Wooden World: Vincent Ward’s Alien III

After three years, three different screenwriters and an assortment of drafts and directors, Alien III finally began to take some crude sort of shape. Plot and design elements were beginning to take hold, and though Ward’s script was never made per se, many of the decisions made here would ultimately affect or appear in the final movie. The decision to kill off Hicks, Newt and Bishop was made here, as was Ripley’s isolation among an imprisoned monastic order, her Alien pregnancy, and a denouement featuring a final sacrifice.

Still, progress was glacial and expensive. The pressure to deliver a worthwhile successor to Aliens was running high. The production had recently lost its director, Renny Harlin, who felt frustrated by a lack of creative control and went on to direct Die Hard 2 instead. For a moment the film was mired in production hell yet again, but when producer David Giler saw The Navigator: An Odyssey Across Time he was impressed enough to seek out the film’s co-writer and director, New Zealander Vincent Ward, and quickly hired him to direct their hindered Aliens sequel.

“At the time I was working on Map [of the Human Heart] with my co-writer,” Ward told The Independent in 1993. “I was broke, I’d spent a lot of money on going to the Arctic and interviewing anthropologists and dam-buster bomber pilots, and we were driving each other crazy. I was living in this basement in Australia, and the phone call came and I turned it down. But then they rang me back and said, ‘We’ll send you the script anyway.'”

But Ward was unimpressed. “I read it, I said ‘no’ again. And then they rang me back a third time, and said, ‘You can change the script if you like.’ Well, by this time that basement was driving me crazy, so I said yes just to get out.’

Free of David Twohy’s prison-station script, Ward was on a plane for Los Angeles when he struck an idea for the film. “After The Navigator I wrote a book [Edge Of The Earth],” he told Empire magazine in 2009, “and started exploring more medieval imagery, and I came across engravings and so on that I hadn’t seen before. One of them was of a devil being cast out of someone’s mouth. So on the plane over some of these images came to mind. By the time I got to LA, I had a complete story.”

He explained to The Independent that “It struck me that it would be possible to take the elements of the Alien story and overlay a whole Christian mythos on it, and it would fit perfectly. So these monks see a star in the East, which is Ripley’s escape craft, and it crashes down in a lake, and you carry on from there.”

Somewhat to his surprise, the producers liked his bizarre idea. Ward’s story would take place on a quasi-medieval wooden orbiter: Lindisfarne in space. “It was like a Bosch world,” he explained, “It had a lot of technology at the centre of it, controlling basics like gravity and air, but it was all rotting, and the surface world was like second century AD Turkey, controlled by an ascetic sect of monks whose buildings and machines were all made of wood.”

RELIGIOUS COLONY ARCEON
——————————————-
POPULATION: 350 exiles
CRIME: Political heresy
~ Alien III, by Vincent Ward & John Fasano

“It was sort of a retro film,” Ward explained. “[Ripley] was with monks in a strange wooden orbiting vehicle… With a monk commune, in a wooden orbiting satellite, really. [The monks] decided to do everything the hard way, because they were monks, but they did have basic technology so they could survive. Then, in a world where people believe in devils – where she doesn’t, comes the Alien. I think it would’ve been quite amazing.”

The Alien, the devil and the dragon: Ward wasn’t the only person who had thought of the Alien in an historical and mythological manner. In an interview with Don Shay, Ridley Scott commented:

“We’d always talked about and played around with the idea of the absolutes – of good and evil. And if the Alien was really … what was it? Was it the face of the Devil; was it the face of the demon? Because if you look at historical manuscripts, engravings, and pictures, from wherever they come from whether; it’s China, whether it’s Europe, whatever the nationality, there’s a kind of continuity of the idea of the demon, as there is about the dragon.

So, [Alien was] like taking off the mystical aspects of it and saying it’s nothing to do with [myth]; it’s a biological fact, it’s a biological creature, and it’s been here before.”

Despite its strange take on the Alien series, those involved with crafting the film were genuinely interested in exploring Ward’s angle. “I liked him immediately,” said the film’s production designer, Norman Reynolds. “He was very enthusiastic; he had lots of ideas. We looked at some images he was really excited about: the fires of hell, all that sort of stuff. It seemed a really interesting way to go with Alien.”

However, it is also true that many couldn’t wrap their heads around how a satellite made of wood could sustain life. Vincent Ward explained that the satellite was not made of wood, only covered in it, like scaffolding that had grown outwards from a technological core. The orbiter was originally quite ordinary, but it was modified it to resemble an ancient abbey. The monks themselves were to be exiles from Earth, and included political criminals among their ranks.

“What if you had like a sort of powerful sect on Earth (in the future of the Alien movies) who reject all technology beyond a certain date. So the ruling forces say to the sect, ‘Okay, you wanna live this way? We have an old satellite – huge thing. We’ll tow it into outer space and you can just live there on your own.’

They just give them a place to live where they know inevitably they’re gonna die. The sect agree, but they believe in having an environment that looks archaic. Within that environment -a huge, round satellite about a mile in diameter- you have maybe 16 floors, each one about 100 metres high. It’s layered like an ant’s nest, or bee’s nest, and each layer has been largely clad with huge areas of sculpted wood. They can grow wheat there, and even have windmills and orchards. In a way it’s like a monastery.

The satellite [named ‘Arceon’] has a range of technologies that allow it to survive in outer space: it has a means of dealing with gravity, and a means of dealing with air, and it has a low surface atmosphere. It looks like a meteorite on the outer surface.’
~ Vincent Ward, Empire magazine, 2009.

The wooden world under construction. Wooden panels and struts slowly envelope a technological core; the source of the station’s life-support systems and gravity.

Before we get to the story synopsis, let’s take a look at (and get out of the way) one of Alien 3′s most infamous legacies, the killing of Aliens’ characters, and where it all began, right here, in Ward’s story.

Ward’s script begins with a scene familiar to Alien 3 viewers (the evacuation of the Sulaco) though with some key differences. The Sulaco is under siege by Aliens, and Ripley and Newt are awakened from hypersleep. They record an SOS message before abandoning the ship in an EEV:

“…taking pod four. The crew of the SS Sulaco and all Marine commandos are dead. Ship’s sensors have interrupted the hyper sleep cycle. An overlooked Alien egg has hatched. Bishop and Hicks have been killed. Xenomorphs have infested the cruiser. Newt and I are taking pod four. The crew of…”

As we know, the EEV crashes, killing Newt but sparing Ripley.

The script does not provide any explanation for the appearance of an Alien egg aboard the Sulaco, which remains a point of contention for the third movie even today. The script explains that Hicks and Bishop are subsequently killed by “Xenomorphs”. No real details are provided.

Ward’s decision to kill off Aliens’ supporting characters had, for him, a degree of emotional logic that would run throughout the film. Though he was apparently enamoured with Cameron’s parental theme, he wanted to give the film a parental theme of his own, supplanting Newt with an Alien embryo and adding nightmarish visions of Ripley’s dead daughter, Amanda (‘Kathy’ in this script, somehow). “One of the first things I wanted to do was kill [Newt] off,” Ward explained. “She kind of annoyed me.”

Ward explained that his motivation for killing Ripley’s adopted ‘family’ was necessary to explore the mindset of someone suffering from loss and their subsequent quest for personal redemption – not unlike Ripley’s previous arc in Aliens. “You can’t keep living your life fighting creatures without much of a family,” said Ward. “How would you survive? Families give us something. We’re communal, social creatures. So Ripley’s big regret is that she missed out on a personal life. She seeks some sort of strange atonement for not having had a relationship with her daughter.”

Ripley’s impregnation was to be a mockery of her parental desires. Her family is destroyed and then replaced by the Alien. “It was effectively father to the embryo inside her,” said Ward, “and so therefore would not want to destroy her during its gestation.”

Her pregnancy would also inflict her with nightmares and strange hypnagogic visions of the Alien and her dead daughter. In one sequence, the Alien leers at her and sizes up almost for a kiss. “The thought of that creature licking at her would be truly frightening and kind of wonderfully revolting, sexual and protective at the same time, even if it was only in her nightmare. It would make you feel she had gone to hell and back, and when she finally kills it the satisfaction would be very primal.”

The image of the Alien leering in at Ripley, lips pared, tongue extended, later became one of the film’s strongest images, and was even featured in promotional materials and the trailers.

Now, on to the plot of the film…

SYNOPSIS

Cast of Characters

Major characters
Ellen Ripley – returning from Aliens.
Brother John – one of Arceon’s monks. Forty-ish, bookish, solitary. A proto-Clemens.
Brother Kyle – another monk. Black, early fifties. A proto-Dillon.
Mattias – Brother John’s grizzled dog.
The Abbot – leader of the monastery. Appears kindly but is authoritative. Can be considered Ward’s equivalent to Superintendent Andrews.
Anthony – an android banished to the monastery’s sub-levels.

Other named and unnamed characters feature, but are either insignificant to the plot or are mentioned offhandedly.

The movie begins with the intention of beguiling the viewer into thinking they are watching a medieval scene. Inside a glass furnace several monks blow and shape the molten glass. One monk, Brother Kyle, observes one of his fellows, Brother John, entering the works, and welcomes him with song. John does not reply. Instead he tends to a burned monk. Kyle continues to mock him with song:

Brother Kyle: Tend you quickly he will, with bottles from a shelf.
But heals not, so easily,
The ills which plague himself.

Brother John stops stirring.

Brother John: (to Kyle) Enough.

Despite Kyle’s jibs and John’s impatience, they are in fact quite amiable with one another. Kyle compliments his treatment of the burned monk, but John opines that he is no ‘Father Anselm’, a recently-deceased monk who was the Abbey’s Physician; a position that John himself would like to obtain.

We find out more about John in the next few scenes. The film assumes him as its protagonist. We see his living quarters, his “old worn out” dog, Mattias, and also John’s predilection for the library and several of its tomes. The Abbot appears in the cordoned area of the library, but allows John to borrow the book due to his treatment of the burned monk in the glassworks. “Father Anselm was… an unexpected loss,” says the Abbot. Then he adds, with an insinuation of a future promotion: “You’ll do fine.”

John takes the book at the Abbot’s insistence and leaves to find somewhere else to read. We are then given a tour of the wooden abbey as John and Mattias walk through it.

There is the bell tower with its ropes and cogs; the abbey floors thick with sandy dust, and then the films reveals its most infamous environment:

The door has opened onto the surface of a planetoid!

The curving horizon broken only by the very top of the Abbey bell tower poking through the levels below. Smoke curls from vents set into the surface. Sunken areas of the planet’s surface are seas.

This is Arceon. A man-made orbiter. A shell of lightweight foamed steel, five miles in diameter.

Constructed by The Company on Special Order, with the habitable levels within finished in whatever material suits its end user.

Here, on the top of the world, John and Mattias revel in the “celestial light” and the thinner, but fresher air. They walk to the shore of an artificial sea, where they sit and watch the stars.

The sea on the roof of the world.
By Vincent Ward and Stephen Ellis.

After a moment, John begins to read aloud to Mattias. The book is the memoir of a monk living in a thirteenth century monastery that had been beset by the Black Death. “I stayed as long as I could bear it,” John reads, “then with my dog [I] fled.”

Rather ominously, the book’s text was finished by another hand, hinting that the author did not survive. John, somewhat disturbed, closes the book. It will prove to be prophetic, but for now he is again looking to the heavens.

Suddenly, he sees:

One of the stars.
Brighter than the rest.
Moving.
Fast enough to leave a faint trail.
Across the stars.
And down.
A comet…

John and a band of nearby monks all gather to watch the comet’s descent. It takes days to approach, but by the time it roars overheard three hundred monks have gathered on the surface to observe it. The comet trails fire above them. “John holds up his hands – to touch a star – skin blisters as it passes over him.”

The comet crashes in the lake. John is the first there, leaping into a coracle to row to the impact site.  He finds that the comet is in fact an emergency escape vehicle. He climbs in despite the protestation of the other monks. Inside he finds blood, shredded clothing, the head of a child’s doll, and two cryotubes – one smashed and empty, the other still harbouring its occupant. Ripley.

Brother Kyle boards the EEV and together he and John remove Ripley from her pod and carry her into the coracle. Kyle admonishes John for entering the vehicle but the latter is too amazed by the technology within to care.

Ripley is left to recuperate whilst the monks tow her EEV from the water. Ripley later opens her eyes to find John asleep in her room, having kept watch over her. Suddenly, an Alien emerges, glides over to her, and lays one hand over her abdomen and cocks its head. “The implication is clear,” reads the script. She screams – but it was all a dream. John eases her back to bed, where she again falls unconscious.

When she comes to she scans her surroundings and looks outside where she sees:

Garden of Earthly delights…
Monks labouring under a beautiful, celestial blue sky…
picking apples, fishing on the water on small inland lakes,
working with hammer and saw on small wooden cottages. Lyrical.

But the environment is quickly revealed to be a facsimile:

Workers on a scaffolding
with crude brushes at the end of poles paint the sky blue.
The abbey, the cottages, the fields outside her window are all on one level – inside the planet!
The vaulted ceiling, painted to look like the sky with huge glass ‘windows’ to allow the sunlight in,
is actually the underside of the planetoid’s outer shell.

The Abbot enters her room. Ripley looks around and, to her relief, finds John there also, standing in the doorway behind the Abbot. John’s presence and demeanor comfort her, not unlike Clemens in the final movie. The Abbot introduces himself and explains the purpose of the monastery and the monks within it:

“This is the Minorite Abbey within the man-made orbiter Arceon … We are a monastic order that has renounced all modern technology. We live the old way. The pure way.

Ripley then asks for Newt, and is told nobody other than herself was found. She then panics about an Alien infestation, and attempts to explain the events of Aliens, but the Abbot cuts her off at the mention of Earth – “Not possible,” he says, explaining that:

“When we left Earth seventy years ago, it was on the brink of a New Dark Age. Technology was on the verge of destroying the planet’s environment. A computer virus was threatening to wipe away all recorded knowledge. There didn’t seem to be any way it could be averted. In the almost forty years since we were towed out here in hypersleep, the news that came with occasional supply ships only got worse. Finally, the ships stopped coming. We had to resign ourselves to the fact that worst had come to pass, and the Earth no longer existed.”

Ripley continues to rave about the Alien, and the Abbot’s patience evaporates. He demands she say no more, and assigns two “burly monks” to guard her door. Entry is forbidden, even to Brother John.

That night John falls asleep in the library. Another monk barges in, hysterical, and tells him that Sandy, his sheep, is ill. “All creatures great and small,” John mumbles, grabbing his medical kit.

When the two monks arrive at the barn, Sandy the sheep is convulsing in agony. The following scene could have come straight out of Eric Red’s Alien III script: the sheep convulses and the two monks watch as it explodes in a shower of gore and an infant Alien emerges from the carcass:

“It shows the characteristics of the animal in which it has gestated. Tiny razor sharp teeth and black, glass-like eyes peer from an elongated head covered with downy, but gore-matted WOOL. A quadruped, its shrunken hind legs struggling to free itself from the cooling morass of intestines.”

The hysterical (and bereaved) monk attacks the Alien with a pitchfork. A fire erupts, and the Alien is thrown into the flames. John and the monk leave in shock while the barn collapses like a pyre.

Meanwhile Ripley, who can see the barn burning from her quarters, leaps out of bed only to be assaulted by four burly monks, who escort her to a tribunal overseen by the Abbot. The monks accuse her of bringing a pestilence to the satellite, though Ripley’s warnings about the Alien still go unheard. The Abbot decides to have her interned in the bowels of the monastery, which the other monks promptly carry out. Afterwards John corners the Abbot and protests, but the Abbot brushes him off.

Meanwhile, in Ripley’s subterranean cell, a face appears in a hole in the wall: “bright, wrinkled eyes beneath a snowy white crew-cut” peer at her from the cell next door.

We cut back to John who, after having an apparent epiphany whilst researching medieval depictions of Satan, decides to approach the Abbot once again – and spies him ordering John’s silent arrest. The monk who alerted John to the sheep’s condition is likewise condemned and taken away, and John susses that the alleged offence is having witnessed the birth of the Alien in the barn. For now, John decides the best option is to approach Brother Kyle in the glass-works. Unfortunately, John’s frenzied state alerts the other monks, and he flees the scene.

He decides to enter the subterranean levels of the wooden world, and takes a secret passage down.

LADDERS

Extending down through huge open areas beneath the upper level.
Past vast underground viaducts held up by wooden rafters.
Beyond that – a great underground sea that marks the centre of
the planet – below that, the cells.
And Ripley.

