Jorge Saralegui Interview

Jorge Saralegui is a Cuban-American film producer and screenwriter. He began his career pursuing screenwriting and became a script reader for 20th Century Fox, before eventually becoming the executive vice-president of production at 20th Century. While at Fox, he shepherded the development and production of Speed, Independence Day, Broken Arrow and Die Hard With a Vengeance.

In the Alien community, he is best known for overseeing the production of 1997’s Alien Resurrection. We spoke to Jorge for Episode #203 of the AvPGalaxy Podcast about his time on Alien Resurrection. You can watch the interview below or read on for a transcription.

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Adam: Before we start to talk Alien, can you tell our audience about yourself? Who is Jorge Saralegui, and what do you do?

Jorge: Well, I am now doing what I had been doing before my film career. So, the film career is the substance in the sandwich, and now I’m back to being the second piece of bread instead of the first piece of bread. I’m a writer. That’s what I do. Now I write novels and short stories, and that’s what I was doing before I entered the film business.

Adam: How has that shift been for you, just moving back to writing?

Jorge: Fantastic. I mean it’s what I always saw myself as since I was 9 years old… okay with very little reason but nevertheless I did and yeah so, it’s always been my self-image. It helped me in my film career. It hurt me in my film career. It did both. I’m not saying being a writer, I’m saying being who I am, which includes being a writer, but no, it’s great to be starting…

I guess you might say, or resuming a career, and just at this point, writing whatever I want to write without worrying about anything, which is the great thing about writing fiction. There’s a lot less limitations than, like what do you do with Alien 4’s ending when the budget can only accommodate so much.

Aaron: Did coming into the film industry from a prose-writing point of view, did it give you a different insight into the productions, into the creative process than your contemporaries at the studios at the time?

Jorge: Completely. This is probably true for a lot of fields, so you guys probably encounter it in other aspects of your life, but in Hollywood because… okay, how do you judge whether a project is going to work out or not? Well, you don’t really know right. Okay, you can extrapolate. You can do things like make sequels like everyone does now, but this was not so true back then, right?

There were sequels, but the business okay wasn’t built around that. So, you’re basically projecting, and even though people want to quantify it, it’s still a matter of opinion, right. Okay, if you’re wrong a lot, you’re probably going to be out of a job, okay. If the only job you’ve ever had is working in the film business, it feels like you’re on the edge of an abyss the entire time.

So, you become very cautious in terms of where you stick your nose out. How far you stick it out. That sort of thing. Okay, that’s true pretty much at every level of the business. It was even true where I started. I started as a reader, a script reader. That was my job, on which I got… a friend introduced me to a friend who helped me get a job, and I was basically doing it just to supplement my writing. It was a good way to make money on the side.

Aaron: So, for the audience that might not know, so that is you are reading the scripts. You are picking out what you think would be successful or interesting to produce, and then passing it on to the next level up to go here, have a look at this?

Jorge: Yes, I guess the job is called story analyst in some places. But basically, what you’re doing is you’re the first reader of a script submitted to a studio or production company. So, what happens is you write a page and a half synopsis and about a half page to a page of comments recommending it or not, and explaining why you feel the way you do. Okay, then the executive reads that.

If it looks like crap which okay most things aren’t necessarily crap but they’re obviously not something you’re ever going to make. They may not even read the script. They’ll just take your word for it. They’ll go oh a story about this. That’s mediocre, or they may glance at it or whatever, and they may use your thoughts to then parrot them back to the agent that submitted the material in the first place, right.

Okay. So, this is where things were different for me. So, I’m a reader. Most of the readers did the same thing I just told you, which is they would write very cautious middle-of-the-road comments. Most are negative because, of course, they’re negative, right, okay, but very careful and especially when they like something, they really [inaudible]. I didn’t. Now I didn’t for a few reasons.

One, my innate personality. I tend to be confident in my opinions, okay. That just always have been okay. Then we’re talking about, does this story work, and I’m a writer. Now I’m not a screenwriter at this point, but I’m a writer, and I can feel stories. I love stories, so I have a good sense of it. If I’m excited about something, then I can communicate it. I’m also a writer, I can write clearly why I feel the way I feel, and I am a structured enough person that I can talk about it in terms of plot and structure and character and so forth, okay.

So basically, I wrote very clear and definitive coverages. Script coverages. That’s what they’re called. Okay now had I sucked, I would have been out immediately because I’m being too opinionated but they were good and what happened was, I found out later is that there’d be an executive meeting – a round table of the executives and they’re talking about the projects that came in and it got to the point okay where they would say “Well okay I read this and Jorge says… He’s a f**king reader.”

