Alien Vs. Predator

[MacGuffin]

Sanaa Lathan vs. Alien vs. Predator
Source: Variety

Sanaa Lathan (Out of Time) will star as the lead in 20th Century Fox's Alien vs. Predator. Shooting begins October 28 in Prague, and Fox will release the film in August. Paul W.S. Anderson is directing from a script he wrote with Shane Salerno.

Lathan will play explorer-adventuress Lex Kline, who leads an expedition to Antarctica to uncover warring alien races. The Kline character is said to be reminiscent of the Ellen Ripley role Sigourney Weaver played in the "Alien" series.

Lathan stars in the film alongside Italian actor Raoul Bova (Under the Tuscan Sun), who plays an archaeologist, and Lance Henriksen, as the industrialist who finances the expedition. British actor Ewen Bremner also stars.

[MacGuffin]

Teaser trailer here.

Featurette here on "AvP" where Paul Anderson explains how these two creatures will meet.

Teaser Posters:

[Ghostboy]

Script review here. It sounds, to put it succinctly, fucking awful.

That teaser trailer sucks too. The least they could do is show one of the monsters in their entirety.

[MacGuffin]

It sounds, to put it succinctly, fucking awful.

Watch that featurette, it sounds even worse.

[aclockworkjj]

Paul Anderson

I don't understand how he could follow PDL up with this...what a shame.

[Cecil]

sounds decent. im looking forward to it

[Banky]

i think it will be good

[SHAFTR]

that Teaser sucked.  To not show Alien/Predator in the same frame, I don't understand.

[Duck Sauce]

the logo looks like a car emblem from the 1980s, but I like it.


please dont fuck this up with CGI and wirefighting, its too cool of a concept.

jesus, who actually thinks PA is the man for this?

[Banky]

i give kudos to fox for giving such a detailed website for a film that is in preproduction

[Stefen]

new trailer, dont know if this has been posted yet
http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/avp/internet_trailer/large.html

Eh, I'm not holding my breath.

[NEON MERCURY]

its a shame that  the previews suck b/c this could be  and has the potential to  kick ass.....but the only thing that doesn't make since is all the predator has to do is turn inivsible and shoot them thangs(that killed Jesse the Body Ventura in predator one) at the alien and the film is over....

[Just Withnail]

its a shame that  the previews suck b/c this could be  and has the potential to  kick ass...

With Paul W.S. Anderson at the helm, I see no potential in this what so ever. His suck-ness by far out nesses the brilliantness of Alien and Aliens.

[MacGuffin]

IGN FilmForce Exclusive: Interview with AVP Director Paul Anderson
Check out our chat with the man in charge direct from the editing room!

Alien vs. Predator is officially in crunch mode. Principal photography has ended, the boxes of latex and glue have long left Prague, and the U.S. release date of August 6, 2004 looms large in everyone's mind. AVP Director Paul Anderson is cracking his knuckles, breaking out the caffeine, and beginning to flog his post-production team as they endeavor to bring two of the most beloved movie franchises of all time together in one big loud summer movie plate of what we hope will be awesomeness.

For Anderson, the London spring will be experienced mostly in the wee hours of the morning as he shuttles between his home and production studio. IGN FilmForce's Steven Horn managed to get in touch with Anderson on his cellphone in London. Reached in the editing room, Anderson took some time out of his busy night to talk with us about the status of the project.

STEVEN HORN, IGN FILMFORCE: Hi Paul, how's it going? You guys are right in the middle of it all, huh?

PAUL ANDERSON: Yeah, we're f***ing ... we're going full throttle!

IGNFF: Excellent.

ANDERSON: Yeah, because we really only finished shooting two weeks ago.It was insane! We finished up with two days on top of Mt. Blanc, four thousand meters up in the air with temperatures of minus 80 degrees centigrade. That is pretty damn cold, I mean that's Antarctic cold. We were out there for two days and you had to wear complete face protection, like a faceplate. It made you look like Hannibal Lecter. But if you didn't, then your nose would just freeze and fall off.

IGNFF: I bet the people with beards had the nasty icicles in them and everything? Author's Note: What kind of dumbass statement is that?

ANDERSON: Absolutely! I'd grown my stubble a bit and it took you ages to defrost afterwards because your face was just covered in ice – and that was underneath these masks, it was quite phenomenal.

