Predator

This week, Chris and special guest (and film critic) Dan Murrell get to the choppa! with a deep dive of 1987's Predator. They'll be braving snakes (venomous and Hollywood), fire ants, scorpions and traveler's diarrhea as they explore this unlikely sci-fi action classic's arduous production. Learn how Arnold hooked the crew on cigars, bested Jesse Ventura's biceps, and why Shane Black was killed first. Plus, why you may not want to attempt heat vision in 100-degree weather... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Winterbauer?

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• 1:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Hello and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a testosterone-driven sci-fi action romp through the jungles of South America. As always, I'm your host, Chris Winterbauer. However, my steadfast co-host, Lizzie Bassett, is on maternity leave this week, so we are joined by a special guest. Dan Merle is a movie critic and fan who racked up four Emmy nominations as a writer and producer at Screen Junkies. You may have seen him on Movie Fights, Screen Junkies News, or as the former champion of the movie trivia shmodown. Since 2020, he's run his own YouTube channel called Dan Merle

• 2:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Movies, where you can find him reviewing the latest releases, covering the box office on Charts with Dan, and talking about the latest movie news. Dan, thank you for joining us and welcome to the show.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  It is my pleasure. It's always a pleasure to talk movies, but it's a particular pleasure to talk this movie.

• 2:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, on that note, we are discussing Predator, a seminal science fiction action film. I'm assuming you've seen it before.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  Yes, only about 15 or 20 times.

• 3:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay, got it. So tell me a little bit, when did you first see Predator? And what were your thoughts upon your most recent re-watch of Predator?

• 3:19Speaker 02

  I have an interesting relationship with especially R-rated movies from the 80s because I couldn't watch R-rated movies when I was growing up. So there's a whole raft of movies like Robocop and Predator that people grew up with that are my age, which is ancient to many people at this point, but that were like 80's staples. And I mean, these are all movies that had toys and, you know, kids, my friends watched all these movies. I didn't see them till I was well into my teens, sometimes into my 20s. But I kind of liked that because I can approach the movies for the first time and not worry about like, was it really that good? Or was it just because I saw it when I was a kid? Predator is a movie that I saw, I think probably the first time, I'm going to date

• 3:59Speaker 02

  myself here, on VHS sometime in high school. And I liked it. I thought it was, I thought it was a fun movie, but it's one of those films that I've sort of grown to like even more over time because there's just something about it that...

• 4:17Speaker 02

  You can't even really quite put your finger on it, but it just kind of bottles, like it's like, it's like extract of action movies in the eighties. And I, I, I think as time goes on, there's almost like the sentimental attachment that grows to it because, you know, they, they always say, well, they don't make them like that anymore. They literally don't make them like Predator anymore. Like even movies that try to do the eighties action thing, they still don't make them like that.

• 4:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely not. And maybe for good reason, as we'll learn, this was a very difficult production. I agree. I think this movie has aged like fine wine or Arnold's sweat in a bottle. It was, I, I saw it on VHS. I was much younger. I think it was about nine or 10. My dad, just the minute I turned nine or 10, it just was like, all right, Predator, Alien, let's go.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  I mean, listen, he, he knows that the classics are.

• 5:05Chris Winterbauer?

  He does. For me, it was, when I was younger, it was kind of the also ran eighties action Alien movie behind The Thing and Aliens. Those felt a little more obviously accessible. This movie, it almost feels a little morally ambiguous at the beginning. Are these the good guys even? You know, as Jesse Ventura is spouting nonsense. But as you mentioned, it's a fantastic time capsule of eighties machismo. I think it really does a interesting thing where it riffs on Schwarzenegger's established screen identity at the time. Like he's right between commando and sort of more serious roles. It has some really cool innovative creature effects and visual effects that we'll discuss. But of course, before we dive in, the details.

• 5:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Predator is a 1987 science fiction military action film written by Jim and John Thomas and directed by John McTiernan, produced by Lawrence Gordon, Joel Silver, John Davis, distributed by 20th Century Fox. It stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Jesse Ventura, Shane Black, Bill Duke, El Pedia, Carrillo, Sonny Landem, R.G. Armstrong, and Kevin Peter Hall and Peter Cullen as the Predator. As always, the IMDb log line for the film reads, "A team of commandos on a mission in a Central American jungle find themselves hunted by an extraterrestrial warrior." And that is the entire plot. There's not a lot else there.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  No, that's it.

• 6:25Chris Winterbauer?

  You don't need much more either, I would argue.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  No, you don't.

• 6:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Some of my favorite sources for this episode include, but are not limited to, Guns and Shea Butter: An Oral History of Predator from The Hollywood Reporter, If It Bleeds: We Can Kill It: The Making of Predator, a very fun documentary from 2001, The Last Action Heroes: The Triamps, Flops, and Feuds of Hollywood's Kings of Carnage, Nick DeSemelian, which we've discussed before, and more. Now, of course, Dan, Predator spawned a franchise. Many video games. I played a number of them. Crossovers with the Alien Universe, unfortunately, including maybe my least favorite movie ever, AVP Requiem.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  Dreadful.

• 7:03Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't like dumping on movies. That movie really bothered me when I watched it. It's so mean spirited. It produced one of Arnold's most memorable lines. Get to the chopper! As I love to yell at my wife when we're late. But much like Dutch's mission, the production of Predator quickly spiraled out of control as the production team found itself dogged at every turn by the problems with their titular character, a hostile environment, and perhaps their own substance-enhanced egos. All right, Dan, let's go back to the beginning. Do you know anything about how Predator was conceived?

• 7:37Speaker 02

  I don't, you know, for, I think because it's just so wonderful in its simplicities. I've never done a huge deep dive on Predator. So, you know, I know the basic big thing about Predator that everybody knows about the original Predator, but I actually don't have a huge wealth of knowledge.

• 7:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Fantastic.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  As to the deep backgrounds. So I am excited to learn here today, too.

• 8:01Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. Well, like so many films that we cover on this podcast, Predator was conceived as a means of escape. Bakersfield-born brothers Jim and John Thomas had hopped from dead-end job to dead-end job. They'd been lifeguards, disc diggers, carpenters, teachers. Nothing had stuck. Not that there's anything wrong with those careers, but they had not found what they wanted to do yet. But they both dabbled in writing. And Jim in particular had tried his hand at screenwriting. And when he got stuck, he asked his brother to help, and they found that they were a pretty good team. So they decided to write a spec script together and break out of the world of lifeguarding. They were actually lifeguarding in Marina Del Rey on the beach at the time.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 8:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, so down just south of Hollywood, they had a bit of downtime. John had hurt his back jumping from his tower, so they set up an umbrella on the beach and they literally wrote Predator on the beach in Marina Del Rey together over a period of six months.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  That's the most LA story I've ever heard.

• 9:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely. Just people are drowning and they're writing Predator on the beach.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:04Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, the concept of the movie is basically that conversation you have with your high school friends, which is could an elite group of soldiers kill X and just fill it in. It could be Samurai. I don't know if you've seen The Gorge on Apple TV. It's wild.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  I've heard it. I've heard some good things about it.

• 9:20Chris Winterbauer?

  It's actually pretty fun. But the original conceit, as Jim said, was what would it be like to be hunted by a dilettante hunter from another planet the way we hunt big game in Africa?

• 9:32Speaker 02

  I love applying the word dilettante in that sentence to the Predator because when I think of dilettante, I don't think of the Predator.

• 9:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Right. I think the original conceit was more, what would it be like if an alien rich dentist who happens to like hunting hunted you? And I don't think, I think originally the idea was that no one was going to be a soldier. Right? We get eventually to everybody is a soldier, right? In the end, but I think at the beginning, it really feels like more of a horror film. Oh my God, I'm no longer at the top of the food chain. Something else is following me through the forest or the jungle or the woods.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  That makes sense because I would say that Predator is horror adjacent.

• 10:10Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. I, I, there's some tension between McTiernan and Silver around the tone of the film. I definitely think it's horror adjacent. I think some entries lean more into horror. But, and I think for the first act of the movie, it's definitely an action film and it transitions more into horror, like more of a slasher film.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 10:27Chris Winterbauer?

  So the Thomas Brothers smartly worked to keep it simple. Initially, there was a Brotherhood of Alien Hunters that was whittled down to one. So obviously, that comes into play later with Predator 2 and then one of my favorites, actually Predators, Robert Rodriguez. The hunted would become a highly trained soldier. So again, riffing on The Most Dangerous Game. And they set the film in Central America because the US was toppling governments there left and right, so they figured a commando could get lost somewhere in Central America. Now, it should be said that early drafts focused more on the concept of hunting and its rules and etiquette. So the use of stealth, camouflage, not hunting females, mimicry.

• 11:09Chris Winterbauer?

  As John said, a lot of those ideas were not prominent in the final version of the film, but quote, "The first draft of the script was really the essence of a hunting story, although much of that doesn't really come across in the first movie." Now, the first draft that we were able to find was dated July 27, 1985, still under the title Hunter. The Predator title had not yet been swapped in. So it includes a preface that makes two important points. The Predator has two specific qualities, Dan. Could you guess what they are that require technical innovation from the filmmaking team?

• 11:49Speaker 02

  Oh, well, he is invisible or can become invisible, obviously.

• 11:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Active camouflage, as it becomes known.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  Would it be infrared vision?

• 11:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. So heat vision or thermal imaging. So on the front page, before the screenplay starts, it says, "The Predator possesses the ability to completely camouflage and he detects prey from the heat emitted from their bodies." I think those are the two original conceits of this somewhat derivative story that the brothers had come up with.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  I agree. Without that, it loses some of its appeal.

• 12:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. So they send it out all across Hollywood and everybody's rejecting it. And a part of me wondered, I'm sure you're familiar with Enemy Mine, the Dennis Quaid, Louis Gossett Jr. Alien movie from the time.

• 12:33Speaker 02

  Hmm. Yes.

• 12:34Chris Winterbauer?

  It's also like Man vs. Alien and it hadn't performed very well, the Wolfgang Peterson movie. So part of me wonders like, eh, we've kind of seen this. It didn't really work. You know what I mean? All it takes is one bad comp in Hollywood for a project to just go the way of the dodo.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  If there's one thing that has not changed in Hollywood over the century plus of making movies, it's that the number one priority of almost every executive is not to get fired.

• 12:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. Ironically, somebody getting fired is what's going to get this movie made. So they get tons of rejections and there's one long shot connection they have. So Jim at the time had worked on some sets in lower level positions like P A, working for Grip and Electric. And he had a friend who was a cinematographer, who had a friend, who had a friend, who was a script reader at 20th Century Fox. So a friend of a friend of a friend. The middle man, the friend of the friend, was, according to Jim, a quote, "bottom feeder to the Hollywood scene." This guy's one claim to fame was that he'd sold his student film of riots in South Central Los Angeles to the FBI to identify the rioters.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 13:42Chris Winterbauer?

  "It wasn't really encouraging for what we were going to do," end quote. But they had no other options. So they took the meeting. The script reached the script reader at Fox, who liked it. So they're on their way.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  You never know. The stars will align in such a way.

• 14:01Chris Winterbauer?

  And align they did because Hollywood studios are about as stable as governments being toppled by US intelligence in the 1980s. And so despite the success of Star Wars, 20th Century Fox was by the mid 80s, one of the weakest studios. So Paramount was kind of on top. In 1984, Paramount had five of the top 10 box office spots for the year. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was their highest ranked film.

• 14:24Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 14:24Chris Winterbauer?