Who cares what a reader says, right but my opinion, the value of my opinion had risen to that level which I heard about from the story editor, and of course, all that did is give me more confidence. That’s how they ended up offering me a job to be a studio executive. I was going to leave and be a story editor someplace else.

Still really just wanted to be a writer and in order to keep me at Fox they offered me a job as a junior executive and I almost didn’t take it because I thought it was going to be too much work and take away from my writing which it did but I somehow thought I could wangle it all and so I almost said no but said yes and took it.

Adam: So, after that, you were at 20th Century Fox for a number of years as one of their producers.

Jorge: Yes, I was there as a reader and then I was there as a… well, as an executive, okay, not a producer. Okay, as a studio executive.

Adam: So, and let’s go into that real quick, like as a studio executive, what exactly is your role there? You’re just deciding what gets made, what doesn’t get made, essentially?

Jorge: Well, again, I’m gonna try to be concise…. Semi-concise here, okay. As you can imagine, this conversation can go well away from Alien and into just this topic. So basically, the basic system is someone writes a script and they submit it to an agent. Their agent. They try to get an agent or maybe a lawyer, or they happen to have a personal connection to a producer.

Okay. At that point, the agent or the producer or an agent with a producer as a team submits something to a studio, okay. That’s when it arrives at the studio – script. It’s sent down to the story department, which is where readers like me read it, and who put it out. At some point in here, the executive, the vice president, reads it, and if they like it, they then submit it to the group as a whole, headed by a president, and often a chairman is in the room as well, and they decide to buy the script or not.

Okay, so they buy the script in our example here. You now start developing it. Okay, you have a deal with a writer to do one or two more drafts. So, you work on it. As a rule, you get to a place where it’s still not good enough, and you either put it on the shelf or you hire another writer. Often an unfair thing to do. Often, the result of executives not really knowing what to do okay.

Basically, executive saying “Well, I went left, I went left, and that didn’t work, so I’m going to go right.” That sort of thing okay. Eventually, the studio says, “Let’s get serious about making this one. Okay, let’s start packaging it. Okay, packaging is putting together a director, an actor, team.” So that’s where you go, and you usually you find a director first and then with the director, you find actors.

In the meantime, you’re working on a budget, and when you get the budget to a level where the studio is willing to bite off on it, you make the movie, or you pull the plug at the last minute because you just can’t get the budget down low enough.

Adam: Interesting, so it seems like the executives are kind of like a council for the studio, essentially deciding who’s going to make the movie as opposed to producers, which is all like raising money and the logistics of the shoot.

Jorge: Yes, and the producers who really do make them, kind of like executives, are executives there.  I’m trying to think of somebody who’s a huge producer. Say, like Legendary, okay, and made like the Godzilla movies. Right, okay, they have a deal with Warner Bros, but they have enough money that they could make things on their own. So, they can push for things.

They also co-finance, but that’s getting kind of in the weeds, but yes, the producers are basically another… they’re sort of the equivalent of the executive. They have the same role kind of. They were there first because they usually come in with the project okay, and they work with the writer in tandem with the executive in developing it right.

They’re the ones that tend to be on set because, as I’m an executive. I’ve got a bunch of projects right now. So, I’ve got to mainly be in my office working on all my other stuff, on new stuff coming in. Occasionally, I’ll visit the set, but the producer in theory ought to be there every day. Some of them aren’t. Some of them never go okay but that’s the idea.

Adam: Do you remember the first time you saw the film H.R. Giger’s masterpiece?

Jorge: Yes, I do. I was living in San Francisco, where I was a writer, and I saw it at the North Point Theater, okay, when it came out. I went and saw it right then and it scared the shit out of me and I loved it. Loved it. That’s as simple as that. I love the movie, yeah.

Aaron: So, Alien is a franchise that audiences and creatives continually come back to. There may be lulls between projects, but we keep coming back to it. People keep coming back to it, and we’ve had absolute success with Romulus last year in 2024, and there’s a Hulu series on the way this year in 2025 and a sequel to Romulus in development. Alien isn’t going anywhere soon. What do you think it is about the Alien series that makes it so enduring?

Jorge: Well, actually, I would say that the second aspect, which is the less savory one, is the fact that it’s a franchise and these days… this is the unsatisfactory answer that I’m giving you. I’ll give you a better one, okay but it just occurred to me… well first of all it’s a franchise which means a lot more today for some reason than it did 30 years ago and the global audience is bigger and you get enough people to go and you can get away with it.

