This place stinks like mothballs cooked in engine oil and looks like Satan’s hillbilly backyard. A three-story cliff wall looms over a flat area carpeted in woodchips, dead foliage, rocks, burnt logs, pointy leafless trees, fortified animal cages, and a huge piece of alien architecture resembling a trident prong jutting from the ground. Canvasses of stretched skin hang like kites caught in trees. Human, animal, perhaps even dinosaur skulls and bones litter the terrain. Some of them are twined together into ghastly sculptures. Mounds of lumpy viscera and blood punctuate the landscape.
Welcome to Texas.
Or more precisely, welcome to the set of Predators. Or even more precisely, welcome to the Predators’ hunting camp built in the parking lot of Troublemaker Studios on the outskirts of Austin, Texas. This is where the hunters hold up, relax, skin dead things, and trade campfire stories about some dumbass cousin of theirs getting ghosted by a giant log or their own Frisbee. Good times.
This is not the Predators’ home world. It’s a planet used as a game reserve, where Predators drop off abducted human badasses (and other alien life forms) and then go about killing them so they can make conversation-piece ashtrays from their skulls. Next to the hunting camp you walk into 22,500 square feet of thick, green jungle with trees shooting up far above.
While part of the film was shot in Hawaii, for the sequences needing more control, a mandate was laid down to production designer Caylah Eddleblute: “Build a jungle in Texas… in the winter.” Not a simple task. Austin does not roll out the type of balmy weather during winter you’d expect from a Texas town. Below freezing temps and ice storms are common.
Greens designer Richard Bell, the type of man with a trusty pair of shears always holstered on his hip, and crew stapled 1.5 million silk leaves to create the jungle canopy. Yet, the majority of the plant life is alive and requires constant care in the low temps to prevent browning and droopiness.
Although his biggest fear has nothing to do with temps or the grisly set decoration he’s been spending 90-hour weeks working around. “There’s been times when I have walked on set and the whole set has been eaten by deer.” he says. ” It’s amazing how much they eat.”
In the era of computer animation, most filmmakers would say screw the leaf stapling and the goddamn deer. We’ll just do it all in post-production. In fact, Predators‘ producer Robert Rodriguez and his Troublemakers Studios are industry evangelists when it comes to digital post-production. They’re responsible for Sin City, a movie in which literally everything on screen, except for the actors, was added during post-production via the magic of microchips and keyboards. Yet, they’ve ditched the green-screen fetish on Predators. Practical, in-camera effects are the guiding principal. After all, that’s how John McTiernan did it on Predator over 20 years ago, and it seemed to work out pretty well.
Fake blood oozing from his ears while standing on the studio parking lot full of tractors chugging nearby, Topher Grace, a veteran of green-screen performing from his Spider-Man 3 days, details the experience of his “zero” green-screen work on Predators. “The thing that’s really wonderful about this film is it’s all in-camera, so far. Everything we’ve done, we’ve done.” Topher says. “It’s always easier for actors when it’s there. It’s less acting. If you’re jumping off a waterfall, and you have to indeed jump off a waterfall, it’s no acting required. Whereas if you have to pretend what it might look like to jump off a waterfall, it becomes a lot harder. I think it’s harder for the audience to buy it.”
Yes, some environments will require minor CGI tweaks, as will the alien hounds and the Predators’ cloaking effect. Yet, for the most part, what you see in Texas is what you get on the screen. According to director Nimrod Antal during a break between shooting on a smoke-choked set, “There’s minimal CG and 99% of it will just be enhancement of practicals.”
A clash of trends exists in genre films these days. You have one camp — the Avatar sect, if you will — preaching the wonders of CGI. All CGI, all the time. No one can question computers have handed filmmakers a palette to share every detail of their imaginations with audiences.
Yet, another camp of several filmmakers, actors, and loud movie geeks chafe against this world of pixel obsession. CGI may wow the senses, but it lacks soul. They want things on the screen to have weight and remain palpable. After all, “The wookie always looks better than Jar Jar,” says Antal. Hard to argue…
Fox Studios and Troublemaker Studios graciously allowed RopeofSilicon to visit the set of Predators in Austin, Texas, last winter. Stay tuned throughout the week for our 4-part series. You can click here for Part One and here for Part Two and look for tomorrow’s final installment on whether I think this film will be any good… or not.
