Alex Litvak Interview

Alex Litvak is a writer and producer in the film industry. Litvak co-wrote 2010’s Predators along with Michael Finch and they later worked on a script called Medieval. We spoke to Alex Litvak for the 114th episode of the AvPGalaxy podcast that was published in August 2020.  Prior to reading this, I recommend reading the Nimrod Antal Interview as that also contains a lot of insights into Predators from a director point-of-view. You can listen to the Litvak interview below or continue on for a transcription. The interview references Robert Rodriguez’s 1996 Predators script which you can read here.

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Aaron: I’d like to welcome Alex Litvak to the show. Alex is one of the two writers of Predators so that’s why he’s on the show. Thank you for giving up your time to come and chat to us today. Before we do start nerding out about Predator can you let our listeners and our watchers know about who Alex Litvak is and what he’s been up to since Predators.

Alex: First of all, thank you for having me, guys. Thank you to you and thank you to everybody who’s watching and listening for being a fan. So, a little bit about me. You guys know this I actually wasn’t born in the States, I was born in Russia during the Cold War. My family emigrated to the U.S. in ‘91 and I was always one of these nerdy kids who just loved reading. Loved watching movies. When they asked you in first grade, what you want to do and some kids say “I want to be a princess” or “I want to be an astronaut”. I said I want to be a writer.

I loved fairy tales and wanted to write fairy tales for kids. That kind of evolved into a lot of creative writing when I was 10 and a very foolish attempt to write a novel when I was 16 which I never finished and very bad poetry sort of atypical because it’s all Russia and Soviet Union but typical and that I was a classic nerd and just really wanted to love movies and do movies and tell stories. So, when my family came to the United States, after I was really done with high school and I really wanted to get into film, so I went to USC film school which was a bit of a culture shock.

Like my first year in the States, wound up being my first year in college. I went there for production, took a lot of writing classes which is really another way of saying that I wanted to write and direct and of course I wanted to hold up that golden statue and say “Well this is heavy and thank you mom and my agent” and all that stuff and when I graduated, it’s another set of forks in the road. Which way do you go? Do you try to get a job to write the great American screenplay or do you get a real job and my parents were not happy about my choices in life? “We did not come to this country so you’ll be unemployed for the rest of your life”.

So, one of my internships led to a job working for Renny Harlin. He was in post on Cutthroat Island, the movie that was gonna start a mega successful pirate franchise which basically destroyed pirates for the next 15 years. Yeah, so it was Renny when he was still married with Geena had a production company, was developing what at the time was one of my favorite scripts The Long Kiss Goodnight, sort of as a tangential connection to Predator.

Shane Black is one of the biggest inspirations in my life. Whenever I teach writing classes, I always talk about how the importance of voice, the importance of the perspective, the importance of bringing in unique spins of the story and everything I learned about that, I learned from that guy. So, took that job thinking I write on weekends, didn’t realize it was a choice of a lifestyle really and for the next 10 years and that’s going to be important part of the story. Me being in a box. For the next 10 years, I worked for a succession of various production companies and studios.

I was at 20th Century Fox for two and a half years which is where my first contact with the Predator franchise came in and then finally switched to writing in 2005. So, it was kind of a weird moment in time where after 10 years in the business, the company I was working went under. So a bunch of people got laid off and at the time I just realized I kind of hated what I did. It was sort of the equivalent of wanting to be an adventurer and explorer but first, let me get a job working for the travel agency and figure out really how travel works. So, I felt like the reasons why I chose to defy my family and get to go to USC.

That kid that loved stories, that was not the guy that I was going to the office every day. Working with writer directors, yes which was tremendously educational but it was really living out someone else’s dreams rather than building my own. So, I thought, well look if not now, when? I wrote my first script since film school and low and behold they got me an agent and it sold and led to other things and so that road would eventually take me to Predators and now what I’ve done since then… Predators was my first movie that got made. The second one was The Three Musketeers which ironically, I wrote immediately after Predators and that got me the following year with Paul Anderson.

Since then, Mike and I worked on Masters of the Universe for a number of years and it’s unfortunate, it doesn’t look like that project will ever see the life of day, at least not as a live-action film but we worked on that for a few years at Sony. We sold kind of this big reimagination of Treasure Island to 20th Century Fox. Then we kind of parted ways and worked on our own for a while and we’ve reconnected. We sold this script last year called Versus to Universal and they’re in talks with the director. We’re all very excited about.

I can’t talk about it yet and we’ve actually sold another spec last week which will be announced the following week also. Another sort of big idea action-genre script with another big director attached. I have a movie coming out on Disney+ called Secret Society of Second-Born Royals which is sort of X-Men meets Princess Diaries. I predominantly work in the action thrill sci-fi space but whenever family movies are well done, I really enjoy them and now I’m married. I have a kid so I felt like it’s time for me to do something.

