Marking the occasion of the 40th Anniversary of the original Alien, Director Ridley Scott had a chat with The Hollywood Reporter about his experiences regarding how Alien coalesced.
Those who have watched behind-the-scenes materials or read books regarding the film’s production may be familiar with the events described. Regardless, Scott revisiting them makes for an engaging read.
Sigourney Weaver, director Ridley Scott on the set of ALIEN, 1979, TM & Copyright (c) 20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved.
Back in 1977, after having been invited to a showing of Star Wars and seeing the audience reaction, Scott saw the power of blockbuster Sci-Fi…
“The theater was positively boiling with expectation. I have never seen such audience participation,” remembers Scott. “Because I had a very good time in France doing The Duellists, I was seriously thinking about doing Tristan & Isolde next. So I looked at Star Wars and thought, ‘Why on earth am I even thinking about doing Tristan & Isolde when this guy is doing this kind of movie? And it literally stopped me in my tracks. I was depressed for three months — that’s my highest form of accolade — to get very depressed first, then get very competitive.”
“And suddenly, out of the blue, came this script called Alien,” he says. “And I’m still, to this day, baffled about how someone who is at Cannes seeing The Duellists had put two and two together and said, ‘You know what? You might want to meet this guy, because he may be the right one for Alien.’ That’s how it happened.”
Scott chronicles how ideas, casting, editing and release of the film progressed, and his collaborations with writer Dan O’Bannon and artist H.R. Giger.
According to Scott, talks are happening at 20th Century Fox, now owned by Disney, regarding where to take the films next. He feels the franchise needs to evolve to move forward…
Ruminating on the immediate future of the Alien franchise, now that Disney has acquired 21st Century Fox, Scott confirms that there are discussions for future installments, but warns that if the basic premise of “the beast” does not evolve like the Xenomorph itself, the “joke” gets old.
“You get to the point when you say, ‘Okay, it’s dead in the water,’” he says. “I think Alien vs. Predator was a daft idea. And I’m not sure it did very well or not, I don’t know. But it somehow brought down the beast. And I said to them, ‘Listen, you can resurrect this, but we have to go back to scratch and go to a prequel, if you like.’ So we go to Prometheus, which was not bad actually. But you know, there’s no alien in it, except the baby at the end that showed, itself, the possibility. I mean, it had the silhouette of an alien, right? The alien [origin concept] is uniquely attached to Mother Nature. It simply comes off a wood beetle that will lay eggs inside some unsuspecting insect. And in so doing, the form of the egg will become the host for this new creature. That’s hideous. But that was what it was. And you can’t keep repeating that because the joke gets boring.”
Scott has argued this before, multiple times, with comments like “the beast has almost run out,” and how he would like to shift the focus to what he perceives as a more dangerous threat: Artificial Intelligence. The topic of the Alien having run its course is something that Scott has gone back and forth on, around the release of Alien: Covenant he admitted that there was still an audience and fan appetite for the Xenomorph.
But again, it seems for Scott, the Alien as it was known in the original film has had its day. Head on over to The Hollywood Reporter to read the full article/interview.
Additionally, according to another interview with Variety, Scott’s third Alien prequel is actually being written:
“Alien” made $105 million worldwide back in 1979 — the adjusted gross is $283.5 million — and spawned three sequels, two crossovers with the “Predator” franchise, and two prequels, 2012’s “Prometheus” and 2017’s “Alien: Covenant,” both directed by Scott. A third prequel, which he will direct, is in the script phase.
Though this doesn’t come from a direct quote but Variety is a reputable website.
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I liked it better when it was objectively.
Spoiler
May I ask politely for an American Football analogy instead? It's my favorite sport.
Spoiler
Regardless of having everything for a home run in place,
apart from a clear idea of the film's objective and a well-written script.
A perfect home run, whilst forgetting to pick up the ball.
Resurrection was always going to be trite, bringing back Ripley through cloning- are you serious?
The best you could hope for is stylish trite, which is exactly what we got.
So just because it could have been a classic but missed that benchmark, it's automatically a disaster, trash and embarrassing? And here you actually used to like Prometheus.
Resurrection is much, much closer to those comments than Prometheus in my opinion. We'll agree to disagree on all parts.
The Prometheus we got is embarrassing.
Disaster and trash? Ouch!
It sits alongside VIII-TLJ, GoT-S8, SWPrequelTrilogy and The Hobbit Prequel Trilogy.
The shelf of immense wasted potential, scripts full of holes and bizarre acting caricatures.
Which do you like better? is not Which is better? -anyway.
I don't see why you'd even bring it up frankly, I wasn't discussing the "Prometheus Vs Covenant" argument.
Or like me and a bit more than the 50% of the AvPG fans that voted, we just feel Prometheus is the superior film regardless.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
and more internally consistent- is already discussed to death.
If Prometheus was better received than Covenant by critics and audiences alike and is a disaster, then what does that make Covenant?
Loved most of the rest though.
And Prometheus script is a trashfire.
Spoiler
Defying audience expectations is alright, as long as you have something of substance to replace it with. Prometheus' fault is it didn't. For heaven's sake, some of the dialogue alone: "Half a billion lightyears." -So barely out of our solar system Meredith Vickers?
Doesn't exactly encourage the audience to engage with the lofty questions the film poses when they can't believe in the world because of it's lack of logic, or a solid character to attach to, and I don't mean attach to as in care for, I mean believable characterisation.
