Moviefone Editorial

Tag: predator

  • Exclusive: See Artwork from Hero Complex Gallery’s Upcoming John McTiernan Tribute Show

    There are few universal truths in life – radio stations play the best music on Fridays, peanut butter goes great with chocolate, and John McTiernan is the greatest living action filmmaker. The man behind “Die Hard,” “The Hunt for Red October,” “Predator” and “The Thomas Crown Affair” is a master of character and craft, fashioning one artful, high octane blockbuster after another. These are films that are the definition of iconic. And we thought, You know, he would be a pretty cool guy to fashion an art show around. So for the better part of a year, we’ve been working with our friends at Hero Complex Gallery in Los Angeles to bring you A John McTiernan Art Show, just in time for Christmas on December 21st.

    65 artists from all around the world contributed to the show, which will celebrate the totality of the filmmaker’s career. And we are so thrilled to share two of our very favorite pieces with you — one is a “Die Hard” piece by Scott Park, who turns all the action and chaos of that film into something truly adorable. The other is a velvet painting (!) of Arnold Schwarzenegger from “Predator.” Both are amazing and are only the tip of the iceberg. Stay tuned for more …

  • Exclusive: ‘Predator’ Director John McTiernan Celebrates the ’80s Classic’s 30th Anniversary

    This summer, John McTiernan‘s sci-fi action classic “Predator” turns 30 and, looking back on the film, it’s aged damned well.

    The tale of a bunch of muscle-y special forces operatives, who go into the jungles of South America to rescue hostages and come face-to-face with something way more otherworldly, “Predator” is the rare 1980’s action film (alongside one of McTiernan’s other classics, “Die Hard”) that exists in a timeless space of pure enjoyment. Much of this has to do with the commitment of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Dutch, the leader of the team, and Stan Winston’s effects, but even more of it has to do with the rollicking sense of adventure that McTiernan brought to the project. “Predator,” 30 years later, is still a really good time. (If you’re wondering why the endless parade of sequels and reboots has never really worked, well, here you go.)

    I got on the phone with McTiernan to talk about the 30th anniversary of the movie, what Shane Black was really doing on set, Jean-Claude Van Damme‘s involvement in the project, and whether or not he views it as a classic.

    Moviefone: When did you first board the project?

    John McTiernan: Fox had developed it and they were ready to make it when they got to me.

    What was appealing about the project to you?

    Obviously, it was just fun. It was an innocent monster movie. It was good popcorn-eating. And most of those action films are filled with all sorts of hateful things and this one wasn’t, this was fun. In particular the idea became fun when they said they wanted to do it with Arnold. That made the entire thing much more interesting.

    Was Arnold a part of the project before you became involved?

    We went to meet him. We went down to South Carolina, where he was making a film, and met him there to talk about it.

    Was he attracted to the same things you were about the story?

    Sure. I think so yes. And it was certainly a great part for him.
    The rest of the cast is really interesting, as well, between Carl Weathers or Shane Black. Was there any guiding principle for hiring the rest of the guys on Arnold’s team?

    No, not really. To some extent, 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!

    Is there any truth to you having Shane Black on set for rewrites, but then not using him at all?

    Well, we tried to get him to be on set for rewrites and he didn’t want to take the job — and he was happy to take a job as an actor. And yes, he did contribute. He was always coming up with ideas and things. Like that goofy joke he told, that terrible joke — I heard him tell some guy that joke at lunch, and I said, “We’ve got to put that in the movie!” Because it was what Shane was like. We just used him for what he was like. He didn’t have to act or pretend to be somebody else. It was neat.
    And now Shane is directing a ‘Predator’ movie. Have you talked to him about it at all?

    No, I haven’t.

    You shot the movie in Mexico. What was that experience like?

    Well, it was two parts: I was a very young director at the time, so I didn’t have a lot of credibility. The cameraman and I wanted to do it on the Caribbean side of Mexico, where there’s jungle. And there was somebody with the studio who wanted to do it in Puerto Vallarta, because it has big hotels. I think he owned a condo there. And he hadn’t done any homework and the Pacific side of Mexico, the trees are deciduous, they drop their leaves.

    So, we prepared the movie when it all looked green and we got there to shoot and the leaves were turning orange and falling off. So after we’d shot two-thirds of the movie or so, by then the studio had been seeing footage and they decided they trusted me a little bit, so we then got to move the company over to the Caribbean side of Mexico, near Palenque. All of the jungle that’s in the movie was shot there.
    I remember seeing documentary footage of you guys having to glue leaves back to trees.

    It was pretty ridiculous.

    You famously ordered a redesign of the monster during shooting. But is it true that Jean-Claude Van Damme was in the original version of the suit?

    Yes. We never shot anything with him. It was a complete screw up with his agent, trying to hustle him into a job and didn’t know what the movie was. It’s silly. It was really silly.
    When you saw the second version of the monster did you know he was going to be a classic creature?