Aaron: One of our traditions on the podcast is to ask our guests about the first time they’ve experienced the franchise we’re talking about and it’s especially more exciting when it’s people like yourself who have had a hand in shaping and steering that franchise. Do you remember your first run in with the Predator? Was it through the films or did you have a more roundabout way into the series through comics or games or figures?

Alex: So, I was still in Russia, I think. I don’t know what year it was but it was still the Soviet Union and still the Cold War by kind of the early stages of the fall. American movies by and large were banned. Here and there a few snuck into the theaters and I remember there was one theater that showed like Charlie Chaplin westerns and whatnot but when you talk about Star Wars, The Godfather, Raiders all that stuff never appeared. So, the way the drug culture works here which like if you know the right people, that’s how it was with the with movies where everything was smuggled on video cassettes with like fifth sixth generation dubs so very low quality.

There’s usually a voice talking over, translating the lines so it’s not like high quality dubbing. There’s actually a guy who did the majority of the movies and he was the kind of like cultural Robin Hood if you will and so despite all the incredibly shitty qualities, it was just completely ground-breaking. Predator was actually when they eased the regulations, a bunch of kind of video parlors popped up where basically you go and you pay five bucks at the door and you sit there watching a movie like a small screen and chairs. This is basically like a way for these guys to have more customers and it’s all pirated, all illegal but that was the only way to watch movies.

So that’s how I watched Predator for the first time and actually I remember having some trepidation before I saw it because the one genre, I just don’t really connect with is horror. Like I just don’t like torture porn and I don’t like people being mutilated so it’s Schwarzenegger. I like Schwarzenegger so I’ll go see it and I remember walking out saying I like that, it was pretty great. That was pretty awesome. I can’t say that it was a movie that I was blown away by but I remember being very pleasantly surprised by it and obviously it stays with you over the years. I’ve re-watched it a number of times since and just the more you watch it, the more you appreciate what was done there where something that could have been so genre, ends up being A+.

Adam: Of course, we can’t not ask you about your favorite of the films and also your favorite Predator design itself?

Alex: I’m gonna stick with the classic. We can debate the merits or demerits of other movies as we were talking about Predator 2 before the podcast started but look, the original is a masterpiece. I watched it I think maybe like three, four years ago with my wife because she’s never seen it so I said well that’s a requirement before we watch my movie, you’ve got to watch this one and she is not an action fan. She’s not a horror fan but she really enjoyed it and again just the machismo poetry, the muscular quality of filmmaking. It was good then, it’s good now.

Now I actually feel like possibly better just because it’s like a fine bottle of wine that you open and it’s matured so well. There have been so many movies since that tried to do what this movie did and nobody has gotten there. We had the ambition to match Predator and do better. I don’t think we did but we hopefully come somewhat close but nobody has. That’s why it’s still this monument to what you can do with a generic story if you truly get creative.

Adam: I definitely think the third film what you and Rodriguez and Antal and Troublemaker Studios did definitely emulate that feel of the original film more than any of the other sequels.

Alex: Well, we had the benefit and the curse a little bit of being massive fans of the original. So, unlike Predator 2 where it’s like okay that was a hit but it has not achieved an iconic status yet. Now it is quite a quite a long time has passed. Now you know what this is, what the fans are expecting and you just don’t really don’t want to f**k it up you.

You’re not like “Here is a cool sci-fi action movie, this is a Predator”. We all felt that the franchise has gone off course so how do we bring it back to what we think is the right course but also rather than just delivering what you already expect of course and again that’s my problem with Predator 2, it doesn’t build. It’s just sort of like more of the same. How do we try to give the fans both what they deserve but also what they don’t expect and open new chapters, new doors and at one point we were really hoping to blow the doors wide open.

Aaron: What about the design though? In terms of the actual Predator creature? Is that classic as well?

I know there is a lot of debates about different designs. To me I’ve always cared more about the story and the characters and the world. We’ve had some input obviously in terms of how we conceived the upgrades but we were more interested in the characters, in the worlds and the situations that these guys are going to find themselves in.

Adam: Well, the classic Predator design did make a return in the third film. Was that something that was kind of your idea or did that kind of come from somewhere else?

Alex: That was always going to be in. I mean you can’t not make a Predator film without having the original Predator and being close to the original design. At least that’s how it felt. So, yeah, I think it was always a given.

Adam: The Predator franchise has never really enjoyed the same amount of expanded universe material as the Alien series. So, a lot of the entries that tend to delve into the lore become quite popular. Predator shares a degree of similarity with one of the more revered comic series which is Predator Bad Blood so we were curious as to how knowledgeable you were in regards to the Predator expanded universe and whether that played into your writing on the film? If there was any inspiration for the comics or anything like that?