At this point we cut to one of the script’s better known set-pieces: the bathroom.

As the Abbot and a ‘Bald Tribunal Member’ occupy the stalls, an Alien reaches up and yanks the latter down through the hole in the ground, and drags him under the floorboards. The toilet’s faucets and lavatories “reject a torrent of gore! Blood and viscera spraying the wall – converting the Abbey into an abattoir.”

Concept of the Abbey’s bathroom.

The script does not tell us where this Alien comes from – the sheep-Alien having been killed in the barn. There is no insinuation at all that they are the same creature. If it stowed away on the EEV, there is no indication in the script. Perhaps its appearance was something to be sketched out more thoroughly in a later draft; still, it shows the carelessness of the plotting.

We catch up with Ripley and the head in the hole. The white-haired man is Anthony, an android. Anthony urges Ripley to eat and restore her strength, then to fight back against the monks. They are interrupted by John, who bangs on the cell doors in search of Ripley. He opens Anthony’s cell and enters. The two know one another.

John: Anthony? Thought you dead fifteen years.
Anthony: Made too good for that. What’re you doing?
John: I – I’m looking — the Abbot –
Anthony: What? You look like you’ve seen the devil.
Ripley (o/s): He has.

Ripley deduces that John has seen the Alien, and demands that he leave. She invokes the slaughter of the Nostromo and Sulaco crews: staying with her means certain death. “It never ends,” she says.

This conflict is set aside, and we cut to John, Anthony and Ripley working through the subterranean corridors. They discuss the nature of the Alien along the way:

Anthony: It must be able to take on some of the characteristics of the animal it grows in. Maybe they are from some sort of aggressive soldier race – warring parties drop the eggs on opposing planets-
Ripley: And the Alien takes on the form of the creature that finds it, assuming that animal is the dominant life form on the planet. So when it gestates in a man-

Ripley shudders at the memory.

Anthony: It’s a biped. In a sheep or cow, a quadroped.
Ripley: Shit. I just didn’t think it could do that to animals.
John: Wait a minute – I thought you were the expert on this monster.
Ripley: Is that the only reason you came to get me out? Because I knew about this thing?
John: Yes. I mean no. I mean, that was part of it. Look. I never thought you were wrong. I was wrong not to say anything. I was afraid to speak up. It’s hard to be a monk, you know?

John also explains that Anthony was a spy placed on the wooden world by The Company, and Anthony reveals that the world is not intended to be a monastery, but a prison, and that its inhabitants are all political exiles. John and Anthony both elaborate:

John: The order was more of a counter-culture, a reaction to the technology that was beginning to take over everyone’s lives. It was a simple enough idea – read, don’t watch disc. Walk, don’t pump more carbons into the air. The earliest members denounced technology. Started to collect the remaining books. Nobody would have noticed if it hadn’t been for the virus.
Ripley: Your Abbot talked about that. The New Plague.
Anthony: A computer virus. A bad program. By the time the corporate structure was trans-global, all the world’s data storage systems were linked. It spread through two countries before it was stopped.
John: After a scare like that, thousands flocked to our retreat. People started clamouring for written information.For our books. They abandoned the modern ways-
Ripley: I think I can see how this comes out. They abandoned their possessions.
Anthony: This was a threat-
Ripley: To the Company.
John: A movement to live simply was quickly twisted by Federal agents into a political movement against the Company-controlled world government. Too much was at stake.
Ripley: Too much profit.
John: We were sentenced as political dissidents. This orbiter is our gulag. All the men were packed up with all our books, and towed into space. Ten thousand men. The eldest died very quickly.
Ripley: The Company had a sense of irony. Sending you out on this wooden tub.
Anthony: I was placed among them as a sensor. Keep tabs on the movement.
Ripley: So how’d they find out about you.
Anthony: I told them. After the supply ships stopped coming I saw no point in keeping up the charade. Since I was a sort of walking reminder of technology, they cast me down.

The scene certainly illuminates the strange concept of monks in space, though it does carry a very bizarre notion of political sentencing, and Ripley’s interjections do nothing but make it clear to the audience that corporatism and capitalism are still pressing themes in the series, (Weaver would complain about the quality of Ripley’s dialogue. More on that later.).

Ripley is quick to inform John that the Earth was not destroyed after the exile of the dissidents, but he still seems doubtful. She further reminds him that was was right about the presence of the Alien. They discuss the layout of the monastery, which is split into three ‘levels’: Heaven, a sea, and Hell below it. They also discuss the need for, and lack of, heavy artillery, and the presence of technology in the orbiter:

Ripley: This is a man-made planet. Something has to be circulating your air, your water.
John: God?
Ripley: Please.
John: I don’t know, I just took it for granted.

Anthony announces that there is technology in the satellite, a room where fresh air and water is produced; it is the “heart and lungs of Arceon.” The three resolve to head there, and Ripley announces that she will help the monks escape the Alien, but will avoid confrontation with it. “I’m not going to fight this thing to end up alone again,” she declares.

At this point she feels the first pangs of the Alien embryo inside of her. As she does in the movie, she writes off her bad turn as an effect of interrupted hypersleep.

Back to the Abbot, and it seems that the Alien has run amok throughout the monastery. The landscape is ablaze, the monks try to flee, and the Abbot, drenched in blood, watches as a procession of monks are stalked through a wheat field by the Alien, which reveals itself to be chameleonic. The Alien rips through the monks “like a scythe through wheat”, and soon enough the entire field is consumed in fire. The Alien then attacks the Abbot, and we get a closer look at its camouflage abilities:

THE ALIEN

Rises out of the grass in front of the holy man.
Slowly rises up to its height of almost three meters.
Its long, smooth head is no longer black and slimy.
It is golden.
Its cable-like arms are sheathed in a straw-like covering.
It has adapted to the environment of the wheat field. Its now
grass-like lips draw back into a ghastly parody of a smile.

The Abbot screams and runs.

Back to the trio, and Ripley muses on the Alien’s apparent vendetta against her. She deduces that the Alien stowed away on her EEV and killed Newt, but spared and (somehow) impregnated her as a sort of revenge. “It’s almost like he’s playing with me,” she says. “Maybe they have some sort of race memory. Maybe he knows what I did to his ‘mother’. That’s why he didn’t just kill me. That would be too easy. He has to torment me.”

They reach a corridor lined with prison cells. For some reason, Anthony is winded, and John reaches out to help him climb a ladder. Anthony suddenly experiences a vision:

He is standing in an open field, sheep grazing peacefully at his side.
Suddenly he is attacked by a horde of medieval demons.
Fish-faced demons. Man-headed bird demons.
They fly about him, grab hold of his limbs.

Anthony flails and struggles against John’s grasp, imagining that he is a demon and that Ripley, who tries to help, is the Alien. Anthony falls unconscious but quickly awakens. He explains that the visions are manifestations of all the data (specifically, medieval imagery) he has absorbed during his time in the monastery.

They eventually come across the Abbot, who is in shock over the Alien’s attack. He denounces their idea of reaching the technology room, but joins them anyway. The technology room itself is surrounded by bear traps, set to dissuade anyone from entering. Using planks of wood, the four slowly set off each trap and they approach the room.

But the Alien attacks. Anthony, in a panic, steps into one of the bear traps, and the Alien seizes him, spitting acid over his face. John manages to pry Anthony free, and they flee inside the technology room, locking the Alien outside.

Inside they find:

WINDMILLS

Real Man of LaMancha wood and cloth windmills. Two story high
arms slowly rotating. Moving enormous volumes of air through
the wind tunnel-like room. As far as the eye can see.
Turning, creaking.
WHOOSH…WHOOSH…
But no electronics. No radio. No weapons.
This is the Technology Room.

Ripley collapses to the floor and loses consciousness.

She dreams that she is aboard the Sulaco. Klaxons blare and she rushes for Newt’s cryotube. Again, the Alien assaults her:

The Alien spins her – pushes her over across the sleep tube –
Like it’s taking her from behind!
Ripley looks down into the sleep tube:
Newt is gone.
Her doll’s head lays in a pool of blood.
The Alien wraps his arms around Ripley.
Thin lips pull back for a kiss.
She SCREAMS.

She awakens, back inside the technology room. There is a moment of humour:

John: I thought we’d lost you.
Ripley: What are you writing?
John: Last will and testament. (beat) Just kidding.
Ripley: Is [Anthony] –?
John: Resting. (shakes his head) He’ll be fine.
Anthony: No I won’t. He’s a terrible liar.

But the Abbot is pacing back and forth, denouncing Ripley’s actions. He accuses her of aiding the Alien. She ignores him and inspects the interior of the technology room. Everything in the colony is revealed to be reliant on plant and wind power, which is generated here. But the eco-generator is slowly destroying the wooden planet.

Ripley: Don’t you see? This is a planet set to self destruct. Not in ten minutes or two hours but soon. Your atmosphere here is finite. If the plants die the fires will eat up all the oxygen – this planetoid will be dead – Everyone will die.

The Abbot concurs, but reveals that he has always known that the environment was unsustainable. “The punishment for our crime was death,” he reveals. The monks were exiled and doomed to a slow and inexorable suffocation. “Poetic justice for the anti-technologists,” the Abbot says. “The Company’s finest work.”

The Abbot suddenly begins to talk rapid gibberish. Blood trickles from his ear and-

The Abbot’s HEAD EXPLODES!!!
Like a ripe melon dropped ten stories onto pavement.
Blood, bone, hair and brain matter SPRAY John.
John SCREAMS.

A HORRIBLE ALIEN HEAD BURSTER is all that sits atop the blood spurting neck of the Abbot.

It keeps its hold on the Abbot’s spinal cord – The Abbot’s
body continues to stagger around, arms jerking mechanically as
a lack of fresh nerve impulses from the brain works its way
through the system.

Ripley SCREAMS.
The Infant Alien-headed corpse stumbles towards her –
She plucks Anthony’s staff from the floor and SWINGS –
– Like a child hitting a baseball from a TEE —
WHACK-K -!!
BLASTS the Chest/head-burster across the room –

It hits the floor SCRAMBLING. Scuttles down into where the
Windmills meet the floor. Disappears.

There is an obvious problem with the Abbot’s gestation time here, since he was obviously infected only hours before (if that), when the Alien wreaked havoc in the wheat fields.

Ripley becomes despondent, and is convinced that the Alien allowed the Abbot to escape with Ripley and company merely to toy with its prey. The trio briefly discuss the ‘head-bursting’ and the Alien’s reproductive process:

Anthony: Or this may be an as yet unseen stage of development – you saw a Queen – This could be like a King ant – more highly advanced than the drone, bred for survival –
John: How does this explain the thing that came out of the ewe’s chest? The Abbot’s head?
Ripley: Maybe it can deposit different types of eggs.

Ripley suddenly realises that she has been impregnated, but she does not share the news. She elects to find her ship, and Anthony decides to wait behind. Ripley and John ascend through the lower levels, and come to the satellite’s ocean, which sits in the middle of the structure.

Ripley and John spy a coracle that they can use to cross the sea. Meanwhile, Anthony, blinded by the Alien’s acidic saliva, enjoys his moments alone under the arms of the windmills inside the technology room:

The large canvas arms of the windmill rotate above his head. The wind blows through his hair.
WHOOSH…WHOOSH…
Feels good.

Anthony reaches up and waves his hand over his eyes.

Anthony: Now the seer can only see what God wants him to. Forty years on a planet of Monks and I’ve finally found religion.

A floor board CREAKS. Anthony strains to hear.

Anthony: John? Ripley?

WHOOSH…WHOOSH… He knows it is not.

Anthony: Well come then. I haven’t got forever.

A shadow falls across his face. He can feel it.
He doesn’t have to see what is here.

Back in the coracle, Ripley and John discuss their personal lives. John reveals that he was condemned to the wooden world when he was still a child. He spent three decades in cryosleep at the beginning of his sentence. Ripley opens up about her daughter, Amanda, or as this script calls her, ‘Kathy’:

Ripley: She was nine when I signed on to the Nostromo. ‘Mommy will be home before you know it,’ I said. My shares would have set us up good. Then I lost sixty years floating around in a rescue pod. Thanks to the Alien. I came home to face a bitter, 70 year old woman. My daughter. A little girl whose mother never came home.

This is a strange detail, since we know that Amanda Ripley-McLaren died before Ripley was discovered. However at the time Ward’s Alien III was written the scene pertaining to Amanda’s fate had not been released: the Aliens Special Edition was some time off, and one version of Aliens’ early drafts described a scene where Ripley contacts her elderly daughter, but is shunned.

Unbeknownst to them, the Alien is stalking them underwater. They reach the upper levels and find the once-idyllic fields ablaze. Roasted corpses lie in the ash. Smoke bellows and pumps through the air. Monks have been impaled on their own spears, and their bodies are covered in cocoon resin. “Heaven has become Hell,” reads the script.

Ripley and John enter the glassworks and find Brother Kyle casually playing solitaire and talking to himself. Like the Abbot, he beings to speak gibberish. John euthanises him (via strangulation) and the two move on to the library, where they find Mattias, John’s dog, alive and well. The Alien cuts the reunion short by appearing in the doorway:

THE ALIEN

Standing in the open doorway. It’s in bad shape from the man traps.
Lost a foot. Tongue hanging out, useless.
Parts of it look like wood. Parts of it look like wheat.

It carries Anthony’s waterlogged, limp body – POPS off his head like a grape from the bunch.
Tosses the corpse at Ripley’s feet.

I could swear it’s trying to smile.

The Alien’s acid blood ignites on the wooden flooring, and the creature spins its tail in a circular motion, spraying and spreading fire throughout the library. The floor collapses and they plummet into the glassworks below. Ripley and John land safely, but the Alien plummets into a vat of molten glass. It begins to climb out, but:

THE HUGE DUMP TANK OF WATER

Empties a thousand gallons –
RAINS DOWN on the Alien.
It HOWLS in pain –
The Molten Glass instantly COOLS –
The rapid extreme temperature change causes the beast to
BE-THWOOOoooOOM -!!
EXPLODE into a million pieces…!!!!

The room is littered with Alien bits.
Each piece is encased in glass –
Trapped like a fly in amber.

Ripley and John flee to the monastery, and enter the EEV. “Those dead monks out there are going to start hatching soon,” she warns. She readies the ship and locks John inside, announcing that she has been impregnated with an Alien spore.

Ripley: It always wins. We killed it, but it’s still inside me – You’re my last chance. If I can keep you alive it’ll make up for all those I’ve lost.

John pleads that if Ripley dies for him then his soul will be damned for allowing her sacrifice. Ripley relents, and John performs an ‘exorcism’ to expel the Alien embryo from her body. He punches and pounds her body, forcing the chestburster up into her throat. The scene is clearly sexual, with John straddling her prostate body, and when the embryo becomes lodged in her throat he leans in for a kiss and expels the Alien from her mouth – unfortunately, the creature slithers down John’s gullet to reside within his chest. He tells Ripley and Mattias to stay put, and leaves the ship.

BROTHER JOHN

Dawn’s rays are peeking through the battered ceiling as he walks slowly across the smoking roof.
Into the inferno that is the burning Abbey.

Ripley watches as John and the alien horror inside him are INCINERATED.

Though she seemed unimpressed with the script as a whole, or more specifically its portrayal of her character, Sigourney Weaver read John’s sacrifice scene and had an idea – give it to Ripley. “In the original script, the male lead sacrificed himself, and Ripley goes off, again, into space,” she told Entertainment Weekly in 1992. “And I got to the end, and I thought, ‘Oh, God,’ I said, ‘This is it.'”

Back to the script, and Ripley pilots the EEV and escapes the wooden world.

Ripley vanishes once again into the stars.

She places Mattias the dog into cryosleep and spots a piece of parchment on the floor: it is John’s final testament:

John v.o.: I, Brother John Goldman of the orbiter Arceon, Minorite abbey and gaol, know the Abbot was wrong. There is a great evil here. I have seen it. I put pen to
paper now lest this plague – this creature stills my hand. I have gone down below – both to try to warn the others and get  the woman -Ripley-  get from her some clue as to how to battle this evil, or at least to make my peace for not defending her. She believes there is still an Earth and I hope she is right. I hope she will be able to find out. I hope she can find some rest for the devils that torment her.

Ripley looks at the elapsed time counter on the command console. Pulls a pen from it’s holder. She adds:

Ripley v.o.: Whether the Earth exists or not, whether we end up in Heaven, or Hell, or the cold vacuum of space, she has.

