Really, folks, be honest with me. Who had it on their bingo card that Terrence Malick would wind up the

savior of the Predator franchise? Howdy? I'm Jeff Goldsmith, and this is the Q&A. My agenda is simple.

Each week, I plan to bring you in-depth insights into the creative process of storytelling. And folks,

I kid, I kid. Dan Tractonberg is the savior of the Predator franchise.

Terrence Malick is great in all of his own ways, but all hail Dan Tractonberg, who also, coincidentally, happens to be today's guest.

That's right, he is the writer-director of Predator Badlands, which is in theaters now, so I hope you go see it if you haven't seen it already. But fear not,

we start spoiler-free and then make a very clear announcement before we get into spoilers,

so you could keep listening right as you are. But this was a fun episode because there's so

many unique, interesting things going on here, and truly, Dan has just knocked it out of the

park for what he has done to revive what was

essentially a Dead in the Water franchise with Predator.

So yeah, we did a podcast together for Prey.

We did an article in backstory magazine for Predator Killer of Killers, which you could see on

Disney Plus.

And I was really blown away by Predator Badlands.

It's just a fantastic film. And once again, the genius of Dan's approach is that Predator Badlands is a standalone movie. In fact, I would even venture to say if you've never seen any of the movies in the Predator franchise, you could still walk into this and know what's going on. And that's a really good lesson for storytellers, is that it's okay to do a standalone movie within a franchise,

still have it connect on a kind of subterranean level,

but let it be its own thing.

And Dan has really just mastered the craft of doing that,

so kudos to him.

And I got to say,

Dan was very forthcoming about his creative process

...