Alex: Zero. I actually didn’t know it existed until I listened to your podcast with Nimrod and you guys mentioned it.

Aaron: It’s mainly that conflict between Predators and conflicting ideologies kind of thing, mostly more in that fight I guess than anything but like you’ve already mentioned this Predators was your first writing credit and coming out of the gates with the sequel to an iconic piece of cinema landscape is huge. So, how did you come to be involved with Predators?

Alex: So, my first contact with the Predator was actually I mentioned to you guys, I worked with Fox. So, it was like ‘96 or ‘98 and Predators was one of the projects I got put on as an exec and at the time, all we had was the Rodriguez script which you guys have read and I was like “How do we restart? How do we get something?” So, I pitched two ideas to my bosses. The first one was “Hey, why don’t we do Alien vs Predator so there was I think a script by Peter Briggs floating around which was Alien vs Predator and I was just like “Look guys, this is going to be a massive event.

I remember pitching the teaser. I was like “On one side of the screen is the alien head, on the other side of the screen is the Predator head and they slowly turn toward one another”. So, the problem was this and it was a non-starter at the time because we were making Alien Resurrection so everything was riding on the success of that movie and it underperformed so it was like “Oh we are not making another Alien movie and then because Predator 2 was a disappointment, the feeling was “Well you can’t really make another Predator movie without Arnold and Arnold was not whatever reason not gettable at that moment in time.

So that kind of went away and the other idea was I said “Well why don’t we try to go after Arnold” and tried to get him and I pitched an idea and I said look “I can get a writer to write this.” There’s so many fans out there and the idea was what if we make a direct sequel to Predator which the first one was not which is what happened to Dutch. The idea was Dutch has been mothballed because the whole thing has been classified and never happened so he effectively has been drummed out of the military and he lives… either doing some menial jobs or maybe he’s in prison or whatever.

Another Predator ship crash lands somewhere and instead of going to the jungle, it was anything from the crash lands in the water so it’s more of an ocean setting or it crash lands somewhere in the mountains so we’re now in the mountains but it’s some sort of hard to access location. So, now the powers would come to him saying “Dutch, we need you because another Predator ship has appeared and think of all the tech that we can access. Think of all the technological leaps and scientific leaps that we can make.

Come with us because you’re the only one who faced this creature and lived”. So, reluctantly he says yes so there’s a new group. It’s kind of this new elite group of commandos and now he’s older, they’re younger, he’s been out of circulation. They’re very cutting edge so he’s sort of the odd man so they all go there and he’s not in command. He’s like more of an advisory capacity like Ripley in Aliens. So, they all go there, they get to the ship, they blow the hatch and there’s a whole team of Predators just waiting there for them.

You realize what the whole thing is, it’s been a trap to get Dutch. So, now Dutch is the prize prey and the reason they showed up again is because they’re hunting him. So, now it’s a total kind of this executive decision type fiasco where the team is largely massacred with a few survivors and Dutch is now pitted against the team of… not even the upgrades but just like the Predators have who’ve come specifically after him to hunt him. So, that was the idea. Yeah, kind of interesting but if you really need to get Arnold and Arnold is whatever reason deemed un-gettable at the time so that idea goes away.

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.

Adam: So, when it when it turned out Fox wanted to explore a different direction. I mean what was the next step for you? Had they given you some direction and it was a case of refinement or it sounds more like you just went back to the drawing board?

Alex: Well, there was a case of refinement in the first act because logically they were happy with Act 1. Again, it ended up being vastly scaled down and fewer characters but like at least I would say it was a big rewrite but it’s not a complete discard and then everything beyond that was completely discarded and again I think what it was is we just had greater ambitions. We felt like “Let’s give the fans something we have not seen before”. We knew that was probably too expensive for what they wanted but we’re like “You can discard all this stuff” but like just the idea that we loved and the one idea that I wish we kept was the notion that the guy puts on the Predator armor and becomes a Predator himself to fight.

What Nimrod brought in, he had a much different version of the movie in his head and really the thought was “Look we got to stick to Predator world. Let’s stick closer to what the original movie was with the addition of the Upgrade, the alien planet and the worst of worst. So, those are the marching orders. Now go write the script. So, they gave us offices at Fox in the basement and for the next 10 days, we were there just doing insane hours. Just like churning out pages. I remember hearing the 4th July fireworks in the basement of Fox, the final thing we have to pull an all-nighter.

The Nolan story which you’re going to ask me about later is directly sort of linked to the pace in which the draft was written. I would say the closest to screenwriting combat that I’ve ever gotten. I remember there was a point toward the end where Mike and Nimrod almost got into a fistfight and I’m just like between them trying to… because like everybody’s losing their mind. This is now day 10, lack of sleep, immense stress because if we don’t deliver this time, the movie’s over. Everybody’s done. Everybody’s fired. Then we send it off and thank god, the studio responded positively. Obviously, they had notes but it felt like the skeleton and what they want is there so now let’s go.

