Academy Award-nominated special effects makeup artist and the co-founder of Legacy Effects, Shane Mahan took LA Weekly behind the scenes of Fede Alvarez's Alien: Romulus and unveiled a ton of photos taken on set! Scroll down to see them and read a few excerpts from their interview!
“I think it’s a brilliant mid story between the two films,” says Mahan. “In this story, it takes the idea from the first film — that they were looking for the alien to create a weapon. It’s all about what the evil company wants. The people are expendable. So, finding the alien in the beginning of this film, it looks as though they’ve extracted the essence of it. Álvarez constructed the space station as if it were a manufacturing plant. This was a factory where they had figured out how to mass-produce these creatures. So, those pre-packaged Facehuggers were working, and certainly extending the life cycle and making it very fast to create the Warriors. And then the black fluid, which is a nod to the Prometheus film, was in development, which creates the Offspring.”
Romulus was a massive undertaking, with hundreds of artists working across several shops in unison to help bring Álvarez’s vision to the big screen. WETA brought the Facehuggers. Filmefex Studios in Budapest provided most of the human components, like taking lifecasts of the actors, building fake human bodies and creating prosthetics for the facial damage inflicted by the monsters. Alec Gillis, a dear friend of Mahan’s who worked with him back on Aliens and now runs his own Studio Gillis, got back in the mix to work on the Chestbursters. Even Mad God writer, producer and director Phil Tippett showed off some of his famous stop-motion animation. “There’s a rat in a cage that gets squashed, and then it’s injected and it regenerates,” explains Mahan, “It looks like time-lapse photography, but that’s a stop-motion animated rat that Phil did, and he did a marvelous job.”
For the most part, the new Xenomorph suits are large 3D-printed pieces that are all interconnected and assembled like a giant model kit. Once sculpted in the computer by key artists Scott Patton and Darnell Isom, the pieces are then grown to scale, put together and finished off in hard surface modeling. From there, the pieces are remolded, cast in lightweight urethane plastic, then assembled and painted by Ryan Pintar and Parker Hensley. Shots of the alien in the film are an amalgamation of an actor in a suit, a Bunraku puppet (a Japanese style of puppeteering using rods that move the ligaments of the puppet like a shadow), and an eight-foot-tall animatronic.
Be sure to check out the full article here for more of their interview and check out our image gallery here for even more images and concept art from Alien: Romulus!
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