Alec Gillis & Tom Woodruff Alien Day 2021 Interview

Adam: Out of curiosity though, did you guys ever eventually make it out to the museum in Gruyères?

Tom: I never did no. When were in England on Alien 3, we got a phone call. There were two phone calls that came in from Giger. One early on inviting us to go to his studio in Zurich and see the model that he’d done – a wet clay sculpture and it was too big for him to get out of his basement, out of his workshop and he wasn’t really prepared to mold it. So, he invited us to come over and then Fox over in London said nope, you can’t go over there, you can’t go see it and have any time with Giger.

Alec: They did didn’t want to pay for it basically.

Tom:  Is it the traveling? I thought it was because they just didn’t want to have any kind of a connection if Giger was going to start saying that we were ripping him off.

Alec: Well, I think what we were asking them to send us and that we would mold it there. We would come back with a mold and they said “Like well what are you going to do with it? Like is it because it is the design the director really wants? It’s in the ballpark but we have all the pictures of it we need. Can you make a suit out of that thing?” And we’re like “No it’s kind of like a [inaudible] sculpture”. But we thought it’s Giger and we’re being invited. Maybe we should do this. But I think to your point Tom, I think there may have been some behind the scenes stuff where there was already a distancing that was happening between Fox and Giger that we were unaware of.

Tom: Then there was one day where we’re shooting on the stages at Pinewood and I had to run back to our workshop at Pinewood Studios and grab something and I just remember, just as I was running into the studio, the phone was ringing. I picked it up and it was Giger on the phone and he was asking me how production was going. “Oh, it’s going well, thank you”. He said “Let me ask you a question”. He wanted to know if we knew where his check was and I said I don’t know. You really need to talk to production and I gave him the production number for the unit production manager and the name and number and all of that stuff. Obviously, he was not being well treated through whose fault I don’t know but it’s just a really weird call to field.

Alec: I think Giger had expectations… he had not at that point worked on a lot of movies but he did work on Alien and he had a close relationship with Ridley Scott. I think that’s just what his assumption was that’s how it works right but he also was not willing, from what we heard, he was not willing to come to London to work in the shop. So, he wanted to stay home in his studio and do everything that he could do but not come and be part of the actual production. I’m guessing here but that may have then put the studio in a position of saying well like “What are we paying for? We have a team here that can create all this stuff”.

So, you’re a production designer, you’re sending us things that we will decide whether we like them or not and that’s not at all how it was with Ridley Scott. It’s not how like us, as fans, would necessarily have viewed Giger but I think then he sort of started seeing us as part of this problem or maybe even that I believe there’s a quote in some magazine where he said I believe that Mr’s Woodruff and Gillis have put a worm in the director’s ear and simply was not the case. We were there to support and as Tom said we used his Necronomicon book as our reference so the thing is just infused with Giger’s look.

It’s not a departure. It’s his. It wouldn’t be what it is without his body of work. We have tremendous respect for him as an artist and I can certainly understand how a fine artist would be driven mad by the decisions of the studio. Just the joys of the miscommunication and that the nightmare that was Alien 3. Here’s another thing though from our point of view it wasn’t that bad. We always like chuckle because there’s such a big hype made about what a disastrous production it was.

Adam: We fans love to debate and this one debate I’m curious to hear your thoughts on. If you knew of any intention from the actual production was Bishop II an advanced android or was he actually human?

Tom: My recollection was that he was human. That was the whole point of having him get hit and knocked his ear off to see red blood. It just seemed very clear that they would get that and I know there were… I don’t know how big the comic books were by then at that point but this stuff came up afterwards, kind of kind of looking back into the past knowing “Oh hold on these guys planted this ahead of time. They knew that he was going to be an advanced model and have red blood” and everything like that but no, at the time it was just that he really was the originator of the synthetic and was coming back to try to convince Ripley to give herself up.

Aaron: One of the design elements of Resurrection’s warrior that I think sets it apart a lot from the first three as well, is the way in which head sort of tapers off towards the end rather than the more penile look to it. Given John Pagenet’s fondness of the cockroach, I was wondering if that was a deliberate thing to further evoke the roach?

Alec: That flat kind of like a flat belly of a cockroach. I feel like that touch came from you Tom.

Tom: Well yeah I know there’s certain things… it’s like again the joke that I made in some interview, it’s like “Oh yeah this is now the Alien, this a new model Alien and this year it has cup holders and it was like in an effort to say… as an artist, you don’t want to just blindly repeat what was done before and so we would make changes along the way within the sculpture and they were never subversive in any way. We made an adjustment to a sculpture or added some details or something like that.

