"(Narrator) In 1979, cinema-goers were scared out of their skins by a stylish sci-fi shocker whose publicity warned that "In space no one can hear you scream."" "Pitched somewhere between 2001 and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," "Alien was an acid-burned antidote to the dewy-eyed optimism of Close Encounters and Star Wars." "This was future fantasy with razor-sharp fangs." "A groundbreaking genre classic which gave nightmarish form to unspeakable anxieties, which witnessed the birth of a new breed of screen heroine, and which would spawn generations of shape-shifting sequels." "Far more than a mere fantasy fright-fest, Ridley Scotts intelligent chiller would become one of the most talked about sci-fi films of the century, provoking highbrow intellectual debate and down-to-earth audience reaction as it boldly went where no movie had dared to go before." "(Kane) Wait a minute, there's movement." "It seems to have life." "Organic life." "According to legend, the seeds of Alien's terror were first sown back in the early 70's, when film student Dan o'Bannon collaborated with future horror-maestro John Carpenter on the cult sci-fi spoof Dark Star, a tale of world-weary truckers in space" "which would be hailed by critics as a satirical riposte to Kubricks stately 2001." "Denied a co-directorial credit on Dark Star, o'Bannon began nurturing dreams of producing his own sci-fi project:" "A B-movie-style romp originally entitled Star Beast, which drew inspiration from classics like lt!" "Creature From the Black Lagoon and The Thing From Another World, along with cult favourites like Mario Bavas Planet of the Vampires." "There's a lifetime of moviegoing and storyreading in Alien." "And... when the picture was fresh and had just been out a short time, a lot of people speculated as to just exactly where I stole it from." "Most people concluded that it was stolen from lt!" "The Terror From Beyond Space." "The truth is, it was stolen from everywhere." "What comes to mind is Invasion of the Bodysnatchers by Don Siegel." "The Pod People." "Night of the Living Dead." "It!" "The Terror From Beyond Space." "The Day the Earth Stood Still." "The big standard at that point for any type of special-effect or space movie was 2001, which was only a couple of years old, as I recall, at that time." "But one idea which I had never seen was the idea of a used future." "(alarm)" "I basically recast Dark Star as a scary movie instead of a comedy, in line with The Thing - that type of grim tone of a few people trapped in a small technological space while this really scary something is coming at them." "Move!" "Get out of there!" "It's coming towards you!" "Move!" "Dallas!" "Move, Dallas!" "Move, Dallas." "Get out!" "No!" "Not that way!" "The other way!" "We needed something horrific and visceral, on a level that would not be just a corny B-movie." "So we needed something incredibly spectacular and bizarre." "I had the material necessary for the first half of the script." "You may have figured out we're not home yet." "A kind of Forbidden Planet situation where one of our starships lands on a mysterious planet," "gets stranded there, bit by bit becomes involved with some mysterious and threatening organism." "(Kane) What the hell is this?" "I had that all worked out, but I did'nt know what to do with the second half." "Dan put his finger on the problem." "He said I know what has to happen next." "The creature has to get on the ship in an interesting way." "But I have no idea how." "If we could solve that - it can't just sneak in - then the whole movie will fall into place." "(Kane) Wait a minute, there's movement." "It seems to have life." "Organic life." "I went to sleep - and I'm sure it is'nt dreaming, but the mind is functioning - and in the middle of the night I woke up and I said Dan, I think I have an idea." "He said What?" "I said Well, the alien..." "the alien screws one of them." "It jumps in his face and plants his seed in him." "As soon as I heard it, I thought 'Thats it!" "'" "(screeching)" "That was one of the ideas that made it possible to make this thing worth doing at all." "(Dan) This is a movie about alien interspecies rape." "That's it." "That's scary 'cos it hits all of our buttons, all of our unresolved feelings about sexuality." "All of them." "(narrator) Although o'Bannon and Shusett had envisaged Alien as a low-budget flick in the style favoured by independents like Roger Corman, producer Gordon Carroll thought it was bigger than that." "Believing that the project had the makings of an A-list Hollywood picture," "Carroll encouraged Brandywine partners David Giler and Walter Hill, director of action hits like The Warriors, to finesse it into something in which Star Wars distributors 20th Century Fox would be willing to make a major investment." "Exactly who was responsible for the finished script has become a source of controversy, but o'Bannon is certain that Alien finally got the go-ahead simply because it was in the right place at the right time." "(Dan) I know why Fox went for it." "Fox did'nt expect Star Wars to be such a runaway hit, but when it was they wanted to follow through very quickly." "The fact of the matter was, that week, that month, there was a paucity of... spaceship scripts floating around Fox." "Mine was there." "It was there, it was on the desk, and... that's how it got the green light." "They were patently baffled by it, but they wanted something out of it for themselves." "Walter