Every film is a product of its time.
And every successful film tells you something
about the time it was made.
It's successful because it resonates
with stories and images that people need to see
at that particular point.
"Alien" is a radical break
with science fiction.
This is not the notion of the alien
that we were building toward in something
like "Close Encounters."
"Star Wars" comes out,
we have a fun space adventure.
And then "Alien" comes out, and people embrace it.
And then just a couple of years later, "E.T."
and John Carpenter's "The Thing" come out,
and audiences resoundingly are like, no, thank you.
We want our aliens to be nice and squishy
and cool and eat candy.
I think there's a special status that comes to some films
that lodge in the audience's collective imagination,
and I think "Alien" is certainly one of those films.
Tolkien talked about the cauldron of stories,
and certainly, "Alien" is an example
of a story drawing from a real global set of myths.
If you look at a somatics experiment, what you're going
to see is sand that vibrates in a shape,
and the shape changes based on the different vibrations.
A myth is like something that vibrated from something
deeper that you can't see.
You see a major curse in the form
of the alien, who is very much a fury,
responding to an imbalance.
We're looking at a story where there
is a piece of material prop that is now completely
alive in our imaginations.
It lives in our dreams.
It lives in our cultural conversation.
It's one of the biggest cultural dreams we've ever had.
I met Dan at USC.
He was a real standout.
You couldn't miss him.
He was a wild man, unbounded by conventional reality.
You couldn't call him an iconoclast, because he
didn't have icons to break.
He could be very offensive, and was frequently
offensive on purpose.
He was hot, you know, emotionally hot, emotionally
responsive, very angry.
He was born and raised in rural Missouri and had no television.
They didn't even have a telephone till he was 10.
They lived in the middle of nowhere on 24 acres.
And yet he knew all these things.
They didn't even have a library in the town.
His mother used to send off for boxes of books,
and they would come, and he would read them,
and then they'd send them back.
Dan was always sneaking science fiction.
His mother always wanted him to read good literature.
And his mother would always say, you
haven't got any of that science fiction in your backpack,
have you?
You're not taking that science fiction to school.
His father owned a curio shop, it was called Odd Acres.
There was a sort of screwy Louie room, you know,
where things were sort of off kilter,
and everything looks like it's leaning.
That was growing up in Odd Acres.
One time his father faked a UFO landing.
And Dan helped him, and then he had the press out there,
you know?
By direction of the President of the United States,
stay in your homes.
I repeat, stay in your homes.
Because in one moment of history-making violence,
nature, mad, rampant, roared its most awesome creation.
There's a lot of bugs there.
And he was always very frightened, in a way,
by the sudden appearance of bugs,
like a stick insect and cicadas, massive invasions
in southern Missouri, they would have hundreds of thousands
of them come out of the ground and swarm over everything
and then vanish and die.
So these things really gave him the creeps.
And he wanted to creep everybody else out too.
But he was quite an artist.
And when he was thinking of his monsters,
he would sketch them out.
Before "Alien," Dan had written a screenplay called
"They Bite."
It was "Alien" before "Alien."
And it involved a cicada-like creature,
but instead of being 13 years underground,
it was several million years underground,
and gradually picks off the people in the encampment one
by one.
It's a version of an alien creature
evolving, needing an evolution, and being
destructive in that evolution.
O'Bannon has this great line, says,
"I didn't steal from anybody.
I stole from everybody."
And one of the places that he happily
admitted that he stole from was a 1951 EC Comic
called "Seeds of Jupiter."
There's just eight pages.
It starts on an aircraft carrier,
and this orb crashes onto the aircraft carrier, breaks apart,
small orb, and it's got like, 50 seeds.
And there are three Navy guys on the ship,
and they're wondering what it is.
One of them's called Peach Pit, and he likes to put peach pits
in his mouth, and the other two guys
sort of trick him into putting one of these seeds
into his mouth.
And then they slap the guy on the back, it's all good fun
and he swallows.
He gets terribly sick.
He's dehydrated.
It's emergency surgery.
He's going die.
The Navy surgeon takes a scalpel,
cuts open his chest, everybody shocked,
and out pops this hideous, scaly, disgusting mini octopus.
And then it literally scamper across the deck
and plunges into the sea.
And they go, well, we're never going to see that again.
Guaranteeing that they'll be seeing that again.
The origin of "Death Rattle" was
in a farmhouse in Minnesota.
The story itself is some sort of astronaut
coming across an object.
It's the kind of statuary that you might see in a temple
in some ancient civilization.
In the process of sending it back, he drops it,
he breaks it, and he releases something
that's about to change his life in a very horrible way.
He is attacked by this thing that gets into his body.
He is effectively raped.
His eyes are gouged out and something goes into his head.
And from that point on, he becomes
a receptacle for something that's taking him over.
Something is transforming a person
into something very, very different,
very unfortunate, shall we say.
As a healthy young kid growing up in the Midwest in the 1950s
and '60s, there were things going on in the world
that didn't quite make sense.
Television was very safe and cleaned up,
so I clamored for things that I wasn't
getting from my civilization, from my culture.
Dan O'Bannon drew upon his experiences
as a person from the Midwest, reading comic books at the drug
store, like I did, and brought that kind of sensibility
and that outlook on the world to this major science
fiction horror epic.
The Midwest may seem tranquil and civilized and so forth,
but the fact is, you never know who's next door.
You never know who's going to roll into town, you know,
when the wheels are going to come off.
It's like we're all, you know, one cough, one kiss,
one scratch away from global disaster.
The influence of Lovecraft on Dan
was considerable.
The eggs lying dormant on the planetoid
is comparable to the cicada's million
year life cycle, isn't it?
Creatures coming out of the ground after being
dormant for millions of years is superbly
Lovecraftian, completely.
I think that's a pretty straight line between the two.
Lovecraft, in his own day,
was a pioneer of science fiction.
More specifically, his brand of horror fiction, which he
called weird fiction.
He felt that the essence of horror is the unknown,
and what is most unknown, it is what
is out there in the depths of space,
and what has happened in the far distant past.
Many of the features of "Alien" have a lot
to do with Lovecraft's short novel,
"At the Mountains of Madness."
This is a novel he wrote in 1931.
And it's something that he'd wanted
to write for a long time, because he
had been fascinated with the Antarctic since he was a boy.
An expedition from Massachusetts goes down there,
and come upon fossilized remains of alien entities, which
this expedition labels The Old Ones.
It's been dead a long time.
Fossilized.
In the course of this novel,
they become unfrozen and come to life.
They cannot be defined by normal human or terrestrial biology.
I have confirmed that he's got an outer layer
of protein polysaccharides.
Has funny habit of shedding his cells
and replacing them with polarized silicon.
In fact, the explorers find this immense city
that The Old Ones built hundreds of millions
of years ago in the Antarctic, full
of very bizarre architecture.
There are these alien creatures that
are virtually indestructible.
They simply cannot die.
How do we kill it, Ash?
There's gotta be a way of killing it.
How?
How do we do it?
You can't.
Classical science is based on the idea
that matter is dead and inert.
And this is true throughout Western consciousness,
from Prometheus and Pandora to Adam and Eve.
Space is empty and quiet.
Is it?
That's a perspective that we have.
