Alec Gillis & Tom Woodruff Alien Day 2021 Interview

Adam: Yeah, that StudioADI shop, I picked up a couple of those myself. I got that swimming Alien sculpture as well as the Alien 3 logo embryo piece. I was curious though. I know your shop’s been down for a little bit are you guys planning on bringing that back?

Alec: Not right now. The license has lapsed but the thing is that people are used to prices of collectibles that come from places like China. The hourly rate in China is very low so you have to be in the frame of mind to say that “Well this is not a collectible. It’s an art piece and it’s coming from the artists who actually made it for the film and that’s why it’s three to four times more expensive than what you can get through CoolProps or Sideshow”. Both are valid right. I feel bad that that we can’t sell a big Queen Alien head quarter scale.

I feel bad we can’t sell that for $1200. There are options for people who want that even though they can’t get the exact same thing that we are creating. They could get it from another source but I don’t think that we’ll bring it back because it is very costly for us to do those things. They sold all right but then you’re into all the shipping stuff. Then gets damaged in shipping and then you’re kind of becoming Amazon as opposed to that studio but it was fun. It was a nice way to connect with fans and we’re grateful for the people who invested in them. In a way, it makes them even more special.

Adam: If I remember my timelines rightly, as ADI you were attached to Alien 3 from a relatively early stage when Vincent Ward was still on the project. Were you actively designing anything with Vincent?

Tom: No, he had his art department and they were churning out general thematic things like the planet itself. That was built out of wood and I think there were some costume stuff that usually comes out pretty early in pre-production in as much to get the studio excited to say “Oh yeah I see this movie happening. Let’s go ahead and green light it”. But as far as the creature stuff, I don’t think we got into any of that at all. I remember the first… this was back when Alec and I would do our own drawings.

This was a whole different world where we could sit down and do sketches that presented the concept of what was going to be different about the Alien or any of the effects that are in it but they didn’t have to be photorealistic. This was before Photoshop. It was before any kind of digital manipulation. It was just pencil on paper. I remember being at the shop, having a phone conference call with the producers with Gordon Carroll. Alec and I and then he said “Well I think we’re gonna go forward but we’re going to go with a different director”.

I went home that night and sat down. I just drew a picture of what Bishop looks like which is basically how he was left from the last movie. Now he’s wrapped up in plastic and honestly there was nothing special about it other than to say “Okay yeah here’s an image of what is going to be a character in the film”. So, that’s changed quite a bit but yeah, a long way of saying, no none of that happened. We didn’t really get involved until after Fincher was on.

Aaron: So, the appearance of the eggs and the Facehugger in the opening credits of Alien 3 has always been a point of conversation when it comes to the fans. Now if I remember correctly, the addition of the egg was actually a later thing following test screenings and we only see the one egg on screen but the call sheets actually mentioned two. Was that just an extra in case of accidents or do you recall if it was intended that we see the multiple eggs on screen to account for the multiple embryos.

Alec: Yeah, I think we made two or three but I felt like when we dressed those, we had a closed one and an open one but Alien 3 has got so many versions of the film that I mix them up and then you get your memory of what you shot and that might not be what’s in the film either so I’d defer to you but yeah maybe it was just the one. So, that you could just say it was a single Facehugger that carried the embryo.

Adam: One of the things we’re curious about are the Facehuggers in Alien 3, it was originally supposed to be a brand new Facehugger, the Super Facehugger. We’ve seen photos of it and some footage the of it made it into the assembly cut of the film but how far did you go into that effect. Did you have a mechanical version? Did you know if there was more footage of it shot that ended up in the assembly cut?

Alec: The only shot we did… we made a dead prop version basically. The only shot of it is a guy standing next to the dead ox saying “What’s this?” And he’s just holding the thing. It’s in kind of a wide shot and I think that’s in a director’s cut. But we never made mechanical versions of it because we did make a mechanical Facehugger for the revised opening that you mentioned. Tom Stephen Orrington mechanized that. It was a nice little finger mechanism so we were going to use a traditional Facehugger at some point, weren’t we?

We always had the cracked cryotube with dead Newt in it right. Then we had the cryotube that’s in the film with the fingers reaching out coming towards it like girl sleeping, Facehugger creeping but there were two Facehuggers right because Sigourney carries it. It’s a mislead because you think it’s going for Newt but it actually implants in Sigourney and it’s the embryo of the Queen. There must have been a need for a traditional Facehugger as well as the Queen Super Facehugger.