I think some of it is budget. We like the idea to put this conflict between Predator and Predator cannot be front and center and the other problem that people have with it which again is like the right or wrong, is it’s two aliens fighting each other. Fundamentally we don’t really care. It needs to be about humans in jeopardy so which is why the Predator versus Predator is still obviously in the movie but it’s more in the background than in the foreground. We really were trying to, as you saw with the first version that I was talking to you guys about, we really tried to move it through the foreground.

Aaron: So, on the topic of the Predators then, one of the controversial aspects of the early draft that leaked was how the Super Predators genetically manipulated themselves which in that draft resulted in things like changing their blood to be black. Now the genetic manipulation angle would ultimately not make it into the final film with the only real allusion to that being… I think it was Nolan’s line about the difference between dogs and wolves. So, we were curious as to where this was actually dropped? Was it something that actually made it into the shooting draft and was removed in the edit or was that something that you and Mike dropped while you were working on the various drafts and refining?

Alex: Well, it was always a part of it because the idea of like they’re bigger better killers, why are they hunting people. Just for sport or to make themselves better killers? So that idea early on we very much championed and I know that idea survived for a variety of drafts and I think it eventually got removed because there was just no manifestation of it. It’s not like he saw those guys injecting themselves with anything that made them become bigger and better. So, at some point it just ended up being dropped. I’m not sure when. The idea of an upgrade based on the genetics of the prey, that was one of the big ideas going on.

To us, we never thought it was like sub-species, we just thought it was different clans like ninja and samurai. So, you have a more of a traditionalist mentality, more warrior-like mentality with the original clan and more say practical or more anything goes mentality with the upgrades which is like “Look it’s all about power, it’s about making yourself more lethal, stronger, bigger, faster”. That’s what the other Predators are and what we wanted to bake into the franchise and again that was another idea of other clans out there and there’s a civil war somewhere in the background which our guys could become invested in.

Aaron: Would it have been specifically like classic as a traditionalist and the Super Predators as the tinkerers? Would have been those just specific ones or would it have pulled in like other groups together in terms of the civil war thing like Predator 2‘s clan and stuff like that?

Alex: There were many conversations about how to build on it. Yeah, the whole thing was like you start with two but in success we could say there are five or seven. There are all these different tribes and again that’s where I still wish, as a fan, we explored that because the Predator universe is so fascinating because it gives you a keyhole. The first movie, here’s an alien that comes and it’s not an alien armada.

It’s just one guy and this one guy doesn’t come to conquer us, he’s just here to hunt. He’s just here fishing effectively right. So, what a great keyhole way to the story. So, we wanted to widen the keyhole with this one and then to say but really, we’re just giving you now, it’s a door but beyond the door, they’re like here be dragons and wonders and monsters. So, you really can go to places you’ve never thought of and see things you could never have imagined and I think in trying to compress it back to the keyhole, we’ve kind of lost some of that.

Adam: Moving on to the human characters. We always found Royce to be a very interesting lead. He’s not your traditional protagonist and we don’t even learn his name until the very end of the film. Can you tell us about the conceptualization of Royce? Did you find him difficult to write?

Alex: No. Again, this was a big thing that we wanted to go for. Dutch is a leader of men. Dutch is like “Leave no man behind”. He is a soldier. So, what’s the opposite of that? The opposite of that had to be mercenary. The opposite of that had to be a guy who is cynical, disillusioned, a former version of Dutch if you will. We always thought of Royce as somebody who started out from the good places Dutch and then shit happened and now he is a version of Jason Bourne, a man either men hunted or a hunter. There was a number of different openings that we did for him. The original pitch was with him being dropped but the studio said “Well can we get to know him more before this”.

So of course, we went and wrote a bunch of different versions. There was a version where you saw a bunch of soldiers being hunted and you think it’s the Predator but it’s Royce. He’s the one who is hunting and killing soldiers in some foreign country. There is a reason why we describe him as like a Steve McQueen face because Steve McQueen, that was his speciality, playing these anti-heroes. There’s a reason why he has only one name because I love the Richard Stark novels with the Parker character. The professional thief only has one name Parker.

That’s where that came from. So, his voice was just really easy because it’s a guy who doesn’t joke a lot. It’s a guy who doesn’t fraternize a lot and he’s a survivor. He doesn’t want to be a leader of these guys. He sort of becomes a defecto but he’s all about survival. The casting of Adrian Brody which I’m going to talk about later was surprising but just writing that character… I’d say that’s the character that changed the least from draft to draft. He’s always this guy who desperately does not want to be a hero, does not want to lead men. He just wants to get the f**k out of here and it’s him becoming a leader and becoming a savior to spite himself.

