If you didn’t
know, two weeks ago was the twenty-eighth anniversary of the first Predator movie. Amazing, isn’t it. There are
probably some of you reading this who have never known a Predator-free world...
Anyway...
I mentioned
this fact on the fan page that day, which led to a bunch of responses, and some of those led to me saying (in the loud way you can do when you have a fan page) that I actually liked Predators, the sequel with Adrian Brody, Alicia Bragg, Topher Grace, Laurence Fishburne,
A few years
back, while I was still writing for the magazine, I leaped at a chance to do an
article about Predators. While
many folks still love that original film, lot of people didn’t like the
sequels, or the AvP movies, or the short-lived Saturday morning
cartoon. And I knew Robert Rodriguez was
attached to this new project, so I figured there had to be at least a one-page article there, maybe
even two.
There was no
Saturday morning cartoon. I was just
seeing if you were paying attention.
The idea flew
and a few weeks later I ended up over at 20th Century Fox talking with the two
screenwriters, Alex Litvak and Mike Finch.
They’d pulled their dream job, writing a big-budget sequel to the 1987 action/
sci-fi classic, and they were more than willing to talk at length. It’s worth noting that I was face-to-face
with Alex for this interview while Mike joined us on speakerphone. Because of this, Alex tended to dominate a
bit just because Mike, without any visual clues, was left unsure of when he
could jump in.
A few of my
standard points, but you’ll probably figure it out as it goes. I’m in bold, asking the questions. Keep in mind a lot of these aren’t the exact,
word-for-word questions I asked (which tended to be a bit more organic and
conversational), so if the answer seems a bit off, don’t stress out over
it. If you see a long line of dashes
(----------) it means there was something there I didn’t transcribe, probably
because it was just casual discussion or something I knew I wasn’t going to use
in the final article for one reason or another (there are some off the record
discussions now and then). Any links are
entirely mine and aren’t meant to imply Alex and Mike were specifically
endorsing any of the ideas I’ve brought up here on the ranty blog—it’s just me
linking from something they’ve said to something similar that I’ve said.
By the very
nature of this discussion, there will probably be some spoilers in here. Check out the
movie if you haven’t seen it yet. It’s a
fun sequel with some great Predator action.
Plus you’ll get a bit more out of this interview.
Material from
this interview was originally used for an article that appeared in the
July/August 2010 issue of Creative Screenwriting Magazine.
So, anyway, here’s
me going after Alex and Mike with questions about Predators
How did you guys
start working together?
Alex: I started out in development, spent about ten
years working on movies as a production/ development executive, including here
at 20th Century Fox. That was my first
big break. And then five years was spent at a company called Intermedia,
working on a bunch of movies, helping the Germans piss away a
lot of ... (laughter)
Mike: Yeah, I’d
been working for about ten years before this.
The very typical screenwriter story.
I’d worked on a bunch of projects, sold some specs, several movies had
been very close, had worked for most of the studios doing rewrites or
assignments, but--that very typical story-- none had gotten made. I was definitely a working screenwriter, but
somewhat of an unfulfilled working screenwriter. Adequately paying the bills and liking the
lifestyle, but not enjoying the success of having a movie made.
A: Mike’s actually
a second generation screenwriter. For me
this all kind of fresh and new. Mike’s
dad and his mom created Dirty Harry
and Ice Station Zebra.
M: And I’ve been
living off that ever since. (laughs)
How did you guys get
on board Predators? Wasn’t Robert Rodriguez just going to write
it himself at one point? When was this?
A: This actually,
for me, goes back aways. When I worked
here, at the time I was just obsessed with the idea of doing another Predator
movie. The original is so iconic ad the
second one was kind of a misstep. I felt
there was another great tale to be told.
At the time we {studio) were doing Alien: Resurrection, which didn’t quite work. They’re both
kind of in the same wheelhouse, and the idea of doing another Predator movie without Arnold was kind
of “ehhhh.” So that never
materialized. Just as I was making the
transition to screenwriting.... You come up with these ideas just as a
fanboy. ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to do a
Bond movie where Bond does X?’ It was a
moment like that with a Predator movie.