IGNFF: Well I went to see you in Prague, you know to visit [the set]. I froze my ass off there so I couldn't even imagine what you guys went through there.

ANDERSON: Prague was like a Caribbean beach compared to the top of this mountain I'll tell you – it was cold.

IGNFF: OK, let's get into it. We want to kind of get a sense of how frenzied things are now. Give us a sense of your work day, what typically happens. Or is there even a typical work day?

ANDERSON: We're working seven days a week pretty much. They start early in the morning and they proceed 'til about midnight every night. I completely exhausted my filming crew, they were complete hanging rags by the time we finished. So now I get to do exactly the same to my post-production crew.
 
IGNFF: Are they shooting daggers out of their eyes at you?

ANDERSON: No they love it, I mean one of the great things about this movie is that we have a relatively young cast and crew working on it. All of them are just fan-boys and fan-girls, I mean they can't believe their luck to be working on not only an Alien movie, but an Alien and a Predator movie.

So, it's a phenomenally committed crew. It's not like I'm having to beat these people over the head to stay in the cutting room 'til midnight, or crouched over their computers till midnight, I mean they're doing it. They're doing it because I think they all realize that this is a little bit of cinematic history. We're very privileged to be sharing the same title as some of the best movies ever made. That's a huge pressure on people and a huge honor to be working on that franchise. They're working hard without me having to kick them up the ass. I mean I don't mind doing that of course. (Laughs.) But, you know, they're a highly motivated bunch and very excited about the movie they're making.

IGNFF: It must be sweet to have that kind of dedication – to have fans actually looking after it is a big thing. I hear that a lot from people who read our site, and just friends of mine they're like, 'I'm glad that these guys are fans.' Because it's a lucrative franchise and it could get screwed up, like we've seen before.


ANDERSON: We're all here to make the best possible movie we can do. As critical as anybody else can be, I doubt it's as critical as we are with ourselves and as tough as we are on ourselves.

IGNFF: I remember when you were talking to us last time, you had talked about when the teaser trailer for Alien3 came out. Everyone got excited that it was on Earth and then it turned out that it was not on Earth. People who have seen this trailer are just freaking out…

ANDERSON: Oh that's excellent, the Internet teaser?

IGNFF: Yeah.

ANDERSON: I mean I'm in my own little post-production bubble, so I don't get to hear any…

IGNFF: Oh really? You're not hearing the news? Well based on this trailer people are pretty excited, but they're nervous too. These are pretty beloved franchises and I think the more people understand that the people looking after it, are looking after it, then they'll relax a little.

ANDERSON: I think that you know, all of us involved in making it, both on the acting and the crew side of it have all been very aware of the pressure. The pressure to kind of live up to, certainly in the Alien franchise, two classic movies: Alien and Aliens. If you're going to make a horror movie it doesn't get any better than Alien…and if you're going to make an action movie it really doesn't get any better than Aliens. Predator, you know, was John McTiernan absolutely at the top of his game. That's a huge pressure as well. Everyone's been very aware of that and everyone has been kind of working their little socks off to live up to that and, who knows, maybe exceed it in some areas. We're trying anyway.

IGNFF: So what's giving you the most trouble in post-production right now?

ANDERSON: In post? I wouldn't say that any scene is a trouble scene because it doesn't work or anything like that. This is a movie that had a phenomenal amount of thought put into it before we started making it, specifically with how we were going to do the Alien and Predator combat aspects. I did not want to rely on fully CG Aliens and Predators wailing on each other, because I don't think that would have looked very good … I mean you could have spent years and Jurassic Park money on it and it would never have looked as good as the real thing. So that's why we specifically shot as much practical as we possibly could. What that meant was we had to spend a huge amount of time shooting the fights. If you do it all CG, you shoot a bunch of plates and then you do it post-production on a computer. We went a much more difficult route of practicality, like for example in the first Alien/Predator fight, where an Alien and a Predator go head-to-head, we spent two months shooting it. They're in kind of like a chamber which they literally tear apart as they fight. We had to have practical walls that would break, columns that would collapse, floors that would break. When the Alien's tail snaps into things, those things have to break, and so on and so forth. We did everything, as much as possible, practically. During the shoot that was problematic because it just meant it was a huge amount of time to shoot it. In post, if anything is the most difficult thing it seems like you've got [find a way] for two months worth of material to fit, hopefully, the most amazing head-to-head fight scene ever seen. You shrink down two months' worth of material into an amazing three or four minutes.

