A day on the set of The Predator is peppered with heavy gunfire. First a warning – plug your ears or put in a pair of foam earplugs -- then loud clack clack clack. It's not interminable. There are breaks, cut, and then director Shane Black's voice chimes over a loudspeaker as he works with his actors. But it's never too long before the bullets are flowing again, and so are the F-bombs for that matter, and if that ain't just exactly what you'd want to see (and hear) on the set of a new Predator film, then I just don't know what is.

For the latest installment in the Predator franchise — a sequel that keeps all the previous films in continuity — Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and The Nice Guys director Shane Black takes the helm. It’s a nice bit of full-circle for the filmmaker, who played the minor but memorable role of Hawkins in the original film. The cast culls an unexpected but intriguing roster; a young boy (Jacob Tremblay), an evolutionary biologist (Olivia Munn), and a team of troubled veterans headed up by Keegan-Michael Key, Thomas Jane, and Moonlight breakout Trevante Rhodes. Perhaps the only character who fits the bill as a classic Predator character is Boyd Holbrook’s lead Quinn McKenna, a deadbeat father (to Tremlay’s character), working as a mercenary fixer in Mexico.

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Image via 20th Century Fox

I landed on the set of The Predator (working title, Ollie, also the name of Black’s dog) on day 34 of a 66-day shoot. Production is bustling, spirits are high, and unfortunately for me and my group, there’s not a Predator in sight. No Predator scenes filmed that day, so I can’t speak to how this version of the creature plays, but even without the iconic alien on the scene, we caught plenty of high-action moments.

What becomes clear quite quickly (and these things are always clear, good or bad), is that everyone on set believes in the film they're making. The creatives are eager to talk and share their vision (as much as they can) and the actors across the board talk about a sense of empowerment and freedom in creating their characters, and perhaps more importantly, creating moments on set that feel alive. Black has allowed room for a lot of input on the characters and the ad-lib moments they may spark on camera. It should be noted that an enthusiastic crew doesn’t always translate to the quality of the final film, but suffice it to say, the vibe on day 34 is good. “[Quote] I’d usually be in a worse mood this far along,” Black quips in the press tent, giving up half of his lunch to squeeze in an interview with us.

The energy translates to the raw shots, which we observe in our mini-video village between interviews. Tremblay, the cutest button in the biz, is giving an utterly Spielbergian performance, his big little eyes alight with wonder and fear as he reacts to an unseen menace offscreen. On set, he’s looking at blocky maquettes, vaguely shaped like dogs. Well, not quite dogs, Hellhouds, the creatures seen in the AvP films. They're bearing down on the young boy in a sports park, or what will be transformed into one by the power of movie magic. From where we are, it's not much more than a grass field and a set of bleachers, surrounded by a massive wall of green-screen. Cut, next take. Black gives a note we can’t quite hear, Tremblay translates it with a workmanship that belies his age and oh-so-adorable in-person manner. This time, there’s more urgency and fear. “He’s amazing, this kid,” Black says later in the day. “He’s playing a kid with a learning disability, he’s playing a kid who’s emotionally traumatized, he’s got six different things to do and, I just-it’s uncanny.” He’s not wrong.

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Image via 20th Century Fox

Later in the day, we watch a subsequent scene set on the same field, featuring Jane, Key, and newcomer Augusto Aguilar — three members of the so-called Loonies, a group of war veterans who emerge from a group therapy spat an wind up embroiled in a Predator attack.  The trio forms a line of fire, spouting off profanities and fatigued grunts, deploying their automatic weapons at full capacity; looks of disbelief, frenzy, and straight-aimed determination plastered on their faces. The actors are free-wheeling from take to take, keeping the same vein of intention and experience, but changing the exacts of their lines. A stray shell flies back and hits Key in the chest. He grimaces and leans into it, makes it a part of the scene. Watching them go all-out with their macho moment, chewing their lines like cuban cigars and spitting F-bombs out like pitchers on the ball field — it’s full-on Predator and it’s full-on Shane Black. It’s just a micro-moment in the larger film. The wild thing about film production is that we observed that scene for at least an hour, but it won’t amount to more than minutes (at the most), but if the rest of The Predator carries that energy and intensity, we’ve got a firecracker on our hands. Grunt. Fire. Swear profusely. Repeat. Pow-pow-pow.