And I think "Alien" is very much the nightmare
to that perspective.
And you see this in the Coptic jars where they move.
And you see this when you get out into the depths of space
where it's supposed to be quiet and dead,
and instead, you find the boogeyman.
I cannot think of a film out there that comes
anywhere close to "Alien" capturing that overall
Lovecraftian atmosphere.
That planetoid where the ship lands
is a prototypical instance of what Lovecraft
called the fear of the unknown.
It is a place completely uncharted by human expeditions.
No big budget studio wanted to put a lot of money
into making a pure Lovecraft film,
and so people like O'Bannon and John Carpenter and others
had to sort of use Lovecraftian elements
covertly to infuse Lovecraftian themes
into works that were not explicitly
based on any of the stories.
"Alien" didn't come out of a creative vacuum.
It drew on a whole heritage of American science fiction.
You could make the argument that "Alien"
certainly borrows from "It, The Terror from Beyond Space"
from 1958.
A crew of 10 goes to Mars to recover the lone survivor
of a previous expedition.
The rest of his crew has been wiped out.
Today, of all my crew,
I, Colonel Edward Carothers of the United States Space
Command, am the only one alive.
They obviously think he did it.
He says, no, an alien did it.
What are you thinking about?
Those nine bodies you left down there?
Yes.
But I didn't kill them.
Spoiler, it was an alien.
The alien stows away on the ship and starts picking
the crew off one by one.
It's hiding in the air ducts.
Bullets, grenades, nothing stops it.
What do we do now?
And it's killed by an air lock.
"The Thing" from 1951
is very present with the idea of this creature
that kind of hatches, that mimics,
that is in a working environment.
You can go to the 60s and look at "Planet of the Vampires,"
where they find this giant alien corpse.
Doesn't look like any ship I've ever seen.
Do you think it belongs to the Orients?
I doubt it.
I doubt if the Orients ever built any spaceships.
If they...
- ...we would have... - Look, Mark.
One of the films that "Alien" draws quite heavily from
is a 1966 film produced by Roger Corman called "Queen of Blood."
Listen.
We've been picking up these signals now for three days.
An alien distress signal is received by Earth.
Astronauts go out to find the source of the signal.
They land on a planetoid.
There's this strange sandstorm.
They go into an alien vessel.
They find a dead alien sitting in a chair,
encounter an alien who they're bringing back to Earth,
and the alien begins individually
attacking members of the crew.
And at the end of the film, the humans are left quite literally
holding a tray of her eggs.
Is this the beginning of the end for humanity?
John Carpenter roped in Dan O'Bannon
to helping him make the student science fiction
film called "Dark Star."
And it was about the crew of a spaceship...
this might sound familiar...
who then is assailed by an alien who
sort of stows away on the ship.
"Dark Star," that's
the comic version of "Alien."
One makes you laugh, and the other one's
going to eat you alive.
Carpenter wanted sole directing credit,
and O'Bannon felt he'd done enough to get cowriting credit.
So they had this kind of big falling out.
And O'Bannon's first thought is that, well,
I can go and do this on my own.
I will write a story, a science fiction story
that will beat "Dark Star."
Wouldn't you consider another course of action?
For example, just waiting around a while so we can disarm you?
No.
Because I'm not going to do a comedy,
I'm going to do it as a horror movie.
The ship will automatically destruct
in T-minus five minutes.
You bitch!
A lot of things bother me about "Dark Star."
We had an alien in it, which was a beach ball.
It was our second try on that alien.
I went away from "Dark Star" really wanting to do
an alien that looked real.
Jodorowsky saw "Dark Star," which is how he
found out about Dan O'Bannon.
Nobody in Hollywood was impressed with Jodorowsky.
So he said, well, to hell with you.
So he found Dan and said, come work on "Dune" with me.
If you want to look to the first magic,
I think you have to go back to Jodorowsky.
Jodorowsky was his guru.
He adored him.
I've never met him and I adore him.
Not only is there a synchronicity that connects
"Dune" and "Alien," there's almost an archetypal
counterbalance between the two.
If "Dune" is the Tower of Babel, "Alien" is exactly what
brings down that tower.
In the same way that "Alien" is the response to Prometheus
trying to steal fire from the heavens,
the movie "Alien" is also a response, energetically,
archetypally, to the Tower of Babel project that was "Dune."
When "Dune" collapsed in Paris,
Dan came back and actually crashed on the couch
in the house I was living in with a bunch of people
because he didn't have anywhere to go.
And it... he...
he was completely at a loss.
Eventually, he... we said, you got to go.
So somehow, he wound up on Ron Shusett's couch.
I went back to storage, got my typewriter out, took it over
to Ronnie Shusett's living room, and over the days and nights
of the next three months, Ron keeping me
alive by feeding me hot dogs.
We were both starving.
My wife was supporting us.
We had two rooms, that's all we had.
He made up a board game
called Poverty, sort of the opposite of Monopoly.
You've got to land on enough spaces to pay the rent.
You're out on the street if you can't afford to stay.
It's absolutely a scream.
In 1971, Dan was working on a story he called "Memory."
It's basically the first 30 pages of "Alien."
- I - had this opening.
I didn't know where it was gonna go.
I wanted to do a scary movie on a spaceship with a small number
of astronauts.
They're receiving a signal in an alien language.
They go down to investigate.
Their ship breaks down.
Dan called it "Memory,"
because some influence in the planet
gradually made them lose their memory.
But that's where this story ends.
He says, OK, I'm going
to give you the first act I've got to this original horror
movie I wrote.
I can't get past page 29.
Maybe you can help me do that.
So I read it.
29 pages was almost exactly like you saw in the final finished
product of the "Alien" movie.
It was fantastic.
Dan said, there's a key to everything.
The key is how does the alien get on board?
His concept was always it would come out of your stomach.
Dan had a very bad case of Crohn's
disease, which basically appeared while he
was filming "Dark Star."
So he was, what, 24, 25?
And it eventually killed him.
But it was an intestinal disorder
that sometimes felt like it was devouring him, I think.
Linda and I would sometimes have to take him
to the emergency center in the middle of the night
when the pain was so great.
And at the same time, he'd been having conversations
with Ron Shusett about wasps that procreate by planting
that eggs into other insects.
It was kind of all these things sort of come together and were
being sown into the script.
Ron in a way was really fascinated
with the idea of human beings being a host for...
for an embryo, that human beings were
the nutrition for an embryo.
He didn't have it in the script at all
that it would implant something in his stomach
and it would grow there.
So I went to sleep.
And I'm aware... it wasn't dreaming.
It was something else.
It was when your mind is in the subconscious.
I was wrestling with a property in my sleep.
I woke him up, I went right into his studio and I said,
I have it.
He said, what?
You have the answer?
I said, I have the answer.
The alien fucks.
He said, what?
What are you talking about?
I said, jumps on his face, it's a little creature then,
little baby squid-like, sticks a tube down his throat,
starts feeding him air, but he's implanting his seed.
And it's going to grow inside him
and burst out of his chest in the middle of the movie.
There are over a million
species of parasitic wasps.
That means that of all the animals in the animal kingdom,
the number one form of animal is a parasitic wasp.
There are wasps that like to make caterpillars their host.
They can also release chemicals that control
the behavior of their host.