Adam: When talking about Alien 3, Michael Biehn has mentioned that he heard about a puppet that depicted him being chestbursted. I know that was depicted in one of the rewrites but I’ve never actually seen mention of the puppet. Did you get as far as actually building that?

Tom: Yeah, it wasn’t a puppet in that it didn’t move. It was just a replica of his cryo chamber is broken open and a big high beam has come down basically and just destroyed his head. His hands are kind of up like this and it’s just all this horrible meat and that was one of the few drawings that I did in terms of to be able to show to Fincher “Look this what we think happens to Michael Biehn”. He says “Sure great” and then it was all sculpted as a full on polyfoam replica. But for me it went back to when I was early years in college, I was working part-time as a stringer for the local news channel. The guy that had been doing it before handed over a 16mm camera and he said “Here. You film.” and I remember one morning I got a call that there had been a train accident.

Two trains had collided about 45 minutes away and it was snowing. It was wintery and I remember drying out just to get a couple of shots for the news and what I didn’t shoot was the first time I had ever seen a dead body. That’s basically what from the neck up what this guy had looked like and I sort of conjured that up again in my mind while it was being designed and sculpted. So, it actually exists but again now is there a version out there where it’s in the film?

Alec: He did have objections to them using his likeness. We did get the word from production. We got to show hicks dead in the cryo chamber but we cannot see his face. They had the rights to use a photograph I believe and then Tom raised his hand said “Hey you guys, I used to be a stringer”. Tom was very excited about that but yeah like okay, I don’t know whether it’s ethical or legal for you to use Michael Biehn’s likeness but that was the solution and I think Tom was the one that suggested it.

I think it’s interesting the question as you put it. Was there a puppet Michael Biehn? I think that’s kind of interesting how these communication things go because he probably read a script or somebody got him a script or whatever and maybe there was something but people always use the term puppet. Like well no it’s not a puppet, it’s a dead body. Is it a replica of you or is it… so there’s all like nuances that get missed when people are really upset that the directors decided to kill beloved characters from the previous film.

Adam: On the 26th January 1991 draft of Alien 3, there was a scene in which a foetal Queen crawled out of Newt’s mouth and then into Ripley’s mouth on the E.E.V.. It ended up being depicted in the comic adaptation but there isn’t any version in the film. Did you ever build a foetal Queen and were these scenes ever shot?

Tom: I remember there was talk of seeing it come out of her mouth but for us, it never went beyond the talking stage.

Alec: We complained about that actually because we were going like “What the hell is a Facehugger crawling in and out of people’s mouths for? Is this just a writer who is disinterested in or are we trying to say something different about the life cycle of the creature that a Facehugger crawls in and out of your mouth?” I don’t know but the foetal Queen embryo as it is in the film is in the scan sequence.

Aaron: So, on the topic of the foetal Queen and the Queen Chestburster and one of the really fun things about this hobby is researching for articles and videos and interviews and coming across these nuggets that don’t really get spoken about that often.

So, last year I did a piece on the deleted hive sequence from Alien 3 and I came across some really interesting bits that I hadn’t heard about before and one that really surprised me Alec was you saying that the addition of the Queen Chestburster was something that sort of came a bit late to you and you had to quickly then add a crest to the existing Chestburster designs and models that you already had. Was that in reference more to the reshot sequence at the end where it bursts out of out of Ripley as she’s falling or was that about the one in the scan in in the chest cavity?

Alec: It sounds a little like that I was lying. I don’t know what I was referring to in that particular article but maybe the addition of the Chestburster coming out of Sigourney was a later… it was definitely shot in Los Angeles. So, maybe the thing when she’s in mid-fall and comes out and she grabs it, we were testing that though in London weren’t we Tom? So, no I take that back, it was just stuff that didn’t get shot, I guess. So, we always knew then that the Chestburster would come out and she would hold it.

I don’t think that it was particularly last-minute desperation or me heroically adding a crown to something else because they were sculptures that were dedicated sculptures to do those things. I did sculpt the Queen Chestburster that she holds onto and I don’t know. It does feel like you have to understand that when the production shut down, we ended up gaining a whole bunch of time on the fold. It shut down and rewriting even before principle happened but we weren’t able to really work on a lot of the Alien stuff. We were able to work on dead bodies and put fingerprints on dead hands and things that would never show. So, it might have felt like some of the creature stuff was comparatively rushed.

Aaron: Have you ever had any Alien film where it hasn’t been sort of like problematic or rushed or anything? I mean AvP was really short for you and then Resurrection was even shorter. Alien 3‘s a historical train wreck. I mean how did like Resurrection or the or The Predator go in terms of the creature work? Were they actually not a race to the finish line kind of thing for you?

