Last weekend, Paul W.S. Anderson was at Comic-Con promoting the upcoming Pandorum -- a claustrophobic space horror he produced that stars Ben Foster. We took the opportunity to pick the AVP: Alien vs. Predator director's brain about Predators, the Robert Rodriguez-produced franchise reboot set for a July 2010 release. He told us that AVP would be his last venture into the realm of the rastaterrestrial mercenaries, but advised Rodriguez et al. to start stocking up now on KY Jelly: the sexual lubricant 9 out of 10 Predators prefer!
Robert Rodriguez is rebooting Predator. I wonder if they approached you with that, or if you have any knowledge of what they're doing with it?
It's not something that I'm involved in. I thoroughly enjoyed doing AVP, and it was a complete pleasure working with those monsters. Actually, before the movie came out, Fox asked me if I would do the sequel to the film, and I kind of felt like I had done it once, and had spent two years of my life up to my eyes in latex and KY Jelly and it was fantastic. It was an amazing experience for me, but I didn't want to go back and do it again, so I'm not directly involved in that. But Robert has wanted to do that for a long time, because he wrote a script for Predator 3, I mean it must have been 8 or 9 year ago. I love Predators.
Do you have any advice for anyone embarking upon a Predator chapter?
Lots of KY Jelly. When we were doing AVP. The thing about these creatures -- especially if you're trying to do it old school, and we were doing a lot of that on AVP -- to make them look good, you really have to slick them up, to give life to the rubber and the latex. We were shooting AVP in Prague, and we found that the Czech Republic produced their own Communist-style KY that wasn't very good, because it dried out. So we ended up importing vast amounts of KY Jelly and we had huge problems. One of the big logistical problems we had on the movie is that it always got imported through London, and they kept stopping the shipments, because they thought that somehow we were related to the porn industry. Why in the world would anyone need this much KY Jelly. And you try to explain, well, you know, it's for monsters. ♦