Ridley Scott and Alien
SuperAlien
MemberXenomorphApril 19, 2019I felt the urge to open this topic, not in defense of Sir Ridley Scott, because he doesn't need any, but to make things clearer, after seeing that more and more people question Ridley Scott's huge contribution for the Alien franchise, by stating that he is merely the director.
While not minimizing the rest of the people involved their merits, we have to acknowledge, once and for all, that, without Ridley Scott, the Alien we all love would have been a totally different film. I summarized below some relevant facts about Ridley Scott's contribution during the production of Alien (big thanks to Strange Shapes, where I found most of the info compiled below).
Firstly, on the story, without Ridley Scott we would not have today the xenomorph of an alien origin, but created by the Company - it remains to be seen after Alien Covenant if David created the xenomorph or just his own variant (excerpts from Strange Shapes):
"Here is a breakdown of the two plots. Giler and Hill’s version is a summary of their script before O’Bannon and Shusett urged Ridley Scott to have the script revised.
Dan O’Bannon’s Alien, a synopsis: the crew of the commercial vehicle ‘Snark’ awaken from cryosleep on a return voyage to Earth. Their ship’s computer has detected an SOS beacon of unknown origin emanating from a nearby planetoid. The crew land, and find a derelict spacecraft containing the corpse of a dead alien pilot. Nearby they find another structure; an ancient pyramid, containing mysterious spore. One of them is attacked and impregnated; the creature erupts during a meal after the ship has continued its journey to Earth. The crew are picked off one by one until only Roby survives, along with the ship’s cat. The Alien is ejected from the emergency shuttle and vapourised. The Snark itself is destroyed. Roby enters cryosleep for the journey home.
Walter Hill & David Giler’s Alien, a synopsis: the crew of the commercial vehicle ‘Nostromo’ awaken from cryosleep on a return voyage to Earth. Their ship’s computer has detected an SOS beacon of unknown origin emanating from a nearby planetoid. The crew land, and find a derelict spacecraft containing the corpse of a dead human pilot. Nearby they find another structure; a concrete Cylinder, containing mysterious spore. One of them is attacked and impregnated; the creature erupts during a meal after the ship has continued its journey to Earth. The crew are picked off one by one, and the Science Officer Ash is revealed to be a Company robot. Ash reveals that the crew were led to the Cylinder deliberately, to serve as test subjects for the weapons division – the Alien is one of the Company’s bioweapons. In the end, only Ripley survives, along with the ship’s cat. The Alien is ejected from the emergency shuttle and vapourised. The Nostromo itself is destroyed. Ripley enters cryosleep for the journey home.
As already pointed out, O’Bannon and Shusett intervened to have Hill and Giler’s draft rewritten to incorporate the alien elements that they had excised. “Ridley read [the original script] and went, ‘Oh yes. We have to go back to the first way. Definitely.'” Though Giler and Hill acquiesced to Scott’s demand, they still managed to infuse the script with the paranoia of a Big Brother corporate entity whose sheer size and oversight leads to the deaths of its employees in some dark corner of space."
Secondly, on the creatures, although O'Bannon introduced Giger to the producers, the key to hiring Giger was Ridley Scott, as O'Bannon himself testifies (thanks to Strange Shapes again):
"The only problem with Giger was the reluctance of Twentieth Century Fox and the film’s producers to hire him. Giger had initially worked on a commission from O’Bannon and Shusett, and though he had begun preliminary design work, he had yet to be brought onto the film in an official capacity. “This man is sick,” producer Gordon Carroll is quoted as saying, having seen Giger’s designs. “I fought a year with Fox to hire Giger,” O’Bannon told Science Fiction Film Making magazine in the 1980’s. “I wrote the script so Giger could design those things, and then they picked up the script and said, ‘Naw, we don’t want this guy. When has he ever designed a movie?’”
“I had a heck of a time trying to get the producers to hire Giger,” said O’Bannon elsewhere. “They really didn’t want to get him involved because he’s not a movie professional; he was some ‘whing-ding’ in Zurich. They wanted to find somebody who had done this before, that they could count on.” Ron Shusett chips in: “The studio let us hire Cobb, because he was more normal. Giger, they were terrified of. They said, ‘these drawings are repulsive – people will stay away in droves.’ For eight months they refused to hire him.”
The key to hiring Giger was Ridley Scott, as O’Bannon explains: “When Ridley came to the project, Ronnie was rushing up with the original draft of the script [and] I was rushing up with copies of Giger’s work. Ridley saw Giger’s stuff he was snowed. He said, ‘This is it!’” Scott called up Fox and explained that he would not do the film if Giger was not hired as the creature designer. His threat worked, and Giger was hired. Later, producer David Giler would tell Cinefantastique, “[Alien’s] a richly textured film, thanks to HR Giger’s work.” Dan O’Bannon agreed: “Only because Ridley was hired on was Giger hired. He took a liking to Giger’s work. Without Giger, I don’t think we would have had much of a movie.”