We never felt challenged enough to show pictures to the director because once you open that door, you never close it. We know from experience that you suddenly can’t ever get your work done because that becomes a thing where the director wants to… depending on the director wants to control every little button, every little switch and it just eats up an enormous amount of time. So, I think whatever changes came to the head, I think Alec that was ultimately turned over to Jordu and he came up with a look in a maquette that was really cool and that’s what we ended up going with. So, at that point it went to Jordu Schell for the actual design input for what head looked like, particularly in the back.

Alec: Yeah, we did do some versions certainly but that’s how it goes, we throw a lot of ideas out there and then the director gets to pick and choose. So, it could be that Jordu did reference a cockroach. He liked the colors of the cockroach and so it could well be that’s why it appealed to him.

Adam: Even if you guys did have to end up going with the same molds for AvP, I gotta say I really did like that design in black. I thought it looked really good. Another piece of the design though that I was curious about was there’s like a spike or something in between the dorsal tubes and it’s in your book. It’s in your Making of AvP book but I don’t believe the Aliens had them in the film.

Alec: Yeah, it’s the fish bone. Yeah, it gets in the way of head. When you look up, it’s banging into that head so it was sort of a clip-on thing that we could choose to use or not use and mostly I think we didn’t use it at least in AvP right. I don’t think we used it in Resurrection either.

Adam: I think one of the more intriguing visuals from Resurrection was the viper pit. Rather than design and constructing a creature, you were creating a living set for the scene. Was that a particularly challenging effect for you because it was so different to what you normally do?

Tom: I think the challenge was the size of it and making the movements organic. It took a ton of people crawling in under these foam… like we did one sculpture right and we molded one big like an eight foot by eight-foot sculpture and then we turned it and tiled it together. So, we had a huge I think 16 by 16-foot area or maybe it was eight by eight area. I don’t remember the size.

Alec: It was bigger. I feel like it was at least 20 feet and it was longer I believe. It was a giant square.

Tom: We had to have a slot in the opening so that Sigourney could slowly drop down inside of and it’s all covered with slime so it was hard to get… when she had to walk out and get into position, she’s sliding. The people that are taking her out are sliding but the thing that I thought was cool was back in the early 80s, this very famous fashion photographer, Richard Avedon, had done this portrait of Nastassja Kinski lying nude on her side with a boa constrictor wrapped around her to make it to not stark nudity but to make it a sensual thing. I remember thinking that was always a cool look.

So, I asked Sigourney if she’d be interested in it if we had time to do something where we could kind of copy that look but it’s the Alien intertwined with the Ripley. Ripley would be nude and the Alien is just covering things up and she really wanted to go for it and we decided, well on this background, this a place to do it but production wasn’t completely in league with us and Sigourney wanted it so Fox said “Yep, screw your producers that are trying to get a movie made so Sigourney wants us to do it”.

So, Sigourney got a photographer lined up and I got in the suit and we did all of that. I think it was like the next day, Alec and I got called into the producer’s office and this guy, Bill Badalato, a very accomplished producer and he said he was just trying to figure out from somebody why things were going so slow and he’s sitting behind this big desk and he said “Huh I don’t know”. He said “This wacky space woman wants to do a nude photography shot in the middle of trying to make a movie” and I remember sitting there very quiet and thinking “Oh god does he know”.  I pitched it and then I thought “Okay I guess that’s what we’re gonna do next.” I never saw the pictures. I don’t know how it turned out. They never got released so maybe it wasn’t quite the effect that Sigourney was hoping for.

Aaron: Until Requiem and since, the Aliens have always been depicted with the smooth heads. Was it nice to actually get back to that ridged look when working on Requiem’s Alien? Especially since you sculpted that, Tom.

Tom: I sculpted the one for Aliens right and I did Alien 3 but Alien 4 and that was a different guy, different sculpture. I loved the idea that there was a different dome on it right. It was just a sculpted surface that had some interesting relief and ports in it and bone structure.

Alec: The Strause Brothers loved Aliens. That was the first Alien film they saw. They said that they when they were little, they were in a hotel and when their parents would go to dinner, they’d turn on Aliens and watch it over and over and not know that they were getting charged every time and they got busted on it but they loved the head that Tom did in in Aliens so that’s what they wanted for Requiem.