The clearest example I can think of is that Prometheus wants us to believe, that both Fifield and Millburn are intelligent scientists early on- poking fun at the mission's ridiculous premise. (While using "Darwinism" as terminology, oh Lord.) Ok, but then later on wants us to believe they're idiots- neither is an unattainable goal. But which is it Prometheus?
Don't get me started on how hard it is to take a antagonist (The Pathogen) seriously when it's "power" is so inconsistent and dependant upon what the plot requires, it doesn't make your antagonists or protagonists impressive or respectable. You respect them whenever they do everything right and still fail.
A disaster? Common man. It has some seriously nice settings, actors, world building, music, effects.
Script could have obviously been better but I would definitely not call it a disaster. 9/10 for me. Without the dumb snake scene and dumbed down acting decisions and with the deacon creeping around it would have been a 10.
No, no it isn't. It's seriously a disaster.
A interesting idea totally wasted on a inane script.
Spoiler
Prometheus didn't work because of the writing,
Alien worked in major part because of the writing, all the other aspects are important yes, but if the writing doesn't work- everything else is for nothing.
As such is Prometheus' case.
Going on a mission funded by an eccentric multi-billionaire Capitalist to find God, but finding an/several old God(s) instead/
Mountains of Madness in the Alien universe. With a Pathogen that generates new horrors based upon circumstances of infection. + Philosophical pondering on the meaning of life in the face of such abject horror.
It's a superb idea, wasted.
And Scott still disrespects the beast. I gave up hope for a really good Alien movie ever to appear. In the end it's Alien 1-3 which are precious. The rest...not so much.
Lol, picturing Jeff Goldblum saying that.
Opinion is the plague of the modern age. It has its place in certain corners of the internet (like fan forums - no, not joking ) but I'd hoped that established old media journals like the Guardian would hold out for actual news reporting for a few more years yet. This guy isn't even presenting us with an argument, with supporting facts and evidence or logic or reasoning, just boring us with his hot air.
TC
Now that the Alien retroactively is created by one,
I'm interested in what he means by evolving it because he didn't say it's done.
A tree with too many branches, blocks out too much sun.
I don't know what that means, but it seemed pertinent.
Spoiler
2. Dead, from starvation obviously.
3. Concept replaced by the Neomorph.
4. Using Elizabeth Shaw's ovaries lead to the Alien.
5. A bigger Big Chap, as Engineers are just bigger humans, down to the DNA- Prometheus tells us.
6. Sure, I don't see that being explored to be honest.
7. Definitely a thing.
8. Definitely a thing.
9. Yeah.
The Neomorphs, although I'd like to see them again- got fully explored, by my count you only have the practices of the Engineers which "got sidetracked" and that's something better left mostly ambiguous, unless you're going to use it to say something meaningful about the whole Creator and Created cycle that's going on.
The LV-426 Derelict will apparently be the culmination in some fashion of the Prequel storyline.
It was his doodie.
A.I. in both prequels has been top notch. TOP. Just wish the Alien was also. I'd love to see Scott and Cameron do one more film each at least. Wouldn't that be great. Full expansion, 2 different timelines expanding with Scott and Cameron at the helm, who woulda thunk of this ever happening again in the AR-AVPR era.
Yes.
Not when an A.I. is meant to replicate with accuracy a human mind. I'm not looking for anything I'm just capable of seeing human similarities when they are right in front of me. His current behavior is a result of his human programming. Walter is more alien than David.
A.I. is literally alien lol. You only see human similarities because that's what you're looking for. Nothing about David is human other than his appearance and the facade he maintains because of his programming, which he breaks.
It'd be freaky if David and the cargo were captured by real Space Jockeys and his anatomy and experiments were blended together to create a bio-mechanical Alien. I'd imagine trying to create that entire scene would be messy and complicated though.....
"goes rogue" meaning he goes human and decides to act like one and be free instead of continuing to be a machine on slavery. Going rogue is a human thing.
Considering himself to the devil? Misanthropy? Emotional anger? Conflicted feelings towards Shaw? All human things. There is nothing unfamiliar about any of that. Plenty of men went there. David is just behaving like an emotional depressive angry man. Merely a consequence of an accurate A.I. based on a human male put into a plastic body. I don't see anything alien about that.
I never said that.
https://i.imgur.com/G2vHizS.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/3cNbBGN.jpg
But seriously, I didn't say that David is like an alien. I mean artificial intelligence in general, and Ridley's previous wishes to explore this topic in depth. So maybe I'm talking about things like...the transcendence/transformation of David into something else, a literal alien AI of extraterrestrial origin as the last legacy of a long-gone civilization, biomechanical intelligent beings (like the Space Jockey before the Engineers), an equivalent of MU-TH-UR 6000 in the Engineers/Space Jockeys vessels. etc.
But but! there aren't humans in the Alien universe, just aliens
https://i.imgur.com/nUphEOX.gif
Good point. Also, maybe it's like a cosmic cycle, and the same thing happened eons ago:
https://i.imgur.com/W3TqAtw.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/L9SCCzY.jpg
An ancient civilization ends up being enslaved and finally destroyed by machines, kinda like the ending of Battlestar Galactica, but without religious stuff of course:
An A.I. that goes rogue to create a xenomorph and considers himself the devil is pretty alien.
It's off topic.
bai