And everything it eats is going to feed
these larvae that are growing inside of its body cavity.
On the outside, they look completely normal.
So John Hurt having breakfast, that's a caterpillar with
wasps inside of it.
And then once those wasps are ready,
they just blast their way out of their host.
And if that's lethal to the host, fine.
It doesn't matter.
Ridley Scott liked to show film footage of one species of wasp
in particular to his crew, and this is something
known as the wood wasp.
These wasps have to basically find a way
to stick their wasp bags inside of beetle larvae that
can be deep inside of wood.
So there are all these alien things
that parasites are doing all around us,
and scientists are trying to make sense of that in the way
that the crew Nostromo was trying to make sense of it
with the alien.
That's amazing.
What is it?
Why, yes, it is.
Um, I don't know yet.
Getting inside something else
and feeding on it from within is a really great way
to survive and evolve.
The alien is just fitting into this fundamental basic pattern
that you find on life, probably the most successful way
to be alive on Earth.
Giger really came from Dan O'Bannon.
Dan suggested him on a stroke of genius.
Giger consolidates every monster
from every mythology around the world into a single creature.
He embodies the mythic other.
Jodorowsky rescue
went to an opening of some of Giger's artwork in Paris
and brought the book back.
Dan looked at it and was just knocked dead by the artwork.
They were fantastic, sexual, mechanical,
biological amalgamation that was completely new.
It does express Giger's own admiration
for Lovecraft as a pioneer in envisioning creatures
far beyond human conception.
I think Dan and Giger met at the Lovecraft
level, that sort of creeping horror and unnamed horror
that you are free yourself to define.
Dan and Giger both had similar interests
in the "Necronomicon."
While Giger was doing paintings on that theme,
Dan was also writing his version of the "Necronomicon,"
which I still have.
Its unpublished.
It's a... a printed work.
Giger was a mystic.
He had his own mythology, his own cosmology.
He took like a bee from different flowers
to feed his own imagination and make his own honey with it.
He's the mythology of the future.
Of course, there is an Egyptian touch to "Alien."
Hans, his favorite culture was Egypt.
When he was five years old, he went with his sister
to the museum.
In the cellar, there was this mummy,
an Egyptian mummy, and Hans, he was quite afraid of it.
He was so deeply impressed by the black bones
and the black skin.
From then on, he went almost every Sunday.
He was absolutely fascinated by the pyramids.
In early storyboards,
you can actually see that the derelict was a pyramid.
And then later, Ridley Scott envisions this kind
of ritual area of ruins.
This ship is an emblem, is a remnant
of a formerly great culture, an ancient civilization
that's been long lost to time.
That tells us that we should think of the spaceship,
the derelict, as a temple.
I think the derelict is a crescent moon, and ultimately,
a symbol of death.
You see crescents all throughout the story.
In the original screenplay, the pods
were in a kind of pyramid structure called the temple.
That was removed because of budget considerations
in the production.
Three stages of the alien, you know,
where the hole was put into a pyramid, and on top of it all,
is Nut, the Egyptian goddess of the night
sky with stars in her belly.
And I think that was really beautiful.
You see being born from her the heavens.
And in many ways, this becomes an image
of the alien giving birth to this species
that could devour the heavens.
Nut represents the duad itself, the realm of the dead,
the realm of night, the realm of the stars.
This is where the Sun goes every night.
This is where the soul goes between life and death.
We are in the aliens domain in this whole story.
The first I saw of the "Alien" script was an early version.
Dan O'Bannon brought it to me.
And as I recall, the original title was "Star Beast."
I liked the script, and I wanted to make it, but I said to Dan,
this really requires a bigger budget
than what I'm able to spend.
Why don't you shop it around and see
if you can get a big budget.
If you can't get the big budget, come back to me
and I will buy the script and make the picture.
And a guy called Mark
Hager got this script into the pile at Walter Hill's office.
And it must have been a day when Walter Hill was at a loose end.
He happened upon "Star Beast."
Now, he thought "Star beast" was one of the worst
scripts he'd ever read.
He just thought it was awful.
But he stopped, page whatever, 30, whatever it was, and went,
what the hell?
When Brandywine showed interest and optioned "Alien,"
Dan was, of course, being a pest and insistent that they
use Giger for the creature.
This is the letter to Geiger from Dan dated July 1, 1977.
"Dear Giger, this week I've moved into offices
of Brandywine Productions where we
are beginning to make the design decisions for our film.
The producers, Gordon Carroll and David Giler,
and the director, Walter Hill, are
as excited as I am about the possibilities
of your lending your unique talents to our picture.
Look over the enclosed description of the designs we
need, then let us know how much you would
ask for the paintings involved.
When we agree, we send you a check for $1,000 as an advance
against future payments.
Yeah, well, Brandywine didn't want to pay the $1,000,
so Dan sent him a personal check for $1,000.
The face hugger, that was my first thing
I did for Dan O'Bannon.
He gave me explanation and drawings,
and he said that he's jumping on a big egg,
this egg is about that, so.
And I thought that must be quite a big monster, so I
did an enormous facehugger.
And then he was jumping, I thought
he could jump when his tail is like, it's curved like a spring
of the Jack in the box.
And from those sketches,
he went ahead and did the paintings.
And that's why the paintings say Dan O'Bannon's Alien,
because Dan paid for them.
Fox hierarchy come in to see some of the designs,
and they fired him.
Gordon Carroll finally said, this guy is just sick.
Get him off our lot.
Send him back to Switzerland.
We're having none of it.
So Giger was gone.
Fox is full speed ahead with Brandywine.
They're in preproduction Walter Hill is going to direct
the film, and all of a sudden, the studio
gets a call from Walter Hill, basically, where he says, yeah,
I'm not going to...
I'm not going to make this movie.
I never really believed in it.
I don't think it's that great, and I got another picture
I'm going to do here.
So good luck.
I'm out.
And that other picture was "Southern Comfort."
Not a bad movie.
Not "Alien."
I read the script, and I thought, well, this is
very solid, very interesting.
It's not really an actor's script.
There was no one else attached, and they're
asking me to get involved in what was then
a budgeted film for $2 million.
$2 million sounds like an Ed Wood movie.
So I turned it down.
Ridley and I had just finished off the do list.
There was this thing between Ridley
and I about sci-fi, and that I was the sci-fi fanatic.
And all the films that I used to show him,
he would completely disparage and say,
no, that's a pile of shit.
He had the script through the door called the "Alien,"
and I tried to say, well, let me read it, et cetera,
and for some reason or other, this time,
he said, no, no, no, no, I'll read it first.
And so he was in the next door office
where we made commercials, and I remember him
sitting there going, fuck me.
I got a call a few weeks later,
and they said, well, the budget's up to $10 million,
and a director named Ridley Scott is going to direct it.
I said, sold.
I got a phone call from Ridley saying,
get your backside down to Shepperton now.
So I drove straight down there.
When Brandywine brought Ridley on was when Dan
really got an ally in a lot of what
he wanted for "Alien" to be.
Very, very rare occurrence when the writer can
have that amount of influence.
We thought he was gonna
be the wrong director for it, and he
turned out to be the greatest visual stylist
since Kubrick's prime.
