Predator: Badlands Director Dives Deep Into Developing the Creature’s Language

The otherworldly hunter in the Predator series has been intimidating audiences for decades, as it stalks a variety of terrains and time periods to take out whatever target might be in its sights. With the upcoming Predator: Badlands from Prey director Dan Trachtenberg, audiences will see the beloved monster in an all-new light, as its role has changed from being an antagonist to the protagonist, allowing audiences to genuinely root for the monster. To go along with that, the figure needed to communicate in all-new ways, with Trachtenberg going deep into the research process to develop the species’s language, while previous films often relegate its communication to clicks and other guttural sounds. Predator: Badlands hits theaters on November 7th.

“That’s one of the cool things of the movie, is that, outside of very brief glimpses in other films, we’re on Yautja Prime, what is known as Yautja Prime mainly from extended universe stuff. There’s a lot in this movie that is more from the extended universe than is from things that are properly in the movie,” Trachtenberg detailed at a press event, which ComicBook attended. “I should mention the language. We, insanely, decided to really treat that properly and worked with, we reached out to the guy who does the Na’vi language [in Avatar], who was very occupied, and recommended his mentee. We did it the way that, for The Lord of the Rings, you would do Elvish, for Game of Thrones, you do Dothraki. Except for those, there’s more precedent, for us, there’s very little.”

He continued, “As we discovered, with him being a language expert, all the stuff, and frankly, actually working with [Predator special effects artist] Alec Gillis, all the stuff that you’ve seen in other Predator movies is complete garbage. There’s no sense of it. People from the Internet have tried to make sense of it, but none of it was made with intention.”

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By not having much reference material from the Predator franchise to draw from, Trachtenberg had a lot of freedom, which came with a lot of responsibility to fans.

“So we decided to make it with intention and we completely developed the language, so everything they’re speaking has actual rules and structure and all that stuff. And written as well as verbal. Very early on, we just did explorations, concept art explorations of what Yautja could be. I wanted to be very careful in making this, that I not fall into a trap that is making something that is more lore-focused than story-focused,” the filmmaker pointed out. “I think, lots of times, when people do more in a franchise, there’s a tendency to really go whole hog into the Senate trading committees and whatever. I thought we should just have a little sliver of that, but not let the movie be like, there could be some expectation when people hear the premise that the movie is going to be all about the inner workings of the Yautja culture and that’s not — we wanted to still make it feel genre, feel very specific. Really, what it is, it’s an inversion of the premise of now the Predator is on a planet. He’s going to be hunted by things and has to use his guile to figure out stuff. While we were writing, we were doing concept art and things like that to figure out the world-building of it all.”

Predator: Badlands, which stars Elle Fanning and Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, is set in the future on a remote planet, where a young Predator (Schuster-Koloamatangi), outcast from his clan, finds an unlikely ally in Thia (Fanning) and embarks on a treacherous journey in search of the ultimate adversary. The film is directed by Dan Trachtenberg and produced by John Davis, Dan Trachtenberg, Marc Toberoff, Ben Rosenblatt, and Brent O’Connor.

Predator: Badlands hits theaters on November 7th.