I mean, I’m constantly stunned by like, they made that. They made another one of that. You know what I mean, but they do okay. So that’s there’s that answer, but the real answer to me is the pure, gleeful evil of the creature. That’s what I think it is, and for that, you go back to the first one, and you go, Giger and Scott together conjured a certain sadism in a nonhuman villain.

That’s really hard to do. If you think about other monsters. If you think about sadism, you might say Dracula does take pleasure in what he does, but then he’s a former human, right, okay, but in terms of like a monster that’s not human, that whatever. How do you conjure that sense of pleasure that it gets in saying I am about to kill you, but I’m savoring it, and I’m letting you feel miserable for a little bit before I do it, that to me is what’s different about the creature, about the xenomorph from anything else.

Aaron: I suppose that’s mostly evident really in Alien in the way Scott paces the scenes with the alien making the kills, and like that whole scene with Brett when we see him for the first time. Just how slow and deliberate Scott shoots it, and the creatures performed.

Jorge: Yes, it’s amazing. I just saw them all again, well, the first four again recently. Fairly recently and I was just amazed at how perfect that movie is.

Aaron: Have you seen the prequels and Romulus?

Jorge: No, I have not because I’m a jerk and I’ve never seen anything since Alien Resurrection.

Aaron: You’ve spoken in the past about when you took that executive job at Fox, and one of the things you were so enthusiastic about pushing forward with was specifically a new Alien film. So, other than the whole effectiveness of Alien as the creature, why did you zone in on Alien, because I think prior you’d pushed Speed and Independence Day, but then you end up with this sequel here.

Jorge: Yes, well, Speed was the first movie I shepherded at Fox and by the time I’d done Independence Day and a couple of others, I was in a place where I could kind of do whatever I wanted to do. Within reason. I wasn’t the head of the studio, but I was sort of like a comet at that particular point. I mean that was my high point in my career, and I’d been a junior executive.

I was going to mention this earlier. When I was first hired an executive, I was put on the Alien 3 project, but I wasn’t in charge of it. My job was literally to watch the rushes, the dailies every day, and then write a log for the president, like speed ahead to take four and then speed ahead to this, so you have to sit there for an hour and do that.

That’s what I did, and so I saw, I mean, all the rushes for that and in staff meetings I heard all the complaining about Fincher and how the movie was going and all that kind of stuff. So, I had that exposure, okay, right at a distance and then Ripley’s dead and as far as the studio is concerned, the project is over, but I loved Alien.

It was as simple as that, okay, and I knew that I had some clout at that particular time, and so I came up with an idea that I thought was promising and asked if I could develop it, and they said yes, but it was simply as a fan. It would be like if you guys are doing it because you want to. I just happen to be in the right place.

Adam: Would you say that studios were kind of more focused on trilogies at the time, like, for example, Star Wars or Jaws, but then there came a point where they wanted to push beyond that and build the franchises a bit more?

Jorge: In this case, I don’t think they were thinking that. It was a little pre that kind of consciousness, that meta consciousness. This was “Yeah, that might work. Try it. We can do one more and see what happens.”

Aaron: So, I know we’ve talked about this previously while I was working on my editorial about the early days of the film, and you’ve just alluded to it there, but for completion’s sake, I just wanted to touch on it again for the podcast so it was all here in one place.

So, when you first started developing Resurrection, you hadn’t originally intended to bring Ripley back. It was going to be Newt that you cloned. So, can you tell our audience about those early days of the production and why that direction?

Jorge: Because Ripley was dead, and the idea of bringing her back didn’t occur to me. Like, I went with the story the way it was. I.e. she jumped in the vat and that’s it, right, okay and then I thought, how could you bring it back? How could you continue from here, and I had the idea of cloning Newt and doing something that, in retrospect, doesn’t make a lot of sense.

But it did to me at the time, and they bought it, which was because of her survival skills in Aliens, they thought she’d be a useful scout for whatever unit they were going to send to find the aliens on the home planet, and that was my idea. So, she is this… and what I liked about a character like her is that, being a clone, she’s an outcast and viewed as subhuman. So, she’d be dealing with those issues while…. So that was my idea. Have her go on an expedition to the home planet.

Aaron: So, you already zoned in on this clone concept straight off the bat. Did Sigourney sort of distance from the franchise factor into… we go Newt rather than Ripley as well.

Jorge: Yeah, I mean no one… well, first of all, I mean no one was really talking about it because it’d be kind of like… okay, I sat around and wrote a little treatment about the whole thing, right. Then I showed it to my boss, the president. He said, “Sounds good, pursue it.” Now I’m back to being on my own again, and then I found Joss Whedon, and then we set all that up and then once we got that going, Sigourney Weaver heard about it, but up until then, we weren’t thinking about her.