read it and he said You may think I'm crazy." "I think we've got..." "This script is just awful." "But it's got one great scene in it that maybe makes it worth doing." "You tell me if you think I'm nuts." "So I took it home and..." "I read it up until page 95 or something." "I called Walter and said You're nuts." "It's terrible." "He said Did you come to the big scene?" "I said Where the thing jumps out on the guys face?" "He said That's not it." "Keep reading." "I said I'm on page 95!" "He said Keep reading." "So I came to what we later came to call the chestburster, and I got it." "I said I think you're absolutely right." "This is terrific, in fact." "We've all heard about big-grossing movies." "This may be the gross-est movie of all." "They rewrote a lot of the dialogue, changed the names of the characters, added Ash the android... and... changed an arbitrary number of other details in an arbitrary manner." "I don't..." "Thats the best I can tell you." "The characters were wooden, the dialogue was bad, so we optioned the script and... took it home and fixed it up - it was kind of a long process." "It's my script, with the surface details all kind of bunged up and broken and bent." "So the dialogue is'nt quite as good and..." "this transition does'nt quite make sense." "Kind of... my script after it's been in a car accident." "On the other hand, the whole mood and tone and feel of the thing has survived essentially unmodified." "I remember what I was thinking and feeling when I was writing it, and I can see what's on the screen." "(narrator) With the formerly low-rent B-movie blossoming into a major studio feature, the producer started to look for someone with a unique vision to helm the venture." "While o'Bannon himself had once been in the frame as a potential first-time director, attention now fell upon Ridley Scott, an Englishman with a background in graphics and advertising, whose own first feature, The Duellists," "had been acclaimed as rivalling Stanley Kubrick in the style department." "We felt that this was a simple enough story, and that if you had good enough actors..." "It was really about how good could someone make the monster look, the effects look - could they make it believable?" "The script arrived, and I, being the sci-fi fanatic - and Ridley not being the sci-fi fanatic - we had a bit of a wrestling match with this script, which of course inevitably Ridley won." "On the front cover was Dan o'Bannon/Ron Shusett, and..." "I sat down on a Saturday morning and it took me one hour and twenty minutes to read it, and, uh..." "I knew I was gonna do it." "I then had to sit in the adjacent office and listen to him basically saying Fuck me!" "And all that." "And so I knew..." "I knew it was interesting." "I did'nt even take it on board that it could be anything but the way I wanted it." "(David) There was a painstaking attention to detail in the stuff that he did." "Everything looked great and looked convincing and realistic." "And real." "So that's why I thought Ridley would be good for this." "Ridley is so detail-oriented... that his eyes go towards everything that's on the outside." "I think that probably comes from his art-directing days and commercial days." "Ridleys got his total act together." "The dialogue, the... the crew, the technical parts." "Hes the master." "Someone has to drive the bus." "Someone has to have the passion to go" "No, go that way." "We gotta do this." "We gotta do that." "That's the driver." "You've got to have that." "Otherwise, it will get watered down." "(woman) You have only to meet Ridley Scott before you think I wanna work with him." "He had, you know, one basic line that he had to say a few times, which was I don't fucking believe it." "When he said that, you... you..." "You know, he wanted something that was alive and that was totally believable." "(Kane) I've never seen anything like it." "Ridley obviously is loaded with talent - he was loaded with talent before he started it - and he took it to a stage to which I'm sure they never believed it would go." "I'm sure they thought they were gonna make a little horror film and that was it." "You cant cut away." "You've got to see it." "Because were doing an R-rated movie, and it's my job to push it right to the edge." "He watched Tobe Hoopers Texas Chainsaw Massacre." "I know that he saw." "And I think he got something out of that and related to that." "I saw that when I was preparing to do Alien." "I was sitting in one of these teeny screening rooms in Fox one day." "I looked at this and that, and I kept discarding films..." "That's no good." "I'd heard about Texas Chainsaw, and I'd..." "I was very intimidated by the poster, which I think was the pig face and the saw." "I thought It's gonna be a really tacky, ghastly blood bath of a movie, which I was always uneasy about looking at." "(chainsaw/woman screaming)" "And when I finally saw it, I thought it was amazing." "You were uneasy from the first second." "As soon as they pick that guy up in the car, it's scarier than hell." "That profoundly scared you to your soul." "It should have been just slop, but the scares were so horrific..." "I think it had a certain documentary reality about it which really hit home." "He would say to them I want it to be riveting, so commercial, but it's gonna look like 2001."" "And I guess they believed him!" "(Dan) He directed through the camera." "He did'nt wanna stand at the side of the set and watch it wing-stage." "He