Alex Litvak Interview

Aaron: Did that not even get broached with Arnie at all then? Was that just an executive level?

Alex: I remember talking to John Davis’s company about it, to my boss at the time and I remember broaching it with a couple of writers saying “Look if I get a green light and they say just higher a writer for not a lot of money, I will come to you guys”. You have to look at it from the lens of Predator 2 didn’t work, Alien Resurrection did not work. So, there was just not a lot of appetite for either franchise and also, I think the genre of filmmaking at the time was not as valuable or respected as it is today.

Now cut to now I guess 10 years passed and I’m now a young writer. I just finished my first script. I am being quartered by all these various agencies. It was at Endeavor and WME. I’m going to all these meetings. I don’t know how, it’s just an idea pops into my head of “Hey what will be a cool Predator movie is if you come to realize that up until now you’ve only met one variety of Predators but there are other clans, other Predators. What if there was a Predator who hunts Predators”? So, literally within seconds of that my brain was just lighting up like a Christmas tree and I was going “Oh wow that is so cool and I’m about to pitch you guys of what the core idea of it was” but I am a writer who has just written my first script.

I haven’t even sold it so what can I do with it but I remember talking to one of the guys who wanted to sign me. He’s like “What do you want to do?” I’m like “I just have so many ideas. I want to do another Predator movie” and he’s like “Oh great”. So, I sold the script. I have this career doing stuff but so that idea just sticks in my head, just something that I really want. I have no idea how to do it. It’s like having a great idea for Star Trek movie or Bond movie.

What are you going to do with it? But it sort of keeps gnawing. Now okay we’re cutting from 2005 to 2008. So, 2008, this idea kind of gestates and I have a full pitch now and I hear that there is some interest at Fox to revive the franchise. I said to my agent “Great you gotta get me in there. I have an idea, everything is like mapped out. I want to pitch it.” So, I went to meet with a guy working for John Davis and the pitch was this.

So, now you’re somewhere in the jungle and a spaceship lands and you’re like “Oh great, it’s a part of a spaceship”. You expect a Predator to come out but what comes out of it is a human. When you come to realize it is an alien planet. It’s a jungle on an alien planet and you’re actually in the future and the hunting party that showed up to this planet is a human hunting party. So, we’ve expanded across the stars and now in this movie, we are going to be the hunters and the reason why we’ve come to this planet and it’s a group of like sportsmen and playboys and whatnot.

The only reason we’ve come to this planet is because the star of the planet is about to go nova so all the life in this planet is about to be extinct in say 24 hours. So, you’re going to hunt species that will nobody will ever hunt again. So, this very wealthy well-equipped group shows up and leading them is our great hunter character so it’s sort of Michael Douglas in The Ghost and the Darkness. The guy who’s like hunted across the galaxy, hunted across the stars but now he feels like he’s about to become extinct himself. He has more in common with his prey than with these assholes that he’s leading. So, you get into that and by the way as you can see one of the things, I wanted to get away from is Dutch.

Hence the reset at the time because I just remembered from Fox “Oh you can’t do it without Arnold.” Okay so it’s future. Let’s just put Dutch aside for a moment and just focus on the Predator versus Predator. So, here’s our hunting party led by this great hunter character. Little do they know that another ship has dropped from orbit on the other side of the planet, on the other side of the jungle and it’s a Predator ship and of course they’re there for the same reason because they’re here to hunt this tremendously valuable, about to be extinct, prey.

So, the first death of the movie is you’re tracking two hunting parties on a collision course and then boom they collide, awesome fight and that’s when the third ship drops from orbit and that’s when you realize the kind of the big idea, the big twist of the movie. It’s not the Predators, it’s Super Predators. It’s somebody higher up on the chain. It is a clan that has no honor, a clan that is more technologically advanced if the original Predators are more traditional so they hunt with certain weapons. They have a certain etiquette. It’s guys who have upgraded themselves up to the ying yang.

It’s the guys who have falcons, their version of bloodhounds and they’re not here to hunt the animals that are about to be extinct, they’re here to hunt the Predators. So, now this party mops the floor with both the human hunters and the original Predators and it’s down to one Predator and our hero and they’re stranded on this planet as the clock is ticking. The sun is about to go nova and their only way out is to work together, team up, beat the much superior enemy at their own game and hijack their spaceship to get away. So, I go and pitch that.