So, it wasn’t like a decision not to do it, it never occurred to me. A failure of imagination, given that I’m cloning Newt, and you might say, why didn’t I clone her, but it didn’t even occur to me. I just thought of that story. As a writer, I probably just happened to think of that story, and then I fell in love with the story. Since no one was saying no to it, the story just continued until Sigourney said no.

At that point, I was into this one enough, but it was kind of like, okay, then I initially didn’t want her to be doing it right, but because I felt that the ship had sailed to some degree, or my ship had sailed right, okay. My ship had wind in its sails, but the studio said, well, if she wants to do it, it’d be stupid enough not to put her in it, and I said okay, and that was that.

Adam: While we’re aware of a pitch for an Alien 4 from Stuart Hazeldine around the time Resurrection was starting to be developed, it’s not a period we know a lot about. We’re pretty big on the movie archaeology of unused scripts and pitches around here. So, we were wondering if you became aware of any previous attempts at a fourth film locked away in the Fox vault.

Jorge: I read that question, and the answer is no, I think. Okay, why don’t you stir my memory and tell me a little bit about his pitch?

Aaron: It was called Alien Earthbound. It was kind of a similar thing to what ultimately happened… well, no that that’s a lie to say that. It also featured cloned Ripley, if I remember rightly, in a way, and the idea was that it was set on this space station that was anchored to the Earth with like an orbital elevator lift.

Aliens got loose on the space station, and it was like a race to stop them getting down the lift to Earth, and it involved somehow Ripley’s granddaughter or great-granddaughter. I can’t remember how exactly it worked…

Jorge: No. I guess it’s possible that I saw it, but I have no memory of it at all. I was aware because I was there as a junior executive that there were two Alien 3 scripts, right, which you guys know, right, and they married the two as a result. It has the issues that it has. But no, I don’t… I had this weird sense of like I read something from somebody, so maybe I did because I’m trying to think it there’s something, but it might be Alien versus Predators.

That I met that writer, and I had a vague memory of that, but not really, because it wasn’t… okay, put it this way. If somebody had come to me out of the blue with, say, Stewart’s pitch, I would have been interested because it’s Alien, maybe I can get, maybe push this script through, and that didn’t happen right, and I’m sure that would click in my mind.

Aaron: So, Joss Whedon was… You said in the past that he was the first person you thought of to work with on Resurrection. At the time, he was a really hot writer. I think he made a bit of a name for himself with his work on Toy Story and with you on Speed, if I remember rightly.

What was it like working with him at the time, and how do you feel about the way he’s distanced himself from the film with comments like they filmed it all wrong.

Jorge: I met Joss back when I was… it’s funny when I was a reader, one of the scripts that I had submitted to me was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the movie and I said that they should make it and they ended up making – not because of me directly and then I was the junior executive on Buffy the Vampire Slayer so I saw him a couple of times there and I met Rutger Hauer but then at that point, Joss…

I guess he worked on Toy Story or whatever, but I don’t know where he’d gone. He’d gone somewhere. I just knew that I really liked the dialogue in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That kind of like stylized valley speak struck me as really inventive, so he was always in the back of my mind, and then he asked to meet with me one time and we had lunch and he said that the truth was that he didn’t want to write Toy Story and that kind of stuff.

He wanted to write action movies, and he had an idea for a Die Hard on a bridge called Suspension, and I told him Okay, sounds good, but if I were you, I wouldn’t pitch it because you’re the Toy Story guy. I would write the script. Now, first of all, that’s always my advice anyway because I’m a writer and I’ve written novels.

So, I’m always thinking, why don’t you just f**king write it instead of well, I’m pitching it, and if no one wants it, then I’m not gonna write it. Aren’t you a writer? Like, what do you do all day? Off the Soap Box. I told him to do that, and he did, and he sold it for a ton of money. I mean, never got made, but it established him as one of those… in the ’90s, a lot of action scripts sold for a lot of money. His was one of them.

So he had a name as that okay and then when I was working on Speed and developing it and we’re about to make it and then we had a crisis on the on the script at the very end, I brought in another pair of producers and I recommended… and they asked me who would you recommend as a writer and I thought of Joss because he’d written Suspension and because I liked his humor.

They met with Joss and really liked him and so then he was brought on. Did a tremendous job on Speed and that really made his reputation because that movie was huge and everybody loved it and he got arguably a disproportionate amount of credit for it but regardless he got a lot of credit for it and so he was doing really well and we were definitely friendly at that point having had this experience, this happy experience and so I just asked him “Do you like Alien?” and “I love Alien.” So, then I said, “Do you want to do this?” He goes, “I’d love to do this”, and that was it.

