SCOTT: The problem with science fiction is we all feed off each other.
That's why they all start to look the same.
How do l do this different? You know, how do l get your attention...
...and have you have bad dreams and bad chills?
[GROWLS]
[GASPlNG]
SCOTT: That's what stopped me doing science fiction...
...because l thought how's it gonna be different? How's it gonna be new?
MAN: lt's really terrifying when you start to delve deeper...
...what can happen to the human body when things go wrong, genetically speaking.
What if the entire movie is about humanity...
...us in the future challenging the scientific idea of creation?
Where did we come from?
FASSBENDER: What we thought we knew in the first Alien...
...is just a tiny tributary of what's actually going on.
SCOTT: We've tackled a lot of new ground, which opened up the door...
...to a different form of thinking.
Get bolder, get braver.
Dare to talk about who made us and who made them.
FASSBENDER: I think you've got to give the fans something new...
...and you've got to maybe sort of upset them a little bit or take that risk.
SCOTT: l said, "I have an idea for a follow-through on the original four Aliens."
Because it really got-- Wrung it dry.
Four films on Alien as a franchise is pretty good.
[HISSlNG]
[SCREECHING]
Inevitably, it's a prequel.
SPAIHTS: The idea of returning to Alien, and of particularly bringing Ridley back to Alien...
...had been floating around for years.
And a lot of people had taken a run at it.
Uh, the day that l got into it...
...I was not even ostensibly going to a meeting about the project.
I just went into Scott Free to talk generally about writing projects.
And they kind of popped it to me across a desk, uh, without warning.
"We've thought about going back to Alien."
And I said, "Alien? Back--? Well...."
And I sort of walked through the films in my head...
...and by the time you get done with the four orthodox Alien movies...
...plus Alien vs. Predator, the mythology is so dense...
...I wouldn't have the foggiest idea of how to write the next one...
...where on earth you'd go from there. And they said:
"Oh, we feel the same way. We'd go back."
SCOTT: There's one question no one asked in all four movies...
...much to my amazement.
I'm surprised no one said:
"Who's the big guy in the seat that became known as the space jockey?"
I don't know who gave it that name, but somebody called it a space jockey.
It's not in the film.
This guy sitting in his chair in the middle of this craft...
...clearly a craft, was a big question. Who was that?
I'd never thought about it before...
...but l discovered instantly that I had all these opinions...
...and I started mouthing off in the room. I got very opinionated.
"Well, you'd have to go back to the ship wreck from which it all sprang.
And you'd have to look at that dead giant, the space jockey...
...the dead giant in the chair with an elephantine proboscis, rib cage."
What do you do if you're gonna go make a movie about that guy...
...and his comrades on some big starship?
They look ridiculous. They'll be unintentionally funny.
We won't relate to them, because they're not people.
They're gonna speak some language we don't understand.
How do you do it?
And it seemed very plain to me that the only way...
...you could go dive into the story of the space jockeys...
...is if their story was ultimately ours.
If their story lead back to us.
They needed to be intrinsically involved in the human story...
...in human history and, l thought, in our evolution.
LlNDELOF: I first heard about the fact...
...that Ridley was considering coming back to sci-fi...
...and that he was gonna do maybe an Alien prequel.
And I think l was hearing the same thing that everybody else was, which is...
...he was very interested in this massive corpse...
...that was sitting in a chair in the beginning of Alien...
...and sort of telling a story from the point of view of:
"Okay, well, what was that? And how does that plug into the mythology?"
And I think, you know, sort of every bone in my fan-boy body...
...was just sort of vibrating. Oh, my God, I can't wait to see that.
SCOTT: Then that evolved.
And from that evolution, I pitched to Fox and Fox said:
"Wow, that's a really interesting idea."
And that's where we started to evolve into previsitation.
Have we been previsited before?
And the more you climb into it, the more you realize it's entirely logical.
SPAIHTS: The notion that our gods really came not from the heavens...
...but from the stars, from other worlds.
And, you know, there's no shortage...
...obviously, of this kind of theorizing and mythologizing...
...from relatively serious scholarship to wild conspiracy theories...
...saying that the pyramids, the lnca temples...
...the Greek astronomers, all of this ancient wisdom...
...these old accomplishments were assisted by powers from beyond the stars...
...that we, ourselves, were shaped by something else.
SCOTT: lt's entirely illogical to believe that we haven't been visited before.
Because there's two points of arrogance attached to that idea.
One is to believe that we're it in this entire galaxy.
There has to be more.
Not humanoids, necessarily, but more other life forms.
And it's arrogant for us to believe that we are superlative...
...as opposed to we may be minor.
