Aliens vs Predator Requiem (2007)

Hi, I'm John Davis, producer of Alien vs. Predator Requiem. I'm the producer of this movie, and I'm here with the directors, the Strauss brothers. Hi, this is Colin. And this is Greg. And you're watching the extended, unrated commentary of the version of the movie? You're seeing stuff nobody else is going to see. And basically what we have here is a new opening for the film. In the theatrical version, just to kind of keep us from a simplicity standpoint, we stayed with one ship that... where all the action took place. But in this version of the film, we thought it was very important to be tied correctly to the continuity of the previous film. So we basically added these new shots of the mothership instead of a little scout ship flying away from Earth with Scar's body on it, and then added new scenes of that scene, the little scout ship kind of taken off from the mothership. Yeah, what happens, obviously, when the studio sees a movie, sometimes they like a shorter version of a movie thinking that it'll get you into the plot quicker but we like scenes that allow you to actually sense the ambience of the world yeah and basically what we have here is this is the the mother ship we think Lex probably froze to death back in Antarctica but you know I'm sure maybe she'll be fine now this is the taco scene this is what happens if you have tacos Alien tacos. Or any kind of fast food. Facehugger tacos. Mild case of indigestion here. So this is one of my new favorite shots in the movie, which is, you know, just gives some nice scope to the film. You realize that the Predator mothership is flying away. And then what we do is we're assuming that Chet, the little baby Chet, our Preda alien, snuck onto this little hunting craft. And then that way, when all the chaos ensues on the ship... it's understandable why there's not somehow 800 Predators there to fight her. Yeah, we actually had an even longer version of this with Predators loading facehugger tanks onto the scout ship in a loading bay, a big hangar bay and everything. Again, it was just a case of not having infinite time and infinite money to make the DVD version all that much longer. But it was great that we got to redo the beginning, so I really appreciate that. Yeah, and also it's kind of cool because it's just nice having a DVD and getting a new experience out of a film instead of just the same old stuff. Well, when you have Strauss Brothers and you get your DVD video effects for free, why not have additional scenes in?

This is the trophy room. We actually had a lot of fun there. If you look up on the right, there's actually the space jockey. I think that's a cousin of the jockey that was in Ridley's movie. A second cousin, I think, yeah. And then this is a good old, you know, prepping the skull for getting ready for the trophy room. This was kind of a cool sequence because we wanted to have something that was a little bit of a throwback from Predator 2 in the movie, and at the same time also just trying to show, you know, like what life on a Predator ship is actually like. Now, by the way, it was exciting for me to be involved with this process because as a producer, the very first movie I worked on, the very first movie I produced was Predator. I got to do Predator 2 also. And I came up with this notion of convincing the studio to do Alien versus Predator that had been done in a comic book form and all that stuff. But it took a while to convince the studio that there was a fan base to combine these two and that it would support the extensive cost to do a feature film, but to be able to actually do the sequel to Alien vs. Predator and to have the writer from the first Alien vs. Predator join us, one of the writers, which was Shane Salerno. Unfortunately, Shane can't be here today. He was going to join the commentary, but the writer's strike in Hollywood has prevented him from coming in and actually doing video commentary, so we're going to have to thank him for his script and all of his hard work without him being here. He's here in spirit, I guess. Exactly. Here's actually a lead into one of our favorite parts of the new, the sort of new tone of this film versus the last one, which is we get to have an eight-year-old boy here that soon... Yeah, I don't like killing a kid in the beginning of the movie. ...soon bites the dust. And this is actually kind of a fun scene to shoot, too, because we actually had a helicopter in the techno crane for shooting where this crash site was. It was basically like a clear-cut... in a forest we found outside of Vancouver that just happened to be almost the shape of a ship impact. And they let us go in there with big bulldozers and cranes and stuff and actually smash trees and kind of art direct the whole thing to look like where the crash site was. And then the ship was put in all digitally in post. As a producer, this was literally the first day of shooting some of this. And I was really heartened to see these dailies because the bros... really understood the genre well. They were unbelievably prepared to do this movie, but until they rolled a foot of film, we actually had no idea what we were gonna get. And literally seeing the first day and these dailies and how they shot it and the DP they picked was great and his visual style and the way they boarded and shot this scene, it was the first beginning of a sense of, oh my God, this could be and will be a great film. These guys really not only know this, not only great visual effects artists, but they're actually going to be able to direct a film that's going to be really awesome. And this scene in particular I really like with what Daniel Pearl, who's our cinematographer, brought. His whole big thing is getting shafts of light and making the forest look like that. It was just such an amazing thing. Guys, how long did it take to do a lot of these visual effects? What's the process? These shots we had almost, what, eight weeks in the end? Ten weeks or so, yeah. These ones came in at the end. I mean, you always want to have as much time as possible with visual effects because it's just such a time-consuming process. But getting the Predator home planet scene in the movie was something that was thought about early on but took a little bit of convincing. So we didn't really get full go-ahead on that until kind of late in the process. And then we had to kind of scramble quickly to get it all completed in time for release. That's right. This wasn't scripted originally. And we all felt that it would be a lot better to open this movie up and to connect with, you know, where the Predator's home planet is and how that relates to the movie if we could shoot it. So it took us a while to convince the studio to let us do it. Thankfully, they did. Yep. Yeah, it was just we thought it was important to add something, you know, show something that no one had seen before. And predator condos seemed really important on that list. Exactly. Especially with the new housing market stuff going on. You get a good price on a condo in Predator Planet. Exactly.

This obviously is supposed to be Colorado. We shot in Vancouver. Yep. And Vancouver is a great place to shoot a movie, one, because it's less expensive, so we could stretch our dollar further and get more stuff. But it looked like Colorado also. And it had the local film community, which is an important thing, too. Because if we actually shot in Colorado, you'd be probably flying everyone in. There's additional hotels. Yeah, and this is one of only three days of sunshine in Vancouver. Yeah, we were lucky, right? We actually really lucked out on this. That was one of the weird things. We pretty much assumed, you know, when we had our first meetings with the studio, everyone was like, look, we've got to try to keep the movie a little bit more upbeat at the beginning if it's going to be so gloom and doom at the end with the rain. So then we were like, oh, man, it's going to be overcast every day. It's probably going to be raining every day. And I think literally we had only one day of exterior shoots where we didn't want it to rain, and it did. This day we had the worst process trailer rig ever. literally every five seconds, the rig was bottoming out because the Suburban was almost too heavy for it. So there were sparks shooting out from under the rig, and it was pretty tricky. We started learning where out in the street the bumps were. They kept happening at the same place, so we had to kind of time out the line delivery so that none of those sounds would actually interfere with their dialogue recording. Exactly. And this scene... This is pretty early on. I think this is day two of the shoot. And we actually had to set up Video Village in the toilet, in the bathroom area there, because this pizzeria was so tiny. And it was like 120 degrees inside there. I kind of hoped that wasn't going to be a metaphor for our career. But I love shooting scenes inside restaurants and pizzeria, especially scenes where you have to have food. I was going to say, it's because you're not too far away from the food. Exactly. Yeah, this is another shot. There's a funny story about these aerials. This was probably the most efficient day of helicopter shooting ever. Every aerial that you're going to basically see in this movie was filmed basically... Within two hours. Yeah, within two hours, and it was just... And I didn't even know if we were going to get up the second time because the helicopter, the gas fuel pressure gauge broke and was telling us there was no fuel pressure, and... Definitely, I was kind of looking at the producer, Paul Deason, and Paul was kind of like, I think it's fine. Go ahead and go back up there. I was kind of scared a little bit shitless about getting back in a chopper that didn't seem to be working properly. But we got back up. It would turn into the brother Strauss very quickly. And we had you guys insured also. So if we lost one of you, we had another brother, plus the brother we lost would have given us another $2 or $3 million to shoot the movie with. Yeah, you weren't working on the chopper that morning, John, were you? No, I was actually watching the chopper go up with you in it. So, again, the casting on the movie was a really fun but also at times difficult process because a lot of the bit parts had to come from the Vancouver actor pool. Yeah, and at the time Vancouver was really busy, so the pool was smaller than it normally would be. Fan 4-2 was up there shooting. They got up there and got started before we did. So a lot of the good local talent up there got sort of sucked up by the bigger movies. But we were fortunate. The young girl, who I think is both very pretty and very good, who you're going to see at the door in a second, we found her in Toronto. Yes, Kristen Hager. She's great. And this is Johnny Lewis here. Yes. Mindy Marin was our casting director. We needed to find people in the casting process who were really kind of people you would believe were in this town. We didn't want to break the wall of reality here by having really familiar faces. And so we were able to find really very, very accomplished actors who hopefully you haven't seen in a lot of movies before. And it was also the cool thing, too, a lot of our main leads were all stage actors from John Ortiz. Except the guy with the Halloween line, who's about the most Canadian-sounding guy we could have got. But, yeah, yeah, kind of Canadian, Colorado. October. Yeah. Get some beer, eh? Yeah. But, you know. And Johnny was good, huh? Johnny was great. He was fun to work with. Yeah, when he first came in, I mean, he was one of the few people that we got that it was just like from just meeting him, he had the charisma in the room. He hit the