    Oh, yeah. We’d been working on it for a couple of months in Los Angeles, practicing things and working out how the whole crab face worked. That was a lot of fun to watch because it was all airplane controllers, the various things on his face. So there were like five kids off camera who had some portion of his face with a radio airplane control on it. There was one kid who had the eyebrows and one kid who had the claws. And they had to practice. It was like puppetry — but very complex puppetry. You had five puppeteers make one monster work.

    Has the legacy of the film surprised you?

    I don’t know. It was a good, fun movie and I’m glad people still like it.

    But you didn’t know you were making a classic?

    No, one doesn’t set out to do that.

    In the breadth of your career, where do you place this movie?

    It was just a fun thing to do. I enjoyed it. But, again, I’m not a historian of my own career and I don’t find it real useful to think about stuff like that. That’s for other people to do. As I said, the whole idea of it was it was supposed to be fun. And it seemed innocent. I still get meetings for action movies and most of them are mean, they have mean hearts and are filled with cruelty in one sort or another. It just misses the point of why people go to the movies. People go to the movies to have a good time. Most people forget that or lose track of it — why those people sent their $10 to see the movies.
    And the sequence where they’re shooting into the forest is your commentary on guns, right?

    Well, it was sort of a commentary. There were some studio types who were basically into gun pornography. They wanted to sell gun pornography. They said I wasn’t doing enough close-ups of guns and stuff. So I said, “Why don’t I just do a whole scene?”

    But I also made it one that had something to do with the story, because all of these guys have giant guns and the whole point is that they’re helpless in the face of this monster. That’s the whole point of the story. They’re these enormously, heavily-armed guys, and they’re not prepared for this. So the whole point was, we hit nothing. But it also got rid of the gun pornographers because I gave them five minutes of nothing but guns. So they were quiet after that.

    Jesse Ventura’s gun was off of a helicopter, right?

    Well, we made it. There were a couple of guns we made up, that the military made afterwards. The one with the 40mm grenades? We made that. There was nothing like that. And it seems like the military has made one. We made one. It was scenery. It was battery-powered. And we made it for the movie because we thought it was cool. We were thinking like 14-year-old kids. That is the ultimate critic or advisor in a movie like that, you have to listen to the 14-year-old boy in you. So we made up that gun.
    The Gatling gun was a machine that is mounted on helicopters. Nobody’s ever carried it. That’s ridiculous. It runs at a quarter speed — just so you could see the barrels rotating. Otherwise, the barrel would go so fast you couldn’t see it. And if it was running at full speed and shooting –- one, even somebody as big as Jesse Ventura could only carry two seconds of ammunition — but it would also bury him in shell casings up to his knees in about ten seconds. It’s ridiculous. But it was fun. We made it up.

    Well, being someone who is a fan of your films, it’s obvious what the studio made you stick in the movie, but you had ways of getting back at them. They didn’t let you shoot anamorphic so you stretched out the Fox logo at the beginning, right?

    [laughs] Yeah, that was funny. They wouldn’t let us shoot anamorphic at the time because it was early days on computer stuff, and they didn’t think they could handle it. Now, they can do it — but, at the time, they were just hoping they could figure out how to do it. So they were afraid to let us work with anamorphic.

    You think if you made it today, would you approach it any differently?

    No, I don’t think so. You have to make the movie that the 14-year-old boy wants to see.

  • ‘Overboard’: An Appreciation

    In 1987, MGM released director Gary Marshall‘s “Overboard.” A gentle screwball comedy released during the height of the sex comedy craze of the ’80s, “Overboard” starred former Disney kid Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn (then a box office dynamo and one of the most powerful women in Hollywood). Hawn and Russell were a real-life couple at the time, having gotten together on Jonathan Demme‘s underrated “Swing Shift” (they had previously met on the set of a 1968 Disney movie, “The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band”), but all the celebrity couple buzz didn’t add much heat to the movie’s opening. Instead, the movie came and went, making a modest profit and receiving only so-so reviews (Roger Ebert was one of the film’s few fans in the critical community).

    But the movie has endured. Last month, Anna Faris announced her intentions to re-imagine the property, and we recently devoted an hour of our very own podcast to applauding the movie’s goofiness (and puzzling over its legal implications). It has gained a loyal and voracious cult following amongst even the most ardent film fanatics, and, 30 years later, it’s unclear how anyone could have believed it to be anything but a classic.

    So the question remains: why?

    While it is true that the movie is a nostalgia-lover’s dream come true, from the hairstyles to the bouncy score by Alan Silvestri (that same year he also scored a little movie called “Predator“) to outdated hairstyles to the somewhat primitive understanding of both gender roles and the criminality of what is essentially kidnapping, one of the reasons the movie has endured is how timeless it truly is.