Aaron: Was there ever any temptation to just go all the way or was he just always planned that he would have that arc?

Alex: He has to come back because the what works about these the stories is fundamentally that deep down there is a shred of humanity and a shred of goodness in him. Hans Solo is going to come back to help Luke. It’s just making this moment so satisfying you’re like finally, you’ve become the guy they’ve always thought you could be.

Aaron: So, the character of Edwin and the casting of Topher Grace was another element that we found particularly interesting with Predators. Now I’ve always thought he was a really fascinating concept but personally he’s the one character in the film that I’m not overly convinced with in the final product. So, can you tell us a little bit about the thinking behind his character and how you feel about the finished effort?

Alex: That idea was that’s one of the characters that survived in the first draft. I think it was Mike’s idea and I gotta say I think it’s pretty genius. Putting yourself in the mindset of okay so we’re gonna do something different here and of course you’re gonna have your prototypical soldier and we have our share of soldiers in this thing from different special units from different countries. We obviously had to have the Russian guy but he was like finally a Russian guy who’s not a monster – was a hero and then okay there’s some criminals. How can we give fans something feels fresh?

Who is the biggest Predator on earth and arguably not on the combat setting which is expected? Not in the streets which is okay fine. You got your criminals and Predator too. What’s the new spin and I gotta say whether or not some people like it and some people hate it, it’s a pretty interesting idea that Hannibal Lecter also finds his way onto this planet. So, in the only major difference was in the first draft, you knew from the get-go what he was. We sort of used Steve Buscemi from Con Air as a prototype as the guy who is a mass murderer and they’ve dropped in and they all have their weapons and hit weapons are these knives and scalpels and just really creepy dude.

Now over the course of it, it shifted to “Hey let’s play him as somebody who is going to be dangerous coming not only from the outside but from within the group” which was also an element in our first draft where eventually he turns on the group but it’s a little bit more expected because he’s a serial killer. I have to say again execution aside and people love it or hate it, the notion that there is a Predator embedded on Predators and he’s like a chameleon hiding in plain sight. I think it was a really interesting idea. I think the ideal of a character like Edwin is a really cool idea and I’m glad that it’s something that we came up with early and unlike all the other stuff managed to survive various changes and iterations.

Aaron: So, you you’ve already talked in some degree about this next question and naturally when any Predator related film starts to come out, everybody is always curious as to whether or not Arnie and Dutch are going to be involved. So, we know he was approached regarding Predators. Robert talked about it. Nimrod talked about it and we saw an alternative ending in your leaked second draft but how far did that go in terms of you and the writing. Were there any other versions of Dutch throughout the writing of Predators?

Alex: Yeah, it was actually. So, obviously there’s the one that you are aware of. I so wish that happened because I remember us talking about it and we’re like if this happens and I remember saying this to Nimrod, if we’re in the back of the audience in Westwood on the opening night and Arnold comes on, the whole theater is going to stand up and cheer because “Now he’s the Predator warchief. How awesome is that”. So, the other idea there was a draft where the Nolan character became Dutch. Robert said “Well maybe, we can actually get him for like a more serious part and why not have him be the Nolan character”.

So there the notion was that Dutch has been brought here and he’s been surviving here and he’s kind of lost it. So, he still has the darkness of the Nolan character but it’s Dutch. I don’t think it was ever serious and I don’t think anybody wanted to see Dutch as this dark anti-hero so it was just one draft and never really took off from there.

This is now third or fourth draft probably fourth where it’s like we find Dutch and so he finds our guys take him and takes him into the compound and then tries to rob them and kill them because he’s a survivor. So, it was still all the moves of the Nolan character – just Dutch and with kind of more of the backstory of Dutch. It was tried for one draft and never really went beyond that.

He gets killed much like the Nolan character gets killed which is another reason I think it was an exploration, not a real attempt whereas with the cameo at the end… everyone was like “Yes let’s try for that”. That was more of an exploration like “Do we do we like it or not” and it’s just something that Robert wanted to try and again, he’s like “Well maybe Arnold wants to die in the movie” or something like that but I don’t think that draft was ever shown.

So, I go back and they were working on Predators so in Nimrod’s mind, the movie that he wanted to make was just a relentless pressure cooker where like it starts, it doesn’t stop. Like great but when we do a first pass of the script, the script ends up being 67 pages. I love the pressure of the original. We want to keep it going and as a result a lot of the dialogue stuff we wanted to do. He’s like “No it’s got to move. You say two lines. Don’t say five”. So, as a result, we end up with this 67-page script. We’re like “Nimrod, it doesn’t work”. He’s like “Yes you’re right, it doesn’t work”.

