PREDATOR: A 35th Anniversary Oral History

Introduction

Forever immortalized as the film that gave the world the “epic handshake meme,” Predator (1987) is, perhaps, the zenith of the oft cocaine-fueled science-fiction/action films of the 1980s. The successful merging of these two money-making genres started with Star Wars (1977) and continued with such classics as Alien (1979), Blade Runner (1982), Tron (1982), and The Terminator (1984), to name but a few. Universally considered to be in the running for the greatest action film of all time, the John McTiernan-directed classic revels in the masculinity, bravado, and sheer testosterone of it all. Plus there’s body butter, lots and lots of body butter. 

Efficiently told via a tight and exposition-free script, Predator leaves very little meat on the bone, literally. A popcorn movie of the highest order, the film has spawned a multimedia franchise in the ensuing decades. This includes video games, comics, books, and six subsequent films. Often imitated but never bettered, Predator is just as popular today as it was thirty-five years ago.

While its main characters are now seen as misogynistic, homophobic, and out of touch, the film’s main themes of brotherhood and sacrifice still remain relevant. Cinema Scholars presents an oral history of the making of this classic film, as told by the people who made it.

Beginnings

Rocky IV (1985) was an incredible box-office success. The over-the-top defeat by Sylvester Stallone over, it seems, the entire Russian Federation, created an inside joke around Hollywood. It was stated that Stallone had run out of “earthly opponents” and would need to fight an alien. First-time screenwriters, and brothers, Jim and John Thomas ran with this idea.

They wrote a script called Hunter, eventually retitled, Predator. The brothers were able to get the script into the hands of 20th Century Fox producer Michael Levy. Levy liked it and handed it over to his boss, legendary producer Joel Silver (48 Hours, Lethal Weapon, Die Hard).

Jim Thomas spoke with The Hollywood Reporter in 2017 about writing the Hunter/Predator script with his brother and how the genesis of Predator was born:

“I had the basic idea for Predator, which at that time was called Hunter, and my brother was laid up from a back injury from the beach, so I said, “Well, do you want to write a script with me?”…We just sat out on the beach and composed this thing over a period of about three months…the original conceit was always, “What would it be like to be hunted by a dilettante hunter from another planet the way we hunt big game in Africa?”…we sent a barrage of letters out to every agent and producer that we could think of and got rejections back from virtually everybody…I heard of someone at Fox who was a reader. We got the script to this reader…so this reader turned it over, from what I’ve heard, to Michael Levy or Lloyd Levin’s assistant or reader, and they happened to read it and these young junior executives who had just come in there really liked it…Joel Silver got attached, he had just done Commando and had a good relationship with Arnold”

It was Silver’s decision to make Predator a big-budget tentpole production. John McTiernan was tagged to direct the film based on the recommendation of John Davis, one of the producers. Davis had recently seen a small independent feature McTiernan had helmed, Nomads (1986). Starring Pierce Brosnan, the film was McTiernan’s first. Predator was also John Davis’s first feature film.

Davis, an executive at Fox, had recently gotten friendly with Schwarzenegger during the production of Commando (1985). Subsequently, the Austrian Oak insisted that Davis come to Mexico and be a producer on his new film. Davis went on to have a successful career, producing almost sixty films over thirty-five years.

John Davis spoke with Variety in 2017 about being a producer on Predator and how his friendship with Arnold Schwarzenegger gave him his start in the industry:

“The Thomas brothers snuck the script onto the Fox lot and under somebody’s door…We got there on Monday, and there was this script. I was an executive at the time, and I had been working with Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was a really good friend of mine. We were always both trying to figure out how we could work together. And so I’m the executive on this movie at Fox, and what happened is I became a producer. I auditioned to become a producer. And Arnold says, ‘Well, you’re becoming a producer now. You need to actually produce this movie and come to the jungle with me. Let’s go make this”

Casting     

McTiernan and his team traveled down to South Carolina to pitch the idea to Schwarzenegger, who was still filming Commando. The bodybuilding champion and future governor was relatively new to acting. The plan from day one was always to surround Schwarzenegger with veteran actors. Castmates that the rising star could siphon and sponge knowledge off of.

