“Big things have small beginnings,” declares Michael Fassbender’s android David inquisitively in Ridley Scott’s quasi-Alien prequel, Prometheus, after extracting a tiny organism from a strange cylinder-shaped object discovered on LV-223. The phrase, taken from David Lean’s epic Lawrence of Arabia, could easily be used to describe the gestation of the Alien franchise, which sprung from an expanded version of the ultra modest 1974 Dan O’Bannon scripted student film Dark Sta:.
Directed by John Carpenter, this micro-budgeted semi-spoof on 2001: A Space Odyssey used a literal beach ball for the alien that interacts with the motley crew of a small spacecraft. Drawing few laughs from initial audiences, O’Bannon wondered whether the premise would play better as horror. He hinged his new story (then dubbed ‘Star Beast’) on a creepy scenario concerning astronauts being awoken from cryogenic sleep by a distress signal emitting from an unknown planet. The crew go to investigate but become stranded after their ship breaks down upon landing.
O’Bannon’s predicament was how to realise the titular threat and get it on board the vessel in an interesting way. It was his writing partner Ronald Shusett who came up with the creepy notion that the creature impregnates one of the crew. “[…] He jumps in his face, plants a tube down him, inserts his seed in him and later it comes bursting out of his tummy!” O’Bannon recalled of his colleague’s ingenious solution to the story. But Alien’s gestation was only just beginning.
“You had to treat this B-monster movie as if it were an A movie,” said David Giler, one third of a trio of producers that also included Gordon Carroll and filmmaker Walter Hill, who saw the sci-fi prestige potential of Alien following the success of Star Wars. Hill embarked on major rewrites of O’Bannon’s script that changed the dialogue, all the characters’ names, placed greater emphasis on the ‘truckers in outer space’ type scenario and notably included the ‘science officer Ash is a corporate robot’ revelation and the ‘retrieving of the cat’ climax.
After a slew of well-known filmmakers turned the project down, a 40-year-old British director with 2000 TV commercials and one feature film to his name signed on as director. Influenced by Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and having directed the well-received The Duellists, Ridley Scott brought an eye for detail, atmosphere, a depth of vision and a duty to realism to the world of Alien that was formidable. “I wanted to have a total sense of reality and realness to this whole film because the realer and truer you get then, I think, the scarier it gets later,” Scott reflected during his 1999-recorded DVD commentary.
Instrumental to this sense of reality was the lived-in and progressively claustrophobic interior chambers that made up the crew’s commercial spacecraft the Nostromo. Oscar-winning Star Wars set decorator Roger Christian, whose worn-out look for the Millennium Falcon had greatly impressed Ridley Scott, employed a similar technique of intricately assembling and dressing aircraft scrap components for the crew’s doomed mining vessel.
“Ridley said: ‘It’s a space truck – I need that look!'” recalled Christian to SciFiNow, who as an art director assisted production designer Michael Seymour on Alien. “When I came on-board there was no dressing. There was a snake-like structure of the Nostromo going over two stages. Ridley needed that to do all those amazing tracks in the opening sequence and to get that claustrophobia.”
The indestructible malevolence and believability of the titular humanoid threat was another milestone. Inspired by H R Giger’s Necronomicon (after meeting the Swiss artist on Alejandro Jodorowsky’s aborted Dune), Dan O’Bannon was instrumental in introducing Scott to this strange and deeply visceral biomechanical world.
Giger wanted to redesign the alien but Scott insisted that the artist’s 1976 painting ‘Necronom IV’, with all its haunting psychosexual beauty and subconscious Freudian power was a perfect design basis for the creature. Giger also created the iconic alien egg, the Facehugger, Chestburster, along with the derelict spacecraft and the ominous Space Jockey.
“He was supposed to come for two weeks but ended up staying for the entire shoot,” continues Roger Christian. “Michael Seymour built him a structure on one of the stages and I filled it with bones and Giger sculpted the alien planet in miniature using those bones. I got him a lot of modeling clay and he was just very quiet and dedicated. He sculpted all the time and when the stage was built he would go in with airbrushes and sculpt and spray-paint everything. Giger was really involved in that world.”
Not that the human characters in the story were sidelined. Making up the ‘truckers in space’ ensemble were a bunch of character actors that included Veronica Cartwright as navigator Lambert. “It bothered me that the character was so weepy all the time. But in a weird way that character was the audience and the way they were feeling; they wanted to get out of there too!” she tells us.
