AVP Director Reflects On Its Practical FX

Just over two decades ago, filmmaker Paul W.S. Anderson brought together the “Alien” and “Predator” franchises with “Alien vs. Predator”.

The team-ups of the two were already happening in comics and video games, while their film franchises seemingly laid dormant so such a team-up project wasn’t entirely a surprise.

Shot in Prague in 2003 ahead of release the next year, the film landed generally negative reviews from critics but grossed $177.4 million worldwide against a production budget of $60–70 million.

Anderson sat out a widely panned follow-up three years later with “Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem” and that appeared to be the death of any further attempts to bring the franchise together – until this year as rumblings of the possibility have surfaced in the past few weeks such as in the “Predator: Badlands” trailer.

Anderson recently spoke with Forbes to revisit his work on the film and was asked if he’d make AvP any differently if her were directing it today. He says not really and remains quite proud of the film’s reliance on practical effects:

“I kind of like the way that we did it, to be honest, because it was a very cool mix of practical effects and CG. We really held off on the CG because it’s one of the things I hadn’t liked about Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection. For me, [those films] kind of demystified the Alien and nothing dates faster than cutting-edge CG.

Whereas if you look back at the original Alien and Aliens — as well as the first Predator — those are movies that have held up very well because they’re primarily guys in suits. And, of course, guys in suits don’t hold up too good on camera, so you don’t show very much of them. That was very much my approach. Yes, we’ve got CG, but let’s not use it. Let’s do it as old school as much as we can, withhold actually seeing the creatures, and do the creatures practically whenever we can.

We also used a lot of big miniatures. The big wides of the pyramids were all big miniatures, but you look at them now and they still look great. The only CG in there is the little CG guys walking up the outside of the pyramid. I think I’d probably mount the movie in exactly the same way.”

For more from Anderson, including details on one scrapped flashback idea involving the Battle of the Bulge, head over to Forbes.

The post AVP Director Reflects On Its Practical FX appeared first on Dark Horizons.