‘Wouldn’t it be cool to see a Predator movie where Y happens?’ At the time I hadn’t written or sold
anything, so I just filed it away.
Cut
to present day, 2009, right after Medieval,
we walk into a room at Fox and sat down with Drew Crevello, who was a huge fan
of the script. We started talking about
what’s next, we were completely available, and he says ‘Predators. We’re reviving
this movie.’ It was an old script by
Robert Rodriguez who I think wrote it in ’94, fresh off Desperado. At the time it
was wildly expensive and taking the franchise to a cool other level, but not
sort of do-able at the time. So Alex
Young found the script and wanted to revive it with Robert, but they were
looking for other screenwriters to come in and polish it off. Reinvent the reinvention. So it was around the same time last year, May
of 2009, that we got the job.
As fans you’ll
always kind of go ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to do this?’ Isn’t that the reason why we are in this
business—to tell the stories in the mythology, in the genre, with the characters we love? It’s every fanboys dream and we got a chance to live
it. Only to discover, of course, that
once you get the prize there’s all this hard work and blood and tears and
sweat.
M: And Fox and
Drew Crevello and Alex Young and Robert Rodriguez and later on Nimrod Anatal,
the director, were very supportive. They
wanted not to make a retread of the original, nor did they want a reboot. They wanted a reinvent the franchise. They wanted to take something that was
incredibly fresh at the time that had become somewhat stale over the last
fifteen years. Essentially give it a
fresh start in the world. To their
credit they were very supportive of letting us take Robert’s original document
and poach those elements that were workable and good, especially with the
specific budget constraints that they had, and make it into something new and
fresh. We were told to write a sequel
that feels like an original.
What was that
original thought you came up with? The
‘wouldn’t it be cool...’
A: There was a
bunch of things. One is the idea that up
until now you’ve only seen one variety of Predator. One of the big ideas was it’s Predator vs.
Predator. What was interesting to us is
you’ve met this one variety of intergalactic hunters, but what if there are
others? Other tribes, other clans. If
those guys are like samurai-- very traditional, for centuries they’ve been
hunting with the same weapons, the same tactics, the same code--there’s another
clan which are more like, say, ninjas.
They’re more technologically evolved.
They have falcons, they have dogs, they have all this crazy equipment
and toys that are going to make the original Predator look like an 8-Track
competing with an iPod. And those two
clans are at war. So the idea of two clans,
of clan warfare, was one of the things we came up with.
M: A second one
was the idea of putting a group if human beings in a no-win situation, a true
crucible, was very intriguing to us. We also liked this conceit that in the
original you had a well-oiled machine, a crack team, going up against one of
these. In this version we wanted to put
a group of very disparate individuals.
All highly skilled, all tactically proficient, all killers in their own
right. Really... all predators in their own right. Human predators. And we wanted to see what would happen to
those characters when they were put under true duress. These were people who were dominant and
dangerous in a human environment. Taken
out of that environment and put somewhere else, in a sense being turned from
Apex predator to prey, what would happen to them? How would they break down? Would they experience cowardice? Fear?
Would they curl up in a ball and die?
Surrender? Stand and fight? It really let us explore seven different ways
into true fear.
A: And there’s the
third piece which is the setting, which is---not giving anything away--not only
an alien planet but an alien hunting preserve. Prior to us getting the job I
had a conversation about it independently with one of the other producers on
the franchise and pitched the idea of going to the stars. He was like “Ehhhh, Predator is a very terrestrial franchise. Up until now it’s all been on Earth.” So that idea never flew. Ironically, when we
sat down with Drew, it turns out Robert, independently, has been talking about
going to the stars, because it seemed like the natural place to go.
So the three
things we brought to the table. One was new Predators. Two was new human protagonists that Mike was
talking about. The Dirty Dozen approach. The Unmagnificent Seven. And three was a new setting. So effectively you have the construct of the
first movie, but it’s different Predator, different humans, different jungle.
Since the original
came out twenty-odd years ago, there’s been the sequel, a bunch of material
from Dark Horse that a lot of people took as canon, the two vs. Aliens movies that seem to loosely
follow the Dark Horse ideas... Did you
use any of that material?
A: No.