So now we’re all scratching our heads in the 11th hour trying to figure out how the movie needs a slowdown. It needs a moment where they’re in relative safety where we can also explain some of the stuff that has happened and Mike to his credit, that was another Mike idea. He goes “What if they find a survivor” and I was like “What are you talking about?” I didn’t get it at first and then what he talked about, I was like “Oh so you’re talking about Robinson Crusoe”. He goes “Yes” and then it all started clicking. Oh, it’s Robinson Crusoe. The guy who’s been stranded there for a very long time and thematically what appealed to me was, it’s survivalism.

It’s a guy much like Royce but now he’s been here for whatever number of years and it’s all about me. It’s all about surviving at any cost which is what he turns into. So, we presented this to Nimrod and he liked all this and then we went and wrote it. Fundamentally when you think about it, the Nolan section, it’s like it’s very modular. You can lift it out of the movie and we wouldn’t have any substantial repercussions on the story.

It’s just that there are some character themes. We kind of get into the mythology which we desperately wanted to do but when I met Lawrence Fishburne and I gotta say very early on, even I think over the course of the writing of it, the Fishburne idea was thrown out because Nimrod worked with him before on Armor and he goes I need Larry Fishburne to do it. As you remember that second draft is still pretty short for a feature so we need to drop in a section where like it beefs it up more so but that’s why Nolan is in the movie.

Adam: When it comes to later series entries, there tends to be a lot of discussion around homages and easter eggs. Now it’s an interesting one for Predators as sometimes people accuse it of being a remake or a retread of the original which is something Aaron, both you and I, disagree with. We feel the film has its own identity. Alien vs Predator Requiem is another film that tends to get that criticism levied at it and when we spoke to Liam O’Donnell, who was involved with that film about it, he talked about how it came from a place of insecurity regarding the film they were making. I was curious as to how you feel about homages in franchise films and how fair of a criticism do you think it is when it comes to Predators?

I think it’s a both fair criticism and unfair one but the reason why I told you guys all these different versions that I’ve explored before prior to being hired to write this and then the version that Mike and I explored together, was the first draft… there’s a script that you want to write. The script that they let you write in the movie that you see and it is in the current climate virtually impossible to do something truly original, partially because every story has been told, partially because studios don’t want to take chances. Movies are an investment so in the minds of the studio… it’s writing like Predator civil war. It’s more expensive. If you venture into new territory.

People love the originals so if you’re closer to the original, then there’s a greater chance that the fans will respond. If you go too far out, there’s a chance of people go what the f**k was that. It’s a dance and there are reasons why these choices are being made. Do I wish we kept some of the ideas that pushed it further into new territory? As I said the ambition for us, for Mike and I, was to do aliens. Like we talked about it endlessly. How it honors everything that’s great about the original but elevates you to the next level. That’s what we’re shooting for.

I don’t think we got there. So, do I wish some of the ideas that were truly originally survived? Absolutely. Do I understand why they didn’t survive? Yeah. That’s why I said it’s a fair and unfair criticism because at the end of the day, the feeling was you want to be, not an homage, but not a repeat but there’s a formula that’s working with a Predator movie. So, let’s stick with that formula but also update it with new stuff and I think people tend to overlook and again I understand the place they’re coming from, but I think they tend to overlook these other ideas such as “Oh it’s an alien planet, oh it’s actually not the band of brothers but a group of outsiders and killers who are forced to work together”.

The notion that there is the old Predators but then there’s a Predator within their group who’s gonna turn on them. The notion of the upgrades which I like and Predator versus Predator which I totally understand kind of gets shoved into the background but these are big ideas here. Whether or not they get the attention they deserve, that’s up to the fans but I do feel like there is enough in it to say “Well we didn’t just rip off the original and just basically remade it with different casts. I think there’s nothing to stand on its own.

We knew Predator beat by beat so of course there had to be a moment when somebody turns around and faces him and we talk about the building moment but you don’t see the building moment, it’s just a scream so now we’re like okay we’re going to show you what it’s going to look like and it’s going to be this awesome moment and he’s going to win. I mean he’s going to lose too but he’s going to win so it is fair to say that’s what we were going for.

I think some of the just criticism comes from it’s another jungle which is fair and that’s ultimately the budget. It would have been more expensive to shoot anywhere else. That I get but I feel like we purposely try to find moments that you go “Oh it’s kind of like the original but these guys found their own style”.

Adam: Another one of our favorite aspects of Predators is the introduction of the River Ghost creature. The idea of other extra-terrestrial prey was introduced in Predator 2 though originally planned for Predator but it was something that Rodriguez featured heavily in his original treatment and it was an element that we’re glad made it into your version. Could you tell us a bit about the conception of the River Ghost? How, if at all, he changed over the course of development and if you had further ideas for him that existed outside of the script?

