Sci-Fi Dan Trachtenberg to direct Predator film ‘Badlands’

[DarkKnight88]

Honestly, making the Predator basically the protagonist of this film is probably one of the more novel ideas this franchise has had and I can’t believe nobody ever thought of it sooner. Like, of course, it’s so obvious it seems like a no-brainer.

Ahem lol

 

[Still Wynning]

Ahem lol

I said “protagonist” as in from the perspective of a Predator from the outset and fully formed and fleshed out as character. The posted example barely qualifies.

 

[DarkKnight88]

I said “protagonist” as in from the perspective of a Predator from the outset and fully formed and fleshed out as character. The posted example barely qualifies.

Look, we can just call Paul W.S. Anderson a trailblazer and end it here lol

 

[BlackFox]

Cant wait to see footage of this to see what has been cooked up. Still angry we never got to see Prey in the cinema, such a good movie and looked beautiful.

Not going to lie and say Im not going to miss Naru and Sarii in the next installment but this does sound promising. Trachtenberg can hopefully pull it out the bag again.

 

[Pennywise]

Some new info on Badlands from Trachtenberg.

Predator's Dan Trachtenberg Talks Killer of Killers

Filmmaker Dan Trachtenberg offers new insight into Predator: Killer of Killers and the future of the franchise.

comicbook.com

By putting the Predator in the central role of Badlands, it required Trachtenberg and his collaborators to flesh out enough backstory for the Yautja culture. One of the biggest challenges involved developing the culture’s language, a process the filmmaker approached organically.

“That’s one of the cool things of the movie, is that, outside of very brief glimpses in other films, we’re on Yautja Prime, what is known as Yautja Prime mainly from extended universe stuff. There’s a lot in this movie that is more from the extended universe than is from things that are properly in the movie,” the filmmaker detailed. “I should mention the language. We, insanely, decided to really treat that properly and worked with, we reached out to the guy who does the Na’vi language [in Avatar], who was very occupied, and recommended his mentee. We did it the way that, for The Lord of the Rings, you would do Elvish, for Game of Thrones, you do Dothraki. Except for those, there’s more precedent, for us, there’s very little. As we discovered, with him being a language expert, all the stuff, and frankly, actually working with [Predator special effects artist] Alec Gillis, all the stuff that you’ve seen in other Predator movies is complete garbage. There’s no sense of it. People from the Internet have tried to make sense of it, but none of it was made with intention.”

He continued, “So we decided to make it with intention and we completely developed the language, so everything they’re speaking has actual rules and structure and all that stuff. And written as well as verbal. Very early on, we just did explorations, concept art explorations of what Yautja could be. I wanted to be very careful in making this, that I not fall into a trap that is making something that is more lore-focused than story-focused. I think, lots of times, when people do more in a franchise, there’s a tendency to really go whole hog into the Senate trading committees and whatever. I thought we should just have a little sliver of that, but not let the movie be like, there could be some expectation when people hear the premise that the movie is going to be all about the inner workings of the Yautja culture and that’s not — we wanted to still make it feel genre, feel very specific. Really, what it is, it’s an inversion of the premise of now the Predator is on a planet. He’s going to be hunted by things and has to use his guile to figure out stuff. While we were writing, we were doing concept art and things like that to figure out the world-building of it all.”

Not only did Badlands require the creative team to expand on the world of the Yautja, but new methods were also utilized to inject more life into the main hunter, known in the movie as Dek.

“We did a very new thing with the creature. The thing that’s been special about Predator is that it’s had practical suit effects. It’s one of the first big pioneers of that art. All the movies have featured that craft,” Trachtenberg explained. “The problem is that … when we did some early tests for this movie, we realized the obvious thing, is that it’s typically a horror character. It pops out of the shadows for a few seconds and we see glimpses and it’s cloaked for so often. This movie, you really wanted people to connect with Dek. Unfortunately, the rotors that go inside the mask that is usually adorned for the Predator not only affects all the physicality of the creature, so it makes people move a certain way, but also it just does not have the articulation to bring people in and connect to a creature. We were trying to do this thing of, we want you to bond with a horrific-looking creature. The methodology was a guy in a suit, and you’re seeing suit, the whole thing, other than his face. The face is all digital, largely handled by Wētā Workshop.”

