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One of the most unique aspects of Alien’s production design is all of the mechanical analog
clutter filling the Nostromo’s interior. And yet, there’s this overwhelming sense that everything
your looking at is totally real, functional, and well-used. Well, that’s because it is…
When the crew behind Alien began building the sets, Production Designer Michael Seymour
realized a big problem–the $8.3 million they had received from Fox was not going to be enough,
saying, "we realized that was in fact not a great deal of money." (Rinzler 132)
The actual cost for what they wanted to do was more than expected and Seymour had
to reduce the original estimates by forty percent (Cinefantastique V09 31). And Fox
was constantly breathing down their necks and insisting that they reuse
sets and adapt existing items to keep costs down (Cinefantastique V09 31).
Seymour got a hold of the finances of the first Star Wars movie–which Fox had just released. He
wanted something to measure Alien’s budget against (Rinzler 132). What he found was kind of shocking.
Alien and Star Wars had basically the same budget, but Alien needed much fewer visual effects
shots (Rinzler 132). So how did Star Wars manage to get so many great sets out of the same budget?
Well, luckily they already had the guy responsible for decorating the
Star Wars sets, who by the way, won an Academy Award for his work (IMDB).
This is Alien Art Director Roger Christian. Seymour tasked him with everything Nostromo
while the other Art Director Les Dilley–who also worked on Star
Wars–would handle everything on the planetoid and the Derelict Ship (Alien Commentary).
The art department had a small budget of two million dollars and they were
under enormous pressure to basically design beyond
the concept art themselves in a short amount of time (ASC Scott).
Christian stressed the importance of set dressing by people who understood the
logic of the sets. To ensure they were going in the right direction, the team
first built and dressed a section of corridor for Sigourney Weaver's screen test (Space Truckin’).
This wasn’t a choice. When head of Fox, Alan Ladd Jr. first met the production’s pick to
play Ripley, he insisted that they make a screentest (Rinzler 133). Pressed for time
and only a couple weeks away from production, director Ridley Scott had a clever idea–have the
art department build a section of corridor for the test so that he could test the set design,
lighting, and color at the same time they are testing Weaver (Rinzler 133). With it
being the last chance to replace the director, Scott was also being tested.
They filmed her in a few different lighting styles and when they saw the rushes,
everyone realized just how masterful Scott was at getting amazing visuals (Rinzler 136).
The test was successful with the only note being that Sigourney Weaver not
smoke in the movie because she looks ridiculous (Rinzler 133).
Christian and his team began building out the sets using the method he developed on Star Wars–instead
of building everything, he would dress the sets with real old machinery and junkyard scraps.
The other Art Director Les Dilley estimated they must have spent thousands of dollars on scrap
metal and junk, particularly from old jet-aircraft engines. To build out the sets they started with
industrial pallets and added aircraft piping on top (Mediascene #35 13, Alien Commentary). While
this sounds like a lot, this would look more realistic and would cost a lot less
than trying to build everything from scratch (Alien Commentary). They would
assemble the pieces “like a sculpture,” add fake stains, stenciled numbers and symbols,
and even spray-painted some of the scrap metal to look like plastic (Alien Commentary, Rinzler 133).
Scott recalled Christian taking him to a “bomber
graveyard” and explaining to him how if they bought two large scraps,
they could actually recoup some money by later selling off the titanium parts, as they were
very expensive (The Beast Within). But Star Wars had a much bigger element of fantasy,
so on Alien, Christian felt he could go much further with the oily,
gritty look (Space Truckin’). He said he thought it was the first time anyone created
a truly believable [quote/unquote] “space truck” (Space Truckin’).
So they basically had dismantled bomber planes and reconstructed the parts into a space ship. This
is why it looks so convincing–everything you see has at one time been actually functional and used.
It reminds me of Stanley Kubrick’s principle of never creating anything from scratch because–why
rely on a movie crew to design a chair when you can use a chair that was designed by a
chair designer who has devoted their life to designing chairs? This is why the interior of
the hotel in the Shining was copied from the interior of an actual hotel and why he even
said that if he had to make fake rubble, he would find some real rubble and copy it (Rolling Stone).