Such was the vibe last year, when I had the opportunity to join a small group of journalists on the set of The Predator in Vancouver, Canada, where we watched filming, toured the set (admittedly, mostly green-screen that day), got a peek at the costumes, and spoke with the cast and creators of the film. We learned a lot while we were there, and you can stay tuned for more as I roll out the full interviews in the coming weeks (be sure to check out our extended on-set chat with Black, if you missed it), but for now we've got a smorgasbord of highlights and need-to-know details in the list below.

The Story

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Image via 20th Century Fox
  • The film is set 30 years after the original and features a number of scenes set in a Georgia neighborhood.
  • There are a few threads in The Predator that tie together to create the bigger story. Munn explained, "It starts with two different stories in the beginning. There's [the] soldiers and their encounter with the Predator. And then on the other side, this other storyline's going on. My character has been on a list from the CIA because she is an evolutionary biologist." With the help of Munn's character, the government is trying to investigate the Predator attacks. The film also focuses on a young boy played by Jacob Tremblay, who comes into the possession of some Predator tech, and eventually all their stories weave together.
  • Despite early reports, the film isn't set in the suburbs. However, it does have a few scenes there. “To the extent that this happens in a small town, it’s a small part of the movie," Black explained. "They said well, 'It’s set in the suburbs’. No. I mean there’s scenes that happen that are set in suburban streets, but the idea that it’s some Mahjong club fighting a Predator, that isn’t how it’s gonna happen."
  • Black says he wanted to make a Predator movie that was an old-school thriller and reminded him of the era of nerdiness in his youth. “Something that recalls for us all those wonderful, exciting days when we were geeks, lining up for Star Trek: Wrath of Khan when it played in Westwood at The National."
  • As such, the film is a loving mishmash of genre traditions. According to Black, the film has “spies, romance, mystery-- just stuff as much genre into one pack as we can, so you can literally unpack different facets of the movie." Later he added, "If you bought a comic book that just said, 'Genre Shit' and started reading it, it could well be this movie."
  • Holbrook echoed that sentiment, "I think what we have here is kind of like a hybrid. You'll see a true reference to that once you see the film, and what's going on with all of Predators. It does play a little slower, maybe like a western, which would lend itself to that thrill factor. And then it's the western in sci-fi, so I think that would build up to the scares."
  • Even though the film taps into a lot of genres, including comedies. it is first and foremost a thriller. "It’s ultimately gonna be a thriller. It’s not gonna be a comedy. It’s an R-rated movie and it’s supposed to be a kind of harrowing experience," Black said.
  • They also wanted to harken back to a more grounded, gritty approach to the action and camera work. “I think there was a great deal of nostalgia and also a desire to do a kind of old-school thriller in the form of The Predator, because I think the reason there’s a lasting quality that the original movie has is due in part to the fact that it was made before it was so easy to just do a bunch of CGI effects and before video games had taken hold as well.” He continued, “Obviously we’ve kept up on visual effects and technology and we’re big fans-but let’s try to do an old-school kind of real hearty and heartfelt kind of war movie surrounding this story."
  • Black knows that there's a "basic premise" that has to be honored in every Predator, which is that "whatever the plot turns out to be, it has to, at some level, represent a hunt." However, there's a lot of room to make something unique in that structure. "It’s like, monkey bars," Black said. "You ever play on the jungle gym when you were a kid? It looks like they’re rigid and hard and it’d be hard to play on these things because they’re so rough, but if you go inside them there’s actually a lot of room to move around, you just know that the borders are there every once in a while."
  • One of their drives was to expand the mythology of the Predator and why they do what they do. "We just tried to take the existing mythology and take it a step further," Black said. "Ask some questions about why. Why Predators do what they do? What would be the next step for them? How do we up the stakes so that there’s not just a single Predator hunting a group of soldiers? Who are the soldiers? How are they different? What’s the heroic quotient and how do you make it not just guys with tough talk and big arms?"
  • Black didn't just double down on mythology, he wanted to add an element of mythical wonder to the Predator story. "It’s about the myth of alien incursion," he said. "It’s about watching the skies and basically just, guys who doubt themselves, who have skills, but don’t believe they’re truly capable of facing what they’ve been pitted against, and it’s the thrill of the hunt."
  • There's also an element of "intrigue" and "espionage mystery" that ties the government into the story. Black described, "The Predator explores what happens when the Predator strikes, these incursions, are not just an every-once-in-a-while phenomenon known to a few, but have come to the attention of an establishment that is actually set on preparing for and marshaling forces against these incoming Predator strikes."
  • The film also looks at what might happen if the Predators had a bigger game in mind. "What happens when the Predators get a little more ambitious?" Black asked. "Maybe it’s not just a weekend anymore."
  • As the trailer revealed, the film will not be set at Christmas (but there is some Halloween!) Of his Christmas tradition, Black said with a dry smile, "As soon as people noticed it, I said fuck it."

