Strause Brothers: On Alien Vs. Predator
A talk with the directors of Alien Vs. Predator.
CraveOnline: Have you gone back to the original Alien and Predator storylines, since AVP kind of fudged the backstory?
Colin Strause: Some stuff has been smoothed over like we redesigned the altar that Scar’s body was on to make the ship a little more Predator-ish. There’s a couple of things. We tried to stay as close as we could be there were a few things we had to massage a little bit just to kind of make the movie more what we wanted it to be.
CraveOnline: Does this pick up right after AVP?
Colin Strause: Yes, shortly after. I mean, we redo the Scar Vs. scene and there’s some extra stuff on the ship which actually they just released on Yahoo.UK the first five minutes of the movie, slightly cut down. There’s a few shots missing out of it.
CraveOnline: There’s also a shot of what we can assume is the Predator homeworld?
Colin Strause: Yeah. There was an exterior of the plant. The big wide on the planet itself with the Wolf ship flying away and then the whole inside his big temple thing where he receives the distress signal and watches all the playback on that.
CraveOnline: So is this teasing for a possible film that’s going to maybe take us to the Predator home world?
Colin Strause: Yeah, I mean, we kind of told them this is to us kind of the end of the Earth story. The next one’s got to be in space. The way we kind of end this it’s like we’re kind of done here, so it would be nice to set the next one before Alien but definitely needs to be more of a space epic.
CraveOnline: So could we get to a point where there’s a movie that’s just monsters and no humans at all?
Greg Strause: Actually that’s a hard sell.
Colin Strause: We pitched on the first one and we had like our pitch was like Dances With Wolves and we had like 45 minutes where there was going to be no spoken language at all in the movie. Needless to say we didn’t get the first movie but we tried.
Greg Strause: It sounds great. We’ll call you.
CraveOnline: Can you talk about the design of the Pred-Alien? How many incarnations you guys went through? Was that the toughest design challenge that you had?
Colin Strause: It was definitely one of the trickier ones. I mean, one of the hard things is that there are so many other people that had to see stuff and approve and try to get everyone on the same page. One of the cool things is we went with ADI the guys have like even for the Predator they must have had 60-70 different concepts painted together of all different Predators. Some of them were from the previous movie they didn’t use, a bunch were new ones they did. Like the Whip was something that one of the concept artists just happened to have. This huge bullwhip and as we went over there on the first meeting we saw them and holy shit this thing is about as cool as it gets. We’ve got to put that in the movie. So, you know it was just really good working with Tom and Alec on that. What they would do is we did our initial designs in Photoshop with our designer. We showed the guys from ADI what we wanted to do, and then they would start doing their paper designs and we’d get something kind of close and then they’d start building all these mequettes. We’d start with the head mechets, and they’d start with the full-body mechets. We probably went through a bit of design work.
Greg Strause: Yeah, I remember going through some of the art work and it was like Pred-Alien version 65 and you’re like Jesus Christ. It’s just naturally going through a lot of indurations but there were some concerns. We wanted to keep him very much or her very much an alien so there was some back and forth in terms of how many predator sort of characteristics should come through so that was what most of the back and forth was about.
CraveOnline: Were there key things that you had to have like with Predator, the key thing is the fangs and the Alien the key thing is the head?
Colin Strause: Yeah, for us it was keeping the Alien teeth because that’s such a distinct feature and having the dome. That’s why we went back with putting the skull actually underneath the glass dome so it has a real Predator skull under there. Even in the original Alien you could never really see it because the photographers lit so dark. We have a couple shots in the movie where you can actually see the whole skull feature and everything underneath. The with the mandibles in that because of the basically the egg laying scene we wanted the mandibles under there so she could actually wrap around almost like a face hugger in a way and grab people’s faces as she’s doing the impregnation. So it was a kind of important design thing. In the battle sequence I think she looks pretty fearsome. When she has the mandible closed she looks more Predator, but when they open up you see the distinct Alien teeth and everything.
CraveOnline: Alien fans have been waiting a long time to see Aliens on Earth. How much fun can you have with that finally within the context of the AVP story?
Colin Strause: The thing we were trying to be careful of is we didn’t want to have Aliens dancing in front of McDonald’s and stuff. I know a lot of people were worried being on Earth it’s like you know what are the locations going to be. One of the first things in our pitch we said the movie’s got to take place and power’s going get knocked out and it’s got to be raining the whole last night. Seeing an Alien in broad daylight or just plain view is going to look stupid no matter what you do. The reason it worked in all the other movies is you were in a dark spaceship, you had flashing blinking lights, steam jets. You had all these great elements to cover them up basically and if you don’t do that they’re going to look like guys in suits. That’s why the first thing we did is get that atmosphere and that in there and the 2nd thing was picking cooler locations. The 1st big battle takes place in this huge underground sewer network. The next battle takes place in a power plant. Then you have the big rooftop battle. Then there’s a National Guard battle on the street in the rain. We tried to pick locations that even though they were earth bound, they still were reminiscent of you know, the power plant is going to look very much like Alien. It’s got all the yellow warning beacons and lot of steam and everything so we’re trying to give it that space sort of feel so even though it is Earth, try not to make it feel cheesy or anything, just give it a much more gritty kind of environments.
CraveOnline: Do you have another sequel planned? You mentioned going into space and approaching the time line of the original Alien movie.