Carl Weathers of Rocky fame was cast for this very reason. Weathers was an experienced actor. He was also a physical specimen and athlete that Schwarzenegger would have to compete with. Add legendary wrestler, former Navy SEAL, and future governor, Jesse “The Body” Ventura to the mix, and Arnold would clearly have to bring his A-game.      

Another intimidating presence that was added was veteran actor Bill Duke, a menacing-looking figure with a stone-cold and dead-eye stare. Duke had a working relationship with Silver and Schwarzenegger as they had worked on Commando together. Shane Black was a young writer punching up scripts for Warner Brothers.

While he was finishing up his first script, Lethal Weapon (1987), McTiernan and Davis wanted Black to punch up Predator. However, Black saw himself primarily as an actor and requested a small role in the film instead. A deal was made and Black agreed to make rewrites in return for being given a small part as one of the commandos. He was killed off seven minutes into the film.

John McTiernan spoke with Moviefone in 2017 about the casting process for Predator and how it was important to surround Arnold Schwarzenegger with intimidating and talented actors:

“I wanted him to have a couple of good actors around him because Arnold wasn’t that experienced at the time. He hadn’t made very many movies. But I knew that he was very smart and he’s like a sponge. He just picks up information from people. So I tried to keep people around him who knew how to act, particularly Carl Weathers. Arnold was really wonderful about that—you could tell. Normally, the star stays in his trailer when they’re doing a scene with the second lead. Nope. Whenever Carl was working, particularly during the first half of the movie, Arnold somehow wasn’t in his trailer. He was standing around watching what was going on. He was learning! That’s why I cast Carl. Because Arnold is so competitive, right? So I gave him someone to compete with! A guy who is a much more experienced actor!”

In Predator, Schwarzenegger stars as “Dutch,” an elite Special Forces soldier leading a rescue team into a Central American jungle. As additional testosterone support, Arnold is teamed up with actor/stuntman and legendary bad boy Sonny Landham. The actor’s onset antics reached their zenith during production when a bodyguard was hired to watch over Landham. This was on behalf of the film’s insurance company as they were worried about the safety of the other actors.

The cast is rounded out by Elpidia Carillo (Salvador, The Border), Richard Chaves, another veteran of the Vietnam War, and R. G. Armstrong. The seven-foot-two inches tall Kevin Peter Hall was cast as the titular character. However, this was not without some controversy. 

Van Damme

Jean-Claude Van Damme was initially cast to portray the Predator. At the time, he was not yet the legendary action star he has since become. To date, his only major credit was as a villain in the martial arts film No Retreat, No Surrender (1986). Further, the design of the Predator costume was much different than what we have since come to know and love.

The original design was a bizarre cross between the video game character Q*bert and the H.R. Geiger designs from the Alien franchise. Four-time special effects Oscar winner Stan Winston had not yet gotten involved in the project. Needless the say, the stories of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s short stay during the production of Predator are legendary.

The reasons why the Muscles from Brussels left the project after only a few days into principal photography are varied. Most parties agree that Van Damme hated the red full-body suit that he needed to wear for the matte scenes. It’s also widely reported that he did not get along with producer Joel Silver.

Van Damme, at one point, smashed the $20,000 head of the suit to the ground, destroying it in front of Silver. Silver swore Van Damme would never work in Hollywood again. Producer John Davis has gone on record as stating that it was simply because Van Damme was too short to play the role.

Jean-Claude Van Damme spoke with The A.V. Club in 2008 about what he thought the Predator costume would be versus the reality of what it turned out to be:

“They did a cast of my body. My feet were in the cast of the alien. My hands were in the forearms, my head was in the neck. I was moving everything with cables. It was a very unsecure, very dangerous type of outfit. It didn’t work for nobody. They put air conditioning into my back, because it was very hot in Mexico. So they did another outfit with a bigger guy, taller guy on the inside. So I was hired, then I was cancelled…But that helped for Bloodsport. It’s a very funny story, because when I met Menahem Golan from Cannon, he heard about me playing the Predator, and he was very excited to sign me for Bloodsport. That helped me a lot”

Regardless of whether Van Damme was fired or voluntarily left, he was quickly off the set of Predator and summarily replaced. The producers redesigned the Predator costume and recast the role with the seven-foot-two-inch tall Kevin Peter Hall, well over a foot taller than Van Damme. This was done so that the Predator could more physically dominate the film’s human characters.