The Predator

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Image via 20th Century Fox
  • Black says they’re looking to use a healthy mix of digital and practical effects for The Predator and it sounds like he’s taken more than a little inspiration from Spielberg on that front, name-dropping both Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park as reference points to his approach. “I’m very open to digital techniques that look real. But, I also know the eye can’t be easily fooled. And the eye knows when it’s being fooled, so if it’s gonna be a digital shot, it just has to feel real, you have to know there was a camera... You combine things, like Jurassic Park when the real sculpted dinosaur head comes in the car, but then the CG dinosaur walks away through the windshield. So, using that technique of half is digital, half is sculpted... And, we use a lot of sculpture."
  • Tom Woodruff and Alec Gillis of ADI, who have worked on numerous Predator films over the years, are designing the Predator again for this film.
  • Holbrook teased an evolution and refinement of the Predator after the alien's decades on screen. "They've had 30 years to kind of up their game, and they have. We're doing a lot of interesting takes on this - surprising things, I think."
  • Black says he was primarily attracted to the franchise because of the Predators aliens themselves, "I just thought that it was a great, iconic alien. And, what separated it from other alien invasion movies wasn’t just a space plot, it was an actual space creature with a mythos and a sense of honor, in some respect. A mission. And, a sense of humor, oddly. The idea of the game it plays. It’s rare that the Predator shows humor, but there are moments where you see it almost look at someone like, ‘really?’"
  • The Predator will feature Predator dogs, aka Hellhounds, but don't expect them to look like the ones you've seen before. VFX supervisor Jonathan Rothbart explained the design process: "We were trying to stay away from matching any previous design on them." He further explained that they drew the design directly from the Predator, "So we try to keep it where at least we have some familiar aspects to the dogs that you can bring back to the Predators. Such as, they have some level of dreads to them. And their mouths are not the same as a Predator mouth, but they do have that kind of distended jaw a little bit. It doesn’t open sideways like that, but it still has some similarities, just to keep it in the same realm. The skin tones have some similarities as well."
  • To get the character of the Hellhounds right, the VFX team looked at pit bulls for the right combination of snuggly and scary. Rothbart said they had to find "a dog breed that fit the character of the dogs in the film, because they have to play sometimes a very angry mean role and sometimes a little of a nicer role. So we looked at dogs that could kind of fit that both scary and friendly feeling and matched them up with that in our initial designs."
  • Rothbart also discussed the balance of CGI and in-camera effects: "We try to get as much interaction done on set, and if we’re working on the film and it’s an all-digital creature, we’ll bring in stunt actors called proxies for them. So they’ll do a lot of the interactive fighting and struggling with the creatures and then we will pull them out, erase them, and bring in our digital creatures after that. Any time there’s any kind of struggle or interaction, we do have somebody for them to work with so it just brings out the realism that much more. In the case of the Predators, we try to keep them live-action as much as humanly possible. There’s only a couple shots where we’re actually trying to do any replacement at all, and those are just very difficult things."
  • Sounds like the Predators are going to have some pretty physical action beats – they recruited parkour-trained stuntman Brian Prince, but the costume itself provides some challenges on set. Rothbart said, "What’s funny is the guys who are playing the Predators are really talented and they can do parkour, but when you put a huge suit on, it slows you down. Especially the big head."
  • Rothbart discussed the challenge of getting the human eye to believe CGI on an organic creatures (as opposed to robotic looks, which are easier to pull off) and how he designs to make it convincing. "We always try to base the look off of something that is known to us on Earth. As long as we have some aspects of a creature or animal that we know of here then people, in their brain, can make a connection between those two. Therefore, that brings out more realism. If you try to do something totally unique and different, it becomes much harder because you have to not only have people buy into the fact that there’s a digital creature out there, but also that it has some look that they’ve never seen before and therefore your latitude for realism becomes far finer."
  • They also put an emphasis on creating maquettes for the actors to work with in-camera, in order to facilitate believable performances. "We always try to get at least some elements of it in-camera when we can. We build maquettes that have that look so we can bring it in-camera and see how light reacts to it and how it’ll work. For me, something I really like to do is build maquettes or just even shapes that match the creatures so that the actors can see them and therefore interact and know what they look like when they’re acting against them." While we were on set, we saw actors interacting with blocky, grey Hellhounds, as well as some motion capture performers on four-legged stilts.
  • The VFX team was very attentive to updating the monsters up to modern technology standards, while honoring what people love about the original creatures. Rothbart explained, "We had a lot of conversations about that. It’s a funny thing, because you want to respect the film and the fans who love the original, so you don’t want to stray too far from that technology because that’s what they’re going to see and they love that design. We wanted to do some advancement in technology because this is years later, but we didn’t want to take it so far that it was no longer recognizable."
  • The same goes for the Predator's heat vision and cloaking effects, "We have the capability of doing something more advanced now, but you have a known technology look that you don’t want to stray too far from," said Rothbart.
  • Other than the dogs and Predators, Rothbart teased that the team was working on effects for another creature, but declined to share the details on what that might be, referring to "other creatures to be named later." Possibly an evolved Predator, as hinted by the trailer?
  • Rothbart says the film will live up to the expectations of blood and gore set by the original. "Most definitely. We’re R-rated. Whenever there’s blood and gore, we see it. It hits our shores. Again, I’m a firm believer in trying to get as much in-camera as possible, so we have a lot of that, but there’s always more to have," he said with a laugh. "We’ll bring that up another level. Plus, there’s certain shots where you just can’t quite get it, so we have to do it. But we do a mix of actually going out and shooting blood elements, so we have real stuff as well as certain ones that, because of the interactivity with something that’s going on, we also have to use CG."
  • The film is primarily Earth-bound, so the team didn't have to work on alien worlds, but did a lot of set extension via wrap-around green screen curtains. They also built an interior of the spaceship, but the exterior is primarily VFX. "We have pieces of it. But the ship as a whole is too big for us to ever build," Rothbart explained.
  • Asked why he wanted to include heavier issues like Autism and PTSD in a traditionally meat-and-potatoes action franchise, Black explained that he wanted to buck the idea of the "perfect specimen" being defined by superficial qualities and explore the idea of the Predator might be a misfit himself. "I guess it was a reaction against perfection and the Predator going up against a perfect specimen all the time, and that being solely based on physical appearance and muscles," Black said. "I thought, well, maybe misfits; maybe there’s a version in which misfits play more of a role and maybe there’s even a sense that The Predator himself is even an outcast. So, we were trying to find thematic elements that work for us."

