Rex Pickett Interview

Aaron: I think they actually fired him like three times something like that and then rehired him during the production.

Rex: They might threaten to fire him, or he may have had… David can have his moments. Let’s be honest and for good reason and maybe there were actors saying, “I can’t work with this guy” and “We’re going to fire you, David.” Maybe he walks for a couple hours. That happens on a lot of films but to actually fire him and bring in another director, I don’t buy that, but I don’t know where that’s coming from.

Aaron: I’m fairly sure that was that was what Fincher had said himself.

Rex: He’s exaggerating, I think. I think they probably threatened to fire him, but did they actually fire him? I mean they may have fired him, Aaron, in post-production. “Okay you’re off the film, we’re editing the film.” That I believe. Directors are often taken off films in post-production but not in production. So it’s possible that happened and then they brought him back on and then he argued he wanted more money. So they gave him some more money to do some reshoots and whatever but at the end of the day, and this happened to me on my second feature film, there was a problem with…

Actually if you want to know the truth there was a hair in the frame and the only way to solve it was to do an optical. It’s 16mm and I’ll never forget this guy saying to me at the optical lab he goes “You know Rex, I don’t think anyone’s going to notice it. I know you want to get rid of it, but I can’t take a sow’s ear and make a silk purse out of it.” And I always remember that. So, let’s go back to the Hill-Giler script that is a sow’s ear. I don’t care how much you reshooted.

I don’t care how much talent David brings and he brings an enormous amount of talent but that screenplay… writers get f**ked over in Hollywood. They get replaced and everything else and there are bad films that make money and then nobody cares. But the truth is if it’s not in that screenplay, it’s not in post-production you face what you’ve given birth to. I mean there’s no fixing a film in post-production. You can do a lot with music and cutting and whatever but there’s only so much you can do to put the band-aids on and save it. I’ve seen it a million times. You start cutting it down. You’ve seen a film 70 minutes long.

They might have been two hours long in the cutting room and suddenly there’s 70 minutes. I’d rather just see the two-hour lousy picture and see where they went wrong than the 70-minute atrocity that they ended up with but it’s who has the money, who controls it, and this is 20th Century Fox. They control that movie. They control its destiny and so yeah, I bet they did fire him two or three times in post-production. I can imagine when you’re sitting in the editing room, you have problems and David wants to reshoot for good reason or he wants maybe to bring in somebody else to rescore the film, and we don’t want to give you the money for that.

Aaron: It’s like you’re saying as well. The finished product deviates very little from that first draft. Walter Hill and David Giler’s first draft that you were rewriting. So, from first draft to finished on the celluloid, there’s not a lot of difference.

Rex: Well, let me tell you a story here. Think about Tim Zinneman in that letter. They fire him and now just out of petulance at a very high level, he sends that letter… he’s held on to this letter that was just written to David. It’d be like me talking to you and I’m just saying something casually about somebody. They’re really a piece of crap and don’t listen to them but if you put that in an email and sent it to them or whatever, you might if they’re a powerful person.

I learned my lesson there on that I suppose but never in a million years would I think that David would show it to Zinnemann and that Zinnemann would be fired and that his act of vengeance would be to send that letter out. That then goes to Hill and Giler. That then becomes like the creature inside them that is growing and growing as we’re rewriting and then they come and and it just explodes. It’s not about the project. It’s not about the movie. It’s about their f**king ego.

…My script would have been made and I’m not saying it would have been genius. I don’t know what it would have been because remember a script is just a blueprint, but we know it would have been an infinitely better movie. It would have more character. It would have made more narrative sense. It still would have had all the action that the fan base really craves but it would have had an emotional component to it with Ripley and other stuff because I’m known for dialogue and character and all that other stuff but because one guy, one embittered little man who’s fired and he knows that it’s just gonna blow everything sky high basically.

Maybe he thought David got him fired and which is not true at all. I don’t even know why the studio fired him. Maybe they just wanted a new regime. Maybe Hill and Giler wanted him fired and that’s why. I don’t know but if that letter hadn’t been sent, Alien 3 would be a different movie. It would have been the script that little old Rex Pickett who had been following this saga from coke crazed Vincent Ward and his monks on a wooden planet to Fincher, you would have had a different outcome. This is a big movie. You wonder why how that could be possible. Well, everything I’ve told you is absolutely true. I have not fabricated anything and it’s unfortunately how Hollywood works at that big level sometimes.

I feel for David. He David did everything right. He took a risk to fly me out there. He took a risk to present me, a nobody, to Fox and also being the husband of his assistant. They probably thought he was crazy. He took a risk to alienate Hill and Giler and he did it for all the right reasons. I’ve had a lot of time to look back on it. Then he just got he got shafted because ego and politics had nothing to do with aesthetics. “Rex Pickett’s script sucks” or whatever had nothing to do with that.

It was totally had to do with the ego. The ego of one person. Not even Giler because I don’t think Giler cared. Giler had nothing to do with their script. He took a co-credit on it but he was basically in the pub just getting smashed. It was mostly Hill and Hill, I’ve already told you how unprofessional he was. He was taking dialogue off of tv and he was farming out action sequences to my ex-wife who’s Fincher’s assistant on a $60M film. Then she’s sub-farming him out to me and I did him for free.

Aaron: So, with the rewrite, you have to stick to that structure. You have to stick to the bones of the story but when you sat down to go “How do I fix this?” While working within that rigid story structure. How do you identify what you want to do? What you can change to improve it?

