Peter Briggs Interview

Aaron: Well, it’s very flexible I think in terms of what you can do with it, especially with things like the DNA reflex and stuff like that which I think must be a huge benefit for writers as well in making things like that not seem too far left field.

Peter Briggs: If you sort of are going to factor in Prometheus and the black goo, it becomes even more off the wall. I mean where do you stop. Strangely enough the black goo. I’ve been working with Ivor Powell who was executive producer of Alien and has been a friend of mine for like 10 years. Ivor was a producer on the thing I’d been working on with Gary Kurtz until unfortunately Gary’s death a couple of years ago called Panzer 88 which is World War 2. It was a supernatural film.

Now the slant is changing. It’s our World War 2 science fiction film but I’ve been working with Ivor over this time. Ivor has just written a script with a guy which has been made as a film and it’s been sitting on a shelf. The film’s called BIOS. Sapochnik and Spielberg have just produced it. Tom Hanks is starring in it and they’re just waiting for COVID to be over.

I think actually they just sold it to Apple a few weeks ago. I hope that people on the press junket of BIOS talk to Ivor about the script he wrote which was a direct sequel to Alien right after Alien and I’ve read it and it’s an interesting read because it deals with a primordial black goo. The script is called Universal Matter and Ivor told me that he’d given it to James Cameron before Cameron came on Aliens and deals with a mercenary team who go into the pyramid. It’s an interesting read. I think it’s a missing factor link that in the story that people should talk about.

Aaron: So Alien vs Predator is famously based on the comic but there is a lot of comics in the Alien and Predator series. There’s a lot of really fantastic ones that people love. So, one of the things I’m curious about is just how familiar you were with those other titles before you started working on AvP. I’d love to know if there’s a particular series that you would think would be fun to adapt into a film?

Peter Briggs: Wow I mean there are holes in my knowledge over the course of years because Dark Horse has done an awful lot. I remember in the early days, I liked the colonial marines bug hunt story. That was fun. There’s great ideas all the way down through them all but as a writer when I’m adapting things like… if you look at Hellboy for example which I adapted. Back in the early days of that, there really wasn’t very much in the way of material. So I didn’t have an awful lot to pick and choose from but our Hellboy film, the story you see is by and large the story I sat down and wrote.

If you compare that with Seed of Destruction which was the original Hellboy comic, it’s a different story altogether. There’s elements from it but I think if I were approached to do it now 30 years afterwards, it’ll be a colossal task. My feeling is if you’re gonna adapt something, you have to pull from everything and I would probably sit down. I don’t think it would be a straight adaption. I think I would pull ideas from everywhere and try and put it together. So no, I wouldn’t say that there was necessarily any one storyline that I would want to adapt. It would be a greatest hits collection.

Eric: Could you tell our audience how one Peter Briggs came to be involved in the Alien vs Predator project? What was the genesis? How did that come about?

Peter Briggs: Okay well I had seen Star Wars and I had seen Alien and these two movies galvanized me into wanting to be in the film industry. I come from a small town in the northwest and I knew that I wasn’t going to be in the film industry. That’s why I moved to London. I became a runner at a commercial’s house. I cleaned loos. I wallpapered walls. I did everything and in between that, I learned how to operate a camera and edit on a 16 35 mm Steenbeck.

So, I got my union card eventually as an assistant cameraman. The film industry in Britain collapsed because those nice guys from Cannon Films came in, destroyed the British film industry. We saw Elstree Studios… I used to live in Borehamwood in fact when I was writing Alien vs Predator. I would walk down and get my milk in the morning from the Tesco and they were wrecking the studio to build a supermarket. So, at that point the film industry was in a bad state. I was kind of supporting myself by working at stills photography place. I’ve been writing scripts for a few years with some friends and I had a small pile of scripts and a couple of my own.

I had a script called Total Recoil which I’d written in 1984 which was a Dirty Harry Goes to London sequel. I had another one called Radio Calling which was about a Chicago radio station. There was a comedy I’d written that with a guy called Mark McCrory. I had an adaption of Robert Mason’s book about helicopter pilots in the Vietnam war called Chicken Hawk. I had a computer thriller I’d written called Nightfall which was a sort of before the internet existed thing about a future virus program that could take down all computer systems. There was probably another one but I’m blanking on it now.

