Peter Briggs Interview

Aaron: Going back to your cherry-picking details from the source material and what you thought would work and what wouldn’t. I believe you criticized this part being in Anderson’s. It’s the whole blooding element of the comic. What is it about that particular thing that you don’t like?

Peter Briggs: Nothing. I like it. I like a lot. You’ve seen Alien blood go through two decks of the Nostromo. I haven’t seen anything like it except molecular acid maybe and then you’re asking for somebody to pick up an Alien limb and bring it directly with that blood to your forehead. No thank you. It works great in the comic books but honestly when I kind of sat and thought about it, I just didn’t want to go there. I mean you could see it working with some of the terrific like Hot Toys figures and things where you have that etched into the helmet. I mean that makes perfect sense.

Eric: You said in interviews that you originally wrote the script with an eye towards it being “economically viable”. Now this is something people often forget. It can be very critical in a pitch meeting. Sometimes like with the original Alien and Jaws, resources can force a sort of less is more approach to the hands of a filmmaker. In Alien, you had Kane’s chestbursting scene.

That’s what grabbed the media attention but I’ve always maintained it’s Lambert’s death which is the more haunting one that stays with people and that’s relatively cheap because most of it was completely off screen. With this in mind, would you say, especially more in the second draft when you knew you had it as an actual project, did budgetary considerations cause you to scale back more than just set design for later drafts or give you ideas for increasing tension, intimacy and horror?

Peter Briggs: The second draft really was not major in any major way. It was really about characters and trimming some dialogue here and there. Moulding several characters into one. That opening but no all the other action sequences were pretty much… they were all as is. I don’t think anything really drastically changed in that second draft. The Predalien thing which was like three seconds.

When I was writing it, you must remember this was 1991 and at that time Terminator 2 had not come out yet. It was just about to come out and the world hadn’t seen T-1000 morphing effects which were all thanks to John Knoll and his brother creating photoshop. Then two years later we get Jurassic Park and we’ve got CG creatures. It wasn’t a consideration for me writing it because I was writing it as a sample. I wasn’t writing it with any view for it to be over… I mean I was writing it for a view of can you make this thing but we didn’t have CG effects then.

I mean it was still the tail end of practical effects and when I was writing it, I was concerned that just on a sort of academic hypothetical level, not really thinking of it in terms of production, that the effects were doable. I mean we had the rhinos, easily done now with CG. Hordes of Aliens easily done now with CG. We couldn’t have done those effects back then. So honestly it was probably a good idea that the film didn’t happen. One of the really great shots in Paul Anderson’s shot is the swarm at the pyramid. That would have been along the level of the kind of visuals I wanted but those visuals just would not have been achievable I don’t think.

We all know Charles De Lauzirika who’s the treasure miner… he and I have had drinks a couple of times and he’s a really nice bloke and him putting together back the Rex Pickett draft for the Alien 3 release and fixing those effects… that was a huge service to Alien 3. Just so much better in that release than it was in the slightly sloppy theatrical. That was the last hurrah of kind of practical effects with the rod. What really annoys me the rod puppet in Alien 3 is you see some behind the scenes shots where you see some of the guys puppeting it, some of the shots of the rig and then puppeting. It looks better than the shots in the film which does show that I think with enough diligence that those shots could have really worked really well but they were under the gun.

Aaron: Speaking of creature performers and suits and stuff. In a hypothetical world if yours was to become a thing, would you not want to see men in a suit performance?

Peter Briggs: Totally but it’s the difference between… I mean if you look at Jurassic Park. Jurassic Park is a great example. If you look at that first Jurassic Park and you look at the Stan Winston reptile suits and you look at the CG in the film. A lot of that CG in Jurassic Park still stands up really well but they switch the performance so sometimes you’ve got the rubber suits, sometimes you’ve got the CG. I’m a big fan of that. I mean as far as the Predators go, why would you do Predators any other way other than guys in suits?

As long as you nail that suit. It’s going to look great. It would be great to have some elements of that but it would depend on what form the Alien would take. My favourite Takeya Alien – it would be a variety of different looks for the Aliens. I mean I remember if you’ve read the scriptment that Cameron wrote for Aliens which is very different. I mean the end of it is basically the end of Alien Resurrection. You have Ripley walk up to the nest and she takes the syringe and she stabs herself and gets carried in and ends up in the nest and she comes to.

If I remember correctly aren’t there a bunch of Aliens carrying eggs into the shuttle and like that the ticking clock there? It was gonna be Ripley’s gotta stop the eggs from taking off on the shuttle which Jim, I guess very wisely changed when he wrote the script. But I always remember from that script and the way it ended up in Alan Dean’s Foster’s novelization. The mention of the Albino Alien drones which we’ve never seen in any real way and again going back to all this. Many years have passed.

Many films have passed since I’ve wrote that original script. We’ve seen a lot of different Alien stuff and it would be my job now to try and create the kind of unified field theory of Alien and try and bring all that together in a way that makes sense of some of the things in the franchise that don’t make sense. Crossing the t’s and dotting the I’s and making things happen. I was actually contemplating writing an Alien movie, just a one-off Alien movie on spec because I came up with an idea that would have really explained the way the Engineers as being a different race from the Space Jockeys.

As a fan it’s what I want and it’s an idea I think is really good. We would have seen proper Space Jockeys then because if you look at if Prometheus if you look at the Space Jockey in the ship or rather the shell that the engineers climb inside to become the pilot, there’s a huge discrepancy of the size of Ian Whyte to the size of the Space Jockey that we see in Alien. It’s a vastly huge creature and I came up with something to explain that but I don’t want to talk about it. I’ve got something in it that’s so good. I hope that maybe if Fox calls me or Marvel calls me or something, maybe I’ll do something for them.