It's just the sheer volume of material that you're working with. But then the exciting thing is you have it, you see it, you see an Alien flung and smacking into a pillar or whatever, you get it. Combing through the material and getting the best of the best to put in the movie is incredibly time consuming, and that's why we're working until midnight every night.
 
IGNFF: The good part about having all that coverage is the DVD! You can put it in the director's cut.

ANDERSON: Yeah, we can have the ten-disc set on this movie! We've got plenty of footage. (Laughs.)

IGNFF: One thing you guys didn't really have nailed down yet when we visited was a score – any news about the score?

ANDERSON: We just hired a composer called Harald Kloser to do the score. He's a very well known European composer. He did a movie called The Thirteenth Floor that came out a couple of years ago in the states. He just finished the score on The Day After Tomorrow, Roland Emmerich's new picture. It has a phenomenal score; big, epic, as you'd expect from one of Roland's pictures.

IGNFF: Yeah we heard a lot of chorale like (sings), that kind of stuff in the trailer. Lots of huge orchestral stuff...

ANDERSON: Yeah, Harald is a big composer. He's Austrian so he's like Mozart, only alive, and hopefully easier to work with as well. (Laughs.)

I'm very excited about him. The reason why we hired him is that he's such a humongous fan. Again I wanted to go with people's passion for the franchise, their passion for the movies. This guy's a complete Alien and Predator freak. That's what I [also] pursued when I was casting people for the roles, when I was getting the crew together. That was the thing that I most wanted to hear was people's enthusiasm for the franchises, for the existing movies. Harald is no different from any of the rest of the crew in that he's a complete Alien fiend. So he's going to start working very, very soon, we're flying over to London I think this weekend.

IGNFF: So is Harald's music going to be orchestral or...

ANDERSON: It's going to be primarily orchestral, there won't be any source music in there. It'll be an orchestral score probably with a kind of a synth bed in some scenes. But it's very much along the line of the traditional scores that the Alien and Predator movies have had. It's not like we're going to cover the movie in techno music or anything like that. You know, this is a terrifying movie and it needs a terrifying, classic movie score to go with it; at the same time it's got huge action so it needs that kind of proper orchestral support.

IGNFF: Yeah, well I mean some techno is terrifying so...

ANDERSON: (Laughs.) Also one of things that Harald came to do is to work with a lot of high and low frequency noises as well. One of the things he likes to do (because he's done a lot of experimental stuff as well, which you won't find reflected in Roland's movie) is where he samples machinery and animal noises, things like that, and then works those natural and unnatural sounds into music. The idea is that what we'll get is something very, very unsettling.
 
IGNFF: How about the sound of Predator-vision – that was a very distinct sound – will you be able to preserve some of that?

ANDERSON: Absolutely! I mean our intention was to not stray too far away from what the original movies did; the Alien makes a certain sound and the Alien is going to make that sound, Predators make a certain sound and that's the species they are. They're not suddenly going to start making different noises. We're staying very true to the franchises in terms of the sounds of the creatures, in terms of things like graphics, the Predator-vision, we're keeping the same thing.

Predator hunts mainly in thermal mode when he's hunting for humans, obviously he has to shift modes as he did. In Predator 2 you could see that he would shift modes when he was looking for different things, so when he's in that meat locker and he's looking for the lights he shifts to infrared. It's already been established that the Predator can shift to different vision modes and obviously he needs a different vision mode when he's hunting Aliens than when he's hunting humans. Aliens are cold-blooded, so they don't give off the same kind of heat signature that a human does. So we've got lots of different levels of Predator-vision.

It's been really exciting you know, what does a human look like in Predator-vision? What does a Predator look like in Predator-vision? What do they look like to themselves? How much inside an Alien can you see? What's the inside of an Alien look like? I mean that's all been quite exciting. But the basic idea was to keep exactly the same idea for human's thermal-vision and still keep the kind of soundwave to the left hand side of the screen. Obviously we're doing it in much more sophisticated fashion because you know this is fifteen years later and we can. You know, what McTiernan was doing fifteen/sixteen years ago was state-of-the-art, what we're doing now is state-of-the-art but obviously two different arts. It's more sophisticated but it's very much the same template, I always liken it to, it's like the first Predator was running Windows 1.0, and now he's running Windows XP. It's the same operating system but it's very much improved. The same extends to the Predator's weapons as well – he's got a mix of the traditional weapons, some of which have been slightly improved, and new weapons as well because when you're hunting humans that's one thing, but when you go hunting an elephant you take an elephant gun. When you're hunting an Alien you take something slightly bigger than when you're trying to hunt Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny Glover.