So, I was in a spot where I wasn’t… I didn’t go to film school. I got my union card was for all intents and purposes not a very good film cameraman that wasn’t going to be hired for that. One day I decided well let me see if I can get some representation and so I photocopied all the scripts. Had a huge pile of scripts.

There was no internet obviously for another 10 years or so and took it around all the various talent agencies in London. Knocking on people’s doors and got a few knockbacks from some smaller agencies. Then one day I came downstairs and there were two envelopes on the doorstep with some junk mail and one of them was from William Morris and one was from ICM. I opened the ICM one and it said “Can you give us a call. We’re interested in representing you” and the other one was from William Morrison said the same thing. So, I met with the guys. I first of all went with an agent at ICM, spent a year working with them. They put me together with Paramount UK and at the time Paramount UK were developing science fiction material.

There had been a writer’s guild strike in the States and they knew that if the WGA went on strike again that they needed to have some way of replenishing scripts. So they kind of very sneakily did this backdoor thing of opening Paramount UK and developing material. So, I was working for a lady there developing science fiction material for Paramount UK and I was suggesting William Gibson’s stuff and everything was being rejected. I mean nothing I came up with they wanted to do. The crunch came when I suggested Starship Troopers and was considered by Paramount 1950’s Heinlein crap.

Then the next week Tri-Star bought it for Paul Verhoeven. I spent the best part of a year at this point working for Paramount and it was clear it was going nowhere. So, one Saturday afternoon I was in Camden Town making the usual run of all the comic stores that I used to go and walked in and there on the end was Dark Horse’s Alien vs Predator. This was at Mega City Comics and I bought it and it just started to rain outside. The World’s End pub was right across from the tube station.

So I ran across with my plastic bag of comic and bought a Guinness, sat down, read Dark Horse’s Alien vs Predator and thought that’s pretty good. Then the issues started to come over the course of the next few months. The more I sort of looked at this, the more I thought if I was going to write this as a writing sample, it would kind of be the thing that might get me in with Joel Silver.

Joel Silver was huge at the time. Get me with Joel Silver for a rewrite and so I came to the realization this was something I should do. At the same time, a friend of mine, a Finnish film journalist called Juhani Nurmi. He was very good friends with H.R. Giger so I’d been pushing Juhani to get Giger onto Alien 3. He was in turn friends with Renny Harlin who had just hit with Nightmare on Elm Street and so we engineered getting Giger onto Alien 3 and as a result of that… this was I guess the Summer of 1991, I went down to Pinewood Studios and went on to the set of Alien 3 as a guest of Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff. That was an entertaining experience in itself.

I got shown around the creature shop. I met a young sculptor there. I didn’t know his name at the time but it was a guy called Chris Halls who changed his name to Chris Cunningham and in about six months later, I was working on Judge Dredd. I’d been hired to write the Judge Dredd movie and suggested Chris Hall based on his work in 2000 AD. I hadn’t made the connection at that point between the two guys. I sat down with Alec and Tom and they told me some entertaining horror stories about Alien 3 and it was pretty obvious even at that stage that the film was in trouble and Tom and Alec said “So what do you do?”

And I said “Well I’m trying to be a writer” and they went “Oh how’s that going?” I said “Well not really anywhere. I’ve got an agent but I’m well…” “What are you writing at the moment?” And I sort of shame-facedly shuffled my feet and I said well “Actually I’m writing Alien vs Predator. There was like a brief moment where Alec and Tom sort of looked at me and then howled with laughter. They just went “Seriously!?” And I went “Yeah”. I think it was Alec who went “Oh man, oh I can’t see that happen.”

Which is hilarious when you consider that they ended up doing the visual effects for Alien vs Predator another 10 years on. I said “Oh, have you guys seen Predator 2 because Predator 2 I think it just came out at that point and obviously the trophy case sequence in that with the Alien skull and they said “No we haven’t seen it. We’ve been too busy with this” and I talked about that and off I went. I finished the script and I moved from ICM to William Morris at this point.