The Shane Black Element

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Image via Shane Black
  • Asked what he brings to the table that's different from other Predator films, Black said, "It’s the ambitiousness of not wanting to stay small and just wanting to pack as many different possibilities, themes, and character... think the death of some of the Predator movies has been a dearth of really intriguing characters that have development."
  • Key echoed that, explaining how the screenplay was designed to invert the two-dimensional characters in the original film. "Fred Dekker, the writer, said he wanted to flip everything from the first movie. In the first movie, there's this sense of this extremely capable, cocksure team and we're the exact opposite. We're people who doubt the veracity of our own existence and how we move through it. We're broken, we're scared and we're thrust into this position." He later added, "There's something deliciously two-dimensional about the characters in the original film and I think there's going to be something deliciously three-dimensional about these characters, which is difficult to do in an ensemble, but that's our endeavor."
  • Black also wanted to ensure that the film doesn't just hinge on action spectacle, but keeps the stakes high by driving everything into thriller territory. "Change the scale, up the stakes and make it as thrilling as you can. I mean, there’s just so many set pieces and sequence and the influences that we were going by are not the spectacle-like [movies]... So, our quest to be a cut above is to make it so you keep changing it up. So, that it feels more like a thriller and less like just action. Because, action to me is not sustainable over two hours."
  • He cited Transformers as an example of a movie with amazing effects that eventually become numbing and added the goal for his Predator movie is to give you  "a bigger canvas, more action, and better characters. That’s a lot."
  • Jane never read the script before signing on. He and Black had been trying to work together on a film for a long time, and The Predator was the first time their schedules lined up so he signed up for the film sight unseen. "He said 'Hey, I'm doing this movie,' and I said 'Great, I'm available. Show me where to be.'"
  • Holbrook compared Black's approach to reinventing the Predator franchise to Christopher Nolan's work on The Dark Knight trilogy. "When people talk about reinventing, and I think Christopher Nolan is really the only person that's really taken a franchise that people love and give it a complete freshness, I think that's what Shane is doing with this. Taking elements that already exist, pre-existing in the past franchise, and reinventing them."
  • Key praised the meta elements in Black's writing, which allows for a lot of in-universe references for fans to find. "There is something Shane possesses that I really enjoy, there's always a nice, sly meta quality. Like at the end of The Last Boy Scout he's like 'Come on, man. It's the '90s. You blow him away and say something cool ass shit.' This picture contains a little bit of that as well as some great referential stuff... not just to the original movie, but to Predator 2 and every other movie in the franchise, including the Alien Vs Predator franchise. It pulls pieces from all of the movies. The way he references the movies is really clever, especially if you're a huge Predator fan and I'm a huuuge fan of this universe. "