line delivery we want. Well, you know, you've got to have the real down-to-earth quality of this guy. I mean, we were up against the fact that he is a pizza delivery boy. And if you're not careful with who you cast in that role, that could come off a little cheesy. And Johnny did a great job. He really pulled it off. You don't think anything against him because of his job, and that can be a tricky line to walk sometimes. Yeah, and the other thing with him, too, was his— You know, it could have been easily interpreted in the first runs of the script that he was a little bit more of the dorkier kid getting kind of picked on, and we wanted him to be a little bit more kind of a... not a jerk himself, but he's basically trying to be what his older brother is, which is a little bit of a kind of a fuck-up. So, you know, we wanted to make sure the kid had enough of an edge to himself that, you know, it's like when you see him, even though he's getting kind of roughed up by three guys here, he also will, you know, he doesn't have a problem talking shit back to these guys or... You know, getting himself in situations like you'll see later on in the movie where he's, like, you know, charging the Predator. Yeah, he's got a little bit of attitude. He's got a backbone. Exactly. And let's talk about the other leads in the movie. Yeah, I mean, we have Reiko and Steven and John Ortiz. And basically, like, the three of them, you know, when we first were doing the casting on all this, like, here's a scene with John. You know, it was like John was a name that popped up, you know, because after Miami Vice, everyone was like, you know, this guy, like, he fits exactly what we need. And he was pretty much, you know, we kind of hired him almost without even really doing any traditional casting at all. And then... We basically saw a little audition quick time on the Internet. Yeah, and it was like, and we're like, that's it. Done, get him. And then same thing when Reiko came in the room. I mean, it was interesting. We were looking at all different types of actresses for the film, and... You know, we weren't, you know, we never were ever intending to try to find a kind of Ripley-like looking lead for this. And she just came in and, you know, just really just hit it. You know, she pulled her hair back in a ponytail. She did the lines and, you know, there was just an intensity and a fierceness to her character. You know, she had the strength, but at the same, you know, to look like a soldier because that's, you know, that's one of our things with the movie. She had to be a little bit... You know, she's going to be wearing a shirt. She's going to be a little bit buff. She's got to have a toughness to her. But at the same time, there's got to be a sweetness because she has to be, you know, she has to be this character who tries to regain her motherhood. Right. We saw a lot of actresses, and literally she was the only one I believed when she read the four scenes that we gave the actresses to read for us. She was able to do the mother. She was able to do the tough person that had to do what she had to do to survive when everything went down. Especially down in this scene when we murder children. Yes, this is one of the better parts. Exactly. Now, this is my favorite scene in the movie right now. I love this, and I love what's about to happen with the kid also. To me, it just reminds me of all the original Alien movies. It's my favorite part of the original Alien movies. And pop. Exactly. And a lot of this we did... by the way, visual effects in the computer. Yeah, the last shot of Sam bursting open is definitely a CG chestburster. Exactly. And see, here's Reiko again showing us what are going to be the various colors of her personality in this movie. Yeah, this is sort of the scene where she hasn't seen her daughter in a while. She's grown up quite a bit. There's a bit of distance between them. That's Ariel Gady playing Molly, the little girl. And Dad, who we get to kill off. Yes, exactly. His name's Cannon Fodder. Yes, we found him in Vancouver too, didn't we? No, he came up from L.A. We brought him up. One of the things is you have to try to cast as much of the movie as possible in Vancouver. Certain roles, if you don't find the right people, then we would bring them up. Start flying them up. Yeah, by the way, I grew up in Colorado and was happy to leave because I found it such a boring place to grow up. So the fact that we destroyed this town made me very happy. Now this place, there's some funny stories about this. This house, there's not a single prop in here. This really is these guys' place. Yeah, and if we could see the floor here, you'd see shotgun cartridges that had been spent. Wild turkey. Empty bottles of booze everywhere. I mean, it was insane. And there's a funny scene where our AD was like, who the hell lives in this place? And then just had the owner happen to be sitting right behind him. We're like, oh, my God. It was one of those great situations where you rent a house. And you don't have to worry about the owner coming back saying, you damaged my house shooting the movie. It probably is in a better condition after we left, I think. It's definitely cleaner. We had to definitely send in a team that wiped the place down beforehand because none of the crew wanted to touch it. Oh, and some of the other, because we're trying to find the crappiest house we could find for these guys. Yeah, they're not supposed to be making a lot of money. These guys are just barely making it by in life. So we definitely didn't want to end up with anything that looked like this. Oh, wait, here's my favorite part. The longest address ever on a house. And that's the real address. That's the real address, yeah. We were shooting it. It was the one thing we didn't look at when we were prepping the house. And that door opened, and we're like, oh, that's really long. And then we're thinking about, should we digitally paint that out so it doesn't look so crazy? And we're like, yeah, we'll just better put the money somewhere else. Exactly. Now, this is the part where Brian Tyler called originally. I don't think he made it on the CD with this name, but he called the score in this section... Bum Feast, right? Bum Feast, yes. I think he had to change. I think they made him change it for the CD. Yes, Brian was our composer. Did a fantastic job on this movie. And it was a really fun process for us to work with Brian because he's got his own recording studio, and it's in the back of his house. And it's a really fantastic studio. He's got all the instruments there. And as he composed, we went to the house probably about 10 or 15 times. And we would hear what he had interpreted a scene. We would then discuss it with him, talk about either it was perfect or different ways of doing it or were there pieces that weren't working for us. And he would work on it again. We would go back, and we would listen to it. And it was a great collaborative process for the three of us. Yeah, I mean, Brian, when we first met with him, the guy had so much intensity, and it was great. Just missed one of my favorite lines there. Oh. Better save some for me. Yeah. Yeah, don't worry, lady. It's been saved. And it was a really interesting process with the music on this movie because the movie, I believe, is about 91 minutes long. And I think we had 93 minutes of music the first time through. Yeah, we recorded more because even the credits are fully scored as well. So it's quite a bit of original music recorded. This is the first time we see Chet. our nickname for the Predalien. And he's establishing his dominance over the little newly shedding warriors. Bitch-smacked the warrior around and then gets to have his way with the homeless lady. And this is one of the homage shots, the original Predator. It's very, you know, the whole layout and composition of the shot was very similar to the opening of the original film. And again, obviously, this is a visual effects. You want to talk about hydraulics a second, guys? how you started yeah i mean um basically hydraulics there's about 110 people artists at the company um you know they've sort of cut our teeth in the whole filmmaking process doing this exact kind of work i mean here's a shot of a cg predator coming out anytime the predator's cloaked it's a a fully animated cg version uh we have to do that because we have to render out a front uh pass and a backside So you get the interesting look to the optical distortion when he's cloaked. These here were a couple of these are green screenshots actually shot on a stage, and then we put in the matte paintings of the lake location. Right, and by the way, both the aliens and the predators went back to the original house that had done AVP1. Yep, and Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection. Yeah, Amalgamated Dynamics. And those guys were just kick-ass as well. I mean, Tom and Alec are like... You know, they have the same evil sort of sense of humor as us. We got along with them really well. And they also come from a similar background from us. I mean, they both own the company, like me and Greg own Hydraulics. And they're also both artists, which me and Greg also still are. So it's like everything we do, we're very much in tune with each other. And, you know, it's just in different parts of the same field, basically. So this is the extended scene inside of the Predator crash ship. One of the cool things that we did in here is we wanted to have a little bit more of a moment of the Predator actually using the helmet of his fallen comrade here to actually see what happened on the ship, whereas in the theatrical version, everything was shown from actually in the Predator homeworld scene. Yeah, this is actually closer to the way it was originally done. which the idea is that a predator's masks actually have a recording system in them. So he has to switch masks and put on the dead predators one to see, to get sort of like a video replay of what happened. Cause he's gotten a beacon, a distress beacon, but the wolf still at this point doesn't really know what kind of bad shit went down on the ship. And one of the cool things, too, about this scene in general is one of our concept designers, Matt Santoro, who works with us at Hydraulics, he actually turned out to be one of the main cast for the voice of the Predator. I think it was actually two or three people in the end, but... Matt's voice was used for a majority of the shots, and he just used to do the Predator mimicking kind of as a joke, and then we were like, wait a minute, God, you're really good. Maybe we should actually try you out for real, and we sent him over to where the guys were recording all the voices, and he auditioned for it and actually ended up getting the role. It was definitely the best. Great party trick, huh? Hey, I'm the Predator. I'm going to do the Predator. Yeah, definitely... It's kind of just a funny thing to have from a guy that would work. Yeah, I would have thought just being able to gargle real well would get you a job in a movie. Does that help him with girls? Does he pick up girls with that? He does a pretty mean Stephen Hawking's in a strip club as well. Wow. Which is really kind of disturbing. I'm taking him partying with me. And then also here we extended out the scene a little bit of the – predator putting this syringe thing into his arm. And again, a lot of these extensions were just done because on the DVD version, we wanted to give the pacing a little bit more breath to the sequence and just turn this into a much bigger predator moment. Because we've never seen a predator in the other movies for so long and actually seen all of the cool type of ritualistic stuff that he does as he gets ready for a hunt.

