David Fincher is a man who famously has very little to say about his experience working on Alien 3, and when he does, it’s generally not something pleasant. He’s even gone as far as to compare the production to being “sodomized ritualistically for two years.” He is truly not a fan of that time of his life, but recently he’s started to open up about the infamous, troubled production.
Back in June 2023, Fincher discussed the film while talking during a panel at Tribeca Festival, where he called the production a “truly f–ked-up situation.”
“I came out of a truly f–ked-up situation and kind of swore that I would never make the same mistake,” Fincher said of “Alien 3.” “I made a lot of brand new ones, but I’d never start something that didn’t have a script that I didn’t believe in or that I didn’t understand or that I couldn’t articulate to people. And I’d also very much learned that I wanted to make all my own mistakes instead of inheriting them from other people.”
The latest issue of the Empire Magazine has a fantastic 6-page spread looking at the most iconic shots from David Fincher’s filmography and the magazine event got David to open up about an undeniably iconic moment from Alien 3, and the director even had something nice to say about it!
“The one shot Fox was happy to put in the trailer: the Alien’s filing-cabinet drawer opening on Sigourney Weaver’s face! I always knew we wanted to do it and it never looked the way I wanted it to. I wanted to light all behind her. It should have been two shapes in silhouette, we should have had more coverage of it, and we didn’t – mostly because we were spending all our fucking time trying to shoot plates for the rod-puppet side of the thing. I think we had an hour-and-a-half to get that. But it’s power, because it’s a powerful idea.”
Alien vs. Predator Galaxy had the opportunity to talk to Rex Pickett, the screen-writer David Fincher personally hired (and snuck into the United Kingdom) to rewrite the script. During the interview Rex went into detail about working alongside David Fincher, and his own negative experiences on the production. If you haven’t already, you should give our interview a listen (or read)!
Thanks to Nightmare Asylum for the heads up! Keep your browsers locked on Alien vs. Predator Galaxy for the latest Alien and Predator news! You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube to get the latest on your social media walls. You can also join in with fellow Alien and Predator fans on our forums!
But in all seriousness, is Ripley a bit slow to realize what's happening, or just not telling others what she's realizing? Could this be sped up as well?
I can't help but picture 'Se7en' as a commentary on 'Alien 3' with Fincher being the young inexperienced cop full of hope, Ridley being the older experienced cop who knows the industry has gone to shit and can't be saved, and Fox being the seven deadly sins 🤣
I think he processed this horror in seven
He should bring back the cast for reshoots.
Because it is. One of the best cues in any of the films and it's just - yeah, nah.
It's more like what the review pointed out were the flaws of Alien 3 and how it could be done.
Having it just be "ah the Alien killing people again" just resets it back into territory we've already been in.
What did Fincher want to do with the script or has he never elaborated on that?
Yes please
Either way, I'd definitely view it with an open mind :-) the hardest part will be viewing it *knowing* what was there prior to cuts- I felt the same when viewing the Assembly Cut the first few times; it's like listening to a fave song and there's a note missing; you can't focus on what is there for what feels "off" (best example would be the soundtrack during Ripley's sacrifice in the Assembly Cut - it feels butchered) 😅
I feel the bigger issue is that there are those who feel Alien 3 needs to jump to the same beat as the first two movies... it doesn't 😅 "Alien and Aliens did it this way, so Alien 3 would be better if it did too". I don't feel it does. (But again, I acknowledge that I'm very biased on this front BECAUSE I'm one of the few who feel Alien 3 is perfect as is- for the record, I'd still be very interested in seeing your edit, to see how it plays out, despite my jesting) 😊
She knows there's an Alien. We know there's an Alien. It's an Alien movie. It's about finding out where it is, how it got there, what state it's in.
Just like Aliens - we know the colonists found Aliens even without the deleted scene. But we don't know exactly what the marines will find until they get there.
Take out the Alien and you get that same sense of building dread you got the first two movies.
"There was one survivor, two dead and a droid that was hopelessly smashed beyond repair...the survivor...is a Belgian sleuth".
https://i.imgur.com/IrcrV70.jpg
"No no, mon ami - whilst it is true zat only Mr. Gollic could 'ave been alone in ze infirmary long enough to have bitten through ze head of the good Mr Clemens, one of you, in this very room spat ze acid at Mr Murphy to commit the murdeurr most cruel.."
Well, we're already clued in that they're in a hurry to get to her.
See, I'm a sucker for mystery, and I love seeing events unfold as we go along. Like this is the version I would very much want to see, even though I know an Alien is coming.