And he's such a visual guy
that the first thing he did was kind of to break it down
into storyboards, draws his own storyboard, extraordinary
artist, these fantastic images.
But what it doesn't really have is a clear idea of the alien.
It's not quite there.
O'Bannon says look, I've got this book.
When Dan showed Ridley
the "Necronomicon," Ridley instantly said,
yes, this is it.
I was shown the book, Necro...
Nomicom.
"Necronomicon," OK, in Los Angeles, in fact, by O'Bannon.
He brought it in.
And I nearly fell off the desk.
Said, that's it.
And why look further?
And so that's how I saw it.
It was as simple as that.
I've never been so certain about anything in my life.
There were many arguments at that stage.
Fox were really quite troubled.
But it was an early sign of how strong Scott was on that film
that he won so many battles.
And the most fundamental and important one
was he got Giger back on.
And I just thought it was stunning,
and I just stuck to my guns saying, no.
No, that's it.
They said, let's bring him in and talk some concepts.
I said, no.
You can't do that.
That's it.
We want to be shooting by so and so.
That's it.
Just to get this right is gonna be incredibly difficult.
This is beautiful, not just threatening.
And also has very sexual connotations.
So in everything, it's like a rather beautiful
humanoid biomechanoid insect.
Giger talks about intentionally drawing imagery
from his own dreams, that means coming
from a place where he didn't have
agency over what came to him.
When he painted, he was in this sort of trance.
He was possessed, like a seer, a blind seer.
Would go like that, and like in a Polaroid,
an image would appear and take shape.
Giger's images existed in a universe
of their own in Switzerland.
And they really found their place in space, the xenomorph
and the space jockey.
Giger's images really found a home in "Alien."
Part of what you're seeing with the character of "Alien"
is this gorgeous synchrony, this incredible synthesis
of multiple mythological characters,
Sekhmet, Pazuzu, Kali.
You can see the medieval dragon,
the Renaissance demons, the work of Heironymous Bosch.
And it's a synthesis that wasn't done consciously.
It was a synthesis that happened in the cauldron of stories
that was Giger's imagination.
This is a character with which all three of these artists
identified.
And because they all resonated with this pattern,
they were drawn together, this coming
from a much deeper place.
Such a brilliant choice that in the end,
you could say separates "Alien" from anything else was you've
got this extraordinary artist with this sort
of mind-blowing imagery, and you inject it
straight into the film.
In the hands of perhaps an aficionados who
loved horror movies and science fiction,
it might have turned out to be a completely different movie.
The triptych of Dan
O'Bannon, Ridley Scott, and Hans Rudi Giger
was the gift from the gods.
They were on the same wavelength.
And they were all thinking about this
is more than a science fiction adventure into the future.
This was just as much an exploration
of the ancient past, of the repressed
and forgotten that the alien represents.
When a story comes from multiple people,
and beyond the agency of multiple people,
it has a special existence.
It is a symbiosis.
"Alien" is a symbiosis of a few people
who had that sensibility.
If Dan had gone off and been in charge,
it would have been a different film.
It would have had more of the "Dark Star."
Ron Cobb would have been pure sci-fi, all perfectly done,
more Star Trekky in a way, or "2001."
I came on board and made everything look grungy and real
and like a space truck, you know?
"Alien", I would say we got the sets right.
The audience didn't ever question
that we just found some old space craft
and gone in and filmed in it.
That was different to the world that had gone before.
There was "Robby the Robot," there was "Barbarella."
It's both very tangible, and a completely different world
at the same time.
There's something almost perennial about the way
that yes, those ships are a completely different
environment from what we're used to now
and what we would have seen 1,000 years ago,
but human beings haven't changed,
and they still behave in the same way.
I place the hub of the wheel at Ridley,
because he's a visionary, and he knew what to do with this film
and how to marshal all these different elements
into "Alien."
He was running the camera,
during a lot of the lighting, everything
was going on at once, and he was just
conducting it so splendidly.
Ridley shot, yeah, a good 80% of the film,
and it was a panel vision camera.
I mean, these aren't light.
He wanted... he wanted anamorphic on purpose.
We were contained in a space, and that wide-angle lens
made it seem much more claustrophobic.
The costume designer who worked with Ridley
said to me once, you know, Ridley's
got a camera for a head.
He knows where to put the camera automatically.
When your hand-held, your breathing with the actors,
you're just part of what you're filming.
You're not distanced.
I think that's one of the best operated films ever seen.
It's not wobbly cam.
It was very beautifully photographed.
There's a great opening sequences where
the camera drifts through the empty Nostromo,
and he had this wonderful sense of movement in the frame.
Even though they're all in their cryo chambers,
there's a strange sense of life about the vessel.
It's all kind of presaging what's coming.
But it's a haunted quality that flutter in the frame.
And he talks a lot about the fact
that he never let the camera sit still,
that it has to keep moving, because you want the audience
on edge the whole time.
You never let the film settle down.
And even around the scenes where they're kind of just
having these kind of rather sort of squabbling sequences
between the crew, just normal ship stuff,
this there's slight air of agitation about how he frames
and how he moves the camera.
He's getting the heartbeat
of the film, this kind of growing throb that it has.
The reason he wanted the ship in one path
was he wanted to film like the Mary Celeste at the opening.
He was tracking around the ship, and there
were eerie little things going on,
the pecking birds that I put in there for Ridley,
and everyone said, you can't do that.
I thought it's a great idea.
The annoying thing, yeah, that was a Ridley realism,
the little nodding... the little nodding things.
He had a thing about that for whatever reason
back from childhood.
I loved it.
They were in all the cars in England.
Everyone had these blooming things that were nodding.
And they always was a joke.
You know, America had dice hanging and stuff,
but England had these nodding birds.
It's perpetual motion.
How do you illustrate that this thing is just carrying on,
and there's no human beings on it?
It just worked to me.
And that quite kind of going around the ship
and the eeriness of it, to me, said a lot.
The little papers rustling.
It's all illogical.
What would make these pages flit around?
Where's the wind coming from?
All that stuff.
Yeah.
It didn't make sense, but it did.
Yeah.
You know, it was like Ridley's vision.
His eye prevails over...
perhaps he'll forgive me saying... the scientific logic
of something, which is hence why we had rain pissing
down when Brett gets killed in that sort of chain
hanging room.
And I had several discussions.
Having worked on "2001," where everything
was meticulous and real, but rain in space?
You know, where... where's it coming from?
He said, I don't care.
It looks great.
It does.
That was it.
A thing that we got from Ben Burtt,
we got this sort of that
kept going throughout the film.
It was almost like a breathing,
a sort of an alien breath, breathing
in, exhaling and inhaling.
And I think it gave a kind of, just a kind
of feeling that something was breathing down your neck
all the time.
Kind of gave you an organic feel to the ship.
And then the computer
chatter that comes on in the helmet, it makes you think,
what's going on here?
Everything that Ridley built up was
building on this fear of the unknown,
of something happening.
Everybody's now waiting for something to happen,
but it doesn't.
When I started working on the film,
I just realized that this...
this film was going to be virtually in slow motion.
Everything was slow, except for these stabs that you've
got at various points.
And you thought, how can I sort of push someone
into a corner from the editing point of view,
and how far do you go before the audience says enough's enough?