But Ridley Scott needed to push things further to really make this spaceship feel both unique
to the audience and, at the same time, mundane and lived-in for the characters.
Which is why he used a couple of pretty weird techniques to make
the details of the ship stand out in your mind.
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Now back to the show!
Despite the rough look the filmmakers were going for, Scott decided to make much of the
set gold and glittery (Space Truckin’). The effect was subtle, but most noticeable in the
opening shots as the computers wake up and in the maintenance garage (Space Truckin’).
These columns were jet engine remains turned on end and sprayed gold and dressed with gold foil
(Alien Commentary). The idea was to create a look similar to columns in an ancient temple (Space
Truckin’). And it was also sort of a reference to the original Moon Lander (Alien Commentary).
To fill the equipment room, they found exotic-looking digging equipment such as small
bulldozers and spray painted them gold to match the look of the room (Alien Commentary). This
machine here was a tank track mixed with shell casings (Alien Commentary).
The walls of the corridors were sprayed a metallic, gunmetal gray with gold dusting,
but Scott felt they still looked flat (Alien Commentary). To fix this,
he attached a box to the front of every dolly to hold gold and silver spray cans
so he could quickly fill in areas he needed while lining up a shot (Alien Commentary).
Scott wanted the ship to look lived-in and cluttered. Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon
gave Scott some advice having used this idea for
comedic effect in Dark Star saying that to make the ship look really beat up,
make the set three times messier than he wants it to look on screen (Space Truckin’).
While using function as a base level, sometimes Scott opted
to go for something more atmospheric than realistic, such as in this scene.
Scott had to fight to add the chains and the water dripping from the ceiling, which others
thought was too low-tech and questioned the source of the water (Alien Commentary). Scott gave the
excuse of condensation for the water and that they still had to raise and lower things in the
future for the chains, though really, he didn’t care about the reasons (Alien Commentary). If
you’ve seen my Blade Runner video, you’ll know why–sometimes you need movement in the frame.
While filming the opening tour around the ship while the crew is still asleep,
Scott had the idea to add some movement of papers being blown by the ship’s air
conditioning (Rinzler 187). Christian ran to the hair and makeup area to grab a blow
dryer and stood just out of frame to get the movement in this shot (Rinzler 187)
And then there’s the drinking plastic birds…
The idea of the computer readouts reflected in the emergency helmets came to Scott as he saw the
set coming together (Alien Commentary). He had the idea that it would give a sinister effect,
as though the computers were talking to each other (Alien Commentary).
Scott noted that the cockpits of even the most sophisticated fighter planes are pretty
basic in terms of the look, and he wanted to keep things raw and real (Alien Commentary).
The cockpit or bridge set in the movie was made using discarded mechanical equipment,
including pieces of aircraft, automobiles, radios, and television sets (Martin for Starlog, 24).
To film the monitors without showing scan lines, cinematographer Derek Vanlint suggested shooting
at twenty-five frames per second rather than twenty-four, and it worked pretty well
aside from a couple of times in the detonation scene, but it added to the chaos (ASC Vanlint).
The seats the crew sit in are also real. In a meeting with his team, Christian asked for
discarded aircraft or jet-pilot seats to be found and put on sliders (Rinzler 120). So,
the bomber-like seats for the crew of the Nostromo were actual bomber seats. Christian added special
harnesses for the crew to strap in and some old levers for several flight controls (Rinzler 120).
Christian said, “[Special Effects Supervisor] Nick Allder, had adapted flight controls from
the airplane scrap and made them so they could tilt back and forth and side to side. We also
had throttle-type sliders placed beside the seats, like engine thrust controls. We'd built
banks and banks of switches. Sometimes you can spend weeks laying on layers
of stuff and it looks terrible-and then, one day, it finally works" (Rinzler 176).
An early and important project for the art department and effects technicians were the
electric control panels that would be seen throughout the Nostromo (Rinzler 120). Allder
and his team developed real hardware for the practical switches on the bridge
from Ron Cobb's sketches and Scott's ideas (Rinzler 120). Technicians Dennis Lowe and
Guy Hudson spent about two months making panels for the bridge over the spring,
averaging about four a day in their workroom at Shepperton Studios (Rinzler 120).
