Tom Woodruff Interview (2)

Aaron: One of the notable differences with Feral’s suit to how you did all your other Predators was in how Dane’s head was in the neck. Something that you’d done previously with all the alien suits. So why this change because it seems like a really big change in terms of how the Predators were constructed and performed?

Tom: Yeah, it is a big change. It was something we also after Aliens, it was something we did for Pumpkinhead. We had my face down in the neck and that gave us the opportunity to not see a person’s neck and a head, and the head could tilt back here instead of down here but for the Feral Predator, it was done primarily to be able to come up with a much smaller Predator head on set. The Predator heads have been really big, and they’ve established the Predator and not knocking them, they are what they are but like Dan said, “Let’s do what we can to make this look like a different breed or a different generation.”

Or just something that isn’t just the same Predator revisited and to make that head smaller, we had to have Dane tilt his head down so that we could hide the face here and hide his neck under the skin of the Predator’s neck and some costume, some armor but that was the whole point. I thought it was highly successful. I was actually delighted to see the early test where we 3D printed Dane’s head and we 3D printed a sculpture.

A 3D sculpture that Michael Eppinette had done for us and found out where we’re going to fit Dane’s head into this Predator head, and it was tight including servos that had to go into it. It was very tight but wow I think it worked out great to be able to have that… when you line all the Predators up, there’s something very distinct and very almost unnatural about seeing the latest Predator which storyline, is probably the earliest Predator that we’ll ever see from that creature world.

Aaron: Did it actually make it easier for you then having to not worry about all the servos and the mechanics directly around a performer’s head? Did that free up for you in terms of construction?

Tom: Oh, a little bit but not as much as you would think. There was still a lot of tight packaging of servos in the space that was left back here that would have been the back of Dane’s head. Now we had a little bit more room but again we kept wanting to compress this. We would do sketches, and Dan would say “Well kind of compress it a little bit more” and we’d go back to our 3D work and find out what we could do to allow some room. Luckily, the electric servos are much smaller than they were back in the late 70s, the early 80s. So that certainly helped out too. The advances that were made in the technical tools.

Adam: With the advent of things like digital scanning and 3D printing now, do you find that’s really kind of changed the game a bit in the world’s practical effects?

Tom: I think absolutely it has. Especially when build schedules have gone from six months to four months. If we had to work all of that out in the sculpting room with light casts and everything, it would take a lot longer to complete any one direction before it was complete enough to either say yes or throw it away and start all over. With the 3D world, you can just turn things around and push this here or push this here and it’s so much faster but also in terms of design. It just feels a lot cleaner because you’re not limited by your tools or your materials.

Aaron: So, something I’ve seen people point out is an apparent similarity between the Feral Predator’s absolutely phenomenal bone mask, easily one of my favorite masks from the series and the skull of the River Ghost creature, the alien introduced in Nimrod Antal’s Predators. Was that a conscious similarity or was that a coincidence?

Tom: I think what probably one of the big differences is that the head of this of this River ghost is taller than the head on the Prey Predator. Somewhat. It’s a more vertical thing but I don’t know. What was the challenge if Dan had seen that and or subconsciously or whatever. It gets to the point where there’s only so many things that you can do to a Predator to change him up from what’s been done but not lose the essence of what a Predator is, and I think anybody that sees our film for all the differences. The visual differences and performance differences, it’s still a Predator. I think that’s very cool to be able to find something like that that defines a whole world.

Adam: And now that Prey has been out, we’ve been treated to a lot of behind-the-scenes concept art for the film. It was interesting to see that the Predator character went through a few earlier iterations before landing on the final design that we see in the film which from what we understand was largely based on the conceptual work of Michael Vincent. How did StudioADI and director Dan Trachtenberg arrive at this final look for the Predator?

Tom: He’s a brilliant 3D artist. He creates in 3D. We used him quite a bit. We actually had come to him at a step not at the end. We hadn’t designed everything but we came to him with sort of the works of what we knew were going to be part of the character. By that time, I had split off to do weapons with Farzad. Alec had split off with Michael to develop that head in a way that we would have a great looking 3D sculpt that we could then print in-house and do final detailing on. Again, a lot of that was in an effort of showing five different versions of this Predator head without having to sculpt them with Michael just kind of burning the midnight oil and just going in one two three and making some changes but were all in the same world. That made it so the next day we’re able to go back to Dan and say, “Which of these do you want to progress with or which of these do you want to say it’s done, and we should move forward?” So, he’s very fast. He has a great attitude and he’s a great collaborator.

Adam: Speaking of some of those earlier concepts too, Kyle Brown did a number of Predator pieces. We love the performance of Dane DiLiegro as the Predator and we had him on as a guest recently for our podcast. He had told us how much of a challenge this role for him was. That it was brutally hot in the suit during the shoot. Did this particular shooting in a remote location with the excessive summer heat create additional challenges for your team with the suit and did you give Dane much coaching considering your history with the suit performance as the alien character?

Tom: Yeah, I think what we went through in Calgary was still better, still more humane than what Kevin Peter Hall went through in Mexico on the first movie. It was very hot, but it was very dry. It was a rough terrain. Dane had some of his vision was obstructed looking out through holes under the jaw and he did do an amazing job. I know he’s done other suit stuff, but I don’t know that he had ever done anything that had this long of a run of 8-10 weeks of doing all of this suit stuff and he’s such an enjoyable guy to be around.

