Ridley Scott's Alien is a sci-fi/horror classic, a crazy cocktail of influences that somehow
manages to be more frightening than the sum of its parts.
Everybody who worked on it had their own idea of what Alien would be about.
Perhaps that's why scholars, sci-fi nerds, and film critics alike continue to discover
creepy, unexplored channels within this terrifying masterpiece.
So now let's take a look at the story behind Alien.
Dark Star
If you could trace the origin of Alien back to one single point, it would have to be Dan
O'Bannon's 1974 sci-fi comedy Dark Star.
While attending USC, O'Bannon made a seven-minute horror-suspense short film called "Blood Bath."
The project caught the attention of a young John Carpenter, also a student, and the two
set out to make a science fiction movie for John Carpenter's master's thesis.
They called their finished movie Dark Star, and it...wasn't very good.
It did have an alien in it...but, unfortunately, that alien was a beach ball.
With feet.
According to O'Bannon, "Instead of the most impressive student film ever made we had the
least impressive professional film ever made."
But that crappy film gave birth to a legend:
"Couple years down the line, I decided to do Dark Star as a horror movie instead of
a comedy.
And that was the germ of Alien."
Not many people saw Dark Star, but future Alien director Ridley Scott did — along
with visionary Chilean-French filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky — and it left a lasting impression.
Dune Connections
Jodorowsky was so impressed with Dark Star that he hired O'Bannon to help him adapt Frank
Herbert's space opera Dune for the big screen.
The project ultimately tanked, but Alien was one of many successful projects that rose
from the ashes of Jodorowsky's ill-fated attempt.
O'Bannon moved to Paris to work on Dune, which is where he met met artist Christopher Foss,
who'd later do design work for Alien, as well as future Alien designer H.R. Giger.
Jodorowsky's philosophy of art design also heavily influenced O'Bannon's work on Alien.
He would find his, quote, "spiritual warriors," and then put them together in one big room
to work out a movie's structure.
Later, O'Bannon would use the same strategy to brainstorm about Alien, bringing together
Foss, Giger, and cartoonists Moebius and Ron Cobb to hash out the design for their little
sci-fi horror project.
Script struggles
Ultimately, Brandywine Productions agreed to produce the film for 20th Century Fox,
with Ridley Scott in the director's chair.
But the Nostromo still had some turbulence ahead.
According to O'Bannon, producers David Giler and Walter Hill wanted to completely redo
his script.
So that's exactly what they did.
According to Giler, he and Hill added "the feminist elements everyone is talking about.
We gave the characters texture, functions.
In O'Bannon's draft, they were totally different, military types.
All men.
We changed all the dialogue.
Every word of it."
O'Bannon's original screenplay featured the xenomorph and the wrecked ship, and that's
about where the similarities to the finished film end.
Hill's and Giler's rewrites added Ripley and Dallas and the rest of the gang, not to mention
the whole vast corporate conspiracy subplot and the entire concept for human-looking androids,
an idea that was already an Alien cornerstone by the first sequel.
"Thank you."
But bizarrely, some drafts also had a time-travel-based plotline featuring Jack the Ripper, Hercules,
and Genghis Khan, like a Magic Tree House book...with murderous chest-bursting aliens.
Then there's the Alien that, against all odds, Scott and his team somehow made despite all
the confusion.
As artist Christopher Foss put it to Den of Geek, "Poor old Dan O'Bannon, the bloke whose
concept it was, just got absolutely shafted…
I kind of got the impression that Ridley [Scott] was quietly going his own way, trying to get
on with it and get it done."
Ship shape
The Nostromo, the dark, claustrophobic spaceship where all the Alien action takes place, is
practically another character in the movie.
And Chris Foss and Ron Cobb were essential to the creation of the vessel.
But the final result didn't come right away — the team worked on the design for five
whole months, pretty much the whole time the producers were trying to find a director for
the movie.
And some of those designs got...weird.
Foss' had "endless spacecraft designs suggesting submarines, diesel locomotives, Mayan interceptors,
Mississippi river boats, [and] jumbo space arks."
But in the end, they were simply too outlandish for the producers to get on board.
The Nostromo's final design came from one of Ron Cobb's simpler sketches, and even then,
Ridley Scott made the ship's modeler get rid of Cobb's original yellow color scheme in
favor of the flat gray that made it into the film.
Casting chaos
Before Sigourney Weaver got the part of Ripley, none other than Meryl Streep was on the short
list of candidates to be offered the role.
Streep is, of course, ridiculously talented.
And Alien probably would have been just fine with her in the lead role.
But fate intervened.
In 1978, Streep's romantic partner, actor John Cazale, passed away, and nobody felt
comfortable interrupting her mourning to make the offer.
As it turns out, Ripley wasn't even Sigourney Weaver's first choice.
She said in an interview, "Actually the part I wanted to play was Lambert, Veronica Cartwright's
part.
In the first script I read, [Lambert] just cracked jokes the whole time…That's the
character I could identify with."
And while Weaver wanted the part of Lambert, Veronica Cartwright was dead set on playing
Ripley.
It was only just before shooting began that Cartwright was told their roles had been switched.
"I get a call.
And they said, 'Okay we need you to come in for your wardrobe for Lambert.'
And I said, h'old on I'm not Lambert, I'm Ripley.'
'No, no, you're Lambert.'"
Obviously, the decisions all worked out in the end, but it's interesting to consider
how close we were to getting a completely different movie.
Silly scenes
Ridley Scott worked hard to preserve the "less is more" aesthetic that made Alien so terrifying,
and that meant cutting a lot of scenes from the final film.
Some of the biggest cuts were made because they looked...kinda stupid.
For example, Lambert's death is haunting because most of it is implied and offscreen.
The camera cuts away just before the alien gets her, so we don't actually see what happens.
But her death was filmed.
It just looked way too cheesy.
By the same token, Brett's death in the final film is terrifying, but the extended cut of
that scene is borderline absurd:
"I'm not gonna hurt ya."
Academic legacy
For a sci-fi horror creature feature, Alien gets a surprising amount of love in the academic
world.
Case in point: June 2017 saw the publication of a book called Alien and Philosophy, a collection
of essays on all things Alien.
It's heady stuff, but it just goes to show there's more to the xenomorph than a facehugger,
a chestburster, and "a man in a crocodile suit."
If the grotesque imagery, state-of-the-art special effects, and storied production aren't
enough to build a compelling Film Theory thesis, then maybe all those Freudian themes will
do the trick.
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