Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1544083
stantly. We kept asking, 'Is this insane? Is this going to work?' "The first reel in the movie goes pretty hard, setting the stage for the audience to buy into the rest of the craziness that ensues. I give Dave a lot of credit for that opening. It just reels you in." What were some of the more challenging or pivotal scenes and how did you address them? David Trachtenberg: "Introducing Thia was a balance. Is she too goofy? Is she fun? Who is she? It was a tricky thing we kept navigat- ing over and over again. She needed to be introduced into the story in a very strategic way to not make too hard a turn into something so different from expectations of Predator movies, but remain commit- ted to the idea that she would be a little quirky and fun." Stefan Grube: "What Thia establishes the first time you meet her goes deeper than setting up the plot twist in which it's revealed that she has been misleading Dek. It's a tone-setter. You see her split in two, and you're like, 'Okay, better get on board.' But yeah, we passed those first few scenes with Thia back and forth a lot. We kept finding something new in the dailies and saying, 'We gotta get that in!'" David Trachtenberg: "An equally challenging objective was to find the tone and the relationship between Thia and her twin sister Tessa [also played by Fanning]. The big scene where they first meet in the convoy was a beast, and I give Stefan full credit for making it work so beautifully. He really found the rhythm and the tone of that moment, and how they interacted and related to one another." Stefan Grube: "I'd throw that back to Dave. I only did the final pass that made it into the movie. We probably passed that scene back and forth more than any other, and it was also a scene that ended up being re-shot. The first version was wholly different from where we eventually landed. And the process of how we got there truly speaks to the benefit of editing as a team." David Trachtenberg: "Aer we re-shot and figured out the exact version that ended up in the movie, it all made perfect sense. Stefan really nailed it." Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi performed without a mask before VFX added it in. Tell us how this shaped the edit? David Trachtenberg: "We approached Dek's scenes very much like cutting traditional dialogue scenes. It was pretty straightforward in the sense that we could use the nuance and complexity of Dimitrius' performance in live action, and then the VFX crew did their thing, fil- tering his performance through the CG mask." Stefan Grube: "Yeah, there was no imagining. Dimitrius gave an amazing performance and then our VFX team knocked it out of the park." David Trachtenberg: "The bigger challenge for the VFX team was getting the Dek mask to reflect the actor's emotional nuances—like an eyebrow raise or a smile—since the alien features of the Predator 8 cgw j a n u a r y • f e b r u a r y • m a r c h 2 0 2 6