guy comes
out on fire and Carl shoots him,
Al had gotten all the stunt guys together.
They wrote this song
called "Dude Commando".
While we're setting up this huge sequence,
they march out singing this song.
That was Aldo.
(Di Sarro) The song was awesome. (laughs)
The song was composed and written
by Leon Delaney as I remember,
performed eloquently
by the whole stunt department,
and backed up by the effects crew. (laughing)
Di Sarro on the Mexican jungle
versus a Hollywood stage:
I had two Mexican effects coordinators:
Jesus and Jobie Duran.
I don't think I ever worked with a group
that had so little and worked so hard.
I learned that it's incredible
what you can do with very little
when you use good ingenuity.
Where I would use nuts and bolts,
aircraft cable, Nicopress tools,
these people would take
baling wire and tie things down
that you couldn't move with
an earthmover. It was amazing.
We basically had to hack
our way through, make paths.
If you wanted to rig bullet hits up in a tree,
and that tree was 40 feet tall,
you would nail 2x4s to the tree,
and climb up, then nail a few more.
You'd build your steps as you climbed.
We had to put the net up there.
That net was also very interesting.
I had two peones at the gymnasium
when we were prepping
and they both slept under the truck
at night, they had no home.
I paid them in American money.
Three dollars a day.
Well, the production designer, John Vallone,
was concerned about who was going to build
that net, the price of it and everything else.
He came to me and it ended up in my lap.
All I asked of his department was that they
send the peones out and supply those vines.
So a few days later, there's this
huge stack of vines all coiled up.
I took some of those vines
and laid out three going one way,
and took some and laid them out
perpendicularly, and I said "Grande".
The second day, the gymnasium floor
was covered in this net. I gasped.
"How are we going to get it out? It's huge. "
Vallone saw it and said "How much
did this cost? How many guys did this?"
I said "Two. "We had to stop 'em!
We had to cut it down!
They wanted to gimbal the helicopter
our commandos were flying in.
In the gym, they had a real helicopter
fuselage laying on its side, in a heap.
Jesus Duran said "Seсor, I think
there's a crane on the side of the gym... "
Well, he had the crane arm punch through
the brick wall of the gymnasium.
Then, Jesus, Jobie and their families
took a piece of old cable and Crosbys
and put it around the engine.
And they picked the helicopter up.
Then they put some sandbags
in the back of it to balance it.
Then they took 2x4s and wired them
to this fuselage so we could lift it.
We put 20 people around it
and we made a gimbal in about three hours.
You know you did something right
when they roll the camera in,
look at a rehearsal
and somebody says "Let's shoot it. "
That's like music to your ears.
Editor Mark Helfrich:
There were some scenes where I had
to create something out of... not much.
One was that scene where
the Predator gets trapped in the net.
I have shots of the net swinging
that I printed backwards and upside down.
Because all they did was shoot
a net going up, and that was it.
There was nothing that showed
any kind of action inside the net.
That's one place I can remember
pulling out all the stops,
speeding it up, flopping it,
printing it backwards and forward again.
Later they added the laser stuff.
That was one scene made out of trickery.
(Di Sarro) Isn't that neat?
And you know how
we made the net snap up?
We got 55-gallon drums
and hoisted 'em up into the tree.
Then we went up with a water hose from
the water truck and filled 'em with water.
We blew the rope and phewwww!
That's how we did that. The water
jugs would fall and the net went up.
Al Di Sarro continues:
John McTiernan was a