I get the general idea, I'm just struggling to wrap my bonce around how it would play out.
It'd certainly be a good deal shorter cutting the burster and the deaths of Murphy, Boggs and Rains.
As for it being a murder mystery- the first half kinda is. Except we already know whodunnit, so it's just murders I guess.
But how did it get there? What's it doing?
Ripley sees the acid and we all think facehugger. She has the autopsy done
- nothing. Now what?
You have no idea what's going on. You've got a hint of an Alien, but no clue as to where it might be or what it's doing or what stage it's in.
Actually stop and think about it. Ignore what you know of the film.
Ripley is found on the beach. Why? There's acid in the cryotube, but Newt isn't infected.
What's up? Acid doesn't say anything other than an Alien is here, the same as the colonist's lack of communication says Aliens are at the colony. We're putting the pieces together as we go.
To put it another way:
Alien: what's the signal? What's this ship? What are these things? Oh shit, an Alien.
Aliens: the colony has gone quiet. Oh shoot, acid blood. Shit, face huggers. The colonists are all in one area - oh shit, Aliens.
Alien 3: oh there's an egg and a hugger on the ship, and a fire. Oh, there's a hugger with the dog. It gives birth.
No mystery, no unravelling of the plot, just everything in your face straight up.
We know there will be Aliens. Discovering them is part of the fun - but there's no discovery in Alien 3. It's just there, immediately, while Ripley plays catch up.
But I do know. I don't know where the colonists are til Hudson finds them, I don't know that an Alien is about to fly out of someone's chest. I absolutely 100% know that an Alien is about to show up.
Girl just went through two massive traumas involving Acid Blood and when she finds Acid stains thinks it "might" be an Alien. Id be so fast outta there.
What you're describing works if it's Predators , where I actually do have to find out WTF is going on with them,but not for Alien 3. It would have to be a completely different character for that to work for me *shrugs
Seems like a fix for a problem that doesn't exist with the movie.
If you don't see the opening, how do you know why the EEV crashed,
If you don't see the hugger, how do you know where the acid on Newt's tube comes from?
If you didn't see the facehugger, why did the ox die?
If you don't see the Alien spit acid in Murphy's face, how do you know where the acid mark came from the tunnels?
Everything you're saying is reinforcing the problem; these questions are boring because we know precisely their cause as we watch the film. Remove the Alien, and they're all little mysteries that build a dread towards the inevitable reveal.
Like this?
The queen no longer had an egg sac, but it could also be that there was something like a residue of semen on her abdomen, which dripped under the floor bars during the fight with Ripley and developed into an egg there.
Otherwise this scene wouldn't make any sense to me.
Where the other facehugger comes from is a little more difficult to explain.
It could be that he was on the dropship and got to the Sulaco and the Eev.
If you hadn't shown an egg, everything would have been a little easier and you would have assumed that the huggers had gotten on board via the dropship like the queen.
On the other hand, the egg down there looked creepy and the way the facehugger stretches to yawn also
Clues that we already know the answer to anyway in detail, there is no puzzle. In Alien we don't know anything which makes it crazy , In Aliens we know things, but we don't know where the colonists are, we don't know "what's laying these eggs" so we are going from A to B there.
I don't know what the surprise is about in A3 following Ripley on a journey to find out exactly what we know is going to happen.
The surprise in A3 is that she has the Alien inside her which isn't hinted at really.
I get what you guys are saying, I just don't agree (for me) it makes the slightest bit difference.
Seeing the Dog/cycle of the Alien is one of the best bits
I think what you guys are saying only works if it's not Ripley, but it is Ripley and we know that she knows some bad shit is about to go down!
how do we know beforehand that the company knows everything?
tag:
not to be taken seriously. and off topic. lol
Rather than watching someone work out a puzzle you already solved, you solve it with them. It gets you more invested in the story.
It's an Alien movie. We know there's an Alien. It's about watching the clues unravel, piecing it together the way Ripley does and actually experiencing that journey with her.
That's what makes Aliens so compelling as a sequel, and one of the reasons cutting the Hadley's Hope scene works quite well. It's called Aliens. There are obviously Aliens. But feeling Ripley's unease, watching the marines slowly discover the signs, all leading up to the facehuggers in the labs, takes us on the journey the characters are on.
Except we would be, if we took the Alien out.
The EEV crashes -- why? We see acid in there. Is Newt harbouring an Alien? No. We see an injured dog, or a dead ox -- what happened? Murphy explodes in a tunnel, with more acid damage -- did he find an Alien? Ripley wants to talk to Bishop, what will she discover when she does? It was with us all the way, there was a fire in the subflooring. So there is an Alien -- but where? Golic returns from the tunnels covered in blood, raving about a dragon that feeds on minds.