The Characters

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Image via 20th Century Fox
  • Tremblay stars as Rory, a young boy who gets an alien gauntlet in the mail and sparks up the action. "It’s my wrist gauntlet," Tremblay said. "I don’t want to spoil too much, but it has this thing in it that’s called the T-drive, which is a key to some cool thing.
  • Tremblay further described his character in the most adorable (on-brand) way possible, "His name’s Rory and he has autism and he likes to make things and he likes playing games, he loves to play chess and ummm…yeah, that’s it!"
  • To prepare for the role, Tremblay and Black went to an autism center and spent time with the kids there, which the young actor says helped him with the physicality of the role.
  • Holbrook leads the film as Quinn McKenna, Rory's father, who he describes as a "deadbeat dad" who works as a fixer below the border. "You find him doing mercenary work, basically collecting a paycheck. If you got something you need done down in Mexico, I'm the guy," Holbrook said. "He's estranged from his wife, he's detached from his son, and really, I think what the heart of the story is, is about reconnecting, being father to a son and reconnecting, and getting all these looney toon guys who have no direction to give them a sense of purpose."
  • "Those Looney Toon guys" are a group of PTSD-afflicted war vets known as the Loonies, who get locked up on a bus with Mckenna and run into some Predator action. "There's something that the government wants to put a lid on that I witnessed, and I get into the VA, and I'm sort of teamed up with these guys, in my opinion, unfortunately," Holbrook explained, "You know, they're a bunch of bozos, maybe schizophrenic, or maybe, I don't know, PTSD - real issues. So I think I'm stuck with these guys, and what changes throughout the film is that we become the unit, a group of soldiers that we can fundamentally relate to. And I become their leader, which they're leaderless, sort of hopeless, I think. There's a lot of redeeming qualities that these guys are searching for."
  • Who are the Loonies? Here's the breakdown:
    • Rhodes stars as Nebraska, described as the "sanest" of the Loonies, who is the de facto leader of the group until McKenna comes along. Rhodes described: "He is kind of the man behind the man in a sense, in regard to [McKenna]. He's kinda like the guy who's gonna help keep them on track. Help them push and everything. He's kind of the leader behind the leader of this motley crew."
    • For his backstory, Rhodes decided Nebraska was the leader of a special forces unit who "made a wrong decision and got everybody killed except for himself."
    • Key plays Coyle, an ex-Marine soldier who he describes as the "bigmouth" of the Loonies, citing his "brash attitude" attitude as his secret weapon. "Everyone deals with their trauma in a special way. Coyle's is that he's chock full of one-liners, which is a Shane Black specialty, right? He's kind of the maidenhead on the front of the crazy ship."
    • He and Jane's character, Baxley, are "inexorably linked" by a tragedy in the Gulf War and Key describes them as "the kind of tobacco-chewing, blood-spitting, eat bullets for breakfast guys."
    • Jane explained the circumstances of the tragedy that binds his character to Coyle: "We were in the same unit together and there was a friendly fire incident where Coyle opens fire on his own dudes and killed all the guys. There was only one survivor and that one survivor is me. So me and him end up having to go to the inquiry and the military courts and all that shit that you do when an incident like that happens. Through that three year period we became friends. It's a sort of love-hate relationship. 'You killed all my guys.' He's got all the guilt of that and he feels that maybe through this connection with the one survivor he can redeem himself somehow. I go from wanting to kill him in his sleep to realizing he's the one guy who really understands me."
    • Jane further explained how that event shaped Baxley into the character we see in The Predator, "My character is sort of OCD to begin with, and after that incident it really flowered into full-blown Tourette's. My character's got full-blown, hardcore Coprolalia, which makes it interesting, especially on dates and stuff. I don't get a lot of dates."
