungle, the foley people had not created a sense of crackling leaves that sounded like old quarter-inch tape." "Instead, all of the green, lush leaves of the jungle sounded fresh and alive." "So I wanted to work with those people." "It turned out to be Vanessa Ament and Robin Harlan." "We put them on the foley stage and, before each session, we would walk around the neighbourhood and steal fresh foliage from trees and plants in people's yards." "And Vanessa got that real jungle sound like she had in Platoon." "(Anderson) Some of the foley wasn't strictly realistic, but it worked dramatically." "These guys are such good commandos, they can sneak through a pile of dead leaves and no one can hear them." "In some cases, it is the second-unit director who shoots a movie's action sequences." "(Baxley) Joel wanted me to write and construct a shot list for all the action as I did on The Warriors, when Joel and I first worked together." "Not necessarily in script form, but in terms of blocking it, so he could get a feel for the sequence." "Initially, the schedule allocated four weeks for the guerilla encampment." "Joel was concerned that the first unit was falling behind." "So he said "Make a pass at it. "" "Jim and John Thomas were cool with it, so I did." "I said "How much time do I have to shoot it, Joel?"" "He said "How much do you need?"" "I said "First unit had four weeks. "" "He smiled and said "How about a week?"" "I said "What about the cast?"" "He said "First unit needs them. "" ""Figure out a way to shoot it with one actor at a time and I'll make sure they're there. "" "Special Effects Coordinator Al Di Sarro first worked with Baxley and Unit Production Manager Beau Marks on "The A-Team"." "Baxley and Marks persuaded Joel Silver to hire Di Sarro for "Predator", which would be Di Sarro's first film." "His next would be "Die Hard", reuniting him with McTiernan." "Both films would earn Oscar nominations for Best Visual Effects." "Here, Di Sarro remembers working with Baxley on this sequence:" "Craig Baxley?" "Work of art." "He spent weeks while we were prepping and filming the first-unit stuff." "It's archaic now because we have the laptops, but everything you got from Baxley was eloquently written on a yellow legal pad." "Beautiful handwriting." "Very legible." "His shot list was almost a mini-script." "You could read it and see it in your mind." "When the commandos come in and kill all the guerillas, that's where I learned words like "In scene 53 will be the demise of... "" "(Baxley) In the end, I was a bit disappointed." "There's another minute to that sequence but I was told it was too violent." "In the original cut when the truck blows up, an adjacent fuel dump goes up." "It was a truly amazing visual:" "An area 100 feet by 100 feet filled with fire, seven stuntmen caught up as it engulfed them all doing full-burns." "Another cut:" "Two stuntmen starting the helicopter, Bobby Bass runs in on fire." "Through the windshield, we see fire wrapping his entire body and face - the stuntman had gel on." "He's pounding on the windscreen "Help me!" "Help me!"" "As he's caught up in an onslaught of bullet hits." "He's shot and he falls out of frame and the guys are still trying to take the helicopter up." "Nobody had ever seen anything like this." "I thought Jim and John had written an incredible screenplay," "And throughout preproduction, I thought we were all making the same movie." "War is aawul, horrific, and I was under the impression that that was the movie we were making." "John never wanted me to shoot that sequence." "He stressed we weren't making a war movie." "(Di Sarro) We actually started detonating fireball explosions on their chests." "Those were very effective." "A lot of partial burns, a lot of full burns." "We had gotten to the point where we were detonating gas explosions into the people." "That was all through experience and testing - what size bomb and how to wrap it." "For the most part, stunt guys, if they don't know who the effects guy is, are very protective of their people." "They will apply the stunt gel and prepare the wardrobe for full burn." "And they'll bring their guy out ready to be glued." "In a lot of cases, I've seen a lot of stunt guys even apply the glue, and light them." "I had such a relationship with all these stunt people that they came to me for all that stuff." "If I told them "The stunt gel will be there tomorrow morning." "Go home", that was done, because there would probably be ten times more stunt gel than they'd need, in iced coolers." "And all of the wardrobe, all of the Nomex underwear, will already have been dipped in gel and put in ice buckets." "Believe me, when those guys have that kind of trust in you they'd just as soon have you do it, because they have a lot more time to party." "In the type of heat you'd experience in Mexico, once you dressed the stuntman up, you look for certain things." "You want to see that he's shivering." "The bottom jaw needs to shake from cold." "Because an experienced stuntman, who's cool, won't sweat from nerves." "You can almost rest assured he has at least five minutes on the air bottle." "They use a seven-minute air bottle, but I've never found a seven-minute bottle that's seven minutes." "Everybody breathes differently, OK?" "Now, when you get somebody who's nervous, you keep him in an air-conditioned area with an iced Nomex gelled suit on." "You put on everything but the headpiece." "Everybody's got to be ready." "You bring him out, put the mouthpiece on, the hairpiece on, put the air on, the headpiece on, seal it, glue him, go." "Because a nervous guy?" "Two things:" "He will suck that air bottle in a minute and a half." "Now he's out of air." "And he's on fire." "And the first response, whether you're on fire or not, is to get the headpiece off to get air." "Now what happens?" "You burn." "The other problem is if you don't keep the body cold, it will sweat." "Sweat causes pockets of water inside the suit." "The heat from the fire boils the water in the suit and causes hot-water burns." "When you glue them, you never glue places like the hinge point between the thigh and the knee or the elbows." "The ears are very sensitive, the feet and hands are very sensitive." "You put a little bit on the shoulders but you never really need to glue too much higher than the waist because the fire will rise." "You want to keep the heat as cool as possible and the closer the source of the flame, the hotter the flame." "So if you have a three-foot flame licking up, at the end of three feet you're not as hot as you are at the start of it." "Little tricks." "The helicopter we saw destroyed was the same helicopter that had already been filmed hanging in the trees." "Di Sarro refurbished it for the attack sequence." "Jim and John Thomas:" "( John) The site of the guerilla encampment actually became a tourist attraction." "( Jim) It's still there." "The burned-out helicopter is there, and a bunch of stuff." "Despite the mayhem taking place on screen, the geography of the scene is always clear." "Not only is our sense of space created by skilful direction and editing, but also, surprisingly, by the sound." "Co-Supervising Sound Editor Richard L Anderson:" "There's a problem in these kinds of movies you can fall into - overcutting." "That's when you cover everything, and with sound, by saying" ""While this event is happening, 30 other guys are shooting at each other offstage" "so we're going to have 30 guns going off offstage. "" "The problem is you end up with this wall of noise and you can't hear anything." "It's important to feature the key thing." "(Stone) Richard Shorr laid out all those gunshots." "The first thing we did was assign certain gun recordings to certain