There was a lot of, I think,
studio concern about the fact that it
was 45 minutes before anything, in their opinion, happened.
Before the facehugger jumps out of the egg and...
and hits John Hurt on the... on the old visage.
But that was its strength.
Indeed.
That really was its strength, to be
able to hold it back that long before you
really gave it to the audience.
They all found it very hard to cope with that.
Dan O'Bannon had conceptualized very early
on in his script that they wouldn't find the eggs
in the derelict spacecraft.
They would find the space jockey.
Extraordinary vision, and it came from Giger.
It was a Giger picture.
And it did something brilliant in the sense
that it showed you that the universe was extraordinary.
It was haunting.
It was almost certainly benign.
You felt almost sort of a loss when you saw it.
It was a kind of creature ossified to a chair.
You never quite understood what was creature what was chair,
and it was just brilliant.
It's another thing that Scott had to fight for.
Because Fox just went, well, it doesn't have any plot function,
you know?
They just go through the floor and find the eggs.
Ridley said, you can't just have a hole in the ground.
You've got to suggest something.
In the chest of what was then the space
jockey, which we now know to be the engineer, there's a hole.
Bones are bent outward, like he exploded from inside.
So you get an instance of what is a hint,
a tiny little drop of maybe what these... these things do.
And they lower Kane in on like, a wench.
Can you see anything?
I don't... a cave.
A cave of some sort, but I...
I don't know, but it's like the goddamn tropics in here.
And he sees in there this great sort of tableau
that Giger had actually painted.
When we got that onto that set and saw what they had done,
I mean, it was just... it was mind-boggling.
Everything was actual size.
There was no CGI.
So you were inside of these big huge caverns
that look like big vaginas, you know?
I mean, everything had a sort of a very sexual orientation.
So you've landed on the planet,
and you've had this ethereal sequence.
Kane is almost guided via the signal,
some voice is calling him onwards.
And it's kind of wonderful to think that there's
something there, you know, that the alien spacecraft
is calling him.
We get finally to the belly of the derelict,
and we get the egg chamber.
That's the wake-up moment.
That whole tactic of the beginning, the openness,
and the kind of hauntingness, suddenly, it
gets sucked inward.
Up until that point, the film has
been a kind of strange hybrid between a Kubrickian
serious science fiction and this almost kind
of fairy tale-like atmosphere.
It's kind of strange sort of hauntingness.
It's not, strictly speaking, entirely realistic
up until the point they have dinner.
The chestburster changes the complexion
of the film from a kind of epic to a kind of horribly,
horribly intimate and sort of claustrophobic and inward.
It's kind of an inward movement, even though the creature
comes out of him.
Suddenly, everybody's trapped.
Suddenly, the spaceship is small and confined, where before,
it being this kind of fast vessel.
And what the film does is make that hyper leap jump
into a primal survival story about many more things
than we realize.
Ridley always says that this... this
was the scene that stood out that
would make or break the film.
It was just some craziness that came out of Ron Shusett
and Dan O'Bannon's mind.
When you read it in the script, there's so many different ways
to approach it.
And Ridley was so constrained with the scene.
It's a very significant moment in film history.
The idea came from a painting from Francis Bacon.
Ridley Scott told me that this painting, it's just
a crucification, and one of the member
has just teeth and red flesh, and he liked to have
the chestburster like that.
I've always been very moved
by the movements of the mouth and the shape
of the mouth and the teeth.
And I like the, you may say, the glitter and color
that comes from the mouth.
When I was first went to Paris, I found in an old bookshop
a book on diseases of mouth.
The plates were hand-colored, and that it
had a tremendous effect on me.
The three studies
for figures at the base of the crucifixion
is the real point of departure for Bacon.
He thought of that picture as his first picture.
He was 35, and that's late, of course, for an artist
to have a first work.
This is his breakthrough work.
And it's full of contradictions, full of paradoxes.
How did suddenly this enormously challenging,
unbelievably horrific and ugly imagery arise?
The imagery is Christian.
And Bacon, even by then, was a very violent atheist.
You get the crucifixion in the title,
but it is a mixture of Greek myths and Christianity.
The Greek influence was very deep,
and I think he thought of himself
as somebody hounded by furies.
And I think he felt their talons in his flesh.
He said, oh, yes, the furies visit me very often.
The temple of Apollo at Delphi
was one of the major sanctuaries of the Greek world.
It is really important in the story of the furies.
The furies in Greek mythology are
avengers of crimes, usually committed by children
against their parents.
And they first appear in Aeschylus' trilogy
when Orestes murders his mother, Clytemnestra,
and her lover, Aegisthus.
When Orestes finds refuge at the temple of Apollo at Delphi,
the ghost of Clytemnestra tries to wake them up and rouse them
so that they can fulfill their purpose, which
is to hound down Orestes and take revenge
for Clytemnestra's murder.
The violence of the brings up the...
the... the images.
I mean, if you remember that wonderful translation
of one of his lines, "the reek of human blood
smiles out at me."
Well, what could be more amazing than that?
That immediately brings up the most astonishing images.
The furies are a common torment to a creator,
and here's why.
To create is inherently a rebellion against creation.
The fact that his father kicked him out
of the house when he discovered he was homosexual was
a lasting wound in Bacon.
I think the furies, to some extent,
are actually his father, his father
pursuing him, chasing him out of the family home
and branding him as an outsider.
This image came fully formed out of Bacon's imagination.
It's like Athena springing fully formed from the head of Zeus.
I see it as the monster coming out of Bacon,
and the monster coming out of the world.
Myths are thought to be messages from the divine.
When Ridley Scott puts this image of Bacon
into Giger's hands, that's an odd synchronicity.
And when you see the importance of the story,
and you're looking back on it with the power and magnitude
with which that story landed, all the synchronicities
that brought it to that point seem all the
more important and stunning.
It's crazy that these scenes that are... a word I hate using,
but they are so iconic.
It seems like that page should be...
you know, obviously, there should be
like the Constitution, right?
I mean, at some point at the end of "Citizen Kane," it says,
and the camera turns and focuses and the...
it's a sled, Rosebud.
Fade to black.
It's not like, you know, you know, you think and you go,
ta-da!
Right?
But the chest buster scene is just a one-page description.
Broussard's face is screwed up into a mask of agony,
and he's trembling violently from head to foot.
There's an incoherent shriek from Broussard, oh my god!
A red smear of blood blossoms on the chest of Broussard's tunic.
Their eyes are all riveted to Broussard's chest
as the fabric of his tunic is ripped open,
and a horrible, nasty little head the size of a man's fist
pushes out.
Everybody screams and leaps back from the table.
The cat spits and bolts.
The disgusting little head lunges, comes spurting out
of Broussard's chest, trailing a thick worm-like tail,
splattering fluids and blood.
Lands in the middle of the dishes
and food on the table and screws away while the men
are stampeding for safe ground.
When they finally regain control of themselves, it has escaped.
Broussard lies slumped in his chair, a huge hole
in his chest spouting blood.
The dishes are scattered and the food is
covered with blood and slime.
I'd make that movie.
Yeah.
The chestburster made everything possible for us.
It wouldn't have been the magic it was
without the chestburster scene.
Everything rested on that scene from beginning to end,
from getting the film made, to how the audience responds,
to whether those monsters continue to live
in our imagination today.