wanted to see it through the eyepiece that was filming it." "The degree of control that he exerted over the visual look of the film was a revelation to me." "He could produce miraculously realistic effects quickly and simply because he understood the lighting and the photography of that medium so well." "(narrator) While Scotts visual artistry provided the look of the film, the physical form of the alien itself was defined by another transatlantic tryst, injecting Swiss genes into the embryonic process, via artist HR Giger." "The biggest overriding factor was that if you have'nt got a monster, you ain't got a movie." "If you've got a monster which is OK, you're dead in the water." "By this time, movies... it became sort of corny to have the alien monster." "What we did was bring it back, bigger and brighter and more grandiose and believable." "And one of the keys was Gigers design." "(Ridley) I was seeing conventional things on paper." "I wanted to go away from that." "Then Dan showed me a book." "He said on the other hand there's this, which is kind of odd." "He opened up Necronomicon, and I was, you know... stunned." "(Dan) The sense of claustrophobia was overpowering to me." "Whatever these strange shapes were, they seemed to be alive and conscious, and yet the sense of compression and no room to move around almost made me choke." "(Ridley) When you see something thats really odd, its rare." "So in this instance, there we have a total original." "As soon as you open up the book you have an original." "Somehow, a characters passionate about what he does." "Also, because hes so passionate, he's disturbing." "He's quite disturbing." "Visually, his paintings have an impact on you, you know." "Its the dark side, but done in a beautiful way, I think." "It shows the beauty of... horror." "Well, it's troublesome." "It's, um..." "The greys, the different textures of greys, the different hues of greys are not easy..." "It's not easily digestible." "One likes colours and more familiar surroundings." "But when you see something that has that machinery-grey pallor to it, it's not really something that's gonna make you kick your heels and dance." "." "Needless to say, I think he is a depressive, right?" "Um... but surprise, surprise, when you're actually working with that, with those kind of obsessions, which are cradled between... you know, dead flesh and sexuality." "(Dan) I realised that I had struck a particular artistic depth and originality here which I had'nt seen before." "It was then that it struck me." "I said Do you know something?" "If you could get this guy to design a monster movie, you would have something absolutely original and unique." "They were'nt robots, but they were'nt humans." "There'd be what looked like a woman - half of her body - but she had a pipe stuck in her mouth, like she was sucking on a penis." "But it was just a pipe that fed her life cycle." "It had a very powerful sexuality." "It looked to me very specifically..." "It could have been male or female, that's what was interesting." "You had no idea whether it was man or woman, what sexuality it was, and therefore it could just as easily, you know, fuck you before it killed you." "And I think that, again, made it all the more disconcerting." "To me it was omnisexual, and it contained everything within itself except the need for a passive host." "It's like a dog." "If you did'nt see its genitals, you wouldnt know what gender it is." "(narrator) While later embodiments of the alien would be rendered with CGI technology," "Gigers original creation was to be made in the Creature From the Black Lagoon tradition of using a man in a rubber suit." "(Ridley) In those days, we did'nt have the technology." "It was very much push and pull." "Somebody saw this guy standing in a pub in Soho who was a graphic designer, and built like a stick, but very strong." "My casting director said Do you want to be in the movies?" "He was over seven foot tall, and incredibly elongated." "I remember his hands were below his kneecaps." "I mean, it was phenomenal!" "So I figured, little by little, I know I'm gonna get a great head, slightly dodgy hands." "Full figure?" "Tricky." "But actually, we only see it occasionally - and mostly backlit." "And how do I make the goddamn tail work?" "Because the tail should have the power of a crocodiles' tail and will break your neck if it hits you." "It did only have two arms and a tail and two legs, but when you're looking at it, you're not quite sure how many limbs or what it is that you're really looking at." "Argh!" "(Terry) It made it more frightening when you only saw scraps of it." "Whether that was the constraints of the fact that it was a man in a suit..." "It obviously had a large bearing on that." "(yells)" "The sets were absolutely phenomenal." "The detail was unbelievable." "And what you see is the actual size." "We looked that big in there because it was built that way." "It looks like it's been dead a long time." "Fossilised." "It was everything everybody would have wanted." "This sort of... sensuous, sinuous world of parts and..." "God help you if you're there, you know." "A recreation basically of Gigers imagery." "Yeah... that was fascinating." "He stayed over a pub in Shepperton." "Can you believe it?" "He was there for nine months and he loved it." "He loved it." "He loved the Yorkshire pudding and the roast beef and the shepherds pie and the A1 sauce and things like that." "We built him his private studio