characters or groups of characters." "Then he'd map the thing out as he understood the geography of the scene." "He assigned those guns and ricochets to tracks which would be dedicated to the speaker channel he wanted the sound to appear in, and then the mixers made it work." "(Stone) The other layer of this effort, which I have to credit Shorr for doing, is very carefully articulating what surfaces bullets were hitting, whether it was a body, a metal rail, a wooden crate," "a bunch of dirt or some leaves." "All of that detail, even if it was as short as two frames in the movie, was covered." "Jim and John Thomas, who were on location for four months:" "( John) One of the big problems was the heat vision." "Something like that had never been attempted before." "We had a thermographic heat-vision camera that actually ran on liquid nitrogen, and was married to the Panavision." "Through the use of a beam splitter, 70% of the image went to the thermographic video camera and 30% went to the 35mm film camera." "Visual Effects Coordinator Joel Hynek:" "The thermographic scanner had only half resolution of video." "That was actually a benefit." "It made the heat vision look more abstract." "It's like you're seeing the thinking process of Predator." "It's like a fly's vision:" "A million images you can't comprehend but you know that somehow there's a mind processing information." "We had tested the thermographic camera." "We had set up a greenhouse at R/Greenberg and raised the temperature to see at what point the camera could no longer distinguish a person from the surroundings." "It was around 93 degrees." "( John Thomas) We were working in 102, 103-degree temperatures." "The heat-vision camera had its own special cooling unit that was housed in a truck because the cables weren't long enough, so for the aerial shots they brought in a crane and lifted the truck into the trees." "It was pretty wild." "(Al Di Sarro) We had to bring in water trucks and make ice water." "We'd spray all the foliage down to get it cold enough so that you read the heat from the body for all that stuff Greenberg did." "According to Hynek, even after the jungle was initially hosed down, the camera still could not distinguish the actors from the environment." "No one knew what had gone wrong until Hynek realised." "(Hynek) These black trucks had been sitting in the sun." "I said "Guys, cold water!"" "In some of the long shots, like when Arnold throws down the cigar, the actors and the cigar would be from thermographic camera but the trees came from the optical camera." "We'd make that image blue because the coolest things in the Predator's vision would have been blue." "The idea was to blend the two images together to make it look like one, and now, on some shots, I can't tell!" "Co-Supervising Sound Editors David Stone and Richard L Anderson:" "(Stone) When we started this, we heard a simple premise:" "Arnold in the jungle and an alien." "Arnold didn't have the respectability he has now." "So we thought "genre", "stupid", "let's just make it loud and please Joel"." "But Rich and I were both surprised at how artistically it was executed." "(Anderson) Predator was originally dubbed in the Dolby SR format with mono surround." "As I recall, I specialised in the backgrounds:" "The bird and animal sounds because the jungle was such a big part of it." "(Stone) Richard orchestrated the life and the jungle activity that was so much a part of the story." "Thatjust doesn't happen from laying down a flat background." "You have different birds and howler monkeys and they react to what the humans are doing." "That's Richard thinking through:" ""What would happen after they mowed down the jungle with that big gun?"" "Would birds start tweeting right away?" "I don't think so." "I should credit Andy Wiskes for the jungle recordings." "(Anderson) A lot of which came from a movie originally called Lazaro and was released as Where the River Runs Black." "(Stone) As far as we know, Lazaro was one of the first soundtracks made of almost entirely digital recordings." "Andy, who recorded a lot of Grateful Dead stuff, was a great field recordist." "He went into the jungle for that picture, not ours." "He lugged a ¾-inch video recorder all through the Brazilian jungle." "He rated each recording with the number of mosquito bites it cost to get it." "(Anderson) Though I think his was the bulk of the background, we had otherjungles in our library besides the Andy Wiskes's stuff." "From the basic jungles we had, I would pick the best stuff for the scene." "I'd make one stereo pair to go left-right across the front of the screen and another pair to go centre-surround, front to back of the theatre, to get a surround feel." "Then I cut individual birds reacting to the people." "Sometimes you'd have the actors not reacting to anything, butjust looking around nervously." "So I'd put a monkey or bird call offscreen, and cause them to look in that direction." "Editor Mark Helfrich:" "I was hired to edit Predator, which at that time was called Hunter." "Midway through the shooting the movie was retitled "The" Predator." "Shortly thereafter they settled on just Predator." "I had an all-female crew, which is very bizarre for such a macho movie." "Months of shooting went by, then the production was shut down." "The studio wanted to evaluate how to proceed before starting up again." "Most everything had been shot up to where Dutch was left to face the creature - everything except the creature." "The incomplete film had to be edited and mixed in record time." "So I brought on another editor." "I called John Link and said "Do you want to come work on Predator?"" "He said "Sure" and moved here from Colorado to do it. (laughs)" "(Link) I drove from Aspen, got to the studio... (Helfrich) Yeah, in a beat-up, shitty..." "He had the worst car." "He should have put that car to rest years before he did." "Billy is played by actor Sonny Landham." "Al Di Sarro remembers working with Landham:" "(Di Sarro) Sonny Landham. (laughs)" "You get real close to Sonny, you can hear the fuse." "Joel Silver hired a bodyguard for Sonny to make sure he was there in the morning, to make sure he didn't do whatever he was doing from off-time to on-time." "One night, Sonny almost threw him off the balcony of his room." "The guy had to weigh almost 400 pounds!" "He was huge!" "And Sonny scared him." "He came down and quit." "Craig Baxley remembers working with Landham on "The Warriors":" "I needed somebody in the subway I could throw a bat at, a line drive hitting him in the shins, pinwheeling him like a rag doll." "Sonny Landham was definitely the right choice." "Sonny got his SAG card on The Warriors for that one gag." "Joel loved him so much, he put him in 48 Hrs and Predator." "After Predator, Joel gave me my first shot at directing first unit on Action Jackson." "During our casting sessions, he said "Do you mind using Sonny?"" "I said "As what?" He said "What else?" "The heroin dealer. "" "I said "The guy who gets thrown out the window, across the alley and in through the window on the opposite side?"" "Joel smiled." "I said "Sure, he'd be perfect. "" "(Anderson) People often forget that silence can be an extremely loud sound effect." "(Stone) He knew that often the suspense of the story depended on the silence." "This is one of the quietest macho action movies." "Quite seriously." "(Anderson) Dave, you dealt mainly with what we'll call "hard effects" - the impacts." "(Stone) And also worked with John P on the design stuff." "(Anderson) That's John P, as in P period." "His official name is John Pospisil." "He designed the Predator's suit camouflage coming on and off." "(Stone) We worked together on the snap to the Predator