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Director Nimrod Antal and Producer Robert Rodriguez Predators Press Conference

Casting Adrien Brody, was it really a fight?
Robert Rodriguez: "I was very receptive, and Nimrod as well, to the idea of that. It seems on paper like an odd choice but it really wasn’t. We went to him originally for another part that is actually not even in the movie now. It was in an early version of the script. I sent him an early script and he wrote back and said, 'You know, I don’t really want to play these kinds of parts anymore.

I want to play something like the lead.' I thought, 'Really? That’s a pretty out there choice.' We were just e-mailing back and forth. He said, 'I’m going to send you this picture of this prison movie I just did with Forrest Whitaker. This is what I look like now. I kind of beefed up for the movie a little bit but I could go further than that.' So I checked it out, it was very impressive. I showed it to Nimrod and he said, 'I don't know, what do you think? Should we do it, bro? He’s an Oscar winning actor.'"

"Any time you have an Oscar-winning actor wanting to be in a Predator movie, you should probably go that route. It’s fairly easy for us as filmmakers to make that choice because we’re looking at a list of actors up for the role and it’s just guys who you’ve seen just do it too many times. They’re already doing that same role in three other movies that year. When you’re looking for something fresh and different, and it really felt like we needed that for this, very much like when I cast Antonio [Banderas] in Desperado and George Clooney in Dusk Till Dawn, they hadn’t done action either.

You’re just going for really great actors and somebody that will feel surprising and new and fresh and like you just discovered them. Yet that’s only because he’s transformed himself so much. He’s actually got the experience and an Oscar and has been around so long that he’s got the acting chops to be completely impressive. So you’ve got the best of both worlds, someone who’s really new and yet someone who’s not."

Nimrod Antal: "His passion was also refreshing. To see someone of his caliber really want something as bad as he did... What I can’t stand is when you have these comfortable actors who have some success and they’re just, 'I don't know, I don't know.' This guy came in saying, 'I want this. Please give this to me. I’ll fight for it. I’ll prove you guys wrong if you have any doubt.' That was bitchin’."

Robert Rodriguez: "That was cool. That’s the main thing we talked about too was just the passion he had for the role, that he had something to prove where the other guys who would have already done these kind of parts go, 'Oh look, this is what I do and this is how I do it.' This was a lot more exciting and a lot more of an adventure for us and we’re really pleased."

Nimrod Antal: "It was our job to make him look tough. That was the other thing. We knew we could do it. That’s our job. If we want to turn a man into a woman, we could do that. If we want to turn a woman into a man, we can do that. We knew the perception of Adrien, especially films like The Pianist and everything, put him in a certain box in people’s mind and we knew that we could turn him into whatever we needed him to be."

Were those all written into the script or did you add them after?

Nimrod Antal: "I think first and foremost, we were really lucky, I was really lucky with Robert because there was never much of a discrepancy between his opinion and my opinion as to where this thing had to go. So we knew early on that we wanted to incorporate elements that were going to give the original fans a smile here. We wanted to throw in as many nods as we could, but we also wanted to be really careful about the balance of that and not have it just be a parody of or a redo of. We wanted the film to stand on its own. I think in the screenplay there may have been even one or two more nods to the original film but Robert was like, 'Let’s not try to. We have to make this stand on its own,' and that’s what we wanted to accomplish first and foremost and the nods were just a secondary thing."

Robert Rodriguez: "There’s only one that I think we added early on in the film, a Predator vision only because we remembered not everyone who’s going to see this movie has seen any of the other ones, so you’ve got to kind of set the rules. So the mimicking of the voice seems redundant to someone who’s seen Predator, but we just kind of had to do that really early on just so people would know that’s what they’re capable of."

Nimrod Antal: "I think we found our balance."

Robert Rodriguez: "The balance was otherwise pretty much there we decided beforehand."

Did you ever consider Jesse Ventura for a cameo?

Nimrod Antal: "Well, he’s dead."