at Shepperton, where only I went in on a daily basis." "He showed me work in progress." "I think the egg was great." "He looks in and you say Don't look in the egg!" "Inside, there's somebody's hands with rubber gloves on, going..." "All it was was my hands going like that." "(Kane) Wait a minute, there's movement." "It seems to have life." "Organic life." "And the membrane on the top is called Nottingham lace, which is the lining of a cows stomach." "I had the buckets of stuff delivered every day from the abattoir, steam-cleaned, and I had the gloves and white coat, and we'd put the airline on the intestine of a sheep." "It went... whoosh!" "Like that." "Thats what I mean about make it up a little bit." "Wherever you can do it physically, do it physically." "Doug Trumbull always used to say that to me." "In Blade Runner, he said Can you do it real?" "Try doing it real first." "I had'nt been on a film that had looked like that ever, at that stage." "You'd normally work on these films..." "They'd have built a room and a hall and whatever, you know, built castles and things." "Not these sort of living objects." "What makes sense here is to have two brains on two separate sides of the movie." "It makes sense to me that Giger designs everything to do with the aliens and somebody else designs everything to do with the earthbound creatures." "Ridleys first idea was to be in a Gothic cathedral... with elements of a World War II submarine." "So you were always looking for all these evocative modes of description and such." "What it all did result in is a fairly retrograde look." "It's not really the future so much as being caught in a factory, 'cos they thought that that would stress the idea of people having to live in a machine." "It represented the Earths sensibilities perfectly - the interior and the exterior." "You believe it." "So Cobbs mind was perfect." "He thought like an aeronautical engineer." "I was very, very intensely fascinated by introducing elements of reality to the allegorical Nostromo, because I just thought theatrically they would help the story - like the fact thats it's a pressurised ship." "There's jeopardy in the fact that you're in this pressurised hull surrounded by a vacuum." "So I was trying to do all these little corrections, trying to make it a little more believable as a spacecraft." "It turned out to be a good split." "It was a great marriage." "'Cos you don't get a sense that that brain has also designed this." "They're two quite separate worlds." "And God knows, nothing could be farther away from Giger than the other department." "(Veronica) once you got onto the set, everything was interconnected." "I mean, you walked on that set and the halls were all connected, the hospital was connected to the dinner area..." "Everything was interconnected." "So once you were on that set, you were on that set, and it became very claustrophobic." "An actor walks on a great set and he takes it in..." "Also, he walks in with great wardrobe on because we've taken care of him." "He feels good, looks good, walks in this room and goes Wow!" "That is a great beginning." "Thats the starting plate for him and me." "I'm saying I've given you this, now were gonna work together." "(alarm)" "(Ron) We wrote it with no women in it at all." "We used only last names." "We had an asterisk at the bottom." "It said To broaden the appeal, any two characters can be female." "We did'nt dream, though..." "'Cos males in action movies sell tickets, we definitely did not have the inspiration to make Ripley... (alarm)" "We said This one character, it's a bit boring - this young ensign that takes command." "Maybe if we made this character a woman, we could kind of, you know... earn a few points at the studio that's making Julia and Turning Point- womens films." "The first thing they said when I came to Hollywood was" "What do you think about having a female in the lead, instead of the conventional male - the person who's the last one to go, the hero?" "I just thought at the time What a good idea." "Let's do that." "It did'nt hit me that Well, if I make this lead character a female, it'll be really powerful." "So my surprise about Alien was afterwards." "The reaction to the importance of this leading character being female was tremendous." "I thought Wow!" "OK." "Are you there, Ripley?" "We're clean, let us in." " What happened to Kane?" " Something has attached itself to him." " We need the infirmary." " What kind of thing?" "An organism." "Open the hatch!" "If we let it in, the ship could be infected." "You know the quarantine procedure." "24 hours for decontamination." "The trick, basically, was that you... you should think she's the last person in the world who's gonna survive this." "To me, she was always sort of a young ensign - this was one of her first jobs - and she was very much by the book." "She came recommended the long way round." "Somebody had said to somebody" "There's this girl who's doing theatre on Broadway who's very interesting." "Is a giant." "Smart performer, very physical." "Has'nt done a movie." "I was given the script." "Not having seen the designs, of course, I pictured something much more routine - like a big blob of yellow Jell-o chasing people." "I thought it was not that great." "Parker, Lambert..." "I ended up... at the audition, met Ridley, who I liked right away." "He first showed me these astonishing drawings... by Giger." "They just were so startling." "I realised I'd never seen anything