Vision." "(Anderson) I know one of the elements was a whip crack." "(Stone) I think John P came up with some tonal modifiers that gave it that angry, ugly darkness." "(Anderson) What John tends to do is take a sound element and EQ, change the speed of it, play it backwards - that kind of thing." "I always suspected that snap was stolen by Fox for that Hard Copy or A Current Affair show's triangle logo sound." "(Helfrich) We completed the cut in a couple of weeks, and showed it to the studio." "This was basically my cut of the film." "McTiernan hadn't really gotten in there yet." "As I recall, the purpose of screening it for the studio was that Joel had gotten the studio half-pregnant." "He shot the majority of the film, but he didn't shoot the creature... which is the main thing!" "So there was no backing out." "He needed more money to get the film right." "We showed it to the studio, the studio loved it." "(Baxley) I think the original editor on it was brilliant." "And his cut's the movie." "(Helfrich) During the hiatus, Craig Baxley got a movie to direct." "He loved the attack scene that I cut, and he asked me to edit Action Jackson." "Since it was another Joel Silver film, Joel said "Go ahead. "" "So I left Predator and went onto Action Jackson, leaving Link to finish it up." "Craig Baxley and I ended up working together for several years on several films." "Action Jackson was a lot of fun." "Some films are of their period." "And Action Jackson is so '80s." "(Link) Basically, the entire film had been edited except for the end sequence and a couple of pick ups, so there was not that much to do except to go through and finesse everything." "Helfrich's work was absolutely wonderful." "He did a fabulous job." "I probably would not have changed one frame of what he did." "John McTiernan had different ideas." "So we reworked things." "Not that it would be better, but it was somebody else's interpretation." "It was just a personality conflict, which I've had many a time." "According to Helfrich, the use of the original creature in this scene is what prompted the production shutdown." "(Helfrich) It looked like a giant red lobster." "You see this shot of this lobster, this guy in a red suit with these big claws dragging Shane Black, and it was just so hilarious." "In the cut presented to the studio:" "(Helfrich) All the heat-vision stuff was already cut in." "I came up with the idea of that zoom of that lens changing as he gets closer and closer." "I used a piece of that heat vision that looked like the reflection of an eye and I put two frames in, then I think a black frame." "Whatever I created was consistent throughout the whole film." "Al Di Sarro on the film's weaponry:" "The Mexico military had to keep the guns." "Our weapons specialist would load them and, in fact, the military helped." "We had that big GE, the Gatling gun that Jesse Ventura used." "That was quite a rig." "It never worked." "They had nothing but problems with it, nothing but problems with the guns." "The gun house, Stembridge, sent out a guy by the name of Mike Papac." "We became, and still are to this day, the best of friends." "He is now probably one of Hollywood's top prop guys and probably one of the biggest owners of a large variety of weapons." "He set up a work station in our special-effects trailer." "Not only is that where we spend more time than we do in our homes, but it's where all the creative thoughts and decisions are made, and mechanically and physically put into effect." "He and I rebuilt the Gatling gun, got it working." "There were a lot of old parts on the gun." "We had to fabricate some new pieces." "We had to retap, rethread some new holes, we rewired the thing, we simplified it." "He tore the whole thing down." "He actually field-stripped that weapon, which scared me because it was in so many pieces" "I didn't think it would ever go back together." "It was a real weapon, but there's a lot that goes into making a studio gun an efficient gun." "You don'tjust put a blank in an automatic weapon and fire it." "The blank doesn't create enough gas in the chamber to eject the shell." "What you have to do is drill the barrel out and tap it, and you put a plug in the end of the barrel and in that plug you drill a hole." "What that does is restrict the gas." "The right-size hole creates enough pressure in the barrel to eject the shell and it creates a bigger muzzle flash." "Perhaps the movie's most memorable sequence is the one in which the commandos unleash their fire power into the jungle." "(Di Sarro) We called that the "mow-down" sequence." "And we actually were out in thatjungle for two weeks, maybe more." "We had a crew out there doing nothing but wiring explosives." "We just let the good times roll on that one." "It was awesome, wasn't it?" "We had thousands of SD-100s, from De La Mare Engineering, which is about the biggest charge you could set, and hundreds of feet of 100-grain primer cord which burns at a rate of 25,000 feet per second." "That's what was actually cutting the trees in half." "That was one of Joel Silver's favourite things." "David Stone and Richard Anderson on the sound of the Minigun:" "(Stone) Whatever kind of blanks or propane gas that it shot to create the visual in production, they were very proud that it shot 400 rounds a minute." "That means it's a high-frequency event." "The higher the frequency, the less alarming it sounds - it's just a buzz." "There's nothing on our planet that comes as close to the sound of that gun as a gas-powered leaf-blower." "The challenge was to make a gun that sounded macho and bitching and scary, that had enough low-end material to be foreboding, that would still appear to fire off nearly that many rounds." "(Anderson) We used a US Army 50mm machine gun, mounted on a tank." "The problem is, they don't fire really fast." "(Stone) We had to find a way to speed up their frequency without losing their fearsomeness." "We tried cutting them close together, but if we cut them too close, we were back to sounding like the original." "We cut a number of these. 50 calibres together, with sweeteners, and then had to layer them on tracks to multiply them." "(Anderson) So it was staggered:" "One would go in the space between two others." "Then we added in the spinning-barrel sound." "That was sort of a signature sound, along with the explosive shooting sound." "(Stone) To be fair, that was inspired by production recordings because the prop sounded that way, but we had to enhance it." "(Anderson) It wasn't as good - rather thin." "(Stone) We put a little sound make-up on it." "Everybody loves that moment." "One of the filmmakers doesn't remember the scene or the gun quite as fondly." "Cinematographer Donald McAlpine:" "The Gatling gun fired directly into the hand-held camera - held by me." "It was spewing flame and blast." "Coming out is pressurised air and bits and pieces of who knows what." "Three grips would stand behind me pushing forward against the blast." "It was like sticking your head in an airplane engine." "With all the thousands of shots, one mistake with a load and I'm dead." "The cameras were all set up, looking at ajungle set up to explode." "I was on a tower 30 to 40 feet up." "At that height, I was blown from one side of the tower to another by an explosion that was a little too close." "There had been a language problem." "It never happened again, though, I can tell you that!" "(laughs)" "An important aspect of "Predator's" sound design is its logic." "The sound is imaginative, but it also reflects the design of the Predator's technology." "(Stone) We've both done a lot of science fiction movies." "Whenever we do a show, we talk about that stuff." "Somehow the logic there was more the result