PREY

DIRECTOR DAN TR ACHTENBERG TAKES THE PREDATOR FR ANCHISE BACK TO BASICS WITH NEW MOVIE PREV

WORDS: DARREN SCOTT

Dane DiLiegro as the Predator. No spoilers here!

WHEN DIRECTOR Dan Trachtenberg takes time out to talk with SFX – wearing a Weyland-Yutani Corp baseball cap, no less – he’s in the final days of working on Prey, saying it’s “the most intense it’s ever been” as they complete sound and visual effects. It is, he says, “a very precarious tightrope we’re walking.” Gulp. If it doesn’t make it to Disney+ on time, don’t blame us.

Originally produced under the codename Skulls (“Always a cover-up,” he says, “Prey was actually the first title that I pitched”), this fifth instalment in the “regular” Predator series was originally in early stages of production at the same time as 2018’s The Predator.

The then 20th Century Fox saw Prey as an opportunity to mimic the Star Wars franchise, by having a “main trilogy and then there’s these interesting side stories”. Slightly sidelined by the Fox/Disney merger, this new take on Predator was influenced, he says, by minimal dialogue, action movies and survival stories – “a single character going through a gauntlet”.

That character is Naru (Amber Midthunder), a highly skilled warrior who sets out to protect her people in the Comanche Nation – only she’s never hunted something quite like this before. Naru and Prey, Trachtenberg says are “a lens-shift from the typical action hero that we see in this kind of movie. I started thinking about, ‘Who is the person that’s never the hero?’”

He thinks back to third grade and, not being allowed to see the original Predator in 1987, recalls some friends recounting the action to him. “They got to this part where they described Billy, the Native American scout, getting into a fight with a Predator on a bridge over a waterfall.

“Then I saw the movie eventually when I was old enough, and that part is not in the movie. The set-up is there, but the pay-off is not. So I always thought, well, what about that movie? That’s what I want to see.”

UNDER ATTACK

Prey is set 300 years in the past; fans may recall a pistol bequeathed to Danny Glover’s Mike Harrigan in 1990’s Predator 2, engraved with the year 1715… “As I was thinking of the movie, the Predator thing trickled in for me and I thought of that gun. I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this can work that they were here, that they came around this time.’ So it certainly was an unlocking element for me for the story for sure.” From here, Trachtenberg knew the direction a new Predator movie had to go. “I always think the Predator, Alien and Terminator movies, despite having different directors, all feel like they’re of their own little genre,” he explains. “I think it’s in large part, mainly thinking of Aliens over Alien, the action-horror mash-up, but with a real hankering for the military aspects feeling more authentic than not. There’s always this authentic blend of where you’re rooted in the real world, then the introduction of the sci-fi element, that McTiernan and Cameron were so deft at.