  20th Century Fox had one. The number 10 spot, any guesses?

• 14:29Speaker 02

  Oh, man, going on my box office rolodex. 1984, 20th Century Fox.

• 14:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Michael Douglas.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  Michael Douglas. Well, it was, it was, it was a Paramount film, wasn't it?

• 14:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 14:39Speaker 02

  I don't think it was, that was like 87.

• 14:41Chris Winterbauer?

  It was later, yeah.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  Was it Romancing the Stone?

• 14:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Bingo. You nailed it. Romancing the Stone. A film I quite like. So in September of 1984, the studio shakes things up. Barry Diller, chairman and CEO of Paramount, comes in to replace Alan Hirschfield as the chairman and CEO of Fox. He brings with him, or is joined by prolific producer Lawrence Gordon, who I'm sure you're aware of and our audience has heard of on our Waterworld episode and many, many others. He comes on as president and COO of 20th Century Fox's new entertainment group. Of course, when they come in with a new regime, it's like new mandate, all the old stuff's out. We got to bring in all of our new stuff. So

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 15:20Chris Winterbauer?

  in a way, you'd think the project's dead, right? Because it's tainted by the old regime. But Lawrence Gordon was a former Roger Corman protege. And he had found his bread and butter, producing action films alongside Joel Silver. Now, the new regime comes in and the script reader that's leaving does our team a huge solid. And I tried to find her name and I cannot find it. But if you're out there, whoever you are, please come forward.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 15:48Chris Winterbauer?

  She put a sticky note on the script and left it on her desk and it just said, read this. And then she left. And the next exec that comes in, a junior exec, fresh out of Brown University, Michael Levy, reads the script, based on a sticky note, likes it, sends it up the chain. And Lawrence Gordon, who has a soft spot for his good sci-fi monster B-movies, says, "All right, I'm into this. Let's check it out."

• 16:17Speaker 02

  I mean, Roger Corman, to be fair, Roger Corman would have made an invisible monster movie just because it was cheap.

• 16:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  So I can see the appeal.

• 16:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he's like, great. And we don't see it until the last five minutes, right? Okay, perfect. Like, exactly. Now, there's another assist that the script got, which is there was a middle executive between Michael Levy and Lawrence Gordon, named John Davis. And you might be wondering, like, what did John Davis do aside from hand the script from one person to another? But John Davis's dad was Marvin Davis, billionaire owner of 20th Century Fox at the time. So we had a little nepo baby action that may or may not have helped the movie. Cause John Davis was a fan. So who knows?

• 16:58Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 16:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Nepotism can work for good, guys. That's all I'm saying.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  Every element of Hollywood is in this story so far. I love it.

• 17:03Chris Winterbauer?

  I know. Absolutely. Well, and it's, you're about to get even more. So they've got the perfect director from the movie. The Steven Spielberg of New Zealand. Dan, are you familiar with Jeff Murphy by any chance?

• 17:17Speaker 02

  That name sounds vaguely familiar.

• 17:20Chris Winterbauer?

  You have technically seen some of his work, even if you've never seen any of his movies. So he was a New Zealand based filmmaker. He's, he's an enormous filmmaker out of New Zealand. He'd kind of been a part of the renaissance of New Zealand film in the seventies. And there are two films that really bolstered the New Zealand box office. Goodbye Pork Pie and U2. He eventually would direct a bunch of American TV films and sequels like Young Guns 2. And then he was the second unit director on Lord of the Rings. And was kind of like a legend on that project, working with Peter Jackson. So that's where you definitely-

• 17:53Speaker 02

  That might be where, I've watched the appendices many times over. So that's probably where the name's hitting from.

• 17:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely. At this point though, he's looking for his first Hollywood opportunity. So Murphy and the Thomas Brothers get together and they start working on the script for about three months with a very specific action star in mind for the lead role. Much less buff and coming off of an Australian post-apocalyptic action film.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  Mel Gibson.

• 18:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Mel Gibson. That's right. Thank you. But Fox had somebody bigger in mind. And that of course is Arnold Schwarzenegger. Now, the Austrian born bodybuilder was on the verge of pulling off a truly impressive career shift that would shift Hollywood and as you mentioned, kind of masculinity and action films with it. He had won Mr. Universe at age 20, would go on to be Mr. Olympia seven times. And yes, it was his role in the 1977 documentary Pumping Iron that would prove most influential to his career arc. Have you seen Pumping Iron, Dan?

• 18:54Speaker 02

  I have not seen the whole documentary, but I've certainly seen my share of clips. It's it's an interesting look at an Arnold Schwarzenegger before media training was a thing.

• 19:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. He's much less polished, very raw in a lot of different ways.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  He was having a good time back then.

• 19:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely. Yeah, my uncle was in the weightlifting scene, like, kind of tangentially in the late 70s, early 80s in LA. And he, you know, crossed paths with a number of these fellows and it was a very different, different world, the Gold's Gym life back in the day. So by 1985, it was clear that Arnold, with his once in a generation physique and limited acting skills, let's be fair, he gets better as he goes on.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  He does.

• 19:37Chris Winterbauer?

  There were kind of two ways to use him, it seems. Number one was to instill terror, as James Cameron had done very effectively with The Terminator. And number two was to generate laughs. Steven DeSousa's rewrite of Commando, like, made great use of Arnold dropping one-liners.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  Some of the best comedy one-liners of all time are in Commando.

• 19:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely. It's just so campy and on its face ridiculous that you can't help but be swept away, I feel like, by that movie. I mean, he's just carrying giant logs at the beginning of the movie.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  It's almost slapstick.

• 20:09Chris Winterbauer?

  It really is. It feels almost more like Abbott and Costello or something than it does like an action film.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  Or like the Zucker Brothers made a parody movie of 80s action movies and it's Commando.

• 20:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely. Yes, that is, that's actually a much better comp, like the airplane of action movies.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 20:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, it was extremely successful. The Terminator had more than 10x its budget at the box office and Commando, the more direct comp, made nearly 60 million against its $10 million budget. So the verdict's in, Arnold's a star. Unfortunately, he was not a fan of Jeff Murphy. Murphy had actually been considered for Arnold's breakout movie, Conan the Barbarian, the John Millius film, but in keeping with his New Zealand sense of humor, when he met with Arnold, he kept referring to the character as Conan the Librarian. I'm not 100% sure why, but it is funny.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  This is a solid B minus joke.

• 20:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Arnold, who was taking his transition to the movies very seriously, did not like this. To be clear, I don't think this was a shot at Arnold. I think Murphy was just making fun of the ridiculousness of the material.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Doesn't matter. Arnold's in, Murphy's out, and John Davis has the perfect replacement.

• 21:20Chris Winterbauer?

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• 24:03Chris Winterbauer?

  We're in 1986 now, and almost nobody knows who John McTiernan is. He's 34, and he had just directed his first film. Dan, have you ever seen the movie Nomads with Pierce Brosnan?

• 24:18Speaker 02

  I have not seen Nomads, no.

• 24:20Chris Winterbauer?

  It features possibly the most absurd French accent I have ever heard, courtesy of Pierce Brosnan. Let's give it a listen.

• 24:29Speaker 04

  No, no, no, no, no, no. Nothing so dramatic. My work is cultural. No!

• 24:36Chris Winterbauer?

  It's amazing. It is such a strange movie. I'll try to describe it to you. I watched it for this podcast. It's actually very fun. So Pierce Brosnan is a French anthropologist who studies nomads, who get sucked into a murder mystery involving Inuit trickster demon spirits, all told through flashback as his female doctor at the time of his death becomes possessed with his memories.

• 24:59Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a wild ride.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  That's a lot to take in. And, you know, and I love Pierce Brosnan. I, you know, I thought he was a great James Bond that had the unfortunate luck of having some terrible movie star in his way. But we've got to stop asking him to do things on film that he can't do, because he also did what I think is maybe some of the worst singing I've ever seen in a film, in Mamma Mia. I mean, it's like, know the man's range. He has good range, but don't ask him to do things he can't do.

• 25:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, and I think that actually, this experience, not to go on too much of a Pierce Brosnan tangent, but he was, he had only really done Remington Steele at this point, the TV series. And so this was a really big opportunity, because Gerard Depardieu had dropped out of the lead role, and they needed somebody at the last minute. So he jumps in. I'm like, why didn't you just rewrite it and make him Irish?

• 25:42Speaker 02

  Right, just scratch out French and say Irish.

• 25:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Regardless, John Davis really liked this movie. So he sits Lawrence Gordon down in a screening room at Fox and says, watch this. I don't know what Gordon thought of it, but Arnold Schwarzenegger apparently liked it and liked John McTiernan and was like, this is our guy. So McTiernan gets hired to direct. Lawrence Gordon pulls in his old buddy, Joel Silver, to produce. And the Thomas Brothers get a crash course in Hollywood weird by way of Arnold Schwarzenegger in a hot tub. So Jim and John Thomas first met Arnold at Marvin Davis's 45,000 square foot home,

• 26:25Chris Winterbauer?

  where he sat nude in a hot tub, smoking a cigar, quizzing them about his character motivations. And the Thomas Brothers smartly pivot away from commando. This isn't going to be cartoonish. This is not going to be funny. The stakes are going to be higher. You're an everyman. They had a vision. We want this to be kind of a serious movie for you. Now, the only problem is John McTiernan did not think the movie was going to be serious. As he later said of the script, I could see the potential. It had some stupid stuff in it that I figured I could get rid of, but it seemed fun. It was an action movie and didn't take itself too seriously. Well, the script took itself seriously, but I didn't. End quote.

• 27:01Speaker 02

  I mean, all of those things that John McTiernan said about the movie should have just been the pulls for the poster.

• 27:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  That's a selling point as far as I'm concerned.

• 27:08Chris Winterbauer?

  It takes itself seriously. You shouldn't. That's the quote.

• 27:11Speaker 02

  Exactly. Predator.

• 27:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. So this begins kind of like the first point of contention around like what the tone of the film is going to be. So the Thomas Brothers don't want to change the script because they feel like it's really working well. Everybody up until this point has told them how good it is. And here comes John McTiernan saying, yeah, I don't think it's that great. McTiernan apparently is viewing it as more of an adventure film. I'm thinking a roller coaster. I'm honestly thinking something kind of like Temple of Doom, where you have these set pieces connecting the characters. It's a little fun. It's a little hokey. The ending of the movie in particular was a point of contention, as what'll happen in Predator 2. Dutch discovers the Predator spacecraft. It's full of human trophies. McTiernan said, this does not go with the tone of an adventure film. It's creepy.

• 27:57Chris Winterbauer?

  It's repulsive. So McTiernan actually He wrote his own ending, which the studio didn't like. And they said, just, we're not hiring you to write. Go stop doing that. You're just directing the movie. And there were even talks at the end of killing Dutch and letting the Predator win at the end of the movie. Those, those talks that went nowhere, as I'm sure.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  And that's not gonna happen, no. Not, not in the 1980s and not with Arnold Schwarzenegger, not a chance.

• 28:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. Yeah. I mean, that's why Terminator 2 is so effective. You know, when he actually dies and, you know, gives the thumbs up. It's like the one, one time he lets himself go. So the Thomas Brothers are at the end of their rope. They're basically like, John McTernan seems to be making a very different movie than what we've written. So we're out. They stepped away from the project. They took an overall deal with Disney and they assumed that their time with Predator was done. It was only lurking in the shadows. It would come back and pull them back in soon. Meanwhile, casting begins in earnest. And Dan, this movie has an amazing cast.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  Incredible.