of problem solving than something predetermined by a writer." "A script might say:" ""He pulls out a medical kit and fixes the hole in his leg. " End of sentence." "Well, some poor prop person had to figure out what to design and how to make it." "(Anderson) It opened up, didn't it?" "It opened up and a section slid out." "(Stone) We decided that hydraulics and pneumatics would be part of that because there would be this sense of air releasing, and we could also use stuff that sounded like crustacean plates." "Vanessa used pieces of plastic and Samsonite to make his body feel organic." "Sometimes we're helping to complete the logic of the story." "Part of what we do is to help the sleight of hand of the director." "(Anderson) As I recall, we did a lot of the Predator's screaming and yelling." "But that sort of trilling sound that he makes, head dialogue editor Norman Schwartz's people did." "(Stone) I think of it as a lobster purring." "It had a hard edge." "(Anderson) I'm pretty sure it was done vocally by somebody." "Norman's forte was looping people, working with actors." "(Stone) He was one of the first people to specialise in that." "(Anderson) The scene where the Predator takes his helmet off and confronts Arnold mano a crustaceo, those sounds were from us." "They were animals of some sort." "(Stone) And when he's dying later, and gurgling, we worked on those vocals, also." "We were crossing our disciplines." "It wasn't conscious or deliberate, itjust evolved this way." "(McAlpine) We were a long way from the processing lab and there would be long delays in getting our dailies back." "I'd shoot down the middle and achieve the effects in the lab." "That means shooting at a conventional exposure." "The lab's a wonderful tool." "It should be used to enhance, but not as a recovery tool." "The idea was to make the jungle a threat." "To enhance the threat, the greens look more black." "We used a metallic blue cast to kill much of the green." "According to McAlpine, because "Predator" already employs blue, the night scenes do not have the same stark blue tint that can be seen in other Hollywood movies." "When the pig attacks... (McAlpine) We used an arc light swinging in a crane." "We used the maximum exposure to make sure the information registered, then took it down in the lab." "One crew member would be in the crane when the light flared." "When it did, every insect in the jungle would attack the lights, flying to its doom." "There would be a 12-foot ball of insects!" "We'd have someone up there every half-hour and they'd all come down, insane over the insects!" "Stunt Coordinator/Second-Unit Director Craig Baxley:" "Don McAlpine is one of the best DPs in the business." "John was very fortunate to have him." "I think he learned a lot." "Who wouldn't?" "Don is a very talented and gifted man." "Some say he took John to film school on Predator." "Special Effects Coordinator Al Di Sarro's thoughts on McAlpine:" "Very smart man." "An interesting man." "Actually in the process of building a home in Australia - underground." "It was his dream." "Screenwriters Jim and John Thomas:" "( Jim) We were down in Mexico for about four months during the shoot." "We were delighted." "It was our first experience with anything like this." "Some scenes were reworked or eliminated because of time or budget, but a lot of it was just being around and dealing with the actors." "We consulted with props, make-up effects and special effects about weapons, techniques and what this would look like." "In that kind of situation, everybody had to rely on each other because the conditions were so arduous." "( John) Poor Richard Chaves." "He backed up against a tree between takes to take a rest." "The tree was occupied by a colony of fire ants that crawled down the back of his costume and started attacking him." "All of a sudden this guy was shrieking at the top of his lungs." "We couldn't figure out what was wrong." "We finally had to tackle him." "We tore his clothes off and there were these ants that had really taken a chunk out of him." "So you have to be careful." "It's real jungle, it's the real thing." "( Jim) But it was a good experience all the way around." "John McTiernan is widely acknowledged as an excellent craftsman." "As such, he communicates information visually, as in this shot." "Though Dutch doesn't move at first, the camera puts him in a new position as his mind-set changes." "McTiernan uses the camera similarly with Jan de Bont in "Die Hard"" "and with Peter Menzies in "Die Hard with a Vengeance", among others." "Stunt Coordinator/Second-Unit Director Craig Baxley:" "John McTiernan's attitude was actually an incentive." "It drove us to get that amount of work done in that short a time." "We didn't have stuntmen going back to their trailers." "They were digging holes, helping the effects men, anything to help get it done." "We all knew we had something special." "That's the way I worked, and those are the kinds of people I hire." "I don't want prima donnas." "It wasn't a show for prima donnas." "I've always gravitated towards intelligent, gifted athletes who share a passion for concepts that create the illusion of something new." "Al Di Sarro on the relationship between a Special Effects Coordinator and a Stunt Coordinator." "That relationship is an extremely important one because it can affect the outcome of some very dangerous gags." "I look to them to find out what their needs are and I look to my department to service their wants." "We were a finely oiled machine." "Craig Baxley quickly earned the respect of my whole crew." "I don't think there was ever a day that Mr Baxley didn't have time to come to the back of that effects truck and thank everybody." "When we'd break for lunch, my guys would get some food in 'em and go right back to work." "And they'd be doing it for the Bax." "Screenwriter John Thomas remembers working with Baxley:" "His nickname down there was "Dude Commando"." "That was a name Al Di Sarro coined for him." "Baxley had a silver pompadour, and was always wearing jungle fatigues." "( Jim Thomas) "Dude Commando"." "He's a great guy." "( John Thomas) It stuck." "(Baxley) One day, when the guy comes out on fire and Carl shoots him," "Al had gotten all the stunt guys together." "They wrote this song called "Dude Commando"." "While we're setting up this huge sequence, they march out singing this song." "That was Aldo." "(Di Sarro) The song was awesome. (laughs)" "The song was composed and written by Leon Delaney as I remember, performed eloquently by the whole stunt department, and backed up by the effects crew. (laughing)" "Di Sarro on the Mexican jungle versus a Hollywood stage:" "I had two Mexican effects coordinators:" "Jesus and Jobie Duran." "I don't think I ever worked with a group that had so little and worked so hard." "I learned that it's incredible what you can do with very little when you use good ingenuity." "Where I would use nuts and bolts, aircraft cable, Nicopress tools, these people would take baling wire and tie things down that you couldn't move with an earthmover." "It was amazing." "We basically had to hack our way through, make paths." "If you wanted to rig bullet hits up in a tree, and that tree was 40 feet tall, you would nail 2x4s to the tree, and climb up, then nail a few more." "You'd build your steps as you climbed." "We had to put the net up there." "That net was also very interesting." "I had two peones at the gymnasium when we were prepping and they both slept under the truck at night, they had no home." "I paid them in American money." "Three dollars a day." "Well, the production designer, John Vallone, was concerned about who was going to build that net, the price of it and everything else." "He