    • Game of Thrones star Alfie Allen plays Lynch, an ex-Army and Foreign Legion soldier with a knack for card tricks. Allen described: "He was part of the army, he was chucked out of the Army, joined the Foreign Legion... He's got a skill, which is sleight of hand. He uses card tricks to fill his alone time, and it's more of a nervous tick to get the attention away from whatever is going on in the environment he's currently in. He plays up to that label of being in this group of people affected by war, so he has this thing of trying to psyche people out with the eyes, and hopefully throughout the movie you see a bit more of a human side come out." As for what he brings to a battle, Allen describes Lynch as a "weapons dude" who's "pretty good with cars".
    • Aguilar plays Nettles, an ex-member of the Night Stalkers unit who flies Apache helicopter He had an accident in a helicopter and has Traumatic Brain Injury. Sadly, he does not get to say "Get to the choppa!"
    • It's not in the movie, but Key shared the backstory that the actors agreed on for why the Loonies end up locked up on that bus.: "For about five weeks we've been complaining about how shitty the coffee is. They've been in group therapy to help with their PTSD and sense of regret and everything. Every week somebody complains about the coffee. This week Nettles complains about the coffee. Next week Baxley complains about the coffee and then they have a mutiny. They get in a fight with some guys and they get shackled and put on a bus to be taken some place to be detained and Boyd's character just happens to be thrown on the same bus and the rest is history."
  • Munn plays evolutionary biologist Casey Brackett, who is recruited by the CIA to help understand the Predators. Munn explained, "Because of her expertise and the things that she has been able to accomplish in her career, she is one of the top people when it comes to Evolutionary biology so she was on a list from the CIA in case there was ever a connection with higher life forms. So at this point, she gets called in and into the labs and gets to see what's going on and try to offer her help."
  • Munn also says that an encounter with an alien life form is everything her character has ever wanted,  "This is like seeing God to her. This is what she's studying, how creatures change and evolve and how it's not scary and it is a very beautiful thing to be able to see.
  • That quality also gives her character a different perspective on the Predators. Munn, explained, "'m an animal lover, so is Shane, and so we were able to tap into that a lot with this character. And if you ever see a dog that's growling at you and it's just like a stray dog, the thought is to run away. But then they start to chase you...For me, as somebody who loves animals and loves dogs, I'm like, "Where is it's owner? What's going on?" And you're trying to understand it more. So there is an element of realizing when you're in danger. Realizing when they're coming, but at the same time she's trying to assess and she doesn't just jump to conclusions. Just because it doesn't look like them and it's not speaking their same language doesn't mean that you shoot it right away."
  • Holbrook teased a connection to the original film through his character, who is familiar with the Predator lore. "I've seen something, and maybe there is a familiarity. I wouldn't want to say that he's a UFO conspiracy theorist, but he's heard of things and seen things, and that may be a reference to the original. So that's the reference to the original, which we are of keeping in lineage."
  • The cast spent a few weeks in tactical training before filming started. Jane recalled, "We all showed up a couple weeks early. This place is really big. There's a basement and we went down there with three military guys and we'd do shotguns three hours a day. We did military training stuff, learned how to operate as a unit, how to reload on the fly and do all that fun stuff. And a lot of hard work."
  • Black gave his cast a ton of freedom on set, from improv to helping develop the characters' backstories, and designing their costumes.
  • Allen spoke of having a "blank canvas" to build his character from and Keydescribed how that collaborative spirit extended to the set. "We have a ton of freedom. It's been way more collaborative than I had anticipated. It's really been great. We have little conferences in our cast tent. Shane will say, 'There's a texture still missing in this scene that I really want to highlight,' and he'll have us talk. Shane will very often ask me 'If this was a sketch, what would you do here?' It's been extremely collaborative and fluid in the most creative way."
