Col Price & Matt Savage Interview

For this interview, we’re diving into the behind-the-scenes of 2024’s Alien: Romulus. We interviewed Col Price and Matt Savage for episode #196 of the AvPGalaxy Podcast. These were two of many concept artists who worked on 2024’s Alien: Romulus. Col Price was responsible for designing the Jackson’s Star colony while Matt worked on vehicles and ships. You can watch the interview below or read on for a transcription.

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Aaron: Before we do start talking Romulus though, can you introduce yourselves to our audience. Who are you, what do you do and what did you do on Alien Romulus?

Col: My name is Col Price. I’m a concept artist or sort of and so on Romulus, I was in charge of Jackson’s Star which was the whole thing. The mine, the street stuff, so it was nice to get that.

Matt: I’m Matt Savage. Same as Col, I’m a concept artist and I mainly worked on things like the vehicles, the ships. So, I did the Corbelan and I was lucky enough to do the inside and the outside on that one and a couple of propy bits here and there.

Aaron: Can you tell us a bit about your backgrounds and what led to you working in the film industry?

Col: I think I’m coming up to almost 30 years in the industry now. I started off in the games industry. Spent about 20 years as an art director for Sony, then an art director for EA and then an art director at Evolution Studios. At that point when I was in Evolution Studios, I thought I’ll try and see if I can actually make it as an artist.

Dropped everything and went freelance which was a bit crazy at the time and I’ve been doing that, I think it’s 11 years now. So yeah so, it’s been a pretty cool ride to say the least. I’ve just been very very lucky to get on Romulus to be honest. I just think it was one of those projects that you’re never going to say no. You’re not going to say no to an Alien project.

Aaron: You’ve done other tentpole stuff for Fox as well, haven’t you? You worked on Kingdom of the Apes?

Col: Yeah, I’ve worked on stuff like The Matrix Resurrections, June 2, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Yeah, a bunch of stuff. Yeah, in fact I literally finished Kingdom of the Planet the Apes on a Wednesday and on a Monday started on Romulus. So, it was nice. It was a good year that year.

Adam: Do you find it common for people to go from the gaming space in the world of concept art to the film space?

Col: I think with me it was because I’d go further and further and further up the ladder and you get so disjointed. You get less and less artwork to do and it was killing me. I mean the last proper in-house studio game that I worked on was Drive Club for Sony and I was art director on that. I forced myself to do the concept art with the concept art team and it just got so frustrating and I thought I’ve just got to do this. I’ve got to try and see if I can actually do it and make a living as an artist which is predominately what a lot of us aspire to but you get a lot of people…

I mean talking about people before, the guy that you mentioned before, he’s now looking to try and get into the film industry because I think it’s just a natural progression really. You start off in games. I think a lot of people in games actually wanted to go into film but couldn’t find that avenue. I know when I started off it, it was just ridiculous. We’re talking 1995. I mean, nothing existed in the UK to get into the film industry and probably at that point in time, concept art was so niche.

It was just unheard of to try and get into that but I always wanted to get into visual effects and couldn’t get into visual effects because there was literally non-existent. Landed up going into games and just spending 20 odd years in the games industry and I think a lot of people now, it’s a lot easier for them to jump between those two sorts of disciplines. There’s a lot of guys I know that work on games and film. We don’t see any difference now, so it’s nice that we can do that.

Aaron: Matt what about yourself as well? You’re not shy of notable IPs on your resume.

Matt: I’ve been very lucky. The last 10 years have been really good film wise. I’m slightly different to Col. I went straight into film. I didn’t really do video game stuff. I clawed my way into the film industry. It was the only thing I was really interested in doing and I started as it’s called an Art Department Assistant which is the ground level runner job I guess within the art department is making tea and coffee.

I did that on Batman Begins was my first a proper paid gig and then just moved into concept art pretty quickly and just been very lucky. I’ve had dream projects of kind of being announced around the time I’ve been ready to move up through the ranks. Doctor Who was my first concept job and then I can’t remember.

There was an X-Men movie. I did a bunch of Star Wars movies, Prometheus and The Martian. [Ridley Scott] is a huge hero of mine, so I’ve been lucky enough to be in the same room as him a few times there.

Adam: Can you both remember the first time you ever encountered H.R. Giger’s nightmare fuel? Was it through one of the films or through a piece of ancillary material?

Col: I remember that because I think I was around about 13/14 when Alien came out and I had that huge poster and it had that really amazing shot of space jockey and the crew next to it. I mean back in that day and I’m going to sound ancient because I am ancient but we had no internet. Even on the TV, you never got trailers for the film unless it was after nine o’clock so when you saw this image, it was like “Oh my God, what is that?” and that old analogy of you’ve never seen anything like this before.

Well, that was what it was like back in that era. It was a bit like when Star Wars came out. No one had ever seen anything like that before and the same with Alien. When Alien came out it, it was that image. That one image and I was always absolutely obsessed and fascinated by that. What really got me into the franchise wasn’t so much Alien, it was Aliens because I saw that on the big screen when it first came out and that was amazing.

I mean I’d already seen Alien on VHS by the time Aliens had come out but Cameron’s Aliens absolutely blew me away. I mean seeing that on a big screen and not knowing anything about it whereas today you know everything before you go into the cinema. What the film’s going to be like but not only seeing trailers that were in the cinema. So, seeing those films like that for the first time, just going in completely cold, just amazing but like I say that definitely one image because I always remember that poster.