IGNFF: True. So how are you personally holding up, are you dreaming and sleeping Aliens all the time?

ANDERSON: Sleep is a outmoded concept, it's best not to think about sleep.

IGNFF: So you're living and breathing it?

ANDERSON: Absolutely, I mean literally it consumes every waking hour of every day. You do dream about it because it becomes your life, I mean that's all you do is Aliens and Predators. I definitely dream about them.

IGNFF: How are you unwinding these days?

ANDERSON: Um, you don't, you go out and hunt humans in Hyde Park.

IGNFF: (Laughs.) American Werewolf in London style. Anything else you want to put out there as far as what's going on with filming or with post?

ANDERSON: Yeah. It's just that, you know people have been excited about this movie for a long time; for twelve years I think the idea's been out there. We're working our very hardest to make sure that it's been worth the wait. The movie's being made with a lot of people who just love the movies that this film is based upon. [It's] being made with an awful lot of hard work and a lot of Twentieth Century Fox's money ... certainly more than they wanted to spend on it (laughs)...it's been a constant battle but they've moved in the right direction which is very good.

IGNFF: Yeah, well you've kind of got them now...

ANDERSON: They've been very good actually. They've always kind of given more when they needed to, and we're hoping to really deliver on the promise of what this should be. I know for a fact that we've put some amazing Alien and Predator action on film. I don't have to finish cutting the movie to know that, I mean these creatures look the best they've looked and when they go head-to-head, it's like two alien creatures going head-to-head, it looks real, it looks ferocious, it's fast, it's frenzied, it's scary as hell. It's very impactful as well, I mean it's huge! People are going to leave the theaters I think pretty wrung out.

IGNFF: I've always thought of it as getting two elephants together, I mean it would destroy a room, based on their weapons and size…

ANDERSON: Yeah, I mean they tear these places apart! There was one set where we were filming the first Alien/Predator fight. When we started, the room was made out of all this black stone, it's very cool looking. About halfway through the shoot I was standing with my DP. We were looking at the shot, and we're going, 'There's something wrong, it doesn't look right.' What we realized was that the whole set had changed color because we'd been smashing up so much of it that just the dust from all the rock that had been exploding and breaking had impregnated the entire set! It turned it kind of brown, rather than black. It had become a big problem for us and we had to have the whole thing cleaned because we literally had been causing so much devastation that the whole color had changed.

IGNFF: That's excellent! Was that the temple?

ANDERSON: Yeah, we called it the fight chamber, but that's what happened in there. There were two days of dialogue, and then two months of fight...

IGNFF: You guys had a sizeable fire on the set too, didn't you?

ANDERSON: Um, yeah it was a controlled fire, it got a bit big, a bit bigger than it was supposed to be. I have a very good special effects crew, this German crew who also did Resident Evil for me. They kept saying, 'Well how big do you want the explosion?' I'd say 'Really big.' They'd come back and go, 'You mean really, really big?' [and] I said, 'Really, really, really big.' Then we did the explosion and it was f***ing humongous. I mean you could see it all the way across Prague. It was huge, one of those things where literally airplanes would report it from 20,000 feet in the air because they would see something down there. I went to the special effects guys and said it was just amazingly good, but half the set caught fire and burned down. The studio and producers were insane. I said to [the special effects people], 'Well, how did you do that?' They said, 'Well, it's simple, it was just 40 gallons of gasoline.' It was like the explosion in Apocalypse Now, there's nothing better than just burning lots of petrol in like two seconds, KA-BOOM!

IGNFF: Indeed! When we visited you in Prague, we were shown a clip of everything catching on fire and it was pretty crazy... (laughs)

ANDERSON: It was great, a joy to behold!

[metroshane]

If you notice, there are alien statues and such in the pyramid...so the movie I want to see is the one with the effiminate alien sculptor that gets picked on by the other aliens.  Or how about the alien cook names "cookie" or something else.  

I guess I just don't get the fascination and think it would make a great comedy to see the social infrastructure of an alien race.  Do the predators mom's kiss them goodbye and wish them goodluck.  What's it like when aliens masturbate...or do they hump each other like dogs?