  • Key also detailed the extensive thought that went into collaborating with the costume designer his character's look, "Tish Monaghan came down to LA and she and I had a blast putting him together. So, I said I want a version of Travis Bickle's jacket from Taxi Driver. That's what I want Coyle to wear and I want it to have a Great Santini feel to it, which is that it's not his jacket. It's his father's jacket, from the Vietnam War, and as you'll see half the jacket has vet material from Desert Shield and half has vet material from Vietnam. He also wears his father's Army ring even though he wasn't in the Army, he was in the Marine Corp. My favorite part is that he has his work shirt, he works at a cold storage plant, and she said 'Oh, we'll put your name tag under your dad's name tag!' So, the costume's kind of a living museum, a tapestry, pardon the pun, of him and his father's relationship."
  • From Black's perspective, it was the smarter way to write the script because it was such a big ensemble piece and so much of the film is based action-centric. "Because it’s a Predator movie so much of it was plot and action, we had a lot of character beats, but as we were writing it, I would say to Fred, ‘You know what? This thing is gonna be a hundred and fifty pages let’s just find these characters. We can’t define seven characters perfectly. Let’s cast them.’ And so, we’ve been writing through production."
  • Black says he probably picked up some of that flexibility from working with Robert Downey Jr. on Iron Man 3. He recalled, "On Iron Man, Downey would be like, ‘Time!’ and I’d be like, ‘We’re shooting!’ and he’d be, ‘No, shut the cameras,’ and we’d go back to the trailer and we’d all write because he wanted new lines. I mean, maybe it’s a little bit of that. Maybe I took a lesson from him. We’ve had a great deal of fun incorporating input from talented people who haven’t been looking at the same pages for two years."
  • Key and Jane fill a micro-version of the two-hander roles Black is famous for, and you can expect a lot of snappy back and forth between the two. Key said with a laugh, "You see they have a much deeper relationship, but it's a militaristic, macho relationship. 'Fuck you, shut up. You piece of shit. You told that joke again? Go to hell. You never got laid,' which is just them saying 'I love you, I love you, I love you' to each other over and over again in their own sick, twisted, psychologically maladjusted way."
  • Black wanted make sure that he was making a war movie that didn't glorify war, "That was important to me, because when I grew up war movies were not about the thrill of war. In the ‘70’s, they were about the horror of war, but they still celebrated the camaraderie of the men."
  • He also wanted to make sure his war movie explored the soldier mindset and how it affects his characters. "I love also dipping a toe in that right-wing pond every once in a while, cause I’m an avowed liberal. But, every once in a while, you get your Matt Helm on and say, 'What would happen if you just executed assignments and didn’t ask about moral questions? Just get it done.' I like the mentality of guys who do that, but then who have been damaged by that. And so, we get a little taste, I think, of characters who aren’t as comfortable, but who are also killers. Ultimately, no matter how they may feel about it, they have a certain set of skills that can’t be turned off. The faucet can be reduced, but the drip will always be there and the tendency towards violence, the tendency toward the facile skill that elevated and separated them from other mortal men."
  • Black name-checked Logan as a good example of the balance between action and character in a tentpole movie. "I thought that Logan -- in the big action sequence when he escapes from that oil refinery or whatever-where he’s pulling the fence along. I thought that was very clever and cool," he said. "But, it wasn’t just an action movie, I thought. I think Logan’s actually not a bad model in terms of the time spent offering you satisfying action, but also visceral action and then also spending time on a surprising character piece." He added wryly, "Y’know, if we can do half their business I’d be thrilled."

The Predator arrives in theaters on September 18, 2018. Stay tuned for more from our set visit.