​

While there have been a lot of technological advances in visual effects since the first Predator hit theaters in 1987, the filmmakers were tasked with finding the right balance of honoring the past while using cutting-edge techniques.

“The thing I should have mentioned, that I think is very cool about how we’re treating the faces — the CG is so that, we expressed this in Prey, where we had some [scenes] we would augment a lot,” the director clarified. “There was a lot of handover between the practical and digital, like in his hands and picking up things and things you would never notice. Some things, unfortunately, were a little bit noticeable. A lot of that, it was when we went to a face occasionally and it became a creature face. The cool of what we’re doing … where it’s digital, it’s meant to match the suit. So it’s not matching creature flesh, it’s matching his suit, which has a look to it, which Wētā makes amazingly, and should feel like an alien creature, but it’s still a little different than like when you see a full CG Gollum or any alien creature in any cool Alien. It’s that flesh is different than suit, and so the face perfectly blends in and is matching that suit quality. So, hopefully, it looks like real material.”

Conveying the physicality of the iconic creature is a task easier said than done, though Trachtenberg confirmed performer Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi not only rose to the challenge of playing the Predator in Badlands, but also offered an opportunity to convey components of the Yautja that he hadn’t anticipated.

“Let me tell you, this guy, Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi is the actor’s name. We had a very specific casting for Dek. We thought we would want a stunt guy and this was a real opportunity, because all the other Predators need to be like seven-foot-six. It’s very specific people that aren’t often trained stuntmen,” Trachtenberg pointed out. “They happen to be that size and they decide to get into this business. [Prey star] Dane [DiLiegro] did want to be in the business, but he also was an ex-basketball player, he was the one who played the feral in Prey. Here, it was the first time I was like, ‘Oh, we can get a proper stunt guy to be the guy who can move in the ways…’ And at one of our castings, we had a number of stunt guys and then this dude Dimitrius came up and the way he moved just had a great swashbuckle to it. He just was so cool. We set up a little physical obstacle course. That’s how we cast him. Then he did some dramatic stuff from the movie and it was awesome. I was not at all prepared for what he actually does, it’s so … I could not believe, how did we luck into this guy? It’s crazy that we found him. Then he gave so much to the movie and learned the language and, I mean, that language is, not everyone can do it. I can’t do it. I can’t even pretend. You have to make a whatever [click sound] in the back, and he can just do it. He would learn it that morning, if we changed lines or whatever, and it was incredible.”

Schuster-Koloamatangi also helped drive the facial performance of Dek, as Trachtenberg recalled, “It’s why there’s some of those dots there, he’s totally driving the animation. But then also, and this is important to say, is that it’s very much also shared with animators that are … if something in the look didn’t quite hit what we needed to … we’re really in this process where we’re discovering how to animate this face. It’s very different than Gollum or [Planet of the Apes] that are a one-to-one translation to a human face. They’ve got these mandibles, and we just discovered the other day, whenever Dimitrius blinks, we might not want to see the Predator blink. That might just be an eyebrow movement, and we tried that. Like, ‘Oh yeah, that feels more like that emotion.’ And how to make his smiles and snarls and whatever work with the mandibles, they’re different than the mouth inside. It’s all been very tricky and we’re, thankfully, really finding our way through it.”

 

[Pennywise]

 

[Broseph44]

This looks ****ing awesome and badass.

 

[Pennywise]

 

[Kane52630]

Dan Trachtenberg can do no wrong. Looks fun.

 

[Pennywise]

https://collider.com/predator-badlands-elle-fanning-character-details-explained-dan-trachtenberg/

https://collider.com/predator-badlands-protagonist-explained/

 

[BlackFox]

Looks good, more CGI heavy than Prey, but going for more epic scale with larger beasts involved so it kind of has to be. Loving the design of the new Predator and making that the lead protagonist is a nice change of pace.