like this in a movie." "Ash!" "Will you open the door?" "Let me by, Ash." "I remember saying to lan Holm very early on - the first week or two " "I said Do you think Ripley know's what she's doing?" "Do you think she has confidence in these decisions she's making?" "He said Yes, I think she knows exactly what shes doing." "I said I really don't." "I think it's total seat-of-your-pants..." "She never knows, and she can't show it." "I think that was a good, instinctive decision on my part, because..." "Well, first of all, it was true." "I was pretending I knew what I was doing in film." "The first week, Ridley had to keep saying Don't... don't look at the camera." "I'd say How can I not look at it?" "You always put it right in front of me!" "(screams)" "(yells)" "I feel it was a hard film for her to do, 'cos it was her first film really." "And... you know, a stranger in a strange land, coming out to Shepperton Studios every day, which was'nt exactly wonderfully comfortable in those days." "She's just awfully good." " I won't change my mind..." " I'm not trying to change your mind." "I just want you to listen... (Tom) They did'nt know who the director was." "I read it and thought It's all special effects." "There's not much for an actor to do here." "Three or four weeks later I got a call from England." "Ridley Scott was going to be directing it, and this was the budget." "I thought Well, hold on here." "Let me see..." "I've heard of this Ridley Scott guy." "I heard he did this thing called The Duellists."" "Can I see this?" "They said Yes, we'll run a screening for you." "So I went to see The Duellists, and it was a masterpiece." "So I had to do Alien at that point." "(Ridley) Tom Skerritt I'd seen before, 'cos he was doing higher-flying mainstream movies." "Harry Dean Stanton..." "I'd been vaguely aware of, but hardly." "I told him I don't like science fiction pictures or monster pictures." "For openers." "I did'nt, because they're never believable." "They're bullshit, most of 'em." "Ridley said Well, I don't either." "But I think I can make something of this one." "And then he pulled out a very state-of-the-art coloured book of Gigers paintings and all of the..." "different special effects and everything." "I said..." "Jesus, this is a lot of production." "You guys got enough money for this?" "Jonesy?" "Here, kitty." "Ridley said later That's one of the reasons I hired you, to show we had the money to do it." "The only thing Harry said to me at the end was he thanked me profusely for his close-up." "He comes in and goes Here, kitty, kitty, kitty." "There's silence, with that music going..." "when you walk into that chamber." "You know he is a goner." "Kitty, kitty, kitty." "(hisses)" "Hey..." "It was sort of a free-for-all." "This is what I remember." "And again, I was from the theatre, so I was used to more structure." "But you had a lot of, I would say, hungry actors, who each was wonderful playing the character, and they really were instructed by Ridley basically to go for it." "We did not do a lot of rehearsal." "We went into Ridleys office." "I think we read maybe two lines, and Ridley would read the narrative and the direction." "And then finally Ridley started reading the lines." "And then he'd say And then the monsters gonna come in here, and I'm gonna..." "It's gonna be like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."" "And he went into this... thing." "And... he had to leave in the middle of it." "Someone came in and said Ridley, we have a problem, and he left." "I remember looking at the rest of the guys and saying obviously, we're gonna have to do this on our own." "Basically, we rehearsed on camera, and Ridley was operating." "So the referee was often out of the room and off the field." "And so pretty much what you're seeing is a lot of actors going to try to, I think, steal the scene." "Unless somebody has got a better idea... we'll proceed with Dallas'plan." "What?" "!" "And end up like the others?" " Oh, no." "You're out of your mind!" " Have you got a better idea?" "Sometimes it can get very frustrating because he does'nt really talk to you, so..." "In a sense it worked for Alien because your survival instincts came out." "You had to basically create your character because you were'nt getting that much feedback from Ridley." "I say that we abandon this ship." "We get the shuttle and get the hell out of here." "We take our chances and hope somebody picks us up." "Lambert... ssh." "The shuttle won't take four." "I used to like to push people from every which way to get them to do things." "From completely ignoring them so they get totally twitchy, to briefing other actors to push them and throw them off guard during the scene." "Which is a bit evil, but it does'nt half work." "And Yaphet was always up for a good jape." "There's the whole scene where..." "Dallas dies and Sigourney comes in." "We found this laying there." "No blood." "No Dallas." "Nothing." "I said I want you to push her here, in this scene." "I want you to push her over the top." " I can't hear anybody saying nothing!" " I'm thinking." "The take that you see was about seven takes in." "In a weird sort of way, Ridley... goads you." "Yaphet would say something that was'nt there, and the cameras were on and you just had to go with it." "She says Well, I'm the captain of this ship, and Yaphet just goes Pf... and walks off." "Well, each time that he walked off..." "finally he says" "I'm 250 pounds, I have a black