“There are moments in the movie that you have never seen in your life.” Fede Álvarez on Alien: Romulus

“I wanted to take it back to that [horror] purity of the franchise,” Fede Álvarez tells us when we sit down with him to talk about his new movie Alien: Romulus.

Romulus is the eighth movie (depending on whether you consider the Alien vs Predator movies to be included) in the Alien franchise, which started way back in 1979 after a then largely unknown Ridley Scott saw a screenplay called ‘Star Beast’ about a bunch of truckers in space (find out more about the movie’s origins with our Complete Guide here).

As we all know, that movie turned out to be a major success, scaring audiences and living up to its tagline of ‘In space, no-one can hear you scream’. That original horror element is what Álvarez wanted to capture in his own addition to the franchise. “[Alien] is full on horror movie,” he enthuses. “It’s the ‘monster in the house movies’, or ‘Jaws in Space’ like Ridley calls it sometimes. He even said it was like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He saw that movie and he wanted to do that. So the influences are all about hardcore horror. That’s what I wanted to see.”

It’s clear when you’re speaking to Álvarez that he’s a big fan of the franchise and wants to put his own stamp on it. That’s why, when he got the idea for Alien: Romulus, he pitched it directly to Ridley, who gave him his approval. 

“It wasn’t so much about what I want to make when it came to this movie, it’s ‘what is the movie I want to see as a fan?’” he says. “That’s the strange thing that’s been happening these last few years. We were kids when those movies came out and now we suddenly have the chance to give a version of it. I’ve tried to create something that will give people similar emotions to the ones that I got when I watched the original films. It’s not about remaking it because it probably wouldn’t work as well as it did back then. It wouldn’t work with a modern audience to create that level of intensity. You have to do it differently but the emotions you seek and to give are still the same.”

Álvarez is no stranger to the horror genre, directing the claustrophobic horror Don’t Breathe in 2016, plus the Evil Dead remake back in 2013. 

It was when he was directing that latter movie that he realised that making a horror movie for ‘modern audiences’ has always been an issue, even when the audiences weren’t so modern.

“There’s a book I read when I was starting to prepare for Evil Dead,” he remembers. “It was a book of interviews with the masters of horror, and the first one was John Carpenter. They asked him the same question: how do you manage to scare an audience these days when people have seen it all? And then I looked at the date of the interview and it was from 1982. They clearly hadn’t seen it all [haha]!

“I think that’s always a perception that people have seen at all and there’s not much else you can do. There is definitely always something. There’s always a boundary you can push, there’s always something new.”

From the off, Alien has managed to surprise audiences. The chest-burster scene in the first Alien movie was so surprising that, famously, even the cast were shocked when it happened on set. In fact, the cast’s reaction was so visceral that the first take of the xenomorph bursting from John Hurt’s chest is the one we see in the final movie.

“It’s a big part of the first movie,” Álvarez nods. “We’d never seen a creature attach to someone’s face like that and a creature bursting out of someone’s chest the way it does in the first film. As Ridley says, they’re B movies executed in A plus way. At its core, that’s what it’s about. When we start thinking that they’re about more than that – like what has happened with this franchise – they start diverting into the elevated part of it and leaving behind its true essence. That’s what I want to do here – go back to that basic essence of this film.”

With that in mind, Álvarez wanted to make sure there were elements to Alien: Romulus that audiences had never seen before. “There are definitely a couple of things in the movie, moments that you will witness that you have never seen in your life, that no movie has done,” he promises. “They are pretty powerful movie moments.”

After the release (and subsequent success) of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars back in 1977, as well as Superman in 1978, movie studios realised that sci-fi was back in a big way and audiences subsequently were able to enjoy the Star Trek franchise being reborn in the movie realm with Star Trek: The Motion Picture and of course, Alien – both released in 1979.

For Álvarez, Alien’s connection to Star Wars goes deeper than the rebirth of popular sci-fi back in the late Seventies. “In its most basic way – and this might sound silly – it is the evil counterpart of Star Wars,” he says. “It is like The Rolling Stones to The Beatles. It’s the R-rated version of Star Wars. [Alien] was made because Star Wars was a success. Without that, Fox was never going to make Alien. They see that space stuff works and they go ‘right we need to make more of these’. So there are a lot of connections between those two. 

“Space before Star Wars looked kind of plastic and fake. Most things in space were sterile and super futuristic and then comes Star Wars looking real and industrial. Alien brought the same vibe. I think now that we’ve seen a bunch of Star Wars you kind of want to go ‘I would love to see that world, the ships, space but rated R or without the things for kids’. I think that’s how our brains work.

“It’s really hard to do. I still have hope for Hollywood, that we’re going to invent new things that we’ve never seen before. But once you do sci-fi/horror and you do rated-R sci-fi in space, then the future is Alien. If it’s not Alien, it feels like a bootleg or a ripoff. We’ve seen a lot of those and it’s always kind of a bummer. It just feels like Alien has ownership of that universe, of space sci-fi rated R. Maybe one day we’ll get tired of them but for now there are still versions of this movie that I want to see that they haven’t been made yet.”

With such a pedigree and history behind it, Álvarez is very well aware that a new entry to the Alien franchise is going to result in some discussion among fans. “I know there’s going to be a lot of chat because with the fans, with the true fans, there’s no way to win!” he laughs. “That doesn’t mean they won’t like it, it’s just there would always be something they would do differently. They have such strong opinions about what this should be. 

“It’s all generational as well. When Aliens came out there were people who didn’t accept it and were like ‘the only good one is the first one’. Every generation has its favourite and I hope this one can give the new generation their favourite. But for the legacy fans, for the hardcore fans, for people my age (I’m 46), I hope it creates debate. 

“I was shooting Evil Dead when Prometheus came out and I remember shooting that Monday and everybody was talking about that movie. Debating how could they have done this or what they should have done. Why didn’t they show the creature? What is that thing at the end? 

“That’s amazing. That’s cinema at its best when it gets into the culture of conversation that way. I hope [Alien: Romulus] does just that.”

We’re sure it will!

Alien: Romulus will be released in cinemas on 16 August. Read our review here.