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Aztec Rex - An Affordable (And Gory) Dino Movie

As Aussie director Brian Trenchard-Smith wraps shooting in Hawaii on his
latest feature, Aztec Rex, he talks about making this gory creature feature
for a seriously low budget – and how he did it. (Extracted with thanks from
Fangoria magazine.)

It was producer Jeff Hayes who got Brian Trenchard-Smith involved in Aztec
Rex, the kind of movie Brian had wanted to make for a long time. “I
directed episodes of The New Mission: Impossible, Time Trax and Flipper for
him, plus the remake of the WWII classic Sahara, starring Jim Belushi. He
asked me if I would like to make a dinosaur movie, and Aztec Rex is the
result.”

And Brian couldn’t have been happier. “Back in the Stone Age [i.e. 1969], I
worked on the trailer for the dino flick The Valley Of Gwangi, one of many
great Ray Harryhausen films, getting an inside peek at the stop-motion
master’s work as it progressed through the final stages. I became
determined to make a dinosaur movie. It took only 38 years! [laughs]. You
might say Aztec Is Jurassic Park Eats Cortez Or Apocalypto In The Valley Of
Gwangi, with a dash of Aguirre, The Wrath Of God. I like making genre
cocktails that both celebrate and affectionately satirize their
antecedents.”

What’s it about? You may well ask – and Brian will answer: “This is the
untold story of the first scouting expedition to central Mexico by
imperialist colonizer Hernán Cortes and a small band of soldiers in 1522.
They are captured by an Aztec tribe who placate the last remaining
Tyrannosaurus rexes in the valley with virgin sacrifices. Shocking waste of
virgins, if you ask me. Our hero, Rios, a somewhat progressive
conquistador, tries to prevent Cortes from enslaving the Aztecs and put an
end to the human sacrifices—a time-honored plot for costume pictures of the
’60s. But we have tried, without interfering with the fun of the piece, to
inject a little more plot, character delineation and interesting historical
detail.”

"my mayhem is as graphic as time and money would allow"

But of course Brian also injected lots of blood …. “my mayhem is as graphic
as time and money would allow. Two human hearts are ripped out, a leg is
bitten off, intestines spill, ribs are shredded, half-eaten corpses fall
onto wet sand, etc. These are the moments in this kind of picture I would
have loved to have seen as a kid. Gore fans will certainly get some
chuckles.”

Creating all this mayhem and his monster at a low cost proved to be the
director’s greatest challenge. “I made this movie in a fully union
community for a below-the-line budget of less than US$1 million in 15
11-hour days,” he reveals. “We couldn’t afford any mechanical or prosthetic
dinosaur parts, so the creature had to be totally digital - nearly 200
shots in all. Effects maven Elliot Worman did a fantastic job animating the
T. rex. Budget restrictions meant I couldn’t have it moving behind
foreground foliage; there was no time to rig branches with thin wire to
pull them to one side as if the T. rex was moving through, and so on. I had
to be constantly aware of what my creative wish list would cost.”