• 28:55Chris Winterbauer?

  And that is largely in thanks to Jackie Birch. We discussed in our Die Hard episode. She's a veteran casting director of not just action films, but comedies and ensemble pieces. She did a lot of John Hughes movies. And she wanted to stack the cast with real Vietnam War vets. And in the end, she did get two. So Jesse Ventura plays Blaine, was a professional wrestler. Predator was his first feature film. He auditioned for Birch and got the role because he fit the description of the character so well. He's a real vet. He was enormous and he chewed tobacco constantly. So basically he played himself. In preparation for the role, he claims he did aerobics for six weeks to try to get his weight down from 265 to 240

• 29:37Chris Winterbauer?

  because he was so much bigger than everybody else, including Arnold on the movie. As McTernan said, the hardest thing about getting him into an appropriate performance was just scaling him down from the world of professional wrestling, where you're performing for the people in the cheap seats.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 29:51Chris Winterbauer?

  So Bill Duke was an actor and director. He just starred alongside Arnold in Commando. And so that was an obvious fit. And then Birch loved Carl Weathers from Rocky. And I mean, everybody did. He was amazing as Apollo Creed.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:06Chris Winterbauer?

  And he's, he's physically a specimen. He's.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  He's in better shape in Predator than I think he was in Rocky. And he was in great shape in Rocky.

• 30:14Chris Winterbauer?

  He's bigger. He's certainly bigger in Predator.

• 30:16Speaker 02

  He's bigger, for sure.

• 30:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. He, I think he tried to get close to Arnold, and that's what makes that amazing handshake moment so good.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 30:23Chris Winterbauer?

  But there was pushback from the studio hiring Weathers for the role. I don't know exactly why, but I would assume it's because since he was so experienced, he was expensive relative to the rest of the secondary cast members. And the studio was probably hesitant to pay that much for somebody who was going to be, you know, second banana to Arnold and die two thirds of the way through the movie. But McTiernan smartly knew that because he was such a good actor, that would actually enhance Arnold. So McTiernan later said, I knew if I put him next to Arnold in most of the scenes, it would help Arnold enormously. Every time Carl was working, Arnold was over in the corner of the set watching because he was thinking, okay, this is my new life and this guy knows how to do it. I just put Carl in Arnold's way and it worked out.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  Smart.

• 31:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Very smart. So Richard Chavez, who plays Poncho, was a relatively unknown actor. He'd done a few movies, but mostly TV. Birch saw him perform in a play about the Vietnam War. I believe it was called Tracers, that he had actually co-written with other Vietnam War veterans. So again, he was the second Vietnam War vet in the film. Now, you've mentioned an actor or an original Predator that does not make it into the film. Dan, who was supposed to play the Predator initially?

• 31:37Speaker 02

  I mean, unless I am sorely mistaken, I believe it was another icon of, I'd say more 90s action, started in the 80s, but I think I would associate it more with the 90s, Mr. Jean-Claude Van Damme.

• 31:49Chris Winterbauer?

  You're 100% right. And he was more of an icon of the 90s because he had not yet broken out with Bloodsport, which wouldn't come out until 1988. The kickboxer was five foot nine, incredibly agile, incredibly energetic, and impressed McTiernan by basically running around the office, jumping in the air, doing the splits, and acting kind of like a monkey and said, "This is how the Predator would work." And McTiernan said, "Great. That's great. I'll do it." And apparently had to store his furniture in Jackie Birch's garage when he took the job, because I don't think he had a place to live at the time. He was maybe homeless.

• 32:30Chris Winterbauer?

  So Joel Silver brought in Sonny Landom. They'd worked together on 48 hours. I'm not sure if you know a ton about Sonny Landom, but he was a very volatile person.

• 32:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've heard he's a wild card, or was a wild card.

• 32:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Very much so. Apparently, the big issue was that he was really unpredictable when he drank. And so, the insurance company would actually not let them hire Landom unless he had a bodyguard, not to protect Landom, but to protect the rest of the production from Landom. So they had a six foot eight guy who 24 hours a day would just stand behind Landom and make sure he never misbehaved while he was on set. And there are some very funny stories about like them going to a club on their off days and like looking out at the dance floor and Sonny Landom would be like crawling on the ground licking women's legs. It was very, well, very unusual behavior. And he had a bit of a troubled life after

• 33:23Chris Winterbauer?

  the production, a couple of failed bids at political office and some personal issues that we don't need to get into. Now, stepping into this testosterone-fueled endeavor, of course, is Mexican actress Elpida Carrillo, who had had a small role in The Border starring Jack Nicholson when she was 17. She actually didn't speak any English before she took that role. And then Oliver Stone's Salvador. Now, unlike everybody else involved, with the exception of Ventura and Chavez, she had had an extremely difficult upbringing that was marked by a lot of violence that's not dissimilar from what her character describes in the film. So her father was murdered when she was very young, leaving her mother to raise 10 children on her own, and her oldest brother, Roramito, who had become a surrogate father to her and her siblings.

• 34:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Was actually shot and murdered outside their town's movie theater when she was just an adolescent. And then she left home at age 10. She worked at a Chinese restaurant in Mexico City. She was eventually discovered by a local photographer, a turn that led to modeling and then eventually acting. And there's a pretty harrowing interview you can read with her online at Harold de Paris dot com. And she describes some of her early roles and how predatory the producers and directors were around her. It's pretty daunting stuff. So she was more than prepared to handle the machismo bullshit. You know what I mean of these Hollywood actors is my point. Now, there were signs that the studio was not happy with the script. Most notably, there's one actor on this project who's more known as a screenwriter. Dan?

• 34:54Speaker 02

  Mr. Shane Black, one of the weirdest appearances in an 80s action movie.

• 34:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely. Shane Black, who is the first individual to die, and we'll get to why in a second, was first approached by Joel Silver not to act in the film, but to rewrite it. But at the time, he was very interested in acting, so he declined the writing job. So as John Davis recalled, quote, "So the idea was hatched. We'll hire him as an actor. And when he's there, stuck in Mexico, we'll give him the script and we'll make him rewrite it. And we got him down there and we asked him to do a rewrite. And he said he was an actor in the movie and not a writer. So he was the first person we killed. He got killed seven minutes into that movie."

• 35:33Speaker 02

  Wow. The pettiness.

• 35:35Chris Winterbauer?

  So petty. And it also, it actually, the way that some of the blocking is done, it would make more sense for Poncho, Richard Chavez's character, to be killed in that scene where he's chasing Elpida through the jungle, but they kind of do a bait and switch and they have Shane Black follow her. So I totally believe that they swapped the death order so that he would die earlier.

• 35:54Speaker 02

  They totally did. And I'm sure the Writers Guild would have been thrilled at hearing that one of their members, I assume he was a Writers Guild member at the time, had been hijacked essentially to rewrite a script.

• 36:04Chris Winterbauer?

  I believe he must have been because Monster Squad was also in production, kind of contemporaneous to this, which he had written and was obviously a big studio movie. So what exactly was going to kill Shane Black's character was still being hotly debated. And let's get into the trials and tribulations of making the actual goddamn Predator.

• 36:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:28Chris Winterbauer?

  While John and Jim were writing, they said they envisioned a creature that moved like a monkey, but had the face of a cuttlefish, which is kind of very specific and odd. To design the Predator, Joel Silver first reached out to makeup artist Rick Baker, which makes a lot of sense.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  Class, he's a legend.

• 36:46Chris Winterbauer?

  A legend.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  Even at that time, already a legend.

• 36:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I mean, American Werewolf in London, 1981. He had done incredible work, and he was actually really busy working on Harry and the Hendersons at this point. A great 80s movie that you were probably allowed to watch.

• 37:00Speaker 02

  I was allowed to watch Harry and the Hendersons, and I watched it many, many times over. That and Santa Claus, the movie.

• 37:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  Are my Keystone John Lithgow experiences as a child.

• 37:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Very good. I loved, I loved, well, for me, it was those two and Cliffhanger, because I could watch that one.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  Well, see, that was one not till later.

• 37:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. So the project then goes to Richard Edlund of Boss Films, who, obviously, Star Wars, rated as the Lost Ark. Now, the final Predator design is Hollywood lore, and I'm sure you've heard the story of where the final design comes from, and we'll get there, but the original design is kind of a bit of an orphan. I think it's one of those like defeats that no one wants to claim. So some sources claim that Edlund designed the Predators. Others suggest that he and his team worked from a design provided to them by a designer who'd already worked with the filmmakers. Who knows? What is clear, according to Bo Marx, who was an associate producer on the film, is that because McTiernan was a relatively new director, Joel Silver was actually more involved in designing the original Predator than McTiernan was, which, knowing Joel Silver's

• 38:00Chris Winterbauer?

  personality, makes a lot of sense.

• 38:02Speaker 02

  I think that Joel Silver is always very involved in anything he's doing.

• 38:07Chris Winterbauer?

  He does make a couple of really key inputs in this movie that I think led to a better film, and we'll get to those. So, the original design, I think, looks a lot like the aliens from A Quiet Place, the humanoid rendition of the Demogorgon in Stranger Things, the elites in Halo, long arms, heavily muscled, that high-set ankle that renders the legs similar to a horse. I like the original design on paper, actually, quite a bit, but the problem is, they're shooting on location in the jungles of Mexico, right? And this is not a practical suit for somebody to wear when running through muddy and hot terrain. You just can't do it. It's not gonna work.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  It's not a practical suit to begin with.

• 38:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. They're effectively on stilts, wearing a head on top of their head, you know, covered in latex and rubber in 100 degree weather and 100% humidity. It's just not gonna go well.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  No.

• 39:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, that's not the only thing they're worried about. They're trying to figure out the heat vision and camouflage effects, as we mentioned, as well. So those will be handled by a pair of brothers, Richard and Robert Greenberg of R. Greenberg Associates. They've done the effects for Joel Silver's Xanadu, his produced Xanadu.

• 39:18Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 39:19Chris Winterbauer?

  I know. Throwback. Another, I think it's 81 as well.

• 39:22Speaker 02

  That's gotta be either a past or future topic for this show.

• 39:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, it's been requested a number of times and we have it. That and Zardoz are like two of the highest ones that I really want.

• 39:34Speaker 02

  Wow, yeah.

• 39:34Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, six shooter Sean Connery red baby diaper is one of the wildest looks ever committed to film.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  Yes, it is.

• 39:42Chris Winterbauer?

  It's incredible. So the camouflage was developed by special effects supervisor Joel Heinecke. He took an existing method where they created matte outlines of like title elements and people and decided, oh, what if I did an inline version of that? So the concentric circles you've seen are basically they shoot an element of the background, the plate of the background. Then they shoot the character, you know, on a stage, basically. And then they create a set of matte lines going concentrically inward from the outline of the body and they superimpose it on the background. And it creates the illusion of, oh, there's something there rippling right across the background. And the idea was basically like, if you put a water droplet on a photograph

• 40:25Chris Winterbauer?

  and it obscures it underneath, and obviously it gets much better in subsequent films, and has become really the basis for all forms of active camouflage, all the way through The Invisible Man, you know, that we've seen to this day. It was a pretty revolutionary effect.

• 40:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, you know, you look at it, you can tell it's the 80s, but, but still, it holds up.

• 40:46Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. I think it. It achieves what it needs to emotionally. And because we've actually seen it improve directionally from where it started, it has a nostalgic, like warm and fuzzy feel to it as opposed to other effects that have simply been replaced by a different technology entirely. Where you look back and you say, oh yeah, you know, that we just know how to do that. You know what I mean? In a different way now.