The escape pod hurtles into the inky blackness of space, leaving Arceon burning and fading behind it like a dying ember.

THE SCREEN GOES BLACK

END CREDITS ROLL…

Teenager in the back of the movie theater shouts, “It’s in the dog!”

CONCLUSION

“Essentially I found that the whole story was being watered down, and on a project of that scale it’s very hard to maintain a single viewpoint on the material, which is kind of necessary for it to have any singularity to it otherwise it becomes a mishmash of everything you’ve seen before …
~ Vincent Ward, Venue Feature magazine, 1993.

So why wasn’t Ward’s script produced? After apparently being promised full creative control over the project, Ward found Twentieth Century Fox and Brandywine Productions beginning to reign him in. Objections were raised about the strange setting, and after one particularly patronising meeting with Fox’s executives, where Ward was made to sit on a bench outside the boardroom, the director left the movie.

The script certainly has strengths, especially with its promises of grand and nightmarish imagery, but it should be noted that almost every narrative fault in David Fincher’s Alien 3 has its genesis here: the inexplicable appearance of an egg aboard the Sulaco; the offhanded killing of Newt, Hicks and Bishop; a host of faceless and largely anonymous secondary characters; contradictory gestation times; and a general sense of confusion regarding the series’ by-now established rules.

The character of Ripley is strangely unendearing. Weaver described her as being written like a pissed-off gym coach, and that’s how she comes across. She is needlessly sarcastic in times of peril or trauma and even comes across as shallow in several excerpts. “You may dress like you’re living in the Middle Ages,” she tells the Abbot, “but you can’t treat me like your chambermaid, or whatever monks had.” Not entirely sharp in wit or intellect, and lacking any of the moral rage from the previous movie.

Brother John is a very endearing character, though it is hard to imagine Charles Dance in the role: the character has an air of naivete and boyish wonder about him, whereas Clemens is an embittered and world-weary man, a self-exile and pariah. Richard E. Grant, who screentested for the role of Clemens, may have suited Brother John more than Dance (a spectacular actor, of course). I do wish that the character survived more completely into Fincher’s movie. As for John’s dog, Mattias, it’s almost an afterthought, appearing at the opening and closing moments of the film.

Brother Kyle is unfortunately barely sketched. The script hints at a sort of teasing-camaraderie between him and John, but the character barely appears. It could be argued that the character provided the basis for Dillon, who became a far more layered and righteously-bombastic character than Kyle.

Anthony the android is an interesting character, though he violates pretty much all known rules concerning the androids so far. He tires out, is severely hindered by his wounds (unlike Ash and Bishop) and the Alien displays a strange interest in him – Ridley Scott mentioned in an interview that the original Alien would not have been interested in Ash: as an android, he was an unsuitable host. Cameron had planned a scene demonstrating this (the Aliens ignore Bishop as he crawls through the piping to the comms satellite) but it was never filmed. The Alien’s interest in Anthony also raises an interesting but unanswered question – if possible, what would an android-Alien hybrid be like? It’s an interesting angle that Ward never explores.

The idea that the Alien has a personal vendetta against Ripley is an interesting one, but its method of reproduction is hardly explained. If the Alien has a mission, it’s seemingly only to torment Ripley – a frightening idea in itself, but hampered somewhat by the Alien’s often rampage-happy attitude. There are insinuations that the orbiter will eventually become a floating hive, waiting to come across more unsuspecting prey in the vast expanses of space, but the Alien ensures the colony’s destruction by torching everything it touches. The ‘head-bursting’ is utterly bizarre, and feels like it was only included to amp up the gore factor (though it is reminiscent of the pseudacteon fly). Lastly, there is a sexual element to the Alien that is very welcome: it plays the role of father, tormentor, and rapist – which surely would have pleased fans of the original movie and admirers of the implied Lambert rape scene.

The wooden world itself would have looked strange, but fantastic. Ward was clear that the world was in a state of decay: missing panels and walls exposed the interior to the vacuum of space; the wood was knotted and gnarled and barnacled. It would have been an esoteric but very visually interesting environment for the Alien to stalk through. The prison colony in Alien 3 looks beautiful itself (Fincher made the best of a colour palette of browns and greys) but the film’s descent into a labyrinth of identical-looking corridors is a mess.

Part of the monastery set, built by Chris Otterbine.

Parts of the monastery survived into the final film. Here, Ridley Scott is interviewed on the set (his son Jake worked in the conceptual department); parts of the abbey can be seen behind him.

Of the script’s various set pieces, the Alien in the fiery wheat field feels like the best. The bathroom attack seems too scatological and unbecoming of the series. Ward seems to enjoy talking about the toilet scene when he is asked about it on the Quadrilogy/Anthology, and we were clearly meant to be on the side of the Alien during its attack, since it lunges for the nasty tribunal members and the Abbot. It is similar to Superintendent Andrews’ exit in the final movie, where the Alien attack is played for a laugh as well as a shock.

Ward’s fear of studio executives muddying the creative waters was not unfounded, as the production of Alien 3 attests. The series was now a franchise, and creative liberties were becoming synonymous with financial risk.

“When you’re working in the studio system,” Ward explained, “they have these very powerful words – one’s yes, one’s no, and if you want something to retain its voice you have to know when to use the second one of those words. Also, you all have to be on the same page, because working in the studio system, it’s very corporate. One of my producers was on the same page, and one of them wasn’t. I ended up with a story credit for it, but it doesn’t at all resemble what I had in mind … These films are so expensive that the accountants start making the decisions.”

But the film did have vestiges of Ward’s story in it, which he acknowledged. “The basic story points are all mine,” Ward told The Washington Post in 1993, “but the rest is totally different. My idea was to spend $40 million recreating Bosch in space. I wanted to use every penny of $40 million just to scare the hell out of everybody. Apparently they had something else in mind.”

That same year he elaborated on his vision and the final outcome with What’s On In London magazine: “The prison planet wasn’t really me – I had more of a complete world than that. What I’d first pitched them on was, ‘Yes, it’ll scare the pants off people and yes, I can terrify them and there’ll be Aliens and yes, I can do all that stuff but I really want to create a world that’s quite special and different’ – and what they ended up doing was creating this convict world with guys with prickly scalps who couldn’t say more than ‘Der!’ I thought that was really boring – and so badly written. The characters… aaargghh!”

He was kinder when speaking with Venus feature magazine: “Under the circumstances they made a very good job. It’s not the film I would have made, but given the pressures they were under they did well.”

“David [Fincher] came in on the project when the original director Vincent Ward, who I thought was a really interesting guy, left the project. I really liked Vincent because we had already been involved in his Alien 3 and sold our company’s [Boss Effects] involvement to Vincent and 20th Century Fox. We were working with Vincent on designs and ideas when all of a sudden Vincent disappeared. Apparently he had some creative differences and so he left the project. We were really dismayed by this, because we had already been involved in Alien 3 for a couple of months … Certain parts of the monastery stayed in the movie, but got shifted around a bit. Norman Reynolds [the Production Designer] had already built numerous sets for Vincent’s script and had to start all over again. So it was kind of pandemonium.”
~ Richard Edlund.

Just as Ward read Twohy’s script and dismissed it, Fincher was not keen on filming Ward’s monastery story, and luckily for him, neither was Fox, who proceeded to redress or rebuilt the sets to resemble a prison colony.

Fincher himself was paraphrased by Alien set director Roger Christian as having walked into a meeting with Fox saying, “I don’t know what you’re doing – Alien is all about dirt and filth and oil and a hardcore technical world, why are we doing this ‘wooden’ thing?”

Rock Jockey

HR Giger’s sketch of the Space Jockey lying dead on the planetoid’s surface. Image copyright HR Giger.

At one point in the film’s production the decision was made to remove the Space Jockey from his pilot chamber and deposit his body in the rubble surrounding his ship. This was done to ensure the Jockey’s appearance, since there was talk of removing the pilot room to spare the budget. In this version, Dallas, Lambert and Kane would wander past the skeleton without ever having noticing it, since it has ossified to resemble the indigenous twisted rocks.

“They said, ‘This [pilot chamber] is not your main set. You’re just gonna have to walk by and see a skeletal imprint in the mud of this 15-foot creature, and then you’ll walk into this strange-looking building. It’ll be a bunker or something…”
~ Ron Shusett, making of Alien, Alien Anthology.

On May 14th 1978 HR Giger, sitting at home only a week after having sent his slides and sketches to Twentieth Century Fox, received a phone call from London. He’d already been contacted two days earlier by producer Gordon Carroll, who had complimented his work so far. Now Carroll was calling again to notify Giger that one of his pieces, the cockpit of the derelict craft, would not be needed. Ridley Scott reiterated this message.

“They have a new idea for the script that I should visualise,” Giger wrote. “The skeleton of the astronaut, which used to be in the spacecraft, should now be placed in the landscape, blending in so that it can’t be distinguished, and the crew wouldn’t notice it until they see it on the recorder, back in the [Nostromo]. Like the film Blow-up, where the figure hidden in the bushes is only discovered once the negatives are developed.”

Storyboard for the Space Jockey’s appearance, disguised amongst the rocks…

The crew later freeze-frame their helmet footage and make out the shadowy skull of the Jockey.

On July 4th 1978 Giger, now firmly entrenched in the film’s production, received another call from the producer’s office. “Another change,” he wrote in his diary, “They want the skeleton of the alien Space Jockey to lie in the cockpit again.” It wasn’t the only backtrack that occurred during the film’s production. By this time Giger was well-acquainted with ideas coming, going, and coming back again, either exactly as they were before or as some odd permutation of the original.

Though the idea of the Jockey’s outdoor appearance was on the cards for several months its design never amounted to more than some sketches and doodles (though one can be spied in Giger’s ‘Alien Landscape’ painting – if you look for it).

For many years fans theorised that an actual prop was built and photographed. The rumour emerged in 1979 after a Topps trading card depicting a ‘grotesque rock formation’ was released, and many peregrine-eyed fans thought they could spy the shape of the Jockey in there somewhere.

Unfortunately for them, the rock formation was simply that, and nothing more – but the trade-off was ultimately worth it, considering that the rock Jockey’s excision meant that he could make a far more memorable appearance within his cockpit.

Sandals in Space

A Viking funeral…

Any filmmaker will tell you that making a movie is creatively and emotionally exhausting. Frustration is a recurring feeling. Trains and unfinished tracks are normally invoked as metaphor. These feelings ripple through every strata of the production -from the model shop to the cutting room- because there are so many departments to juggle and satisfy and each has a creative instinct of its own. But but no one seems to cut a lonelier picture than the beleaguered screenwriter.

Dan O’Bannon’s struggle with writing, selling, and preserving his screenplay have already been documented here at Strange Shapes, in Writing Alien. After snapping up his screenplay, Brandywine producers Walter Hill and David Giler rewrote it several times, altering the story significantly. For example, there were no actual alien elements in their preferred version of the story. The Space Jockey was a human space-pilot, and the egg silo was a government installation. Eventually, Ridley Scott put his foot down and resolved to film somewhere between O’Bannon’s original story and Giler and Hill’s rewrite.

However, according to wmmvrrvrrmm’s research at Alien Explorations, some unseen versions of the script were far, far wackier than anything heard of so far. “Regarding Giler and Hill, they did eight various drafts,” explained Ron Shusett, “And they went off in many different directions … They were trying, roping, you always have to see how far you can push the envelope. It got ridiculous when you got Genghis Khan to fight the Alien … Their idea was somehow every past villain in history they would have to fight, somehow, Attila the Hun, ah, you know … famous historical villains … Hitler-type people, people that were mass murderers, or in some cases maybe a creature … Jack the Ripper, well that was one of them.”

Read his post to learn more: The Realism of Giler and Hill’s earlier drafts.

If historical figures aboard spaceships sounds too outlandish for the pair, consider this story from James Cameron: in 1983 the budding writer/director had a meeting with Brandywine, who were impressed by The Terminator script. The trio talked possible projects, and Giler suggested a Spartacus remake – set in space. “It quickly became clear that David Giler wanted a swords and sandals type film set in outer space,” Cameron said, “with literal swords and sandals.” He was straightforward with his opinion on the idea: “That was a concept that I found pretty idiotic.”

The meeting started to flounder, and on his way out the door the producers raised the possibility of an Alien II. Cameron added guns and boots to this new film, and swords, sandals, and historical heroes and maniacs were not mentioned around him or any other Alien director again.

Dog-Catchers

Aaron: The place has gone toxic. You should get out while you can.
Bishop II: Don’t panic. We’re here to micromanage the situation.
Aaron: (re: Commando Team) What’s all this?
Bishop II: A specially trained team to help get  the Xenomorph under control. Now, where is she?
~ Alien III, by Rex Pickett.

Their identities are unknown, and they can only be divined by their collective purpose. The third movie’s commando unit, sometimes nicknamed “the dog catchers”, appear at the film’s climax to collect an Alien specimen. In fact, the last third of the film is a race against time: Ripley must destroy the beast before Weyland-Yutani arrive to either hinder or complicate the situation. Unfortunately for the team, they arrive just as the adult specimen is destroyed, but this may have worked to their favour – despite their hardware, they seem comically unequipped to tackle the Alien: dressed in bleached gambesons and carrying lassos, they look like cumbersome hockey players.

Special Forces and investigatory soldiers were a staple in several Alien III scripts, but most appear at the beginning of the screenplays and are summarily wiped out, and owe their employment to the Colonial Administration rather than the Company. The commandos from the movie probably owe their appearance to William Gibson, whose script featured a specialist crew known as the “Deck Squad”, who are described as thus: “Their spacesuits are white, clinical; over these they wear disposable Biohazard Envelopes of filmy translucent plastic. Some are Colonial Marines, armed with pulse-rifles or flame-throwers. Others are scientists and technicians, carrying recording and sampling gear.”

The wardrobe, armaments and gear all sound like those of the dog-catcher commandos. The “filmy translucent plastic” overcoat is very much like that worn by the Company Man played by Hi Ching.

The combat gear was designed to evoke the dusty, hockey-pad/samurai spacesuits from the original movie.

In one version of the script, Ching’s scientist character is named “Company Man #1” and nothing more. Rex Pickett was later hired to polish the final script by Walter Hill and David Giler, and in his version of the story the Company Man #1 is introduced as Dr. Matshuita, “one of the finest transplant surgeons in the world,” according to Bishop II. Giler and Hill then fired Pickett and rewrote the script. In the final draft, Dr. Matshuita is once again “Company Man #1”.

There was an earlier draft by Giler and Hill where the Company Man attempts to convince Ripley to dismiss suicide, after the mysterious Bishop II has been killed by a blow to the head by Golic (Aaron “85” in the final movie). In later drafts it was decided to not have Bishop II die so anti-climatically, and he was kept around to the end, albeit sporting a horrific wound, and Company Man was yet again pushed into the background.

Curiously, in Pickett’s iteration of the story Aaron notices that “aside from pulse rifles some of them are carrying what appear to be sophisticated animal-control devices.” What these devices are isn’t elaborated on, but it’s surely more potent than the lassos from the movie – still, this doesn’t guarantee any success, and it’s a small injury to never see these commandos actually take on the Alien.

The commandos leave without getting what they want, but they are not empty-handed. Saying that, prisoner Morse is a very small consolation prize when you almost had the perfect organism in your grasp.

Animal Farm: Eric Red’s Alien III

“The [Alien 3] script that unfortunately circulated, I don’t even look at it as my script. The piece of junk was a product of a few weeks of intense, hysterical story conferences with the studio to rush to get the picture into production and it turned out completely awful…”
~ Eric Red, Arrow in the Head interview, 2001.

It’s hard to find a fan of Eric Red’s Alien III. Though scripts by William Gibson and Vincent Ward have become appreciated by fans (usually figuring into ‘Greatest Scripts Never Made’ lists), Red’s is usually openly ridiculed – maybe fairly.

Red had a solid filmography at his back before being recruited to pen the third movie by Brandywine Productions, with credits including the minimalist thriller The Hitcher and grungy vampire movie Near Dark, but Alien III would be his first foray into big-budget franchise pictures. It would also be his last.

Cast of Characters (in order of appearance)

Sam Smith – The lead character, “Captain in the Special Forces”.
John Smith – Sam’s father, a “career military officer”.
Mary Smith – Sam’s mother.
Karen Smith – His sister.
Mark Smith – His kid brother.
Sergeant Chong – a Japanese military officer.
Dr. Alice Rand – Science Officer.

Screenplay also includes various named but one-off characters, and several unnamed military and special forces.