The direction for the design of Alien was also indicated by Ridley Scott to Giger, he told Giger the Alien should look like the Necronom V painting (thanks, BigDave) below:
Before Ridley Scott was involved, the Alien looked like in Dan O'Bannon's
and Ron Cobb's visions:
It worths a mention that Ridley Scott chose Bolaji Badejo to be the man in the Alien suit (Strange Shapes):
"While Ridley was trying to find his Alien performer, Roger Dicken was skeptical that one could be found, telling Cinefex, “I went to about three meetings in London and watched these characters rolling around on the floor and quite frankly, I thought it was a bit Mickey Mouse. I mean, it was obvious to me that none of this was going to work, but I had to just sit around wasting time while everybody else figured it out. I sat through a few more meetings while they ran through football players and wrestlers and tall men. Then, for a while, they thought they’d use an ordinary-sized guy so there wouldn’t be any problems with stunts and all. At that point, I even offered to be the monster myself. I figured if I was going to make the suit, I might as well be in it.”
The saving grace was a trip to the pub. “We started with a stunt man who was quite thin,” said Scott, “but in the rubber suit he looked like the Michelin Man. So my casting director [Peter Archer] said, ‘I’ve seen a guy in a pub in Soho who is about seven feet tall, has a tiny head and a tiny skinny body.’ So he brought Bolaji Badejo to the office … I said, ‘Do you want to be in movies?’ and he said, ‘Sure’. And he became the Alien.”
“As soon as I walked in,” Bolaji told Cinefantastique, “Ridley Scott knew he’d found the right person.” Prior to filming, Badejo was placed on the Nostromo set with a mock-up Alien head and roamed the corridors on film, slithering, pausing, turning, kneeling, and prowling through the corridors to nail an appropriate system of movement for the beast.
“It’s very 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 … I think 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 the ultimate feeling of a heart attack. The rush of a heart attack, even if the thing didn’t ever touch them.”
~ Ridley Scott, Fantastic Films, 1979.
Then we come to the design for the Space Jockey, after the two variants proposed by Ron Cobb
and Moebius:
"None of these concepts were taken too seriously by Ridley Scott, who commissioned HR Giger to design the Space Jockey, using one of Giger’s Necronomicon paintings as a launching pad for the final creature" (Strange Shapes):
Here is the testimony of the creature master himself: “From the script I knew he was huge and had a hole in his chest, but that was all. Ridley suggested another one of my Necronom creatures as a guide. They don’t look much alike now, but it was a starting point; and the Space Jockey kind of grew up from there in bits and pieces. The creature we finally ended up building is biomechanical to the extent that he has physically grown into, or maybe even out of, his seat – he’s integrated totally into the function he performs.”
~ HR Giger, Cinefex, 1979.
And for the derelict, after the ideas of the derelict by Chris Foss:
and Moebius:
"Scott eventually turned to Giger, fresh from designing the Alien, for other interpretations of the Jockey ship.
“What we were looking for here was a totally alien-looking spacecraft,” Scott told Cinefex in 1979. “I didn’t think it would something with a lot of lights on it and stuff like that. I figured it would be like nothing anyone ever imagines; either that, or extraordinarily familiar and slightly archaic looking.”
“Once the Alien was under control,” said Giger, “Ridley asked me if I could design a spaceship not made by human beings. Well how do you do that? I thought maybe it might look organic -something that could grow even, like a plant- but I didn’t know exactly what it should look like. Then early one morning I couldn’t sleep, I got up and started painting and the derelict ship was born in a few hours. It ended up like an aerodynamic bone with little technical stuff all over it, but it wasn’t anything I had planned – it just sort of ran out of my mind and my airbrush.”
Like the other artists, Giger brought his own style to the concepts, and his proved to be the most provocative. His Jockey ship rests atop a landscape of twisted metal and bone. “I wanted it to look planted,” Giger told Famous Monsters, “perhaps in the process of maturing, a mixture of organic and mechanical stuff.”
“Giger’s first drawing was just a knockout,” said Scott. “I took one look at it and said, ‘That’s it.’ Other people couldn’t quite see it though, so I had to keep digging my heels and saying, ‘You wont get a better derelict – don’t screw about with it.’ You know, Giger is a special case, and when something’s that good, you have to recognise it and leave it alone.’
"However, despite Ridley loving the design, some members of the production crew took issue with the derelict’s odd shape. First to object was the film’s writer. “O’Bannon,” Giger wrote in his diary, “who has just flown in from the USA, doesn’t think it’s technical enough. A battle of pros and cons begins. I keep my silence; I know that Scott will win the argument.” Of course, as it turns out, he did."
