Robert Rodriguez unleashes his Predators at last

Reboot of the Schwarzenegger action franchise marks start of a remarkable return for the Desperado director, who may yet team up again with Quentin Tarantino
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"Sometimes I feel like I'm in a dream world," says director-producer Robert Rodriguez, "because it doesn't always seem too logical how things work out." Indeed, this year the film-maker is feeling a distinct case of deja vu. His first release this month will be a sequel to Arnold Schwarzenegger's 1987 film Predator, helmed by Hungarian director Nimród Antal, produced at his Troublemaker Studios outfit in Texas, and based on a script Rodriguez wrote as a writer for hire during a brief production hiatus in the mid-90s. The second is Machete, a self-directed (with Ethan Maniquis) "Mexploitation" flick about a Latin hitman who takes revenge on the gringos who double-crossed him. "I came up with them both in the same year," Rodriguez marvels, "and now they're coming out within months of each other, 15 years later. It's pretty surreal."

  1. Predators
  2. Production year: 2010
  3. Country: USA
  4. Cert (UK): 15
  5. Runtime: 107 mins
  6. Directors: Nimrod Antal
  7. Cast: Adrien Brody, Alice Braga, Danny Trejo, Derek Mears, Laurence Fishburne, Topher Grace, Walter Goggins
  8. More on this film

At 42, Rodriguez is coming back to public life with a vengeance. His last film, the children's comedy Shorts, was a disappointment, and after the debacle of the Grindhouse double-bill project, made in tandem with Quentin Tarantino, it seemed the pioneering one-man band of US indie cinema might have finally lost his mojo. But, just as Tarantino bounced back with Inglourious Basterds, so Rodriguez has been taking time to regenerate, with a bunch of projects that, as well as the aforementioned, include the long-delayed sequel to Sin City and, most curious of all, another reboot: a whole new instalment of Spy Kids, the kid-flick fantasy franchise he launched in 2001.

This reinvention of sorts begins with Predators, a bloody horror sci-fi thriller based on the only script Rodriguez ever wrote to spec. "I thought, 'If I only have to write it, I can make it as big as I want,'" he recalls. "Twentieth Century Fox just wanted a script that would entice Arnold back into the mix. I knew Arnold personally, and I knew he liked the first film's jungle setting, so I decided to write something with a jungle setting but set on another planet. I wanted to make it more of a sequel to the first one, pretending the real Predator 2 didn't exist.

"As James Cameron's Aliens was to Alien," he continues, "this would be Predators to Predator. So I just wrote it – wrote it big, wrote it crazy – and it was completely undoable, especially back then. The CGI just wasn't available like it is today. So I turned it in and kinda forgot about it. Arnold decided he was just not interested in doing another Predator and moved on to other things and so, because my script was all Arnold and they couldn't just get someone else in without changing it considerably, Fox went the route of the Alien Versus Predator films."

'To put these ideas forth and then have the script disappear, not knowing if it was gonna get made was like getting pregnant, having a baby then giving the baby away!'

GRINDHOUSE Rodriguez Robert Rodriguez on the set of Planet Terror, his half of Grindhouse. Photograph: Allstar

Fast-forward over a decade, and Rodriguez was surprised to find this long-lost work back on his desk. "Fox came to me and said, 'Would you take on the reins of bringing this franchise back for us?' Now, I wasn't able to, because I was committed to another directing job at the time. However, I did say that I could produce it at Troublemaker Studios with my crew and oversee it, because I didn't want it to slip away again." He sighs: "It was always a strange feeling. That's why I didn't take another writing job afterwards. To put these ideas forth and then have the script disappear, not knowing if it was gonna get made or get changed or made without me, was almost like getting pregnant, having a baby then giving the baby away!"

This reboot, which Rodriguez insists stands alone as its own entity, is now an ensemble piece, in which Adrien Brody (Arnold was "too busy doing his governor stuff") heads up a band of killers who find themselves stranded in a strange world. "My original draft was about the dual meaning of the title. The 'predators' were also the humans; you have all these killers on this planet who could very easily do each other in before they even meet one of the creatures! Adrien plays a mercenary, but the others are even more hardcore. There's a yakuza, somebody from death row, a serial killer, a sniper and a cartel enforcer, and they're all picked for a reason: this is how the predators evolve, basically, by training on these different types of prey. Not just humans but other creatures too."

Rodriguez remembers the 1987 original with fondness and a perverse awe. "I saw it at the theatre," he laughs, "and audiences didn't really know what to make of it at the time; people thought they were going to see an Arnold, Commando-type movie, and then it turned into more of a sci-fi film. Arnold doesn't even kill it – it kind of blows itself up – and Arnold is left in a helicopter looking completely shell-shocked, like he's off to the loony bin! People enjoyed it but they didn't quite know what to make of it. But it caught on later and became a cult movie, because it does have that unique mix of genres, which I've always loved to do. Films like From Dusk Till Dawn that mix genres, I find them more entertaining. Also, I think the Predator itself is such a great character. It's more humanoid than the Alien creature. You can identify with it, because he looks very human. He's badass and he makes total sense; he's just a hunter, doing what he does best."

It's a theme that recurs in Rodriguez's next film, Machete, a full-length version of the fake trailer that preceded Grindhouse. "All the stuff from the fake trailer is in the movie," Rodriguez enthuses. "That was a bizarre way to do it, but, creatively, it was a great challenge. It was like, 'OK, he's in a pool with two nude girls; how did we get there?' I had to work backwards, to put him in there in a way that you wouldn't expect." Then after Machete comes Spy Kids, his first film in digital 3D, then (possibly) Sin City 2, and then – though Rodriguez claims he has no immediate plans to work with Tarantino again – there's every chance of a QT/RR rematch ("We do something every 10 years," he grins).

In the meantime, he insists, life is very sweet indeed. "What could make my life better?" he ponders. "Oh, if I could only find that magic bottle that lets you never have to sleep. I have so much stuff I wanna do, but ..." He sighs. "That six or seven hours you have to be in bed with your eyes closed. What a waste!"

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