came to me and it ended up in my lap." "All I asked of his department was that they send the peones out and supply those vines." "So a few days later, there's this huge stack of vines all coiled up." "I took some of those vines and laid out three going one way, and took some and laid them out perpendicularly, and I said "Grande"." "The second day, the gymnasium floor was covered in this net." "I gasped." ""How are we going to get it out?" "It's huge. "" "Vallone saw it and said "How much did this cost?" "How many guys did this?"" "I said "Two. "We had to stop 'em!" "We had to cut it down!" "They wanted to gimbal the helicopter our commandos were flying in." "In the gym, they had a real helicopter fuselage laying on its side, in a heap." "Jesus Duran said "Señor, I think there's a crane on the side of the gym... "" "Well, he had the crane arm punch through the brick wall of the gymnasium." "Then, Jesus, Jobie and their families took a piece of old cable and Crosbys and put it around the engine." "And they picked the helicopter up." "Then they put some sandbags in the back of it to balance it." "Then they took 2x4s and wired them to this fuselage so we could lift it." "We put 20 people around it and we made a gimbal in about three hours." "You know you did something right when they roll the camera in, look at a rehearsal and somebody says "Let's shoot it. "" "That's like music to your ears." "Editor Mark Helfrich:" "There were some scenes where I had to create something out of... not much." "One was that scene where the Predator gets trapped in the net." "I have shots of the net swinging that I printed backwards and upside down." "Because all they did was shoot a net going up, and that was it." "There was nothing that showed any kind of action inside the net." "That's one place I can remember pulling out all the stops, speeding it up, flopping it, printing it backwards and forward again." "Later they added the laser stuff." "That was one scene made out of trickery." "(Di Sarro) Isn't that neat?" "And you know how we made the net snap up?" "We got 55-gallon drums and hoisted 'em up into the tree." "Then we went up with a water hose from the water truck and filled 'em with water." "That's how we did that." "The water jugs would fall and the net went up." "Al Di Sarro continues:" "John McTiernan was a new director." "And you needed to be able to get into his mind to see how he thinks" "He was a lot more knowledgeable than I gave him credit for going in." "And I had to learn that the hard way." "Aside from working with his actors, he also was thinking of the mechanics of the gags." "He always wanted to know "What's your feeling on this?"" "And I would tell him." "Most of the time, I was there." "But more than one time was I in the process of rigging something when he'd make a suggestion that turned my head and made me say" ""That would be a lot easier, better way to do that." "I have to be honest. "" "We didn't understand." "I'd just come off of The A-Team with Baxley who we used to call "Bax to the Max"." "His attitude was "How big can it get?"" "That's not McTiernan's attitude." "He has a particular vision of what he wants to see, and it wasn't always bigger is better." "He'll give you the time and the chances to let you find it, and when you found it, it works." "Screenwriter John Thomas on the Predator's camouflage effect:" "Jim had an idea in the form of a dream he had." "In the dream, he was peering into an ovoid chrome room through a hole." "Inside the room was a little man who was made out of chrome." "You couldn't see him - he was reflected everywhere at once - until he moved." "Then you saw this leading edge of his physical being, and that's all." "That began the fascination with what this thing looked like and what its capabilities were." "We envisioned it as a physical adaptation." "In the film it was basically a suit." "(Helfrich) I was on the film before they started shooting." "We had done some visual-effects tests for the creature's invisibility effect." "We saw several tests." "One was just a single warp." "We chose the concentric configuration of warps as being the most interesting and the most visible." "Because a lot of the shots would be really long shots, the creature would be really small." "You'd have to have enough of an effect to see anything." "Nowadays this effect is rather commonplace, but then it was revolutionary." "The Predator's camouflage effect was created by dressing an actor in a red spandex suit, which stood out from the background." "Because the suit was the only red element in the frame it could in essence be pulled out of the image, leaving behind a silhouette." "To enhance the suit's redness, it was lit with red lights." "During production, the crew would shoot a first take of the action with the red-suited actor." "In additional takes the camera's movement would be repeated, but without the actor and with a wider lens." "Visual Effects Coordinator Joel Hynek:" "Everything was done optically in those days." "We'd start with the photography of the red suit in the jungle." "From that we'd pull a silhouette matte." "Then from that we'd pull an opposite matte, where the Predator's clear." "The clear mattes would be pulled from footage shot with the wider lens." "The wider lens created images of the background that were a different size than those captured in the first take." "Hynek would take the clear mattes and divide them into between eight and 15 concentric rings, progressing towards the centre - what he calls "inline mattes"." "The background inside the clear matte would be of a different size and, because Hynek had divided the clear mattes into concentric rings, the Predator seems to be invisible while also bending the light of the background." "To enhance the three-dimensionality of this effect," "R/Greenberg's optical crew would change the size of the rings:" "The outer ones would be smaller while the inner ones would be wider." "All of this footage - usually three negatives - would be composited in an optical printer." "(Hynek) Each shot would take as many as 15 passes." "To create each inline required four passes." "That's 60 passes." "And if you made a mistake on one, you had to chuck the whole thing." "It required a lot of discipline to put those shots together." "And back then you couldn't see a shot as you were creating it." "You'd have to visualise it as you went along." "The printer heads were motorised, driven by computers." "We had a program that when the last photographic pass was finished, it would hit a microswitch." "The microswitch would activate a tape recorder, which would wake up the sleeping operator by blaring" ""Feed me, Eugene!"" "The machine guns Dillon carries are MP5s." "The MP5 is one of the smaller weapons used in the film, but like all the weapons, its sound is distinctive." "It emits a lethal little snap." "Unlike Blain's Minigun, or Dutch's machine gun/grenade launcher, the MP5 does not sound like it's trying to be impressive." "(Stone) It doesn't need to. (laughs)" "(Anderson) Orchestrally, we'd decided the Minigun was like the bass section, like the tubas, and the MP5s would be like the trumpets." "The MP5 would be featured in other Joel Silver movies, most prominently in John McTiernan's next film "Die Hard"." "In "Die Hard", however, the same weapon sounds different- fuller, with more bass." "Anderson explains:" "Not only do we have more than one recording of those guns, but on some of the guns, we have recordings from different perspectives." "The other thing is, when you're premixing, the mixer can EQ the guns and add reverb to match the space." "Even if you had the exact same library-recording shot with the same mike, the dubbing mixers will make it