Shane Black Explains How The Predator Honors the Legacy of the Franchise

ComingSoon.net recently spoke to filmmaker Shane Black on the set of his upcoming film, The Predator. Below are some highlights.

Black on why he collaborated with Fred Dekker for the film: “We’ll, I’ve been working with Fred on a couple of different projects. We found that we sort of complement each other very well. And that goes back ages. They say that no matter how old you get that in your own mind you’re never really capable of picturing more than twenty-five years old as your current age. You always feel yourself to be roughly twenty-five. It’s been thirty years in the business for Fred and myself. You look in the mirror and part of you just says, ‘Jeez, it’d be nice to be a kid again and go back and get that excitement back.’ I mean, there’s a maturity that comes with liking adult themes and adult subject matter, seeing Oscar-winning films, but every once in a while I’d say, ‘Boy, I’d just like to do a Predator movie with Fred.’ Something that recalls for us all those wonderful, exciting days when we were geeks, lining up for Star Trek: Wrath of Khan when it played in Westwood at The National. And so, I think there was a great deal of nostalgia and also a desire to do a kind of old-school thriller in the form of The Predator, because I think the reason there’s a lasting quality that the original movie has that’s due I think, in part to the fact that it was made before it was so easy to just do a bunch of CGI effects and before videogames had taken hold as well. So, there was a more visceral kind of war movie thriller-esque quality to the material because they weren’t saying, ‘What if the camera whooshed around and the character fell off a cliff and we followed him down and then when he hit we ran with him.’ Who’s the cameraman (laughter) Fred and I just thought, let’s make a… obviously we’ve kept up on visual effects and technology and we’re big fans… but let’s try to do an old-school kind of real hearty and heartfelt kind of war movie surrounding this story. And all the elements were like, y’know, spies, romance, mystery-just stuff as much genre into one pack as we can and so you can literally unpack different facets of the movie, which is sort of a stew that represents to us the genre movie that we would’ve loved to see when we were coming up, when we were all young and still felt twenty-five.”

Shane Black on if the new film draws from a 1980s script he wrote with Dekker called Shadow Company: “Partly yes and partly no. I don’t think it’s giving a lot away to say that to the extent that this happens in a small town, that it’s a small part of the movie. They said well, ‘it’s set in the suburbs’. Hmm, no (laughter) I mean there’s scenes that happen that are set in suburban streets, but the idea that it’s some Mahjong club fighting an alien isn’t how it’s gonna happen.”

Black on how the new film is fresh and will honor the legacy of the earlier films: “Well, I think that there’s a basic premise that has to be honored every time you make a Predator film and that’s in some way, whatever the plot turns out to be, it has to, at some level, represent a hunt. But, beyond that I think there’s infinite variability. It’s like, monkey bars, you ever play on the jungle gym when you were a kid? It looks like they’re rigid and hard and it’d be hard to play on these things because they’re so rough, but if you go inside them there’s actually a lot of room to move around, you just know that the borders are there every once in a while. So, we just tried to take the existing mythology and take it a step further. Ask some questions about why? Why Predators do what they do? What would be the next step for them? How do we up the stakes so that there’s not just a single Predator hunting a group of soldiers? Who are the soldiers? How are they different? What’s the heroic quotient and how do you make it not just guys with tough talk and big arms? I mean, I always favor real characters with real actors in these movies. I’m happy to have someone like Jesse Ventura, he’s actually a fine actor as far as that goes. But, the actors we tended to get for this are a cut above I think, the average tough guy. There’s an element of intrigue and I think espionage/mystery, whatever. The government is involved in this and it takes it to the level of what happens when The Predator strikes, these incursions are not just a every-once-in-a-while phenomenon known to a few, but have come to the attention of an establishment that is actually set on preparing for and marshaling forces against these incoming Predator strikes. And, so it’s that sort of-what the next step is when they get noticed is kind of what we start as our jumping off point for what’s different. And also, what happens when the Predators get a little more ambitious. Maybe it’s not just a weekend anymore. So, we’ve had some fun with that.”