The plot revolves around the generically-named Sam Smith. He lives in North Star (pop. 251), an orbital colony that is modeled on 20th Century Kansas rural life. Instead of the bleak, functionalist cargo containers at Hadley’s Hope, the milieu here consists of “postcard shots of the dusty, average mid-western town. Farmhouses. Silos. Windmills. A Drive-in. Fields of Wheat. Fields of Corn. An A&P. A School. A Grocery Store. A 7-11.” Sometimes the script mysteriously refers to the colony as “Sulaco Space Station”. Endearingly, it is also known as “Shitsville” by its youth.

In the beginning, Sam awakens from a nightmare that placed him aboard the Sulaco. Inside were ruined cryotubes and a shred of clothing with the nametag “Ripley”. In the dream, Sam is part of a rescue squad who are quickly ravaged by an Alien. He quickly wakes up… to find that one of his arms is bionic. At breakfast with his family (General John, Mary, Karen, and Mark Smith), Sam is told that he has been unconscious for two weeks, and is lucky to be alive. His injury is blamed on a technical fire aboard his rescue ship, though Sam has flashbacks to a vicious encounter with a strange alien being. John Smith explains to Sam the nature of his recovery: “They used the latest android Synthetic technology on you … They found enough of you to put back together. The rest we… we had to reconstruct.”

Sam and his father drive around town, the former noticing that many families have moved away, apparently due to an increasing military presence. Locals accuse the soldiers of being complicit in illegal experiments with the colony’s denizens, and Sam is quizzed by military personnel about any recollections of his “accident”.

The truth is revealed to Sam when, having sneaked into a military base, he activates a 3D hologram of the events aboard the Sulaco, which show him and his men being slaughtered by an Alien:

“He sees himself and his soldiers, like laser ghosts, whirl in horror, totally unarmed as the Alien swings down from the rafters and hits them. Sam screams out as he sees the creature’s jackhammer jaws piledrive the recreation of him in the torso, taking his arm and a good part of his ribcage with it. Sam is splattered with green holographic blood. THE CAMERA PUSHES IN TO A TIGHT CLOSE UP OF SAM’S FACE as his face contorts in anguish. He watches the monster tear his men to pieces, ripping them limb from limb in a greenish slaughterhouse, their faces screaming in total silence, which makes it worse.”

Sam confronts his father about keeping the secret from him, but General John justifies the secrecy: “I have a job, Sam. I’m here to do my job.” Afterwards, Sam stows away in a truck filled with pigs. It enters a military installation. At the end of the journey “Sam tumbles head over heels with fifteen fat, rolling pigs down a stained, stainless steel shaft in almost total darkness. They all slide together.” In this pit are animal pens spread across a big, steel-beamed warehouse space. The floor is covered with straw and wet with blood and guts. Suddenly “the belly of a pig ruptures and a chestburster smashes out in a sickening spray of intestines. The Pig Alien has the wide torso, tiny head, and little legs of a pig.”

Inside the pen are multiple forms of the Alien creature, and the monster line-up reads like a Kenner toy bonanza. There are dog Aliens, cat Aliens, the aforementioned pig Aliens, and even chicken Aliens. Sam escapes the pen and sneaks around the base, spying on scientists and his own father, who seems to be conferencing with military brass, several scientists and Dr. Rand, a shady top scientist. Rand declares that the Alien’s genetic material is compatible with organic and inorganic material. “Imagine a living, organic jet fighter,” she says, “or an Alien tank.” More importantly, she claims to have managed to effectively control the Alien. When she attempts to demonstrate this, one of her Alien subjects punches a hole on her skull.

Chaos ensues, with a swarm of Aliens tearing through military personnel. When Special Forces come to the scene, Sam takes charge:

Sam: I’m Sam Smith. Captain Special Forces. I think I’m the ranking officer here.

He flashes the I.D. card in his wallet. The Special Forces team surrounds him.

Sam: I think it’s pretty simple. We have to kill that monster and get everybody the fuck out.

Sam and the team assess the situation, and find that an Alien nest is quickly being established. Not only that, but with any Queen figure still immature, the Aliens have still still managed to reproduce:

On the black and whit screen, the Alien is weaving huge, suspension bridge-like cocoon all over the warehouse area. Thirty people, half mutilated or dead are spun into the cocoon. The fifteen foot Alien looks like a weave-woman with the tender care it takes in building its nest.Sam operates a joystick on the controls. The TV camera zooms in and pans to reveal tortured, slimed faces in the thick tendrils of cocoon from floor to ceiling. Some are already beginning to reform…

Sam decides to rescue his father, who is trapped within the hive. He runs into his pal, Sergeant Chong, who assists him. They find Sam’s father, and pull him from the hive and into the airducts, but not before an Alien reaches for them–

Sam grabs a grenade from his belt. He bites out the pin.

Sam: Breakfast of champions!

He chucks the grenade into the Alien’s mouth. The creature swallows it. KRAKA-KABOOOOOOOOOOM! It gets its head blown off.

The script also plummets into Friday the 13th styled sex n’ murder:

INT. ZERO GRAVITY CHAMBER – SECTOR “C”

A set of panties float in the air.

Two naked bodies, slick with sweat, floating and thrusting in the anti- gravity room. Russ massages Terry’s breasts, fingering her hard nipples, her body wrapped around his. As they float in the room, he turns her over and puts his head between her legs. She wraps her soft thighs around his face.

Lauren: OH YES!

She goes down on him too, her head bobbing between his legs.

Russ: C’MON BABY OH JEESUU–!

Her legs are wrapped around his back and plunges into her, pressing her face to his as their tongues meet, their two perspiration slick bodies revolving upside down, suspended in zero gravity, stars and space seen through the window of the room.

Lauren: OH! UH-HUH!

He slides out of her and turns her over in the weightless space, taking her from behind his hands squeezing her flushed, jiggling tits at he slams into her, her wide, soft buttocks slapping his waist.

Lauren: BABY IT FEELS SSOOO GOOO–! OOOOHHHHYYEEEEEESSSSS!!! RUSS OH YEAH OH YEAH!!!

Russ turns her over as they both about to come. She straddles him and they thrust desperately, revolving in the air, their bodies shivering in orgasm.

After that bizarre scene comes…

He opens his eyes and his guts come out his mouth. The huge, thick, slimy teal rips through his torso and smashes out Laurens chest, taking her ribcage, intestines and left tit with it. Their eyes are rolled up in their sockets and the mutilated corpses are flung off the tail. Three Aliens crawl through the floating blood and guts towards the airlock door. More follow. An armoured slew of crawling monsters.”

Apart from the slasher elements, we also get a traditional Alien cocoon/flamethrower scene:

Colonel Sinclair: H-heeelllpp m-meee. P-please…

Sam and the rest turn to look. A horrible halfway transformed Colonel Sinclair is all sewn up in cocoon substance, his arms and legs molted mostly away. He realizes he is turning into one of those things. His face is torn as much with terror as hideous agony.

Colonel Sinclair: K-kkk—iiilll mmmmeeeee— Mmmmuuuuhhhnnnneeerrruuuff Ggggggoooooo…….!

John Smith hits him with a douse of flame from the flamethrower blowtorch. The charred crisped remains of the Colonel slowly smolder in the blackened, burning cocoon.

Sam: Let’s get out of here.

Meanwhile, the earth begins to rumble all around the colony. Sam and the special forces are besieged by Aliens. Chong is blown out into space (“Poor old Chong”) and we segue into a space battle with a batch of Aliens and space-suited commandos. Around the colony, Aliens are wreaking havoc in cornfields and in 7-11’s. The Smith family fight off an Alien home invasion, but luckily Mary Smith is adept at combat:

An Alien crashes its claws through the kitchen window in a decimation of glass and wood frame. It shoves its snout through.

Mary: Okay you ugly motherfucker, suck on this.

She grabs a handful of knives from the wall and thrusts them inside the monster’s face. Lots of acid. It makes a grab for her but its arm goes down into the garbage disposal. Mary flicks the switch on the wall.

GGGGGGGGRERRRRRGGRGRGRGRGRGRMMMM!!!! The creature loses its arm below the elbow. Mary grabs her kids in her arms and tugs them with her down the steps into the basement as the creature thrashes in agony while the sink melts away.

She then kills an Alien with a chainsaw, and the family is quickly saved by Sam and co. The special forces and armed civilians -bikers, farmers, drunks and ramblers- then face down a moving wall of Aliens. After a protracted battle, the Aliens are defeated. The locals begin evacuating the ravaged space station, but the Smiths return to their farmhouse. Unfortunately, John Smith has been injected with Alien spore, and he begins to transform. In this scene, he explains some of the shenanigans going on:

John: We’d b-been experimenting with the Alien. Couldn’t t-train it. B-but we isolated its cell, i-its genetic code. F-found that on the genetic level is was a purely predatory cell and t-thought if we could fuse it with a human D-DNA we could make a stronger, more resilient h-human. Sam, I didn’t want to test it on anyone. I tested it on myself. S-Sam they put the Alien cells in m-me. S-somethings happening to me you’ve got to get out you’ve ggggGGGGGGGGGGGOOOOOOOOOOOOEEET–“

Outside in the farmyard a cow emulates The Thing From Another World as “legs burst out the side of its ribcage as its spine jerks and splits in showers of blood and acid”; this strange cow-insect-Alien conglomeration proceeds to attack. The Smiths escape the farm, but Alien-John sets about establishing more spawn, resulting in Alien roosters and Alien mosquitoes, all culminating in what Red can only describe as a… thing:

Fifty humans have been turned into an Alien Thing. They have fused together into one…thing. It is a two story, moving, murderous ass of armour and flesh, eyeballs, and tongues, screaming mouths and jackhammer jaws in a huge, an amorphous blob of arms, legs, talons, hooks, snouts, and teeth. There are the teeth… The Alien Human Thing is advancing down the block.

This creature’s appearance precipitates the unfurling of the space station:

The skin is peeling off North Star. The farmlands and hills are burning away, revealing the metal endoskeleton of the space station that lies beneath, charred and blackened beneath the smoldering skin of the farmlands. The small pickup speeds across a road that is sizzling off the huge steel girder structure of the Sulaco station. Below the beams can be seen the full fifty stories of the space station, dropping away into the hellish infinity. The whole frame work is shaking and shifting, the beams ripping loose and dropping miles down into the bowels of the ship. Great fires burn fifty stories down. Boiling, billowing clouds of fire and debris are surging upwards from the bottom of the space station.

There is a race against time, the station falls to pieces, and the Smiths appeal to Alien-John for mercy (which is granted) and board a spaceship, but not before saying goodbye to their Alien father:

John Smith, with the last drops of humanity in him, helps first his wife, then his daughter across to the silo. He reaches out his hand and picks up Mark. The little boy’s face is soaked with tears. Real tears pour from John Smith’s face as he holds the child near his mutated features. He looks at him one last time, then places him down with the rest of his family.

The family escape and “Sulaco Space Station” becomes an orbital biomechanical vessel, a fusion of Alien DNA, human flesh, and steel girders and plates. This Bio-Station attempts to pull back the Smiths’ escape craft, but Sam retorts by firing nuclear missiles at the beast. The survivors are left adrift in space, but a rescue ship shines a light upon them. “The four space suits hang, floating, as the rescue ship starts for them. Fade out. The End.”

A key problem is that the script feels tonally out of sync with the rest of the series. The dialogue is hammy and prone to emulating bottom-rung 80’s actioners, and the prose has strangely jejune sentences like, “Ten or more Facehuggers are scrambling across the gore-splattered straw floor for Sam. They want his ass.”

Most grievously, the characters are dull. The military’s motivation is cardboard. The Aliens have all the hardiness of toothpaste. Sam’s bionic arm is slightly developed and then dropped completely, like a forgotten detail. The Alien variants are comedic. An Asian character is referred to as a “chink” and a “Jap”. It switches names frequently (North Star becomes Sulaco Space Station, Mark Smith becomes John Jnr) and also steps into redneck parody. For example, one character (Old Man Perkins) yells into his cornfield, “Harrison, if this is your cow run loose again on muh property I’m gonna shoot him down like I keep tellin’ yuh!” In another example of unintentional humour, when a married couple are attacked inside a convenience store the husband grabs his wife and exclaims, “LETS GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE, MARY!!!” The entire script plays like a strange precursor to Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. There’s nothing in the script comparable to The Hitcher’s quiet foreboding and horror, and nothing approaching Near Dark’s swagger. It’s a flat script. as far removed from the Alien series as it is from Red’s more impressive work.

Red explained to Arrow in the Head the trouble with planning a sequel to a successful series: “Sequels are very demanding to do. They have their own group of problems. When you do the first picture, you’re basically setting the ground rules, you’re designing the engine, you’re building the car and setting how it works. Sequels have different requirements because you both have to use the things that worked in the first picture if you can, but also give it a different spin and make it different. They’re tricky, they’re not as simple to put together as they might seem.”

But according to Red there was another problem impeding the story-writing process  – the producers. “The basic problem when I was involved, for five weeks, was they didn’t know what they really wanted. They really wasted talent because of that. Another major problem was they didn’t want Sigourney back, so I had to go through a whole series of new characters.”

Though it’s easy to empathise with someone having to tolerate indecisive (and dictatorial) producers, crafting new characters and scenarios is a writer’s job.  Weaver referred to the resulting script as being “a real disaster, absolutely dreadful.” Meanwhile, Red continued to blame Hill and Giler, who “had no story or treatment or any real plan for the picture. They were very disorganised and irresponsible.”

After the debacle with Red’s script, Giler and Hill looked for another screenwriter, this time settling on Critters 2 writer David Twohy. Though Twohy’s last screenplay had featured the same elements as Red’s Alien III (that is, vicious aliens in a small-town America environment), he was to give the producers a very different sort of story…

The Funeral

Kane’s shroud was “carved in wood and fired from a fishermans catapult”.

After the inexplicable chaos of Kane’s sudden and violent death, his crewmates bundle him into the airlock. Too rattled for speeches, they wordlessly propel his remains into the stars. Kane is left to aimlessly wander the universe and the Nostromo rushes on towards its own destiny.

The immediate aftermath of the chestburster scene (such as cleaning up and bundling Kane away) is not shown, and for two obvious reasons. One: to drive the momentum of the film, and two: to probably avoid showing any tenderness towards Kane’s remains. The crew at this point have started to draw together somewhat due to the extreme events happening on board, but they are not (and won’t be) a warm, cohesive unit. Nobody swears revenge for Kane; they just want to get out alive.

The funeral itself seems makeshift. It’s unlikely that the bodies of dead crew are required to be catapulted into space (perhaps they are frozen instead, to await autopsy) but the film obviously presents a very extreme circumstance where the bodily remains, having been exposed to alien spore, may be hazardous to keep around.

Here is the funeral scene as depicted in Dan O’Bannon’s screenplay. Remember, in this version Kane was known as ‘Broussard’:

EXTERIOR – SHIP – OUTER SPACE

A hatch slides open on the side of the ship, and Broussard’s wrapped body tumbles silently out.

AN ELECTRONIC BASS DRUM BEATS A DIRGE as Broussard drifts into eternity.

The scene is intentionally minimalist and cold. The electronic bass drum is perhaps a parody of a funerary salute or drum roll.

Here is how David Giler and Walter Hill wrote the scene in their revisions:

INT. AIR LOCK

Kane’s body wrapped in a makeshift shroud.

INT. BRIDGE

The crew looking at Kane’s body on view screens. Silent. Depressed.

DALLAS: Inner hatch sealed.

Ripley nods.

DALLAS: Anybody want to say anything?

Nothing to say. He nods to Ripley. She presses a button.

INT. AIR LOCK

The outer hatch opens. Yawning space outside. Kane’s body shoots out into eternity. The hatch closes.

There are no ominous drum beats, but the scene retains the sense of unspoken melancholy and thinning nerves present in the original. The whole ordeal is, essentially, the far future’s rendition of burial at sea, and it’s the last we see of the ship’s Executive Officer.

But Kane was scripted to return, in both the original screenplay by Dan O’Bannon and in the many rewrites penned by Walter Hill and David Giler. The geography of the scene may have changed between versions, but the setup remained the same. Ridley Scott told Fantastic Films magazine that, “When they’re looking for the Beast, they hear a tap-tap-tapping coming from Ash’s observation blister. When they check it out, it turns out to be Kane’s corpse floating along with the ship and bumping into it. Seems that when he was ejected, he got tangled up in one of the stanchions.”