fit the environment." "Film Journalist/Historian Eric Lichtenfeld:" "This is a transitional sequence for "Predator"." "Not only are we about to enter the third and final act, but the tone of the movie is shifting as well." "We are leaving behind the technological and entering a much more primal adventure film." "Billy's stand and sacrifice embody this." "The setting expresses this visually:" "Billy, alone, is perched halfway across the canyon, while his comrades have practically made it to the other side." "Casting off his weapons and his clothes, he reduces himself to his most natural state to confront the Predator as though it were a force of nature." "The ritualistic tone of this sequence predicts the primal battle Dutch will later enter." "Similarly, the style of the editing here is a shade of the editing we will see as Dutch makes his preparations." "Also, Billy's death is the only one we don't see happen." "Throughout the movie, Billy has been the most mysterious character, which makes it fitting that his is the only mysterious death." "The only image is a point-of-view shot of the jungle." "It's as if Billy is simply consumed by the jungle with which he shared a seemingly mystical relationship." "Stunt Coordinator/Second-Unit Director Craig Baxley on Dutch's slide through the brush:" "I was very passionate that the action on Predator should be cutting-edge and set the audience back on their heels." "It was important to put the audience in the midst of the action." "John McTiernan was going to put a rope on Arnold, drag him on the ground, and skew the angle on the trees." "Instead, I suggested we take a hill, build the equivalent of a mini roller coaster, put tracks down the hill, build a small platform to accommodate Arnold, then mount a camera on the front looking back on him," "have the greensmen dress the set with plants and bamboo." "Then we'd send Arnold down the hill." "So the audience is with it, rather than on the outside looking in." "Arnold laughed, said "Fuck you, I'm not doing that." "You ride it first. "" "I said "Trust me, you'll be safe. "" "We were in Palenque." "Resources were virtually nonexistent." "To compound that, Al did not make the second trip." "I had to improvise with local effects men." "Now for a counterweight..." "How do you stop Arnold Schwarzenegger coming down a hill?" "At 20 miles an hour?" "We took ten men and used them as a counterweight." "We calculated the weight with a double so as he gets to the bottom, they just slowly lift a foot or two off the ground and gradually slow him." "Yes, primitive, but sometimes the simplest, most basic way is the best." "And the safest." "We had hands-on control similar to the wirework being done today on pictures like Crouching Tiger and Iron Monkey." "So we rehearsed it several times." "Arnold watched and smiled." "The double said "Man, this is the e-ticket. "" "Arnold said "This is fucking great!" "OK, Bax, but if anything happens... "" "Well, my fault:" "The double weighed about 20 pounds less than Arnold." "So when Arnold went down that hill, and got to the last 25%/ of the track," "I see the men going up, up, up, and they're now, like, six or seven feet off the ground." "I've got stunt guys grabbing them and pulling them back down." "The cart, nearing the end, was about to come up off the track." "As the stuntmen pulled, the cart came back down." "Arnold said "Craig... "" "I said "There was never a question, Arnold. "" ""We knew exactly what we were doing. "" "Editor Mark Helfrich on cutting effects sequences without finished opticals:" "That's an internal-pacing issue." "I think editors have to go with their gut." "There are so many films nowadays where you're cutting against nothing, against a blue screen, against a creature that will be added later." "You just have to imagine what's going to be." "When Poncho is shot in the head, I just kept cutting to a tree branch, but that pacing is the same that's in the movie now." "Co-Supervising Sound Editor Richard L Anderson:" "The problem in all these sci-fi movies is the opticals or special effects always come in at the last minute." "Of course, a lot of times we have to cut sound effects to them." "And we're really down to the last moment because as late as they turn the optical over, we have to be later to add sound effects." "Co-Supervising Sound Editor David Stone:" "My favourite thing was the shoulder gun." "Remember how it moves independently when it aims at something?" "It reminded us of Peter Sellers with a rubber parrot on his shoulder, so we ended up calling it the "parrot gun"." "It had the most wonderful angry, science-fiction, sneering, spitting feel to it." "When we first started seeing those opticals," "McTiernan made a big point about how it was both organic and technological." "(Anderson) When he has the helmet on, there's a constant sound, a kind of a whirring, buzzing sound, which is the technology part." "The other part is his heartbeat." "(Stone) John P and I spent an afternoon squashing sponges in glass jars with our fists, mushing 'em in different solutions, trying to make what we imagined this alien heart would be." "We were trying to come up with what people would perceive as a heartbeat but would be unfamiliar in some way, whether it was rhythm or pitch or something." "(Anderson) I think it had real heartbeats mixed in, broken into a weird rhythm." "(Stone) Then P did some sweetening and altering so it didn't sound like John and Dave's hands in ajar squooshing sponges." "A sweetener is another sound effect which you've crafted to work along with the original basic recording of an object to make it have the dramatic effect that you want." "(Anderson) The musical equivalent would be if you were playing a piano and then said "I'm looking for a bird quality to go with it." "Let's add a flute. "" "If the piano was the main thing, the flute would be a sweetener." "(Stone) John P is also a visual artist." "Sometimes, for science fiction stuff, we would communicate about the concept for a sound element by making little drawings to each other." "I'd say "It has to have a fat envelope here at the beginning, then it tapers down. "" ""This part is rizzy, this part is searing and hot. "" "We would talk like that and draw little unfinished cartoons about the way a sound would sound." "(Anderson) Like you attempted to graph it?" "(Stone) Not so much graph it as draw a childish version of what it would look like if you could see it in a cartoon world." "(Anderson) John is in a cartoon world." "(Stone) He very much is." "He of course has a real genius ear." "The way he bends and shapes sound to give it personality and character is unparalleled." "Cinematographer Don McAlpine:" "Setting the traps and shooting it hand-held, necessitated my lying on my back for hours at a time." "There was not a half-inch of my back without massive insect bites." "Still, he finds this sequence the most "emotionally satisfying"." ""You feel I am a hunter. "" "McAlpine is an avid outdoorsman." "Here, he comments on how this might have affected his experience on "Predator"." "Working in rough exteriors certainly didn't phase me." "I'm a professional cinematographer, and arrogant enough to believe I can do anything. (laughs)" "I've deliberately made choices in my career to avoid getting into a creative rut." "The Hollywood word for it is "typecast"." "I did Down and Out in Beverly Hills and got offered four dog scripts!" "The camera is a manner of communicating all manners of things:" "Energy, emotion." "When you put two up, you divide the magic." "If the camera's merely a recording tool you can put up 20, but if you regard it as an artist's tool, it's best to use one." "When forced to, I use a second camera but as