Thank you for your patience to read such a lengthy post.
And thank you, Ridley Scott, you are my hero!
"He survived, he’s now in Disneyland in Orlando, and no way am I going back there. How did he end up in Disneyland? I saw him in Disneyland, Jesus Christ!"
Not many people know that the facehugger from the film was not designed by Giger, but by O'Bannon, following Ridley Scott's suggestions to combine elements from various works from Giger's Necronom. The early facehugger designs by Giger are those featured in the mural from Prometheus:
“There was a big meeting,” O’Bannon told Cinefex in 1979, “and everybody was talking at the same time and trying to tell Dicken what the hell it should look like (the facehugger). Finally, Ridley pulled out Giger’s book and said: ‘Look, I want these fingers here on this page and I want that over there for the back, and then I want the tail from this other page.’ And Dicken was just confused. So I asked Ridley if I could take a try at it, and he said, ‘Go ahead.’ So I went over to the art department with Dicken and we took a drafting table and a huge piece of paper and some pencils. I drew two heads on the paper, and then I opened up Giger’s book and put it down in front of us.”
“‘All right,’ I said. ‘Ridley said he wanted part of this body, right?’ And I sketched it out. ‘And he liked these fingers.’ So I added the fingers. ‘And he wanted this tail.’ Well, while we were doing this, Giger came in –his plane had arrived from Switzerland- and he had some new designs for the facehugger. And they were very similar to what we were putting together on the drawing board – not identical, but similar. His had an eye on the back, and the shape of it was much more like the palm of a hand. I looked at them and I said, ‘Oh, that’s good.’ Then Giger looked at the thing I was sketching with Dicken, and he said, ‘No, that’s better, that’s much better.’ I was really flattered. So I said, ‘Then I should continue with it?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yes.’ So we went on.”
Facehugger profile. Note the cyclopean eye. Image copyright HR Giger.
O’Bannon continues: “When it came to trying to figure out what kind of a skeletal understructure the thing would need so the fingers could hook up, I got Ron Cobb over and he scrawled out his ideas – which, as usual, were excellent. Then I cleaned the whole thing up a little and did it in ink –exact size- and that’s what we went with.”
The facehugger, like the film at large, was the rare successful product of a melting pot approach to design. “I was really pleased,” said O’Bannon, “because I had kind of eclectically constructed the facehugger out of the things that Ridley wanted and the things that Giger wanted, and some good ideas from Cobb and from Dicken. Then we put the thing through a blueprint machine, got Ridley to okay it, and Roger went off and built it.”
Ridley with Giger’s Necronomicon paintings and a prototype facehugger bust. Image courtesy of mauvais-genres.
"He survived, he’s now in Disneyland in Orlando, and no way am I going back there. How did he end up in Disneyland? I saw him in Disneyland, Jesus Christ!"
Not to diminish Strange Shapes' contribution to the Alien fandom but any newer fans should also check out the Weyland-Yutani Archives, a similar blog created by Scified's very own Xeno_Alpha_07. Hosted here on Scified the W-Y Archives were originally hosted on Blogger for many years.
Another valuable resource for Alien fans is the Alien Universe Timeline created by Scott Middlebrook, AKA Scified member S.M. Other Alien lore websites that fans may also find of interest are The Nostromo Files, Alien Universe (which has replaced the cool MUTHUR interface that was at Alienmovies.com), and of course the guys over at AVP Galaxy. Of course, there are many other Alien resources out there but these together with Strange Shapes are the ones worth mentioning, IMO.
There is no denying that Ridley Scott was instrumental in helping shape 1979's Alien into the movie it became, but since he returned with his series of prequel movies he has staked ownership on the entire franchise, ownership he cannot claim IMO.
Blogs like Strange Shapes and other online resources help catalog the 40+ years of interviews and behind-the-scenes information that help fans appreciate the movies that little bit more, but said information, and I mean no offense by this (I have such a blog of my own linked in my signature), is for the most part merely a collection of interviews, most of which, as interviews tend to be, are diplomatically and politically (in terms of promoting the movie) phrased. What you will not find in these interviews is what wasn't said publically, although with the history of Alien and it's sequels certain truths have been deduced, such as Giler's constant interference, O'Bannon and Fincher's mistreatment by the aforementioned, and Scott and Camerons frustration towards Giler.
Giler hate aside, and getting back to Scott, Ridley was key to the first movie, but his contributions and practices were not all paved with gold...
# Allegedly Scott was shy and reclusive on set and gave very little in way of direction. This may have been due to inexperience with Alien being his second ever movie. But in his wake Cameron (Aliens was his second movie) and Fincher (Alien 3 was his directorial debut) reportedly showed much more authority on set.