Alex: It was really just the idea that there were other things on this planet. That was in Robert’s draft. It was in our first draft. We just always loved the idea that this is the preserve so humans aren’t the only prey there. But no, I don’t think we ever had a real story behind them. Yeah, the only alien character had much more screen time was the original Predator in the first draft. From page 35 on until the end of the second act was a companion and a guide for our guys as they’re being hunted but not really with the River Ghost.

Adam: Was there an idea for a shape-shifter as well?

Aaron: That was Nimrod’s idea.

Alex: That was his idea that he threw in about Isabelle being a shape-shifter. Mike and I were like “What!?” And he’s like “Just make it work” and we’re like “Okay” and we put it in and that didn’t really get any traction. It was coming from the same place like there are other things that have been dropped here so what if she’s one of those things.

Aaron: So, despite a pretty positive critical response and a good box office return and Brody and Braga were contracted for sequels, we never saw one. So, as far as we know Isabelle and Royce are still fighting for survival on that preserve. While you’re working on Predators, did either you or Mike have any sort of thoughts on where you would have liked to have seen the story go?

Alex: Several and there were actually several meetings with the studio about that.

Let’s talk about casting. So, the big thing there is obviously it’s Brody so here’s how this came about. People ask me sometimes like “Do you picture actors when you write characters?” The answer is no but we wrote this kind of Steve McQueen type character. We had two actors in mind which was Van Diesel certainly because of Pitch Black. He gave us kind of a human Predator but we thought there’s no way he’ll probably want to do it because he’s got Pitch Black but the other guy was Jerry Butler because of 300. Leonidas versus Predator. That would be cool.

So, lo and behold, his agents were interested for him but he wanted way too much money but in some alternate universe, there is a version where Jerry Butler is Royce. So, now here’s how the whole thing came about. So, they start casting the movie. The first stop was Clive Owen because of Robert’s relationship with him on Sin City. Clive Owen passes. Then they go to Jamie Foxx. He passes. Then they go to Michael Fassbender.  So, we got three passes and meantime the production is moving forward and I believe they were casting other parts but we still don’t have our Royce. Adrian came about because they offered him the Topher Grace part because you’re gonna be the weird serial killer dude.

He’s like “I want to be the McQueen guy” and that’s when the conversation started. We were like “Hey, wait, hold on a second”. We’re not going for the expected, we’re going for the unexpected. What about a guy who does not have the physicality of Arnold, who’s kind of leaner, smaller but he can move and it was the whole thing was like “Okay he’s got an Academy Award, he’s a real actor”. So, I think it was a combination of we just needed somebody because the movie was getting made and two, it was like “Well hold on a second, if we’re going for different, this guy is very different”.

I have to say like watching the movie, he delivers. I have to say like they’re things that I wish were different about the movie. I have to say Adrian Brody’s not one of them. He got into amazing shape. He committed. He has the right look. You believe that this guy is a killer. The irony is he gets in this amazing shape. He gets really buff and then he was down with some stomach flu and by the time he was at the premiere, he lost all the muscle.

Now we can talk about the sequels. So, the movie comes out and not a very favorable spot for genre movie, like middle of the summer but shockingly does really well especially on the shoe-string budget that the movie was made for and everyone was like “It worked!”. Despite all the struggles that we’ve had, it worked. So, what did we do? We went in and there was a series of meetings. So, the first take was we went into Drew Carvalho. Everybody was up for it. Nimrod was up for it. Robert was up for it. We had to get the studio on board first. So, we met with Drew and pitched him this idea.  In the sequel now, this is with Royce and Isabelle.

They’re still on the planet. They’re still stuck there and they keep dropping more people of course and the opening of the movie was that somebody new gets dropped and a Predator shows up, about to kill this person. Boom the Predator gets killed and it’s Royce and Isabelle showing up saying “Welcome to the resistance”. So, they have their own little tribe on the planet where they’re surviving. They’re being hunted but they’re also striking back. So, you’ve established they were still there.  You also establish that Royce are incredibly valuable targets because these guys are all about the genetic upgrades, right. They want their DNA.

But they’re still stuck here. They’ve got their sort of foothold on survival but how do we get back. So, at the end of Act 1, Royce and Isabelle and their guys, are captured by Super Predators on purpose because they allow themselves to be captured and they’re brought to their ship that they use to funnel people into this planet. There’s got to be some sort of big transport so now you get to see the transport. So, now these guys break out. Our guys break out and what the movie is it’s Die Hard on a Predator ship.

The idea was now you break free and now you’re trying to control the ship with all the Super Predators and you have to fight there and of course all the other shit. There’s like an alien zoo on that ship and the last thing is like why? Drew was like “Wow, I love that idea”. So, at the end of the day, we win, we get back to Earth. We land and we realize it’s the future. All along we thought that this is happening now but what if these guys have been on ice for like 300 years. They said the hatch opens and the space marines come in. That’s how you merge the two worlds, the Predator and the Alien world finally merge and bring the space marines into the story because I love him.

