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PREDATOR was released 38 years ago today. Among the most popular science fiction/action movies of the 1980s, and one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s biggest movies, the behind the scenes tale ain’t got time to bleed…

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In the mid-1980s there was a joke in Hollywood that after beating Ivan Drago in Rocky IV, Rocky Balboa would have to fight an alien next. In response, screenwriters Jim and John Thomas took wrote a screenplay about a killer alien coming to earth. They called it Hunter.

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The Thomas’ didn’t have an agent so sneaked into 20th Century Fox and slipped their script under the door of an exec. It ended up being picked up by Fox and turned over to Joel Silver produce.

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Joel Silver had just produced a huge action film hit in 1985 with Commando. As such, he showed the script for Hunter to Commando lead Arnold Schwarzenegger, who agreed to star.

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The script went through changes:
- The name was changed to Predator because there was a US series called Hunter.
- The script focused on a band of alien hunters. This changed to one alien.
- The film had a Native American as the lead. This character evolved into Billy.

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The first director attached was Geoff Murphy, known as the ‘New Zealand Spielberg’. Years earlier, Murphy had interviewed to direct Conan The Barbarian 3 and called the character “Conan The Librarian”. Arnold Schwarzenegger remembered this and put the kybosh on Murphy.

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Producer John Davis remembered seeing John McTiernan’s Nomads (1986) and being impressed by what he created on a budget of less than $1m. He screened Nomads to Schwarzenegger and Joel Silver, and they loved it. So McTiernan was hired as director.

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Military consultant Gary Goldman said he was impressed with Schwarzenegger’s effort and how seriously he took the training. And DP Donal McAlpine has told a story about how Arnold knew what he was good at, and what he wasn’t…

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Arnold married Maria Shriver in the middle of the shoot. The cast and crew all flew to the wedding on Friday, rehearsed Friday night, Arnold got married on Saturday, had a 2-day honeymoon, and was back on the set on Wednesday.

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Arnold didn’t like the jungle: “We were always on a hill. One leg up, one leg down.” And in the scene where Arnold is caked in mud his temperature dropped. They warmed him by giving him Austrian punch. Arnold said “the more I had, the more drunk I got.”

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Carl Weathers played CIA man Dillon in the film and seemed to have a wonderful time on the set with Arnold.

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Originally, the team arrived in the jungle not by helicopter, but via a team halo jump. The team’s plane would under fire from a mig and the pilot would try to leave. Dutch would run and leap out the back ramp, grabbing a parachute on the way.

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vFresh from the sale of Lethal Weapon, writer Shane Black had been brought in as an actor, playing Rick Hawkins. Joel Silver wanted Black on hand to spruce up the script if needed. Black though, wasn’t keen and wrote a couple of his character’s lines but that’s it.

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Sonny Landham played Billy. He was known to have such a short fuse the studio hired a bodyguard to protect people from him. This bodyguard followed Landham everywhere he went to make sure he didn’t get into any trouble on the set.

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Jesse “The Body” Ventura was a WWF wrestler in his film debut. The wardrobe department told him that his arms were one inch bigger than Arnold’s. So Ventura said to the Austrian Oak they should measure arms. Here’s Arnold telling the story…

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Bill Duke plays Mac Elliot. He has a character tic where he shaves though he’s clean-shaven, and this tic was brought to the table by Duke. The scene where he presses the razor so hard into his cheek that he starts bleeding was a specially made razor that squirted blood.

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The only woman in the main cast, Anna was played by Elpidia Carrillo. She put a lot of work into creating a backstory and McTiernan said: "She knows more about the character than I do."

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A military adviser called Gary Goldman put the actors through the below drills:
- They walked 20 mile treks through the Mexican jungle.
- Goldman took them on road runs in the mountains.
- He set them drills and simulations for a few days.