I’ve seen the AvP movies and I
feel... I was disappointed. Predator 2 was a disappointment,
too. The original is the original. The original is this iconic bar that you try
to measure up to. I’m not sure if we have succeeded. I’m not sure if anyone can succeed. It’s this lean, mean piece of cinematic mastery. It’s Arnold at his best. It’s John MacTiernan at his best. I don’t know if anyone can truly measure up
to it, but at the least we were very conscious that we were going to try our
best. What was fun about the process was
everybody who was part of it grew up on the original movie. Everybody was saying ‘Let’s not be lazy. Of course we can do another Predator movie,
but let’s try to give the fans something special.’
We talked a lot
about Star Trek, and how JJ was able
to give the fans the essence of the original but with these new cool touches
that made it fresh and cool again and give the franchise a new life. That’s what we’re hoping to do for Predator.
M: To answer your question, we ignored Predator 2 and the AvP series. This is
somewhere between a reboot and a direct sequel to the original Predator.
A: We wanted to acknowledge the original
existed. There are references to the
original in this script. The story of
the original gets told by somebody in the group who’s heard about it as an
urban legend. A spook story.------
Fundamentally we wanted to take the good Predator,
the one that did it right, and kind of ignore everything else and do the true
sequel. As Mike says, the sequel that
feels like an original
What’s your
process? Are you outline guys, notecard
guys, what?
A: Our process is beyond
bizarre but it actually works.
M: First part is we don’t actually ever see each
other.
A: We’re never in the same room. (laugh) We start
by having these endless conversations about what it is, starting from the macro
to the very specific. Our styles of
writing... I’m incredibly anal and analytical about stuff, to a fault. Mike is very, very fast and goes with his
instincts. We sort of balance each other
out that way.
So we talk
about everything. Kind of build it in
our heads. I’m a big fan of putting
stuff down on the page because that sort of locks stuff down. Then Mike goes in and does the very first,very rough pass. In a weird way, when I
go after and do a very substantial rewrite, it gets me over the fear of a blank
page. I’m looking at a very rough draft
of a scene where some things work and some things don’t, but I already know
what’s not working. Then he goes after
me, cleaning it up and fixing things I missed.
M: But it isn’t like I present Alex with a full
script. I’m working about ten or fifteen
pages ahead of him. I will start on
Monday and I will write ten pages and give it to him and he’ll start rewriting
it. Then the next day he can give me
those ten pages and I’ll give him the next ten or seven or twelve or
whatever. And since we have
diametrically opposed schedules--I’m married and I have a five year old. I go to bed at nine but I get up at six or
five.
A: When my night
is just beginning.
M: It’s like one
person working 24 hours a day.
We tend to
problem solve quickly while we’re in the process. That’s the upside. That is in large part built on the tens or
hundreds of hours we spend time talking about the macro concepts and the
micro-specifics, down to left-handed or right-handed. Every beat that ends up on the page has been
discussed on some level.
So just to be clear,
the two of you never actually outline, but you get enough of it in your heads
you can sit down and write?
A: I hate doing
those documents, but sometimes I feel like...
Sometimes there’s a loose beat sheet.
Sometimes we do more structured stuff, especially when you have to
present something to a studio, where it helps to lock it down somewhat. It really depends on the job.
M: We do have a working
document. It’ll run from ten to fifteen
pages. Depending on the situation it’ll
either be in beat-sheet form if it’s for us, or it will be in a more literate,
compelling form if it’s for a producer to read.
There’s always something there.
That doesn’t mean that we stick to it, because as you progress things
change, characters change, you start to understand them better. You start to get under their skin, they get
under yours. The nuances of the script
will change, but structurally we pretty much have it nailed before we go in.
A: I think I
understand your question better now.
Regardless of what form the document is, it’s been outlined and
discussed ad nauseum. We never go ‘Let’s
just start writing.’ We talk, we figure
it out. I think that’s always the fun
part of the process. It’s the
frustrating part, too, sometimes. That’s
where our creative chemistry is strongest, where we constantly challenge each
other to come up with something cooler, something we haven’t seen before.