Here's a trivia moment coming up. There was actually a version of this scene, and it was basically based around the idea of the Pred alien taking on certain characteristics of the Predator. And if you look in the back of that shot, there are Predator's bodies hanging from the ceiling. Skinned. And they've been skinned by the Pred alien. And it was a whole different version of that scene that played out a lot longer with the wolf Predator becoming extremely pissed off. You know, because what could be worse than seeing a creature that makes trophies out of predators? So that was kind of the idea with it. Didn't end up making it in the film. Didn't end up making it in the extended cut either. But, you know, we didn't have the time or money to paint them out of the back of that shot, so we just took all the green out. Hopefully no one will notice. Yeah, in the digital intermediate process. A bit of trivia there, though, that he's actually hanging in the back of that shot. Here's one of the more tender scenes in the film. Yeah, I think it's the only tender scene in the whole movie. More like a tenderizer scene, getting ready for the slaughter. Exactly. Again, this was a practical location. No, wait, so this was a set, right? Yeah, this one was one of our sets. It was one of the few sets we actually had in the entire movie. Almost everything was practical locations, which was really, really challenging because we had 52 days of shooting and we had something like 42 or 43 company moves. And a company move is where you literally pack everything up, put it on a truck, drive somewhere, unload everything, shoot, and then you've got to pack all the shit back up again and then move somewhere else. And sometimes we would do that two or three times in a day. And it definitely made it really, really hard on the crew and on kind of all of us because we... They said they didn't... Our union guys said they didn't even do that many moves on X-Men 3, which was a huge... A way bigger movie. Just enormous film compared to the size of this one. So what we have here is an extended little character moment scene between... Kelly and her husband and basically this was just you know it was a scene that was cut out just from a pacing standpoint from the theatrical version but we liked it because it you know it just it gives you a little bit more time to kind of like like the father before he gets killed yeah I mean that was really the idea was set up the father a little more as this really likable guy makes it all the more tragic when he bites it later on yeah and there's nothing wrong with enjoying a little cabernet in a movie and on character moments even horror pictures are very important Hurry up. You want to do it? You're the convict in the family. Why don't we just climb down from where they threw your keys? So Jesse can see me climb out covered in shit? No, thanks. Wait a second. We're going to be covered in shit? Take this.

Oh, wait. Really funny story right about here. These guys actually were scared of the rats. Yeah, they were scared of the rats. And then as I'm talking to them how they were supposed to walk, I literally fell off this platform and went swimming in this goddamn water. Yeah, we had about four feet of water in this. This is all built on sound stages. So this is a set we built. It's a treacherous set, though, because the walkways are pretty narrow. The water is deep enough that if you were to hit your head and no one saw you go in, it could be lights out forever. Although we had a crew of 110 people standing around. One of our creative consultants' feet. That's Liam's foot. His feature film acting debut. Best foot actor ever. Guys, what's it like shooting for 52 days? What's it like towards the end of the schedule? How rigorous is it? It was pretty nuts because what we would do is we would show up on second unit, talk with the second unit director, go over stuff, go to editorial for a few hours, and then, like, our day would start. And then at the end of the day, when most people would probably want to throw themselves in front of a large bus or something, we would then have to go. We had to do dailies and do visual effects dailies. Yeah, I mean, it was insane. It's quite grueling. I mean, and you don't get the two days off on the weekend. Most of the time we were shooting five days, but during the weekend there's always something. Usually we're scouting the locations for the next week or the two weeks after that doing tech scouts. What's it like the last week? Is the last week kind of, if I can just keep it going a little bit longer? Yeah, there's definitely a little bit of an uplifting thing that lasts. You see the checkered flag waving. Man, you're just absolutely exhausted by the end of that. And when the movie was finished shooting, how long did you guys sleep for? Like a week. Yeah. In our schedule, I mean, 52 days, there's going to be people who do this commentary going, oh, yeah, it's nothing because Benjamin Button shot for 145 days. You're thinking like, oh, my God, how do they shoot for that? That's triple our schedule. Yeah, I mean, they're definitely marathons. But even on the short side, there's so many things going on, and the days are pretty long. It's not that we're complaining. It's just that. Yeah, you are pretty wiped out by the end. Now, Stanley Kubrick, when he would shoot a movie, he'd wake up one morning and if he didn't feel like shooting that day, if it didn't feel right, he just wouldn't shoot. And so his movies could sometimes take six months. Yeah, it must be nice to have that. I had control. Exactly. I could imagine calling up the studio. I don't feel like shooting today. They're like, you don't feel like having a career today, do you? It's like, yeah, that 300 grand we're spending today, yeah, it's fine. We'll forget about it. And we had lots of nights. I mean, nights are like the worst. Six weeks a night in the rain. That was, yeah, challenging. Buddy! Buddy!

Buddy! Buddy! Buddy! We won't stop looking for you, bitch! Here's a hunter in his son's bodies... with a hole... Rather vaginal-shaped facehugger there. Yeah, and large holes punched in their chest. This is the first time we see that the, we start to see that the wolf actually has a little bit of a different mission, and when we come back to that scene, he's gonna start dissolving them with his dissolving fluid, trying to erase all the tracks of any evidence of aliens being on Earth. This is one of our really, really good local actresses, this is Chela, and I think she did such an awesome job with this, especially in particular with this scene, too. Do you think that something happened? I don't know. This is very good work. Again, another night. Another cold night. Yeah, luckily we weren't in the rain yet. But once the rain started, you know, once you're just out there in the cold nights, it's fine. But the rain, I mean, even with the best rain gear, that stuff gets in and your hands turn numb after 10 minutes. I don't even know. We had some great camera assistants. And these guys, a lot of the camera work's handheld. I don't know how they got two. We had these great operators. And the camera assistants have to be hanging right next to these guys running the focus. No gloves. No gloves on the focus. And they can't wear gloves, and they're running the focus wheels on the remotes. And how those guys could do it for 8, 10, 12 hours a night, I don't understand. Because after 10, 20 minutes, I wouldn't even be able to feel my fingers. It was so cold out there. Yeah, the brothers had come to me somewhere early in pre-production and said, we've got this great idea. The last half of the movie should be cold at night, and it should be constantly raining. And I thought to myself, I hope these guys understand what a terrible environment they are going to be living in because it is a really great idea, but, man, is it going to be miserable. Especially with half the cast running around in T-shirts and jeans. Oh, God, worried about hypothermia. I mean, we were actually pretty honest with everyone during casting, too. We were like, do you really want this job? You're going to hate us at the end of this one. And they're like, oh, it'll be fine. We're like, no, you're going to hate us. You're going to be freezing your ass off. We're going to tell you to keep doing it again and again and again. And it's just going to be miserable. Yes, if you haven't figured it out by now, the brothers have no friends. Oh, another one of the most efficient helicopter days ever.

What was your favorite aspect of the original Predator movies that you wanted to bring forward? Well, the Predator, I think one of the things for an element we wanted for this movie was actually the realistic gore and all the tribal qualities of the Predator. I mean, like one of the cool things was, you know, which was, you know, because obviously they couldn't do in the last movie because of the rating, was that, you know, when the Predator shoots someone, they get big giant holes blown in people. People's heads get blown off. There's... When you, you know, the skin bodies. And it was like, those are the type of things that really, you know, missed from the last film that, you know, when we had the opportunity with the rating on this to actually, you know, and also just from the story, having these elements in it was such an important thing. Exactly. And how about from the Alien movies? What was particularly important to you? Trying to get a grounded cast. You know, like one of the things we really liked in the first Alien in that was that those were just regular people. And that's what they would call the truck drivers in space thing that we've always been saying. But it's true. I mean, they're your regular town folk. They're not mercenaries or special military scientist guys. It's like these are relatable people, people that you may have cousins or friends that are similar to these people. And it's just something that I think when people like that get killed, you'll feel more for them than you will a bunch of mercenaries or something like that that probably kind of got what they had deserved coming. Now, obviously, the Predalien was a very important idea to us because we wanted to introduce something new into this movie. We felt we had to have a brand-new element that upped the stakes to change the balance of power in some way, shape, or form. Well, yeah, something also to expand the mythology of the aliens, but at the same time try to increase the mystique. Because, you know, every movie you do, you're going to demystify the creatures. It's just... There's nothing you can do that doesn't really do that, but at the same time... Either you end up demystifying them a little bit, or you don't see anything new and cool. That's an interesting trade-off. Which actually brings me to this, which is something that we just loved from the original Predator. The really long camera moves. The long camera shots and the idea of skin bodies. I know we're going to catch a little bit of crap from fans today, that if this predator has come down to Earth to cover up all the tracks, this doesn't make any sense. We were like, eh, let's just practice for them. Two things here. One, the predator's coming to clean up any evidence of aliens, so leaving a skinned human isn't evidence of that. And two, it's just cool. We had to have it. So any chance to put skinned bodies in the movies, we took that chance. Now, there was a little funny note, something we didn't notice while we were shooting on that first shot where the bag was being zipped up. it kind of almost looks like the skin guy's penis is hanging there. And it just happened to be that when they were doing one of the resets on that shot, part of the intestine got put down there. And then we noticed after we put in the cut, we're like, oh, God, there's a skin junk just right there. So that's something funny, I think, when people watch the movie. That wasn't intentional. Yeah, it's like once you see that, that's all I see now. Every time I watch that scene, I'm like, ah, there's the skin penis scene.