Hall also appears unmasked at the end of the film as a helicopter pilot. Van Damme, to his credit and work ethic, used his failure in Predator to launch his career. The legendary Belgian action star has maintained a successful career spanning over thirty-five years and almost sixty feature films. 

Filming

While there were delays due to prior commitments from Schwarzenegger, filming on Predator commenced in the last week of March 1986. On location in the jungles of Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico, the shoot was an unmitigated nightmare. The cast and crew had to deal with the oppressive heat of the jungle, as well as illness. This was due to eating and drinking contaminated food and water.

Additionally, there were almost three hundred Mexican crewmen, confined to the tight spaces of the jungle with almost nothing to do as two weeks into production, all of the leaves started falling off the trees. This left the crew unable to film. Someone had failed to do the pre-production research and now the entire cast and crew were in a quagmire.

Venomous snakes and bad drinking water were not the only obstacles during production. McTiernan lost twenty-five pounds because he refused to eat the local food. Schwarzenegger suffered a similar fate, getting noticeably thinner throughout production. At one point, he had to perform a scene with an IV in his arm. McTiernan even fell out of a tree, breaking his wrist.

Evidence of this can be seen in numerous behind-the-scenes photos. Adding to the nightmare, was that the Predator’s infrared POV shots were almost impossible to achieve as the temperature on location was equal to human body temperatures, thus making the actors invisible to infrared shots. They eventually solved the issue via camera trickery and expensive special effects.

Arnold Schwarzenegger spoke with Cinefantastique in 1987 about the brutal conditions during the production of Predator and the rigors that he had to endure:

“I I took more abuse on Predator than I did in Conan the Barbarian…I fell down that waterfall [40 feet] and swam in this ice-cold water for days and for three weeks was covered in mud. It was freezing in the Mexican jungle. They had these heat lamps on all the time, but they were no good. If you stayed in front of the lamps, the mud dried. Then you had to take it off and put new mud on again. It was a no-win situation. The location was tough. Never on flat ground. Always on a hill. We stood all day long on a hill, one leg down, one leg up. It was terrible”

The infamous ‘suit’ used during the production of Predator is another story that has since become the stuff of Hollywood legend. In fact, almost half the film had already been shot before the revamped costume had arrived. When it did arrive, it wasn’t much better. In fact, it was so bad that production was shut down for almost six months while the legendary Stan Winston and his special effects team designed a new one from scratch.

Adding to the chaos was actors Bill Duke and Sonny Landham partying at local Mexican clubs on the weekends. Things got so out of control that Landham, apparently, was crawling on the floor and either touching or kissing women’s legs on the dance floor, as per Bill Duke. Shortly after that was when a bodyguard was hired to keep Landham’s antics in check.

Assistant Director Beau Marks spoke with The Hollywood Reporter in 2017 about the difficulties that the production team had with regard to the Predator costume:

“We needed two different Predator suits. One is the suit that when you can see him and one’s the suit where you couldn’t see him, which was a kind of a hold-out suit. It was all red so when we shot it in the jungle we could pull a matte off of it. Probably a couple weeks before we needed the Predator a box comes. And we open it up and it looks like a giant red rubber chicken. It’s pretty hard to have the most deadly alien from outer space coming to hunt man and it looks like a fucking chicken unless you’re doing a comedy. The real suit came shortly thereafter and it wasn’t any better. So we shot some tests with it and it became quite obvious that this was a disaster”

McTiernan decided to bring in an expert, Gary Goldman. This was because the director thought his cast might be a little “soft” when it came to enduring a brutal jungle production. Much like the characters portrayed in Predator, Goldman was a Vietnam veteran. After testing the cast’s cardio in the brutal jungle heat, Goldman agreed that the cast was not field-ready or battle-tested.