M: We try to keep
it fun. The reality is, if the process
becomes a grind then it stops feeling light in its feet. It stops being interesting for us. We have a lot of fun. Because we want the audience to have
fun. At the end of the day this type of
movie, an action horror flick, it’s got to be fun. It’s got to keep the audience on their toes
and slightly off-balance. We can only
generate that if we’re having interesting, upbeat conversations about it.
How long did it take
you to get a first draft?
M: This script was
slightly different than others. We can
write a good solid draft in eight to ten weeks, a little bit faster provided it
isn’t all outlined up and detailed and we don’t go off track.
In this process
we actually wrote a first draft which we sent to the studio. That same week they brought on the director, Nimrod Anatal. We had a meeting with him about the rewrite
for a few changes that became slightly more than a few changes. With him we had to amend the way we work.
What happened
for the rewrite was we had about ten or eleven days before we had to hand a
draft into the studio. The draft that
was going to get the OK or not. Nimrod
had some substantial ideas, all of them good.
Drew Crevello was good enough to give us offices in the basement of
Fox. And for ten days we sat together
with Nimrod, sort of breaking scenes and rewriting them. Essentially dissecting the script and
rebuilding it.
A: It was a true writer’s room. Mike would do his pass, I’d do my pass, and
then Nimrod would be sitting right there reading the pages. It was madness. It was a death march to screenwriter’s bootcamp. But we got it done.
M: It was a very interesting process. We had a relatively strong script, but the
changes Nimrod wanted-- some of them were budgetary, some of them were taste,
some of them were content, some were character-- it required that we really
delve into the script. To his credit, he
sat there 18 hours a day for ten days. Sitting
on a couch in the basement of Fox reading our pages as we hand them back and forth,
working until four in the morning every day.
We had about a
day to go and we realized that we had a very solid script but it was about 10
or 11 pages too short. So we sat there
going What are we going to do? We can’t
hand in a script that’s 87 pages.
A: I think it was
less than that. It was in the 70s.
M: Whatever it was, we were missing a piece, and
we didn’t know what it was. We stared at
each other and then someone had the idea there’s this guy who’s been on the planet, who is a human
being who’s survived. Wouldn’t that be
cool? That became the genesis of the
Noland character.
A: A Robinson Crusoe character. Named off Tom Hanks in Castaway.
M: Once it came to us I went into my little
office, wrote for about four pages, and delivered about 12 pages to Alex. He spent the next ten hours rewriting
it. We dropped it in the middle of our
script and we had our script.
A: If Final Draft allowed us to magically expand the script, there would be no Laurence Fishburne character.
I got to see a draft
from July of 2009...
A: I know which draft you saw. It was an early
draft that got leaked. The ten-day
draft.
The first draft
was a lot more epic. The final set piece
in the first draft is a Braveheart-style battle between two Predator
clans. As cool as it sounds, unfortunately
it was the first thing to go because... we can’t afford it.
M: These were the
elements we removed and rebuilt to make it a more refined, tighter story.
A: What you read
is what we call the “down, dirty, survival draft.” It was truly mystifying to us, to this day,
that people responded so strongly to it.
We were just trying...
M: You have to
figure after those ten days we had no idea what was good and what wasn’t. The only thing we had faith in at that point was
each other. And that was quickly fading.
(laughs) --------To this day I sort of
miss that level of intensity.
A:-------------
M: This could not have existed without Drew, it does not
exist without Nimrod, it certainly doesn’t exist without Robert. To their credit, all three of them handled
themselves as true gentlemen. They
could’ve bullied us, they could’ve pushed us, but they elected to be
collaborative and they were fantastically supportive of the crazy, odd ideas we
had.
When is this
set? Predator 2 was in the not-too-distant future.
We only get a glimpse of Royce in the regular world. There’s a mention of Afghanistan. Where does it line up with the other Predator
films? Is this “now”?
A: Yes.
Character-wise, how
much did you flesh these guys out? Do
you know how Stans ended up in prison?
Where Mombasa is actually from?
What Hanzo did that cost him his fingertips?
A: Oh sure, yeah.
M: As a matter of fact, Robert asked us after the fact, for
the DVD extras and the comic book guys, to write extensive bios on each of
these characters. It’s not necessarily
in the script but each of these characters has a backstory. Each of them has a reason they’re there.