Here’s the scene from Dan O’Bannon’s script. It takes place near the end of the second act. For clarity, Kane is known as Broussard in this early iteration of the story, Dallas is Standard, Ripley is Roby, and Parker is Hunter:

INTERIOR – DIM STAIRWELL

Standard’s face is tense as he advances up the circular steps. Suddenly, a METALLIC TAPPING SOUND is heard. He freezes. Then he continues up.

EXTERIOR – DORSAL OBSERVATION DOME – VIEW OF OUTER SPACE

The view of interstellar space is spectacular. As Standard comes up the steps, the METALLIC TAPPING is heard again. Standard looks around. Then he sees it — BROUSSARD’S CORPSE FLOATS OUTSIDE THE GLASS OF THE DOME. It is tangled in some rigging, and the movement of the machinery causes the cadaver to tap on the glass periodically.

STANDARD : (shouts) You can come up!  It’s safe!

The others come up the steps.

ROBY: (spying the corpse) Oh — Jesus —

Broussard’s corpse is blue and bloated where the wrappings have torn loose. Bumping against the glass, he looks like he wants to come in.

STANDARD: The ship’s gravitational attraction must have drawn him back.
HUNTER: (horrified) Should we go outside and bring him in?
STANDARD: No… the risk is too great. Perhaps after we’ve destroyed the thing.

Glancing back, the men retreat from the observation dome. Broussard remains against the glass, peering in with dead eyes.

Here it is repurposed in Giler and Hill’s script. The action sees Ripley searching for the key to Mu-th-r’s control room in Ash’s compartment.

INT. BLISTER STAIRCASE

Ripley cautiously descends the stairs to the blister. Carrying a flamethrower.

INT. ASH’S BLISTER

Looks around the blister.
Satisfied it’s deserted.
She puts down the flamethrower.
Methodically begins to search for the key.
Faint tapping sound.
Then stops.
She looks around.
Sees nothing.
Resumes searching near blister window…
Ripley finds key…
Tapping sound.
She whips around to see: Kane’s disfigured face slapping against the plexiglass.
She stifles a scream.
Drops the key onto the curved surface of the blister.
Fishes for it.
Kane’s bloated face swings in…
She grabs the key and bolts up companionway.

O’Bannon’s version focuses on the elegiac aspects of the scene: Hunter’s discomfort, Standard’s resolve, Roby’s disgust, and the dead Broussard’s imagined forlornness. Giler and Hill’s version focuses more on Ripley’s restrained horror and the spectacle of Kane’s decomposing face.

The return of Kane was ultimately cut from the movie, but the production crew did manage to craft its pivotal prop: the body bag.

Sarcophagus. There was an Egyptian element to the Company designs, from the panels on some of the ship’s walls, to the ‘wings of Horus’ Weylan-Yutani logo, and to this burial unit. Interestingly, Egyptian mummies kept their hearts as they were necessary for judgment in the afterlife – Kane’s own heart was likely shredded when the Alien tore through him.

The overall look of it all is part quarantine bag, part Egyptian mummy’s shroud. The body is bound and fastened into a shape reminiscent of a sarcophagi, and the deceased’s name and rank is slipped into a clear pouch under the chin. When supervising model maker Martin Bower had Kane’s shroud carved as a small wooden prop he had these details copied in full, even though we would never see the thing in a close-up shot.

The patch on Kane’s shroud commemorates the establishment of United Kingdom settlements on Mars and Titan.

Finally, the corpse is loaded into the airlock and sent adrift. For this scene, Ridley sketched two figures escorting Kane out of the lock. These were likely Brett and Parker, who were originally planned to have ‘maintenance’ scenes outside of the Nostromo.

Today, space burial is extravagant yet quirky; usually reserved for science-fiction icons and a few peculiar scientists. The remains of American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh are currently racing for the limits of our solar system, and has the distinction of being “the first set of human remains which will escape the solar system to travel among the stars”.

There’s a sense of wonder about that… but in Alien, the space burial is makeshift, emotionless, and somewhat nihilistic: Tombaugh’s ashes are considered to be trailblazing their way into a seemingly infinite frontier; Kane’s bones will be lost in the ever-expanding void. Tombaugh’s chariot, the New Horizons spacecraft, will investigate and analyse foreign worlds. Kane is merely debris.

Strange Shapes Interviews Ian Whyte

Ian Whyte is a former basketball player who first appeared on film screens as the lead Predator in Alien vs. Predator. He resumed his role, albeit as a different Predator, in Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. Other film roles include lending his services as a stunt performer for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, playing a djinn in Clash of the Titans, a fiery sword-wielding representative of Satan in Solomon Kane, various roles in Game of Thrones, and the Engineer in Prometheus.

Valaquen: It seemed like you jumped right into the deep end with your first role, playing the iconic Predator in a long awaited movie. How did the role come to your attention, and what did the audition process entail?
Ian Whyte: The casting director called my basketball team who then called me to pass on the news. My initial reaction was, “Yeah right! Nobody wants to put me in a film!” but within five minutes I had been invited to London to audition for the part. I was asked to put on a wetsuit, a balaclava, a rough mock up of the predator head with thick black ropes for dreads and the predator mask. When fully dressed I was given the command: “Start running!” and I went around and around in circles, in the studio on what was the hottest day of the year for about an hour. I briefly met Paul Anderson the following day. A week later I was invited to Prague to meet the ADI crew who had the final say on the casting and a week after that I received a phone call from the producer offering me the part… if I wanted it of course!

V: The interesting thing about Scar, your character in Alien vs. Predator, is that he kills human characters as well as the Aliens. Can you comment on working with (and killing) actors like Lance Henriksen?
IW: I was very honest with the cast as to my experience in front of the camera and they were very gracious and very helpful when we were shooting the scenes, none more so than Lance himself. That scene was quite literally a baptism of fire. There was an experienced stuntman on hand to do the actual burn sequence when Weyland ignites his oxygen bottle, but I did the closeups. The shot that was used in the film showed some whisps of fire on my shoulders, but in quite a few of the takes I was quite ablaze! Before I left for Prague to shoot, my wife said to me, “You can do as many of your own stunts as you like, just don’t let them set you on fire!” and that was one of the first scenes to be shot as well!

V: Aliens vs Predator: Requiem, wasn’t well received but your performance as Wolf earned you a lot of acclaim from fans. Some even compared you to original Predator performer Kevin Peter Hall. How did you approach the svelte professional Wolf in comparison to the bulkier amateur Scar?
IW: I approached the role in much the same way with regard to my training, I just had a lot more of it! Three years passed between AVP and the sequel and I spent those years training as if the film was just around the corner. It was time well spent, because the shooting schedule crammed twice as much action into half the amount of time compared to the first one. One day the producer came into the studio and shouted, “Send Ian home! We can’t keep him here any longer!” I had just gone over 18 hours on set.

“Just don’t let them set you on fire!”

V: You also played the Engineer in Prometheus. How did this role come to your attention?
IW: Very quietly! Initially I was just asked to do some makeup tests for the prosthetic makeup applications that the makeup supervisor was working on, but it very quickly became an ongoing audition of sorts. Then I met Ridley one rainy Sunday afternoon in Pinewood and quite soon after I met the casting director for an official audition. Without any irony whatsoever, the scene that I auditioned was the one scene in the script that I didn’t shoot for the film: the self sacrifice scene at the waterfall!

V: Unlike the Predator or the creatures from Solomon Kane and Clash of the Titans, the Engineer’s face is a large part of the performance: he is largely unmasked, and can emote. He also gets some dialogue. Do you prefer the sort of roles where you can hide under layers, or do you prefer roles like the Engineer, where the make-up does not disguise you completely?
IW: A mask is a luxury for an actor that is true. You can completely let go of reality when the camera doesn’t see your face, but these are fantastical roles anyway, they require a great deal of imagination and invention to make them a “reality”. I tend not to discriminate between masked roles and straight roles, the emotions are all going on underneath the mask anyway and it’s me that’s moving the costume, not the costume that’s telling me how to act.

V: The Engineer is a mysterious being. We don’t know where he came from, and we have only the thinnest understanding of his mission. When you play such a creature do you formulate a backstory and attitude in your head? Who, as far as you’re concerned, is the Engineer?
IW: Someone on the crew, (I forget exactly who) described them absolutely perfectly as “Truck drivers of the apocalypse!” They serve a higher power/intelligence, unnamed and unknown.

V: This time you ripped Michael Fassbender’s head off, bludgeoned Guy Pierce, and hounded Noomi Rapace – can you comment on working with these actors?
IW: The first time I saw Fassbender on set it was a  20 second masterclass in knowing your character. Quite amazing! Everyone was thoroughly charming, I only met Guy Pierce on the day that we shot the awakening scene. Whilst we were between shots, we stayed on the set chatting. When someone asked me if I would step away for costume checks an hour had passed, almost in the blink of an eye. On set we only ever saw each other in makeup, so we had an agreement to meet at the premier party, so we could see each other up close, in person!

V: Ridley has a reputation for being a perfectionist and artist. Were you given any leeway in your interpretation of the Engineer, or were you directed more closely by Scott?
IW: I had a rudimentary framework of concepts that I knew would need to be employed; his superiority, almost regal posturing, but generally I was free to explore the character. The first time we see the Engineer rise from his hibernation sleep, I just went for it and the scene sort of grew organically. A hush fell over the set after cut was called on the first take and we all looked at each other as if we’d done something wrong. Gradually the crew went about their tasks and a friend of mine on the makeup team came over and said “Ridley’s coming over.” I thought “oh! what have I done?” I had nothing to worry about, he was very pleased.

Ian Whyte serving a higher power in Prometheus.

V: Fans have been waiting for decades to see the Space Jockey come to life and pilot his ship. How did it feel to don that suit and helmet and sit at the controls in that very impressive set?
IW: This was an idea in Ridley Scott’s head for 32 years. Ever since we first saw the pilot in the derelict ship in Alien, questions have been asked as to who this being is. It was an honour and a privilege to finally bring it to life.

V: You’ve also been busy with various roles on Game of Thrones. First as a White Walker, then Gregor Clegane, and also as a giant. Can you tell me about working on the series and your multiple roles?
IW: George R R Martin has created a vast stage for actors, I would have been happy to just play one role, but to have the opportunity to play multiple parts is a joy and a privilege. They will all die of course!

V: Your role as Gregor Clegane was probably your most human to date (though the Mountain is no less of a monster). Was accepting the role a daunting prospect for you?
IW: It was very daunting not least because I am not the first person to play the part and I came under quite a lot of criticism, not for my performance, but for daring to take over the part in the first place. Oh well! Criticism is all part of the job. You have to be professional about this sort of thing and do what you think is right. It was almost a different character from series one, no action at all, just a vile presence, a cauldron of simmering rage.

V: You also shared some screentime with Charles Dance, who is also an Alien veteran, having played a prominent role in Alien 3. Can you comment on working with Dance in the show, and your scenes together?
IW: Oddly enough, it never occurred to me that he was in Alien 3 until we did a personal appearance together for a fan convention in Belgium and he was asked questions about his career. He is a gent of the highest order and a joy to work alongside. After meeting for the first time I quite forgot that he has been quite an inspiration to me throughout his career and we just got on with doing the scenes.
I found playing this character in these particular scenes quite paradoxical. This is a man who is infamous for his brutality, his inhumanity and his angry rages, but in Tywin’s office he is as if a naughty schoolboy standing in front of the headmaster… I found it a delicate balancing act.

V: You have appeared in every season of GoT to date, either as a monster, Clegane, or a giant. Without giving anything away, can we expect to see you again for series 4? As someone who’s read the books, the Mountain has some very front-and-centre scenes coming up.
IW: Wouldn’t it be great if I could give you a scoop? No! quite simply, NO! no details of series 4 shall pass from my lips! sorry!

Ian in costume as a giant from Game of Thrones.

I’d like to thank Mr. Whyte for taking the time out of a hectic schedule to answer my long winded questions. It was nothing but a joy and I look forward to seeing more of his gods and monsters!

I have to extend another thank you to Space Sweeper for crafting the article’s banner, so – thank you!

~ Valaquen.

The Engineers

“[Alien’s] a really classic movie now,” Harry Dean Stanton told Venice Magazine in 1997. “I never liked science-fiction movies or monster movies, but that one was very believable. I told Ridley Scott during my interview with him that I didn’t like those sorts of films and he said, ‘Well I don’t either, actually, but I think I can make something of this one.’ And he did.”

For Yaphet Kotto, the role of Parker came through the door when the actor was already considering other projects. “I got the script in the mail,” he told the Austin Chronicle, “and it came at a time when I had two other projects to make a decision about, and one of those projects was a firm offer for a great deal of money, and a friend of mine was directing it — Stuart Rosenberg. He called me directly at home and said, ‘C’mon I want you to do this. I’m going to send it to you. Blah, blah, blah.’ I said, ‘Stuart, I really can’t do this movie.’ He asked, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Because I’ve got a script that I really love.’ ‘Do they want you?’ I said, ‘I don’t know,’ but I still had to let him go. So I waited four months for this offer – and it came through.”

“I saw that this character, Parker, was the first African-American who was going to be in space,” Kotto continued, though he felt more impressed by Ripley: “What completely shocked me and surprised me though was the character of Ripley. Whoa, this was history. ‘I’ve got to be in this one,’ I said. ‘No, I’ll wait. I’ll wait and I’ll wait and I’ll wait — and I’ll keep on waiting until they are ready to go, and then I’ll go and force my way into this movie. I’ve got to be a part of this.’ I turned down everything. I waited for four months, and around December [’77] I got a call from Fox, saying they wanted to talk to me about Alien. And when I went over there, they offered me the part as soon as I walked in the door.”

“I was there [at Shepperton Studios] for four months,” he told IGN, “and I was glad to get back because I’d just done Live and Let Die there. And so, I went back there and worked with the old crew again on Alien and I said, ‘I’m back!’ I was happy to do that … And let me tell you, the sets were incredible. You walk in and you see these big sets, in England, these big hangers at Pinewood. Oh, man it was great.”

In Another World…: Nabbing the Alien job did cost Stanton another smaller, but quite classic role: “I always wanted to work with Stanley Kubrick. He wanted me to work with him once, but I was in London doing Alien. He was doing The Shining with Jack [Nicholson], and he wanted me to play the bartender.” Stanton was of course forced to turn down the part. “But I had a chance,” he concluded, “at least Kubrick thought of me.” The role of Lloyd the bartender went to Joe Turkel, who was later cast as Eldon Tyrell in Blade Runner due to his phantasmagoric performance in Kubrick’s movie.

As for Yaphet, he also turned down another classic film role. “You know, I was offered to do the part of Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back one afternoon in the luncheonette by Irvin Kershner, who had just finished directing me in Raid on Entebbe. He was directing Empire. I was having lunch with Veronica Cartwright, and he came over and asked me if I wanted to do the part, and I said no. He asked why, and I said, ‘Because they’ll kill me off. I’ll have trouble finding work after that.’ I said, ‘I’ve got something I want to do called Brubaker in Ohio. That’s where I’m going after the movie is over.’ I knew I had to get back down to Earth.”

In Dan O’Bannon’s original script Brett is “Jay Faust: A worker. Unimaginative.” If any character made the leap from this synopsis to the movie and remained intact, Brett may be that man. Of course, Parker is not far behind, having first been conjured up in O’Bannon’s mind as “Cleave Hunter: High strung; came along to make his fortune”. Faust and Hunter became Brett and Parker when David Giler and Walter Hill rewrote the script. “Some of the characters are named after athletes,” revealed Hill. “Brett was for George Brett (of the Kansas City Royals), Parker was Dave Parker of The Pirates.”

Even Brett’s shirt had a ‘backstory’: “[He] probably picked it up in some station way off, just off Mars where they go into some gift shop. He gets cards for the kids that he’ll probably see in four years time, that’s why he bought this Hawaiian shirt.”
The shirt and other items like the ship’s dipping bird and various bric-a-brac are “from the various gift shops around the universe, wherever they’d stopped off – I figured that wherever you go there’ll be gift shops.”

The two are quickly pinned as the disgruntled ‘hands’ aboard the ship. In O’Bannon’s script, Parker’s only protestation is to mutter, “Seems to me we came on this trip to make some credit, not to go off on some kind of side trip” – later, he complains that if they abandon ship, then “We’d be broke”.

In the revised/final script, their first solo scene together has them funneling through the underbelly of the ship and complaining:

Parker: I want to know why they never come down here. This is where the work is.
Brett: Same reason we have half a share to their one; our time is their time, that’s the way they see it.
Parker: Well, I’ll tell you something… it stinks.