Goldman took the team for a week and taught them tactical maneuvers, how to properly run in jungle conditions as well as how to hold and use assault weapons. Goldman did his best to get the team to look like seasoned commandos, and it shows in the finished product. It also helps that Schwarzenegger had an entire gym trucked into the hotel that he and the cast and crew were staying in.

The hotel’s ballroom was converted into a testosterone-fuelled workout room where each member of the cast tried to one-up each other when it came to pumping iron. Schwarzenegger would routinely make fun of his castmates, challenging them to act like “manly men.” All of the stuntmen would also join in as they had to make sure their bodies matched the actors in terms of physicality.

Post-Production and Release

The score for Predator was composed by legendary film and television composer, Alan Silvestri. Coming off of the huge success of Back to the Future (1985), Predator was the composer’s first major action film. The completely orchestral score is filled with Silvestri’s usual tropes. Deep and heavy horns. Disjointed string rhythms. Ominous and resonant timpani rolls. All of this deftly underscores the growing and tense action and suspense that builds throughout the film. Silvestri would be back to score the sequel, Predator II (1990).

Composer Alan Silvestri spoke with Soundtrack Magazine in 1991 about composing the score for Predator and wanting it to have the feel of an old-time horror film:

“I met the producer, Joe Silver, while we were dubbing Back To The Future…We hit it off very well, and we had been looking since then for a film together, and when Predator came up, the call came…The schedule worked and all and we decided to do the picture together…After seeing it and after having some talks with the director and producer, we wanted to somehow have it have the feel of an old-time horror movie, suspense-horror film. We knew we wanted a large orchestra for it, and that there was going to be a lot of music…We needed the orchestra in this case to really give us the size, and we used a great deal of electronics for a lot of percussion-type work, a lot of effects, so it was a combination of the two, really”

R/Greenberg Associates created the optical effects for Predator. This includes the alien’s ability to turn invisible. The design group also created the Predator’s thermal vision point of view and the glowing green blood. In order for the Predator to become invisible, a stuntman had to wear a bright red full bodysuit. The red was removed via matte shots and chroma key techniques. the result was an empty space where the stuntman should be.

The crew then reshot the scene with a wider lens and combined the two takes optically. The result was that awesome camouflage-looking outline that you see in the finished film. For their incredible and challenging work, the team received an Academy Award nomination for Best Visual Effects. Joel Hynek, Robert M. Greenberg, Richard Greenberg, and Stan Winston were all recognized in the nomination.

Predator was released on June 12, 1987. The film was a smash hit success, reaching number one at the domestic box office on its opening weekend, grossing over $12 million. This was second to the top-grossing film of the year, Tony Scott’s underrated Beverly Hills Cop II (1987). On a budget of under $20 million, Predator went on to gross just under $100 million worldwide during its initial theatrical run. While the film received mixed reviews from critics, the legendary Roger Ebert stated in 1987:

“Predator moves at a breakneck pace, it has strong and simple characterizations, it has good location photography and terrific special effects, and it supplies what it claims to supply: an effective action movie…Stan Winston, who designed the creature, has created a beast that is sufficiently disgusting to justify Schwarzenegger’s loathing for it.”

Legacy

In the ensuing thirty-five years, the legacy of Predator has grown, as the film often appears on numerous “best of” lists. In 2007 Entertainment Weekly named the film the 22nd greatest action film of all time. IGN hailed the film as the 12th greatest action film of all time in 2012. A strong cast and a fantastic monster make Predator a film that is eminently rewatchable. Much like another McTiernan classic, Die Hard (1988), Predator is the original and unmatchable film that spawned a franchise that has lasted decades.

It takes all the excesses from the 1980s and wraps it up in an easy-to-follow plot that is filled with machismo, bravado, and plenty of chemistry between all of the actors. The film may not be reinventing anything when it comes to action films, but it’s a lot of fun and a timeless classic. If you haven’t seen it, ‘get to the choppa’ and seek it out. You won’t be sorry.  

Check Out More Oral Histories From Cinema Scholars!:

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BOOGIE NIGHTS: A 25th Anniversary Oral History (Click Here)

The Hollywood Vampires – A Drunken Oral History (Click Here)

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