Tom: This the big difference between working on a studio movie and working on a small independent movie and the studio movie is going to require so many pre-production hoops. I’m not being sarcastic. So, many pre-production hoops that you have to get through and accomplish in their order which doesn’t really take into account that we have to get all… you’re going to have to start shooting on this day and especially now with CG movies, we’re going to finish shooting on this date. Then we’re going to do all the post-production but we have to build everything back here. Back here on the big studio movies, well they haven’t really released any cash yet and our build schedule just gets shorter and shorter on all of them.

I don’t think there is such a thing as a comfortable build schedule. At least we haven’t had them because to me, well surprise maybe the studio is right. If it’s a comfortable build schedule then it’s a lazy build schedule but you just hit the ground running and you never stop until you’re done shooting.

Aaron: Didn’t you have a bone to pick with some of the reporters anyway because they did run with stuff that got you in trouble with like Giger?

(Editor’s Note: See this article on Alien Explorations for a full run-down of the trouble between Giger and the production of Alien 3).

Alec: Oh, that was just the one. Would that have been Cinemafantastique. I can’t remember the name of the article.

Tom:  The Cinemafantastique one was after Aliens. We came back and Rick on our crew answered a bunch of questions that got published before the movie came out and Gale Anne Hurd was really upset.

Alec: Gail Hurd was saying don’t talk to Cinemafantastique and then I think it might have been them on Alien 3 when that came out, we did an article and it was a hatchet job, right. Remember that, Tom? We would say something like “Yeah Giger was in Zurich. He didn’t want to come to London and he was submitting designs to David Fincher. Meanwhile Fincher was asking that we also do designs based on H.R. Giger’s work and it was a nice coincidence and not a big surprise but the work that Giger was submitting was coincidentally very similar to what we were doing because of course it’s based on Giger’s work anyway right, from his Necronomicon”.

So, what that article said was Woodruff and Gillis claim that it’s a coincidence that their Alien looks like Giger’s. I think that article kind of fomented some negativity in Giger’s mind because Giger was very initially very complementary of everything that we were doing even when the film came out… we didn’t talk to him that much but when the film came out, he complimented us about how great the Alien looked and then after some time went on, he really soured on us which was too bad.

We reached out to him and tried to communicate. We actually had worked to protect his credit because we noticed that the credits were going to say “Alien designed by Woodruff and Gillis”. We’re like “No that’s not the case. We are in charge of the Alien effects” and we wanted to make sure that Giger was protected there. By this time, he was already soured on us.

Tom: There was another similar situation which might have been in Cinemafantastique where we were talking about how we sculpted the Alien to look like what was in Giger’s Necronomicon book and particularly when it came to painting it, we said “Let’s paint it. Let’s use this palette. All these soft warm brown colors” and I think in the interview it was “Yeah we wanted to make our Alien, the Alien on screen, look more like Giger’s original work than what he did on the first movie because there are quite a few subtle differences” and somehow that got re-translated as “Woodruff and Gillis wanted to make something better than what Giger did”. That’s what they gleaned.

Alec: Basically, there was a sort of a movement for a while there that was “Woodruff and Gillis are arrogant upstarts who think they’re better than Giger” and we would see that in early chat rooms when the internet was taking off and it came a lot from England I must say. Here’s the article. The writer’s name is Tim Prokop and as I recall the article itself wasn’t that bad. It was the little headlines that they pulled out that made you think that we were… if you didn’t really read the article, you wouldn’t really think but yeah, I was gonna do a post about this and I just decided why?

We have such tremendous respect for Giger and what we always thought of our role in this was as caretakers of his design. We were disappointed on Aliens that Cameron didn’t bring Giger in and as it turned out, Cameron was fully capable between him and Stan. They were fully capable of doing phenomenal and respectful Alien work but it was very different. Those suits looked very different but that’s the cool thing about the xenomorph is that it does change. So, there’s room for that kind of thing but yeah so, we were a little saddened when it went sour with our relationship with Giger but what can you do? I think part of it is that Giger established the language.

He was the pioneer. He was the genius and the revolutionary fine artist right and we are creature designers and creature builders, commercial artists for motion pictures. So we are probably come out of in a different way but then a little less of a sexy way perhaps than a lot of fans want it to be. Like Giger really literally was the dark genius right and we are not that personality type so we probably, to some people at that time, particularly having created a new company, people didn’t really know who we were and thought we were imposters.