<\/p>\n
SAN DIEGO (AP) \u2014 \u201cPredator: Badlands\u201d<\/a> belongs to a long-established cinema subgenre: two opposed people reluctantly stuck together with a common purpose.<\/p>\n The film, the seventh in the franchise (not counting the \u201cAlien vs. Predator\u201d<\/a> offshoots), has the buddy comedy energy that comes with that dynamic. It also belongs to the narrower subgenre of people quite literally stuck together, like 1958’s \u201cThe Defiant Ones,\u201d in which Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis were fugitives united by chains.<\/p>\n And, in a scenario that provided special challenges for stars Elle Fanning<\/a> and Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, \u201cPredator: Badlands\u201d belongs to a still narrower subset it may share only with \u201cThe Empire Strikes Back\u201d:<\/a> movies with a broken android worn like a backpack by a tall and powerful creature as they face peril in a strange corner of space.<\/p>\n \u201cThe real physical inspiration for it was C-3PO strapped to Chewbacca\u2019s back,\u201d director Dan Trachtenberg told The Associated Press in an interview where he was joined by the film’s two stars. \u201cBut I think the fun of this is that it\u2019s not Chewbacca. It\u2019s not a friendly, well-intentioned creature, it\u2019s a Predator.\u201d<\/p>\n The apt working title of the movie, which will be released Friday by 20th Century Studios, was \u201cBackpack.\u201d<\/p>\n For much of the New Zealand shoot, Fanning and Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi were every bit as close as they appear to be in the film, where the top half of her artificially intelligent character, Thia, was back-to-back with Schuster-Koloamatangi’s young Predator, Dek, who is out to prove himself on a hunt against a seemingly unkillable megamonster.<\/p>\n \u201cHis Predator braids would, like, whip me in the face all the time in our action sequences,\u201d Fanning said with a laugh.<\/p>\n Trachtenberg and the crew used an array of practical ways to make the backpack setup work.<\/p>\n \u201cAny way you can think of making the rig, we tried,\u201d Schuster-Koloamatangi said.<\/p>\n \u201cThrough the mud, through the water, through rivers,\u201d Fanning added.<\/p>\n She said at times her co-star pulled her in a wheelbarrow, and at other times they’d do it on foot.<\/p>\n \u201cI would really pretend to be a backpack swinging around,\u201d she said. \u201cWe\u2019d have to coordinate our steps, I\u2019d be walking backward and it would be like, \u2018OK, left, right, left, right.’\u201d<\/p>\n In the scenes when they weren’t back-to-back, Trachtenberg wanted them to be genuinely face-to-face.<\/p>\n \u201cWe developed this system where he wore a suit, but his face was open,\u201d the director said. \u201cAnd that way Dimitrius could really be driving the performance, and he and Elle could work off each other in moments, though fleeting, when they were actually facing each other.\u201d<\/p>\n He said the \u201cwhole reason for making the movie was to really emotionally connect with this crazy thing. So it really demanded that we had a different approach,\u201d and that the process \u201callows us to be far more expressive and do things the other entries in the franchise couldn\u2019t do with its creature.\u201d<\/p>\n Trachtenberg, a 44-year-old Philadelphia native, has taken over the franchise that began in 1987 with the Arnold Schwarzenegger original. He has taken it to entirely new times and places, with entirely new approaches.<\/p>\n