He’s just such a positive a positive guy and he loves you. It’s all very real. He’s not just putting it on to earn his next job. I would tease him. I think the first time we had him in full suit, we jumped in a van, and we took him up on the hill, on the setting where Dan was shooting, and Dane is just bubbling like a little kid. “What should I do? Should I do this, and should I turn this?”  I didn’t say a thing. I just turned to him outside. He goes “What’s the best thing to do?” And I just turned him and say, “Shut the f**k up.” No, it was great. He’s brilliant. I didn’t have to give him many performing notes because he already had that the whole thing down. He was comfortable in the suit and the amount of movement that it still provided and vision. He did an excellent job.

Aaron: So, kind of rolling back a little bit but also relevant because I’m curious now just thinking about it. With the head in the neck thing. Is that common in terms of suit design, creature design or would that not have been something you might have had very specific experience with the alien compared to some of the other Predator performances?

Tom: Well for us when Alec and I was still at Stan’s, it was the approach we used for the aliens in Aliens and Pumpkinhead. There’s videos out there of me and the Pumpkinhead suit. At that point Stan had to move to directing and he wasn’t there on a day-to-day job so he turned all the design and build over to us but having come hot off of Aliens, we thought there were techniques that worked so well including the what we call the trash bag queen and sadly enough I keep going to some of the companies that are getting licensing to do characters and I want somebody to do a trash bag queen so we did a trash bag Pumpkinhead.

We wrapped the head. We wrapped black cloth, and we shot it all backlit and we loved it. Stan loved it. We got a little bit of a call out from the fans way before they could just sit at home and do it on their keyboard but yeah someone said “Oh it’s the same thing you did with the alien” and yes that’s right in the interior, the head is down but from the outside, it doesn’t proceed to the outside doesn’t stick out as evidence of how it was done. It’s just here’s an interesting creature of the big head and a long neck and where’s the human head inside. That to me is the success of it and I’m sure they’re out there. There’s so many shops doing these things and so many creature artists doing these things. I know there’s got to be more characters built around that concept that went into characters and movies and streaming.

Adam: Feral was a pretty unique design when compared to previous Predators. How do you land on the right balance of familiar and new when designing the next iterations of these well-known characters? Do you feel that audience or fan expectations can sometimes be creatively limiting?

Tom: That’s interesting. We certainly don’t want to disappoint the fans, but we certainly can’t rope them all in and make them all happy about everything. In a movie like this, it’s great to be able to turn all the attention to the director where Dan can establish the approach. One of the first things he said was “I want to see what a Predator looks like that is inhumanly skinny, tall and super lean and skinny” and at the same time, he wasn’t ready to give up on the bigger beefier type Predator so one of our earliest tests was Alec found…

I think it was still a Predator suit that was left from AvPR I think. It wasn’t in great shape. This stuff just doesn’t last but he pulled that down. They made some repairs on it. Alec had already found Dane. Had Dane come in. I had a son who’s six foot three I think and super skinny and he had been doing some character stuff. We made a custom leotard for him and then we did a lot of digital printing onto the spandex of like a Predator color and body details all printed on this spandex thing so when we put that on him and they shared a stunt head. He was super tall, and he was super skinny but next to Dane, it was very easy to see that we don’t want to go in that design. We don’t want to go in that direction of the super skinny version now. It’s always great to try it. I always think it’s a benefit if you have a couple of different ways to go that you quickly weed out the ones that aren’t working so that you can focus full force on getting the other ones to the point where they’re the correct way to go.

You could definitely tell that he had the muscles to get around and to do the things that he was doing on screen purposely. I do think that there’s a certain look… I know on Wolf, he was very lean. It was fun to go in that direction. Again, something different. He was very lean and when we got to this one, Joey Orozco who did the sculpting of the body was being very methodical in matching what the size of Dane’s arms were and then making an exact size sheet of clay, thickness of clay. He would just start wrapping the Dane body sculpture and that so whatever was built up was symmetrical. I think that also helped that very specific balance of symmetry also helped to make it look like a complete and well thought out design.

Adam: After working on The Predator, did you find it a bit refreshing compared to that one where you had built Fugitive Predator which was a much more traditional looking Predator. This one you were given a bit more creative freedom to try something that was a bit more pushing the boundaries of what we had traditionally known as a Predator.

Tom: Yeah, we were very lucky to that Dan gelled well with us because it would have been very easy to say look Tom and Alec have done these and these are very similar, and I want something very new. It’s not at all unheard of to have a production come together and say, we want to start over from the very beginning. We want to use people that have never done this type of creature before. So, in a way we were very lucky that Dan took us on and saw that we were flexible because had somebody else put this design together and would have looked very similar I’m sure to what Dan was directing.

There would be a great feeling that that “Oh ADI dropped the ball, or they couldn’t turn the ship around. They could only do a Predator one of two or three different ways.” So that is something I think that Alec and I were both very thankful for that Dan saw flexibility in us and in our work over the years that he entrusted us with the new design.