And Joel just said, “No, listen, don’t worry about it you’re gonna shoot the action.” I said, “OK, I’d like to have my effects man on the show, a guy named Al Di Sarro,” and Joel said, “Fine, you got ’em.”
ALL PREDATOR MOVIES IN ORDER MOVIE
But when John and I had our first couple meetings, John stressed that this was not a war movie, this was a horror movie and that he was gonna shoot all the action. So I was intrigued by the fact that Joel asked me to shoot all the action. I was their stunt coordinator I directed a number of the shows also. And then the fact that you have an escape, the mud protected you, now you’ve got the chance to rise back up and take on this creature and be a real hero.”Ĭraig Baxley, 2nd unit director/stunt coordinator: When this came up, Joel tracked me down. You’ll play this guy more like an everyman, and at that moment when you are crawling up through the mud and this incredible creature is about to destroy you and you have no weapons or anything left, that’s a real hero’s moment. But when you first are introduced” - I think the first scene he’s carrying a tree over his shoulder and has a chain saw in his hand - “that’s a cartoon character. He wanted to know about this character that he was going to be playing and we told him, “You’ve just done a movie, Commando, which we really liked. I remember Arnold, he was actually very serious. Thomas: Our first introduction to Arnold was at John Davis’ father’s house up in the Knoll, and it was in a hot tub. I said, “This is the guy that should direct the movie.” And Arnold liked him, and that’s how it happened. I made Larry sit down and see John McTiernan’s film in a screening room because nobody had ever heard of him. At that time, we were doing lots of operations in Central America, so that’s where we set it.ĭavis: I had seen a small movie John McTiernan had done that was really, really, really good. And what’re the most dangerous men? Combat soldiers. But the original conceit was always, “What would it be like to be hunted by a dilettante hunter from another planet the way we hunt big game in Africa?” And at first, we were thinking about how a band of hunters would branch out and hunt various and dangerous species on the planet, but we said: “That’s going to be way too complex.” So, what’s the most dangerous creature? Man. We just sat out on the beach and composed this thing over a period of about three months. Jim Thomas, screenwriter: I had the basic idea for Predator, which at that time was called Hunter, and my brother was laid up from a back injury from the beach, so I said, “Well, do you want to write a script with me?” and he said sure. And Arnold basically said to me, “You’re going to be a producer, you should come to Mexico and you should produce this.” So I did. I mean, literally, it came out of nowhere. And we found this script and it was pretty amazing. Basically, they had slipped under somebody’s door at the studio. And then I decided to give in, and I was also working on the script for Predator, which was John Thomas and his brother Jim, the Thomas brothers. I was an executive at Fox and I worked on a movie that happened right before it called Commando. One of the first people I had met in Hollywood and gotten friendly with was Arnold Schwarzenegger. John Davis, producer: This is the first movie I produced. One thing that everyone whom THR spoke with did agree on, however: Filming in the jungle in the dead of summer is, uh, not ideal. Why did the studio shut the film down? How much of the film was completed at that point (estimates range from “90 percent” to “less than half”)? What happened with the original Predator design? (Did it look like a “cockroach,” a “f- ing chicken,” a “bloody big rat”?) Why did Jean-Claude Van Damme - who was originally cast to play the alien - get fired? Whether it was the heat of the jungle or the haze of time that accrues over three decades, the stories from people involved took on almost a Rashomon-like quality. Great Months in Box-Office History: June 1987 It was a hit with audiences upon its release, but in the years since its legacy has only grown. The film combined pioneering visual effects, pithy dialogue, abundant gore, big-ass guns (of all kinds) and “one ugly motherf- er” of a now-iconic movie monster. Dutch Schaefer ( Arnold Schwarzenegger, then still not quite having joined the first-name-only club), the leader of a team of mercenaries sent into the Central American jungle on a rescue mission who come face to face (well, Dutch does at least) with an alien hunter who makes trophies of men’s skulls. The story, by first-time screenwriters Jim and John Thomas, centered on Maj. In June 1987, 20th Century Fox released Predator.