You might not recognize Sandy Collora’s name, but you’ve probably seen his films. Special effects artist and creature designer turned filmmaker, Collora is probably best known as the director of one of the most famous fan films of all time Batman: Dead End. If you haven’t seen it, check it out now. The film is most memorable for it’s Hollywood-level production values and a shocking climax that involves Batman battling Alien and Predator. Collora’s 2004 follow-up, World’s Finest, which involved the team-up of Batman and Superman, was not as well received.

Four years later, Collora has returned with his first original feature film, Hunter Prey. Shot with the RED camera system, and shot in Mexico over the course of 18 days on a shoestring budget. IO9 has an interview with Collora, along with a bunch of production photos (a couple which we have included in this post). Collora explains the premise of the film below:

“The film centers around a crew of special forces commandos who must recapture an alien prisoner that has escaped after the military transport ship carrying it crashes on a desolate and hostile planet. There are subtle political and environmental overtones that I certainly don’t hit anyone over the head with at all, but that will hopefully make you think about things like war, politics and current events, by presenting them in situations cinematically from a uniquely different perspective. That’s one of the great things about Science Fiction; You can tell the audience something in a very unique way by using the guise of a futuristic world or society that can reflect our own. The film, very much like the approach Jim Cameron took with “The Terminator”, is a very small piece of a much larger picture. It concentrates on how the bigger situation (which in this case, is interplanetary war) is affecting the two main characters, who are now separated from it, and how they relate and react to their situation and each other as a result of it. As the story unfolds and more things are revealed about the characters and what their relationship is, we had to create in a sense, what we could not show. This was a very interesting challenge not only for co-writer Nick Damon and myself, but for the actors as well because through their performances and the dialogue, they had to build in the audience’s imagination, what we couldn’t afford to actually build on screen.”

Hunter Prey is now in Post Production. You can read the whole interview on io9.com.