audience that's really interested in me." "What the..." "Are you allowed to say fuck?" "What the fuck are you doing?" "!" "She got so pissed off, she goes I'm the captain of this ship..." "In the actual movie, she's really strong, and he goes ok." "Let's talk about killing it." " It's in the air shafts..." " (mumbling)" "Will you listen to me, Parker?" "She got a bit upset." "She screamed at him to shut the fuck up." "Shut up!" "So you get a wonderful real moment there between them, and I did'nt say any Cut." "I just kept sitting there, like that." "Fortunately, she went on." "She carried on." "We'll move in pairs." "We'll go step by step and cut off every bulkhead and vent until we have it cornered, then we'll blow it the fuck out into space." "Is that acceptable to you?" "I think that's one of the reasons there is so much tension - we are trying to survive." "Ridley got a reality in it." "He made it believable." "I think it's the first horror film I've ever seen that I really liked." "My God." "We'd been looking at oxford Scientific, with the logic of the cycle of how the alien functioned." "Basically, it was a piece of macrophotography, about that big." "(Dan) There are some microscopic worms that have these complex life cycles, and which burrow and lay eggs under your skin and get in your blood vein." "Finally, it bites it's way out of you." "And that's the alien, right?" "So whatever it impregnated - it could have been a dog, and you'd have had a dog version of Alien..." "Impregnated with a man, you get a man version of Alien." "I wanted to make all the men cross their legs." "I did'nt wanna allow them that comfortable spot where they can sit there and... and leer at the abuse of a good-looking woman on the screen." "The first thing I'm going to do when I get back is to get some decent food." "What could be worse?" "It comes from inside of you." "Talk about no escape!" "You pound down the stuff like there's no tomorrow." "I'd rather be eating something else, but right now, I'm thinking food." "(Ron) We knew that if that was'nt compelling and horrifying, it would be laughable." "And the entire production pivoted on how well we portrayed that thing coming out of Kanes chest." "The designer of the chestburster funnily enough wasnt Giger." "(Ridley) one day he came in - it's the funniest thing I've ever seen - with a black bag." "He looked really upset." "I said oh, you've done the chestburster." "He said Well, no, it's not very good." "It's really terrible." "I said Come on, let's see it." "How bad can it be?" "He suddenly put his arm up, ripped the bag back, and it looked like he'd stuffed his hand up the back end of a turkey and on the end of his arm was this plucked turkey." "And I..." "I..." "We all collapsed with laughter." "He was furious." "He was scratching his head." "I said But it's so enormous." "It's bigger than my ribcage." "This has got to be a little beast." "What's the matter, man?" "The food ain't that bad, baby!" "I'd done lots of scribbling and drawing and figured that... if you attack it logically from where it will be, where the grown-up will be, you've got to work backwards to the child." "And so I simply worked backwards to the child." "And what came out of it was something phallic." "We had all read the script, and it said that something jumped out of John Hurts' chest and his line was oh, my Go... uh..." "You know." "That's what it said." "Uh!" "They said What's it gonna look like?" "I said Nobody's gonna see it." "What?" "What?" "We were told to just stay in our dressing rooms or hang out." "We hung out for about five hours, four hours." "Nobody could figure out what the hell was going on." "Get it into his mouth!" "There were a lot of people on the set, all wearing raincoats - which should have given us a tip." "There are buckets of offal all around." "The formaldehyde smell was just unbelievable." "You would sort of gag as you would go into the set." "I believe he had either three or four cameras set up so he could capture everything." " Get it into his mouth!" " I'm trying!" "My favourite memory of Ron Shusett and Dan o'Bannon, the original writer..." "They were in their raincoats and they were like..." "It was like Christmas." "They were like kids, practically jumping up and down." "And I'm pretty sure Ridley had a sort of glint in his eye." "(Kane screams)" "That was the black hole at the heart of the picture - was that going to work?" "It did." "I think it did." "It did." "They did'nt have a lot of million-dollar machinery underneath the table." "As far as I remember, they had a rubber hose and a squeezy thing and, you know, maybe a couple of wires." "I've got poor old John lying there..." "with his T-shirt on him which has been carefully razor-bladed here, so when it hits... the thing comes straight out." "I want him on the table backwards, threshing." "Absolutely going..." "John Hurt is such an amazing actor that when he started to break apart - we did'nt know what was wrong with him - he was so effective that you forgot that you were shooting a movie." "He seemed to just be exploding from inside." "Sinew and muscle and lungs and heart are getting shredded." "He's now lying back like that, with Roger Dicken jammed in his crotch, with a thing like that... shaking his head, going This is never gonna work." "And all the actors are at the kitchen table, all ready to leap backwards." "With all the airlines driving raspberry blood everywhere." "I was told I'd get a little blood on