Here we have a couple more hydraulic shots of the cloaked predator entering the sewer. That vision mode, the orange-reddish vision mode is actually what we call trail vision. Facehugger juice vision. Basically, he's using that. He's calibrated his mask system to follow when he injected that stuff in the wrist computer back in the ship earlier. We kind of glossed over that. Once he puts the juice in there, he's able to calibrate the system and follow the trails of the facehuggers, which here we see the trails have kind of ended. That's where the bum feast occurred and those guys got hugged. Exactly. And again, this is a set. It gave us a lot of control. Yep. Every inch of this set was filled with four feet of water. So all the crew, everyone had to wear hip waders. Ian was walking around in that suit, and that suit would get waterlogged, and we had added all sorts of stuff to the water to make it gross and green and dirty and grimy. And they would have to literally drain it every, I think... It started to smell like a garbage can in there after four days, so we'd have to drain the water for safety reasons and put fresh water in there. And here he is dissolving the homeless guys. Basically, the homeless guys got dragged over to here and cocooned by the warriors. to keep them sort of safe until they burst. And Colin came up with the idea for Ricky to start with his shirt off in this scene. He wanted to show off his tattoo. Yeah, you know, well, it was one of the funny things we saw. Yeah, thanks, jerk. That, you know, he had... It was interesting, too, with this scene, because when we first were doing the casting on Ricky, there was concern that, you know, here's this guy who's supposed to be in high school, he's got tattoos, are tattoos really going to fly? And there was actually talk for a while that we were going to have to maybe digitally paint those things out. And I actually really liked, because those are his real tattoos that Johnny has. And I actually liked them because it helped give that edge to his character. He's a kid from the wrong side of the tracks. Yeah, it's fine. Yeah. And then the truck here. This is one of my other favorite things in the movie. We wanted to make sure, like, you know, because we could have had a deal with any of the car companies for getting new cars put in the movie and stuff like that. And we just wanted to make sure, like this kid, if he lives in such a shitty, crappy house, it's like we wanted to have this really cool, funky old matching car. And it was definitely one of the harder things to find. Colin liked this truck so much he ended up buying it off the production afterwards. Well, no, not really. But it would have been funny. It would have been great in your garage with your Ferrari. Actually, you know, it's funny. I've seen a couple of these actually driving around. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I'll take the truck or the 430 Spyder. But, you know. Again, I felt really lucky that we ended up with the young girl that we did because I think she really pulled it off for us. She did a good job. And we knew that we had to find her in Canada because of our budget parameters and shooting in Canada and the actors we could take and not. But there was a nice pool of actors for us. It's the first time we see a Claymore mine deployed. Basically, he sets these things in a passive mode and then... Later on, he can activate them and turn on the laser tripwires. And the idea with those lasers is that anything that were to pass through those would basically get vaporized. And obviously, a lot of the sequence, while it was shot live action, was extensively finished with CGI. Yeah, the scene actually got rewritten quite a bit in the editing process. Well, it got rewritten. like, literally two or three days before shooting it, so we had to, like, kind of scramble and reorganize all of our previs, and then once it got shot, you know, there was some story things that we wanted to change around, and we had to literally do a lot more CG aliens and stuff like that to try to bridge all the different live-action shots to kind of get everything making sense again. Like, here's a predator where he's basically using himself as bait, yelling through the, you know, screaming in the tunnels. Trying to stir up the hornet's nest, so to speak. And a lot of these are CG aliens that are clinging to the top of the tunnels. Now we're going to see the Pred alien pretty soon here. Yeah, he's going to sneak up at the end to sort of bail out the aliens so they don't just all get taken out too easily. And we went through a real process trying to get the Pred alien look right. Was it more predator? Was it more alien? How are we going to distinguish it on film? very, very, very, very thoughtful labor to process until we came up with really a Pred-Alien I think that's probably two-thirds Predator and one-third Alien. The other way around. You think it's the other way around? It stands up right. Two-thirds Alien, one-third Predator. That was just the scene where I think a lot of the Alien fanboys are going to skewer us for how easily their aliens got overpowered by the Predator. The Predator's just so damn strong. There's the Predalien, and he's pretty goddamn powerful. He just bursts his head right out through the top of the asphalt. And there's the Predator Power Glove, which was done using a CG glove extension there. But Predator's able to use that for a sort of super punch. He himself can just break out in one swipe. And by the way, guys, I know you had great costumes for Halloween this year. Having all this stuff laying around was great. We've got a couple toys. Those heads weigh an awful lot, though. Your neck gets tired. And that slime dripping down. Originally, this scene was a lot longer, and there was actually shots of the Predalien up on the roof. Yeah, there was actually a Predalien POV mode that we actually had in the movie where he could... look into the chest cavities of people before he implanted the embryos. And it was something that was originally in the script, and then, you know, as we started designing out in the movie, we were just, you know, I don't know, we didn't want to... It became too much of a demystifying thing, so we decided just to, you know, we wanted all those out of the movie to keep it more mysterious. Yeah, but we had that slime dripping down on her in no takes without it, so in order to get the dialogue line, there was no way to cut around that. So, uh... I'm sure there'll be a few people scratching their head going, like, what was that? Oh, and then here's our little skull ripping thing that we snuck into the movie. It was right there ripping out the spine. Ripping the creepy chef guy's spine and skull right out of his body before a warrior comes in to cut off her escape. And in this scene as well, there was a predalien POV and... Although conceptually there may have been issues with it, visually it was really cool because right here the predalien is actually staring at her belly and sees the fetus inside. And there was a sort of thing we were playing off of that the predalien was more attracted to women in general to impregnate them with embryos, but he was even more attracted to pregnant women because there was a little bit more food in there for the embryos. It's like a nice snack. It's like packing a picnic up or something. Here comes a beer vision shot. So she puts that on with her beer goggles, and you transition off the beer bottle into the scene. We're like, okay, it was a green thing. We thought it would be kind of a cool scene transition, and, you know. Yeah, this is one of those days where we were in three, four different locations in the same day. We only had a couple hours to shoot the bar scene here. And this is one of those moments in the movie where we debated how much music should we have and how much music shouldn't we have. How do we sculpt things? the music and also we didn't want any contemporary music in the film so we actually you know already needle drop stuff from you know and this is the only place there is contemporary but it's not used as score and it's actually Brian and it's Brian Tyler actually playing the guitar it's like his actual original music and it was just kind of a cool thing to actually say like there's everything in here is done by our composer and there's not a single note from anyone else in this again I loved going into our composer's house he had 37 guitars, seven different sets of drums, 15 instruments I'd never seen before, all in the back of his house in the most incredible recording studio. Here's the power plant location, which John was extremely instrumental in securing for us on the shoot, Yeah, they were going to let us shoot here, and then they weren't going to let us shoot here, and then John had to flex some of them muscles. Yeah, it's actually an operating power plant, so it's very understandable that there was a lot of nervousness of letting a film crew of 100 people running around this place. Talking about blowing stuff up. Yeah, and let us use explosives and whatnot, spark gags and pyrotechnics and that to pull off some of the stuff in the fight once the Predator starts shooting. So here we are back at the power plant. Predator's POVs at this point are starting to become more and more distorted due to all the EMP from the interference generated by all the electrical generation equipment. Yeah, and here he stumbles across the dead body of Nathan. And then now we're getting in some new footage. This is Carl. We find him also again. He's the guy that gets his head blown off in the cemetery scene. That's later on in the movie. And one of the cool things about this is, you know, it gives us another Predator eye flash moment where you see the Predator readjusting his vision modes. And it's just, you know, another kind of cool scene. Also, it shows a little bit of the honor code of the Predator, where, you know, he's not going to kill Carl here because he's completely unarmed. He even drops his radio, so he has no way of warning anybody. Ricky. Hey. Hey. So, uh... And this was one of my favorite scenes coming up in the movie. It's the only real decent skin we have. Yeah, I think people will notice it's kind of suspicious how we linger on that one shot of her anatomy for such a long amount of time. Yeah, it was kind of funny because we blocked out the scene. And then I remember talking to one of our operators, and I was just like, tilt down, tilt down. I just gave him a little hand signal. And he did the tilt down on that one take. And it was like, and he just stayed there. And we're just like, hold, hold, hold. And then he went slowly up and he just perfectly hooked back up to her face. And it was like, it worked out really great. And we're like, ah, you know, it's like, it's one moment in the movie that's got a little, a little bit of that kind of, you know, that kind of action. We didn't want to go full on. You know, you got alien. She's like in her panties at the end, alien, uh, four, uh, There was that one shot of the girl with the thong laying down. I mean, you know, so it's not completely unheard of. And even in Predator 2, you know, you had the... The scene in the guy's apartment? Yeah, exactly. So, you know, there's some interesting stuff there. And here's the unexplained how the hell did Dale know that... Yeah, well, there was a scene that got cut out. Here's the really uncomfortably long other butt shot. That was actually a funny thing was because editorially we had a blocking issue where Ricky was standing and we actually couldn't cut to a different angle to get around it. So we're like, I guess we're holding on her butt for a little bit longer. And yeah, so we just kind of had to deal with that. Yeah, here again, it seems like this where I'm really grateful for our DP because I thought a lot of this stuff he lit and shot so beautifully. Yeah, for having very little setup time or anything at all. I mean, it was really running gun on this stuff. Those are some of the thermal shots as the Predator is getting deeper and deeper in the power plant here. The vision gets a little twitchier. Sort of EMP from parts of the power plant start interfering with his vision modes. Yeah, it's really funny how when you see the movie early on, you see directors cut probably... was it 10 or 12 weeks after you finished 10 weeks and you don't get to see a lot of these finished shots because they're not done some of these shots weren't done until a week before we locked the movie which would have been maybe