Explore the beginning of the Predator franchise in Prey. The film explores the alien hunters' first trip to Earth as it faces off against fierce Comanche warrior Naru, who is looking to prove herself as a worthy hunter in the eyes of her tribe.
Amber Midthunder leads the cast of Prey as Naru alongside Dane DiLiegro as the Predator, Dakota Beavers, Michelle Thrush, Stormee Kipp and Julian Black Antelope.
To celebrate the film's release, Screen Rant spoke exclusively with star Dane DiLiegro and ADI team Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff to discuss Prey, finding the new design for the Predator, director Dan Trachtenberg's main perogatives for the character.
Screen Rant: Tom and Alec, you have stepped your toes into this field before, what with the AVP movies and such. How did it come about for you to be a part of the Prey team?
Tom Woodruff: Well, Alec and I worked on the first Predator film under our mentor, Stan Winston, and then we came back again during the AVP movies, so there were a couple of movies that we've missed — oh, and The Predator, the Shane Black one. We've sort of been infiltrating this whole character world from the very beginning. [Chuckles] But this turned out to be something completely new through the vision of Dan Trachtenberg and what he wanted to get out of any kind of redesigns that we were going to employ on the new Predator.
Alec Gillis: Fox has been one of our main clients over the years and we associate Fox with just great sci-fi, so it's always nice to work on a fox movie. We've also done a lot of Disney stuff, with the Santa Claus movies and some other titles, so I wouldn't say we were shoo-ins, but you always have to compete, you got to stay sharp. But we're very happy to be included in this one.
Dane, I know that this is one of your first-ever roles. How was it for you auditioning and trying to get this iconic character?
Dane DiLiegro: I'm sure Tom and Alec will laugh at this, but I am a tadpole in the ocean of their experience. Going through this entire process, essentially with them from day one really was a pleasure, just in terms of Tom's experience on set suit acting or Alec's experience in his wide array of productions he's worked on.
I don't know if you know, but Alec DM'd me on Instagram in January of 2021 to be the reference guy for a design pitch on a project that they were working on in Canada. I will cut a lot of stuff out of this long, arduous story, but fast-forward to now, I turned out to be the main antagonist of said project and it's been an incredible experience. And humbling for me, too, just as Alec said, to be included on this project.
Here I am talking to you and with Tom and Alec, to be able to put our story out there, which we appreciate, because it's great. It's very easy to highlight focus on the main faces of the show, but it's also important to highlight the people behind the scenes and the people under the rubber as well.
How involved were you in crafting this new design of the Predator with Tom and Alec?
Dane DiLiegro: That process kind of started before I got there. When I showed up, there was already a 3D design of what, essentially, I think they thought was going to be the head, or an iteration of it. There were a few things here or there with some of the designs, we pitched an idea to have the gloves open, because there's a lot of stick handling.
But most of it was Tom and Alec and Dan working in synergy as a team to influence how this character is going to look, how he is going to move and all of that.
Tom and Alec, what was it like finding the new design for this Predator?
Alec Gillis: It was a lot of fun. Tom and I love the design phase, to be doing a wide variety of things, from the organic aspect of the Predator's body to his costume and his weapons, that was a blast. What you're doing is you're exploring the story and the character that's through the visuals of that and some things just don't fit and don't work and you discard them.
Dan is very methodical and very intelligent, he doesn't get distracted by things, you can always say, "I want you to look at this part" and he's great about that. Then he will come back and say something unexpected that makes you think, "Oh, gosh," like when he gave the note early on that he wanted this to look like a horror character, that was a really nice thing for us to grab onto and run with.
Tom Woodruff: I think it was the aspect of trying to find a Predator that looks like he predates the Predators that we have seen much later in the world, but carry enough of the essence that we know that he comes from a long line of these Predator creatures.
Alec, you just mentioned occasionally throwing a few things out. Were there other incarnations of a design for this Predator?