Conversely, Cartwright had believed she was cast in the coveted role of Ripley. “Originally that was the only part I ever read for so I assumed that was the part I had. I hadn’t even read the script from the point of view of Lambert.”
Ridley Scott knew intuitively when he met the young, unknown Sigourney Weaver that she was right for the (gender-neutral) role of warrant office Ripley, who would ultimately become a new breed of screen heroine. However, 20th Century Fox was fixated on an established star for the part.
“Ridley said: ‘I’ve found the actor, she’s so good and I need her!’ so they said: ‘We’ll screen-test her and take a look,'” remembers Christian. “Ridley wisely didn’t want to do the usual screen-test with a white wall and a plant, with the actor standing there doing their lines so he said to me: ‘Can you build me a piece of the Nostromo corridor and I’ll put her in action?’ I quickly got a lot of scrap and brought in a built corridor and it’s there in that screen test that you see in the beginning of Alien.”
The filmmaker purposely snubbed his cast to coax stranger, more realistically aggravated performances from them. “Ridley wasn’t giving the actors many instructions, as he wanted them to be a bit nervous and isolated, so Sigourney would always come to me,” Christian continues. “I was on set the entire time during the shoot and she just got my trust. I always said, ‘you look great Sigouurney – you’re already looking like someone who could be in command of that ship, you’ve got that strength to you!'”
“We were all a little aggregated with one another,” adds Cartwright. “After Dallas died Ripley becomes the captain but she had to earn that; nobody was just going to let her be the captain. I was the voice of reason that thinks, ‘let’s get the fuck out of here!’”
However, getting out of there was not an option, particularly when it came to the now iconic chest-burster scene, where doomed crew member Kane (John Hurt) gives horrific birth to a xenomorph baby. “Those were real reactions from everybody. John Hurt had a false chest filled with [animal] kidneys and livers… and then there was this puppeteer underneath doing the monster stuff, so we all saw the creature breakthrough, turn around and look at us,” remembers Cartwright. “I was told that I would get a little blood on me, but the blood jet was pointed directly in my face! I started getting so fascinated watching that thing and then I was just covered! That was the cut they used, as it was the only take we ever did.”
When Alien was released in 1979, audiences were utterly tormented by the intense claustrophobic fear, helpless sense of isolation and nerve-shuddering suspense that Ridley Scott and his collaborators had expertly created.
Despite its visceral power it would take seven years for a sequel to surface and catapult the series to the next level.
Enter a young, ambitious visionary by the name of James Cameron, then riding on the success of The Terminator and highly enthused by the possibilities of a follow-up to Alien. Cameron had adapted an unrealised story he’d previously penned called ‘Mother’ about an alien on a space station, and incorporated Ripley, along with a squadron of marines into the mix. The concept gave birth to the military-infused action-orientated thrill ride Aliens. However, it was his close collaboration with a returning Sigourney Weaver that ensured the true essence of Ripley was retained.
“Interestingly, Sigourney herself had an issue with my take on her character,” Cameron admitted for the 2003-recorded DVD commentary. “She didn’t think that Ripley hated the alien. [I said]: ‘No, she hates the alien that killed all her crewmembers and put her through the traumatic event of her life. […] Ripley would want to prevent the kind of trauma that she had been through happening to anybody else.'”
Picking up events 57 years later, Ripley comes out of stasis to reluctantly return to the now colonised planet LV-426 after her employers lose contact with the colony. With the military accompanying her, she travels on the condition that they eradicate the creatures.
Cameron initially saw Aliens as a straightforward revenge story, which was reflected in his catchy ‘This Time It’s War’ tagline. However, the filmmaker admitted Weaver helped him see Ripley differently. “Her motivation was on a higher plain. […] She was acting out of a sense of duty and that spoke very much to some of the themes I had in the story with respect to her relationship with Newt.”
Indeed Ripley, who learns she has tragically outlived her own daughter, forms a maternal bond with the orphaned child survivor she finds in the cooling ducts on LV-426 and strives to protect. A romantic interest is alluded to between Corporal Hicks plated by Michael Biehn (particularly in the 1990 ‘Director’s Cut’), while Bill Paxton assumes the ‘voice of the audience’ role as Private Hudson and Jenette Goldstein memorably embodied macho marine Vasquez.