• 41:09Speaker 02

  I mean, staying with Arnold, there's, there's stuff in the Terminator, particularly the, the, the first Terminator, the kind of animatronic double of him that just, and I think James Cameron even has said it, it just doesn't work anymore. It just doesn't work at all. I mean, Predator, the invisibility looks dated, yes, but it still works.

• 41:28Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. Yeah. And you can tell, it's funny with Terminator, they obviously deleted the scene in the second Terminator when they used Linda Hamilton's twin sister to do the, you know, surgical scene on Arnold's head in order to avoid the doubling issue that they'd run into on the first film. You can see him learning from his mistakes and some really, really remarkable effects were there. Now, speaking of distorting things, the draft of the script had apparently gotten to the point where nobody even knew what they were making at this point. And so as Shane Black said, they did the classic Hollywood thing, which is they hired seven different people to do a rewrite. And then they went back to the original because they realized it was actually pretty good to begin with. So September, October, 1985, the Thomas Brothers agent, they actually have one now,

• 42:13Chris Winterbauer?

  calls them and says, the script is in, they hate it, they hate the script. They want you guys back because Shane Black won't rewrite it. And they want you to go down to the production in Mexico. So the writers get shipped down, everybody's down in Mexico. Production's fast approaching and they've got like a week before shooting to do military training. The military procedures in this movie are not particularly accurate. And that's for a couple of reasons. First of all, as Vietnam vet and military trainer Gary Goldman said,

• 42:46Chris Winterbauer?

  None of these guys look like soldiers. They're way too big.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  They're massive.

• 42:49Chris Winterbauer?

  His pull point was like, to be a soldier, you have to be able to run. If you can't run, you're screwed. He took them on a run his first day, and he said they all tried really hard. In particular, Arnold, like, really worked his ass off to keep up. But he's like, these guys are bodybuilders. They're enormous. My guess is Carl Weathers was the most fit out of everybody, and he was known to be a bit of a health nut. So he quickly realized, okay, they're not gonna come across as like, real soldiers. So he's tried to teach them how to use the machine guns properly, fire, you know, three to six rounds in controlled bursts. Bill Duke proceeds to pick up the minigun and scream like a madman, and just like in the movie, fire 200 rounds off in an uncontrolled burst until it runs dry. And Goldman kind of realizes, okay, that, this is

• 43:32Chris Winterbauer?

  the kind of action movie that we're making. We're not actually gonna worry about being too accurate in, in this instance.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  No. You're telling me that soldiers don't hip shoot machine guns?

• 43:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Just the, everybody's firing from the hip. That's the, that's like, the most recognizable. Well, that and Carl Weathers going guns akimbo with two MP5s is one of my other favorite. And then his arm gets blown off.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  I mean, at some point, you just have to lean into it.

• 43:58Chris Winterbauer?

  It's great. I'd be like, there's no way you could control those guns with one hand.

• 44:02Speaker 02

  Not a chance.

• 44:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Not a chance.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  Not a chance. Even Arnold, even the best, strongest people in the world.

• 44:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. I know, love that there's like, headshotting guys from the head the whole time.

• 44:12Speaker 02

  Perfect accuracy. Penpoint accuracy.

• 44:14Chris Winterbauer?

  It's so funny, though, how, I remember, I just saw the trailer for The Accountant 2, which just, it looks wonderfully stupid. And, but that is something that's changed so much culturally, is they actually aimed on the sights of guns now in movies. It is.

• 44:26Speaker 02

  I blame Keanu Reeves.

• 44:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, John Wick. That, that changed it.

• 44:29Speaker 02

  He made everyone look, he publicly made it so that anybody who doesn't do the work now is gonna look so stupid.

• 44:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 44:35Speaker 02

  That I feel like now everyone's like, alright, I guess I gotta learn how to shoot this thing.

• 44:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, that, and I will say Tom Cruise in Collateral, who like, does a proper draw and actually, you know, knew how to hold those firearms, or at least I've been told by firearms experts. That kind of, I feel like, was the early shot across the bow of hip firing weapons in movies.

• 44:54Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely.

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• 45:39Chris Winterbauer?

  So they're going big in this movie. And Schwarzenegger decides he's gonna go as big as possible. So he has his weights shipped to Mexico. His trainer, Sven Olthorson, he also played a Russian officer in that big shootout at the end of Act One, comes with him, and he wakes up at 5:30 a.m. every day to work out, until he realizes Carl Weathers is actually trying to beat him to the gym. And so he starts coming in at 4:30, Weathers comes in at 4:00. And finally, these guys are in the gym at 3:30 a.m. just getting as swole as possible every single day. And they're trying to rope everybody else in. So John Davis remembers Arnold pressured him into a workout. He does it. The next morning, he was in so much pain that when Arnold came and knocked on the door,

• 46:23Chris Winterbauer?

  he just pretended to sleep through it because he could not get out of bed.

• 46:28Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, that's what an Arnold workout will do to you.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  He had the, he had the drive. He had, whatever it takes to succeed, Arnold Schwarzenegger had it.

• 46:35Chris Winterbauer?

  He did. He's relentless. And I think actually, one of the reasons he was able to transition to film is weightlifting, like filmmaking, is so process-oriented. It is such a delayed satisfaction-based endeavor, where you have to trust that eventually you'll get there. And I think a lot of people think filmmaking, oh, it's a creative activity. It's about inspiration, you know, finding lightning in a bottle. It's about relentless iteration. And that's what, you know, building your muscles is, too.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  That's true. That inspiration comes on the 15th try of something.

• 47:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. Or 132nd, if you're Stanley Kubrick, as we just covered. Now, Arnold was, it seems, maybe a little insecure about one member. Jesse Ventura was the only person close to his size. He later admitted that he told the wardrobe team to lie to Jesse Ventura about Arnold's costume measurements to make him believe that his bicep was one inch bigger than Arnold's. And then, according to Arnold, Jesse told Arnold, while they were working out together, "Hey, we should measure our biceps, see who's is bigger, and bet a bottle of champagne on it." And of course, Arnold's was three inches bigger because he had given him the wrong measurement.

• 47:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course.

• 47:50Chris Winterbauer?

  A whole lot of that, you know, fun boys' club stuff going on.

• 47:53Speaker 02

  Those are the games you play.

• 47:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. So, production begins in spring of 1986, sometime in March or April, near the resort community in Puerto Vallarta. And this was delayed because of Arnold's commitment to raw deal, so they're finally getting started, and everything slows down to a halt immediately. A number of problems are quickly apparent. Number one, they don't have the Predator suit yet. So, it's not ready, it's not done, so they start shooting everything without the Predator involved, which fortunately is a good chunk of the movie.

• 48:27Speaker 02

  It's a lot of the movie.

• 48:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. So, they've got 14-hour days that are stretching to 19-hour days. The temperature is 100 degrees plus, high humidity, it's ruining the makeup, they have to reset, do touch-ups. The actors and crew are carrying heavy machinery and literal machine guns. And it turns out that Puerto Vallarta is missing a key element that the script called for: a jungle.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  Oh, you think that would pop up in the location scout?

• 48:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, apparently, McTernan claims that the production designer had a house near there and got the movie so he could redo his house while he was making the movie. Jim Thomas and second unit director Craig Baxley claims that it was actually because Joel Silver and John Davis had villas that they would vacation at there, so it was easier for them. That makes more sense to me.

• 49:15Speaker 02

  That makes a lot more sense. The producers are the ones that are gonna make that call.

• 49:18Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. Now, they may have hired the local production designer who also wanted to, you know what I mean, redo his house.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 49:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Further, they were filming during dry season, so everything was brown. Nothing was like lush and green. So they actually had to bring in foliage. They had to spray the area with water to remove dirt and dust and green it up. They built a bunch of trees out of styrofoam and fiberglass. I believe that amazing split tree at the end of the film that kind of serves as your central geography was a build and it actually, I think it looks great. It holds up really well. Stunts and explosions exacerbated the problem. They were using so many squibs and explosive devices that after shooting a few takes, the area they were filming in would just look like a baseball diamond. It was just like totally flat. There was just nothing left. And then, of course, the, the terrain was like really steep and really muddy. So they were constantly having to deal with that.

• 50:08Chris Winterbauer?

  And there were snakes, famously called the two-step. They call it that because if it bites you, that's how many steps you take before you die. Not a good, uh, not a good omen. Then there were the red ants. Richard Chavez laid down for a break during training, only to find himself completely covered with the little guys. He then ripped his clothes off, ran through the jungle completely naked and jumped in the production water tank. He was very disappointed because he'd been working out really hard with Arnold and he wanted to be able to show off his muscles in the early scenes of the movie. And now he was covered in red welts, so that probably wasn't gonna happen. There were a lot of scorpions, a lot of scorpions. They had to put towels under the door to keep the scorpions from getting into their rooms at night. And actually, that did lead to one of this film's most famous lines, Ventura's, I ain't

• 50:53Chris Winterbauer?

  got time to bleed. That scene had actually been cut for scheduling purposes, but Sonny Landom got bit by a scorpion or stung. And so they put that scene back on the schedule because his character was not involved.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  Wow. See?

• 51:07Chris Winterbauer?

  So little silver lining.

• 51:08Speaker 02

  Classic Hollywood moments, all at the whim of a scorpion's stinger.

• 51:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. And then, of course, if you survived all of that, you still got traveler's diarrhea. They got a notification from the hotel that the water was not potable because the filtration system had broken down a week before the notification went out. So they had drank from it for a week. They would go say their lines and according to Shane Black, run to the bathroom to shit their guts out. Arnold said during the shoot that he was so dehydrated, he was in bed for four to five days and had IV lines running into him.

• 51:39Speaker 02

  And I mean, you could use the production water, but one of the actors just jumped in naked and it's full of red ants. So that's a no go.

• 51:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. There are of course, a number of other injuries, including the stunt performers. The waterfall jump was done by Arnold's double. The double fell and broke his knee and had to be flown home. And just a knee break, sounds like the most painful possible place to break a bone. So many complex things happening there.

• 52:02Speaker 02

  No, thank you.

• 52:03Chris Winterbauer?

  And of course, Joel Silver had decided to hire a local crew in order to save money instead of Americans. And unfortunately, they were less than experienced. Turns out they didn't have much experience at all and light fixtures started exploding on set because they had not properly been replaced as requested by DP Donald McAlpine. So they asked for American replacements and Silver was like, are you insane? We can't afford this movie with actual Americans. So he said, can you get folks from Australia? So they literally just started ringing up crew in Australia because it's cheaper to pay an Australian crew with the conversion rate, even if you have to fly them to Mexico halfway around the world. And so they just called people and say like, do you have a passport and can you be on a flight tomorrow? And that's how they got the rest of their crew.

• 52:48Speaker 02

  That is wacky.

• 52:49Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, this, what you'll do to save a dollar in Hollywood is just, it's so ridiculous.

• 52:56Speaker 02

  Literally anything.

• 52:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, anything.

• 52:57Speaker 02

  Anything to save 50 cents, they'll do it.

• 53:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Even if it costs you a dollar, but you save that 50 cents.

• 53:03Speaker 02

  But you save 50 cents. That's how they think.

• 53:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, you can bank that savings. Now Arnold Schwarzenegger did also get married early in production, late April. He leaves from Massachusetts to marry Maria Shriver, which I'm not blaming him. That's just a, why not reschedule it?

