SAN DIEGO (AP) — “Predator: Badlands” belongs to a long-established subgenre of cinema: two opposite people reluctantly stuck together for a common goal.
This film, the seventh in the franchise (not counting the Alien vs. Predator spinoff), has the comedic energy inherent in that dynamic. He also belongs to a narrower subgenre of people literally stuck together, as in the 1958 film The Defiant Ones, in which Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis were fugitives bound by chains.
And with a script that posed special challenges for stars Elle Fanning and Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, Predator: Badlands belongs to an even narrower subset that it can only be shared with The Empire Strikes Back: movies featuring a broken android that a tall, powerful creature carries like a backpack while facing danger in a strange corner of space.
“The real physical inspiration for this was C-3PO strapped to Chewbacca's back,” director Dan Trachtenberg told The Associated Press in an interview where he was joined by the film's two stars. “But I think the interesting thing is that this is not Chewbacca. This is not a friendly creature with good intentions, this is a Predator.”
The appropriate working title for the film, out Friday from 20th Century Studios, was “The Backpack.”
For much of the New Zealand filming, Fanning and Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi were as close as they seemed in the film, with the top half of her artificial intelligence, Tia, side-by-side with Schuster-Koloamatangi's young Predator, Dec, who is about to prove himself in a hunt against a seemingly unkillable mega-monster.
“His Predator braids kept slapping me in the face in our fight scenes,” Fanning said with a laugh.
Trachtenberg and team used many practical ways to make the backpack work.
“We tried every way to make the installation,” Schuster-Koloamatangi said.
“Through mud, through water, through rivers,” Fanning added.
She said that sometimes her co-star would pull her in a wheelbarrow and sometimes they would do it on foot.
“I would actually pretend to have a swinging backpack,” she said. “We had to coordinate our steps, I walked back and said: “OK, left, right, left, right.”
In scenes where they weren't back-to-back, Trachtenberg wanted them to be truly face-to-face.
“We developed this system where he was in a suit, but his face was open,” the director said. “And so Dimitrius could really direct the show, and he and Elle could work with each other in moments, however fleeting, where they actually looked at each other.”
He said that “the whole reason for making the movie was to really connect emotionally with this crazy thing. So it really required us to take a different approach” and that the process “allows us to be much more expressive and do things that other parts of the franchise haven't been able to do with this creature.”
Trachtenberg, a 44-year-old Philadelphia native, took over the franchise that began in 1987 with Arnold Schwarzenegger's original. He took it to completely new times and places, using completely new approaches.
He first took the helm in 2022's Extraction, set in 1719 on the Great Plains of the Comanche people.
His animated film Predator: Killer Killer, released earlier this year, includes sequences set in 9th-century Scandinavia, 17th-century Japan and World War II.
Co-written by him and his Prey co-writer Patrick Aison, Predator: Badlands takes place in the distant future on a new planet.
Trachtenberg said at the film's Comic-Con presentation that one of the inspirations was the realization that “The Predator never wins.” He wanted to see what it would look like without making a slasher film.
Fanning, who also plays other identical androids, and Shuster-Koloamatangi were two of three actors credited to the roster.
She's been acting since preschool and is already a professional at age 27, but she's relatively new to the movie franchise (2014's Maleficent being the exception) and completely new to space sci-fi.
“I think I’ve always been on Earth or in a fantasy world,” she said with a laugh. “I think the approach to the story, the characters and the script are very similar.”
By age five, she had more loans than her 24-year-old colleague had in his entire short career.
Standing over 7 feet tall, Shuster-Koloamatangi was a local mercenary in New Zealand and a special find for filmmakers. Although most of the filming wasn't comfortable, he appreciated being on familiar ground.
“Home lawn, baby,” he said with a laugh.