Is it tough doing a
story where... well, almost every character is kind of evil? They’ve all got varying moral codes, but it’s
tough to say there’s a “good guy” anywhere in this story.
A: That’s fun,
man. That’s what makes it cool. There’s only so many ways you can write an
action hero. But when you have a group
you have personalities, you have dynamics, you have conflict.
M: Also, we looked
at this as a chance to differentiate this class of character. Once you took these people and put them in a
no-win scenario, a scenario where they were going
to die, the walls between them and us--and hopefully between them and the
audience--really crumbled. Once they
were put in this situation they were able to speak the truth, and like all
humans we found that, even with the limited amount of time we had to spend with
each of them, they became much more interesting. Each of them had a personal story. Yes, they were killers, but they had
families, they had reasons for what they did.
More importantly, we gave them the opportunity to face the fact that
they were bad men and gave them the chance to either stand up and make it right
or to run and die as cowards.
This is why
Noland becomes a pivotal character in the piece. He’s a man who has chosen survival above all
else. He’s chosen to live above
humanity. When our characters look at
this guy halfway through the movie, sort of this linchpin moment, and
understand that he’s become more animal than human—more Predator than human—they
are all asked to make the decision ‘How am I going to go out? Am I going to go out as a human being or as
an animal? And is it worth living if
you’re going to live like an animal?’ So
each of these very hard people with very specific backstories, is each given a
chance to make up for the sins they’ve committed. To die well and for a purpose, for a reason.
And that reason is each other.
A: And if anything, the Noland character is
instrumental in Royce’s arc. Here’s a
guy who’s purely about survival. ‘I
stick my neck out for no one,’ to quote Humphrey Bogart. This very sort of classic antihero. And then you’ve got two contradictory
examples. There’s Isabella, the female sniper, who actually has compassion, who has kindness,
who has managed to hold onto her humanity in the middle of all this. And there’s Noland, who’s forsaken it
completely. The two examples. Royce finds himself at a crossroads. Is he
going to be like Noland or is he going to be like her?
M: The key here is there’s a crossroads for each
of these characters. They all have to make a choice. And they live or die, well or poorly, by
virtue of that choice.
A: You don’t have
that in the original because they’re soldiers.
It’s a homogenized unit. They’re
brothers-in-arms who’ve been together through hell and high water. There’s a bond of friendship, a bond of
trust. None of that exists here, and
that was the fun of it. They come from
such different backgrounds. There’s mistrust, there’s tension, there’s
friction. New bond are being forged,
friendships are being built, but at the same time quarrels and hostilities are
constantly igniting because these are predators. It goes back to the title of the movie. It’s not just about the two different varieties of Predators, the humans themselves
are predators now. Royce is the ultimate hunter. We had so many versions all with the same
idea--you think you’re following a Predator but you’re really following Royce.
M: But all that was lost for a much more startling open.
A: We sort of went
for the LOST-style opening, which is just bang! guy falling.
M: You begin with the
guy in free fall. A guy who wakes up,
opens his eyes, and he’s falling through space.
A parachute deploys...
I saw a draft with
two variant endings on it. Ending A,
ending B. You look at Casablanca, you
look at To Kill A Mockingbird, even
stuff like Aliens or Terminator. You can’t picture these stories with
different endings. Is it tough to write
completely different endings for the same film?
A: Oh, for sure. This was the draft that hopefully gets the
greenlight. We were just trying like
hell to get through and give the studio something that felt like a movie. There were so many arguments about how it
should end. I really fought for the
Dutch ending, because I was like ‘We’re going to be there in Westwood when
everybody’s going to go nuts when he takes off the mask and it’s
Schwarzenegger.’ To this day we actually
don’t know which ending was shot. Nimrod felt it would be cool if there was a
twist with Isabelle. Down the line there was another ending, more of a seventies
movie ending.
M: To answer your question it was not difficult at that
point because effectively the movie was over.
Those endings were epilogs. We
used them as such.
>>note: One version of the film ended
with a cameo from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Dutch, now completely a part of
Predator culture and leader of his own tribe.
Another revealed that Isabella is also an alien, although not a
Predator. Neither of these was used,
although the setup for the first version was shot.<<
