After 41 years, “Alien” (1979) still packs a punch. Superbly directed by Ridley Scott, this is an edge of your seat horror film that ranks on the same breath as “Rosemary’s Baby,” “Psycho” and “The Shining.” Throughout the years, film critics have looked at the movie for themes and interpretations. When it first came out, the enclosed corridors of the spaceship, the sweaty atmosphere, and the relentless and sneaky enemy made some people think about the Vietnam war. The Apollo moon landing had happened only a decade prior to its release – and the first part of the film is a bad dream version of it. Discussion about the objectification of women has also been brought up with evidence to back it up. Notice the playboy centerfold photographs on the walls of Ash’s room as he tries to dominate Ripley with a rolled-up magazine. People have commented about the phallic symbols in the design. Were those intentional? It’s also worth noting that Ripley is one of the most powerful, intelligent and resourceful characters in the annals of cinema – and she happens to be female. (The role was originally written for a man.) Yet, her authority is undermined by male figures. It is significant that the crew is blue-collar and is at the mercy of corporate greed back on earth. I love that Ridley Scott recently said “I wanted to scare the shit out of people. That’s the job.” Yet great art and great cinema – as I have mentioned in prior emails – it’s open to our interpretation, and with the passage of time we bring our own baggage to our experience and analysis of the work. Which brings us to May 1, 2020.
Ripley warns the crew at the beginning of the film, “Listen to me, if we break quarantine, we could all die.”
“Alien” follows the crew of the Nostromo who answers a distress call from a distant planet and bring back on board a foreign organism. This creature penetrates one of the crew members and parasitically replicates itself. The fragility of the human body against outside forces is articulated in one of the most memorable and shocking moments in the film. The new life form starts growing and hunting our crew members. It’s a perfect killing machine, and it takes advantage of the hesitation and panic inside the ship. The claustrophobic environment creates a nail-biting sense of paranoia. “We have to stick together!” – implores Ripley. Unfortunately the crew doesn’t listen to any of her warnings.
Director Scott generates suspense and fear with a bare minimum. It’s an extraordinary movie. Worth revisiting.
Ash: “You still don’t understand what you’re dealing with, do you? The perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.”
Lambert: “You admire it.”
Ash: “I admire its purity. A survivor… unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.”
Love,
Roger
Available on HBO streaming services and to rent on iTunes, YouTube, Vudu, Redbox and Google Play.
Directed by Ridley Scott
Written by Dan O’Bannon
Starring: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm
117 minutes
About Director Ridley Scott
English film director and producer Ridley Scott was born on November 30, 1937 in South Shields, England, to Elizabeth and Col. Francis Percy Scott. He had two brothers, one of whom was Tony Scott, who later also became a film director.
In the late 1960s, Scott founded Ridley Scott Associates, a film and commercial production company, and brought Tony on to work with him. The company garnered attention for the Scott brothers, along with other commercial directors, including Alan Parker and Hugh Hudson. Still, Scott continued to pursue a career in film directing. He finally landed a job directing 1977’s The Duellists, which was nominated for the main prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and won an award for best film.
Scott then went on to direct the movies Alien, starring Sigourney Weaver, and Blade Runner, starring Harrison Ford. Blade Runner failed at the box office in 1982, but later became regarded as a classic. In 1991, Ridley Scott directed Thelma & Louise, starring Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon. The film was one of his biggest critical successes, and snagged Scott an Academy Award nomination for best director. He later would go on to receive more Academy nods and critical success directing film such as Gladiator (2000), Black Hawk Down (2001), American Gangster (2007), The Martian (2015), All the Money in the World (2017) among many others over his long career.
Alien Origins
“With Star Wars essentially a sleeper phenomenon and a runaway box office success, the executives at 20th Century Fox were determined to greenlight another outer space adventure … and fast. Sci-fi was suddenly white hot and they turned to producers Walter Hill, David Giler and Gordon Carroll, who had been developing a ‘Jaws in Space’ story by Dan O’Bannon and Ron Shusett, originally called Star Beast. The tale followed a small, blue-collar crew shipping ore through space who respond to a mysterious signal at their peril.
To his credit, studio CEO Alan Ladd Jr. wisely did not seek to simply clone the heroic bravado storytelling of George Lucas’ space fantasy that audiences were lining up to see over and over and over — and producers were stumbling over each other to replicate.
After receiving the Alien script, Scott was flown in to Hollywood to ‘meet the team.’ He didn’t think much of the screenplay’s lack of depth, but he saw the entertainment potential after blazing through the read in 45 minutes. ‘I thought the script had an inordinately good engine. I thought it was virtually no characterization whatsoever. It was, ‘And then and then and then.’ And then I got to a page where it says, ‘And then this thing comes out of the guy’s chest.’ And I’m thinking, ‘This has put off four of the directors’ — because I was number number five on the list. Obviously, clearly, the previous four went, ‘What?!? This is ridiculous,’ and just put it down. Because I’m a bit of a designer, I could see the film and I knew exactly what to do.”