Alec Gillis: Yeah, one of the things we started on, because we started out thinking, "Well, this is 200 years ago" and "What is this guy? Well, let's downgrade his weaponry a bit, so that it's not going to be a fair fight." As we did that, we started to say, "Well, why don't we do that with his physiognomy, as well." We started to think of, "What does that mean, is he a Neanderthal Predator," so we played around with some of that. It was interesting, it just looked very brutish and ultimately, we decided to go towards something a little more elegant. Dan wanted something pretty streamlined. Terrifying, but streamlined.
I think, with this current face that we landed on, you know, one of the things was we wanted it to look as non-human as we could. We put a wider eyespace into it, gave it bigger eyes. We looked at potato bugs, they're also called Jerusalem crickets, and things like that so that it would have sort of a very non-human look and kind of a freakish look as well. Then we were able to also play around with some more vibrant colors on it, that was also very satisfying.
The great thing was that Fox and Disney allowed Dan to encourage us to not do the same old Predator. Don't get me wrong, that Predator, you got to give all props to Stan Winston and his design of that first Predator. Tom and I were there, we worked on it. The way it came together in such an unbelievable fashion, like, here we are 37 years later having made a ton of Predator movies, that's incredible. I don't mean to say "that same old Predator," I just mean that like, "What can we do to capture the spirit?" We wanted it to feel like when you first saw the Predator in 1987, before you became very familiar with that face. So we stand on the shoulders of giants, for sure.
Working on the design, you'd obviously seen what was coming. But what were your and Dane's initial reactions to seeing the completed new design?
Tom Woodruff: I agree that it probably made a more complete impression to Dane, because we're involved in the designs and the weeks of design and tests and test sculptures and everything, we're sort of looking at it at an exploded view. But, from our history and our expertise in having done this so many times, we know how it all fits together, so it's not like there was a moment where you want to believe that you put the head on, you step back and go, "Ah, there it is."
It's close to that, right, it's close to that, but hopefully what Dane saw, and certainly what the audience sees, is that sudden "Wow!" picture, like suddenly the curtains dropped, you're seeing something new and just intrinsically interesting.
Dane, what was your reaction when you did finally see that design?
Dane DiLiegro: I think the first time I ever really saw him, I came in for a suit fitting, that was the day I came in and it was just the unpainted black suit. I was talking to Joey Orosco and Andy Bergholtz, our sculptors of the character, and on their desk was some concept art. I remember I was in the middle of a conversation with Andy and my eyes just kind of, he's still talking to me, but I'm like, "I just need to go over here and look at this and just see what this thing is."
And I just thought, "Oh, my God, he's terrifying and he's gross and he's — wow, okay, this is what it is, okay." When I see the design of a character, that is the foundation, that's the base on any movement, any type of instinctual [behaviors], the way this character conducts himself is based on the design. So seeing that early enough in the process helped me, working with them as well, come up with how this guy is going to move around, and stuff like that.
I do really feel like this is the most physical Predator we've seen since the original in that it's very practical and you've got a lot more style with some of your fighting in comparison to past ones. Did a lot of that come from you, the stunt team, from Tom and Alec, from Dan?
Dane DiLiegro: Dan gave us a couple of keywords initially: feral animalistic, wild, primal. So I knew we were kind of departing from the stand-up, humanoid, WWF wrestler, Dan did not want that 1987 wrestler-style Predator, he wanted something dynamic, he wanted something lean, that was more violent and quicker.
But the start of all that is the design and the builds of this character and what Tom and Alec did, they really had their hands full, because now they have to design a suit that can stand up to the physicality in the way this character can move. That's a tricky design, because the more you go into that movement-dynamic character, the more the suit has to articulate and there's folds, you have to prevent from happening.
Things that we shot in the middle of day, in broad daylight, it's very easy for things to be exposed. And the way they put the suit together with newer technologies today, compared to in the past, it was a synergy of a lot of creativity and technology. You saw the final result; it looks great.
Alec Gillis: Steve McMichael was our stunt coordinator and JJ, who's a Korean stuntman, I look at that, I know those guys, they loved quick movements. Dan worked with them much more closely than I did, but you got to give credit to those guys, as well. The other team that was really instrumental in the success of this Predator is Ryan Cook with visual effects, because even though this thing is, I don't know, if I were to lay a percentage on it? 90 percent practical; there are touches of digital at the right moments that have been added to this Predator that I think it's really a great model for the overlap of practical and digital.
