The movie that inspired Dan Trachtenberg the most: “An awesome, incredible experience”
Right now, there are a lot of people having to track wildly back on their opinions of Predator: Badlands, the latest instalment of the action franchise that began way back in 1987 with Arnie slashing his way through the jungle, and a lot of that is down to the approach taken by director Dan Trachtenberg.
It was kicked off by his directing the spin-off Prey in 2022, which took fans by surprise because although it was a Disney+ premiere, it was actually very ace, with Trachtenberg taking the Predator and landing him slap bang in the American wilderness in the 17th Century, while a young Comanche warrior tracks him down.
The movie was a big hit, and Trachtenberg earned two Emmy nominations for his directing on the project, with Predator fans who were initially worried about it, too, being safe or not gory enough, having to eat their words. The same kind of thing has happened with his sequel, Predator: Badlands, which worried internet warriors when it was handed a PG-13 certificate in the US rather than the traditional ‘R’ for Predator movies.
But once the film began to do the rounds, it was clear there was more than enough blood and guts on display; in fact, the pendulum swung the other way with multiple complaints about how scary the film is. The censors seemingly only ok with the violence because it wasn’t human-on-human.
Aside from the Predator franchise, Trachtenberg cut his teeth on commercials, short films and TV shows, and he was responsible for one of the finest episodes of Black Mirror – 2016’s Playtest, which saw Wyatt Russell stuck in a digital haunted mansion packed full of enormous horrors.
The same year, he made his feature film directing debut with 10 Cloverfield Lane, the follow-up to JJ Abrams’ 2008 sci-fi monster movie Cloverfield. Starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead and John Goodman, it was a hit with audiences and critics and won Trachtenberg a Directors Guild of America award nomination for a first-time director.
Trachtenberg was always a film buff; from a very young age, he would build sets out of toys and listen to soundtracks when he was too small to watch certain movies. He then twinned his time at high school with working at a video store and taking screenwriting classes at weekends before taking a degree in film at university.
And his love of one classic blockbuster in particular has underlined his approach to the latest Predator movie, featuring as it does a combination of dark humour, gory moments, slapstick and a monster at the core.
Trachtenberg told IGN: “Jaws is one of my favourite movies of all time. Jaws is one of the scariest movies ever made. It’s also one of the funniest, and when there’s drama, it’s super sincere, and there’s also high-seas adventure, and all of those things make that movie an awesome, incredible experience as a motion picture. Neither of those parts ruin the others. So that’s always been a part of the equation for me.”
Indeed, Jaws is littered with moments of humour that people quite often forget about, from Brody spitting out the insanely alcoholic liquor that Quint hands him to drink to another scene where the police chief smashes his head on a sign while walking down a corridor.
Steven Spielberg is known for using humour as a device to give audiences a break from tension in his darker movies like Jaws, and on that shoot in particular, the stresses and strains of the production led to a gallows humour among the cast and crew, some of which led to improvised lines that made it into the final cut.
Trachtenberg, meanwhile, is rumoured to be working on a TV series adaptation of the controversial Kevin Costner epic Waterworld, which was the most expensive movie ever made when it was released in 1995.