peripheral to the main one." "All I'm doing is stimulating some cells in the back of someone's eye." "My real job is making that image connect with some thought process or emotion." "You go through a stage in your career when you're fascinated that you can simply record an image, like a rose." "As your career develops, you're trying to make that rose mean something." "When McAlpine ended his interview for this DVD, he began a six-week excursion in the Australian outback." "He intended to do some hunting." "Screenwriters Jim and John Thomas:" "( John) In the original script, Dutch gets back to the camp and finds the ship." "They have a battle there, in a clearing, in plain view of all of the trophies it's assembled." "He wounds the hunter mortally." "As it tries to get into his ship and escape," "Dutch kills it with one of its own weapons." "( Jim) That was changed for budgetary reasons." "And also for story." "From the beginning, we were influenced fairly heavily by Heart of Darkness." "The way we visualised it, once this team completed this mission they'd been suckered into and realised that the only way out was through this trackless canyon, they went deeper and deeper into this jungle, and into the nightmare of dealing with this creature," "to the point where you had only one person left." "In our original story, the team leader was actually an American Indian who had gone against his tribal upbringing." "He had become a soldier because he gained a lot of strength through that." "It was his shield, covering up all kinds of things in his past." "And after this near-death encounter with the Predator, he was nearly crazy." "Actually, in his delirious dream state, there were a couple of flashbacks where he was remembering things from his youth as an Indian, being counselled on how to deal with the Spirit and the Earth and how to find his own strength." "Really, that was what it was about:" "After all his weapons are stripped away, this man went to the deepest parts of himself and found a way to survive." "To Arnold's credit, before we went into production we got together, and he wanted to know who this character was." "We described that." "Visual Effects Coordinator Joel Hynek returned to the "Predator"production after the shutdown." "Whereas before, he was one of four or five crew members from R/Greenberg, now he was the only one." "(Hynek) The hiatus was valuable." "We tested what we shot and we didn't need red lights." "The additional red lights had slowed down the crew, so McTiernan was relieved when Hynek told him that they could generate mattes using natural light." "(Hynek) During the hiatus, we also came up with a manual repeat pass." "I believe the first shoot was the first time motion control had been used in the jungle, but setting the motion control camera up in the jungle was a nightmare." "We would get to the location at 4am." "We were determined not to slow production down." "Now we could do shots in half the time, if not one-third." "Don Poynter was an animator who did rotoscoping for mattes and animated sparks." "Don spelled his name out on the Predator's arm, here." "Animators do that all the time." "Film Journalist/Historian Eric Lichtenfeld:" "As is usual for several of "Predator's" genre, the movie did not receive overwhelming critical support." "Many critics could not- or would not- see the artistry for the gore, the precise, fresh details for the conventional backdrops which they shape." "Writing for the LA Times, however," "Michael Wilmington saw McTiernan's strengths - strengths the director would continue to develop and capitalise upon in his subsequent films." "In his June 12, 1987 review, Wilmington wrote:" ""Like many directors schooled in TVcommercials" "McTiernan has an interesting visual flair and he creates a mood here out of almost nothing:" "Crawling, belly-level tracking shots, heroic or statuesque angles, a bleak approach to violence, picturesque deep-foliage landscapes streaked with weird harsh light." "The whole movie often jells on an almost abstract level, unrelated to its own story. "" "Wilmington qualifies Predator's style in an interesting way." "What he calls "abstract" might also be called "mythic"." "One of Predator's most unique aspects is its simplicity." "Most movies - even, or rather, especially, action movies - get more complicated as they near the climax of the story, as all the elements start coming together." "For McTiernan's movies, this is true for "Die Hard"," ""The Hunt for Red October" and "Die Hard with a Vengeance", among others, whose third acts are each a much more complicated juggling act for the director, the screenwriters, the editor, etc." "The opposite is true of this movie." "Like a horror film, all has been stripped away:" "The complexity of the mission," "Dutch's manpower and fire power, until he and the Predator must face each other, both seeming like forces of nature." "Given Jim and John Thomas'influences, the confrontation between Dutch and the Predator resembles something like Hercules and the Hydra." "The mud and improvised weaponry enhance the primal aspect of the story." "Complimenting this is the sound design." "In this last act, it is dominated by music and very precise sound effects." "There is little dialogue." "After all, what's there to say?" "Screenwriters Jim and John Thomas:" "( John) Our intent was to strip away elements of the modern, organised, socialised world to where itjust came down to primal instinct." "( Jim) Here's a guy who has the most technological weaponry and he's reduced to covering himself with mud and making bows and arrows to fight something as primitive as life itself." "That was the fun, getting to that point." "Stripping away." "( Jim) When Arnold came on, it was a surprise." "We were always thinking a bit more of an everyman." "Then, his interest in wanting to know the character and the story." "It was great casting, but that's what Joel does best, bringing those elements together." "This stripping away is actually the inverse of how the movie operates throughout much of the first two acts." "Essentially, the movie starts out as a military movie, which in itself gets increasingly complex." "It then becomes more complicated as science fiction and horror blend in." "Now, though, it's simpler." "In the third-act fight, typical action, combat or western movie structures are not imposed on the battle." "Dutch is not fighting to stop a drug dealer or terrorist, take a bridge, or drive a villainous rancher out of town." "Nothing is at stake beyond Dutch's own survival." "As the screenwriters have said, the Predator is not a monster." "There is no higher morality in play here, not even something as basic as the subjugation of evil in which the hero's success and survival play an integral part." "And yet we want Dutch to win just as badly as we do the hero who fights to save something bigger than himself." "This is unique among action/adventure movies, even McTiernan's." "It's always satisfying to see the hero win, but is that because some larger purpose has been served or because we feel an inherent pleasure in seeing the character we identify with trounce the villain?" "So if Dutch's survival has no larger ramifications, why should we care if he survives?" "And since he's played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, how can we be made to feel like he might in fact die?" "In addition to a stirring visual style, McTiernan has another strength:" "His ability to make you forget that the hero is "the hero", his ability to make you think the hero could lose." "Sometimes this is a matter of casting and characterisation, as is the case with Bruce Willis in the first "Die Hard", which was made before Willis had proven