Ripley also comes into initially distrustful contact (which is quite understandable given her run-in with homicidal automation Ash in Alien) with an android named Bishop played by Lance Henriksen. “Ian Holm and Rutger Hauer both did wonderful jobs [playing androids] that I thought: ‘How am I going to live up to this?'” Henriksen admits to SciFiNow. “So I thought: ‘I’ve got to forget all of that stuff as it wasn’t going to help me at all’. […] I think there’s a great innocence to Bishop. So I played him in relation to my emotional life between the age of 12 and 14 – there was a feeling of outliving everyone I’m talking to and they are alive and I’m not. Therefore I’m a self-aware and optimistic creation.”
Less optimistic was the atmosphere on the Pinewood Studios set. Cameron brought his now legendary hard-driving work ethic to the UK-based production that reportedly clashed with the predominantly British crew. It all culminated with a union strike that led to a meeting of minds that ultimately helped relieve cultural tensions.
Nevertheless, the end result speaks for itself and Aliens became another heart-thumping thrill ride for audiences when it was released in 1986 to critical, commercial and subsequent Oscar-winning acclaim. Weaver was nominated for Best Actress for her impressively committed, genre-defining post-feminist portrayal of the defiant heroine (within a still noticeably male-dominated universe) that anchors the film.
In addition, the gung-ho mentality of the initially macho marines, who are defeated by an enemy they don’t understand, served as an apt commentary on the humbling experience of war.
“ […] These technologically advanced soldiers succumb to a technologically inferior but much more determined enemy that they don’t know how to fight, which is really a Vietnam metaphor,” admitted Cameron.
For Alien 3, initially hired New Zealand writer-director Vincent Ward sought a unique back-t0-basics approach. His soulful take had a solitary alien causing havoc in a self-sufficient wooden monastery planet run by outcast pre-medieval monks. “I took the idea that Ripley arrives in a world that makes her believe in evil and sees the alien as the devil rather than the organism that it is,” Ward told SciFiNow. “When things start to go wrong the monks believe that Ripley has brought something ‘evil’ into their midst, and as her health diminishes she too begins to feel that somehow she is responsible.”
Ward had the character of Hicks and Newt dead on arrival, abolishing the family motif set up by Cameron in Aliens and returning Ripley to a solitary character. But regrettably, producers demanded radical changes to other areas that pulled Ward’s intriguing concept apart.
“They suggested convicts instead of monks and a mining colony instead of a monastery – all out of fear that the film would be too religious, which certainly wasn’t my intention,” Ward continued. “The producers were under a lot of pressure to get [the film] out as soon as possible, and I believe that studios can be very conservative beasts who go for what has gone before. That’s the problem you face when you want to do something interesting.”
Although set construction had already commenced (courtesy of Oscar-winning production designer Norman Reynolds), the gradual erosion of Ward’s idea together with a meeting that scrapped the ‘wooden planet’ locale entirely resulted in the filmmaker and the producers parting ways.
A young David Fincher was hired to replace Ward largely on the strength of his impressive music video and commercials career. But it was to be a bumpy ride, particularly when production commenced without a completed script. “Eventually, Sigourney agreed that if Walter and I write it she would do it on faith and Fincher did too,” reflected David Giler.
In essence a vague ‘spin-off’ of Vincent Ward’s original idea, events for Alien 3 took place on a prison planet populated by entirely male inmates. Fincher wanted Richard E Grant for the role of Clements, the medical doctor that Ripley eventually becomes intimate with, however, producers preferred older thespian Charles Dance.
A slate of predominantly British thespians also made up the supporting cast, including Pail McGann, Brian Glover and Pete Postlethwaite amongst them, while Lance Henriksen briefly returned to portray both Bishop and his human creator. “I love David Fincher and thought he was a brilliant young man but I felt ‘why revisit something like that?’ I did it once – it’s enough,” he recalls to SciFiNow. But Walter Hill called and said: ‘Go to England have a cup of tea and donut and come home. You’re going to be playing Bishop 1 and 2.”
H R Giger was also brought back to do some redesigns for the returning xenomorph, most of which regrettably didn’t come into fruition or were cut from the theatrical release. This included the famous Ox-chest bambi-burster scene, which was restored for the intriguing 2003 ‘Assembly Cut’. The entire production was constantly adapting to new material, with both the studio and producers at loggerheads with a defiant Fincher. Despite his determination, Fincher’s version was compromised and significantly scaled back due largely to budgetary concerns, with scenes snipped without his consent on the final edit. Fincher subsequently disowned the film and to this day rarely talks about it.