Aaron: Something I’m really curious about from your point of view as a writer is typical presence of a team up in an Alien vs Predator story. I’m always iffy on this and I’m particularly iffy on the way it was done in in Anderson’s film but when you were working on yours, was that a story element that you sort of had to think about? Were you conscious of “How do I make this work?”

Peter Briggs: Yeah, because I mean the Predator is there to hunt the Aliens. The humans, on their own, are their own prey for some Predators. There were elements in the comic that didn’t sit well with me. I didn’t much like the attack on the… although it works great on the page and that’s down to Phil Norwood, he’s a storyboard artist in his own right.

The artwork I thought was spectacular. I love the hoverbikes but I didn’t like the attack on that ranch’s house, it worried me and I do like the Predator ethical code. I do like the fact that the girl in Predator 2, she’s pregnant even though she’s armed. She’s pregnant and the Predator lets her go or you lose. We could talk about this all day but I think that humans were just an inconvenience. It was like the Predators turned up in my draft and the Predators are like “Oh hey, what’s this? Oh no there’s a facility. Well, we still got a job to do.”

And the girl was just sort of in the way and the Predator just tolerated her. I mean it was like she’s there as long as she’s not an impediment. She can be here but really, it’s not a team up. It’s like if you want to follow me, follow me. If I was approaching it again now, I would probably push that even further. It was a shame at the end of Alien vs Predator given that was the movie that was going to be made of it. That Zoe Saldana did not go off with the Predators at the end. I would have liked to have seen that.

Eric: Can you remember the first time you noticed your project being mentioned and starting to think to yourself “This thing’s starting to gain a reputation now. It’s growing bigger than just a job. It’s gaining notoriety.”

Peter Briggs: No, I don’t. I don’t remember at all. I think Alan Jones asked if he could interview me for Cinefantastique. Then Stephen Nelms asked if he could interview me for Starlog Platinum Magazine. So certainly, those two interviews that were around about 1992-93, I guess but it’s taken its own life over the years. I guess when it started to crop up in screenwriting books, there was a book by Chris Gore called The 50 Greatest Screenplays Never Made.

There was a thing from Kubrick and there was a thing from David Lean. Then there’s my script in there which is kind of a very bizarre thing to sort of see that and then Dave Hughes I think did The 50 Greatest Sci-fi Movies Never Made in his first edition of that and then it appeared in a book called How Not to Write a Screenplay. There was a chapter on action writing which it had Shane Black’s Lethal Weapon and my Alien vs Predator sort of examples of how to write action scenes in it. I guess it was a sort of a cumulative effect.

It was in a lot of books and a lot of magazine articles. Then I guess it finally ended up on the internet, scanned and pirated and it was weird. I mean I’ve met people guys like Zack Stentz who wrote Thor who said that when they were in college. They were trying to make it in the film industry, they would sort of like read this and it would be sort of like inspirational to people to prove that you could write a script and get it sold and break the Hollywood system. So that’s always gratifying to kind of see that people liked it for that reason. But I think the weirdest thing was I was with Steve Norrington back in the early 90’s and I knew Steve from a commercials company in London.

There was an exhibition in the basement of Tower Records for some reason. I think it was probably an Alien’s video release and Steve and I were they had one of the smartguns on display. I bought a magazine and I went to the checkout to pay for it. I pulled out my credit card and I gave it to the guy and the guy looked at my credit card and looked at me and he went “Are you the Peter Briggs?!” And it was years after this until I’d done anything that had been made and that was a weird moment for me.

To be known for a script that has never been made. It’s an odd thing and honestly, I’d rather people knew me for the stuff that has been made but those are the breaks. It’s got a life of its own. Even now, I mean this year I’ve been approached for things connected to this script that I can’t really talk about at the moment for reasons that have to do with lawsuits and things and yeah, it’s an odd one.

It’s nice that people still like it but it was a script that a very young guy wrote in a very short period of time as an act of desperation to try and get a job and break into the film industry. That it’s gone beyond that is a nice thing but I think you have to just look at it on that basis but if you’re a fan of the script, thank you for liking it.

Eric: So, through your later work on Hellboy, you developed a relationship with the folk at Dark Horse. Did you ever discuss this script with Mike Richardson and Randy Stradley?

Peter Briggs: I’ve never met Randy. I know that Randy who I understand, I think he’s retired now. Randy was annoyed with me for many years and quite rightly too. I took his baby and I ripped it off and got a lot of acclaim for it and I’ve apologized to Randy several times in print and I can’t say enough. Without Randy Stradley, I wouldn’t have a career.

Mike, I became friendly with around the time… I think I met him in Portland Oregon when I was doing Hellboy in 1996 and Mike and I definitely talked about Alien vs Predator and again, at that time nothing was happening with it and Mike and I, our paths crossed several times over the years. In fact, I remember about ’96, he asked me if I’d like to write comics for Dark Horse and I said that I very much would like to do that. Unfortunately, nothing ever came of it which is a shame.

I actually just wrote my first comic a year ago which was for Rebellion in England and Mike and I met at the Hellboy premiere and we bumped into each other at various comic cons and I remember saying to him “Hey Mike. I’ve come up with a really great idea for Alien vs Predator vs Terminator and he laughed at me and then a few years later they brought out Alien vs Predator vs Terminator.