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John McTiernan feels there's a fascination among audiences about seeing guns being fired, so he added the scene of the remaining team members firing blindly into the jungle for a couple minutes. "What I was really doing was to quietly ridicule the desire to see pictures of guns firing. All of this is sort of a moral separate peace here, and in order to do it I set up the circumstance where there were no human beings in front of the guns. In fact the point of all the firing was, as the man says as soon as they stop shooting, 'We hit nothing.' The whole point was the impotence of all the guns. Which was the exact opposite of what believe I was being hired to sell." He points out that he did the same thing in Die Hard (1988).
Several directors were approached to direct this film including Ridley Scott, James Cameron, Brian De Palma, Richard Donner, John Milius, John Carpenter and Renny Harlin. However, they would all pass stating they didn't want to shoot an Alien/Monster movie in the jungle. John McTiernan would eventually be chosen to direct this film instead.
The invisibility cloaking effect was achieved with a bright red suit (because it was the farthest opposite of the green of the jungle and the blue of the sky) the size of the Predator. The red was removed with chroma key techniques, leaving an empty area. The take was then repeated without the actors using a 30% wider lens on the camera. When the two takes were combined optically, the jungle from the second take filled in the empty area. Because the second take was filmed with a wider lens, a vague outline of the alien could be seen with the background scenery bending around its shape.
Jesse Ventura was delighted to find out from the wardrobe department that his arms were one inch bigger than Arnold Schwarzenegger's. He suggested to Schwarzenegger that they measure arms, with the winner getting a bottle of champagne. Ventura lost, because Schwarzenegger had told the wardrobe department to tell Ventura that his arms were bigger.
Dutch's line "Get to the chopper!" is Arnold Schwarzenegger's personal favorite catchphrase of all of his films that he appears in.
The Predator costume weighed over two hundred pounds, and even though 7'2" Kevin Peter Hall was a large and powerful man, he had to be connected to a "bungie" rig, to enable him to move more believably.
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