It's that moment we finally assert
that science fiction isn't only about minds,
It's about our bodies.
It's continuous with the directions
horror was taking over the preceding decade, right?
Horror is moving toward body horror,
through David Cronenberg in particular.
It's part of the texture of a film
that to me, is one of the most tactile movies ever made.
The sense of goo and grime, of things
spurting at us, the sense of heat and steam and sweat.
There is a tendency to think about the chestburster sequence
as a scene or even a moment.
But it really takes a while to build up to it.
The Nostromo moving in.
It's funny, isn't it, how all these, you know,
outer space shots now have a certain sort of like, you know,
generalization about them.
You know, when you think about "2001," how gob-smacking that
was at the time, and now we just take it completely for granted.
Why is it called the Nostromo?
The shuttle craft is called the Narcissus.
Narcissus and Nostromo are both words
that are used in book titles by Joseph Conrad, who wrote
about the evils of imperialism.
By allusion to the works of Conrad,
there's a strand within "Alien" which is about a concern
as to what humanity might find as it
ventures into the dark places.
In the case of Conrad, he's thinking
about the heart of darkness, the dark places of empire.
At the same moment that Ridley Scott is making "Alien,"
you have Francis Ford Coppola adapting "Heart of Darkness"
to be "Apocalypse Now," and explicitly commenting
on parallels between the Vietnam War
and the encounter with evil in the British and Belgian empire.
"Alien" directs our attention or reminds us
of the dangers of imperialism and conquest
of other places, what we might find
in these uncharted regions, especially if we attempt
to exploit those regions.
I hate to bring this up, but this is a commercial ship, not
a rescue ship.
Right.
It's not in my contract to do this kind of duty.
The 1970s was a time of economic downturn,
of threat, threat coming from new places.
Ash, can you see this?
Yes, I can.
I've never seen anything like it.
Particularly the
first stirrings of terrorism.
There were enemies within.
There was political corruption.
People had doubts, were feeling isolated,
were feeling disillusioned.
I say that we abandon this ship.
We get the shuttle and just get the hell out of here.
We take our chances and just hope that somebody...
Lambert.
...picks us up.
This is a consequence of Watergate.
This is a consequence of the Vietnam War.
This is a consequence of the political corruption in Europe.
And I think that that uncertainty
plays out in all kinds of movies from that period.
If you look at '78, you get Ted Bundy's captured,
John Wayne Gacy's captured, the Hillside Strangler's out there.
So there's this kind of new phenomenon
out there, right, the serial killer,
and what does that mean?
There's this kind of idea that there's
something out there that can be completely evil
and illogical and horrible.
And there's no reasoning with it,
and there's nothing you can do to really stop it.
At no point in the "Alien" movies,
and definitely not in the first one,
do you feel like what makes us human
is the thing that allows us to beat this creature.
I admire its purity, a survivor,
unclouded by conscience, remorse,
or delusions of morality.
There is a commentary in there about the way that things are
going right now, and about what we're doing as human beings,
and how we're taking those strengths,
and those emotions, those things that make us human,
and we're turning our backs on them.
You have in these, in the 1970s,
tremendous fear over what's happening
to the American family.
And I don't love you anymore.
Where you going?
I don't know.
Panic about divorce,
panic about family breakdowns.
Here's what I don't understand,
all the time... where are you... where are you running?
All the times I come over here, I can't understand
how you can prefer her to me.
You can't understand that?
No. It's a mystery.
Well, you knew my history when you married me.
Yeah.
I think you can
see that the crew of the space ship
operate like a kind of family, and there
are sort of family-type tensions between them.
Before we dock, I think we oughta
discuss the bonus situation.
- Right, right. - We think we ought...
One of the things that that strikes me
about this movie in general is the way
that it's connecting what's gonna happen with 80s movies
and what has happened in 70s movies.
Because sonically, it feels like a Robert Altman movie.
You have this scene of all of these characters
sitting around talking before they find out that Kane is OK.
How about a little something to lower your spirits?
Thrill me, will you, please?
The way that it's blocked and staged,
five or six people in the frame who are all doing something.
Just give me the short version.
People talking on top of each other
at once at equal volumes, where you have to sort of decide
who you want to listen to, and they're
all mumbling and talking extremely naturalistically.
It's doing the thing that cinema in America
was doing in the 70s, which was to try to point
the lens at a more naturalistic working class
reality of America.
The future of blue collar workers
is something that's wholly revolutionary.
And the movie, in a way, is about that.
It's about the exploitation of these blue collar workers
by the corporation.
Hey, Ripley, I wanna ask you a question.
If they find what they're looking for out there,
does that mean we get full shares?
Don't worry, Parker.
Yeah, you'll get whatever's coming to you.
Look, I'm not gonna do any more work till we
get this straightened out.
|
"Alien," to me, makes more sense if it were made in 1974,
'75, '76 than after "Star Wars."
"Alien" is a smaller movie.
"Alien"... I can't believe I'm saying this...
is a realistic movie.
Part of it was just
getting away from that sanitized view of space that
had dominated science fiction from the 60s and much
of the 70s, and coming to something
that felt like a real lived-in environment.
It was continuous with the world we
knew outside the movie theater.
Harry Dean Stanton
and Yaphet Kotto are the two most
working class guys on the ship.
And they, unwittingly maybe, but maybe intuitively,
know that if they just freeze Kane,
everything's going to be OK.
How come they don't freeze him?
How come you guys don't freeze him?
What I think we should do is just freeze him.
I mean, he's got a disease.
Why don't we stop it where it is?
He can always get to a doctor when we get back home.
Right.
They're speaking the truth in this kind of almost
Greek chorus kind of prophet way,
but nobody really wants to listen to them,
and they're just making fun of them.
Whenever he says anything, you say
right, Brett, you know that?
Right.
What they're making fun of them for
is that Harry Dean Stanton keeps saying right, right, right,
but it's because they are right.
And in the staging of this scene,
Dallas, the ship captain, is sitting closest to us,
and there's this wall of the two working class guys between him
and the two women, who are scientists and flight officers.
And when he gets frustrated with this sense
that, even jokingly, his authority is being undermined
by these two guys, who are his employees,
he crosses to the far depth of the shot
to talk to Lambert, who immediately
starts talking this sort of elevated, educated way.
Well, according to my calculations, based on time
spent getting to and from the planet...
Just give me the short version.
How far to Earth?
10 months.
And you can really see visually
in this incredibly subtle way that there really
is this war about the movement between the classes on the ship
and who has the right to be heard.
Right.
We now know that Hollywood in the 1970s
was a very oppressive place for women.
Do you find, in fact, that this, what
could be best described as your equipment, in fact,
hinders you perhaps?
You think about the sexism,
the misogyny that was implicit within the industry that
made this film.
You mean my fingers?
No, I meant your...
Come on, spit it out.
I meant your...
your figure.
My figure?
And there's no way of looking at "Alien"
without seeing it as a male fantasy of the kind
of oppression that have been being handed out to women
over the centuries, a guilt that was part of masculinity
in the 1970s, and should be part of masculinity now.
"Alien" has within it fantasies of male pregnancy, fantasies
of male rape, fantasies of male penetration.
And it's all tied up with that amazing chest buster scene.