a month before it came out so we went through 7, 8, 9 months of having to edit this movie and look at this movie and figure out the changes to make the movie without a lot of this stuff cut in it's such a pleasure to be able to I actually appreciate the movie now completed. Well, yeah, a lot of scenes don't make, you know, anywhere near as much sense as they should when the visual effects aren't in there. And the ten weeks that you get to put your first cut together means that a lot of times the visual effects guys only have three or four weeks. Because you've got to have a little bit of time getting a scene roughed in before turning it over, otherwise they risk doing a bunch of work that will all be for naught. So... In four weeks, five weeks to do, I think we did 220 visual effects attempts in that month, which is quite a blistering pace. Our company is still a modest size. It's not one of the big majors or anything like that. So it was quite a bit to turn out. But without any of that stuff, you risk showing a film where no one understands anything of what's going on. But by the way, anytime any of you guys are in Santa Monica, California, stop by Hydraulics and see the boys. Yeah, it's right off the promenade. And here's the locker room shot at a high school up there in Vancouver suburbs. And splat. Splat. That's probably a bad sign. Exactly. So this is an extra scene for the DVD version, which was basically the sheriff, as they're heading towards the explosion that the predator put in the street, they get notified that the nuke plant is on fire. And it just kind of gives a little bit more scope and humor to the film. Humor? There are a couple of funny moments. We're now about... To transition into the difficult shooting part of the movie, because we're about to transition to rainy nights. Yes, and then here in this scene, Tom Woodruff as the alien destroyed this poor woman's rose garden right there. He's just thrashing around in there, and we didn't realize these were, like, some really expensive flowers, and he just completely, like, trashed her whole backyard. Well, you can't see when he's in the suit. When he has the alien suit on, if the head is tilted down at all, it covers up his eye holes, so... He was stomping around blind out there, and he was getting kind of cut up, tore up from all the thorns of the roses and everything cutting through his suit. And it was right at the end of the night, and the sun was coming up, and we were just completely out of time, and we were screwed if we didn't get it, and luckily we got the shot. But that's an interesting point, by the way, because it's not only being able to make that suit look real, but the actor inside, Tom, on his part, has to move in a way that sells it also. And so it's a real talent being able to move in the suit. Yeah, and it's actually surprisingly easy to make the aliens not look cool. A lot of times when it wasn't Tom, we were sitting there cursing in our breath, wishing we had Tom. Yeah, but he couldn't be on both units every day. It was a controversy generator. The munching alien. If anyone forgot about the fact that aliens eat people in Alien 3, that was in there. We threw that in to remind them. This is the predator sneaking up behind the alien. Yeah, this was a tough one. We literally had like two hours to shoot this whole thing. And it was just... It was like one or two takes. Oh, I guess we got it. Move on. One or two takes. Oh, we got it. Because we had the underwater cameras. I mean, it was just... Yeah, because we're having to actually deal with this real swimming pool, and we weren't allowed to put anything in the water itself, so all the liquid had to be pouring out there was all CG, and then all we could do was put a little bit of liquid nitrogen bubbling out. And then here we did, on these type of shots, you know, we added digital fire, the cooling towers in the back left corner were digital. You know, it was just stuff that we're trying to do to add scope to the movie and, you know, kind of squeeze that dollar as far as we can. You know, just to try to make the movie look as big as possible. You know, this is night. You're pretty tired right now. And unfortunately, you were shooting an hour outside of Vancouver on this location, all these locations. So you'd stay up all night, and you'd have to come back in in the morning, and you'd hit the rush hour traffic coming back in the city. Yeah, you hit it both ways. It was the worst. It was the worst. This is one of the nights... We were praying to not have rain, and it was raining, up until the minute we rolled the camera. And it stopped for 20 minutes or 30 minutes. Luckily, the demo paid off. I just saw my two kids. It was raining only in between takes, so it worked out perfectly. If it was raining in one scene and then not in the next, and then raining again, people would be left kind of scratching their heads. working out when the rain starts and trying to cross your fingers and hope that it wasn't going to, you know, Mother Nature wasn't going to ruin a night of shooting because there was nothing else we could shoot. You have these things in the schedule called cover sets that are set up and ready to go as a backup plan. So if you're, you know, if it looks like the weather report says it's going to rain, you go to a cover set. But once you've shot all those scenes out, you don't have those in reserve anymore. So you're... You're kind of screwed. And you don't get your money back. So you literally are just, if you don't shoot, that money's gone. Yeah, everyone still gets paid.

Yeah, this is kind of a funny one. This is what we told the art department. You know, get a lot of blood on the walls. We come back in there, and it looked like they must have exploded three different bodies. It's like, wipe it all down. Yeah, get rid of half of that blood. You know, don't you feel like sometimes when you're shooting a movie like this that has police cars with working lights, and you got to get back in in the morning in town, you don't want to wait forever. We should just kind of grab one of the cars. Those things are loud, too. Like, you're recording, and you just hear this... She has the motors in there. And it's like, oh, you know, people don't realize how loud those damn things are. It screws up all the sound. This is the extended scene of Carrie's death. And basically what we have different here is we actually have her bursting while Darcy walks in and stumbles across this really grotesque scene. Yeah, this is actually the original way we had blocked this out. Again, it's one of those scenes that sometimes lands on the cutting room floor when you don't want it to. But here's the great payoff, which is four little chest bursties saying hi to everybody. So this is the cemetery scene. This was originally removed from the theatrical version just from a pacing standpoint, but I'm really glad we got this back in for the DVD version because I think it actually gives the movie a little bit of a breath in the middle that the film kind of needs. Yeah, I mean, really, the reason I wanted to bring it back was just because when... what's his name, gets it from the Predator. He gets it really good. Yeah, it's a great moment. Yeah, you'll see in a second Carl gets his head popped a bit. But one of the more interesting things, too, with this scene also, I thought, was here you've got this daughter and mother that just saw the husband of that getting killed, and then all of a sudden here's another guy that gets killed in front of this kid. So that way when they actually show up to the sporting goods store later on, you understand why they're so traumatized. And why did you pick the name Hawkins? Well, it's a little throwback to Predator 1. Okay. You know, if you actually read closely, there's actually a couple of the guys from Predator on some of these tombstones here. On the different tombstones. Somehow they all managed to come back to Colorado to be buried. Yeah, I think Jesse Ventura's character was in there as well, but it was in the background. I don't think I ever really see. But we thought the Hawkins thing was kind of just a cool little, you know, a little throw-in for people that noticed it to get a little chuckle out of it. This is also our anti-smoking PSA. Yeah. Predators hate smokers. You know, they have a hard enough time. They've got asthma. They're having to breathe through that mask. I mean, the guy has a gun in his hand. That isn't asking enough for it. He's got to have a cigarette in front of a kid. I mean, what a bad example. Yeah, this is kind of our statement to society. Don't use bad language and smoke in front of kids while pointing guns at their mom. Yes, but having aliens attach themselves to them and exploding from their innards is okay. That's the great thing about the Strauss brothers. They bring... good old-fashioned values to horror filmmaking. Yeah, without the predator here to teach him a lesson, this would be a really poor example for little Molly. You know, and also we decided, like, this scene guarantees that that kid's going to be in therapy for the rest of her life. Yeah, again, I love it when we blow off part of somebody's head. We do it, obviously, later in the sporting goods store, but... Hydraulics has done a great job of actually making that really kind of interesting. You can't have enough decapitations in a film, I don't think. And it's also another cool beat for the Predator. It just shows that even though some people might root for him, he is still a bit of an asshole. And he will kill anyone. But he lets the mother and child get away at the end, so he's still very honorable. Well, he'll kill when he's threatened or he'll kill for the sport of killing. Yes, he doesn't kill indiscriminately. Come on. Look out! Now we're into the rain. Yes, and this is where we had like 20 cars and we had to make it look like 50. And it doesn't necessarily look cold here. It was cold. It is freaking cold. And the rain that we add is like the drops are four times bigger than normal rain. And it's colder water. So it would have been better if it was like real rain actually hitting these people instead of this misery that we unleashed upon them from a giant crane. Yeah, on some of these scenes, it doesn't look cold because we had little fans hanging off just off the side of frame to blow their breath out of frame quickly so you didn't see it. But a lot of these, it's a lot colder than it appears. It's not always so glamorous making a movie, is it? No. So I like this scene a lot because it's not too often you get to use the word dickhead in a movie. We're sort of bringing that back. That's a real throwback to it. Yeah, it was like, well, it's also how me and Greg talk to each other. We always call each other, like, asshole and stuff like that. So, like, in the sewer scene, he's like, oh, you're accused, asshole. You know, that was very much influenced by the way we talked to each other. So we were going over the script stuff for Shane. We're like, that's some of the brotherly kind of stuff you got to put in there. And, by the way, this was unusual in that Shane wrote the first draft, and he wrote the last draft. Usually multiple writers come and work on it, and Shane was able to stay in this process from beginning to end. And it was great continuity, and it was great having him around when he needed little fixes and all. Now, this scene has some interesting history to it. We were supposed to be in this other location. We had this whole thing choreographed and blocked out and storyboarded and pre-vis. And then literally, what was it, like three days before the shoot? Yeah, the owner pulled a fast one wanting to double the price for the location. So we lost it. And it was like, and we literally had like a day to find another type of store. And the store we found was like three times smaller. And we're just like, oh, crap. Yeah, it took a lot of fancy lensing with Daniel Pearl to make this tiny little store feel. I mean, we wanted it to feel huge. We wanted it to feel gigantic. Yeah, we got something that feels modestly sized, but it was really the size of a little convenience store. And trying to make it plausible that there's different storylines happening on different sides of the store, when if you really looked at it, they're only 12 feet apart from each other. You could practically spit on each other. Yeah, it made things a little trickier than they should have been in that situation. Now, another cool thing was the night vision shots we saw a few minutes ago. That was