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Richard Chaves (Poncho) tells a story where he lay down for a rest in the middle of the jungle trek and when he sat up he was covered in hundreds of ants that started biting him. He went into shock and ran through the jungle ripping his clothes off.

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The first person cast to play the Predator was none other than the Jean-Claude Van Damme. The idea was that JCVD would use his martial arts skills to play the Predator as a ninja alien that would do kung fu kicks and perform the splits.

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Van Damme was only on-set for 2 days before he was let go and fired. Some say Van Damme didn’t like the Predator head; when they first put it on him he smashed it on the floor. It cost $20,000, so Joel Silver fired him. There are different versions as to what happened:

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JCVD was out and McTiernan brought 7’2” Kevin Peter Hall in to play the Predator. The same year Predator was released – 1987 – Hall also played sasquatch in Harry and The Hendersons.

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Hall found it tough. The suit weighed over 200lbs so had to be held up by a rig so Hall could move it. He was wearing the suit in sweltering conditions and also couldn’t see out of the mask so had to memorise where he had to walk to in scenes.

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We do see Kevin Peter Hall’s face at one point though as he plays somebody other than the Predator. In the scene at the end where we see inside a helicopter, one of the pilots is Kevin Peter Hall.

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McTiernan had to deal with problems:
- Due to extreme heat most of the cast/crew came down with fever.
- McTiernan wouldn’t eat local food and lost 25lbs.
- McTiernan broke his wrist when he fell out of a tree.

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Boss Studios were hired to design the Predator. The costume was late so McTiernan had to shoot every scene not involving the Predator. Eventually, a huge wooden box arrived – the predator costume was inside and nobody outside Boss Studios had seen it. It looked like this…

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Boss were fired and Stan Winston was brought in. He’d recently built The Terminator endoskeleton and won an Oscar for his work on Aliens. He was paid $1.5m to design the Predator again from scratch.

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When Winston was on the way to discuss Predator, he was on a plane sitting next to James Cameron. He told Cameron what he was working on and Cameron said “you know, I always wanted to see something with mandibles” Winston thought “that’s a good idea”.

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The FX gurus behind the Predator’s cloaking device were Joel Hynek, Robert and Richard Greenberg. When Joel Silver was asking for more funding he said to the studio “imagine this, and when the monster appears, it looks even cooler?”

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The finishing touches on the Predator:
- The head had 9 servomotors to move the mouth and face.
- Its green blood is the liquid from a glowstick.
- The Predator’s clicking sound was recorded by voice artist Peter Cullen - he took inspiration from the noise crabs make.

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The village ambush wasn’t shot by McTiernan but by the 2nd unit director Craig Baxley. When McTiernan saw what Baxley had done he didn’t like it and said “It’s static shot after static shot. It isn’t a war movie!” However, he was convinced by Joel Silver to keep it in.

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Before filming the sequence it took the crew 2 weeks to rig the jungle up with explosives. They didn’t destroy any of the jungle as that location had burned down 2 years before, though they did spend time spray painting the stumps black.

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The Predator POV is apparently like a snake sees its prey. They tried real heat vision cameras but the cord only stretched 4ft feet from the van. Also, the actors be seen on heat vision. They sprayed trees with ice water but that didn’t work so it was done digitally.

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Joel Silver wanted Michael Kamen to write the music after working with him on Lethal Weapon. Kamen was already booked on Adventures in Babysitting so McTiernan asked Alan Silvestri as he was a big fan of Silvestri’s Back to the Future score.

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On its release in 1987, Predator was met with very mixed reviews but quickly became a popular 1980s action classic…

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Predator was a hit on its release and, on a production budget of $18m, grossed about $98.3m worldwide. It has spawned many sequels, but none as acclaimed as the original.

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PREDATOR was released 38 years ago today. Among the most popular science fiction/action movies of the 1980s, and one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s biggest movies, the behind the scenes tale ain’t got time to bleed…

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PREDATOR was released 38 years ago today. Among the most popular...

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