“Big things have small beginnings,”
declares Michael Fassbender’s android
David inquisitively in Ridley Scott’s
quasi-Alien prequel Prometheus,
after extracting a tiny organism from
a strange cylinder-shaped object
discovered on LV-223. The phrase, taken
from David Lean’s epic Lawrence Of Arabia,
could easily be used to describe the gestation
of the Alien franchise, which sprung from an
expanded version of the ultra modest 1974 Dan
O’Bannon scripted student fi lm Dark Star.
Directed by John Carpenter, this micro-
budgeted semi-spoof on 2001: A Space
Odyssey used a literal beach ball for the alien
that interacts with the motley crew of a smallspacecraft. Drawing few laughs from initial
audiences, O’Bannon wondered whether the
premise would play better as horror. He hinged
his new story (then dubbed ‘Star Beast’) on a
creepy scenario concerning astronauts being
awoken from cryogenic sleep by a distress
signal emitting from an unknown planet. The
crew go to investigate but become stranded
after their ship breaks down upon landing.
O’Bannon’s predicament was how to realise
the titular threat and get it on-board the vessel
in an interesting way. It was his writing partner
Ronald Shusett who came up with the creepy
notion that the creature impregnates one of
the crew. “[...] He jumps in his face, plants a
tube down him, inserts his seed in him andWORDS OLIVER PFEIFFERTHE COMPLETE GUIDE TO
IN SPACE NO-ONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM: WE EXPLORE THE
CHEST-BURSTING TERROR BEHIND THE ALIEN FRANCHISE
later it comes bursting out of his tummy!”
O’Bannon recalled of his colleague’s ingenious
solution to the story. But Alien’s gestation was
only just beginning.
“You had to treat this B-monster movie as if it
were an A-movie,” said David Giler, one third
of a trio of producers that also included Gordon
Carroll and fi lmmaker Walter Hill, who saw the
sci-fi prestige potential of Alien following the
success of Star Wars. Hill embarked on major
rewrites of O’Bannon’s script that changed the
dialogue, all the characters’ names, placed
greater emphasis on a ‘truckers in outer space’
type scenario and notably included the ‘science
offi cer Ash is a corporate robot’ revelation and
the ‘retrieving the cat’ climax.
After a slew of well-known fi lmmakers
turned the project down, a 40-year-old British
director with 2,000 TV commercials and one
feature fi lm to his name signed on as director.
Infl uenced by Star Wars and 2001: A Space
Odyssey, and having directed the well-received
The Duellists, Ridley Scott brought an eye for
detail, atmospherics, a depth of vision and a
duty to realism to the world of Alien that was
formidable. “I wanted to have a total sense of
reality and realness to this whole fi lm because
the realer and truer you get then, I think, the
scarier it gets later,” Scott refl ected during his
1999-recorded DVD commentary.
Instrumental to this sense of reality was the
lived-in and progressively claustrophobic interior
chambers that made up the crew’s commercial
spacecraft the Nostromo. Oscar-winning Star
Wars set decorator Roger Christian, whose
worn-out look for the Millennium Falcon had
greatly impressed Ridley Scott, employed aALIEN
Ridley Scott brought an eye
for atmospherics to Alien.W W W.SCI FI N OW.CO.U K |^081
COMPLETE GUIDE
ALIEN
“Big things have small beginnings,”
declares Michael Fassbender’s android
David inquisitively in Ridley Scott’s
quasi-Alien prequel Prometheus,
after extracting a tiny organism from
a strange cylinder-shaped object
discovered on LV-223. The phrase, taken
from David Lean’s epic Lawrence Of Arabia,
could easily be used to describe the gestation
of the Alien franchise, which sprung from an
expanded version of the ultra modest 1974 Dan
O’Bannon scripted student fi lm Dark Star.
Directed by John Carpenter, this micro-
budgeted semi-spoof on 2001: A Space
Odyssey used a literal beach ball for the alien
that interacts with the motley crew of a small
spacecraft. Drawing few laughs from initial
audiences, O’Bannon wondered whether the
premise would play better as horror. He hinged
his new story (then dubbed ‘Star Beast’) on a
creepy scenario concerning astronauts being
awoken from cryogenic sleep by a distress
signal emitting from an unknown planet. The
crew go to investigate but become stranded
after their ship breaks down upon landing.
O’Bannon’s predicament was how to realise
the titular threat and get it on-board the vessel
in an interesting way. It was his writing partner
Ronald Shusett who came up with the creepy
notion that the creature impregnates one of
the crew. “[...] He jumps in his face, plants a
tube down him, inserts his seed in him andWORDS OLIVER PFEIFFERTHE COMPLETE GUIDE TO
IN SPACE NO-ONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM: WE EXPLORE THE
CHEST-BURSTING TERROR BEHIND THE ALIEN FRANCHISE
later it comes bursting out of his tummy!”
O’Bannon recalled of his colleague’s ingenious
solution to the story. But Alien’s gestation was
only just beginning.
“You had to treat this B-monster movie as if it
were an A-movie,” said David Giler, one third
of a trio of producers that also included Gordon
Carroll and fi lmmaker Walter Hill, who saw the
sci-fi prestige potential of Alien following the
success of Star Wars. Hill embarked on major
rewrites of O’Bannon’s script that changed the
dialogue, all the characters’ names, placed
greater emphasis on a ‘truckers in outer space’
type scenario and notably included the ‘science
offi cer Ash is a corporate robot’ revelation and
the ‘retrieving the cat’ climax.
After a slew of well-known fi lmmakers
turned the project down, a 40-year-old British
director with 2,000 TV commercials and one
feature fi lm to his name signed on as director.
Infl uenced by Star Wars and 2001: A Space
Odyssey, and having directed the well-received
The Duellists, Ridley Scott brought an eye for
detail, atmospherics, a depth of vision and a
duty to realism to the world of Alien that was
formidable. “I wanted to have a total sense of
reality and realness to this whole fi lm because
the realer and truer you get then, I think, the
scarier it gets later,” Scott refl ected during his
1999-recorded DVD commentary.
Instrumental to this sense of reality was the
lived-in and progressively claustrophobic interior
chambers that made up the crew’s commercial
spacecraft the Nostromo. Oscar-winning Star
Wars set decorator Roger Christian, whose
worn-out look for the Millennium Falcon had
greatly impressed Ridley Scott, employed aALIEN
Ridley Scott brought an eye
for atmospherics to Alien.W W W.SCI FI N OW.CO.U K |^081
COMPLETE GUIDE
ALIEN