• 53:19Speaker 02

  I mean, listen, this is, we're talking to Kennedy here. The apparatus around that, I would imagine was pretty, I don't know, I don't know when they set the wedding date, but I imagine probably pretty far out.

• 53:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, no.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  So I, I, I'll, I'll grant him on that because I can imagine that you, you're probably talking thousands of guests.

• 53:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, I'm sure.

• 53:38Speaker 02

  Who know, that's like, that'd be like rescheduling a royal wedding.

• 53:41Chris Winterbauer?

  That's fair. And Schwarzenegger, to his credit, I've read, was extremely professional focused and driven on this set. He wanted everybody to take it as seriously as him, and he also wanted them to smoke cigars with him. So Schwarzenegger was handing out cigars left and right. He even got Carl Weathers to join in, who was like a big health nut. And everybody thought, this is great, we're all smoking cigars. Until the producers realized that Schwarzenegger was billing the production for the cigars, and they got the cigar bill at the end of the production. It was thousands and thousands of dollars, which.

• 54:14Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 54:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Very, very smart.

• 54:16Speaker 02

  You know, when people ask about a time machine, what would you do? And everyone comes up with a fancy answer. Honestly, I think a top five thing for me would be go back to the set of Predator and smoke a cigar with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

• 54:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, yeah, it'd be pretty fun. I will say, what would not be fun is what they had to do to get the heat vision to work. So heat vision nowadays, I feel like is easily achieved or enhanced through a combination of post-production tools that were not available in the late 1980s. Lucky for the production, SFX supervisor Joel Heinecke had recently used a heat camera for a commercial about home insulation. But the heat camera is not a film camera, right? So they have to come up with a way to convert it into a film stock. And.

• 55:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 55:03Chris Winterbauer?

  They have to be able to switch from a normal perspective into the heat perspective on the exact same point of view. So they used a beam splitter, which is basically a mirror that sits at a 45 degree angle to the scene to redirect half of the light that hits the mirror down into a heat camera and then allows the other half of the light to pass through it to hit the regular camera directly aimed at the scene. If you'd like to see something similar, Nope did the same thing, basically, with an infrared camera and a regular camera to do its day for night scenes.

• 55:45Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 55:47Chris Winterbauer?

  It's like how a teleprompter works, just in reverse.

• 55:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had honestly always assumed that that was just visual effects of some sort.

• 55:56Chris Winterbauer?

  No, that was actually.

• 55:57Speaker 02

  Animation or some, you know.

• 55:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Entirely practical, as we'll learn.

• 56:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that is pretty cool.

• 56:03Chris Winterbauer?

  And very painful. So they have a two-camera rig, right? These cameras are rigged up to each other, basically at a 90-degree angle with a mirror in between them, capturing the image, which means it's very big and very heavy and cumbersome. And they actually attach this to a Steadicam to achieve it. So this was effectively being done handheld, which is, I mean, kudos to the operator, whoever it was, because that must have been heavy. It had an incredibly complex pipeline to then get that onto film. So they had to run a cable from that heat camera into a monitor that was inside of a van parked nearby. They then had a film camera inside of that van,

• 56:46Chris Winterbauer?

  filming the monitor to capture the heat vision on film. So they were shooting an image of an image already coming through a mirror, right, in order to get this on film, which on the one hand is very complicated, but on the other hand, actually does give it a somewhat more organic look. Like it's digital, but it doesn't look too chunky for like 80s digital.

• 57:09Speaker 02

  Maybe that's why I assumed it was effects, because it does have that sort of digital look. And I'm like, well, they couldn't, wow, that's, that is crazy.

• 57:17Chris Winterbauer?

  It was very time consuming. There was a dedicated camera assistant who would basically measure. The angle of the beam splitter with a protractor on every take because they had to make sure it was exactly forty five degrees. Otherwise, the perspective would be off and the frame would not be filled with a corresponding image. Some days, according to bowmarks, they would only get three seconds of usable footage from the Predator's POV. The problem was that even though it all worked from a technical perspective, the jungle was just as hot as the people that they were trying to show.

• 57:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Shining like lights. So when the jungle's, you know, ninety five degrees, you just blend in as Arnold does when he's covered in mud at the end of the film. So their first solution is basically they run in and they hit whoever's in the shot with a hairdryer. They heat them up physically.

• 58:06Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 58:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Right before they roll. Then they tried putting bags on top of people so that they would overheat and then rip the bag off and shoot the scene.

• 58:15Speaker 02

  Smart. Intentionally overheat your actors in the jungle?

• 58:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep, who are already dehydrated from shitting their brains out.

• 58:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 58:21Chris Winterbauer?

  So Heineck sends a memo to Joel Silver, basically saying, look, this isn't working. If the temperature reaches ninety four degrees outside, we can't shoot. The actors are indistinguishable from their environment. This, of course, happens. Joel Silver, who didn't read the memo, runs out, screams at Heineck, saying, breach of contract, you know, I'm gonna fire you. And so they decide instead of heating up the actors, let's cool down the jungle. So they bring in water trucks and they spray everything down. But of course, the water trucks were painted black so they wouldn't be caught in the background. And that absorbs heat and the water heated up. So that didn't work. So they had to then go and return with ice water. And they finally were able to successfully cool down the set. Apparently, the weather ended up cooling down shortly after, anyway.

• 59:05Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 59:05Chris Winterbauer?

  So by the time they come up with a solve, it happens anyway. Now, we talked briefly about Joel Silver. He and McTernan, I think, were really at loggerheads over the tone of this film. And it's interesting. McTernan's such an unusual director, and I never know what he wants to do with a movie necessarily, because he doesn't seem to take any of them that seriously. You know what I mean? If you listen to interviews with him. But at the same time, he's very meticulous with what he wants.

• 59:34Speaker 02

  Yes. I mean, I don't know. I feel like part of it is. He's had an interesting trajectory. I mean, it's not like he's been making movies for decades. You know, he had a bit of an interruption there. So I think maybe that gives him a little perspective as to the importance of certain things versus, you know, um, cause it's, he is one of those. I mean, he, you can't talk about 80's actions without talking about John McTiernan. And yet his career was so unlike, uh, so many of his peers.

• 1:00:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. And he definitely seems to have a paranoid personality as we later learned with his eventual indictment. You know, his work with Anthony Pellicano's wiretapping, uh, a producer of Rollerball. But at this point-

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  Of all the movies too.

• 1:00:21Chris Winterbauer?

  I know. It's just like, it's not worth it, man.

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  Of all the movies, Rollerball?

• 1:00:25Chris Winterbauer?

  I know, I know. Now, at this point, it seems like McTiernan wanted to lean more into the horror elements or suspense elements of the script and away from the action. Joel Silver, though, was like, action's what's gonna get the audience here. And I think that's specifically why he hired second unit director Craig Baxley, who had directed a lot of the action work on the TV series, The A-Team. And so I think McTiernan was feeling like Silver was edging him out by using a second unit director on the action scenes. And so as a result, McTiernan started telling Baxley, "We're basically not gonna shoot these action scenes. We're, don't worry, they don't matter." Like, the point is all of the suspense stuff later. Now, I think the other concern was that McTiernan would fall behind, and he did, very quickly.

• 1:01:08Chris Winterbauer?

  This was only his second feature film, and it was extremely difficult. So 48 days into a 56 day shoot, scheduled shoot, McTiernan had, according to Baxley, only shot half of the movie.

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  Yikes.

• 1:01:21Chris Winterbauer?

  So the studio's threatening to shut the movie down, and Joel Silver, according to Baxley, comes in and says, "In order to keep going, in order to get the studio to fund us further, we have to give them some, quote, 'eye candy.'" So we're gonna have Craig Baxley, the second unit director, choreograph and film the entire Palapa gunfight scene that ends act one. So according to Baxley, he and his team shot that entire sequence over seven or eight days, it seems like with him directing, not McTiernan.

• 1:01:54Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:01:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Which is, I think if like Marvel movies nowadays actually do think something kind of not dissimilar when they bring in an indie director and, you know, they're like, "Don't worry, we'll handle the action for you. You worry about the Woody repartee around the table, you know, that we're gonna film later."

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, and I mean, you know, Lord of the Rings, there were lots of things that, I mean, Peter Jackson was certainly

• 1:02:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely.

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

  intimately very involved, but there were lots of things, B unit and C and D units, stuff that was done without his involvement, although an entire sequence is, that's a little bit extreme.

• 1:02:25Chris Winterbauer?

  I think so, and it's hard to tell if and how involved McTiernan was, but it does seem like Baxley was at the helm, and that sequence does stand out as being the most ridiculously rah rah, you know what I mean, sequence of the film. It feels...

• 1:02:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's the, it's the beating heart of this 80's action thriller. It's, it does feel like you could pluck that out and put it in Commando, you could pluck that out and put it in just about any movie, you know, but, but, but again, that's kind of what makes the movie great.

• 1:02:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:58Speaker 02

  A little bit.

• 1:02:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, and McTiernan actually had a brilliant solution to this problem that I think is one of the more subversive elements of the movie. So he was really frustrated that the studio and Silver wanted this like gun pornography. And so he basically says, "Look, I'm gonna give you so much gun porn that you're never gonna wanna see a gun for the rest of the movie." And that's where he conceives the scene where Bill Duke goes down and dryfires the minigun, and they all just hipfire every bullet in their arsenal into the jungle, only to realize they didn't even hit the darn thing. So that scene was both to satiate the studio's desire for gun barrels, but also show the audience, "Look at how ineffective

• 1:03:42Chris Winterbauer?

  their type of warfare is at the end of the day." And hardly a gun is fired until, you know, throughout the end of the film.

• 1:03:49Speaker 02

  No, well, they used all their ammo.

• 1:03:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly.

• 1:03:51Speaker 02

  That's, that's called, what is it called? Malicious compliance?

• 1:03:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. That's exactly right.

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• 1:04:39Chris Winterbauer?

  So, the Predator has finally arrived. Eight to 10 weeks into shooting, the suit shows up. There's two versions. Have you, Dan, seen the videos of the original Predator suit? I have. I get kind of District 9 vibes from it a little bit. Yes, yes, it does. It looks a little bit like the prawns from District 9. Yeah. There's like the holdout suit, which is red, which I'm sure you've seen. It's basically a big red Lycra rubber suit. Just so it's the opposite of green when he's invisible, and they can easily do the matte effect. Then they have the photography version. McTernan says he opens the box, pulls the suit out, turns to his assistant and says, "We're in trouble. Like, this isn't gonna work.

• 1:05:23Chris Winterbauer?

  It was executed too quickly. The proportions, although they looked good on paper, kind of looked ridiculous on a person. Beaumark said it looked like a chicken. Jim Thomas said it looked like a cockroach. John Davis just said it was underwhelming. Ironically, the only person who liked it was Jean-Claude Van Damme. Well, of course. At least he says that. Well, but he was also really frustrated with the suit, too, because he didn't know that he was gonna be invisible the entire movie. I don't know if he never read the script. I mean, his English wasn't great at the time, but he at first thought it was like a... He hated the suit at first, because he was like, "I look like a superhero." And they're like, "No, no, no, no, no. This is to do with invisibility." And he says, "What invisibility?" And they're like, "Oh, you're invisible until you're wearing the other suit." So he was...

• 1:06:06Chris Winterbauer?

  He was not very happy in this film.

• 1:06:09Speaker 02

  Or attentive, apparently.

• 1:06:10Chris Winterbauer?

