uh so uh mark blair has this wonderful question um as revolutionary as blade runner in its as sorry
he missed one word here that's why i flubbed uh as revolutionary as blade runner is
in its cinematic visual aesthetic alien might have been even more so
agreed uh this is in great part to h.r giger who created a holy original aesthetic style
uh but also mobius and the recently departed ron cobb r.i.p ron cobb one of my heroes which
movie might you argue is the more impactful in the last 50 years and cinema more or less
i i'm not that interested in delineations that specific they're both ridley scott films and
they're both ludicrously complete worlds that's the thing that's so impactful about them is
the world feels totally consistent like you can watch the movie das boot which by the way
if you haven't seen the movie das boot watch the movie das boot it's a german submarine film and
it's totally clear that it was filmed on the submarine like there's no doubt when you watch
that movie you have no doubt that their filming location was an actual submersible and it was
these weren't movie sets built on gimbals and everything like they
they had a real submarine to film on alien feels like the same level of veracity
yeah it feels exactly the same level of veracity it feels like all that
see when you look at an existing world a real existing world there's all this
there's all this storytelling that that is kind of just inherent in there like
the world exists and it's demonstrating to you to a certain extent how it got here
uh so that's easy to film on a submarine and make it feel like you're on a submarine it's
much much harder to create a world out of whole cloth and get a bunch of really good designers
to design pieces and parts of that pick and choose how it all goes together and then create a world
that feels every bit as consistent as a submarine in a submarine film
i mean even when you go into the art department on alien and see all the symbology iconography that
ron cobb and his team did for all the symbols and purina signs that are on the doors that all mean
specific things about what part of the ship you're on and what the safety protocols are
in that regard i think that i think
i think alien is the more visually complete film specifically because there are some of the city
some of the exterior live action shots in blade runner i feel like i'm on a lot
there's that is that is true occasionally in the exterior blade runner shots not the kids
riding bicycles through the flaming garbage cans but more like the the pan down to the
the noodle place no two two four um that stuff feels just a tiny bit like a lot that's just me uh
i'm positive the same amount of intelligence and ingenuity went into all of that stuff in
blade runner but they they the it's just that like the the the the completeness of the design
in alien for me i hope it's repeated i hope other people build worlds as consistent as that because
that one's so good i've gone back to it probably 50 times in my life um
shane shellenbarger says i have heard it said that alien is a remake of it the terror from beyond
space how do you feel about remakes what bad film would you remake and how would you change the film
this is a great question i remakes are fine i don't have i don't have positive or negative
feelings about them i i think it's a ridiculous idea to remake truly great films i don't think
anyone wants to watch a remake of it's a wonderful life for the philadelphia story
or gone with the wind or citizen kane those are we don't need new hot takes on those films
in fact that's all that's probably almost impossible almost i say almost i mean i i
would imagine if you had a a powerful filmmaker like soderberg steve mcqueen and they had a vision
they wanted to tackle with an old film i have no doubt they could take us to an entirely new place
with that but by and large like i appreciate more things like a movie that didn't get a lot of play
in the beginning like at the tara from beyond space which i have never seen full disclosure um
because it's not sure you can say that alien is a remake
is it a remake i mean you know there's only a certain number of plots
there's just there's a finite number of plots and i mean remake how we make just
in terms of the layout of of of things that happened within the film well that's that's just
that's copying a narrative structure this do they have the same blast doors that's an
aesthetic copying i see i submit that none of those things are happening i submit that ridley
scott maybe had some plot points he liked about the terror from beyond space if this is true i i
don't know this is true this is not something i've researched but i'm just responding off the cuff
when a creator like ridley scott tackles a project he's not thinking i'm gonna copy
this old thing what he's thinking of is um there are some menu items in this old piece of content
that i consumed that i really found tasty and i would like to try playing with them myself
that's what's really happening so for me when i was like 19 and 20 a young artist sculptor
living in new york trying to find my aesthetic giger was so important to me so many of my early
sculptures look like i'm ripping off excuse me i just spit ripping off giger's aesthetic and i
am i'm actually like i'm playing with it i'm copying it i'm recapitulating it in
order to try and find what's interesting to me about it and so when ridley's doing that
he's not just borrowing from one movie he's borrowing from all the movies he's ever seen
i'm watching the departed i watched the departed two nights ago and there are like
these beautiful there's this the first time you see matt damon's character and
you get this draws this little black circle around and zooms out so you can see him
looking at his future in the in the police building and then later on as he gets tense they
the the camera the camera literally becomes like a tunnel and surrounds him he gets claustrophobic
and so in i i believe that kubrick excuse me scorsese i believe that scorsese in those two
in those two shots is actually referring to some early silent era films that's an early silent era
thing of drawing your focus just using a black mask to like here look at this part of the frame
um so this recapitulation it's not an outlier it's it's all culture is recapitulation we take
the things that we found interesting and that taught us things about ourselves we recapitulate
them through our own process our words our bodies our actions and then they become totally different
cultural artifacts this space suit it's a copy of it sorry yeah my my cane suits a copy of the
spacesuit from alien but it's also something else i i i don't presume to know exactly what but as
an output of mine it is a recapitulation that was part of a process of discovery for me pun intended
um why do you daniel monteith why do you think the third aliens movie gets such a bad reputation
yeah i'd rather not talk about the story alien film although i will tell you
so a friend of mine came up in commercials directing commercials alongside david fincher
and so he's still one of fincher's good friends and way back in the 90s when i was working with
this friend i was like hey can you ask fincher why alien 3 sucks i was like 25.
i didn't realize what i was asking and he went and he did
apparently the word that came back from fincher was alien 3 is the way it is because when it's
your first movie in hollywood you shoot what they tell you to shoot or they sue you
that is that's the phrase that came back to me i'm not sure if fitra said exactly those words
but i have no doubt that making a movie is your first movie in hollywood when someone has you
a few dozen million dollars with lots of restrictions and input that it can be really
difficult in fact knowing as i know now many high-level directors the more i know and speak
to directors the less i'm interested at all in directing as an occupation it just sounds like a
terrifying ordeal it sounds amazing but it also sounds like ah when it goes south i have heard
stories that have curled my toes about how far it can go south in terms of relationship between a
director and the studio so i cast no aspersions on alien 3. i know that everybody in that production
was doing their level best starting with william gibson on down aw yeah gibson script okay thank
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