# For the Space Jockey scene Scott famously used children in smaller versions of the principal actor's suits, with the intention of making the set look twice as large. Yet in all subsequent shots, the principal actors are used on the same set creating a conflicting scale. Some might call this nitpicking, but imagine such an error of scale appearing in a modern movie such as The Lord of the Rings. And then, of course, there is the shot of the Aliens tail raising provocatively between Lambert's legs just before it kills her, and has led many to believe it also violated her. But those aren't Lambert's legs - the shot was taken from Brett's death scene earlier in the movie.
# Scott was far from the first choice for the role. Other, higher profile directors at the time turned the movie down. When Scott was hired Fox were literally scraping the barrel, and Giler clearly believed Scott would sway the production in his favor, Which thankfully Scott did not. Not being a horror movie director, as he proved with Hannibal, Scott was ill-suited for the job, and a more established horror director may have produced a better movie, but alas we will never know now. In modern context imagine Paul Feig making a Terminator movie (*shudder*)
# Yes Scott demanded Giger be brought on board, and that O'Bannon's script idea of an actual Alien be used, but both of these, and likely many more aspects of the key decisions while being ticked off by Scott were raised and championed by O'Bannon, who was literally fighting against Giler to have his vision of Alien be made, as opposed to Giler's needless rewrite.
# Not all of Scott's ideas were "inspired". There is, of course, the infamous mention that Scott wanted the Alien to kill Ripley and mimic her voice in the movies closing scene. Another bad idea was Scott's suggestions for some of the Aliens movements, such as the crab walk toward Lambert (see below) which was thankfully left on the cutting room floor, as well as the needlessly exploitative casting scenes depicting Dallas and Ripley as lovers.
After directing Alien, and briefly working on a sequel Scott abandoned the franchise for 33 years. And while devout fans will always view the first movie through rose-tinted spectacles, it was Cameron's sequel in 1986 that propelled the franchise into popularity. I am not denying that Alien was influential, but Aliens was the movie that for many started it all - the comics, the games, the toys. And while some fans berate Camerons Queen, it was this aspect of the Alien that the sequels and the crossovers continued.
But back to Scott.
After 33 years, and a string of good and bad movies he returned to the Alien franchise with rapturous applause and delivered Prometheus. Yes, Prometheus expanded the mythology and was a visual masterpiece, but together with Alien: Covenant lets chronicle what Scott has, of recent contributed to the Alien franchise...
# It was Scott that hired Damon Lindelof to add the "mystery-box" elements to Prometheus. Lindelof is now virtually unemployable.
# For all intents and purposes Scott has retconned the Space Jockey into a bald jock in a suit.
# The Alien is, according to Scott, created by David; a synthetic created by mankind.
# The black goo, shown in Prometheus to infect victims with Xenomorph traits, and the key to David creating his perfect organism, is also shown in Covenant to be a more "generic" bioweapon when unleashed on the Engineer city.
# Rather than deliver what could have been an Alien 2001, Scott and Fox listened to YouTube videos such as the Prometheus HISHE, rather than the fans, and delivered possibly the worst Alien movie to date.
# Scott has repeatedly said that the beast is cooked. And in its place, because his performance in Prometheus was praised, Scott focused more on David than on the Alien, even breaking the cardinal rule of having the creature in full view in daylight (even AVPR avoid breaking that rule).
# The characterization, editing choices and chosen narrative directions taken in the Alien prequels have divided the fanbase.
# Despite whatever arguments one may have against his proposal, Neill Blomkamp's movie generated enough interest among the fandom for Fox to consider it. Early reports suggested that the movie would enter production after Covenants release, with Scott attached as executive producer. However, as Covenants release drew closer Scott proclaimed that the next movie, his third prequel would enter production immediately thereafter and that Blomkamp's movie had been shelved. Scott's movie was rumored to be titled Alien: Awakening, which was formerly the title of Blomkamp's proposed movie. More recently, despite that both James Cameron and Sigourney Weaver have stated that they loved Blomkamp's script, Scott has said that Blomkamp only supplied a short treatment/outline.
# Covenant performed so poorly compared to Prometheus and received such a backlash from fans that Fox put the brakes on Scott's Alien: Awakening, with Stacey Snider shooting down Scott's plans to produce an AI centric war of the worlds, stating that the story of any such sequel to Covenant was not certain.
In short, while Scott may have played a key role in finishing the production of Alien, it was Dan O'Bannon that was the driving force throughout - without O'Bannon none of any of this would have happened. But if one is to praise Scott for his achievements, one should also take into account the damage he has reaped on the franchise and the fandom. Pre-Prometheus I, as we all, heralded Scott's return, but post-Covenant I'm wishing he had not bothered.