In the movie, Parker has reached a conclusion: “That’s why nobody comes down here. It’s because of you. You know you don’t have any personality.” This line was an ad-lib of Kotto’s, as Stanton revealed: “I remember one line where Yaphet turns to me. I said ‘Why are these [people] so difficult to deal with?’ or something and he says, ‘your personality, man!’ (laughter) Which wasn’t in the script.”

On the 1999 DVD commentary, Ridley stated that the two engineers’ kvetching was probably due to an ongoing and unresolved issue between the crew: “[When we meet] Harry Dean Stanton and Yaphet Kotto, [they’re] already complaining about their deal, and we never know whether that’s serious or whether that’s a continual discussion between them and their captain.”

The aim was to highlight the already fractured relations between the upper and lower decks and between the various characters long before the Alien sets foot on the ship. Scott continued: “We were always told just enough about [the crew] so we knew who they were, who the troublemakers were, who the politicians were, there was already a class system [between] below deck and upper deck.”

In fact, Yaphet was expressly instructed by Ridley to harangue Sigourney to increase the tension between their characters. When the crew debate on what to do after Dallas’ disappearance, Kotto constantly challenged Weaver until her temper boiled over. “I remember talking to Yaphet,” Scott said, “and saying, which is a little unfair, to wind up Sigourney and keep interrupting her, and it was really great because she [later] established her authority. So I think you have a very good take over here by Sigourney and Yaphet backs down, and is obliged to accept the situation.”

“I liked Sigourney Weaver from the moment I met her,” Kotto told KultFilmFreak.com. “Ridley told me, ‘No, no, don’t start cosying up with Sigourney.’ He wanted me to annoy the crap out of her, which I did. He told me to get on Sigourney’s nerves; stop speaking to her on the lunch breaks, dressing rooms, etc. All for the end of the movie at that moment when she blows up at Parker and takes over leadership. I did exactly as Ridley told me. To this day, I don’t know if he ever told her. I will never let a director do that to me again! I asked him when I saw him in Canada at their film festival and the release of the Director’s Cut, and I don’t think he had.”

Yaphet needn’t feel bad, as he wasn’t the only cast member who was instructed to rough up Sigourney. In a scene only present in the Director’s Cut, Lambert slaps Ripley as they queue to watch Kane’s inspection in the auto-doc. However, Sigourney kept ducking away from Cartwright’s passes, until Ridley urged the latter to really slap Weaver. On the Bluray commentary track, Sigourney and Scott discuss the scene:

Ridley Scott: This is an additional scene that we didn’t have in the film. This was where I think Veronica whacked you, she’d given you a huge whack, first time…

Sigourney Weaver: Oh, you asked her to do that?

RS: No, absolutely not, but I, but it’s like-

SW: No, she really hit me, you can see how surprised I was … And no one told me that she was going to do this…

RS: I’m sorry… (laughs)

The Nostromo Crew Profiles sketch out the backstories of the two engineers. J.T. Parker was born in San Diego, California, United Americas, in 2080. At the age of twenty he worked as pit mechanic for Speedy Maxx high-speed terrafoil racing team. Typically, he quit the pit crew over a salary dispute. Five years later he was recruited into the United Americas Outer Rim Defense Fleet, serving as a mechanic of heavy land transport vehicles and officer shuttles. Parker went on to spend some time in a prisoner of war camp, ran a black market, was liberated and discharged from military service, and went on to ‘fill several menial’ jobs aboard other space vessels before, in 2120, he served under Captain Dallas on the Nostromo.

Parker is boisterous and tirelessly insistent in nature; traits seemingly carried over from Kotto himself. There are several stories about his stormy energy circulating: Tom Skerritt remembers that, one early morning, “[Kotto was] starting the day too, and he’s in the first scene, he’s the kinda guy who needs to get worked up in order to really get the juices flowing. And the English crew is very serene, always very serene and very understanding – and he starts ranting, ‘C’mon what hell’s going on here … let’s get going, get some light here!’ and finally he stops and was all ready to go. And I was standing at the back with two English crewmembers in front of me, and after this wonderful exercise one turns to the other and says, ‘isn’t if grand, being English?’”

If anybody was wondering what magazine Parker was perusing as the crew observe Kane in the auto-doc, then it was this vintage (by 2122) copy of Fiesta.

S.E. Brett was born in Houston, Texas, United Americas in 2069. At 16 he began working for the family business (E-Z-FLY Spacecraft Repair) until 2094 when he became a hardware specialist for Solari Energy Corp at Osaka solar energy plant. Employment was quickly terminated. The next year he piloted high-speed cargo vehicles for Ridton Corp through Iranistan war zone – again, his employment was terminated. Brett underwent treatment for alcoholism several times throughout the intervening years, and served on several space vessels, losing and regaining his flight status along the way. In 2120 he was assigned to the USCSS Nostromo, under Captain Dallas.

Brett is quiet and seems generally passive, though he is not averse to grumbling. Though he is Parker’s elder, he is very much an underling. He is the teacup to Parker’s storm. The two are famous for being the film’s closest two-some, probably the only two members aboard the ship who can be jovial with one another. This relationship was not existent, or at least overt in any way, in O’Bannon’s script. There, the characters share a singular brief moment:

Hunter is strapping on an oxygen mask and a flame thrower. Faust is helping him.

Faust: Well, uh… good luck. I hope you won’t need me, but if you do, I’m here.
Hunter: (grimly) Right.

His close attachment to Parker was joked about at the beginning of the 1978 ‘Final/Revised’ script. In a scene that didn’t make it to the movie, Kane makes breakfast after rising from cryo-sleep and listens to each of his crewmates’ freezers open. One by one they open, until: “If we have Parker,” Kane remarks, “can Brett be far behind?” Of course, Brett’s chamber only opens in the wake of Parker’s.

Brett is depicted as being quite hands-on. In the movie he rigs the cattle prod equipment, but in the O’Bannon script he also pieces together the rudimentary motion tracker. Of course, their first catch is still the ship’s cat. The first kill in the O’Bannon script differs greatly from that in the movie. After finding the cat, instead of running off alone the three crewmen stick together. However, the others have trapped the Alien within the food store, and move to poison the creature within by pumping in gas. The Alien tears its way out of the room and escapes, and the crew is spared for now. Later, when Hunter (that is, Parker) is trawling through the ship’s vents (in a role filled by Dallas in the movie) the Alien lunges out and kills Melkonis/Lambert as they wait for Hunter to flush it out.

But Faust/Brett does not delay death for long: he catches sight of the Alien within the airlock and insists that the crew blow the lock to kill the creature. Unfortunately the Alien avoids the mortal blow of the closing doors and Faust is crushed in its place. In later scripts a modification of this death was given to Lambert, and then removed altogether.

Brett stationed in the engine room. Behind him we can see evidence of a hobby: crafting old galleons and ships.

Brett’s ships can also be seen behind and around him in the movie.

In the movie, Brett meets his violent end after committing a cardinal sin of horror films: he goes it alone. He trails the ship’s cat through the ‘gold room’ and below the landing gear, unwittingly stumbling across the now-grown Alien on the way. The creature descends, punches a hole in his skull, and drags the carcass up and into the beams. True to form, Brett’s last word is Parker’s name in the extended version of the scene.

“[The Alien] swings down acrobatically and they are suddenly face-to-face,” Scott told Fantastic Films. “I thought that would be quite a spooky image, actually, with the thing hanging there like a mantis. Almost independent suspension, seeming to move on their own.”

“You don’t know quite how it’s got up or down,” he finished. “It’s just there, like a fly. Takes him. Bang! Bingo!”

At first Ridley wanted the Alien to lunge on Brett and tear his heart out. Parker and Ripley would then rush in and cradle his body. The problem was, the imagery was too close to that of the chestburster, which had occurred only moments earlier. “[Originally], I didn’t have the Alien take Brett away,” Scott told Fantastic Films in 1979. “I wanted it to remove his heart. When the others find him and turn him over, there’s a huge cavity in his chest, reminiscent of the hole in the Space Jockey. But that was too much like Kane’s death, so we eventually changed it.”

The Alien swoops from the landing gear-

-clutches Brett-

-and leaves his heartless corpse in the dark.

The framing of the death scene seems to have been formulated on the day (though really it took several days to perfect its stunts). Special Effects Supervisor Nick Allder told Cinefex magazine: “Ridley brought me onto the stage and said: ‘I want Brett to get it now, but I just don’t want the creature to dart out and menace him to start with. I’d rather have it reach out and sort of caress his head – almost kind of inquisitive at first. Then you see it squeeze up, and blood starts running down Brett’s face, and it cracks his head open.’ So we ended up doing it almost on the spur of the moment. We ran blood tubes up into Harry Dean Stanton’s cap and through his hair. Then, when the Alien started squeezing, we started pumping, and the blood ran out and down his face.”

Once the Alien latched onto Brett, Parker and Ripley were to run in just as the beast lifts off into the rafters and chains. The two are showered in blood as the room turns from sudden chaos back to silence. “We used to have Sigourney and Yaphet rush in,” Scott said on the 1999 commentary, “but somehow that was too normal, it was more elegant to leave him to die in a lonely fashion… The cat was the only witness.”

In Stanton’s opinion, he didn’t play his death scene to his own satisfaction: “This is where I screwed up,” he said on the film’s commentary track, “I could never play terror. Oh, I can play crying, I can laugh, I can cry, I can do everything but playing terror, and I didn’t know it at the time but I found out later how to play terror. And I didn’t use it in this part. It worked, but I wish I had known it. You don’t look scared, you just look like, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before'”.

“It’s always difficult for an actor to relate to what is, essentially, a beast. They know what it is, and they know there’s a man inside the suit, and they know the odds are they’ll never have to experience anything like it in their real lives. So I had to try and inflict on Harry Dean Stanton a feeling he probably couldn’t even imagine having.”
~ Ridley Scott, Fantastic Films, 1979.

“In most instances like this,” Scott said of the Brett/Alien encounter, “you’d probably die before the thing touched you anyway. I mean, you’d have a heart attack, right? You’d turn and see it and last about four seconds before you had a coronary, okay? So with Brett’s death, and subsequent run-ins with the Alien, it was always done with to the ultimate feeling of a heart attack. The rush of a heart attack, even if the thing didn’t ever touch them.”

In Dan O’Bannons’ script, Hunter/Parker suffered quite a spectacular fate; one that was carried over into many other iterations of the script:

Standard whirls around, sees the thing clutching Hunter. It holds him off to one side, as though to keep Standard from getting at him. Standard doesn’t know what to do.

Hunter: The flamethrower!
Standard: I can’t, the acid will pour out!

At that moment the creature TAKES A BITE OUT OF HUNTER, WHO SCREAMS IN MORTAL AGONY.

Standard can take it no longer; he raises the flamethrower and fires — BUT THE CREATURE SWINGS HUNTER AROUND AS A SHIELD AND HUNTER CATCHES THE FULL BLAST OF THE FLAME.

Standard instantly stops firing, but now Hunter is a kicking ball of flame, held out at arm’s length by the monster.

Parker’s immolation was eventually dropped due to the logistics of a burn stunt on a small set with a rubber monster. In the final version of the script the scene was heavily simplified:

The Alien drops Lambert.
Parker lands a blow with the flamethrower.
No effect.
The Alien strikes him once.
Killing him instantly.
~ Alien script, final/revised, June 1978.

Ridley recalled Yaphet’s energy and riotous demeanor on the set: “Yaphet was always great as the troublemaker on board the ship, and the day that Yaphet had to die, he said, ‘I’m not going to die.’ He said, ‘This thing can’t kill me!’ So I had to have this long discussion, persuading him to die that day,” (similarly, in a 1994 interview with Conan O’Brien, Yaphet joked[?] that his character in Live and Let Die was “too cool” to be killed – “I was not a villain, James Bond didn’t understand my point of view!”)

Miniature model make Jon Sorensen also recalls: “The Alien, as you all know, was played by an actor of Masai stock, Bolaji Badejo. The Masai are very slender but can be incredibly strong. Anyway, it seemed to us that Yaphet took something of a dislike to Bolaji. Now, whether this was part of a method-style pumping up exercise to keep “Parker” in a ‘fighting’ mode towards the Alien, no one was ever quite sure. But he certainly poured it on and everyone noticed, notably Bolaji. Well the day came for Parker to fight the Alien and Yaphet comes out with it. ‘No f****** Alien is going to beat me. No f****** Alien is going to hold me down!’ Well, Bolaji/Alien pinned Kotto/Parker to the ground, sitting on him. Could Yaphet shift him? No. Not with all his considerable strength could he get the Alien off. He was ABSOLUTELY furious. Bolaji, the quiet man, won the day.”

Humour aside, Kotto did make it clear that his character dying was the right way to go. “I don’t mind that Parker was killed,” he told IGN. “I wouldn’t want Parker to go on because I’d be caught up in the franchise. I wanted to get back to being an actor. And so I chose to get back to it. And this was not bulls**t. This was actual choices that I’d learned from. And I think I made these choices, learned these choices, by having a New York stage background. What you learn in New York is: don’t pull the same trick twice. You’ve got to come back before they put you in another role and they tear you up. So, that was what helped me make the choice not to go into The Empire Strikes Back or go and complain to the [Alien] writers that this character should go on.”

Parker, though initially depicted as being divisive and out for himself, tends to take on a protector role: first with Brett, and later he is usually seen by Lambert’s side. In the end, he throws aside a flamethrower to avoid immolating Lambert along with the Alien, and lunges at the creature to allow her to escape. Unfortunately, Lambert is too fear-stricken to move, and Parker is killed in the same manner as Brett, with Lambert quickly following their exit.

Parker’s ‘corpsing’ apparatus.

“The Alien script was tight,” Kotto summarised. “It was one of the best scripts I have ever read, so there was very little improv.”

Saying that, there was one thing… “They cut my, ‘Do I look like Flash Gordon to you’ line.”

Harry Dean Stanton was particularly grateful for one thing, as Ridley revealed on the commentary track: “There was this kind of stunned silence [after the preimere] and I remember Harry coming up to me, I think it was in the Egyptian, and he’s so sweet, and Harry looked at me and said, ‘Thanks for the close-ups, man'”.

The Android

Inhuman. Immoral. Infiltrator.

Ash was a late addition to Alien, first coming into the script when producers David Giler and Walter Hill were continuously rewriting Dan O’Bannon’s screenplay. Hill attributed his creation to one of Giler’s jokes. “He’s got a marvellous capacity for coming up with the unexpected,” Hill said, “a u-turn that’s novel but at the same time underlines what you’re trying to do. A lot of the time he’ll present it as a joke, and it’ll turn out to be a great idea. Like in Alien, when the Ian Holm character was revealed to be a droid – that was David.”

From the way the two describe the concept of Ash’s beheading scene, it seems as though the character originally began as a human. “Walter Hill and I were writing the script,” Giler told Fantastic Films, “and we had invented the subplot of this dodging character. And Hill said, ‘I have what I think is a dreadful idea, or a really good one. What do you think of this? Suppose, in this part, whack! his head comes off and he’s a robot?’”

The revelation that Ash was a robot would, the producers hoped, give the movie another story-defining shock in the wake of the chestburster. Giler also came up with one more gag: “And we’ll put [Ash] on a table and then we’ll have the head talk.” Hill agreed, and “We went back and made the subplot work for that. Actually at one time I wanted the first words from the robot on the table to be the Kipling poem, ‘If you could keep your head all about you…’”

Notice here that first, Ash began as a ‘dodging character’; essentially an underhanded nuisance (consider it a proto-Burke, if you can). When it comes to dispatching the character the producers come up with the idea of him being a robot, and so they rewrite the script to accommodate this new idea. Interestingly, Giler attributes the android idea to Walter, and vice versa.

“What I liked was the low-key cadence of the characters, which I always wanted to keep it real, and the people real, with normal behavioural patterns, not a movie character. That’s why Ash is particularly interesting, because you don’t really know if there’s anything special going on about him other than the fact he seems to be a bit of a stickler for process and he might be ruthless. You just don’t know whether he’s evil or not. But obviously he’s got some kind of itinerary going on, with his fascination of everything attached to this new discovery of the Alien…”
~ Ridley Scott, Alien commentary, 2003

In addition to that, Ridley seemed to confirm that Ash’s (in)humanity was in the air from the beginning; at one point, he could have been an alien himself. “We could have had a Martian in the crew,” Ridley explained. “He’s not much different [from the other crew], perhaps just slightly waxy skin and two small holes in his head. Biological changes rather than mechanical ones.” However Ridley found his alien-Ash idea quickly nixed: “I was, to a certain extent, held down by my producers. They didn’t know me from Adam, so they tried to keep things in balance. Alone I would have done more.”