Rex: The truth is as you can tell from me, I love movies. I have a very critical sensibility. I’m looking at a screenplay that… and I don’t say this out of any bitterness that they that I got removed from the project or anything else… it just was unbelievably amateurish so I’m looking at it. If you’re gonna box me in… you have to understand I’m writing from the blank page every day to take an already existing screenplay with already existing characters and already existing scenes and just have to go inside and do micro surgery and create those characters inside.

Yes, there’s going to be some collateral damage down the road, but I figure I can fix those things. I’ve said to many people when Alien 3 comes up. I said it was actually the easiest script I’ve ever written, and it was the hardest. It was easy from the writing standpoint because of those boundaries that I had. In other words, “Rex just invent a new world for us.” Well then, I’m going “Oh sh*t. I got four weeks to get a whole new…” Then I would have freaked out but by “Here’s your characters. Here’s Ripley. Here’s whatever.” I just tried to start making sense out of it, Aaron.

I mean literally just making sense out of a script that makes no sense whatever. It was the hardest script because of the politics. Fox demanding pages and calling me at all hours of the night and freaking out because they’re so close. They need a final script that’s going to be approved by the departments and they’re sitting out there, and I would go out to Pinewood to meet David. Often would meet him at his rental in London and these people were waiting on this thing. They had nothing to do. Until they’ve got a blueprint, they have nothing to do, and they know it’s going to be crunch time when finally, the script is there, and Dave and I delivered.

We moved fast to really improve that Hill-Giler script which was in some ways worse than… Ferguson’s script was really cold. Hill-Giler – their script had a little bit of input from Fincher, but it was so poorly executed. So sloppily executed and for good reason when you find out how they work, and I know how they work because Barbara was Walter Hill’s assistant. So, I know exactly how he worked because he told her. At one point he did write. He wrote The Getaway, the Steve McQueen, Allen McGraw film.

He did have some chops in his early years but by now he’s just jaded. He doesn’t care. He’s like the studio exec saying “We can just piss on this and slap Alien 3 on. We’re going to take our big producing fee and oh by the way our writing fees too and we don’t even give a sh*t. We can handle the critics and everything else. The fans will go to see the Xenomorph pop out again and just start its rampage and killing these prisoners and freaking out whatever and who cares.”

That that that was their attitude. I actually cared and Fincher actually cared and so did Barbara. The three of us really cared and nobody else cared at all. So, for me, it was the easiest to write. On the other hand, the studio politics made it really hard. At the end of course with Hill-Giler playing their power move. Alien 3 – that film that you see would have been a different film had it not been for the ego of one man who just couldn’t handle one line I wrote in a letter, not to him, somebody else that then got passed to him. That is the true story.

Adam: Going into some of those changes a bit – so in the disclaimer at the start of your draft, you mentioned Walter Hill as having mandated certain changes that you had to make on the second half of the script. Can you remember what much of this was, like what were the most significant changes in that second half?

Rex: I honestly can’t, Adam, it’s so long ago. I’d have to look at their script, I’d have to look at the script I wrote. If there were changes, trust me they weren’t coming from Hill and Giler, they were coming from David Fincher because he was driving the ship at that point. I was only listening to David Fincher. I never met Walter Hill.

Adam: I actually read this draft. It’s available on our website in our download section for anyone who’s interested. I’m not sure how far your rewrites with Fincher went beyond this draft. But the most significant things I noticed is there’s a scene in the film where Ripley goes to try and find the Alien. This scene’s a little different in yours where they find the ox and they find where the Alien originated from.

They also find Golic and things go on with Golic a bit longer where it seemed like you were insinuating egg morphing where he’s being transformed into one of these Alien creatures or he’s just cocooned. It’s left uncertain but that was kind of the connection I made with the director’s cut of the original Alien and there was another scene beyond just things going on further with Golic. You changed Clemens’ backstory I think where he had had to euthanize his wife and unborn child because she was in a vegetative state, I guess.

Rex: I don’t know where that came from, but I could easily imagine that I’m trying to find the inner lives of characters. Make you feel something for them. I mean that’s what I’m trying to do and even though it’s a sci-fi film, it’s going to have its requisite amount of action. If you don’t give us three-dimensional characters, you exclude the audience and so that’s what I tried to do. I know that I tried to really get into the divisions inside the prison colony between the different factions in there.

Then you’ve got the administrators and there’s rebel rousers in there. I’m trying to create conflict. Conflict equals drama equals comedy equals resolution. I mean this is like standard stuff that Hill and Giler just don’t even understand because you don’t see any kind of narrative trajectory in their screenplay at all. Other than the Xenomorph appears and burst out and then it starts its rampage. That’s probably all they think they have to do, and I want to know who’s dying, who’s being chased.

I want to know who those people are. Certainly, actors bring some three-dimensionality, even through bad dialogue and whatever but the truth is you can put Marlon Brando in a bad screenplay and it’s still going to be a bad movie, albeit with him in it. But I don’t remember those things but that Adam, is what I tried to do.

I tried to get inside the characters and create back stories, create factions on that penal colony because it would seem to me that there would be people with different points of view. That would bring me conflict and that conflict might ultimately result in a different approach to now what’s happening or maybe I thought that when the Xenomorph starts to really grow, that that they would come together in some way. I don’t know. I mean that’s as a writer, that’s what I’m looking for.

I’m looking for conflict and I’m looking for different ways of resolution. I know that they have sworn a vow of celibacy, the prisoners. So, it’s not just some aliens arriving on their planet, it’s a woman. So I played up that which Hill and Giler weren’t interested in because they’re too lazy really.