  No. And he really hated the feel of the suit because it impeded his ability to move. And say whatever you will about Jean-Claude Van Damme, the muscles from Brussels was known for his cat-like agility. The guy is truly bendable and agile. If you, have you, Dan, ever seen the YouTube, uh, Jean-Claude Van Damme Volvo commercial?

• 1:06:31Speaker 02

  Oh, yes.

• 1:06:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Where he does the splits on the automated driving?

• 1:06:34Speaker 02

  Classic. To, uh, is it Enya, I believe, and India soundtrack, I believe, and India soundtrack, yes.

• 1:06:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. YouTube, JCVD Volvo commercial, you will thank me later, audience. So he described the experience of being on this movie as a nightmare. He would overheat, he would sweat buckets, they'd then run in, put a hose in the back of his suit, pump air conditioning inside, all of the sweat would freeze. He'd be too cold, so he'd oscillate from way too hot to way too cold. His head was in the costume's neck, not unlike, uh, you know, a character at a theme park. And they had this big predator head on top weighing him down. He's only 5'9", so I think they were having to use a lot of perspective tricks to make the character seem bigger than, you know, for example, Carl Weathers, 6'2", Arnold Schwarzenegger, 6'2", Ventura, 6'4".

• 1:07:19Chris Winterbauer?

  They had to put him on stilts to create the look of the legs, you know, the kind of horse-like legs that the designers had created. And it becomes quickly apparent that this isn't going to work out. And it's unclear why or what precipitated his firing, but we do know that Joel Silver is the one who fired him. And there were some moments of disagreement that may have led to it. For example, he refused an order from Silver to perform a jump in the suit because he was worried that it was going to break his legs. And everybody has their own versions for like why he was fired. Jackie Burts said it was because he complained too much. Craig Baxley says it's because he broke the suit head. John Davis said it was just because he was too short. Duke said he passed out too many times, which like, if that's even remotely true, is so sad.

• 1:08:00Speaker 02

  You're fired. Why? You keep passing out from exhaustion. How dare you?

• 1:08:06Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, wouldn't be the worst firing in Hollywood's history. Heineck said it was because he wouldn't stop kickboxing. Basically, like, he just insisted that the Predator move like he did and would not accept directions from anybody else.

• 1:08:18Speaker 02

  Okay, that one I believe.

• 1:08:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. I think Richard Chavez nailed it, which is simply like, nobody liked the suit, including the studio.

• 1:08:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:24Chris Winterbauer?

  So McTiernan shows the suit footage to the studio and says Silver, and it's like, this isn't working. Like, we need a different suit. And so, production is halted. The studio shuts down production. They've got Arnold Schwarzenegger, an in-demand action star. You know, the risk of shutting down a production is always, can you align the schedules of the actors so you can actually start it back up? So this is a very risky move right now. But it was also a big blessing in disguise. Dan, can you conceive of any advantage it might have to be able to take a break in the middle or two-thirds of the way through production?

• 1:09:01Speaker 02

  Well, you said that the weather was not cooperating, so I'd imagine maybe they got their lush green jungle by the time they were ready to go again.

• 1:09:07Chris Winterbauer?

  They do have a location shift, which does help them. But the bigger advantage, and actually something that is built into certain action films now, is actually how to beat to edit the film together, at least a rough cut.

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  That's always a good thing, too. Yeah.

• 1:09:21Chris Winterbauer?

  So they were able to put a rough cut together to see what's working, what's not working, is there anything they need to pick up? And they actually screened it for Fox president of production Leonard Goldberg, and everybody agreed, outside of the monster, this movie's pretty good. It's got good action, it's got good stars, Arnold's got good screen presence. We just got to figure out how to get this monster right. Enter Stan Winston.

• 1:09:45Speaker 02

  Oh, the great, the great Stan Winston.

• 1:09:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Right. So Stan Winston had worked with Schwarzenegger and James Cameron on The Terminator, and I would argue he'd done some of his best work in 1986 on a Fox film, which is, of course, James Cameron's Aliens. One of, just, I mean, I think they really perfected the xenomorph's look in that film.

• 1:10:06Speaker 02

  So good.

• 1:10:07Chris Winterbauer?

  So good. So Rick Baker actually was approached by the production again because he had a connection to Silver, but Winston won the job. So from fall of 86 through the winter of 87, Winston took on the task of designing and creating a new Predator. And at the same time, his studio was doing all of the work for the monster squad, which was extensive, and Shane Black had written, as we discussed. And he was in pre-production for his directorial debut, and another 80s movie you probably weren't allowed to see, but actually I am kind of a fan of, Pumpkinhead.

• 1:10:38Speaker 02

  Oh, that's a, that's what I call a blockbuster movie. Uh, it's a movie that I saw on the shelf at Blockbuster, but I don't think I've actually ever watched.

• 1:10:47Chris Winterbauer?

  It's, it's not great, but it is fun and I love Lance Henriksen and I'll kind of watch anything he's in. So it's a good movie and it's got a great monster suit in it. The actual pumpkin head is very well designed. So Winston's crew was working seven days a week to make all of these suits and heads, trying to find something that works. And what's really interesting is that a few of the artists have said that over the years, fans have pointed out elements of the Predator's design that they particularly like. And they're often elements that were conceived to hide rips and hold the suit together at the last minute. And one of my favorite elements, the Predator's mesh shirt, which just makes him a drag icon in my mind.

• 1:11:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Uh, and it was also made out of decorative fishnets from Spencer Gifts, was nearly nixed by Winston before getting into the film.

• 1:11:34Speaker 02

  Well, it's interesting because Commando also had its own mesh shirt, uh, thing, which, which I think adds a lot to the memorability of that character.

• 1:11:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, so Winston himself wanted to nix the mesh shirt. But one of his designers said, no, no, no, no, no. It makes him look smart. It makes, cause it makes him look more human, right? He's wearing this type of costuming. I don't really fully understand the logic. Winston didn't want to do it because he loved the paint job on the abdomen that they'd done, which is remarkable. It's kind of like an alligator belly that they gave him.

• 1:12:06Speaker 02

  It is, yeah.

• 1:12:07Chris Winterbauer?

  But a few days later, that designer overheard Winston telling Joel Silver, quote, "Now look at the mesh. You see how smart it makes him? He's intelligent." So Winston.

• 1:12:17Speaker 02

  Welcome to Hollywood, kid.

• 1:12:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Winston knew how to operate in Hollywood as well as anyone. Now, at the time, Winston's artists, apparently according to Howard Berger, one of the members of the team, recalled how Predator was kind of viewed as the redheaded stepchild of the company. Everyone else wanted to work on Monster Squad and nobody thought that Predator was going to be a hit. It was kind of like we covered Shrek and everybody at DreamWorks wanted to be on Prince of Egypt and nobody wanted to be on Shrek. And of course, we know now which one eclipsed the other. So ultimately, the most famous aspects of the final design came from two places. Dan, do you know, like, what would you describe as the two most famous aspects of Predator's actual final design?

• 1:12:57Speaker 02

  Well, we have the the pincher pincer mouth, obviously.

• 1:13:00Chris Winterbauer?

  The mandibles.

• 1:13:01Speaker 02

  The mandibles.

• 1:13:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep, that's one, 100%.

• 1:13:04Speaker 02

  Uh, and then, I mean, I would imagine that the I wouldn't call them dreadlocks because obviously culturally, but it's the the hair or whatever kind of attachment to the head there.

• 1:13:14Chris Winterbauer?

  You nailed it.

• 1:13:14Speaker 02

  That gives it that distinct profile.

• 1:13:16Chris Winterbauer?

  I would just go, I they're basically dreadlocks.

• 1:13:18Speaker 02

  They are basically dreadlocks, yes.

• 1:13:20Chris Winterbauer?

  So so the dress, so Stan Winston saw a drawing of a Rastafarian warrior with dreadlocks in Joel Silver's office. And that inspired the alien dreadlocks. And then, while sketching ideas during a flight to Japan, and this is kind of the most famous apocryphal story of Predator, I would argue. James Cameron suggested to Winston, if you added mandibles to the creature's face, that would be something interesting that no one had seen before. So James Cameron actually had one of the biggest influences on that creature design.

• 1:13:52Speaker 02

  Man, what doesn't James Cameron have his fingers in?

• 1:13:54Chris Winterbauer?

  I know, we've covered him a lot on this podcast. And it's he is a unique mind in in his ability to create kind of new and interesting riffs on things long established, I would say.

• 1:14:09Speaker 02

  I mean, and I don't want to sidetrack us too much, but one of the things I like about James Cameron is he's he's so arrogant, but he owns it so much.

• 1:14:20Chris Winterbauer?

  He does.

• 1:14:20Speaker 02

  It's just like, you know, people like, oh, well, you know, it's so stupid. You spent this, you spent all this money on this Avatar movie, it's gonna have to make $2 billion to break even. He's like, yeah, so I don't care, it will, screw you.

• 1:14:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:32Speaker 02

  Like, wow, all right. And he backs it up.

• 1:14:34Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. I don't know if I would necessarily want to work with him.

• 1:14:38Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:14:38Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, in certain capacities, but I'm so glad he works.

• 1:14:41Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:14:42Chris Winterbauer?

  And makes things for us.

• 1:14:43Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:14:43Chris Winterbauer?

  As an audience. So Joel Silver, speaking of outsized egos, did contribute a really great idea to the final design.

• 1:14:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Initially, the texture of the helmet is what was used for the alien's face. Joel Silver said, "No, no, no, no, no. Give him an actual helmet, and then have him pull it off to reveal the alien's face at the end of the film." So you think you've seen the alien's face, only to have one more reveal in the third act. I think that's pretty fun and smart.

• 1:15:18Speaker 02

  And sets up one of the, I think, the biggest laugh in the movie, which is Arnold's line there, which is, which is just so well-delivered by Schwarzenegger.

• 1:15:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Really, really good. Now, of course, Silver was not ever satisfied, and at 3 a.m. one morning demanded that gas come out of the tubes of the helmet when it was released and removed. One of the techs was able to jerry-rig it. Again, might have been a ridiculous request. It's great.

• 1:15:48Speaker 02

  But a good idea.

• 1:15:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep. The work on the final suit is, is really, really, really remarkable. It's a fully mechanical head, has moving tusks and mandibles, and a fully animatronic face, and yet the eyes look human and real and compelling and emotive. And a lot of that has to do with the new performer they brought in to play Predator. And that is, of course, Kevin Peter Hall, who is 7'2" tall. He towered over the film's stars, and he was fresh off of a suit-based gig playing Sasquatch in Harry and the Hendersons.

• 1:16:21Speaker 02

  Oh, boy.

• 1:16:22Chris Winterbauer?

  He didn't want to get typecast as someone who could only act in sweet movies, so he agreed to do Predator, given its violent nature. And then, when he came in, he and McTernan agreed to shift away from the animalistic, kind of monkey-jumping-around performance of Jean-Claude Van Damme, and more into the sophisticated, intelligent hunter that we get in the final film. So it initially was something more like getting hunted by a gorilla, and it actually went back more towards that dilettante hunter vibe, I would argue, that we described at the beginning of this recording.

• 1:16:55Chris Winterbauer?