    Part of its timelessness has to do with the ingenious tonal grafting of a 1930s screwball farce onto a 1980s relationship comedy. It was a bold move for sure; this is the decade that was defined by T&A extravaganzas like “Porky’s.” It was rare to see something so sweet. Marshall’s style and sensibilities (an approach that borders on the classical) is perfectly suited for “Overboard”; aside from a couple of Pee-Wee Herman references and some of the clothes, the movie could be set in almost any time. Russell is a blue-collar carpenter, Hawn is a snooty heiress and through a series of zany coincidences, she becomes his wife. That’s pretty much all there is to the story. There are few ties to contemporary technology, popular culture or — another hallmark of Marshall’s style — politics. It’s just the story of a family, framed by a traditionally gonzo conceit.

    Then, there are, of course, the performances.Hawn is finally making her return to cinemas this week with Amy Schumer’s “Snatched,” and re-watching “Overboard,” it’s hard not to get positively giddy at her comeback. Her performance in “Overboard” is genuinely incredible. Watching the early scenes of her lounging around a luxury yacht, she is dressed like Lady Gaga and purrs like a Real Housewife crossed with a Disney villainess (a wicked stepmother maybe or an evil sorceress). When she loses her memory and Russell convinces her that she’s his lost wife, her performance becomes more dimensional, nuanced, and effective; she finds contours to the role that would have escaped other actresses.

    Every moment feels like it’s on the border of becoming something endlessly remembered and a handful of the times it actually does. Who could forget when she has had enough of Russell’s children playing pranks on her and she brings a hose into the living room and douses them all? It’s something that, if you come across “Overboard” on basic cable, you’ll watch until at least that scene. It’s just one of those sequences you remember and love and is just as funny and charming as it was 30 years ago. The fact that she’s able to give the character (ostensibly two-dimensional and saddled with a ridiculous central premise) so much depth, is a testament to her abilities and Marshall’s kind encouragement. (Oftentimes the camera doesn’t move or cut; it just stays still, waiting for whatever Hawn comes up with.)

    And as good as Hawn is, Kurt Russell matches her. It’s clear that the movie was filmed during the first part of the couple’s relationship — a relationship that has, all these years later, kept going. The way he looks at her, even though he’s trying to pull a fast one, is a sparkly combination of infatuation and awe. (Just watch the scene in which he explains the Portuguese story of why boats honk three times when returning to port and you’ll understand.) In “Overboard,” he’s a perfect blue collar slob, excitable and crass, but also one who is wounded (he’s a widower in the movie) and able to bring nuance and emotionality to any scene (no matter how charged with goofy energy); he can also veer left during a potentially dramatic scene, too. Whatever you think he’s going to do, however you think he’s going to play it, he does the opposite. It’s a performance of endless surprises.Another reason it’s endured is how funny it is. Because it’s really, really funny. And it’s not just the performances of Hawn and Russell. It’s the way in which Marshall moves (or doesn’t move) the camera; look at the reveal early on in the film of Hawn’s elderly roommate in the hospital, or how calm the camerawork is. Characters bounce in and out of frame, huge chunks of dialogue are recited, the entire frame is alive with energy but the camera stays steady, allowing everything to be seen and heard when it is supposed to, giving jokes and gags proper room to breathe. (At almost two hours, it’s also unfashionably long for a comedy of the period.)

    The supporting performances are terrific, too, from Edward Herrmann to Roddy McDowell (who was also an executive producer) to all the young actors who play Russell’s kids (the “She might have no t*ts but she’s got a nice *ss” line reading might be the best in the entire movie). Everyone is deeply committed, both to their characters and to the movie’s off-the-wall vibe, which makes it even funnier. Nobody is over-the-top and that commitment to realism inside what is obviously a fantasy makes it that much funnier.

    But the real reason “Overboard” has lasted all of these years and become such a favorite has to do with the movie’s last 30 minutes, which are really, really emotional. Hawn’s character finally comes face-to-face with her actual husband (Herrmann) and is compelled to return to her old life. Again, Hawn is peerless: The look on her face as she registers the situation, the way her physicality changes from boundless to hollowed-out, and how she sticks her fingers in her ears as her would-be children come crashing into the side of her limousine (all yelling “Mom!”) It’s deeply affecting in a very plain way.

    Marshall’s unfussy direction and lack of sentimentality means that these scenes play out with ease; her return to a pampered life are juxtaposed with scenes of Russell dealing with the boys on his own in their shabby house. Even when there’s an element of suspense, the camera luxuriates on Hawn and Russell’s faces. It’s sort of miraculous, especially in the current climate of rapid-fire editing. It’s these quieter moments that ground the movie’s climax, which is pretty huge (it involves two boats and really reinforces the title). At the very end, we even get a nifty twist, but one that never undermines what came before it.