actually the first time they ever had a Generation 4 night vision actually mounted for a film camera. That was one of the things that when we talked to Daniel, he actually got... Panavision. Yeah, Panavision actually made that, and it's pretty wild. I mean, that is some seriously high-tech night vision stuff. And we had these interesting problems that whenever you see the night vision shots go dark, that's actually when a lightning flash is, because inside the night vision itself, it compensates... for something going bright so quickly that it actually irises down and goes dark. So it was pretty wild, but it behaved so differently than we thought it would. Like in the old movies, you see night vision, it blows out white and then it comes back, but this stuff actually held up through all the different exposures. And then these were the shots that really pissed off all the locals. The .50 caliber firing. Yeah, firing a .50 caliber with full loads. You can hear for like three miles in the valley where we were shooting. Yeah, that .50 cal footage is actually stolen from a different scene. It was intended, there was another part of the movie where there was a bit of another storyline that we ended up cutting out. And we had someone, Kelly actually jumped up on the gun and fired the .50 cal. And parts of those... Quick little cuts of the aliens getting cut to ribbons, which I think all the alien fanboys will love those shots. Yes, very much so. We put those in just for you guys. But those are all stolen from that other scene as well, and they fit nicely into the National Guard battle. Yeah, so it makes it look like the National Guard actually did get a couple shots off. Then here's our stoner dudes. And, yeah, part of the idea with these guys was... We didn't want the movie to be completely dour. You know, we wanted to add a little bit of humor, kind of like, you know, what Hudson was in Aliens or, you know, just something just to give a little bit of relief. Because, you know, we were afraid if the movie was so depressing and so serious, so sad the entire time, it'd take some of the fun out of the film. So we just had to make sure there was a couple areas where we left a little bit of that back in. Yeah, and now, by the way, we've never seen this movie with an audience. How exciting is it going to be to see it in a movie theater and see how people really react? I'm bringing a jar of moths, and if anyone starts a boo, we're going to open that and all the moths will fly up. Yeah, like from Strange Brew. Exactly. John's looking at me like, what are you talking about? Ah, this was the town hall turned into a hospital. This was a fun night. Yeah, again. cold freezing in the rain freezing now this is part of this is part of a working hospital this is um or no wait was the hospital shut down by now no this one it's on the property generator powers out at this point but it's on uh it's on generator so that's the uh the whole idea why the lights are still working they're flickering the generator isn't powering everything at 100 but And there's the baby shots. But this is an actual hospital, so there was a big hospital complex. Yeah, the interior was. The exterior was a city hall, but the interior was a mental asylum. Here's Chet. He's drooling, hungry. He's going to eat the babies. They're like little popcorn. They go good with ranch sauce or a little ranch dressing, I think. Eat the babies. Yes, now this was part of a bigger sequence at one time, and the editing process of the movie, there was a whole storyline that we didn't need that we cut out. It involved two young children, brother and sister. Yeah, it was one of those things where it was like, you know, we didn't need any more kids in the film. Plus, it was just a pacing thing. We wanted to keep the movie flowing, you know, and get back to our core group. So this time, instead of Chet impregnating the nurse, he just punches a hole in her head. but then decides that he's hungry now. Yeah, nothing like mouth raping a bunch of pregnant women. That's going to hell for that one. Yeah, I kind of regret how quick this shot is now. I wish we held that one a little bit longer. It's just such a quick flash. By getting the sound effect right here when we were on the dubbing stage. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we're talking to an ADR, talking to the actress there. And she's like, so what are you looking for? We're like, yeah, just imagine a really large thing jammed down your throat, squirting eggs into your mouth. And she's just like, oh, okay. And we played for her, and she's just like, oh, my God. She was a little appalled at the footage that her voice was going to be applied to. Yeah, she did a very authentic choking sound there. It was good. In a movie like this and in this genre, sound design is very important, especially a lot of our— sound had to be otherworldly at points, and so it was designing and pulling that off so it would work. Oh, yeah, I mean, between the guys designing the sound... Yeah, Jay did a great job. Jay kicked ass. Our mixers were just fantastic, you know, trying to balance the music with the sound design, with the dialogue. I mean, because it's a challenge, because part of you just wants everything at a volume 11. You know, I love really, really loud movies, and... You know, and I like it because, you know, my home theater, it's like you want to be able to put that DVD in, too, and just have that thing cranking. Part of what I love is when we talk about on the stage, is that alien enough sound, you know, like we know? Here's the first use of the whip in the movie. This was a fun scene. I also get close to... You know, the guy who we all knew was gonna die, Dale, because he's such a dick throughout the film. Like, you know he's gonna get killed off, so he gets close to getting what's coming to him. Yeah, and originally when we were in the bigger store, when these people ran around the corner after these guys got the heads blown off, they were supposed to be caught in the middle between with the alien on one side predator and the other, and our group was trapped in the middle, which was kind of more of a metaphor for the whole film. Yeah, and I wish we were able to do that, because that would have been better. Physically could not shoot it like that, which is a shame. So it was just Dale between the alien and the predator instead of the whole group. So kind of, unfortunately, had to compromise on that. Here's a good example of combining ADI's makeup with digital gore. So for that shot of the guy getting his face melted off, we had them do a real... burns on his face, and then we did 3D to actually collapse the whole skull and everything. Yeah. Here's the shots where the Predator's about to face off. Face off for a big fight that never really happens. Yeah, well, I mean, part of the idea of that fight was that we've kind of already shown several of the other fights, and we wanted to treat that scene like the shot where Billy gets killed in the original Predator, which, you know, you're setting up for the fight, but, you know, to us, it was like, okay, we've already seen these creatures fighting a bunch now, You know, let's set up that something big's going to happen, but you know what? There's something even more important happening at a different part in town, which is this scene right here where we actually see that we've now murdered pregnant women on screen. Yeah, because we weren't going to hell before we are now. Yeah, this one pretty much sealed the deal. Colin's wife loves this scene. Yeah, actually, that was a really funny thing, too. My wife was pregnant during the beginning of the shoot, and my son was born, my second son, Nolan. They're not going to do it. There's no way they're going to do that. Yeah, he was born almost within 20 minutes of us shooting the first Predator shot in the movie. So there's the four chestbursters, bellybursters, and then a good face shot from Chet. That's one of my favorite, killing the doctor. It was also his reaction, too, because he's like, holy crap, half my face just got taken off, but he's still alive. Just for a few more seconds. We'll get a plastic surgeon in there to fix it up. Yeah, well, it's on the second floor, I think. A chat rhinoplasty. Yeah, exactly. It was a deviated septum he had. The chat cleaned it up real good. More cold, miserable nights. Miserable shooting in the rain. Now... And these nights sucked, too, because there was all the local ordinances. You know, we had minors, you know, with Molly. So we had to be done shooting with her, I think it was a 10. 10 on normal weekdays, yeah. And then... But we couldn't fire guns after 10 as well, and they wouldn't let us on the street until 7. So literally every night, we'd be on the street for like a week, we'd only get... We either could shoot guns or we could shoot the, you know, not shoot the girl, but, you know, film the girl. And that's what really made shooting this stuff miserable because it was like trying to figure out, you know, how do we do this? So we had to block out so many shots without the little girl in it, you know, or sometimes you use a body double for the really wide shots. Or your face is the reality of just not getting the shots you want. Yeah, so these nights sucked. And then, like, the inside of this tank where we're behind Kelly there, Those were actually reshot on a parking lot somewhere where we got the truck and that, because we just, again, it was because of a time thing. We had to finally go to a location where we could shoot before 7. Otherwise, we just were not going to get the shots we needed. And here's the first real big reveal on Robert Joy. I just love what he did here with the Colonel Stevens character. Originally, this character was going to be Garber from Predator 2, but we couldn't get him. Couldn't get that sorted out. We couldn't get the actor to agree to do the film. Which would have been a nice time. In the end, we got Robert Joy, and I'm really happy. I actually think it worked out better that way. And his character is kind of the cool setup, too, like with that shot where there's actually now a recorded image of the alien, which I'm sure would be a little controversial. But part of the idea was if you watch Alien and you really look at exactly what's going on, the company knew more. that I think a lot of people realize in that filming. Like, why would they make the crew so expendable on a distress signal that they knew nothing about? So we wanted to establish that they did know something going into that movie. And Colin came up with the idea for this shot, again, for the alien fanboys. Oh, yeah, exactly. Just blame me for all that. Thanks. And this was another one of our kind of predatorish shots where it was like, let's see how long we can make one shot last in the movie. Yeah, this is actually shot in two pieces. That's actually a wall at Paramount Studios that borders on the Hollywood Cemetery. And we actually digitally blended it to this shot here, which was shot up in Vancouver. Now, guys, let me ask you a question. When there's two brothers and you don't disagree, how do you resolve? Oh, we started carrying knives. And, you know, after the first three trips to the hospital, you learn to... To compromise much quicker. Alternate dispute resolution. I mean, I know what I was thinking, you know, because the AD said to me one day, he goes, look, we were in pre-production and it was location scouting process. He goes, I'm having trouble getting the two brothers to agree on this thing. And I said, well, I got a very practical solution. He said, what's that? I said, fire one of them. I was going to say bribery works. Yeah, I know. Turn them against each other. Do you believe what he just said about you? So how do you guys resolve it? Or do you guys see things kind of eye to eye really often? I mean, if we didn't see eye to eye, the best thing is to give it a rest for a few hours and come back. Or sometimes I'll throw a table of food on it at Greg and scream, cuss, and the next day we'll be like, oh, that's not right. And when you guys were kids, did you guys get along really well and all that stuff? Why do you want to work together when you're in a company together, you shoot movies together? We broke a few walls in our house. They had imprints of our bodies, and I stuck a knitting needle into his kneecap one time. Is that true? Yeah. And then we started playing hockey. And I think that's what kind of balanced it out. Greg was a defenseman. And then somehow I got always the