  So, production resumes in early 1987 near Palenque, Mexico, which is, as you mentioned, Dan, a better location. More jungle, more green, more lush. So, most of the movie's been shot. They have about a third left. They have the third act and the missing Predator shots from the first two thirds of the movie. It's supposed to be two to three weeks of reshoots, and it took nearly three months with additional shots needed on green screen in Los Angeles. Kevin Peter Hall was very hot in this suit for hours at a time. When shooting the lead up to the final sequence where they're crawling out of the water, he noticed that Arnold had exited the water covered in leeches, leaving him terrified that leeches had gotten inside his suit and would be sucking on his blood

• 1:17:38Chris Winterbauer?

  until he could take it off at the end of the day. Speaking of that sequence, according to Hall, the local effects team that prepped the explosive charges in his shoulder mounted gun. So, right, there's that scene at the end there. He can't see Arnold and he fires like nine shots into the jungle, kind of in frustration. Well, they prepped those explosive charges in the gun the night before. And so overnight, the explosives compressed. So, the next day, he gets up, performs the actions as directed, and then the charges are initiated. And instead of going nine, one at a time, all nine fire at once. The gun on his shoulder exploded. Shrapnel flew everywhere and Hall was enveloped

• 1:18:22Chris Winterbauer?

  in a ball of fire. But, thanks to the thick rubber of Stan Winston's suit, he was unharmed. So, had he not been wearing like head to toe body armor, it would have been pretty bad.

• 1:18:35Speaker 02

  Especially on your, next to your neck. You know, the neck is kind of a sensitive area. You don't want to do too many bad things around the neck. Things can go very bad, very quickly.

• 1:18:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Your neck, your temple, you know, your shoulder.

• 1:18:48Speaker 02

  Your eyes, ears.

• 1:18:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. No good.

• 1:18:52Chris Winterbauer?

  There were also a couple of other important moments that were captured, not the least of which was the incredible Carl Weathers Arnold Schwarzenegger handshake, where we zoom in on the bulging biceps. The best meme, possibly meme format of the last 10 years.

• 1:19:07Speaker 02

  The best.

• 1:19:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Apparently, that was another Joel Silver special. So, credit to Joel Silver. And another benefit was that they ran out of time and so they could not shoot the originally scripted ending where Schwarzenegger goes into the alien ship. So that scene had to be cut and McTiernan was able to finish the movie the way that he wanted to.

• 1:19:25Speaker 02

  Now, question, you said you've read the first version of the script. Does it, does it include the, the scene where they go into the ship at the end?

• 1:19:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, yeah, it does.

• 1:19:33Speaker 02

  Is there an old gun involved in the original editing?

• 1:19:37Chris Winterbauer?

  I didn't notice it. Yeah. Are you referencing the, the prey predator two? And then like connection to prey with that Dan Trachtenberg use?

• 1:19:45Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. Yes.

• 1:19:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I didn't see that, but I can confirm that there was an invisible spaceship and that the predator had Anna, who dies in this version and Ramirez's skin stretched out on drying racks like a hunter after skinning his prey. And then it actually ends with Matheny in this draft, not Dutch, picking up the predator's weapon and effectively using it against him, blowing up the predator's head and then ultimately his spaceship. So you lose the like amazing self-destruct moment that ends the finished film. Now, Schwarzenegger has other commitments, so he flies off, you know, to shoot his next movie. I think Red Heat.

• 1:20:29Speaker 02

  Red Heat.

• 1:20:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Red Heat. Yeah.

• 1:20:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:31Chris Winterbauer?

  The weird Chicago.

• 1:20:32Speaker 02

  Or Kindergarten Cop. No, that was way later.

• 1:20:34Chris Winterbauer?

  That was 90, I think. Yeah. But it was right around then.

• 1:20:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:37Chris Winterbauer?

  So post-production begins and one of the biggest tasks that they have is to make the movie sound like a jungle. So the backgrounds and dialogue from a lot of the film were unusable because it was shot near a freeway in Puerto Vallarta and so they couldn't use that. For the background sound, they used Rainforest Recordings by Andy Whiskies, which had been made for another movie. And according to sound supervisor David Stone, the heavy footprints of the film's macho men was handled by two women.

• 1:21:07Chris Winterbauer?

  So Foley Artist, Vanessa Amet, who had worked on Platoon, and Robin Harland were virtuosic in their ability to recreate the footsteps of soldiers. And they did everybody's footsteps, from Shane Black to Jesse Ventura. Every morning, they'd come into the sound studio with bags of leaves, put it down, and they would tackle the marching soldiers. Pretty fun.

• 1:21:28Speaker 02

  I mean, it just goes to show you, if you can be the best in your field at one specific thing, you will never want for work. You will always have work to do.

• 1:21:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. The gunfire had to be entirely replaced. The production sound was too high frequency. It was accurate, but it didn't sound impressive. And of course, all of the sounds of the creature needed to be created. So they did this electronic, organic hybrid. So they did a lot of synth work to create the sound of the heartbeat. They also recorded sponges squishing in odd rhythms. You have the clicking, almost cat-like, sound of the Predator language. And of course, the whoopshoo, whipping sound that they do when they cut into Predator Vision. One of the most iconic and memorable effects from the entire film-

• 1:22:12Speaker 02

  I love it.

• 1:22:13Chris Winterbauer?

  It was apparently, it's a stereo effect created with an analog 8-track. And just really a lot of wonderful, creative work done by the sound team on this film.

• 1:22:21Speaker 02

  So good.

• 1:22:22Chris Winterbauer?

  And it also grounds the visual effects in a big way. I feel like without the corresponding audio, those transitions would feel really jarring. But the fact that they gave whiplash to the whiplash really sells the effect.

• 1:22:35Speaker 02

  Well, and they bring that sound in so fast, especially the first couple of times, it almost works like as a jump scare. Like, you're just sort of jolted into this other-

• 1:22:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:45Speaker 02

  -point of view, and it feels so alien, and no pun intended, and different, that, yeah, that adds such a small thing that adds so much to the movie.

• 1:22:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, and, you know, we kind of established in slasher films using the antagonist POV, you know, as early as, well, you know, Peeping Tom, and then you've got Halloween, but had never really then added another layer, you know, of effect or transition on top of that POV reveal. And so it's really fun to see that in this film. And obviously, they do different variations of it. You know, Fincher does it with an alien, Alien 3.

• 1:23:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Alan Silvestri is brought in to score the film. He had a connection to Joel Silver. There's a lot of score in this film. Four major themes, you know, it's kind of wallpapered with music at the end of the day.

• 1:23:31Speaker 02

  I I've always felt that, and I love Alan Silvestri. But you could tell he had a lot to do because I feel that there are a lot of similarities between Predator and Back to the Future. The scores are very, very similar. Not necessarily in the main themes, but a lot of the the underlying themes and stuff. It's it's there's a lot of common ground there.

• 1:23:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I think like Hans Zimmer, sort of like Gladiator to Pirates of the Caribbean to The Rock, you know, sort of thing where there's a lot of repetition used in the in the underscore of a lot of those films too. So you find you find your main theme and then you kind of paper out the rest.

• 1:24:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:10Chris Winterbauer?

  So the combination of all these effects has resulted in a film that's testing very well with audiences. Above 90% according to Arnold Schwarzenegger. And now they just have to release the thing into the wild.

• 1:24:29Chris Winterbauer?

  So June 12th, 1987, Predator opens wide. It has the second best opening of the year, earning $12 million. Unfortunately, that's a distant second to Beverly Hills Cop 2, which opened at $26 million. Predator did just fine, bringing in $60 million in the United States and Canada and $100 million worldwide. Arnold Schwarzenegger later claimed that Jesse Ventura's wife started crying when he got killed in the movie. And that Jim Thomas says Shane's black mother walked out of the film when he was killed. Now Shane may have told her to do that in protest of how early he was killed. So audiences embraced the film pretty early on, but critics, not so much. And our audience, I think, sometimes will reach out and point out like, you said this got mixed reviews, but it has a 90% on Rotten Tomatoes now.

• 1:25:13Speaker 02

  Well, because it's retroactively, there's no distinction. Like, I can tell you, I was born in 1983, so I was four years old when that's when this came out. I can tell you. That up until really around the time Arnold Schwarzenegger, let's say the early 2000s, maybe going into even like, you know, the early 2010s. Predator was not regarded as this classic 80s movie. It had moments that everybody loved, but the, the, the love for Predator has really been something of, of the 21st century. It was not always seen as this like gem of the 80s. It was, it sort of had a corny reputation.

• 1:25:57Speaker 02

  When I was growing up, this is kind of like cheesy, which it is, but the appreciation came later.

• 1:26:03Chris Winterbauer?

  You're exactly right. And so the, the, the big thing is like Rotten Tomatoes is not capturing the heartbeat of contemporaneous feedback, but we can look back and see what was said. Variety called it a slightly above average actioner that tries to compensate for tissue thin plot with ever more grisly death sequences and impressive special effects. New York Times called the movie alternately grisly and dull with few surprises, though the creature's face, when finally revealed, has an interesting claw configuration where its mouth ought to be. The LA Times called it arguably, I know, arguably one of the emptiest, feeblest, most derivative scripts ever made as a major Hollywood studio. However, in an alternate take, The Hollywood Reporter praised the film, calling it a well-made

• 1:26:46Chris Winterbauer?

  old-style assault movie and highlighted Schwarzenegger's fearless presence as a high point for the film.

• 1:26:53Speaker 02

  That's good.

• 1:26:53Chris Winterbauer?

  And there was a brief awards run for Predator in the special effects category. However, this was slightly controversial because nobody knew exactly what to nominate this work under. Would it be makeup for all of the practical effects worn by Kevin Peter Hall? Or would it be visual effects for all of the matte work done by Joel Heinecke and the special effects team? In the end, it was done, it was nominated under visual effects where it lost to Inner Space, a movie I like quite a bit.

• 1:27:24Speaker 02

  I mean, that's, that's, I mean, the, the sheer volume of effects in Inner Space, that's, that's tough competition.

• 1:27:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. And in an odd twist of fate, Rick Baker won makeup for Harry and the Hendersons, portrayed by Kevin Peter Hall.

• 1:27:37Speaker 02

  Again, tough to compete with.

• 1:27:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, as you mentioned, Dan, no one could have expected Predator's enduring legacy and increasingly sterling legacy. And of course, two of its performers went on to be state governors. Jesse Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sonny Landham ran for governor of Kentucky, I believe, and lost. McTiernan would become one of the most in-demand action directors of the late 80s and early 90s, as we discussed, until his career eventually basically imploded with The 13th Warrior, a film that we need to cover. Jean-Claude Van Damme would break out in Bloodsport. And the franchise would endure sequels and crossovers alike. And of course, its biggest technological innovation would end up being its influence

• 1:28:22Chris Winterbauer?

  on video games and other films with the way it developed active camouflage as a concept, which I think has become universally accepted as this is a thing and this is how we do it.

• 1:28:34Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Now, I do have a question.

• 1:28:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Please.

• 1:28:37Speaker 02

  I don't know if this has come up in your research, but it's something I've always wondered. I have one huge problem with the movie, which is that it spoils what's happening before the movie. Like, the first shot of the movie is an alien spaceship lands on Earth. And then all of the suspense out of what, like, if you don't know the premise, if I'm showing it to somebody for the first time, that would be such a great reveal to know what's going on. And yet it's spoiled immediately. And I think it's objectively a mistake with the movie. I was wondering in your research if it's ever been revealed, who made that decision? If it was an audience thing of, oh, people want to know what's going on right away? Because it seems, to be, let's be fair, it seems like a Joel Silver note.

• 1:29:21Speaker 02

  And he's made a lot of good decisions, but I think that was a bad one.

