How the Predator prequel Prey draws on real history
Producer Jhane Myers speaks exclusively with RadioTimes.com about the extensive research that went into the new film.
The term 'historical accuracy' isn't normally one you'd associate with a Predator movie – what with every previous entry in the franchise having been set either in the present or the near future.
But Prey – the new prequel from 10 Cloverfield Lane director Dan Trachtenberg – is a very different beast. The film is set in the Native American Comanche Nation in 1719, and painstaking amounts of research went into ensuring it reflected that setting as accurately as possible.
"That was all like, way before pre-production," producer Jhane Myers, who is Comanche herself, told RadioTimes.com in an exclusive interview. "We worked with native historians and we worked with the Comanche Nation themselves.
"I had Comanche Nation people involved in almost every aspect," she added. "Whether it was doing renderings, because there aren't any pictures from back then – and we checked museum archives and the oldest thing we found was in the 1790s.
"So you know we had to do renderings to influence wardrobe and costuming, and just everything. It was like I had to create this whole book for the time period, that went out to each department, so they could flip through and get an idea and figure out how they wanted to do this."
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She continued: "We had colour swatches from Earth paint, because we used certain Earth paints during that time, and there were only about four or five colours.
"So that's what we had to base the whole tone of what all of the Comanches were wearing, what they were painting with, even what they had in the parts of their hair."
Myers, whose previous credits include working on the TV series 1883 and films such as Apocalypto and Wind River – said that her producer role on the film was by some distance the greatest undertaking of her career so far.
"When I work on projects, I usually get hired for Native content," she explained. "And usually it's like maybe 20 to 25 per cent of the show, right?
"But this one was 110 per cent. And I add that extra 10 per cent because it came on in the end in post-production, when we got the green light to go ahead and do a whole Comanche dub.
"So that's another extra budget – that's a job in itself to get the whole movie dubbed into Comanche, that's it in a nutshell!"
One other area in which Myers's expertise came in especially handy was when advising on the use of horses in the picture. She said there were originally no horses in the script, which would have been a major error when it came to depicting the Comanche people.
"We're a horse culture, so you can see that in [the character of] Taabe and his horse riding, " she said. "And then you can see that in the camps where we have horses.
"When I originally saw the first script, there were no horses in it. And I said 'You can't have Comanches without horses!' So that's where that came in, and when we wrote the Taabe scene."
Read more:
- Prey review: Pared down Predator prequel works a treat
- Prey's Amber Midthunder on whether she'd return for future films
Prey is available on Disney Plus from Friday 5th August 2022 – sign up to Disney Plus for £7.99 a month or £79.90 a year now. Check out more of our Movies coverage or visit our TV Guide to see what's on tonight.
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Authors
Patrick Cremona is the Senior Film Writer at Radio Times, and looks after all the latest film releases both in cinemas and on streaming. He has been with the website since October 2019, and in that time has interviewed a host of big name stars and reviewed a diverse range of movies.