goalie. And at first I thought it was a cool thing until I realized they just liked shooting the pucks at me really hard. And I broke pretty much every toe I had playing street hockey from these guys shooting pucks at me that actually had warning labels. So this is a practice puck. Do not use it real people. And then they liked firing it at me. So that was nice. But I'm not bitter. Well, it's amazing you guys actually get along so well and are so close. a business together and shooting all the commercials together and the videos together and shooting a movie together because actually I was amazed at how well you guys did get along the entire process. Yeah, it worked out pretty well. This is one of the smallest sets we've ever had to shoot. The inside of that striker, we really wanted to build it, but we just, again, financially... To have to have the, we had to dress the real one. Well, first of all, it wasn't even a real one. We couldn't get one from the U.S. military. We couldn't get one from the Canadian military, which had a similar type of model. Because they were all busy. They were being sent to Afghanistan, so there weren't any extra ones available. So we found this thing was like some piece of crap. Prototype. Prototype. It barely ran. It leaked. Look at that. Every shot, if you really watch closely on the Blu-ray DVD, it is leaking like a sieve inside that thing. Yeah, that thing was miserable inside. Freezing cold. There was no heater in it. And just when you're in there and we had to cover a full dialogue scene. Trying to get the camera in there was impossible. Four different eye lines because everyone's sitting across from each other. Then you had Dallas in the turret, which is a different place, and Kelly up front. trying to get the damn camera in there and turned around for the reverses. It was just a beast. It's so hard to talk to the actors when they're in there, but they've got lights just outside of frame. They can't even move because of the lights on one side, the camera on the other. And Colin and I could only just radio in our notes because there's no way to get in there and really interact with them. And, you know, whenever you can, you want to be there face to face and really, you know, interact with these guys, you know, But calling it in over the radio can be tough. But in this situation, we had no choice. And then our production designer, Andrew, he kicked ass on this movie for having so little money to start with. Like, I think he literally had, like, what, a thousand bucks to do the inside of this tank. It was pathetic. But he made the tank look fucking cool. And, you know, it's like... And then, like, those lights on the top, this lighting company had these new fiber optic light things. So we put those actually in there and... You know, I mean, it was a mess trying to get that thing to actually look cool. And, like, all the armor, like, all the bolts on the side, that's all, like, plywood and crap like that that they just literally glued on. Yeah, I know. But, I mean, it was depressing because we really wanted the tank after the APC scene in Aliens. And also, too, it's like we needed something, an original script. That was a pickup truck. And we're like, how the hell are we going to shoot? Ten pages of dialogue. Driving through city streets in the rain. Yeah, driving through city streets, and it's raining out. It's like, how the hell are we going to shoot that? It's like, it was impossible. We would have needed two weeks to film that scene. And it was like, and we literally had a day to film it all. So that's why, that was actually the original reason why we picked the APC more than just homage to aliens. It was like, we needed a contained set with no rain in it that we could actually shoot. And we kind of didn't like the idea of a minivan. No, yeah, minivans, we hate minivans. Which is one of the things when you're going to have military vehicles in a movie, it's always very difficult. to procure them. If it's a movie that you're shooting in the United States and the State Department likes the theme of the movie, then you can get them. If they don't, it can be really tough. Well, if you're in Canada, they're not going to let the U.S. Army ship military equipment up into Canada. Yeah, because they're afraid that one tank could take over the whole country. Well, I did a movie called Courage Under Fire a number of years ago, and the State Department, Department of Defense wouldn't give us tanks because they didn't like the theme of the movie. It was anti-military, they thought, to some degree. couldn't get tanks anywhere, and I finally found a National Guard in a state that had them, and I went to the governor of that state, and I said, I need the tanks, can I have them? And the governor said to me, I'm gonna give you those tanks. And I said, that's fantastic. He said, I have a daughter who's an actress. There's always a catch. And you're like, she's perfect. Well, no, I said, okay, we'll find her a part for her. And he goes, well, actually, I'm informed that the lead role, female role, is a pretty juicy role in that movie. If she can have that role, you can have the tanks. We ended up having to go to Australia to get the tanks. Here's the first time we start to see the hive. Yeah, now this was actually probably, of all of the days, the coldest. It actually snowed like a foot. This day. And it screwed up our last day of shooting on the rooftop set. We had a tree fell over because so much snow built up on it. Fell over and crashed into one of our lifts, lift trucks, the condor with the lights on it. And we were very lucky that no one got hurt. No one got hurt. But it was a huge tree that landed on our crane. It was about 20 degrees inside that stairwell. You mean that breath coming out? That was all... all real stuff. And then this was our hive set. Luckily, this was one of our few sets that we actually had built. And again, to Andrew's credit, these guys, you know, they had these sculptors, and it was literally just styrofoam. And these guys, you know, we took the concept drawings, and they just hand-carved all of the styrofoam. And here's where the annoying Drew guy gets killed off. I wish we could have killed him sooner in the movie, but... Especially with the whiny voice. It's a nice death, though. Exactly. It's a good death. And originally, too, this was going to have, like, more aliens chasing them in here, and it was just turned into a scheduling and time thing, you know? It's like if we just had that extra week or two of shooting, we could... They were supposed to go up further, and then aliens were coming down, and it was supposed to force them down a different hallway, but we could only get that one. And then same thing with this sequence, too. I mean, this is the whole hive battle, but there was actually a version of this originally planned that was probably two or three times longer, and it just turned into a, you know, just time. Timing money, timing money. Yeah, which, you know, we're always, unfortunately, fighting against on this, but, you know, we're trying to make it as big as we can, but there's just limits, you know, to what we do. But, you know, there's some pretty cool scenes in here. This is my favorite alien kill coming up here. Just point blank. You're dead. And magically none of the acid hits him. Yes. I mean, one of the funny things is people are going to watch the movie and they're going to be like, well, how come the alien acid doesn't melt everything? And it's like, I'll tell you exactly why. There's a couple fantastic reasons. We were going to build this entire set on risers, you know, which a riser is like a, like you're literally building like two feet in the air. And it was going to be designed that we could actually melt away huge portions. Talk fast because our best part's coming up. Okay. For melting all of the floor and it was just going to cost ten times as much. This is our much more intense version of Jesse getting pinned to the wall. We actually redid this in visual effects with her splitting in half and her guts dripping out. But yeah, that was her stunt double for her, and that was real-time, in-camera, actually hit the wall. I thought she snapped her neck when we did that first stunt. We probably did it four takes. I could not believe how hard that stunt woman was great. could not believe how hard it is. Never seen a ratchet pull that's slammed into a firm piece of architecture like that. And then originally, this is the part of the movie that almost got us not the job. When we were in town, John, remember in the original pitch meeting? And this is where we kill Ricky. And you're like, that's me. Yes, he was supposed to have been cut in half there, and Chet would have been tap dancing on his entrails. It was very similar in Aliens when Lance Hendrickson's android character gets cut in two. It was supposed to kind of play out similar to that. But the good news is Ricky got an infection from the weird alien tail that went through him, and he dies two days after the end of the movie. Oh, really? Yeah, so Ricky actually didn't make it anyways. He does die, huh? Yeah, you can see it gets kind of puffy at the end. You know it's infected, so he's not going to make it. You know, the good thing about the brothers, they'll really see the reasonable side of something and not do it. LAUGHTER Well, I mean, he was a cool character. I mean, it would have been pretty cool and dark to kill him there, but at the same time, too, there was actually some great scenes with him in the helicopter telling Kelly not to take off at the end, so it actually worked out. Yeah, it sets up a better tension beat at the end, so you were right, John. And now we have the roof. What did we have, two days on the roof here? This was tough. The first unit, I think we might have had four here, and then second unit had, wow, like 10 or 12 days to shoot all the battle stuff. To get all the battle stuff. How helpful is second unit? You know, because you lose some control over second unit, but you need them to finish. Yeah, and we had 52 days, but they had 35, which as a ratio to first unit, it's a pretty big second unit. So, you know, I mean, a lot of... And again, first unit, kind of the rule is we have to deal with the talent, we have to deal with the actors. Anything with dialogue falls on us first, and anything with stunts and anything with creatures... that goes to second unit pretty quickly. So as our first unit schedule was very aggressive and very packed, large pieces really got slid over to second unit. They ended up doing a lot of the fight stuff, a lot of the action stuff. But it's kind of agonizing having to give up some of the stuff to second unit. Oh, I mean, we would have loved to shoot a lot more of the actual fight scenes and that, but, yeah. And they did a great job on it, but, you know, it's... It's tough when you're, you know, as a second unit director, you're trying to interpret what the first director wants, and sometimes you make different choices, and, you know, so it's, oh, and there's a little technical mistake, the name of the nuke on the thing there was, we researched it, and then the one designer guy who was doing that shot researched the wrong number on the nuke, and then we found out after the shots were all finished that that number actually is, Mark 83 is not a nuke that could fit in that. Oh. that plane, so yeah, so there you go. Continuity mistake. I'm sure that'll spawn some huge online debate. Yeah, there'll be probably some petition against us now for that, but too bad. And here's Get to the Chopper, which I wish we could include the previs of that. It was the most awesome. We actually cut in Arnold's line from the original Predator. It was really cheesy, animatic, like a video game, and then his lips move, and you actually hear Arnold going, Get to the Chopper! Ha! It was just the funniest thing ever. I remember the first time we saw that, we were like, oh, my God. First Predator, we did a read-through with Arnold down in Mexico. Arnold's English was not as proficient as it is now, and we read through the whole script, and we basically, after the read-through, went and cut all his dialogue. LAUGHTER But you know what? Arnold says so much more. He's doing better now as governor, though, because, you know, other than California, you know, he's getting the rest of it right. No, but you know, there's something about him. He says more, not saying anything, than most actors do with 20 pages of dialogue. I mean, that's why I just love Arnold so much.