 

[Sithborg]

A little iffy on the cgi face, but whatever. Still looks amazing. Can't wait to see it on an actual movie screen.

(please release Prey in the theaters in a build up to this)

 

[BlackFox]

Any chance they do a double feature with Prey before hand, that would be the dream.

 

[Ninjablade]

Looks neat. Very intrigued by premise, and I like that it's something different for the film side of things in this franchise. If there's one slasher killer that can work as an action hero, it's the Predator.

 

[donuts]

Meh

 

[Venom 1988]

Looks great, pretty excited about this.

 

[Pennywise]

‘Predator: Badlands’ – Dan Trachtenberg Previews His “Big, Crazy Swing” [Interview]

With the upcoming animated anthology movie Predator: Killer of Killers, Dan Trachtenberg imagines how Yautja warriors would fare against earthly rivals from different warfare eras. Exciting, right? Well, Predator: Badlands is an even bigger swing. As revealed in its first trailer, Trachtenberg’s...

bloody-disgusting.com

Trachtenberg’s list of influences on Predator: Badlands will have action diehards salivating. “There’s a Frank Frazetta, Conan the Barbarian, Spartan thing … but also you think of The Book of Eli or Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior … Shane, [very] western, very Clint Eastwood-y.“ Dek even starts to resemble Conan or Drax the Destroyer later on. The filmmaker went on to detail how happy he was with Prey’s execution but wanted to push Predator: Badlands even further, andmentioned Terrence Malick when recalling his shooting style on set in New Zealand. “We were out in the wilderness with hip waders, in trenches, with eels, and all that for 90% of the shoot … but things were also augmented.“ Despite Trachtenberg’s moderate distaste for the overused descriptor, the word “grounded“ was also tossed around. “We need a better word than grounded, but it’s hard to find.“

Something we didn’t see was Elle Fanning’s introduction as Thia (reportedly), nor is Trachtenberg ready to reveal her origin. When asked if there would be more human interactions than Fanning, the answer was, “No comment … I want to save the fun.“ In the slightest of expansions, in response to a question about what Trachtenberg learned about developing character arcs from Prey to Predator: Badlands, he commented, “[Her] story [has the same roots but] is a bit different thematically, and starts to go into a different branch of proving oneself.”

As a bit, Trachtenberg asked us if we had theories about Fanning’s top-secret character. A fellow journalist suggested she’s a hunter from another planet. But someone else noted she has an android-esque mannerism and posed the possible Alien tie to Weyland-Yutani. Trachtenberg smirked, chuckled, and gave us a sly, “Yes, she does.” Is this just the tricky lead-on of a creator keeping our minds racing? Or is it unclear confirmation that we’ll be seeing the Predator and Alien universes colliding again soon? “There’s a unique hook to her character that is exciting in the pairing of [her and Dek].“ Get to speculating, internet.

 

[Sithborg]

I mean, you can see the W patch on her shoulder.

 

[Snow Queen]

Her eyes also roll back with the logo.

 

[Kane52630]

ID4 easter egg?

 

[BrollySupersj]

Trailer was very cool. I like all the aesthetics of the world, the Predator's face, and the Weyland Yutani references.

I'm thinking we are headed straight into a new AVP.

 

[TheFuture]

ID4 easter egg?

View attachment 130936

I think so.

That design and whole presentation of the ID4 Aliens still freaks me out. The idea of a Predator running amok in one of their hive stations or home world just makes me smile, I don't care how dumb it seems to connect the franchises!

 

[AVEITWITHJAMON]

Yep I'm in.

 

[Pennywise]

This’ll be the first film in the franchise I see in theatres! Going to be awesome!

 

[TheVileOne]

So Thia is an android right? Or a human with cybernetic implants?

This looks awesome, though, can't wait. I love the premise. It looks like a Dark Horse story come to life.