    “Overboard” is a movie that has an oversized conceptual framework but an even bigger heart.

  • First Look at ‘The Predator’ Cast, Including Olivia Munn and Sterling K. Brown

    Predator“The Predator” is back! And there’s a whole new group of people ready to take him out.

    Writer/director Shane Black is overseeing a sequel to the franchise, which was born in 1987 with the original “Predator” movie. Yesterday, he shared the first image of the cast in costume, including Boyd Holbrook, Olivia Munn, Sterling K. Brown, Keegan-Michael Key, “Room” darling Jacob Tremblay, and “Moonlight” breakout Trevante Rhodes. Black noted that this is only the partial cast, though:

    Black takes on the first film in the franchise in seven years (after 2010’s “Predators”) and has said it is not a reboot, but a sequel. He also tweeted a few days ago an indication that the movie will definitely be rated R. “Spines bleed a lot,” he wrote.

    “The Predator” is currently filming and is set for a Feb. 9, 2018 release.

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  • ‘Predator’ Reboot Adds ‘Moonlight’ Star Trevante Rhodes to Cast

    The Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences Hosts An Official Academy Screening Of MOONLIGHTKey details about Fox’s “Predator” reboot are still few and far between at this point, but one more has just been revealed: “Moonlight” star Trevante Rhodes has boarded the project.

    The actor joins a cast led by Boyd Holbrook, according to Variety. Rhodes’s character will reportedly be the best friend of the one played by Holbrook. Unfortunately, that doesn’t give us much to go on in determining what that means for the plot as details are still under wraps.

    Whatever his part in the reboot, Rhodes comes to the film fresh off the critical success of “Moonlight.” As the adult version of drug dealer Chiron, he pulled off a breakout performance. The drama has earned multiple Golden Globe nominations and is expected to be an Oscar contender as well. Rhodes is also slated to star in the upcoming drama “Song to Song,” starring Ryan Gosling, Rooney Mara, Michael Fassbender, and Natalie Portman.

    Meanwhile, “Predator” will continue the sci-fi horror film series that kicked off in 1987. Directed by Shane Black, the reboot is slated to open on Feb. 9, 2018.

    [via: Variety]

  • The ‘Predator’ Reboot May Star Olivia Munn: Report

    ENTERTAINMENT-US-SPIKE TV GUYS CHOICEThe “Predator” reboot may have found its leading lady.

    Olivia Munn is in talks to star in the latest film in the sci-fi horror franchise, reports THR. If she signs on, the actress will join Boyd Holbrook, who is set to play a Special Forces commando. Munn’s would-be character is reportedly a scientist, but with most plot details remaining secret, it’s unclear exactly how she’d be involved in the story.

    The film stems from a series that launched with 1987’s “Predator” and has continued with two sequels and two spinoff movies so far. The upcoming reboot was penned by Shane Black and Fred Dekker and is said to center on an alien-hunter hard at work in none other than the suburbs. Black is also set to direct.

    Munn is definitely prepared to take on another action flick. She has appeared in films like “X-Men: Apocalypse,” “Ride Along 2,” and “Iron Man 2.” Next up for her, though, is the upcoming comedy “Office Christmas Party.”

    The “Predator” reboot is scheduled for release in 2018.

    [via: The Hollywood Reporter]

  • Benicio Del Toro Is Out of ‘The Predator,’ ‘Logan’ Villain May Replace

    EE British Academy Film Awards - Red Carpet ArrivalsBad news for Benicio Del Toro fans may be good news for Boyd Holbrook. Del Toro was negotiating to play the lead in Shane Black’s “The Predator” reboot, but he is now out. The scoop comes from The Hollywood Reporter, which added that Holbrook is Fox’s choice for the new lead.

    Holbrook is not exactly a household name at this point, but he may be on your radar as the new villain in “Logan,” the third Wolverine solo movie. He’s also known from “Narcos,” and maybe “Gone Girl” and “Morgan,” to some extent. THR said Fox is “planning on beefing up the supporting cast” to compensate for the loss of an anchor like Del Toro.

    Why is Del Toro out? The studio had no comment, but THR noted that his schedule was a challenge from the beginning, and it’s implied that they just couldn’t make it work — even after Fox pushed back “The Predator” start date to February to make room for the actor’s other projects. Sources told the site scheduling issues creeped up again when Del Toro’s other movies (including the sequel to “Sicario” and “Star Wars: Episode VIII”) had their own scheduling changes.

    The original 1987 “Predator,” directed by John McTiernan, starred Arnold Schwarzenegger as a soldier hired by the U.S. government to rescue a group of politicians trapped in Guatemala, only to be hunted by the stealthy title character itself. So “The Predator,” scheduled for 2018, was aiming for its own Ahhnold-level action star. Maybe it will help boost Holbrook into the next level of stardom. Unless he drops out from too many other projects, too.

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