The set’s hundreds of switches, dials, and buttons were actually functional––they controlled lights,
doors, alarms, and the forty TV screens in the bridge (Martin for Starlog, 24). Sigourney
Weaver said, “What I thought was so funny was that Ridley had gone to great lengths to make
sure that all the things at our consoles were very real…But when we came to shoot
that first scene where we're all talking to each other, we weren't allowed to push any buttons on
the real console because of the camera angles and because prop men were hiding at our feet,
making things move. We had to push buttons in the air." (Rinzler 181)
When the cameras were specifically showing them manipulating the screens,
each button was specifically rigged to what needed to happen–Harry Dean Stanton said,
“We had specific buttons to press, so it didn't look like we were arbitrarily pressing buttons,
but for the most part, they were mockups." (Rinzler 181).
In the scene where the Nostromo lands on the planetoid, O’Bannon had subverted the
conventional smooth landings of sci-fi movies with a difficult and harsh landing because
of his experiences with turbulence in air travel (Alien Commentary).
The crew shaking in their seats was done first by putting paint mixers
under the seats to make them vibrate, but Scott thought the shaking was too rapid,
so they did it in the most low-tech way possible– a guy crouched below
the frame and physically shook them (Alien Commentary). O’Bannon later said that this
scene was the closest in the movie to the way he envisioned it while writing (Alien Commentary).
Going hand in hand with the budget was the challenge of time. Production was
originally scheduled for thirteen weeks, but this was adjusted to
seventeen weeks after production started, which was more realistic but still pretty
tight (Cinefantastique V09 31). Seymour commanded a crew of a hundred construction workers and prop
men while working at least six days a week for those seventeen weeks and seven days a week,
sometimes until midnight, for eleven of those weeks (Cinefantastique V09 31).
The filmmakers were under pressure to save time and money during production,
with a Fox executive frequently inspecting sets and tearing down unauthorized construction,
which obviously irritated Scott and Seymore who wanted to come up with
more ideas for sets (The Beast Within). One time the executive canceled a construction,
then Scott re-approved it, then the executive canceled it again, and so on (The Beast Within).
Roger Christian: “It was tense because the budget was very low and there were–within the first four
days of shooting there were nine producers and studio executives on the set just counting
the minutes on Ridley and complaining and, ‘why wasn’t he shooting?’ and he was shooting so fast.
They gave him no pre-light time, so he was trying to find the look in the first two days. And one
of the producers, I remember, came up to me on the fourth day and said, ‘why is he taking so
long?’ and I said to him, ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying. He’s doing forty setups,
fifty a day sometimes–the stuff looks amazing. I don’t know what you’re all doing.’”
One of Scott’s favorite sets was the infirmary, which he had to fight for because of its shape.
He was adamant it should be circular, which always costs more money because of
the increase in surface area over flat walls and straight floors (Alien Commentary). Of course,
he got his way and loved how it turned out (Alien Commentary).
The air vent also caused budget arguments. Scott wanted to expand it,
but the compromise was to build a thirty-foot stretch of vent with a T-Section in the middle,
so they could reuse it to give the illusion that it kept going (Alien Commentary).
Christian said, "There were a lot of depressed discussions about what sets
to lose…Some sets were amalgamated with each other to save costs,
and some destined to be revamped, which did save a lot of money" (Rinzler 155).
After each set finished filming, it had to be torn down to make space for new sets,
which is why few of production materials still exist (Giger’s Alien).
The bridge set ended up getting turned into the interior of the Narcissus,
the Autodoc became the engine room, the mess area became the airlock vestibule,
and the hypersleep room became the food locker (Rinzler 155).
One cost-saving measure was to make the sets smaller and this worked perfectly to
create the claustrophobic feeling that makes the movie so scary. Using techniques in the
production design to make the audience feel on-edge is the subject of the next episode,
which you can find right here when it’s ready. Or check out this video on how the
producers took the original script to the next level by inventing one of Alien’s most
important aspects and the crazy battle over screenwriting credit that ensued.