A lot of our fans, they get very militant and very protective of the practical work, and they say CGI sucks. But when you bring the worlds together and work on the strengths of both techniques, you end up with something like this. I used to point to the start in our career, Starship Troopers, as being one of the best digital/practical overlaps that we've worked on, also AVP 1 was as well, but this one I think goes right in there, and maybe even in a more subtle way because it's within the frame, it's not cutting from the practical to digital, but it's modifying the little jiggle of the face when he roars and things like that really I think It helped.
Tom and Alec, you've been involved with the Predator franchise for quite a while, and you've seen the critical receptions that it's gotten over the years. I'm curious what it was like for you two, as well as Dane as a franchise newcomer, seeing this wave of acclaim that Prey has received in comparison to some of the sequels?
Tom Woodruff: That's a good question, because I wasn't in LA, so I didn't see the cast and crew screening. I've only seen it streaming. There's so much talk about how this should be released in a theater, and I don't disagree with that, because my history is such that movies always happen in theaters. The last few years I've finally gotten to figure out the remote on my TV and stream movies.
But even watching it streaming, it's an absolute cinematic experience and the only thing that caught me off guard is I had so many news reports coming through about how everyone loved the story and they loved the actors and they loved the characters and they loved Dane and they loved the monster. But it's almost like it was analytics from sitting down and going through Google News and one day I hit one, next day there's two, next day there's six and before I know it, there's seven or eight stories.
But it's one thing to read those stories, it's another thing to hear from people, like so many of our fans and so many of the people that were involved in the crew and crews that we had before, that they absolutely loved the movie and the creature. So that's, to me, that's a big success for us.
Alec Gillis: I'll say that what I love about this is Dan's leadership and his talent as a director. It's the emotion of the film that, to me, is so surprising. I read the script, we were there, but there's so much heart to this movie and you are pulling for Naru so strongly.
Dane DiLiegro: I'm not.
Alec Gillis: [Chuckles] It feels like that, to me, is the backbone. And then on top of it, it's a period film, that's fascinating, right? I've never worked on a period film before and then you have a Predator you inject into this very naturalistic world of Indigenous people, you inject this horrible creature, and it's firing on all cylinders. But to me, it's the emotion, I think that's why it's such a crossover film.
Dane DiLiegro: For me, it's a very fresh take on an existing franchise while still staying true to the Predator traditions. But the thing that I appreciate, first of all, it's only I think 99 minutes. It's nice and crisp, it gets to the point, but the lack of dialogue in this film, it's quite immersive.
Obviously there's a lack of subtitles, but the lack of dialogue puts a heavy emphasis on the sound design and the scoring and I think Sarah [Schachner], who scored the movie, [had] a heavy strain on her because with lack of dialogue, you need to fill that audio space. I think the score is its own character in this movie, she used a lot of strings and it kind of had that frontier/pioneer feel to it that kind of gave it that homestead [feel]. It really did accentuate the fact that this is a period piece, it's a period piece, sci-fi/adventure movie, but you also have like an R-rated Disney Princess situation kind of going on as well.
It's just like Alec said, all the pistons are firing and it touches on a lot of elements that bring good ingredients in to kind of make that delicious chocolate chip cookie of a movie. When we were shooting it, we were just like, "What is this?" we saw the ingredients, but we never saw the final product and the final product turned out to be this delicious, chewy but crispy, perfectly sized cookie that is Prey.
Prey Synopsis
Set in the Comanche Nation 300 years ago, “Prey” is the story of a young woman, Naru, a fierce and highly skilled warrior. She has been raised in the shadow of some of the most legendary hunters who roam the Great Plains, so when danger threatens her camp, she sets out to protect her people. The prey she stalks, and ultimately confronts, turns out to be a highly evolved alien predator with a technically advanced arsenal, resulting in a vicious and terrifying showdown between the two adversaries.
Prey is now streaming on Hulu.