• 1:29:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, so what's interesting is that shot, which is, by the way, a 100% ripoff of the first shot of the thing.

• 1:29:33Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely.

• 1:29:34Chris Winterbauer?

  It's literally the exact same opening.

• 1:29:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:29:36Chris Winterbauer?

  So it never came up in my research. But what I can say is the July 27, 1985 version of the script does not open with that shot. And I would actually, I'm so glad you brought this up. I would like to read you the scene direction. Exterior jungle horizon, day. Through a collage of shimmering heatwaves, obviously evoking the effect of invisibility we'll do later, a dark, otherworldly object drops into view, heading slowly toward us, floating as if suspended by the rising heat of the jungle. Continuing to approach, the shimmering object resolves, assuming the form of a military

• 1:30:18Chris Winterbauer?

  assault helicopter, its rotors strobing in the sunlight. It continues on, and this is the arrival of, at the time, his name was Matheny and it was changed to Dutch. It was a misdirect, obviously intended to evoke the idea of an alien spacecraft coming down, but it was ultimately revealed to be a military helicopter and I think would answer exactly your problem with the final film.

• 1:30:42Speaker 02

  Yes. I mean, I don't want to pin the blame on Joel Silver. Maybe it wasn't Joel Silver. I will say it feels like a studio note. Like someone in the studio is like, "Listen, these audiences, they're not going to have the patience for you to reveal what's going on. You need to tell them right away it's aliens or else they're going to be out the door." Which is dumb, but that's what studios think of the average person.

• 1:31:02Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. It also kind of, there's not a single other shot like it in the entire film. It's clear, it's shot inside a studio, using miniatures. It reeks of, it was achieved in post-production. I don't, it did not come, I did not come across it. I don't know what point it was inserted, but it was clearly a reaction to a note at some point.

• 1:31:24Speaker 02

  A test audience, something, something.

• 1:31:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Something, something.

• 1:31:27Speaker 02

  Okay. I had to get that off my chest.

• 1:31:29Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a great point. I'm actually really glad you brought it up because I'd wanted to get to it earlier, but I skipped over it. Now, at the end of these episodes, Stan, I like to try to draw some sort of lesson from the film. And I kind of earlier talked about how Arnold seemed to understand that the filmmaking process... Is iterative, much in the way that, you know, bodybuilding is. And it's only through the notes process that you do get to some of the best decisions in the film, even though films can be noted to death. But instead, I would like to end today's episode, before we get to what went right, with a quote from Elpidea Carrillo, who, when asked what she learned about working with Arnold, said, quote, "The only thing I learned from making Predator was to be able to survive

• 1:32:11Chris Winterbauer?

  among a bunch of horny, macho, stupid muscle men. I am very proud of that," end quote. We'll let Elpidea have the final word on this film, since she was there.

• 1:32:21Speaker 02

  Agreed.

• 1:32:23Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, Dan. We always like to end with a little segment called "What Went Right." You can pick any element of this film, doesn't matter what it is, that in your mind went particularly right in this instance. And if you'd like to take a minute, I'm happy to go first, entirely up to you.

• 1:32:39Speaker 02

  Yes, I'll let you go first while I ponder, because there are legitimately several things that I could bring up.

• 1:32:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Sounds good. I would like to give my what went right to...

• 1:32:53Chris Winterbauer?

  God, there's actually a couple now that you mentioned it, that I really want to give it to. I would like to give my what went right, in this instance, to Kevin Peter Hall, who, I think performers in suits don't get enough credit for the physicality that they bring to their characters. And in the third act, you feel a connection between him and Arnold Schwarzenegger, almost a mutual respect, even if there's some disdain and disgust there. And he is physically impressive in a way that makes Arnold feel vulnerable, in a way that he's been invulnerable throughout the entire film. So this goes out to, you know,

• 1:33:36Chris Winterbauer?

  all of those incredible suited performers. I'm thinking about, I don't know his name, the Slovenian basketball player at the end of Alien Romulus. Whatever you think about that choice to go full Slenderman, it's pretty cool, the effect that they finally achieved. So mine goes to Kevin Peter Hall, and I also love Harry and the Hendersons. So it's a shout out to that film as well, for imbuing the Predator with something alien and yet recognizable at the same time.

• 1:34:00Speaker 02

  I like that. You know, mine may seem obvious, but I actually feel very passionately about this. I'm gonna go with Arnold. Because here's the thing, again, growing up in the eighties and nineties as I did for a very long time, the stereotype of Arnold Schwarzenegger is that he was dumb. He was not the elder statesman that we see now. He had not been governor. He was an action movie star. And I think because of the accent and some of the movies that he chose to be in, there was always the the stereotype, the Hans and Franz stereotype that Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't very smart. And Arnold Schwarzenegger is an incredibly intelligent person and has always been an incredibly intelligent person. I think that

• 1:34:42Speaker 02

  because his English skills were improving, the people and because he was a bodybuilder, that people had a certain impression of him. But I mean, even when you talk about the pitch, you know, she had a naked hot tub with cigars, but he has always approached acting and being a movie star with the same focus and seriousness as he did bodybuilding. And when you go back and watch this movie, yes, it's cheesy. Yes, it's it's, you know, it has those elements to it. But Arnold is never, never really winks at the camera. Yes. He takes it and he understands as somebody who even at that time understood the craft

• 1:35:23Speaker 02

  of filmmaking and what he wanted to bring to it. Like, we laugh at get to the chopper now. That isn't, that doesn't work if he is not 100,000% committed to the drama of that moment. And yet, at the same time, he knows when to bring a little comedy to that you one ugly motherfucker. Like, that line, he knows that it's it's gonna draw laughs. So he allows himself a little bit of that sort of almost looking at the camera with the audience. His commitment as an actor, and I don't even necessarily think that he's a bad actor. I know his Arnold Schwarzenegger can't act. Again, I think it's because of the accent and because his diction and isn't what everybody else's is. But I think that

• 1:36:08Speaker 02

  he is actually a great action movie star. And I think that he always understands what character he's playing. He almost always understands the tone of the movie. Now, sometimes he's given a bad script. A lot of actors can't work their way out of a bad script. But I would, I would argue that I've never seen Arnold Schwarzenegger in a, in a well-written movie and walked away saying, oh, he was really bad in that. He always knows what the assignment is. And this movie, I think, almost as much as any other movie, he understood the assignment. He knew the tone of the movie. He understood what he had to bring to it as a character and as a lead and as an action star, and he nailed it. Five out of five across the board. So while it's, while, you know, it may seem obvious for me to say like, the story of

• 1:36:53Speaker 02

  the movie went right. It's only because Arnold Schwarzenegger understood the movie. And everything else, all the chaos around him, you know, that's all stuff that gets sorted out by the studio. But I've always said that I think that Arnold is very underrated as an actor and as a professional who takes what he does seriously, because he does, and I think he should be respected for it.

• 1:37:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Incredibly well said, Dan. Better than I could have said it, and I couldn't agree more. Dan, thank you so much for taking the time to join us on What Went Wrong today. It's been such a treat talking Predator. For all of our listeners, who I'm sure are going to want to hear more from you, where can they go to get that fix?

• 1:37:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. Well, first and foremost, I'm on YouTube at youtube.com/danmerlmovies. I've got at least a few videos out every week covering box office, covering everything you could possibly imagine. And I don't do a whole lot of social media. I am on Instagram, I'm on Blue Sky, I'm on Threads, you can just search for Dan Merle, I'm sure I'll pop up. And I also have a Patreon page, if you're so inclined, where you can go in and support me that way. But yeah, YouTube is the main driver, and you can find me on there every single week talking about movies.

• 1:37:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Fantastic. Thanks again, Dan. We hope you survive the snow in Arkansas.

• 1:38:03Speaker 02

  We'll see. It's dicey here when it snows, we're not used to it.

• 1:38:05Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, everybody. That concludes our coverage of Predator. Won't be the last time we've heard from the titular hunter. Next up, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the groundbreaking 1937 animated film. I am so excited to talk all things animation and Walt Disney. It's going to be a really interesting look at the birth of a medium in the United States. Also, should any of you be based out of the Midwest, I will be at Evolution's Podcast Movement's Spring Conference in Chicago on April 1st and 2nd. If you're in the area or attending and you want to say hi or check out the panel that I'm on,

• 1:38:46Chris Winterbauer?

  feel free to drop us a DM via Instagram. You can also send an email through our website, www.wattwentwrongpod.com. Or you can reach out to us by way of Patreon. Guys, if you're enjoying this podcast, there are four easy ways to support us. Number one, tell a friend. Number two, subscribe on whatever platform that you use to listen so we always pop up when there's a new episode. Number three, leave us a rating and review on whatever platform you're using. Or, number four, you can join our Patreon. Patreon is a platform that connects creators like ourselves with listeners like you. We offer a bunch of free bonus content, including essays and supplemental materials.

• 1:39:28Chris Winterbauer?

  You don't have to pay for this, but if you do want to pay, you can join one of our paid tiers for some extra fun perks. Like, for a dollar, you can vote on upcoming films. Our most recent poll winner was Donnie Darko. We are very excited to talk about this moody little millennial film and have some special treats lined up for that one. For $5, you can get an ad-free RSS feed, so if the ads are bothering you on this show and you want to cut them out, you can get that through Patreon. Or for $50, you can get a special shout-out at the end of each episode. Please note, we restrict these spots to 50 total spots, so they may be sold out. Thank you to all of our patrons for supporting this podcast.

• 1:40:10Chris Winterbauer?

  But a special thanks to our Full Stop supporters, because it's time to get to the chopper!

• 1:40:18Speaker 05

  Caleb Simmons, stick around. Scary Carrie. The Provost Family. Zack Everton. Galen, if it bleeds, we can kill it. David Friskolanti. Adam Moffat. Film it yourself. Chris Zaka. Kate Ellington. Do it now! Kill me! MX Ornia C Grace B Jen Matra Moreno Christopher Elna, what the hell are you? Blaze Ambrose Jerome Wilkinson

• 1:41:00Speaker 05

  Lauren F Lance Stata, knock-knock Nathan Knife Venna Andrea Ramon Villanueva Jr. I was in a fantastic film called Junior Half Grey Hound Lauren Dunn Brittany Morris Darren and Dale Cockling Ashley What's got Richard Sanchez so spooked? Jake Killen Andrew McFagel Bagel Matthew Jacobson Grace Potter, he's using the trees! Ellen Singleton Jushri Samant Scott Gerwin

• 1:41:46Speaker 05

  JJ Rapido, you son of a bitch! Brian Donoghue Sadie Adrian Pan Correa Chris Lille Kathleen Olsen What happened to you, Brooke? You used to be someone I could trust! Leah Bowman Steven Winterbauer Finally, a good Austrian name! Don Schabel George K Rosemary Southwood Tom Kristin Jason Frankel, you fall behind on your own! Salman Chinnani You can't win this, Michael McGrath! Lorna Laan

• 1:42:31Speaker 05

  And Lydia Howes!

• 1:42:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow. Thank you so much to Arnold for joining us for those patron callouts. It's really, you know, it means a lot coming out of retirement for that. Guys, if you would like more of that in your life, you can head to our Patreon, www.patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast. Thanks again for listening. Tune in in two weeks for our coverage of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. And until then...

• 1:43:02Speaker 04

  No, no, no, no, no, no. Nothing so dramatic. My work is a cultural.

• 1:43:08Speaker 06

  Go to patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast to support What Went Wrong and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom Podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman. Research for this episode provided by Jesse Winterbauer.