I don't know how explicitly they
realized what they were doing.
I can't imagine that any studio would be like,
yes, you're making a male rape movie in space.
For sure, let's go for it.
It's wonderful that the unconscious works
in so many mysterious ways.
It feels like a summoning in a major way,
an accidental awakening of some repressed spirit.
The furies certainly speak for the repressed feminine.
And "Alien" certainly represents the repressed
feminine's retribution.
"Alien" touched a nerve with a lot of people
because it was talking about something,
that even in 2019, we're still not comfortable addressing.
The idea that "Alien" is addressing
the guilt that a patriarchal society feels
makes perfect sense to me.
We'll move in pairs.
We'll go step by step and cut off every bulkhead and every
vent until we have it cornered, and then we'll blow it
the fuck out into space.
Is that acceptable to you?
Ripley was created in 1979, and it's
insane that we don't have that many great female characters
since.
And especially in a genre like horror,
that's given so many female characters throughout time,
and yet, there's not one that strikes us
as being as developed and as complex and as interesting
as Ripley was.
And isn't it ironic that she ends up
being that way because she was written to be a man?
Ripley is the only maternal character
within her Promethean crew.
Her transformation gives us direction
for the transformation that we need to take as a culture
to avoid self-destruction.
She's a new example.
When we start off this sequence with Kane,
this very strange shot that's low angle,
and he's all the way to the side...
And maybe at that point, for want of a better term,
there's kind of this something's being buried inside you,
something's been planted in your brain,
and you're not sure what.
How you doing?
Kane seems all right.
He's even smiling a bit.
He's not at his best, but he's... he's looking a bit peaky,
but he's starting to kind of cough.
Before you realize what really happens,
your brain is already ahead of you.
Your brain is going, it's in him, and it's coming out.
One thing that he's certainly
taking advantage of is the incredible width
of the anamorphic frame.
The entire cast is in this one wide shot.
What could be safer than every single cast
member in a brightly lit white room in a horror movie?
Everything in that ship is so dark.
I mean, the light Ridley Scott uses is literally
the light from the torches.
That's it, right?
But that scene, oh my god, you could operate in that scene.
And you needed to operate in that scene,
but they couldn't save the patient.
You go to Ash's reaction.
I think that really, the key to the tension
here is tracking Ash, because he's always in opposition
to everybody else.
It's a very short shot, and you wouldn't notice it
the first time, but when you go back
and rewatch it you realize, he knows
that this is going to happen.
There's so many more single one shots of him
in this very strange off-kilter framing that really gives him
this sinister surveillance kind of vibe,
whereas most of the other characters, you're
seeing them in groups, because they're all on the same team.
You believe that this is because he has a better intuition
than the rest of them about how dangerous it is and he's trying
to protect them, but in fact, he's
trying to protect this baby monster that he's
allowed to come into the world.
This son of a bitch is huge.
I mean, it's like a man.
It's big.
Kane's son.
Ash is such a dick.
Ash, you hear or see anything?
When you think about it, he's not an authentic being.
So someone, a human person had to program him, educate him.
Not only is he supposed to look like a person,
he's supposed to pass as a person,
because the crew didn't know.
And that's what makes him the worse.
That misogyny was built-in.
Could kill him.
Ash looks at Dallas,
like, what do you think?
I'm willing to take that chance.
Just cut it off of him.
You take responsibility?
Yes, yes, I'll take responsibility.
Now get it off of him.
Ripley, on the other hand, is saying,
I am making this call.
It's my job to make this call.
Ripley, this is an order.
You hear me?
Yes.
I read you.
The answer is negative.
Inner hatch opened.
And he says, nope, that's not gonna happen.
I override you.
Where does he get the idea to penetrate this woman forcibly?
You know, but it doesn't logically
make sense for an artificial life form to do that.
He would choke her.
He would suffocate her.
The final choice that he makes is to just
put this woman in her place.
The programming... think, if we think about that,
if we really unpack that, it's so frustrating.
I hate him.
Another thing that I think
about is the tradition of dramatizations that happen
over dinners, which you can see in anything
from Chekov, to Ibsen, going back to Shakespeare.
And I can't help but think of "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner."
And in this case, it's the alien who's coming to dinner
and shreds the social fabric of the dinner table.
But the text and the subtext is totally about food, right?
The first thing that I'm gonna do when I get back
is to get some decent food.
I can dig it, man.
I'm telling you I've eaten worse food...
Even when it comes to...
there's this shot across the table,
and you can see the cat in the background, soft focus,
it's eating dinner too.
Usually you know what it's made of.
No, man, I don't want to talk about what it's made of.
I'm eating...
What's the food made of?
It's made out of your fucking insides of your body.
And there's just this cluster of noise.
And it's almost like you're hearing it from the point
of view of the chestburster.
It's inside of Kane.
It's fully conscious.
It's about to come through him.
It's first impressions of the universe
are hearing these indistinct voices
of all of these human beings.
It's like you're in this sort of sonic womb.
Now, from the laughter, comes of first sign
that something is wrong.
That is John brilliantly portraying the beginning
of the pain within him.
The reaction of everybody is so precise, so right.
As soon as this guy gets sick,
and he flips hand-held behind his head,
you feel like you're in this completely different world.
To me, Ridley's really pulling a Kubrick here.
You see this in "Clockwork Orange,"
you see this in "Barry Lyndon."
In all of these movies, you have Kubrick approaching
sets and characters with a very squared
off and rigid formal style.
But when violence happens, Kubrick
will drastically change the kind of visual vocabulary
of the scene.
It's this amazing choice
to not see Kane's face at the very moment
that he's going through the most agony.
It's incredibly unnerving, and it's
sort of a taste of what's about to happen
25 seconds later when it becomes one of the messiest scenes
in film history.
Hello, Roger, and cut, push out.
It was kind of looming
at us this scene, you know?
Everyone was a bit worried about it for sure,
because A, it'd never been done before,
and there was so much preparation around it.
Like much of the design work for the film,
it had taken a long while to get to where they were.
And I don't know how fully satisfied Ridley was.
I think the egg and the facehugger
worked very clearly for him.
You'd have the kind of witch's fingers element
of the facehugger, it's slightly kind of sort
of insectile nature of it.
But the chestburster was difficult, because it
had to appear childlike.
It had to at least kind of function.
It had to be able to come out of his chest,
it had to suggest the creature to come.
So in a way, the design of the chestburster was governed most,
I think, by function and practicality,
the need the sequence as much by the flamboyance of Giger's work
and then Scott's desire to create something extraordinary.
They couldn't solve the look of it.
Giger had a go at the chestburster,
and he says he never got it right.
It wasn't working.
I did some design they looked like chicken, something like...
like chicken without feathers.
But I was not happy with.
And then build up the thing, and it
looked like a small dinosaur.
It had versions that kind of looked like a turkey
that had been sort of plucked.
Just were laughable.
They couldn't come up with something that was genuinely
terrifying in its own right.
Roger Dicken went away
and developed it on his own.
He was able to make it work.
They had made this little puppet.
Frankly, it looked like a penis and...
with teeth.
And they had, like, they said, and we're
going to have it so that it'll just blow up,
and then these teeth will come out.
They were like, describing this.
It's just a thing.
