What is it?
There's something in those trees.
During the hottest days of the year, the jungle comes alive.
It hunts men.
This is the core concept underneath the seminal 1986
science fiction horror film Predator.
Today, the jungle hunter has become
one of the most iconic movie monsters ever.
But the film struggled to get made,
had multiple production issues, and even
had a completely different man in the famed Yautja
suit, Jean-Claude Van Damme.
That is, until he was fired.
Stick around.
The cinematic masterpiece that would eventually
go on to be known as Predator was
written by brothers Jim and John Thomas.
Following the release of Rocky IV,
a running joke started circulating
throughout Hollywood that Rocky Balboa had defeated
every possible permutation of human
and you would have to next take to the stars
to find a worthy opponent.
Always on the lookout for their next great screenplay idea,
the Thomas brothers started to think
about what that might look like as an actual movie
with super producer Joel Silver and burgeoning action auteur
John McTiernan getting involved.
Now you have the core ingredients for one
of the most iconic monster movies of the decade brewing.
However, the road to production was not a smooth one.
The picture had major problems with the script,
but deadlines and release dates required them to roll right
into shooting after everyone's favorite '80s action megastar
Arnold Schwarzenegger signed on to be the human lead
of the picture, Dutch Schaefer.
Despite hiring Stan Winston to create the creature,
the short lead time required rapid solutions
like apparently going with the first suggestion for what
the Predator could look like.
To make things even more unthinkable,
the suit actor who was hired to be
inside the costume, a fresh faced gymnast and kickboxing
champion named Jean-Claude Van Damme.
That's right.
The muscles from Brussels was the Predator.
Before he was the star of a cavalcade of Cannon films,
he was going to be strapped into a clunky robot insect
version of the Predator.
If it bleeds, we can kill it.
As production commenced on Predator and Jean-Claude
still in the suit, things got worse and worse every day.
The actors were all hyper competitive with each other,
locations were falling through, and behind the scenes
frictions were mounting by the day.
With every passing day on set, tension
between Jean-Claude Van Damme and the production
became more and more strained.
In fact, there are no less than five conflicting versions
of just exactly why Van Damme was fired from Predator.
The first one involves the Belgian martial artist
breaking his own costume.
On some level, it seems intentional
if you believe all the reports of Van Damme hating
being in the costume for the Predator.
In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter,
Craig Baxley, who was the second unit director and stunt
coordinator on the film, said he witnessed Van Damme trying
on the costume and then ripped the helmet off his head
and throw it to the ground, shattering the mask.
For context, the mask cost roughly $20,000 to make
and could not be easily reproduced.
The next possible reason in our cavalcade
of potential explanations as to why JC VD isn't now
known as the most fearsome bounty hunter in the galaxy
is that he complained-- a lot.
According to the casting director Jackie Burch,
Van Damme was constantly complaining
about the heat, weight of the costume, and its immobility.
For some reason, Van Damme didn't understand
that he was going to be in a costume
when he signed on for the job and thus was shocked that he
would be covered from head to toe in a rubber alien suit,
thus he was constantly lobbying to be pulled out
of it, which just wasn't an option for this film.
You're one ugly motherf--
[ROAR]
Multiple sources have also pointed to the fact
that he was just too short to be credibly
scary against the hulking behemoths of Schwarzenegger,
Jesse Ventura, Sonny Landham, and the rest of the cast.
When Joel Silver hired Van Damme,
it was away from all the other actors.
They made him do a movement test where he leapt into the air
and did the splits at standing eye level.
This impressed the mega-producer that Van Damme
would be able to bring an otherworldly mobility
to the character.
Only catch being he's 5'6'' so when he put him next
to the 6'4'' four Bill Duke, well, he's less imposing.
The penultimate reason why Van Damme was fired
includes multiple people having eyewitness accounts
of Van Damme passing out multiple times on set
due to dehydration.
The 100 degree jungle heat and the strain of the suit
were considerable on Van Damme's body.
After passing out twice mid-scene,
Silver purportedly informed him that if he passed out again,
they'd be forced to recast the role for safety purposes.
Two weeks later, while on wire shooting
a Predator leaping from the tree shot, he lost consciousness.
Reportedly, silver had no other alternative
but to let the future star of Hard Target go.
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The final and goofiest reason why
Van Damme might have been fired is that he was constantly
lobbying Silver and McTiernan to make
the Predator into a kickboxer.
Yes, you heard that right.
Van Damme wanted to show off his skills by any means necessary.
And he wanted to show that he could do a roundhouse kick.
Thankfully, these pleas landed on deaf ears,
and the Predator was never modeled
into an intergalactic martial arts expert.
What the hell are you?
Obviously, whatever the true reason was,
the production problems climaxed with Silver and McTiernan
opting to shut down filming and reconfigure
the primary antagonists aesthetic.
The robotic bug thing just wasn't working.
They needed something else, so they pulled Stan Winston back
into the design process and asked him to create
something wholly original.
As fate would have it, this was right
before Winston and James Cameron were
about to be on an extended flight together.
I was sketching concepts for the Predator.
Jim Cameron looked over to me, he says, "you know,
I always wanted to see something with mandibles."
And I went "oh, really?
Well, so what?"
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Kevin Peter Hall was recast as the Predator.
His 7 foot 3 frame proved to be the winning combo
for the struggling production.
His elegance, grace, and brutalist movement archetypes
instantly breathed life into Winston's new costume design.
Out with Van Damme complaints and transparent ambition
and in with an actor who brought a gravitas
and verisimilitude to a role that
would spawn countless sequels and reinterpretations.
If Jean-Claude Van Damme had in fact made it through production
and been the Predator, it's highly unlikely the film would
have worked.
The strength of the film is the suspense
of not seeing the extraterrestrial entity
hunting our group of GIs, and then when it finally
does appear, it's an ungodly seven foot tall hellhound
of a lizard creature.
If the reveal was that it was Jean-Claude Van Damme trying
to do the splits in a weird bug helmet, no.
It just wouldn't have landed.
You ain't afraid of no man.
There's something out there waiting for us.
And it ain't no man.
So the real question is has Van Damme
ever gone on the records about his time as the Predator?
He had kept pretty mum about the process
until March of 2019 when he told the Hollywood Reporter's Heat
Vision podcast--
The guy who did my stunts, something bad happened to him.
And then they stopped the film, and they
did a new, more safe outfit.
Is that the whole story?
It sure doesn't seem like it.
It seems like in the cold light of day
and after a very long and successful career,
Van Damme doesn't want to admit to whatever his behavior was
all those years ago.
But that's the story that Van Damme's sticking to.
So who are we to argue with the world's foremost expert
in kicking people in the head?
Well, that's all we have for this episode.
What do you think?
Would Predator have been better if Van Damme had been in it?
Should they bring him back for one of the inevitable sequels?
Let us in the comments below.
And as always, comment and subscribe to Nerdstalgic
for more videos like this.