We recently had the pleasure of speaking to Dan Trachtenberg, the director of the fantastic Prey, for the next episode of the Alien vs. Predator Galaxy Podcast. We discussed a lot about the creative process behind the film, and naturally we had to ask about deleted scenes and the biggest narrative changes that the film went through!
Dan revealed to us that while Prey didn’t undergo many significant changes to the plot, a major change took place between when he first pitched the film to 20th Century Fox and when Patrick Aison sat down to write the script.
The biggest change I will admit to you guys came from my pitch to the very first draft of the script, that I pitched them something and then in talking it over with Patrick when we first met, I realized, “oh, no,”. The pitch that I wrote to them was that it would be a younger Predator, a younger Yautja, and Naru and it would team up against Fur Trappers.
And I quickly realized, I think, even before I met Patrick, I was like, “wait, before we get started”, that the fun of the movie is David versus Goliath. By the way, I’m sure in that there would have been it’s the antagonist that then becomes the protagonist or whatever I was thinking of. I didn’t want to make it weaker. And that carries through even to the final iteration in the final fight…in the final fight in the 87 movie, in the original movie, the Predator disarms itself and evens the playing field for Arnold, which certainly does good in establishing the code of it, but it also gives Arnold fighting chance.
And I was really anxious to take these two adversaries and if we’re going to see someone defeat it, can she level the playing field for herself? Because it’s all an exercise. I don’t know about you guys, but I feel like Naru more than I feel like Arnold Schwarzenegger in life.
Hicks: It’s one of the things I said in my review as well. Naru’s journey is something everybody surely must have identified with at some point, this desire to prove yourself, to flip the bird to whoever is telling you, “no, you can’t do it.” It’s just pure and universal identifiability.
Yes, absolutely. And so making something like this is like an exercise in “could I do it?” And life doesn’t often level the playing field for so I just thought that was the exciting thing, was taking on this premise. So that’s when child went away and team up went away and was like, “no, the fun is, can she do it?”
Dan would also clarify that there was never a draft written where a team-up took place, and that though no major narrative changes took place, the film’s flow did undergo a significant change during the editing process. Be sure to check back in with Alien vs. Predator Galaxy on the 8th of October at 5pm GMT for the release of the full episode!