me." "I did not realise I had a jet pointed at my face." "There was this beat of silence where blood went everywhere..." "It was like shooting blood out of a high-pressure line." "What you see was the first take, and the only take, of it." "Those were genuine shock moments." "(Lambert) Oh, God!" "You really don't know how something is going to work when you're doing something that's setting a precedent." "And he was setting a precedent." "You don't know where your animal innards are gonna fly when you shoot 'em." "There's no way in the world." "But it just happened that she was in the wrong spot." "(Lambert sobs)" "I think it was good acting, honestly." "But thank God they did'nt laugh, because if they had, we'd have had to start again." "I think when you think of the concept of the chestburster you start to... feel strangled." "It always bothers me when people talk about how it bursts out of someones stomach, because that to me is not the same thing." "That could just be a bad Mexican meal." "But this idea that it takes root in your lungs, which is your connection to life..." "See, you can't do that..." "You start to feel smothered almost right away." "I do anyway, 'cos I'm slightly claustrophobic." "The fact that it gestates where you have that connection with life... (narrator) When this bloody spectacle was first given preview screenings it's alleged that some faint-hearted critics ran screaming up the aisles." "To this day, it still retains an ability to startle and shock." "(girl) It's done so well, you can actually feel it moving inside you." "(man) It ties in with birth and the foetus coming out." "Thats why it's memorable." "Now it's coming." "There he goes!" "(man #2) Having just eaten my lunch, I can kind of imagine how he's feeling." "(man #3) Unreal and gruesome and frightening." "(woman) Well, it still shocked me, and I've seen it several times." "(girl #2) When I first saw it, I was so scared." "I thought aliens were gonna eat me at night." "(girl #3) You know it's coming, but it still makes you jump when it comes out." "(both groan)" "Oh, nice(!" ")" "(man) That was a mind-blowing scene." "Sorry!" "Ugh!" " (Lambert) Oh, my God!" " Oh, my God!" "I knew that it was something really special, so..." "Then the rest was trying to hold onto it and not cut the film down too much by audience reaction." "'Cos when..." "They were terrified that nothing happened for 45 minutes." "I'd say Yeah, but what a 45 minutes." "It's fascinating." "You feel you're part of the craft." "You feel you're part of the life on the ship." "The first thing they do is go into this place you've never seen before." "And you're saying Don't do it." "What else do you want?" "I think we should cut down 15 minutes out of the movie." "I said What?" "!" "Get out of here." "(bleeping)" "Terry is a great editor and has a great sense of music." "I learnt a lot about music from him." "He was screwing around with Tomita." "And that's where I got the idea of the talking heads from two helmets." "Instead of having a computer saying Shall we wake them up?" "I've got the helmets." "(Terry) The slow pace of the film made it more frightening than it would have been if you'd made it slick." "You needed to push a person into the corner and keep pushing 'em until they could'nt take it any more, and then unleash it." "That's the plan that was set up at the beginning." "(Mother) The option to override automatic detonation expires in T-minus three minutes." "They wanted to end the film as she runs into that capsule and slams the door." "We'd devised this thing that was'nt in the original script." "There's a fourth act." "The fourth act is inside that flippin' capsule." "'Cos once she's in there, of course that's where it has to be." "They said We don't need that." "This is where the excessive thing came in." "I said But goddammit, I'm paid to be excessive." "You have to have this." "This will absolutely put a nut to this movie." "(Sigourney) She strips off her soldiers uniform and suddenly is a complete human being." "Originally, I was supposed to be naked." "I guess Fox panicked because of the Catholic countries." "Being from the theatre, I did'nt even think that this was racy." "To me, it was very real that the creature would be watching me... transform from this enemy to this vulnerable... pink thing." "She'd always been functioning in a military jump suit, so I thought it was a legitimate excuse to show the world the rest of Sigourney." "It worked very well actually." "But I think also the stripping down is also to do with vulnerability, so she is really vulnerable." "And if this thing has done this to a male, what can it do to a female?" "(Sigourney) We talked about this erotic idea." "I think if we'd had more time the creature would've come out and come up and looked in the window." "And it was an idea that I have always been sorry we did'nt get to do." "Maybe we'll do it someday, in Alien 5 or something." "But that idea of a strange interspecies attraction - albeit one-sided at that point " "I think is... very thrilling." "(narrator) When the film was completed, it was time to let Alien out of its cage and discover how audiences would respond to an exotic cocktail of fantasy and horror which was trailed with the evocative tag line In space no one can hear you scream." "The reactions to those early screenings were both exciting and alarming." "There was a lot of anger because they got so afraid in those days, I would get outrage from the