Their response is “Okay it’s all kind of cool but we can’t do it in the future, can’t do alien planet because Predator is fundamentally a terrestrial franchise, all the prior movies have been set on Earth so we’ve got to do it on Earth.” I said “Great, let me come back”. So, I pitch the same story but now it’s present day and instead of an alien planet, it’s like a valley in India, that is about to be flooded so again the clock of a natural disaster. The species native to this valley are about to become extinct all of a sudden. I pitched it and I never heard anything back. So, it goes into the ground.

Three months later Mike and I sell Medieval which is the script we’re really kind of most known for and it’s this sort of crazy carnival of carnage with Vikings and ninjas and shaolin monks but we sell it in a massive bidding war. It was the biggest spec seller of that year and it just completely changed the trajectory of our careers. So, within weeks of that sale, we are Fox at because they want to talk to us about stuff and very quickly in that meeting comes up Predators. So, look I don’t know if they’ll go for this take but we have everything already mapped out and this idea of Super Predators is something that I’ve been passionate about for years so Mike loved it.

So, we we’re locked and loaded. So, we go and meet with Robert and the interesting thing about the project which you guys might know about is there was no script because the project came about because Alex Young was the head of the division at the time, realized we have a Robert Rodriguez script so that’s a natural way to involve Robert who’s become a very prolific filmmaker. So, his name means a lot. Nobody was like “Okay now we have to really use the script”. It was like “Look, let’s use the script as a jump off point for creative conversation” and I gotta say to Robert’s credit, he was never like “Well in my script, it was this” and so Robert’s gonna be involved, he’s not going to direct, he’s gonna produce and we wanna hear what you would do.

So, we go meet with Robert. He could not have been more gracious and we talked about what was in his script and he was just like talking about ideas and I remember we sent in a document which had two takes. One was the future idea that I talked to you guys about and the other one was a take involving the worst of the worst which would become the element of Predators. Both takes by the way were very much Predator versus Predator. That was our big idea. We knew that was going to be what’s going to separate us from all the other writers. So, the future version was one idea. The other idea I believe was present day and it involved the dirty dozen assembly of characters like mercenaries and criminals who all have to work together to survive.

It was that idea which was the pivot from Predator where it’s brothers in arms soldiers. So, it’s people who are not heroes, who are not soldiers who are Predators in their own way. So, we send in these two takes that gets us the gig. We beat out several other writers who were in it and then what came back was like “This whole idea of space in the future not so much but we love the idea of the Rogue’s gallery. Love the idea of the worst of the worst and obviously the Predator upgrade.”

Maybe the idea with the alien planet which was in Robert’s version and was also in in one of the versions that I talked about. That’s where it all meshed together because really what happened is, we just started pulling from all these different ideas that we’ve been experimenting with over the years and ended up with kind of like this hodgepodge of elements which is alien planet, upgrade and the worst of the worst which became the foundation for them.

Adam: What were those early conversations with Robert like? Did you come aboard with him already knowing where this new version of Predators was going or did you both kind of deconstruct his draft and start from scratch?

Alex: The latter because we knew that we wanted to do something new right, which his script attempted to do. We knew that was too expensive and we knew that Arnold as a lead was not available. So, we had to have a different lead but yeah, all the conversations were… I don’t think there was any point where he was like “Well that wasn’t in my script and therefore it needs to be in the movie”.

We liked the image of a crucified Predator which is I think the only kind of direct link between the two was, we just like that image so we put it put in the movie. I guess the idea of the alien planet was as I said was in in my very first original idea and it was in his and then we sort of played with what the alien planet was but beyond that, it was just really “Hey we’re making the movie”. So, we got to figure this out quickly. B, let’s make it cool, let’s make it exciting, let’s not disappoint the fans.

Aaron: Did you have the opportunity to read it then before you actually started working on your own incarnation? Had you already read Robert’s?

Alex: I read it years ago at Fox and then they sent it to us again. I believe sort of just saying “Hey just read it so you guys know what we have”. I think the first take actually was possibly employing Schwarzenegger and Schwarzenegger being teamed up with the worst of the worst. So, Schwarzenegger being used as a decoy but again that’s where I remember that specifically the worst of the worst idea, the studio was like “Well you guys clearly had a lot of ideas but the one we loved, other than the upgrades because that was like just everybody was like yeah that’s happening, that’s a given, but the second idea that they loved very quickly was the world scale. [inaudible]

Aaron: Well, it is one of the more interesting aspects of the film as well is this idea of everybody who just has no relationship with each are Predators in their own rights. It’s fun to watch and I imagine so much fun to write as well in terms of interactions.