I called up Steve Kennis at William Morris who was the guy I met a year prior. I said “Steve I know I didn’t go with you before but if I came to William Morris would you still be interested in representing me?” And he was like “Sure Pete.” He’s a big bluff American guy, very much like anyone’s idea of what a Hollywood film producer looks like – a big guy with a cigar and behind a big desk. So I had moved to William Morris and all my friends just made jokes about me writing Alien vs Predator this time. They were like “Peter why are you doing this? Nothing is ever going to happen with it” and I was sort of bullishly forging ahead and I took it into William Morris. My agent said “Okay Pete.” This was the first thing I’d ever given him that was new.

He said “Okay Pete. What do you got?” And I put the script on the desk upside down and he looked at it quizzically and pulled it across the table, turned it the right way around. He looked at it and went “Alien vs Predator. Pete have you any idea how hard this is going to be the sell” and I sort of shrugged and kind of made noises. He went “Look I’m friends with Larry Gordon. I got to go across the States next week. Larry’s an old friend of mine. I’ll take it with him. We’ll have a chat” and so that was that. At the time I was actually making at the time I remember a model of the halcyon model of Ripley’s power loader.

I sprayed that in the garden with paint and I was putting it together. I remember the first good sign was my agent called me from LAX and this is days before there were cell phones. So he called me from the pay phone at LAX, having landed and obviously availing himself of the in-flight drinks and he was like “Pete, this is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. I can’t wait to talk to Larry about this. It’s a great script. Well done” and that was that. I don’t even think I talked to him. I think it was on the answering machine. So a couple of days later I remember I was finishing off my power loader.

It was within a hair’s breadth of Ripley’s hair being painted and the phone went and it was about five o’clock in the afternoon. I can remember it like it was yesterday and I answered in the hallway. It was my agent, Steven. He said “Peter, where are you?” And I said “I’m in the hall.” He goes “Are you sitting down?” I said “No.” “Sit down.” So, I sat down dutifully on the stairs. He said “I’ve sold your script” and I was like “What!?” He said 20th Century Fox Joe Roth came to Larry Gordon last week.

Wanted to know if they could develop it. The idea of Alien vs Predator and literally my agent walked into the right place at the right time and I sold the script overnight which is… people tell you can’t do this because you don’t have the rights. Nobody will look at it. It’ll never happen and it doesn’t. Something like this doesn’t happen and it did happen. It was a billion to one thing and I was very lucky and that was that.

Aaron: It always surprises me because the story’s so “right place, right time.” Everything falls into the correct order and it’s like this huge thing. It’s incredible.

Peter Briggs: It is. It’s like the universe kind of just put all of the blocks into place at the right time but then saying that shortly thereafter Joe Roth left Fox. Peter Chernin came in and killed the development slate and unfortunately, we were on that development slate. So, it kind of it didn’t happen. There were some wrinkles along the way. I remember the Roland Emmerich thing. Lloyd Levin, who was Larry Gordon’s development guy at the time,  called me up and said “Do you know Roland Emmerich?”

And I said “No” and he goes “He’s just done this movie Universal Soldier” and I’d literally only just seen it at the cinema. I went “Oh” and he goes “Yeah, do you think he’d be a good fit for this?” And honestly, I didn’t. This was Roland Emmerich off the back of Universal Soldier before he’d done Stargate, before he’d done Independence Day and everything that we come to think of as a Roland Emmerich film. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to jeopardize my chances back then.

So, I ummed and I said “Well I don’t know. Yeah maybe.” So, I mean they were talking to Emmerich about it but it didn’t really go anywhere despite what Dean Devlin was saying at the time. Then the project was sort of killed but there were development executives inside Fox who were trying to keep the project alive.

Some other odd things along the way down the years but it was a casualty. It was, after being in the right place at the right time, I was in the right place at the wrong time. I talked to Joe Roth about this, years after because his company Revolution produced Hellboy which I co-wrote and we had a good reminisce about what could have happened. What could have been. I know Larry Gordon would have liked to have seen that film. I think we all would have liked to see that film.