audience." "At one stage" " I think it was in St Louis - it was a little bit weird 'cos one of the attendants fainted." "The movie would start, get under way, and at first I thought they were walking out." "I thought Good God, they're all leaving!" "They were going to the back of the theatre." "They did'nt want to sit too close." "This was before anything happened!" "And then I thought This is good." "This is definitely good." "A poor girl about four rows down, she got up and she had to leave." "She threw up." "People were screaming." "There were people running out of the theatre when that chestburst thing happened." "They were really freaked." "It was something nobody had ever seen before." "Management got very upset and said Who's responsible for making this movie?" "I think I ran for the nearest bar." "I was out the front door, into the car, and I went to a bar." "Sat there, waiting for that afterwards thing..." "How did it go?" "There'd been Forbidden Planet, The Day the Earth Stood Still, etc, and B-movies." "No serious mid-road audience had been really encouraged or interested in going to see a movie of this kind." "I think they went in and they were pretty shocked at how intense it was." "You are on the edge of your seat until the old facehugger whacks out the egg onto Hurt." "Somehow, the buzz had gotten out on this movie and it was lines around the block." "It had a lot to do with the ad campaign, which was really good." "It opened, I think, that weekend." "I was staying in Hollywood with some friends." "I could see the Egyptian Theatre." "I sat up there all night, and it was never without a queue round it." "'Cos they ran it for 48 hours nonstop on its opening weekend." "I do remember that on opening night I went in and sat down in the Egyptian in Hollywood." "The house was packed." "When the house lights went down, the audience, in anticipation of this new movie, Alien, the whole audience cheered." "Unexpectedly to me, my tear glands just exploded - tears flowed down my face " "at their desire to see this picture." "It was... you know..." "It paid off for a lot of frustration over a lot of years, that moment." "When I first saw the movie, what thrilled me was how innovative the camera work was, how visceral the experience was, how the fact that you could'nt understand us all the time - in our improvisations we mumbled a lot..." "That was part of it, 'cos you sort of were leaning forward to try to hear the information because you felt that it might be of some help to you." "You really felt you were in that ship." "There was a theatre owner from the southeast part of this country, and he came over to Ridley at this thing where everybody was having a beer and having a good time." "He said I tell you, I had this film in my movie house." "People were going into the bathroom and they were just upchuckin' all over the place." "It was hell to clean that up, but we took care of it." "We don't have that problem now." "So Ridley's waiting." "He said Well, what did you do?" "He said oh, we just cut that chestburster thing out of the film." "It was all right." "So... that's something that just makes a filmmaker faint." "You don't have control over stuff like that." "(narrator) The success of Alien launched a franchise which saw rising filmmakers like James Cameron, David Fincher and Jean-Pierre Jeunet find a foothold in the hothouse world of big-budget productions." "Just as Ridley Scotts original conjured a genre-defining milieu which, along with Blade Runner, would underwrite all subsequent serious sci-fi, so the sequels too attempted to break new ground." "Cameron's Aliens became one of the first movies to flourish in an expanded directors cut format on home video." "Finchers Alien 3 popularised a dark visual style which would come to the fore in Se7en and became as imitated as Scotts world view." "Jeunets Alien:" "Resurrection struck a balance between European art-house cinema and mainstream American moviemaking." "An impressive legacy for a film which began life as nothing more than a creature feature." "The theory of Alien was that you took basically a B-monster-movie and you never let on that it was." "You made it like you were making..." "a Mike Nichols or a Stanley Kubrick movie." "You made it with really good actors and you made it look as good as you possibly could." "You never let on that you were making a B-movie, but you kept that underneath it." "The thing that was always provocative about that first one, it was seven little Indians, or whatevers politically correct." "Seven people in a house, or seven..." "whatever." "Seven Geordies on a spacecraft, OK?" "And they're all gonna get knocked off, and that's a great dynamo, a great engine." "But it depends on how well you serve that up." "That's the trick." "It saved my career, 'cos it saved my spirits and it's kept my ideas fresh." "When everybody doubts me, all I have to do is wave Alien at 'em and they're a little less inclined to disagree with me." "It was so different." "It was'nt like any other monster movie that had ever been done." "To me, I guess the alien represents the unknown and... the thing that is a much darker, starker, wilder version of ourselves." "We all feel, in the case of the alien, that thing lurking underneath the staircase when we were kids, things in dark rooms..." "And Alien realised all of that for us." "That was the thing that really terrified most of us - the reality of all those things that scared us when we were kids."