Aaron: What about that distance he’s put between himself and the film after all this time?

Jorge: Yeah, I remember the day he saw it for the first time. We saw it together in a screening room with… I forget who else was in there, probably some executives. It wasn’t a big room, and he was friendly enough and polite to Jean-Pierre afterwards, but then he told me, “I was just putting on an act. I really didn’t like it,” and so forth.

So, it’s his honest opinion. It’s how he it’s how he felt about it. He didn’t like… I mean it’s easy to see how somebody may say “I don’t like the Jeunet approach to anything right. I mean, Jean-Pierre Jeunet is not for everybody. I’ll give you an example. I just saw it again, right and happy to say, I loved it more than I thought I was going to.

One scene that stuck out to me as “Okay, I wouldn’t have done that” is when Dan Hedaya is about to get killed and his eyes get cross-eyed or whatever and like okay, that’s too goofy for me, today. I think that’s what Joss means in spades. That vibe that is there in lesser degrees elsewhere in the movie, which works in well enough for me, I think, really bugged him.

Adam: And the promotion leading up to Alien Resurrection was a little before our time. So, we’re a bit ignorant to it. Whedon made a comment in an interview with Fangoria that one of his drafts was leaked online before the film’s release. Is that true?

Jorge: I don’t remember that at all, but if it was, nobody cared because that would have been 96, the year before it came out right and online… so what? There wasn’t much online. I remember doing a question-and-answer thing on Queen of the Damned when I did that in 2002 and I remember how new that was. I mean, like internet stuff hadn’t caught on that much.

Adam: And Resurrection reportedly went through some trouble settling on a director. Danny Boyle was supposedly attached to the film but dropped due to worries about the level of effects work. Brian Singer, David Cronenberg and Peter Jackson were reportedly talked to.

You said something interesting in an interview with Starburst about directors not wanting to be compared to Ridley Scott or James Cameron. Since Resurrection, we’ve seen very vocal fans like Paul W.S. Anderson and Fede Alvarez in the director’s chair for other Alien films. Do you think you’d face the same difficulty trying to find a director if Resurrection were made today?

Jorge: If it were made today, but it would still be the fourth in the series? I would say yes. Okay, yes, we would have trouble. I was thinking about this earlier. The main thing is you’re you, you’re going to be compared to the two successful ones. You don’t want to be David Fincher, but then David Fincher was a first-time director.

Now you go, “How come we didn’t go with the first time…?” We did kind of, but the original intent was get a bigger name like Cronenberg, and I don’t think we approached Brian Singer, by the way. I don’t think he was… he might have done Usual Suspects by then. I think he probably had, but no, we wouldn’t have thought of that. Brian Singer wouldn’t have been that until after X-Men, kind of, I think, but it was like… yeah, all those people… like David Cronenberg. I mean, now, especially if you look back, of course, David Cronenberg didn’t do it.

He’s gonna do his things only, right, okay, but so that I realize… but say someone like Peter Jackson’s a good example. Like, why not him and I think yeah, I think it’s not wanting to be compared to those people. Now, Danny Boyle’s willing to do it, but Danny Boyle hadn’t… Peter Jackson hadn’t done those either.

What I’m saying is it’s not like okay Peter Jackson… if someone compares you to Ridley Scott and you come out somewhat in the short end at this point in your career, that’s okay because you’re not that big is what I would have said were I speaking so frankly to him right but no that was the response that we were getting that the shadow of the first two and probably the lack of success of the third one.

You’re bucking that as well. Keep that in mind that I hadn’t thought of that. That’s also going to hold somebody back. This is a franchise on the downslide unless they happen to have been somebody who really loved the series. Now, somebody who I proposed and also went on a writer, jumping ahead a little bit, was Guillermo del Toro.

I was very close to him at the time and the studio didn’t want to take the chance. It would have been interesting because it would have been expensive, although it’s expensive with Jean-Pierre but Guillermo doesn’t cut corners, so it would have been expensive, but I think it would have been great and he wanted to do it.

Aaron: Do you remember what got in the way of…?

Jorge: Yeah, just his lack of a track record. It was too big of a gamble, okay. Too big of a gamble given the money. When you compare him, obviously not now, but you compare him then to Jean-Pierre Jeunet, you go well, that’s a pretty oddball thing, absolutely, but he’d made two polished, finished films. Guillermo hadn’t. So, there is that.