Colin Strause: We’ve been talking very loosely with the writer and all that with what could be the next one but we’re going to wait to see how this one does and then we’ll figure out what the deal is. Definitely the next one’s got to be in space.
CraveOnline: Why the subtitle, Requiem?
Colin Strause: It’s kind of two things. One, it was trying to show the more adult theme to the movie.
Greg Strause: The real answer we can’t give you on record.
Colin Strause: Also it was supposed to make it more adult which is basically the big thing with the movie. The last one was a little bit more kind of a normal sci-fi where ours is much more of a darker town. I think you saw from that clip it’s a lot kind of meaner of a movie.
CraveOnline: What have the Alien and Predator films meant to you as fans?
Greg Strause: It’s funny, Colin and I had said this before, we go on a lot of movie pitches and a lot of times you don’t just talk about the project you’re there to talk about. You talk about things you like. What your tastes are and we’d always be like Predator is the best mission movie ever made bar none and then Aliens just from a horror standpoint scared the piss out of us when we were 8 years old and just loved that movie. Also, though, it’s a scary action film but it’s got a real heart to it. I mean, the whole Ripley/Newt dynamic and her starting as a mom and having to become a solider. It was like this great character of writing in there.
Colin Strause: And also Cameron was a big influence. I mean for us when we moved out here we saw Terminator II, because we were already doing visual effects in Chicago and it was like once we saw that movie we were like we got to get to L.A. You can’t work on toothpaste commercials forever in Chicago. It was like we had to get out here. When we first saw Aliens, it was literally on Pay Per View in a hotel room and our parents were at a craft show or something and we kept flipping on the channel. We’d watch it for a few minutes, we thought we heard them in the hallway, we’d flip the channel back and go back and didn’t realize that every time we did that we kept getting billed like $15 bucks so we had like a $200 bill that our parents just about killed us over but yeah, that was our first time seeing it. We’re just huge Cameron fans too. I mean, I’d say for me the favorite ones are Aliens, Predator and Alien would be my top three.
CraveOnline: Where does Predator 2 fall into that then?
Colin Strause: Lower.
Greg Strause: The rayon shirts don’t hold up as well. They don’t stand the test of time.
CraveOnline: On the tour you said you were already working on an extended DVD. What other extras do you have for Blue-Ray and HD DVD.
Colin Strause: I think there’s some extra concept stuff. There’s still a whole bunch of stuff we’re still going over with the DVD people. We’re still actually doing the DI on it. We have to go there tonight and finish.
Greg Strause: The last bit of color timing work on the theatrical is finished on Friday so we’re just going to start getting into the DVD stuff in the next week or so.
CraveOnline: What’s your final running time on this film?
Greg Strause: You’re going to have to ask Dan. 96 or something? It’s 94-96 right in that neighborhood.
CraveOnline: How do you work together? Is it like one common mind?
Greg Strause: Yeah, we have to otherwise we wouldn’t be able to sit here together.
Colin Strause: It’s interesting. Some things we’re completely aligned on and some things we’re very different about, which is nice because we get to play devil’s advocate a lot, which is a nice thing. Where if a director is by himself, if there’s something he’s not quite sure about, he has to be careful who he says like "I don’t know about this" because it usually looks like a sign of weakness, where I can go to him and go like is this idea stupid or he can go like, "Yeah, it’s a f*cking retarded idea" and we don’t do it or vice versa say this idea’s good. It lets us kind of push each other and lets us battle out the idea so when we actually show up on set we know that we’ve kind of looked at both sides of an issue, picked a way we needed to go and stick with that direction.
CraveOnline: You guys have been involved in so many landmarks effects, what do you think is the next level you can take visual effects to?
Greg Strause: Stereoscopic.
Colin Strause: 3D stuff is going to be the future.
Greg Strause: I don’t know if you guys have seen Beowulf or not but the stereoscopic aspect of that experience I thought it was awesome.
Colin Strause: I wouldn’t bet against Cameron either. If he thinks it’s a good idea I think it’s going to be the future.
Greg Strause: It brings you into the picture more.
Colin Strause: I find myself with my home theatre at home is like I’ll just wait for the DVD, but stereoscopic you kind of have to get your ass off the sofa and get to the theatre and actually watch it. It’s a cool thing because going to the theatre should be an experience. It shouldn’t be a chore. Having something like stereoscopic would be something that you could only experience there. 3D TV’s, 3D plasmas probably won’t be out for another eight years realistically, so I think that will be an experience unique to the cinema for a while to keep people going there.
CraveOnline: Are the Alien and Predator franchises now basically inextricably linked or did you envision some just Predator films again?
Colin Strause: I think it will be definitely another AVP before there’s a Predator film again.
Greg Strause: It’s hard for us to speak for what those guys are thinking over there but I’d say your chances of an AVP III are a lot greater. You’d get that first before you’d get another Predator 3 or Alien 5.
Colin Strause: I think most of it is just looking at it from a pure financial standpoint. I mean, you get two fan bases or you get just one. At the end of the day the whole idea of making movies is making money off them.
Greg Strause: Don’t get us wrong, I’d love to see both of those movies get made just knowing those guys it’s hard to say. If you look at the curve of the financial performance the last Alien movies is kind of like going like this so it’s you’ve got to make movies to make money so. There’s that unfortunate pressure on all of us.
