Badlands Director Dan Trachtenberg On Making The Boldest Film In The Franchise So Far [Exclusive Interview]

One of the things I’ve always loved about you as a filmmaker is that you really seem to bring a lot of video game influences and logic into your cinema. Were there any specific video games that influenced you making this? I saw maybe a little bit of “Shadow of the Colossus” or “Horizon Zero Dawn” in there…

“Shadow of the Colossus.” Huge inspiration, not just aesthetically for some designs, but really even just for the nature of the story. Also, I mean, “Horizon,” probably of course, because there’s a fusion of bio and tech, and futurism and naturalism. Oh, there’s a character in the movie called Bud that was initially inspired by a Murloc in “World of Warcraft.” Just aesthetically, we were trying to find the right kind of silhouette [and] I kept thinking of Murloc. In fact, the movie’s title was initially just a codename. I thought the movie was going to be called “Yautja,” and the codename for it was “Badlands.” It eventually became “Backpack” when we were filming, but I needed a codename. I needed to come up with it quick, and I looked over at my computer and on my Blizzard launcher, my friend was in WOW, in Badlands. It says the character name and the location in the game that they were in, and it said “Badlands.” And I was like, “That’s a great title.”

I also saw a lot of what felt to me like an influence of classic sci-fi novel art in the film, like Michael Whelan or something like that. How did you and your team develop Genna and not make it, for instance, Pandora from “Avatar,” but still keep it rooted in the tradition of sci-fi worlds?

It’s challenging. There are so many great [fictional worlds], Pandora is so all-inclusive, and of course all the sci-fi worlds out there. But I started out iterating on concept art. I worked with this guy, Andre Wallen, who I remember, he just put the Predator silhouette in different kinds of aesthetic locations. Naturally, there’s a grim, eerie quality to his work that steers things away from things like Pandora. And he had done the Predator standing in an ice field, but when I looked at it quickly, it almost looked like blades of grass, like white blades of grass. And that gave [us] the story idea, because we hadn’t even had a script finished yet, or even a treatment, I think, we were kind of simultaneously developing the treatment as well as doing the concept art. And that’s what gave birth to the razor grass sequence. But we really wanted to make sure that everything truly felt deadly, from the blades of grass to the trees to the flora and fauna. It wasn’t just like “the creatures are deadly, but look at how majestic the world is.” That it all really could kill you, but still have a beauty to it.