“I didn’t think it worked – I went to a lot of trouble making the background characters more dimensional, and I thought they were very stereotypical in that film,” reflected Ward to SciFiNow, who received a story credit on Alien 3.
Fragments of Ward’s original intentions do remain however, including the religious persuasion of the ‘monk-attired’ prisoners, a reference to the beast as a devil-like ‘dragon’, the surprise revelation of Ripley’s alien pregnancy and her dramatic sacrificial inferno demise that had a strong feeling of finality to it.
“One of the reasons I died was really to liberate the series from Ripley. […] I didn’t want her to become this figure of fun that no one ever listened to…” reflected Sigourney Weaver.
Despite Ripley’s definitive demise she was resurrected five years later for the 1997 follow up: Alien: Resurrection. Scripted by a pre-Buffy Joss Whedon, the character returned as a human/alien hybrid cloned from blood fragments found 200 years following her death.
It was supposed to be a dark and edgy take on Ripley; one where you weren’t entirely sure where her allegiances lay and whether she was more alien than human. It was different enough to lure Weaver back and attract another idiosyncratic visualist, French auteur Jean Pierre Jeunet, to direct (after Danny Boyle was briefly considered).
Alien: Resurrection returned the story to a spacecraft setting that saw Ripley team up with space pirates and a female android (played by Winona Ryder) to defeat a hoard of aliens before the ship reaches Earth. Despite proving another visually arresting entry in the long-running series, Jeunet’s trademark irrelevant tone and dark humour felt out of place, while the film was almost completely devoid of suspense and scares, with Whedon later claiming that his script had been butchered. Nevertheless, Alien: Resurrection was a commercial hit and Whedon penned an earth-bound continuation that disinterested Weaver and eventually led to Fox green-lighting the derogatory AVP: Alien Vs Predator (2004), which featured Lance Henriksen as Weyland, (after Ridley Scott and James Cameron briefly entertained a writer-producer/director alliance for ‘Alien 5’).
The life-death-rebirth gestation of the series continued with a desire to explore the unknown backstory to the original Alien that saw the return of Ridley Scott to the franchise. 2021’s Prometheus evolved from questions regarding the ominous Space Jockey that the crew of the Nostromo had discovered inside the derelict spacecraft. “That was my starting block of this thing: Who were the big guys and what were they doing there?” said Scott.
However, what began as a prequel to Alien sprang into something else when Damon Lindelof did a rewrite of Jon Spaihts’ original screenplay. “For me, Prometheus was always about making a Blade Runner/Alien mash-up using the best themes from both movies and dropping them all into the same world,” admitted the scribe during his DVD commentary.
Marketed as not a prequel but a film that shared Alien ‘DNA’ and set within the same universe, Prometheus explored such hefty themes as ‘man meeting his maker’ and our relationship to our creators, known as the Engineers; the same people who piloted the derelict spacecraft in Alien. Human mortality and ‘what it is to be human’ were also explored through the inquisitive character of David (Michael Fassbender), a synthetic searching for purpose who has a low opinion of his own creators.
All the xenomorph symbolism returned for Scott’s 2017 follow-up Alien: Covenant, which was written by John Logan and positioned itself as a no-holds-barred Alien prequel that revealed David as the experimental homicidal mastermind behind the iconic biomechanoid. Actor Benjamin Rigby played Ledward, part of the security personnel on the colonisation vessel Covenant, who becomes the film’s unfortunate first victim when the parasite dramatically bursts from his back. “It was a really nice surprise to know that I had such a seminal death in this franchise,” he remarks to SciFiNow. “Ridley was like: ‘The makeup’s really good but the rest is up to your acting,’ so I just went for it! […] I wanted to pay homage to John Hurt because he’d done such a brilliant job but at the same time I wanted to make it my own.”
Depending on your opinion, Covenant was either another visually spectacular, yet uninspired ‘greatest hits’ of the Alien series or a bold parable that capitalised upon the themes of its predecessor by further exploring some deep philosophical questions. “I love what John [Logan] did with that script and I love the ‘making meeting his maker’ through-line,” reflects Rigby. “I think the more we edge toward the potential demise of humanity the more pertinent those films are becoming.”
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