The Strause Brothers for Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem
By Ryan Stewart
Dec 24, 2007
There are only two kinds of people -- Alien people and Predator people. I'm the latter -- I like the Predator's sportsmanship and strict ethical code that prevents him from hunting anyone who isn't prepared to fight back. Of course, it's still possible to get in his way and become collateral damage, a loophole I understand factors hugely in Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. This is of course a sequel to Alien vs. Predator, the underwhelming first merger of the two franchises that opened back in 2004, and there are two reasons why you should probably give the sequel a chance even though the first one sucked. First of all, this time it's rated R, as any movie of this stripe must be in order to be taken seriously. Second of all, Paul W.S. Anderson has been replaced as director by the Strause Brothers.
You know the Strause Brothers, even if you don't know their names. They're well-respected Hollywood effects wizards with their own company, Hydraulx, and they've supervised the visual effects on action blockbusters ranging from Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines to Constantine to 300 to Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, among other titles. That kind of resume buys you the directing shot of your choice, so why would the brothers want to take on a successful but tarnished pair of horror franchises? SuicideGirls got them on the phone to ask that very question.
Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem opens on Christmas day.
Ryan Stewart: With the budgets you guys have worked with in the past, I'm sure you had a range of genre options for your directing debut -- what made you want to get involved with these particular horror franchises?
Greg Strause: Alien has been one of my favorite films since I was a kid and I'd have to say the same goes for Predator. Colin and I had done countless pitch meetings on other projects and they'd always say, "What kind of stuff do you guys like?' and we'd say, "The original Predator, Alien, Aliens, I love those movies. So after hearing ourselves say that over and over a few times, it gradually started to set in, like man, maybe we should take on the Vs. movie.
RS:
Am I right in assuming that as far as the studio was concerned, this could be an Incredible Hulk situation -- they didn't really care if you maintained continuity with the other film, as long as you did something cool?
Colin Strause: Well, the whole idea was to maintain continuity of the franchise, so we treated our movie as a stand-alone. There are things that were kind of re-designed a bit that were shown in the last movie, but the idea is that all these movies ... ultimately, at the end of the day we feel that the AvP franchise should be a bridge between Alien and Predator.
RS:
So you can modify certain things like the design of the monsters, the look and the movements of them, just don't necessarily rock the foundations of the two series.
CS:
Yeah, like the inside of the Predator's ship we redesigned a bit. There's still an element that's familiar to it, but at the same time it's completely different than what was in the last movie. So, we tried to balance that, but at the end of the day we did whatever we wanted to do to make the movie better.
GS:
If anything, a core part of our pitch was to make these movies, this installment, much more like the original. Make it a scary, horrific film again. The last couple of movies sort of wandered away from their roots.
RS:
That's a surprising motivation, given all the action films you've chosen to work on in the past. You're saying you wanted to ramp up the horror quotient of the films as opposed to the action quotient.
GS:
Yeah, actually the whole gist of our pitch on this movie was to do Texas Chainsaw Massacre -- a small town horror film, but instead of a guy with a chainsaw, have the Aliens running around killing people.
CS:
[The idea was to] get back to those gritty kind of horror movies. One of the important things to that we wanted to take from the original Alien is that those people were pretty normal. That was basically "truck drivers in space". They were blue collar people. They weren't billionaires or scientists or mercenaries, you know? They were normal people. Even though they were in the future and even though they were on a spaceship, at the end of the day if you really break it down, they were normal facing a horrific situation and you got to see who became a hero and who died. You felt bad every time someone got killed and that was kind of the mentality we wanted to take to this. We wanted to get away from more of what they had in Alien: Resurrection or even what they had in the last movie, with the mercenaries and all that. We felt like those people, when they die you don't relate to them as well and you may not even care when they die. Whereas, we wanna make sure that when people get killed in this movie -- if a kid gets face-hugged, you're gonna see his chest burst. There's gonna be horrific things. Normal people are going to die in this movie and we wanted to keep that tone because, to us, that's what makes it scary and not safe like a normal studio movie.
RS:
On some level the humans get in the way of the main event, right? It's not Aliens vs. Predator vs. Humans.
CS:
That's actually kind of the whole idea with the humans here because the cool thing about them is literally, it's a survival film. An ensemble survivor film is kind of the vibe. They basically are just trying to survive and escape the town and there's no moment of them "figuring out" what's going on. They don't even know where the hell these things came from, which is kind of a cool thing, because you don't have the cheesy scientist guy explaining, "Oh, these must be Xenomorphs from some distant planet." You don't get any of that type of crap in the movie, you know? We kept it very real. These people don't know what the hell they're dealing with. All they know is that they are cut off. All communication is gone, the town loses power. These Aliens are just slaughtering everyone and the Predator is just ... basically, if the humans get in its way it wipes them out. It's basically there just for the Aliens. The humans are in a really interesting predicament!