Alex: The idea was that you want to create a group where any one of these guys could have been a star in their own movie and we started like “How do we create homages to iconic characters?” So Cuchillo whose name means knife in Spanish. He was supposed to be Machete. I said to Robert “We want to write the part for Danny Trejo because we want to have Machete versus Predator. It will never happen. Can we write this? Sure, but it will never happen. It’s exactly what we’ve got. So, Hanzo is like I know where the name came from.

It came from Hattori Hanzō because this great sword master. That’s the guy that finds his way on the planet. So, we wanted to make you feel like it’s not like “Oh it’s a bunch of guys who are cannon fodder”. It is stars of their own anti-hero movie who are dropped in. Robert had us write a bio for each character and they did something for like EPK or behind the scenes where they talked about each character.

Aaron: The newer Predator films have been cursed a little in regards to early drafts. So, early drafts of Predators leaked and an early draft of The Predator leaked so people got their hands on these early takes on of the concepts really early on before the film came out and the draft, we got from you, from Predators dated 12th of July 2009 was actually your second take on the film so it wasn’t the first draft. Now before we start talking about the incarnation that we got, could you tell us about your first and how that differed from the direction the film eventually took?

Alex: So, we send in this document with two different takes. We get the job. We fly to Austin for several days. It was Mike, myself and Drew (Carvalho) [spelling?] who is another unsung hero on this project. He was out day-to-day at Fox and I have to say the movie does not get made without him. Alex Young was the one who set it all in motion so he gets massive credit for it because the train was moving so quickly and you just needed to make very quick decisions. Drew was the one who was making sure that they were getting made. So, we go we go to Austin.

We had a series of conversations which is kind of like mapping out what the movie is going to be. Then we go and write and basically, we have a hard deadline. Script needs to be in by Sunday. We sent in our Act 1 which is fairly close to what you guys see. There were just more characters. We went for 10 people. Actually, one of the guys was like an ISIS dead guy. There was a guy who was a tracker, a South African mercenary tracker but we start with more. So, we sent them to Fox. “They’re great. Fantastic keep going”.

So now this is where the story takes a completely radical turn from what you guys see. The story that comes that our guys are captured in at the end of Act 1, page 35, and they’re thrown into some gladiatorial combat where Predators have them fight other species that they’ve been brought to this planet. But then very quickly we escaped by breaking out one of the original Predators that is imprisoned there. So, the rest of the story is we are running to a Predator ship across a variety of terrains. So, it wasn’t just jungle. One point it was desert. At one point we go through for a mountain. There’s a big action sequence in the cave but we’re being chased by Super Predators, by the upgrades, and this is where you have the falcons and the bloodhounds employed in a much bigger capacity.

There was also Super Predator tech you hadn’t seen before. That stayed in the movie for a while beyond the first draft where they’re tracking our guys based on the ripples on the water. It was the thing where our guys [inaudible] and they reconstruct based on like them passing from a cloud of pollen where they see the imprint that they left. There’s just a lot of really cool futuristic tech stuff. So, series of running fights. We ultimately get to the Predator ship and of course the Royce character forges a relationship with the woman in the crew. Also, Predators in it.

Also, you actually forge a relationship with a Predator and we like the idea that that it’s a creature that is sentient, that can communicate, that has honor. No lengthy conversation but he would have a line here and there or a gesture to cue us into his state of mind and so it’s like the equivalent of “Take it” in Predator 2. Like moments like that if you feel like you’re getting to know this creature. So, you get to the ship.

The remaining posse show up. Predator dies there. Gives his life to allow our guys to escape. The woman gets captured by Super Predators. Our guy takes off. So, that’s when he does the sort of the noble thing where he comes back around, lands the ship in the Predator compound, liberates the Predator who is held there and the final action sequence and I swear to god this is like my biggest regret this never saw the light of day.

It’s a Braveheart style Predator battle between two clans with our guy putting on the Predator armor and leading the originals against the Upgrades. To this day, is just like such an awesome amazing sequence and then he becomes the chief of the Predators. We do all this. We send the script to the studio and we were so psyched about it and we knew it was expensive but we were like “Look guys, we wrote it big but there’s a way to scale it down” and what has happened over the course of it.

Nimrod gets brought in while we were writing and Nimrod has a different version of the movie. So, very quickly basically the conversation becomes “Guys this draft is not working. It’s too this, it’s too that. We got to start over”. Now we’ve burned all this time because remember like the movie’s supposed to come out soon. So, basically, we were tasked to write a brand-new script in 10 days.