We just kept waiting for them to go and say “Go write this” and I guess stars never lined up and so that version never got off the ground. We do not give up because we just love this world. Then we went and had a series of conversations with John Davis and John (Fosse) [spelling?]and Matt Riley was the executive at Fox. What would it take to get a Predator another movie? Say it’s not a direct sequel. So, what I just pitched was a direct sequel but what if it’s just kind of another way into the story. So, we pitch them the idea of what happens when… we knew that Fox really responded to the idea of a kind of big Predator ship.

What happens if the Predator ship crashes on earth and basically all the stuff that’s inside the Predator ship kind of spills out and what you have is a guy, whose family is I think was a U.S. Marshall. His family’s trapped in kind of this area so he goes in to rescue his family while all the all the Predators are basically rampaging and hunting prey in the middle of the city. So, it was kind of a big Jumanji type version.

I believe it may have been also like some crucial component of the ship was missing and the Predators were trying to recover it but again John Davis got behind. Matt Riley was interested in one thing or another. Stars never aligned and they ended up going with Shane Black’s version. I remember we heard that “He likes your idea but he’s in the process of playing out a director”. So, it was like early super early stages of The Predator. So, once you got Shane Black and Shane Black said “I got my own idea of a Predator movie”.

Adam: Which was your favorite scene to see up on the big screen?

Alex: So, three come to mind. One is there is a moment when Royce says “Here’s what they are doing” and Isabelle says “How do you know all this” and Royce says “Because that’s what I would do” and I remember that moment watching the movie for the first time and he just nails it. Basically, he’s saying because I’m a hardened killer and because I’m a monster just like them and that’s what I would do and he just nails the delivery. There’s a moment where Isabelle says to him “What’s your deal? What made you so f**ked up?” So, the story to his answer is this.

We wrote some speech which I remember being quite good where he talks about something that happened. So, that’s obviously not in the move. Apparently, they were going to shoot the scene just as we wrote it and then Alice Braga found this quote from Hemingway which is in the movie. It was so awesome and Mike and I were like “Whatever we wrote is not nearly as good as that” because it just spoke volumes about… it’s Hemingway. It’s this archetypal hunter and this guy is intelligent enough to read Hemingway. It’s a complete departure from what they did but it’s a spirit for what we’re going for, just made better.

The third moment is a line from the Walton Goggins character. They brought in Jimmy Vanderbilt for maybe two weeks to punch up some stuff. He didn’t see a credit. His name is not on the movie but some of my favorite lines, especially the one I’m about to mention. It’s when Walton Goggins goes “When I get out of here, I’m gonna do so much blow, so many hookers” and it always gets a huge laugh and that’s a Jimmy Vanderbilt line.

Aaron: You’ve just made me remember that we’ve completely forgot to ask you about you actually getting to see the film. Did you go to the premiere the Texas premiere? What was it why attending that first show?

Alex: There were two. Okay I remember Mike and I, went and saw the first 10 minutes of the movie because we were just so freaking nervous and there was a screening. There was a big premiere. So, we went and saw the first 10 minutes and then we snuck out of it and then we saw the movie for the first time, was the extra premiere with the audience and it was an interesting experience because we’re seeing everything for the first time. We went on the set so the things that landed and things were like “Oh god why did you cut that!?”

Like you really felt that way too so it was a rollercoaster experience and like I said, it’s our first movie. For the longest time both Mike and I felt like it’s a hard movie for us to watch, simply because we are so close to it personally because so much blood, sweat and tears went into it. From me wanting to do a Predator movie for years and years and years to us fighting like hell to get this job and then writing the script we were so proud of only to learn they wanted to go in a different direction and then that 10 day of just pure survival and screenwriter combat of writing the new version.

Like when you’ve been you’ve been through all that and you’ve watched the finished product, it’s so hard to be objective which is why to me, it still holds such a dear precious and sort of conflicted place in my heart because I’m just so close to it and it meant so much to hear from fans over the years.

Adam: That’s everything from us but before we sign off is there anything, you’d like to say any anecdote or thought that we just haven’t given you the opportunity to express?

Alex: I think we were pretty much covered it and again thank you guys for being fans and thank you to all the listeners that out there who were I guess just suffered through two hours and 15 minutes of me telling the different stages of this journey but thank you for being fans and it’s wonderful that to this day it just lives on and the culture lives on, the fandom and that’s fundamentally why I want to tell stories so that somebody goes “Hey, I enjoyed that. That made me laugh. That kept me on the edge of my seat. I was rooting for these guys”. So, thank you.