And then it comes out of the ceiling and kills Clemens, and now everybody is on the same page, and we can start dealing with the thing.
Having the Alien running around in between is what makes those beats flat and lacking intrigue and mystery. We only think it's boring because, the way it's presented in the film, it is. But it doesn't have to be.
I just don't get why it would give it anymore momentum over just cutting down the runtime. In Alien we don't know what it is, in Aliens Cameron obviously introduced the Queen, but here I don't see how finding out about the Alien later with Ripley makes any more interesting, it's not a murder mystery.
I'm thinking it probably makes the movie worse if anything. We are not travelling anywhere (space), we are not watching any weird events unfold (Derelict space ship), we just hanging about with Bald guys for an Alien to pop out after 45 minutes.
Thumbs down from me.
When Ripley searches out Bishop, she's searching for answers we already have. It's a box-checking exercise on the path to Ripley playing catchup. But if we didn't know everything ahead of time, we'd be much more invested in her finding him and getting those answers -- because we need those answers just as much as she does. Her discovering those answers is us discovering those answers.
It might not make the overall film better, but it would give more momentum to the first half.
I think the set up in A3 is perfect personally, it only starts to go down hill once Andrews pops it (which TBH is a crappy scene).
Weirdly , in all 3 of the Alien films (rez doesn't exist) , I think I like and have watched the first half's more than the second half's. Those are all the best bits of the films for me.
I'm glad I sat through the whole video. Interesting points that I haven't heard brought up.
There's a wooden planet, where bizarre rituals involving the Alien take place, inhabited by a theocratic society of virgin albino giants, who have lost the ability to reproduce by sexual means. There are abandoned biomechanical ships orbiting the planet. They don't know how to use them though, coz they didn't make them.
https://s6.gifyu.com/images/S6cA3.gif
Ripley meets the Space Jockeys, discovers the origins of Aliens, Space Jockeys aren't the creators after all, etc etc, Earth gets taken over, etc.
Meanwhile in an alternate universe;
AvPGalaxy Thread topic - 'How did the alien get inside Ripley?' page 4957; "it was Bishop!!" "No no, she was STUNG by the queen in the power loader fight" 🤣
We all know there are going to be Aliens in Aliens, but the theatrical cut works perfectly fine revealing the things to the audience and characters simultaneously.
Scrubbing the Alien before Ripley sees it puts us in her shoes and lets things like talking to Bishop hold actual weight rather than be "no shit, we knew that half an hour ago".
We know an Alien's coming in all the films but the fun's in playing along with the charade.
It's also chiefly why I think the prequels don't work as well as they should do, we do not respect the characters, their own internal logic, we think we could do better, so it is just not as fun to play along with them.
I'm with you regarding not removing scenes; It's no mystery to the audience that there's an Alien (the movie's title was a dead giveaway 😂 lol) but joking aside- the audience knew exactly what had went down at Hadley's Hope in Aliens before the cast did, it didn't hurt that movie either. From Ripley's point of view in Alien 3, she had worries/suspicions, but wasn't sure until Bishop confirmed it... as we saw. To me, if we'd had the revelation of Ripley being impregnated but no benefit of the opening sequence, that'd be a whole brand new can of worms beyond "how did the egg get on the Sulaco".
The mystery of 'Alien' (1979) was a one-time-use kinda deal, you cant repeat it without radically changing the monster - and if you do try and do that, look no further than the threads here to see how it'd be received. Prometheus kept you guessing (even after the credits rolled) and everyone wanted a detailed explanation of *exactly* how the pathogen worked and was unsatisfied with it not being more black-and-white, despite the theme of the movie being a play on humans stealing fire from the gods (playing with something we aren't *meant* to understand) we got the same chaotic confusion the characters did. It didn't seem to help in altering opinions 😅
I wish we saw more of the outside Planet with perhaps a secondary Prison/Facility ( would only need to be a few hundred meters away on the other side of the beach etc). It would give us a break in the scenery and also another plot thread (Maybe there's different prisoners in the other cell, maybe the Alien wipes all of them out first? etc etc)
One other thing, being a Brit (Scot), I never got the "who are these guys" thing since we knew who all the actors were in the UK ( well the majority of them). I totally get that point though.
Would I be right in assuming you aren't a fan of 'Aliens: Special Edition'? 😅
And that's using the AC.