Having said that, Ridley did concede that having a Martian standing out so conspicuously would draw viewers out of the film. “If you have a Martian in there, the audience is going to be staring at him. Not only that, but we could then have been directly compared to Star Wars or Star Trek.”

In the script Dallas was less passive in regards to Ash and confronted him concerning the chestburster within Kane. This scene was not filmed but made its way into the comic book adaptation.

The android twist was met with disdain by O’Bannon and alleged skepticism from Twentieth Century Fox, but Ron Shusett stuck up for the idea. “While we were at [Fox], Giler and Hill, who were my co-producers, came up with this idea and wrote it into the script,” Shusett explained. “Everybody hated it but me. The studio was afraid of it. Dan said, ‘I don’t like it.’ Their own partner [Gordon Carroll] said, ‘It’ll be a mish-mosh.’ I said, ‘Let’s film it and preview it.’”

“I thought it was a brilliant concept,” he continues, “and it gave a resonance to everything that came before, because you think back to when Ash opened the door and let the creature on board, you realize he wasn’t human, so of course he could have the lacking of humanity to sacrifice all the humans as long as he saved the Alien. That gave [the movie] an underbelly that helped it last through the years. When we filmed it, we weren’t sure it would work. We tried it on an audience, an invited audience. That was the only way that everybody said, ‘Oh, you need that.’ …  I saw it at a preview in Dallas: when that robot’s head came off, an usher actually fainted!”

“There was no Ash in my original script,” said O’Bannon, “they added that. The idea being here that all scripts must have a subplot, simply to have a single plot by itself is inadequate, all stories must have subplots, so they created a subplot. Ian Holm gives a brilliant performance, it’s brilliantly directed by Ridley, but if you stop and think about it, if it wasn’t in there what difference would it make one way or the other, I mean, who gives a rat’s ass, I mean so somebody is a robot?”

“It annoyed me when they did it,” he continued, “because it was what I called ‘The Russian Spy’. It was a tendency in certain types of thrillers, when people are on an interesting mission, to stick in a Russian spy. One of them is a spy and they don’t know which one, he’s trying to screw up the mission, Fantastic Voyage had that. When I saw Fantastic Voyage, I thought it annoying … instead of it adding any genuine suspense, all it did was annoy me … It’s a tension device which is commonly resorted to and doesn’t work because it doesn’t provide any real suspense. It doesn’t do anything except provide finger exercise for the writer who thinks that all stories must have subplots. So, I think its an inferior idea of inferior minds: well acted, well directed, and fortunately it occupies little enough screen time that it doesn’t disrupt the main plot.”

Ridley himself disagreed, saying years later: “This is a great turnabout in the story because just when you think your main and only aggressor is this thing loose on the ship, you’ve now got a much bigger problem – you’ve got two aggressors, which raises the paranoia and that of the audience twofold.”

Mu-th-r: as for Ash’s ‘accomplice’, the Nostromo’s computer, Ridley explained the naming process as thus: “Kubrick had already found a great name for his computer, which was called HAL. I couldn’t think of anything to say but Mum, or Mother.”

But why would the Company place an android on their ships and keep its identity a secret? According to Ridley, they are insistent “on placing a company man on each vehicle. In this vehicle, he takes the form of a robot, Ash. This would seem to be the normal development of a huge corporation trying to protect its interests. In this particular future, it would be very easy for “pirating” to exist. Corporations will have to find ways to assure that vehicles carrying minerals or vital information will not be hijacked.”

He elaborated on the idea of robots and corporations within the wider, but unseen, Alien universe, saying: “[T]he world has been converted into the property of two or three large conglomerates whose sources of energy are provided by the exploitation of deposits in space. The super cargo spaceships that link Earth and the planets would transport enormous loads of minerals: gas, oil and the like. To dissuade the crews from rebelling and to protect their own interests, these companies might place spies aboard, or at least would make the crews believe in the presence of such spies. Gradually a legend would evolve that these people, whose identities remain unknown, are in fact robots. Furthermore, nobody would ever have proof. This would reinforce legends already currently among the astronauts.”

Ash was placed deliberately on the Nostromo so the Company could successfully investigate a beacon emanating from a mysterious, far-out planetoid. However, Ridley has repeatedly shot down the suggestion that the Company was aware of the Alien payload: “I think any corporation that sends probes into unknown territory is going to think of the possibility of finding something new,” he said. “I’m sure that the crew members on all its ships would have been briefed to bring back anything of interest. It would be part of one’s job to bring it back. An alien, of course, would be of top priority. This particular corporation didn’t have a preconceived notion that an alien would be found on this mission, much less the particular Alien that is brought onto the ship. The idea of bringing it back alive would not have been on the minds of the corporate executives when they first received the alien transmission. They just had high expectations when they ordered the Nostromo to investigate – it was purely out of curiosity.”

This of course also explains Weyland-Yutani’s lack of action regarding the derelict and the eggs following the events of Alien. Ridley added: “I would have thought that Earth would have previously received messages [from space], realised they were coming from an intelligent source but, for economy reasons, perhaps have postponed the preparation of an investigatory spacecraft. Then, one day, Nostromo is in the vicinity and the order is given for the crew to bring back the Alien, good or evil, without any real thought being given to the consequences. The presence of the robot virtually guarantees, in principle, the success of the mission.“

Alien/Android Antagonism: The Alien quickly proves to be hostile, but does Ash have any reason to fear it? “We theorised that the Alien would feel or understand that Ash was a construction of robotics, however complex and strange,” Scott told Omni’s Screen Flights in 1984. “Because Ash wasn’t human, he’d have been no use as a host for its eggs.”

The two also share a sort of kinship beyond Ash’s worship of the creature, according to Scott. Ash is also a biomechanoid, albeit of human manufacture. He is an alien with a human face.

Ash succeeds in obtaining a specimen, though it runs amok through the ship, killing the crew one-by-one. Ash’s own death comes due to his inability to maintain his ruse. “If you create a model as perfect as that,” said Ridley, “it will have, almost of necessity, a form of ’emotional life’.”

Ash was programmed with a human ‘back-story’, though he was well aware of his artificial nature: “That was a consideration I had to deal with,” Ridley told fantastic Films. “There are a number of ways of approaching it, but the possibilities come down to either letting him know or programming him so he thinks he’s human. All the space in between was open, but we went with letting him know. If we had decided to keep it from him, there were all kinds of things we could have done, from programming him to know at a certain point, like an emergency, or even putting a complete memory tape in him that would give him a complete background – parents, schooling, brothers, the whole thing.”

“This scene is peculiar because you wonder how Ash got in behind her … [Ripley’s] not going to get any more information [from him], and she’s dipping into Company records and is not going to get the right answer …  I liked Ash reacting to human emotion … he wasn’t frightened of her, he was backing off, he didn’t understand why she was crying, probably because he had never seen that before, so you got that rather peculiar reaction from Ash as she shrinks away…”

‘”Now we have malevolence, which is even stranger by just adding one simple thing which just came out in the day – he’s beginning to perspire, and this perspiration is white … I guess this [attack] is the closest thing to seeing a robot have sex, huh. I needed to have some show of strength which was simple but violent.”
~ Ridley Scott, Alien commentary, 1999.

Ash’s awareness of this duality (among other factors) may have contributed to his ‘breakdown’, as Scott explained that his complexity made him more than an automaton:

“You don’t have only a physical and mental mechanism, but a machine that is capable at any moment of uncontrollable emotional reactions and which will take certain decisions by itself. Like HAL in 2001. Here, no one has considered that in building a robot, it had been given a psychological life, with worries and problems. This perfect machine starts to have feelings when faced with the behaviour of humans. It starts to be interested in the women and to have desires that cannot be expressed. Behind the assault on Ripley is an attempt to solve these tensions, a sort of rape…”

Excised dialogue explaining Ash’s ‘motivation’.

Android apartheid? In 1987 Lance Henriksen commented on what he perceived would be an android’s inner turmoil, and they are interesting comments in light of the series’ entire range of androids, Ash included: “I read a couple of books. One was Mockingbird [by Walter Tevis]. There’s a bit in it where the android knew how to play a piano, but didn’t know why. He didn’t know what music was, but he kept hearing it. It was part of his builder’s input that hadn’t been completely erased. That image stuck in my mind, and what it translated to me was that there were feelings that Bishop didn’t understand.”

Additionally, Henriksen reckoned Bishop and his ilk were aware of their lowly statuses as ‘un-humans’; this would understandably create friction, possibly like the type of breakdown we see with Ash: “For him, the world is xenophobic,” Lance said, “He’s an alien to anything alive.” The androids are an entire race created to serve. In a sense, they are a slave race: “You’re either replaced or you’re destroyed,” mused Henriksen. Perhaps Bishop’s line that Ash’s model of android was always “twitchy” has more sinister connotations; perhaps each model was systematically ‘junked’ sometime between Alien and Aliens. For the newer, more obedient Bishop-era android, maybe asking to be called an ‘artificial person’ rather than a robot is a plea for respect that is normally not given to these belittled mechanised beings.

One last thought: we know that Prometheus’ David was mass-produced, and Bishop-types have flooded the expanded universe, but would this make sense if machines like Ash are meant to be infiltrators and spies? We can only theoreticise that each Ash-type was uniquely designed in order to fulfill its objective. After such models proved to be undesirably emotional, or “twitchy”, new android lines once again had their individualities taken away from them, from their physical appearances and even down to their programming.

Ash ends his life, like Kane, on a canteen table – ironic considering that it was Ash’s malfeasance that allowed the Alien to grow undetected. In return, he is decapitated by Parker, decommissioned by Lambert, disconnected by Ripley, and then finally immolated.

“A lot of this stuff we had to make up on the day. So we couldn’t work out how to kill Ash. So we used one of those cattle prods and also left his interior to really be an organic choice, rather than having steel pipes and things like that [as innards] … I loved the glass marbles on the strands and the teeny bits of fibre-optics, and of course his blood … we worked forever trying to find what would be the voice of a dying robot. It’s almost a doppler effect. Spooky.”
~ Ridley Scott, Alien commentary, 1999.

“There’s so much you do which you keep really simple,” Scott said of the disconnection scene. “You know, the head on the table could have gone crazy with all kinds of stuff underneath it, but [it] was a very simple thing. We just had the mask, finished it, checked the rushes, went back, and incinerated it. That was it, one shot. Today that would cost a million dollars. I think it probably cost about two hundred quid.”

“Of its genre, I think that [Alien] has become a classic, so people still send me photographs to sign. John Hurt, as you know, had an even more famous scene where an Alien pops out of his stomach. I remember some of the Americans coming up to him the day before [filming] and saying, ‘Hey, John, it’s the big scene tomorrow. Do you have ideas how you’re going to approach this whole thing?’ John looked at me and winked and said, ‘I don’t know really. [Deep sigh] I suppose… I’ll just… bring my not inconsiderable imagination to bear… and just… do it!’ I think that’s in a nutshell what I do. I just do it.’
~ Ian Holm.

Before he goes Ash delivers one of the series’ most famous monologues, which was written by David Giler on the morning of the shoot. The earlier scripts featured a less poetic turn, with Ash soliloquising like a Bond villain in some iterations and having no final dialogue at all in others.

“This was a really doomy speech,” said Scott, “about the indestructibility and the perfection of what they were up against [with the Alien], and this was a scene written during photography because we never were really happy about the dialogue we had, and I think that Dave [Giler] really had to work on this incessantly as we headed towards the actual day. I think we actually came up with the words that morning, or David did.”

According to Veronica Cartwright, two versions of the scene were shot: the first was as originally scripted (a lot of explanatory plot talk) and the second featured the dialogue as we know it. Only Holm’s scenes were reshot, with the crew’s reactions carried over from the first shoot. “The original scene had more grapey things and stuff [around Ash],” claimed Cartwright. “I talked to Ian later, he said they went back and reshot with more tubey looking odds and ends, and they also changed the dialogue … Originally, this is where [Ash] brought up ‘has anybody tried to communicate with [the Alien]?’ and we were all standing around,  listening to him … So here we are, we were all sitting there with bated breath listening to Ian, he’s got his head in the middle of the table, you know with grapes and all sorts of stuff hanging off his head, [but] what you see is Ian months later [when they] redid it.”

The reshooting, if it happened at all, was unlikely to be months later: it was perhaps only days or weeks at the most, considering the film’s limited budget and schedule – it may have even been shot later on that first day. Ridley usually refers to the scene as having been shot very quickly, with the burning of Ash’s body being done only in one take.

“I loved his ideas,” Cartwright said of Holms’ performance. “He had this twitch, which you don’t get to see very much. He starts out fine, but as he starts to get [on] this left eye would twitch all the time as he starts to break down.”

Still, despite all, Dan O’Bannon remained adamant that Ash was a detraction for the film. “The whole point of Alien, according to Walter Hill, is that evil corporations created this situation; this crew wouldn’t even be in this desperate situation in the first place if the evil corporation hadn’t sought out this organism and decided to use it as a weapon, and stuck a robot on board to deceive the crew and get them trapped in this situation where this alien organism can do its worst and show that it would be very good for the corporation’s weapon systems. As far as Walter Hill is concerned, that’s what the movie is about.”

Ash’s ‘death mask’.

Interview with Sigourney Weaver, 1992

Sigourney Weaver talks to Starburst magazine about surviving, dying, Hicks, Newt, Clemens, killing the Alien, birthing the Alien, and more…

Starburst: Alien 3 has just grossed $25 million in its first weekend. Is that the highest of all time for a film starring a woman?
Sigourney Weaver: I’m sure it is [smiling]. I don’t know.

SB: You got paid a reported $5.5 million for this movie. Do you see yourself as a leader for women to get good money?
SW: Well, only once and probably never again. If I did another big budget action movie, then yes, I probably would go to the wall again. But most pictures don’t have that kind of money, and I don’t want to be considered as one of those actors who wants a lot of money, because a more interesting film might not find its way to you then.

SB: So why did you do another Alien movie?
SW: Well, firstly I think we approached this one with a lot of trepidation, because the first and second ones were so successful and so well done that, in my opinion, I think that everyone was a little worried that if we did a third one it wouldn’t measure up. So everyone took a long time and tried to figure out what story we should tell and what elements we should try to duplicate.

SB: It’s taken quite a lot of time to come up with those elements. What were they?
SW: Well, I know that we decided that James Cameron had done ‘guns’ so brilliantly it would be best not to try and reprise that. I don’t think there was any moment when people said, ‘Ah, let’s just do another Alien‘. It was more like, ‘Well, let’s think about it and see if we can come up with an original idea and a wonderful director, and then let’s go ahead with it.’ It was a very slow process and that’s why it took so long.

SB: There were many changes in the script and also problems about appointing a director. Did that cause a lot of disruption?
SW: I think of it as a constructive process really. Vincent Ward came in with a very original idea, and a very arresting one as far as I and everyone else was concerned. And then for various reasons he probably didn’t want to do an Alien film. See, there’s a big Alien responsibility as well as just telling the story – and then David Fincher came in and he was very keen to do it and was obviously a brilliant young man.

Weaver and her co-star.

SB: It seems to me that the director is the most important individual on the Alien films.
SW: Me too. I’ve always felt that the directors have always been the stars of these pictures. And until we found the right kind of genius I think everyone was a little apprehensive. It was like the project never felt set, and then we found Fincher. I think we felt we were in good hands.

SB: Did David Fincher impress you?
SW: Oh yes, he was great, I mean, the first thing out of his mouth was, ‘Shave Ripley’s head’. So we knew that this wasn’t going to be a quiet, undaring director – and he’s very funny too, which is nice to have on a difficult set. On a long cold freezing, uncomfortable movie a few laughs go a long way.

SB: So much has been made of the shaved head. How did it feel?
SW: It made me feel colder. Actually you have no idea, I mean you don’t have long hair, but it’s amazing how much your head stays warm when you’ve got hair. So I just felt colder most of the time, and other than that, I just felt lighter.

SB: Do you think it change Ripley?
SW: I think she felt more frail, perhaps because she had no hair we all sort of looked like these skeletons in a way, and I felt it brought out everyone’s vulnerability, but I don’t think it made her tougher. In fact it made it ore surreal because you could never see yourself in the mirror you always saw the character facing you.