RS:
The big innovation this time is supposedly the hybrid offspring of the two monsters-- the PredAlien creature. Who actually designed that? Did you go through a lot of different versions of it?
GS:
It was a combination of our input and ADI's designs. The PredAlien went through a lot of iterations -- probably 50 or more.
RS:
So what can you reveal about the movie? Fox won't screen this movie just like they wouldn't screen the last one [a decision I can't quite understand, since they typically screen lots of stuff the critics won't love] but give me a couple of tidbits about what the fans can expect to see.
CS:
One of the new things we're revealing, actually today [this was about a week ago] they released the first five minutes on the Internet. I don't know if you've seen it yet.
RS:
I haven't seen it yet, no.
CS:
It's on the Yahoo U.K. website. It's a slightly cut down first five minutes. You actually get to see part of the Predator homeworld, which is kind of a really cool thing. The big thing is the Predator's just got a whole bunch of ... we've never seen a Predator not on a trophy hunt before. So he's got all these new tools and vision modes, things that maybe if he was on an honorable hunt would be considered cheating, but because he's dealing with such a massive infestation he's kind of using every trick he has.
RS:
A lot of people think the Predator got cheated out of his third stand-alone movie by the first AvP. It had been talked about for a long time, but AvP killed it dead. What's your take on that?
GS:
That's a tough one. Definitely, I think the studio is pretty intent on, if this one does well there will be a third AvP, but it's a little hard to judge everyone's interest level. Of course we would love to see a Predator 3 and an Alien 5. You know, I guess only time will tell.
CS:
It all comes down to the appetite of the marketplace.
RS:
Speaking of keeping the fans happy, did you ever toss around the idea of cameos and references? Maybe get Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sigourney Weaver to pop up in the film? Or are references and cameos like that too cheesy for your taste?
CS:
Oh, we've got a few homages in the film to some stuff. We had talked about maybe getting Bill Paxton in the movie as a cool little cameo. There was also a concern that if you do too many of those, it takes away from the seriousness of the movie and it starts becoming too much of a wink, nod, cheesy thing. We've got a couple of cool little throwbacks, but a lot of it is more continuity tying-in, like, with our secret military guy with the OWLF, which was the otherworld life forms, which you saw on all the monitors in Predator 2. So we've got tie-ins like that that we've littered through that are more story-based than just regular winks and nods.
RS:
By the way, what was that situation that happened with Comic-Con? They wouldn't let you do what you wanted or show the clips you wanted to show from the film? What was that all about?
CS:
We were told that they were not going to show the R-rated footage. We couldn't show it. We were gonna show the bloodiest ... just basically because no one had seen anything from the movie at that point and we wanted to make sure that everyone's first impression was that this was very different from the last movie. And we were told that we couldn't show, in that time slot, the type of footage that we wanted to show. That's when they decided that maybe we should just wait and do an Internet thing and show exactly what we want to show.
RS:
That makes sense. It's becoming more common all the time, and you can reach a large part of your core audience very easily.
CS:
We didn't want to water it down. We wanted to make sure that we got to choose the first thing that was released and that was just how it was gonna be.
RS:
And how did you fare with the MPAA? Did they treat you well or did you have to cut so much that a DVD with the original gore will be a necessity for fans?
GS:
We passed the MPAA with an R without any stipulations. We weren't trying to create torture porn, just the most intense film of the franchises. We think we achieved that.
RS:
Were you pretty happy with your effects budget on this picture? You got the money you needed to get the shots that you wanted, and all of that stuff?
GS:
Yeah, the movie looks a lot bigger. It grew. It's a bigger movie than what the reports of our budget were. We were able to use the money in smart places and really make it go a long way. There was a lot of good planning and whatnot, and most of the money actually gets up on screen. I think it shows in the final film. So I'm really happy with the way it looks.
RS:
So, here's the big question -- is the battle decided in this one? Is there a winner?
GS:
There is a definite winner.
CS:
There's a definite winner.
RS:
That's good. I hate movies like Freddy vs. Jason where they torture the ending to make the victory at least a little ambiguous. Drives me nuts.
GS:
Oh, yeah. We've got a clear winner here.
CS:
It might not be what people think, but it's cool.
RS:
As is often the case, are you guys already getting ideas together for another one if this one finds its audience and does well?
CS:
We're starting to kick around some things. We actually pitched for the original AvP and you know, there are some ideas that we have laying around on the shelf that we might bring back for that.
For more info, go to www.avp-r.com
For more info, go to www.avp-r.com