Robert Rodriguez: "He died in the original. NA: We could have had a mutant head or something on a stick. RR: I know Carl Weathers, and I got an e-mail from him during the production. It was just a blanket e-mail he sent out to everybody, 'Oh, I lost my phone and lost all my contacts,' kind of thing. I went, 'Carl Weathers, we should bring him in! Wait, wait a minute, he died in the original one too.' You couldn’t bring any of these guys back. I would’ve loved to have used Carl."

Nimrod, what was your first experience seeing Predator?

Nimrod Antal: "14 years old, Avco (Theater) on Wilshire. Guido Martini, John McMann, Shawn Endler and Chris Ulrich and I, and I walked out going, 'Whoa!' Actually, the day that my agent called and said, 'Robert Rodriguez just decided that you’re going to be directing this movie,' I was reunited with those guys after 15 years and I was in a restaurant with them the moment I found out. That’s a true story."

Why were you back together?

Nimrod Antal: "Well one of them just got a nasty divorce in Vancouver and went crazy and rode his bicycle from Canada to L.A. That’s Guido. But he didn’t get a divorce in the end. They’re still together, so that worked out. So if you’re having marital problems, ride your bike. That’s the thing. We hadn’t seen each other for years and we were the St. Paul’s the Apostle, which was where we all went to junior high school together, and we were all together again after many, many years."

When you were figuring out the motley crew of characters, how did you decide who to include?

Nimrod Antal: "As far as the cast goes too, I think it was always something where one would build off of the other. We’d lock down one guy. I know that at one point the Hanzo character was supposed to be..."

Robert Rodriguez: "Was there a character we dropped?"

Nimrod Antal: "There was one other inmate. There was an earlier draft where I think that there were two prison inmates that were thrown in together. And in our earlier conversations, I think we figured out that it’s probably best just to have one from each region, one from each zone, from each country, from each continent, however it plays out."

Robert Rodriguez: "Throughout the movie, he’s just going to be standing there most of the time waiting to throw a line in and pitch in because you have two of the same character basically stealing each other’s moments. But other than that, it was pretty much…"

Nimrod Antal: "And I wanted to cut out Izzy."

Robert Rodriguez: "That was the girl."

Nimrod Antal: "I wanted to cut her out. It was purely I didn’t want to have a prop running around going, 'Ahhhhh.' I knew that if we were really going to put a girl in there, she’d have to really sell it. My first concern was there aren’t very many theaters of war, there aren’t that many countries which allow women into combat. We were talking about hardened people who have seen a lot of nasty things, so I was a little bit concerned with that. I was worried and Robert actually was like, 'Dude, w …' I was like, 'How many great girls have there been?' And then he started naming them off. He was like, 'Well Ripley, Sarah Connor, Nikita.' And I was like, 'Oh, I guess you’re right. There’ve been a few good ones.' It took me a bit to get my head around that, to accept that. And then we cast Alicia Braga and she’s probably one of the toughest of the bunch. As a character and as a person, she was just awesome."

Robert Rodriguez: "We really got lucky. It was nice to push for that and push ourselves to try and make that happen because that’s the heart of the movie now. We’re really happy with that."

Nimrod Antal: "It would’ve been a huge mistake if I would have won that battle."

Robert Rodriguez: "I remember at one point you came up and went – because it just wasn’t working. On paper, it wasn’t really working. It was a combination of getting it to work on paper but also getting the right actor. We didn’t have the actor yet. And he went, 'I’m still not sure about this part. What if we made her an alien at the end?'"

Nimrod Antal: "I still think that’s a good idea."

Robert Rodriguez: "It’s not a bad idea."

Nimrod Antal: "I think she should have been an alien."

Robert Rodriguez: "It was a way so you didn’t have to in case she wasn’t coming off. It was like, 'Whoa, because she was an alien, that’s why.' We still kept trying and then we found Alicia and then we were both relieved."

Nimrod Antal: "The alien idea would have worked."

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