SB: But there has been criticism about the shaven heads – that you couldn’t make out who was who, and that it might change the perception of people.
SW: I actually disagree with those people. I think it makes everybody’s face really jump out. Maybe you do have to pay more attention to the faces of the people, but I think it brings out the faces and the vulnerability of these actors very much.

SB: There are some people who see it as a symbol of being very offensive.
SW: Yeah, that’s what it’s there for. You have all these convicts on this planet and they all look even more frightening – and solely because of this hair style. In some ways it’s just an act of defiance. I also noticed, while in England, that there were a lot of people avoiding me – but I guess it wasn’t usual to see a 6 foot tall bald woman walking in the streets of London.

SB: But did you like it?
SW: I liked it in a way that I found it very liberating, and my husband was very supportive. He pretended to like it and then told me, after my hair had grown back, that he had hated it, while my daughter tried not to look at me. But non of us [in the film] had hair anyway so we all knew who was in the cast. So if you saw a bald person at Pinewood you knew it was a friend, so you could say, ‘Hello’. And the only other thing that was a problem was that it took a lot of up-keep. We had to shave it every two days, because even then two days’ growth looked shaggy – but yeah, I found it okay. You should try it.

SB: You managed to swindle yourself a co-producer’s credit on this movie. How did that come about?
SW: [Laughs] Well I think they made me a co-producer out of courtesy. They knew, as an actor, I would open my mouth a lot, so they thought, ‘Why not make it legal?’ [Smiles] I don’t ever recall asking to be co-producer, and I was very touched they [Walter Hill, Gordon Carroll, and David Giler] invited me to be on board – and it was a fascinating process, and one in which I learned a great deal. And I felt very privilege to participate in some decisions.

SB: Did you have a lot of input?
SW: I had a certain amount of input. I would call it ‘input’. Some people have called it ‘control’, and I never wanted control. I just wanted to be able to hear all the different ideas and voice my own thoughts, but it was never ‘control’.

SB: Would you co-produce the next movie?
SW: Not if I had any sense [laughs]. [Note: Weaver did in fact co-produce Alien Resurrection.]

Bishop’s… cameo.

SB: The trailer for Alien 3 has a shot of yourself and the Alien with the voice over saying ‘the bitch is back’. What did you think when you saw it?
SW: Someone else asked me this, Fox called me about the trailer, which had already been made, and I remember seeing it and saying, ‘Am I supposed to be the bitch?’ And they said, ‘No, no, it’s the Alien,’ and I think anyone who’s seen Aliens knows that the bitch is the creature.

SB: The production of Alien 3 seemed to take forever – certainly pre-production. Did that cause you any problems?
SW: Right, their plan was that I would not be in the third one and come back and save the day in the fourth. It was a very good script, but Fox very nicely wouldn’t make the film without the character of Ripley.

SB: So when Fox said this did you immediately jump at the chance to do Alien 3?
SW: What I basically said was: I love this character, and I love to do another one if you can give me something that Ripley hasn’t had the chance to do before.

SB: Was the original script what you wanted to do?
SW: Well, the first script I read was the one without me, we made half an effort to write me into it, but in the end it didn’t work.

SB: So, personally, what did you want to do?
SW: I wanted her to have a different set of circumstances, and I think the writers came through brilliantly for me in regard that firstly, in this picture she‘s the alien, she’s disliked and an outcast and oddly that’s one reason she’s not afraid of the convicts, because in some ways she’s like them, in that the system has sort of thrown her out onto the garbage heap as well – and this really appealed to me and was extremely challenging. So, selfishly, I wanted to do it once I saw what the basic storyline was.

SB: As a co-producer, did you have a lot of involvement regarding Ripley’s dialogue?
SW: I would say I had some input in this one, because I kept saying I didn’t want to go over the same territory, and again I trusted the writers. I mean a lot of people write Ripley like a pissed off gym instructor. David [Giler] and Walter [Hill] have always understood that she’s a person, while some of the writers had her swearing constantly, and actually Ripley almost never swear unless she’s really in trouble, so it’s really David’s and Walter’s credit

SB:  Did you have any say about there not being any guns?
SW: I think I said no to guns, but it wasn’t up to me to dictate those kind of things, but to me it was more original to investigate what real courage is.  Which is when you don’t have any weapons and you cannot even get along with each other, how do you go about fighting this common enemy?

SB: Would you say that her sexuality was a weapon in this one, considering the planet is inhabited solely by men?
SW: Absolutely, sounds good to me (laughs)

SB: Ripley seems to have more responsibilities in this film, but at the same time appears to be more feminine, how have you played her this time round?
SW: I guess I’ve tried to play Ripley just as an ordinary person that is put in extraordinary circumstances and comes through, and that enables her to take care of the people that she hates. There’s this unjudgmental quality about her. She may  judge them very harshly intellectually, but she will still try to save them. That’s what makes her female and that’s what makes her a hero. It makes her a good officer.

SB: Did you get involved in the politics of making this film, considering the problems it had?
SW: Well, I would have been involved in that anyway because I was making it every day, and we had a lot of pressure understandably from the studio saying that we were spending too much money and taking too much time, so that would have affected me anyway. At least in this case I felt I could get on the phone and say, ‘We understand there’s a lot of pressure, but can we just reduce it for this week because we were under  enough pressure as it is thank you.’

SB: Was it the toughest Alien to work on?
SW: No, it was the easiest in some ways, because we had a lot of laughs and it was a friendly company.  I think the hardest one for me was the second one because I had to carry the little girl and the gun almost everyday , and that was just so physically draining, and the active power station which is such a lovely place to work in winter!

SB: Talking about the second one, are you pleased with the new Aliens special edition?
SW: I’m happy that the three minutes was put back in.

SB: You mean when Ripley’s told about the death of her daughter by Carter Burke?
SW: Yes, that was the scene.

SB: Do you know why it was cut?
SW: I think it was probably to do with the fact that the film was already around two-and-a-quarter hours and that was probably long enough, but I was very disappointed that that scene wasn’t in the original, because it changed everything. I based Ripley’s whole relationship with Newt due to the fact she lost her whole family and that was the price she had to pay for surviving the first one. I think Jim [Cameron] is also upset that it wasn’t in the original release.

SB: In that scene Burke shows Ripley a photo of an elderly lady that was her daughter, which I read somewhere was a photo of your own mother, is that true?
SW: Yes it is, I pulled a bit of my weight on that one!

SB: Does the production differ on this one compared to the previous Alien films?
SW: Very much so. I mean, the directors I worked with in these movies I really have to take my hat off to. I think it was Ridley Scott who showed me what could be done with the character of Ripley. Basically he let me go off and do what I wanted, but at the time I didn’t realize what a great opportunity it was at first because I was such a snob. I really didn’t want to do science-fiction, but I learnt quickly that this was an unusual and brilliant opportunity. The second one, James Cameron had written without having ever met me, and when I read the script, to me is kind of crazy of the studio, but they in fact just took it for granted that I would be in it because it was such a great role, which it was.

SB: Were you surprised by the script for Aliens?
SW: When I finally was sent the script I was very busy, and I think that I skipped over a lot of stage instructions which went on and on about the guns, and I didn’t realize that they were the stars of the film. So when I got there, there was all this amazing hardware coming out every day, and I was a member of Hand Gun Control in America, and I was just amazed that I was in this very war-like picture, and to be honest I was never comfortable with the aspect of it, and Ripley didn’t have to be a ‘gun creature’ for this part.

“When Ripley finds [Newt], her life means something again.”
~ Sigourney Weaver, Starburst, 1987/

SB: This movie like the others was filmed mostly in England, this time with a mainly inexperienced British cast. Did you have to guide them through this picture?
SW: Well I’ve always tried to do that, because I’ve noticed all the best actors are the ones who can help the other actors perform. They will bring the best out of you, because you’re not thinking about yourself. With the character of Ripley in Aliens she was more like a mother hen in a way to all those actors because, for a lot of them, they were doing their first film. Whilst in this movie these guys were more experienced than I was, they had been in the theater, done every conceivable play, and so I was listening to them, but I think in the Alien pictures everyone sort of takes care of each other, the delineation between the cast and crew becomes muddy because we were all freezing, exhausted, dirty and bloody.
That that’s one of the things I like about the Alien films. It really feels like a collaboration . It’s like one giant crew, and you often forget that you’re in front of the camera.

SB:  You don’t think the American audience will find it difficult to understand some of the accents, or was anybody dubbed?
SW:  Oh no, no one was dubbed. I love the accents. I think they’re great, but saying that, there are still some people back home asking what a ‘wanker’ is.

SB: You’ve played Ripley three times now. What do you admire about her; is there anything you dislike about her and are there any similarities between you?
SW: There are certain things I don’t feel any kinship with. I think one of the reasons why she is so brave is that she doesn’t have a powerful imagination. She tries to think clearly, it’s kind of like ‘The Right Stuff’, the way they train pilots to react if something goes wrong they go to plan A and if A didn’t work let’s try B and so on. That’s what I feel about Ripley, but I’m not very Ripley-like.
I try to keep a cool head but I’m not always successful and I scream when I see a mouse, but I am trying to make an effort with my daughter when I see a creepy crawly and go, ‘Oh yes, that is a spider, let’s go pick it up and look at it’, and things like that, but that’s a real effort for me.

SB: Do you enjoy playing Ripley?
SW: It’s been a real privilege to play her because she is so different from me, and I find a very comforting presence when I play her, she’s good company and I’ll miss that.

SB: One of the most horrifying scenes in the movie is the autopsy.
SW: The little creature they had playing newt was a life-size dummy of Carrie Henn. It was very difficult for me because as soon as they pulled the sheet off her little face I just thought I was going to die. It was excruciating scene to do personally, and I think it was meant to be that excruciating to watch.

SB: But did you have to kill off Newt?
SW: You wanted her to be on this planet with rapists and child molesters? There was a desire on behalf of the filmmakers not to continue with the family ideas that Jim Cameron had started because that was so much him, and I think it was very romantic and in some ways very sentimental. But I think the producers wanted to make a very dark unsentimental film and to get back to something like the first one where no one really gets along.
I was horrified by what they were going to do with Newt. It was a very difficult scene to play, and in fact when it premiered I asked Fox to fly Carrie Henn over so we could watch it together, because I was so afraid that she would be freaked out. I’d already written to her and told her what had happened, and of course she wasn;t freaked out at all. She’s always been so cool about this stuff, but yes, I was upset by it.

Carrie Henn on Newt’s death in 1995: “Life goes on.”

SB: But it was still pretty callous of you.
SW: Yes, I know, but the variety of things that could of happened to her had she survived the crash were awful. So to me it was better to kill her off right away, and there were other options which were even more unsavoury concerning Newt. I think that Vincent [Ward], and I’m not too sure of this, had a chestburster coming out of Newt. So in terms of all things considered, for her to drown was very tame, it’s not that everyone hates children, what we were heading for was an end of the century film, where what you expect doesn’t happen and that you can’t count on anything. It is awful. I agree with you.

SB: In Aliens Ripley spent nearly all of the film saving the little girl and within the first five minutes in this one she’s drowned. It just seems to make the second one pointless.
SW: Well, I certainly can’t speak for Fincher, but I think he would say, ‘Yeah, it was pointless,’ and that’s the point of this picture and the philosophical bent of this movie.

SB: In the first movie there seems to be an attraction between Ripley and Dallas, and in Aliens with Hicks.
SW: Yeah, and they all get killed! [laughs].

SB: Two pretty good looking guys but you don’t have any physical contact, while in this picture within ten minutes of the start you’ve met a bald ex junkie and you’re in the sack together.
SW: Oh, I think Charles holds his own, while with Hicks it’s just hinted at, and if Jim [Cameron] had been directing the third one we would have continued that relationship, but it was so much his view of life that I guess we felt we couldn’t continue, and as for Ridley [Scott’s] film there was a scene in the original script where myself and Tom Skerritt had a love scene.

SB: Was that filmed?
SW: No, I don’t think so, we did it in the screen test. It’s pretty awful and very bleak. I mean people forget how bleak the first one is; it’s very bleak And the bit with me and Tom is sort of like, ‘I need some relief,’ and it’s a very heartless scene.

SB: So why do you think that after having the one thing Ripley cares about die, she immediately gets into bed with someone?
SW: Well, don’t you think they were these kind of lost souls and that she was on her own and so was he, what I liked about it, even though it was a bit far-fetched, was that it showed she was going to start over again, she really was going to try and lead a new life.

SB: As in the first one, your leading man gets killed off rather early in Alien 3.
SW: Well, killing Charles Dance is very similar to the first one when John Hurt was the obvious hero, and the same sadistic writers [laughs] really pulled the rug out from under the audience. When he was the one that everyone thought would go on to the end and that also applied to Tom Skerritt. And it’s the same case with Charles Dance, as brilliant as he is in the film, everyone expects that he will continue, and the next step would be that Ripley tells him about the Alien and gets his support, and in the end I guess the writers just didn’t want it to go that way.

Behind the scenes for Clemens’ exit.

SB: The sex scenes in Alien 3 really aren’t sex scenes, was that cut on purpose?
SW: This has been asked before and I’m fascinated, because we didn;t think a lot of people would want to see the two of us grunting and rolling around. I mean, when I see a sex scene with characters I respect, to me it’s not a pure love story, and I guess I want to respect the characters’ privacy. So I think what we did was cut to the chase, as it were, and in my opinion it was a very sophisticated shot. You see all of it; there has been nothing cut out. I found in America that one of the reactions was, ‘Why does Ripley sleep with a man who she hardly knows?’ while in your country it’, ‘Why didn’t we get to see you sleep with him?’ [laughs].

SB: Just prior to Alien 3 you had a child, and in the movie there’s also the strange pregnancy you have to deal with. Was there any comparisons that helped you?
SW: Well, it didn’t compare at all. It really didn’t help me because Ripley was so close to the little girl that losing her was traumatic enough without my trying to even make a parallel with myself. And the other thing really didn’t seem like a pregnancy; it felt more like a cancer.

SB: The ending is quite touching, especially as Ripley seems to embrace the Alien, as if Ripley felt that she was the mother.
SW: I love that and I’m glad you think it too. It was Fincher’s idea that it wouldn’t be a brutal ending -that it was a tender ending- because, yes, in a way it was her child and that she had been this frustrated mother. I think some of that comes from me because I wanted to be a mother for so long before I was successful. I always wanted Ripley to have a normal life and instead of getting that life she has this awful thing happen which seemed to bring a kind of intimacy with the Alien.
David [Giler], Walter [Hill] and I talked quite a bit about that. Ripley had this daughter that she had lost then then found another daughter that she also lost, and now she’s carrying this creature which I hope will be a surprise to the audience, and I never lost the irony of that.
Personally, I think that if you do a monster movie it should also be about that kind of intimacy. It should be about the guts of life – that’s where you’re threatened most of all.

SB: Of the many criticisms concerning the movie most have been about the ending being too similar to T2, and that there were several different ending shot.
SW: There were no different endings. What you see is the original ending, and what we shot recently we never got to finish. In the end we went with the ending that was in the original script, and yes it is a little bit like T2 but we didn’t feel that it was too similar to change it. There was an ending where she churned up and got back into her space vessel and went away.

SB: It was Vincent Ward’s script when Ripley would somehow vomit up the Alien embryo…
SW: Right. It was a very powerful scene but I don’t think you could actually film it, and there was something very depressing about er getting back into the space shuttle and going off into the stars again. It just seemed to me that this for better or for worse was her destiny, and she does save the world from the Alien. Theoretically she kills the last one, this is the Queen and it would have taken over the world so she does make the right choice.

SB: So this is finally the end of the line for Ripley?
SW: Well, if Walter, David, and Gordon and all those guys can come up with some amazing scenario where Ripley could be reconstituted from her finger nail clippings, I’m not saying no. It’s just that how many times can the same character wake up to the same situations again and win, and then go back to sleep and then have the same thing happen in the next movie?

SB: Would you like to see more Alien movies?
SW: I hope they will make more Alien films because I think there’s a whole new aspect of the series that really hasn’t been dealt with since the first one, which is, ‘What is it doing, what does it want from us, how does it communicate, where does it come from?’ All of these things.

SB: What is the Alien to you?
SW: To me the Alien is anything that terrifies each of us the most. It’s a very personal image that manifests itself in this Alien creature which is so indestructible. It’s whatever our own personal nightmare is.

Interview from Starburst issues 168, 169, and 170.

Special thanks to xeno_alpha of Weyland-Yutani Archives!