It was the egg the Alan Dean Foster book cover one with the egg on the front and all the pictures of the crew. I mean even the Chestburster scene. That wasn’t allowed to come out by the press. It was talked about in the press and obviously people were coming out the cinema going “Oh my God, that’s horrific” but I never saw that until it was on VHS. I wish I’d have been able to see that first one on the big screen though but Aliens was immense. Watching that was so cool. Still a cool film today.

Matt: Well, I missed the first one. I was born in ‘79 so I’m obviously didn’t see that one in the cinema but by the early 90s, there were lots of xenomorph things popping up in things like The Simpsons and Tiny Toons. So, I was kind of aware of this. But I saw a trailer for a Ridley Scott documentary in about 92 or 93 when I was 12, 13 and it was a loaf of bread because of his Hovis commercials and then a Chestburster came out of the loaf of bread. That was the trailer for this this Ridley Scott documentary.

So, I taped that documentary that evening and it had Blade Runner and that just opened my eyes to slightly more adult science fiction having been raised on kind of the fairy tale Star Wars and things like that. I was kind of searching out more adult and when I was 12, Alien looked a bit like Star Wars but it looked better and darker and more interesting. I think my dad must have seen me watching the documentary because he bought me the widescreen Alien VHS that week, completely unprompted. It just became an obsession as I moved through the films.

I was obsessed with Aliens afterwards. Alien is now my favorite movie but when I was 15, Aliens was just everything. I’ve ruined that movie forever because I just watched it so many times. I know it in and out and there’s nothing new there for me. So, I have to rest it for a year or two to watch it again. The design, the story and it never ends. Like it goes on. They go back to the atmosphere processor. They go back to the Sulaco. There’s just always like a third act, a fourth act. I just couldn’t get enough when I was a kid.

Col: Yeah, absolutely immense. Seeing that with your mates and yeah, we were all 15 and absolutely hyper and then watching that was just like… within a couple of weeks I think we’d seen it a couple of times and everyone knew the words and Bill Paxton was our hero and it was yeah just such a really good film. In fact, I watched it a few weeks ago and I hadn’t seen it since working on the film and every time it surprises me. Every time you watch it. I mean both of them. Just how good these films are that they’ve lasted that long.

I can’t watch the end of Alien anymore because it’s too strobey which is just bizarre. I just cannot watch it. So, I have to use my imagination of what I remember in the past of what happens. Switch it off right that’s it. Flashy lights are on but the other one, the Cameron one. Oh my God. It’s got one of those things that you think it’s going to end and then it doesn’t and then you think it’s going to end and then it doesn’t and it’s just a joy to watch. It’s just incredible. Really is.

Adam: Alien is a franchise that has been around since 1979 and as we’ve seen with Alien Romulus in 2024 is still capable of capturing success, both critically and with audiences. What do you think it is about the Alien franchise that helps it continue to endure after so many decades of stories and iterations?

Matt: I don’t know because obviously when I was a kid, I was obsessed with the technology particularly in Aliens, the Power Loader, the APC, the dropship. I was obsessed with sort of the realistic tech in that universe but I wonder whether Aliens transcends that and talks to a broader audience because of the political, and not to get political, but the class system. Even with Brett and Parker like we’ve all had jobs where we’re moaning about our boss and the company and Fede’s kind of brought that right up to date now with his gang of kids being trapped within a company.

I wonder whether that speaks to people without them even knowing that’s why they like those aspects. So yeah, I don’t know. I think it transcends normal sci-fi because of the class system that’s just running through most of the movies. I mean it’s definitely very an Alien, Aliens to some degree, Alien 3 definitely has. The Have and the Have Nots. So no I think it talks to you on a slightly deeper level. I definitely wasn’t conscious of that as a kid but it’s kind of the thing that resonates the most now that Col and I are working for Disney, we’re often complaining about the company.

Aaron: Matt, Romulus wasn’t your first foray into the Alien universe. Like you mentioned you’d previously worked on Prometheus and you worked on the British-based Alien Containment. Can you tell us a little about those experiences and your responsibilities on those productions?

Matt: I mentioned I clawed my way into the film industry. I clawed my way into Prometheus because I was working at Pinewood on an X-Men movie and it was Fox, so we kind of got the word that Untitled Alien Prequel was incoming. I was quite late to that party. They already had that amazing team. The Ben Proctors and Steve Messing and people like that in America so they were pretty much done in the art department.

So, I went and found Janty Yates the costume designer and I’d just been doing costumes on X-Men First Class so I literally went like this is what I did today, can I have a job and purely by chance she said “Oh we haven’t done anything on the space suits yet.” I wasn’t as involved as I was on Romulus but I had probably a couple of months at Pinewood in the snow with Janty. I originally did a suit that… they ran out with money to do… when they eject from the Prometheus at the end of the movie and they go in those pods, they were going to sort of vacuum form on an emergency space suit which we designed.

It was a like a 15-minute life support space suit skin type small space helmet. We did that and we got into Ridley’s good books he was happy and then they ran out of money for that sort of bonus space suit. So, we worked on the… like a blue neoprene sort wet suit with the orange piping but yeah that I was thrilled. I mean I wear my nerd credentials on my sleeve and Janty knew I was a big Ridley fan. So, she very kindly let me sit in on the meetings and meet with him, show him sketches and the short film I did.

I can’t remember the director’s name which is really poor form [Editor’s note: Chris Reading] but he happened to email me as I finished the job and he took a punt and said “We’ve got no money but can you design us a spaceship?” and I happened to have a couple of days free. I was like yeah. He dangled that Alien carrot in front of my nose.