himself as a movie star, let alone an action star." "Schwarzenegger is a different case." "Conventional screenwriting and development wisdom holds that a main character must be "likable" for us to care." "McTiernan's movies usually aren't so stock." "His movies are not especially "deep", but what sets them apart is that they are sincere." "As many of his collaborators will attest," "McTiernan always seeks to ground his movies in logic and does so without compromising them as action/adventure yarns." "As Al Di Sarro has observed," "McTiernan often reins things in - "bigger is not always better"." "As large as his movies get, they are often understated at the same time." "This is where the sincerity begins." "And the sincerity begets gravity." "So as we approach the end of the movie, we feel as though we've gone through this experience, too." "It's the small things, not the enormous ones, that accomplish this." "So even though we don't really know Dutch, we feel connected to him." "Because we feel that connection, it doesn't matter that he's only trying to save himself." "Film critic Michael Wilmington mentions McTiernan's experience directing television commercials." "It has become commonplace for directors to make a transition to features after having first directed commercials or music videos." "But unlike many of these directors," "McTiernan excels as both a craftsman and a storyteller." "The style of McTiernan's movies almost always flow from the story, what some would call "organic"." "For example, the way his characters nearly blend into the jungle in "Predator", or the way he frames Bruce Willis in doorways or pushed to a margin of the frame in "Die Hard", or, in "Die Hard with a Vengeance"," "the way cinematographer Peter Menzies boldly uses the zoom lens, which invokes the New York street-style of photography which rose to prominence in the 1970s." "These devices make McTiernan's movies interesting to watch, but do not take the audience out of the story." "McTiernan uses these devices, among others, to ground the audience in the geography of the action." "Showing where all the elements are in relation to one another is essential in making the audience feel excited or threatened." "This is one of McTiernan's greatest strengths, but unfortunately the same cannot be said of many of his fellow action directors." "Undercranked- or otherwise sped up - photography, overbearing sound design, and, most significantly, overcutting in the editing room, are largely responsible for the glut of action sequences which resemble music videos more than anything else " "and not especially good ones." "Unlike an action sequence in a John McTiernan movie, the style of these sequences overwhelms the story... and the audience." "Is this because directors worry about losing our attention?" "Or does this come from a place of vanity:" "An assumption that we will have no emotional reaction unless they impose their stylistic gimmicks on a sequence?" "In recent years, we've seen action movies set on airplanes where it's virtually impossible to make sense of the geography, whereas in "Predator's"jungle, we almost always know where we are." "For all its gore and impact, "Predator" is surprisingly elegant." "(Baxley) Basically, every stunt has been done before." "The challenge is in finding a combination of five or six different elements to create something that looks and feels new." "It's about execution." "As a second-unit director, my philosophy is not only to do the best sequence done to date, but to get into the director's head, find out what he wants." "Predator was hard." "He kept everything close to the vest." "But I would listen." "And I want to stress that it was John McTiernan's vision and movie." "The heroes of John McTiernan's movies often share a kinship with the heroes of movies by such legendary directors as Anthony Mann who directed Jimmy Stewart in his greatest westerns," "Raoul Walsh, and even to a certain extent, Alfred Hitchcock." "The best example of such a hero might be Gary Cooper in "High Noon", which the filmmakers overtly reference in "Die Hard"." "McTiernan takes all of this to its conclusion by ending the story not on a triumphant note, but on a sombre one." "The make-up, the performances by Elpidia Carillo and Schwarzenegger," "McAlpine's camerawork, and Silvestri's mournful music cue, which David Stone calls "Fanfare for the Common Mercenary", all create this effect:" "Victory in the face of overwhelming odds and weariness in the face of victory." "It's McTiernan's final exercise of realism in what is otherwise an action/science fiction/horror romp." "But McTiernan restores some of the fun to the movie by beginning the end credits with the "roll call" seen here." "This also marks the movie's final connection to the combat film." "The genre uses a similar device to memorialise the fallen, and to add a touch of immortality to our boys and our cause." "This was particularly potent in the World War II movies which were released early on in the war, when the war was going against us." "In conclusion, Craig Baxley:" "McTiernan's a really passionate guy and a great filmmaker." "But Al Di Sarro has had as much to do with his success as anybody." "If the director is smart enough, he'll learn to trust Al." "Because Al will always give him something that elevates the material." "He's a very unique special-effects man." "Usually they're journeyman-like, they'll just twist the wires, etc, and make sure everybody's clear when they hit the button." "Al's not like that, though he won't admit it." "He's an effects man who reads the material and understands it." "Al Di Sarro, who chose not to return to Mexico after production resumed:" "That's sweet of him to say, but you know how it is in this business." "Everybody wants to say something nice about everybody." "You see, it's easy for Al Di Sarro to walk into the encampment and blow off five gallons of gas into the air." "But you need a Craig Baxley who choreographs everything happening around it that makes those five gallons look so great." "It's a combined effort." "It starts at the top with Joel Silver and works itself down in a proper order." "Joel is one of the most incredible people you'll ever work with in your life." "There is no bigger than Joel." "Know that now." "Know it, live it, breathe it." "Because if you try to treat it any other way, you will be crushed. (laughs)" "(in falsetto) "Because I'll tell you right now, if they made fucking killing legal, you'd be the first one I'd kill!"" ""They didn't have to leave the fucking planet to make Star Wars!"" ""You want snow in the movie?" "When you think of snow, think no. "" "I punched him in the shoulder one day." "He turned to me and said "That shoulder is not for punching." "It's for thinking. "" "But I've always seen Joel back his whole crew." "Right down to the craft services man." "Joel Silver stands strong behind his people." "Di Sarro remembers his first reaction to the script:" "Excitement." "Absolute excitement." "I was getting a chance." "I read that script ten times." "I thought through those gags." "They were rigged in my head while I slept." "I lived it." "I had a high confidence level, but also respect for what I was walking in to do." "I was more concerned with conducting myself in a politically correct manner than I was about actually doing the work." "I was in another world." "I was in the world of motion picture feature film." "Fox Studios." "Arnold Schwarzenegger." "Joel Silver." "Big names for a little TV effects guy." "I was intimidated by that to a degree." "But what a place to start a feature career." "How lucky is that?" "Michael Wilmington quote, copyright 1987, "Los Angeles Times"." "Reprinted with permission."