Prey Movie: Director Of Predator Reveals The Childhood Memory That Gave Rise To The New Film In The Alien Saga
Prey Movie is this week’s big streaming premiere. The new installment in the alien saga is rather a prequel to the already recognized stories and that is why the director Dan Trachtenberg told, in a press conference to access, the origin of the film and the difficulties that had to draw to finally release it. Set 300 years ago in the Comanche Nation, Prey is the story of Naru, a fierce and highly skilled young warrior who grew up in the shadow of some of the most legendary hunters to roam the Great Plains.
When danger threatens his camp, he sets out to protect his people. The prey he stalks and ultimately confronts turns out to be an evolved alien predator with a technically advanced arsenal, leading to a cruel and terrifying showdown between the two adversaries. The film features a cast made up largely of Native American and First Nations talent, including Amber Midthunder (The Ice Road, Legion), newcomer Dakota Beavers, Stormee Kipp (Sooyii), Michelle Zorzal (The Journey Home), and Julian Black Antelope (Tribal).
Prey: How Was The Film Made?
This is the second film for Dan Trachtenberg, a filmmaker who was praised for his feature debut 10 Cloverfield Lane, which debuted in 2016. With time and the events that have taken place since then, the production and release of the film were postponed. From the cinema, it jumped to streaming and so on.
Asked about the difficulties that took him so long to get the project done, Trachtenberg explained that it was simply “because it took this long to make the movie. I started developing this maybe a year after 10 Cloverfield Lane came out. And then the merger happened.” Fox-Disney. And all those things slowed this down from getting off the ground”.
“But the main inspiration behind it was kind of a confluence of a couple of things. First, I wanted to make a mostly action-driven movie, mostly told visually, but not looking to just be funny or just a good time, I wanted to inject heart and emotion into it”
Ultimately, ” the idea was to pair the engine of a sports movie, the story of a person who is looked down upon, with an action movie. That was part of the genesis of this. And then, it became something like what if the story could focus on characters who aren’t usually the heroes of the movie, they’re in? So, viewing the movie could be tied to the experience these characters go through.”
The reflection had Dan traveling back to “very early in my childhood when I wasn’t allowed to watch R-rated movies and being in the minivan on my way to a karate tournament, and all the sixth graders had just seen Predator. And I wasn’t allowed to see her. “
“They were describing the whole movie to me on the trip to the tournament. And the one thing they said that stuck with me was there was a fight on a bridge over a waterfall between Billy, the Native American tracker, and the Predator.“
“Then I saw the movie eventually, years later, and that scene is not in the movie. And I always wanted to see that and think about ‘oh, we’ve seen a lot of movies that focus on Arnold Schwarzenegger and that kind of hero? What if we focused a movie on a different type of character? So, all of that swirled together and came together in the genesis of this movie.”