Scott felt that Alien should be “the antithesis of Star Wars and be kind of dirty spaceships in space, used craft that were no longer spanking new and no longer futuristic, but felt like, as we ended up calling them, the ‘freighter in space.’ I wanted to go in that direction. So in a funny kind of way, I was already reacting more subliminally, I think, than design-wise against the way that Star Wars had been done.’
With Star Wars ‘being the romantic version of space, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey being the reality of space,’ Scott notes that after watching both seminal films, ‘It was the first time in my life I learned that computers are smarter than people.’ Far from a self-proclaimed sci-fi geek or fanatic, the director drew some inspiration from Kubrick’s epic, metaphysical meditation in space and also zeroed in on the fantastic aesthetic of French illustrator Moebius.
‘I was absolutely knocked out by [Moebius],’ he says. ‘Moebius is probably the definitive of all comic strip artistes, and I would say without equal, honestly. … And I thought, ‘I’m going to apply Moebius to this film and that’s the way to go,’ because the screenplay didn’t rely on characters, but in fact relied on a monster.’” (The Hollywood Reporter, 2016).
Creating the Xenomorph
Scott told The Hollywood Reporter in 2016, “My feeling was that you’ve got to get the monster right. The big idea in The Exorcist was the possession of the body by the devil. That’s a first. And since then, there’s been 19,000 versions of that thing. And so I read Alien as a bit of a first. It was so outrageous in its idea and story — possession of a body by a massive insect that will lay eggs in you and create other insects. It was remarkable.” Several initial designs of the alien were sketched out by O’Bannon and conceptual artist Ron Cobb, resembling insectoid and crustacean-like, Lovecraftian creatures. Some looked daunting, some arguably looked whimsical.
But nothing would come close to what would ultimately become one of the most terrifying and influential creature designs in the annals of cinema history, courtesy of H.R. Giger.
“The guy who brought him to my attention was Dan O’Bannon,” says Scott. “Inside of a book called Necronomicon, there was the alien. I said, ’It’s designed. This is it.’ [Producer] Gordon Carroll and I flew to Switzerland and we went in to meet Giger at his house in Zurich. And that’s where I met H.R. and found him to be a gentle man, sweet man, who showed me his work, which is extraordinary. And I just said, ‘Would you come and do this,’ and he said, ‘I don’t fly.’ I said, ‘Don’t worry about it, we’ll bring you by train.’ He came by train from Switzerland, and stayed with me in Shepperton Village for nine months, and that’s how it happened. He wouldn’t get on a plane. I had to persuade him.”
Scott adds, “Fox at the time thought Giger was a bit obscene and a bit rude and a bit sexual. And I said, ‘This all sounds good to me,’ which nearly saw me off the case.” But Scott persisted, and Fox relented.
Though Giger’s original painting of the alien provided more than enough nightmare fuel, the eccentric artist insisted on altering his Xenomorph design: “He kept saying, ‘I can design something better.’ I kept saying, ‘No, this is it. You’ve got enough to design with facehuggers, chestbursters, eggs, etc. And by the way, I’d like you to take on board designing the planet and the ship.’ I said, ‘Listen, let’s put this alien to rest on the basis that I think we have it. We can always come back to it.’ Gradually, I think he realized that, in fact, he had already done it. And so I stuck to my guns on that one because he still had to do the other stuff. And also, because I was a designer, I knew that one designer couldn’t handle everything.’” (The Hollywood Reporter, 2016).
Ellen Ripley
Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett had originally conceived of the character of Ripley as a male character. Scott told MTV in 2009 about the choice of swapping genders, “When I met Ripley, I figured, ‘This makes definite sense — why not make it a woman?”
Scott told The Hollywood Reporter in 2016, “Warren Beatty had called up David Giler and said, ‘Listen, I’ve seen this young woman onstage off-Broadway called Sigourney Weaver, you should see her.’ I believe that’s what happened. Because then the next thing is I’m going to meet Sigourney and in walks somebody who’s got to be at least six foot one and dwarfed me. And that’s how I met Sigourney.”
The daughter of Sylvester Pat Weaver, who was president of NBC in the fifties, Sigourney Weaver, began her acting career in numerous stage productions, mainly by the new playwrights. In an interview from 1979, Weaver said of her being cast as Ripley, “I felt the role was going to be a tough one. All the characters and relationships in the film were written very loosely and the casting people were trying to choose actors who would bring an individuality to the roles. As a matter of fact, after I read the script I came back and they said, “Well, what do you think?” And I told them I felt that the human relationships all seemed very bleak. I thought it was best to put all my cards on the table because if they really wanted a ‘Charlies Angel’ I knew it wouldn’t be right for me. But they were the first to admit that it was going to take a lot of development and close working together.”