Here was my pet peeve in the movie. It was the sound effect of helicopter blades. It took us a while to get them right. Yeah, that was kind of a challenge. It was funny, too, for the sound guy, because at first he put the correct sound in there. We didn't like it. We liked the sound of this little tiny helicopter better at first. And then when we get to the mixing stage, you know, because he kept fighting us on that thing, and then finally we go, okay, fine, put the bigger sound in there, and it worked out. But then also, but against him, he didn't think the... the peacock elephant was a real sound effect from the original aliens. He didn't believe us. Yeah, because we're like, it's an elephant. He's like, no, it's only bamboos. They only have bamboos. There's only monkeys. And it took months. And we're like, I swear to God, it's a fucking elephant. Please, I can hear it. I remember hearing about it as a kid in interviews with Cameron. Somewhere, he actually, I mean, I didn't just realize it was an elephant. We read that somewhere, and no one would believe us. It turned out it was called the Peacock Elephant, and they did it on the dub stage. That's why it wasn't in any of the original sound effects stems, which is like all the original sound stuff. There's another controversy shot. The wolf comes up, stomps, and just crushes the head of a wiggling alien torso. Yeah, that's the point where all the alien fans get up and walk out. The reason there's no acid blood is because it's run out of the... torso and his arm stumps where they got cut off, so there's not a whole lot of blood left. He's got those really thick sandals, though, so it makes it okay. But, yeah, so that alien squeal, they were recording the peacock in a zoo, and at that exact moment as they recorded the peacock, a baby elephant did its little trunk thing in the background. So those two sounds were literally married together in the recording, and then that is the sound effect that Cameron used for all the alien deaths. So once we finally found that thing, We put it in all the shots. Ricky finishes off our alien with an extra half dozen shots from his clock. There's our helicopter. Very similar to Vasquez in Aliens, though, I would say, for our legal defense. And now we're getting into our final epic battle sequence. Between Wolf and Chet. And again. Not a lot of time to shoot this. No, I mean, this was going to be a much... There was a whole way... It's typical, sorry. It's a much bigger battle thing. That battle was going to be like a little mini three-act story. And it just turned out we would have needed extra weeks of shooting, so we didn't really get every part that we had wanted. There's the damage that happened to the wrist computer. The one shame, too, with this stuff was the Predator, when he was punched his way out of the roof and came out, he was supposed to be covered in glowing Predator blood, completely fucked up from the... Falling down the elevator shaft. And it washed off. Literally, he would step out, they'd turn on the rain, all the blood would come off. Yeah, we couldn't get a way of getting glowing blood to stay on his torso. And it would have been millions of dollars in visual effects, which we didn't have, so we were like, okay, fine, he can't go. You know, which is a shame, because I think if we could have done it that way, this scene would have been so much more intense with him being completely fucked up. But, eh, you know, you do what you can. It's like we kind of call ourselves, like, the Marines. You know, we do more with less, because that's kind of... That was our motto on the shoot. Okay, and then this is now the setup for basically nuking the town. Which is the continuity containment weapon. There's an F-22 Raptor flying inbound. And the Chet trying to jam his inner mouth striker into the Predator. Originally, we had an idea of once he ripped the inner mouth striker out, that the wolf actually jammed it through the Predalien's dome. Cementing the death blow. And then also here, he was supposed to, the Predator's arm was supposed to completely melt off from the acid, but again, you know. Again, it was one of those things, you can't have everything you want. Yeah, we just literally couldn't pull it off money-wise, but, you know. I mean, and the thing is, like, it's like two shots. Good news is this sequence, I love the way this all worked out. It looks, you know, a huge set of visuals here with the nuke coming down, wiping out the whole city. Basically, the subtext is that the humans are even more lethal than the alien or the predator. Yeah, I mean, that was actually one of the ideas that when we first were attached to the script that we liked, that even though it's alien versus predator, I mean, at the end of the day, the humans win in every movie. And the humans you could almost call as the most evil of all the creatures. At least there's some honor with the predators and stuff like that. And the aliens at least have a very consistent, unified purpose in life. But the humans, you know, it's like we end up killing more than any of these other ones. Yeah, a predator may suicide himself, but the humans will suicide a whole town. Yeah, so, you know. And then this scene, you know, we were supposed to have ash falling down everywhere, but this, again, this was something where we just— Yeah, we wanted it to feel a little more post-apocalyptic. Yeah, we were on a ski slope when we were filming this, and— It was going to cost so much money for cleaning up all the ash afterwards that it was like... If they would have even let us drop it in the first place, because there were a lot of questions about... Yeah, you say, like, oh, we want to bring all this synthetic material in and blow it with huge fans into your forest. Well, thank you, guys. And a lot of people give you a look like... Thank you, guys, for doing your part to save the environment. Yes, exactly. This was kind of cool. When we got to pick out all these guns, the armorer, who's the guy with the weapons, had the coolest place ever. You go to this giant vault, and the guy must have had like 500 guns. 500 guns. Every machine gun, everything you could possibly imagine, and we got to play with them for like a whole day. So that was actually kind of fun. Colin's really into military porn. Yeah. Well, no, even on one of our shooting days, I got to actually fire a P90, which is this cool submachine gun thing. And actually, I got film footage of myself firing it full auto. Oh, wow. Which was pretty fun. But we needed to test them out to, you know... Trying to get muzzle flashes to show up on film is a little bit of a science because different types of ammunition have different size of fireballs that come out the end of the gun. So we needed to test that stuff. Now, there was a second ending that we wanted to shoot for this, which we unfortunately ran out of time. And it was going to be a possible DVD ending where after Dallas hands over the gun, you just see the Special Forces guys raise their machine guns. It's like... Like, they were all going to get killed. And we just wanted to shoot that as, like, one scene. Just, you know, and we're like, ah, yeah, didn't have time, but I guess that might have been a little mean. Yeah, as you can tell, the brothers needed a lot of producerial direction. Yeah, I guess there was a limit to how many children and pregnant women you can slaughter in one film, so that might have been pushing us over the edge. That's a little sanguine. And now we're into our final setup, which was like... This was a challenging one because we filmed this at BC Place, which is the big sports arena in Vancouver. Yeah, we really wanted to find a big, huge location that said military industrial complex written all over it and just sort of the architectural style. But we had like $12 to dress it up. So we're trying to find this... Yeah, it was tricky. Also, just getting that location was tough because there's a lot of concerts and sporting events and trying to fit into our schedule. We had to build back our schedule in around there. So I think it worked out fine. And what's the linkage? Let's talk about the linkage here. Well, the idea with this scene was the show, you know, it's like how did the technology – you know, get so good by the alien. And we've seen Weyland in the last movie. Now you have Yutani. Now we've established Yutani and that she's some sort of evil corporate power and, you know, that she obtains part of her technology in the film. So it's a good setup to bridge that, you know, if you look at the timeline to the Aliens films, how did, you know, humans create spaceships and get that technology so quickly? So quickly. That allow for the sort of space travel that we saw in the other films. Yeah, and it ties into Predator 2, which was the whole idea that they were trying to, you know, secret government organizations trying to capture the Predators and get their technology from them. So it's like that scene to us sets up for what could be the, you know, the AVP3 and, you know, how it bridges to the Alien franchise. And the last thing I'd like to say is just... It's very interesting how the music builds, especially big on Brian Tyler's name. I don't know how he timed that out. We keep teasing him about that. We should quickly do our thank yous. We want to thank 20th Century Fox for allowing us to make the movie. Alex Young, who was our executive, who's now president of production, who was a fanboy all the way. And Hutch Parker, who worked through the whole process with us and provided a lot of guidance. I'd like to thank Dan Zimmerman, our editor, who just did a fantastic job and Obviously, all of our cast, John, Reiko, Steven, Ricky, Ariel, and Johnny Lewis. Everyone else, there's not enough time to go through all the names, and our great crew up in Vancouver. Yeah, I want to really thank Lars. I mean, like I said, Lars and Paul Deason, and then Andrew, our production designer, who really... And I forget, Daniel Pearl. Yes, and the man, Mr. Pearl. Fantastic. Kelly Moon. Yeah, Kelly Moon was our, yeah, she was our script soup, and she really just also helped everything together. Yep, all those guys kicked ass. Mom and Dad. I think we've lost our audience. Thank you, everybody. I hear crickets. Okay. Thank you very much. Bye.