We were going, oh, OK.
I mean, they were so excited, these puppeteer people.
They were... it was just hysterical.
The fundamental math of the chestburster sequence
is that the cast didn't know.
Course, this isn't quite true.
We knew that there was going to be a chestburster scene,
we just didn't know how it was going to be done.
John Hurt obviously knew,
so they just kept him plied with red wine and cigarettes all day
long.
They knew they were relying on his patience
to stay in that position while everything was set up.
The atmosphere on the set had a certain frisson,
you know, in the morning, because everybody
knew that this was filmically, a sort of major scene.
I don't think anybody had any idea that it would
become a kind of film classic.
Roger Dicken brought the chestburster to the set
in a carrier bag.
Blood was being loaded.
All the crew was sort of donning these rain jackets because they
kind of knew what was coming.
In the morning, Ridley said, let's put
some bits of gristle and stuff.
So I sent the buyer down to the abattoir
to buy a load of offal, which stank terrible.
And they put it in formaldehyde for you, but it was worse.
But we packed it round.
And Ridley was doing it himself too.
We were sticking it all around underneath.
We're all up in our dressing rooms
at Shepperton Studios.
Harry Dean Stanton is sitting in the hall
singing and playing guitar.
We're up there for hours.
We kept wondering, what the... what was going on?
But at a certain point in time,
some assistant is sent to bring them to set.
And what greets them isn't a vision, it's a smell.
Because over these hours, this kind
of offal and produce has just
been cooking under the lights.
Literally, you gagged when you walked onto the set.
It was so disgusting.
Ridley wasn't certain how that was going to happen,
how... how... how's that gonna manifest?
All this... this innards of a cow and the blood,
and thinking, my.
What they saw was John
Hurt spread out on this table with all of these hoses.
Everybody is covered up in suits.
The actors walk in, and they see that waiting for them.
And I saw them, their faces all sort of dropped.
They all sort of went like this, and their eyes got big
and roamed around all over this stuff.
We started to shoot the scene,
and I was told I'd get a little blood on me.
So we start to roll.
And then what happens is brilliant.
There's just this splat, almost like a bullet has hit him.
He puts a pause in.
You've got to kind of give the audience a chance
to realize what's happened.
The whole thing was really a trick in the cut.
And there was a cut to the other side
of the table where by which time I had been
replaced by a replica body.
His t-shirt pulled you know, tightly on it,
and then there's gonna be blood lines on high pressure pumps.
They're going to blow blood everywhere.
So we start to roll, and then all of a sudden,
Ridley shouts, cut.
Cut.
It didn't work on the first take.
There wasn't much of a chestburster.
It couldn't get through the damn t-shirt.
Well, we found ourselves leaning in to see
what the hell was going on.
Second time, it still didn't go through,
but it came up like that, and then
went down and covered in blood.
And the actors were all kind of looking like that and curious.
So it was a stroke of genius that it went wrong.
They still didn't know what was coming.
And it reset again.
Ridley just said to Nick Allder and to Roger Dicken,
just get it through this time.
And they added more blood, more pipelines.
And this thing goes up through, splat.
They fire all the pumps.
When it went through,
I mean, that blood just went everywhere.
It was just exactly what Scott wanted.
It was just this absolutely immediate visceral response.
When it happened, of course, it stills you.
So that's how it manifests, huh?
God!
And again, Nick, and again!
I had leaned into a blood jet.
That little blood shot me square in the face.
And that's when I jumped back and I went, oh my god.
And my knees hit the back of those banquette
where we were all sitting, and it flipped me upside down.
And I said, oh my gosh, we're still shooting.
So I rolled over and I got back up,
and I ran around and got back into the scene.
So there were different... there were different reactions to it.
And action.
Blood.
Enough.
Push it out.
Pump it.
Roger Dicken had
built little lungs in as well.
It was a lot of stuff going on under the table
to make it look so real, hung bits of stuff all over it so
that it looked like it broke through the flesh
and heart and muscles.
That was part of Ridley wanting this to be unquestionably real.
And I think that scream, when it screams,
there's the Bacon shot.
There's something really strange in those paintings that
connects to the phobias that we carry with us to this day,
and they come from our ancient past.
So I think, you know, particularly
the "Incubus" is one that was struck
me when I read the script.
Because that chestburster it comes out and sits there
for a moment and screams, and that's just as you
imagine an incubus would do.
It would come out, sit, and scream at you.
I loved that image so much, and what
I see in it is something that's like a material
object trying to come to life.
And that's what "Alien" is.
Slow.
OK, and the head back.
Slow, Go!
Shit.
Great.
Cut it.
Save the blood.
When I'm watching the chestburster scene
on the Nostromo, and I'm thinking about how brilliantly
staged it is because it doesn't take place in a dark corridor
with a guy all by himself.
And then decades later, Ridley Scott
restages a chestburster scene and does it exactly in that way
that's so much more tropey.
In the dark, a guy alone being watched over
only by the malevolent David, and with this smoke and lights
behind him, it's almost like it's the first draft
of the original scene that was rejected
and then for some reason, revisited later.
But on the other hand, there is something really
delightful if you give into it.
I feel like Ridley Scott can't find a better way
to talk about his own mortality than by going back
over and over to the origin side of the height of his powers
and the height of his creativity.
If you look at where Ridley Scott is currently
taking the "Alien" cycle, he's using
it explicitly to explore questions
of where did life come from?
What does it mean to be human?
He seems fascinated by the idea that the child would destroy
the parent, that the created would destroy the creator, that
things we make come back and destroy us, which I suppose
are variations on the Frankenstein story.
But the repeated recurrence of this in his work
suggests, I think, a major autistic obsession, actually.
People often talk of Hollywood as the dream factory
but I think the dreams that Hollywood puts on the screens
are not just the dream of one person,
they're collective dreams.
Cinema is a window on our collective unconscious.
And in that way, I think that "Alien"
is an incredibly important window
on what people were thinking about as of the late 1970s.
When you look back an alien 40 years later,
it seems prophetic of where we've gone.
We're still going in the same direction
that it seemed to be indicating at the time, which makes
the world of "Alien," if not probable, at least, you know,
looking like a possibility in the way
that "Star Wars" could never be.
The last act of "Alien" is escaping self-destruction.
That's the myth of our times.
Part of what makes "Alien" so powerful is it's
so much more than an allegory.
It taps into a deep set of patterns that can
mean many, many, many things.
I don't think we can get to the bottom of "Alien."
Like a piece of sand vibrating in a somatic experiment,
in touch with something deeper, Dan O'Bannon must have been
on the frequency for this myth.
He seems to have been a stenograph for a larger song.
My husband was out of time, in a way,
out of specific time.
But he lives on.
And when he was dying, that's what I said to him.
He was not conscious.
I said, you moved the world.
You did it.
You moved the world.
And he did.
In a way, I don't think Dan O'Bannon is finished yet.
When he died, I had a strange feeling
that he'd gone back to the future from whence he'd come.
And there's still things there that are emerging from him
and things that I have that are just
now becoming relevant today.
And there's more there.
There's more there.
Don't ask me why he had this connection
to the past and the future, but he sure did.
He came from a place that had no telephone or television
and went to the stars.
Went to the stars.
It's inexplicable.