of
the flame, the hotter the flame.
So if you have a three-foot flame
licking up, at the end of three feet
you're not as hot as you are
at the start of it. Little tricks.
The helicopter we saw destroyed
was the same helicopter
that had already been
filmed hanging in the trees.
Di Sarro refurbished it
for the attack sequence.
Jim and John Thomas:
( John) The site of the guerilla encampment
actually became a tourist attraction.
( Jim) It's still there. The burned-out
helicopter is there, and a bunch of stuff.
Despite the mayhem taking place on screen,
the geography of the scene is always clear.
Not only is our sense of space created
by skilful direction and editing,
but also, surprisingly, by the sound.
Co-Supervising Sound Editor
Richard L Anderson:
There's a problem in these kinds of
movies you can fall into - overcutting.
That's when you cover everything,
and with sound, by saying
"While this event is happening,
30 other guys are shooting
at each other offstage
so we're going to have
30 guns going off offstage. "
The problem is you end up with this
wall of noise and you can't hear anything.
It's important to feature the key thing.
(Stone) Richard Shorr
laid out all those gunshots.
The first thing we did
was assign certain gun recordings
to certain characters or groups of characters.
Then he'd map the thing out
as he understood the geography of the scene.
He assigned those guns and ricochets
to tracks which would be dedicated
to the speaker channel
he wanted the sound to appear in,
and then the mixers made it work.
(Stone) The other layer of this effort,
which I have to credit Shorr for doing,
is very carefully articulating
what surfaces bullets were hitting,
whether it was a body,
a metal rail, a wooden crate,
a bunch of dirt or some leaves.
All of that detail, even if it was as short
as two frames in the movie, was covered.
Jim and John Thomas,
who were on location for four months:
( John) One of the big problems
was the heat vision.
Something like that
had never been attempted before.
We had a thermographic heat-vision camera
that actually ran on liquid nitrogen,
and was married to the Panavision.
Through the use of a beam splitter,
70% of the image went to
the thermographic video camera
and 30% went to the 35mm film camera.
Visual Effects Coordinator Joel Hynek:
The thermographic scanner
had only half resolution of video.
That was actually a benefit.
It made the heat vision look more abstract.
It's like you're seeing
the thinking process of Predator.
It's like a fly's vision:
A million images you can't comprehend
but you know that somehow
there's a mind processing information.
We had tested the thermographic camera.
We had set up a greenhouse
at R/Greenberg and raised the temperature
to see at what point the camera
could no longer distinguish
a person from the surroundings.
It was around 93 degrees.
( John Thomas) We were working
in 102, 103-degree temperatures.
The heat-vision camera
had its own special cooling unit
that was housed in a truck because
the cables weren't long enough,
so for the aerial shots they brought in a crane
and lifted the truck into the trees.
It was pretty wild.
(Al Di Sarro) We had to bring in
water trucks and make ice water.
We'd spray all the foliage
down to get it cold enough
so that you read the heat from
the body for all that stuff Greenberg did.
According to Hynek, even after
the jungle was initially hosed down,
the camera still could not distinguish
the actors from the environment.
No one knew what had gone wrong
until Hynek realised.
(Hynek) These black trucks
had been sitting in the sun.
I said "Guys, cold water!"
In some of the long shots,
like when Arnold throws down the cigar,
the actors and the