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?
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?
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.
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?
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?
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, 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?
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.
