BUTTING UP
Special effects expert Steve Johnson has been a Hollywood heavyweight on numerous major movies, including Ghostbusters and Big Trouble In Little China. But creating the original Predator suit was a nightmare in the jungle…
What Was your experience like on Predator? This story is really complicated – because some of it was good and some of it was really, really bad. I worked on Predator for quite a long time – and I was working on the suit for Van Damme before Stan Winston and Arnold were involved. Van Damme was the original Predator but as everyone knows he got let go and it might have been because of my suit and the fact it gave him very limited mobility [laughs]. I have a new book called Rubberhead Volume II and I have a whole chapter on this because it obviously did not end how I wanted… you Mean, not getting a credit on it? I thought I did get a credit on it! Didn’t I? I got famously fired from it, to cut a long story short. Or at least they fired me from designing the suit [laughs]. But what they didn’t fire me from is all the gore that is in there. They still used a lot of my work. So there are my skinned and flayed bodies in there. Carl Weathers getting his arms cut off. The chests exploding. That was what I did on Predator. I love doing that stuff and it was actually a really gory movie for the time. now there is a new
Predator, Which Will probably involve some cgi creatures. as you had such Complications making the original suit, do you think life Might have been easier With cgi as an option? Some of the stuff I am most proud of in my career used both: The
Abyss, Species and Spider-Man… It just depends how you use the CGI. There is no way to make some movies now without CGI. So it has helped the industry because now we can see new interpretations and stories – and I think that can only be a good thing.