Next day, the head of Ridley's company called...
...asked me to write that down for him because he wanted to show it to Ridley.
You're not supposed to write anything down as a screenwriter without a contract.
I immediately wrote it down and they sent it to Ridley.
They told me it would only go to Ridley, and it immediately shot into the studio...
...and up the ladder to the top of the studio.
And within 1 0 days, it was sitting in front of the co-chairs of Fox...
...and we were locking it down.
And after that, I worked as fast and as hard as I've ever worked on anything.
Ridley and l and Michael Costigan and Michael Ellenberg...
...we just spent months in the room...
...hashing out story, going around draft after draft...
...and finding our way to the story.
ELLENBERG: Who would fly a spaceship filled with these horrible creatures on it?
What would possess anyone to do that, human or alien?
And that's the real question he was always sort of curious about.
What would motivate someone to do that?
And so the whole premise from the beginning...
...and what then became, and now is Prometheus...
...that idea still is what the movie is.
And there's something very pure and special about the development of this...
...because it became about, who would make monsters?
SPAIHTS: We began with Giger's monster. We began with the beast.
That's the core of the franchise, it's the core monster.
As a new frontier to explore, we looked at these giants...
...these Engineers, as I called them.
The aliens who had shaped us, the old gods.
SCOTT: l came up with saying, "What happens if these guys exist?
And if they do exist, who were they?"
And I always figured that pilot was flying a battleship.
And the battleship was a carrier of deadly objects.
The deadly objects were the eggs, and the eggs were the DNA...
...that would be carried out to destroy, would be used to destroy.
What would they be destroying?
SPAIHTS: The farther we pushed into the development of the story...
...the bigger the Engineers got...
...and the more marginalized the original Alien monster became...
...until that monster became a kind of feature or grace note...
...in a larger story that was about humanity meeting its makers.
Humanity confronting the forces that had created it...
...and maybe not liking them that much.
Spaihts did a lot of the footslog...
...and a lot of the stuff around the table with me going:
"Yeah, but what about this and what about that?"
And this will be Holloway, "Are you seeing this?"
-Coming down the ramp. -Yep.
That's when you go to the Magellan bridge.
If there's six people, they're gonna have six helmets.
All got screens on them, all moving.
A very good example of their race, so he's kind of like perfection.
MAN: Yeah. -All right.
Why would you wanna find out about who these people are...
...and who made this and who made what?
SCOTT: l tend to lob in kind of little milestones in the story saying:
"There's this and this and this.
And when it rams it, guess what, it doesn't destroy it.
It comes down, bounces."
SCOTT: lt bowls it, so it goes down, hits the ground...
...starts to roll like a Frisbee across the landscape.
SCOTT: And then rolls after them.
I come up with those ridiculously large ideas...
...because mainly I think I can pull that off.
Then it's how do you organically roll those into it?
SPAIHTS: He spitballs freely and creatively all the time.
And always visually. He's always sketching and drawing.
So that iterative process had been underway for months.
We would sit and talk and he would draw things.
And sometimes just stuff he was making up off the cuff.
And often things ruinous to the story that I'd written for that week.
I'd bring in pages and he would kick my sand castle down.
"What if this was happening? What if there was a...?
What do they call that thing where they model a solar system, like an orrery?"
He's like, "What if there was an orrery?" I'm like, "What would that look like?"
He'd start sketching and then I have to figure out what that is...
...what its meaning will be, what role it will play.
And so l throw my pages away and go and write new pages.
This is an early draft of the script...
...which l wrote and rewrote and handed in again and again.
And this one is one that's been marked up by Ridley himself.
And in the early going, you can see the fine detail...
...on which he offered feedback...
...and had strong opinions about individual images, individual words...
...shadows and light, everything.
And I would go through and sort of implement his notes.
And the highlighting is me telling myself I've done the work l need to do.
So we got the side notes. The complimentary ones:
"Better, this is great. But watch out. Don't get too much like this."
Um, so you get notes as general as, "Come on, do better than this, be more mysterious."
And notes as specific as, "l hate this word. Use another word."
MAX: Conceptually, l think the first draft that I read had a lot of potential.
And was stimulating visually to an extent that opened up the universe...
...that I had always seen as a claustrophobic interior movie...
...suddenly became much more involved...
...with the exterior landscape and exploration of it.
And that was very interesting.
And also suggesting what the civilization...
...that was behind the encounter in the first movie might have been.
SPAIHTS: Once the story got about four drafts in, we started staffing up.
And Arthur Max came aboard as our production designer and really--
And artists under him.
--and really began to push the design of the film.
MAX: lt's very difficult to build a world of science fiction...
...when you have only a static object and a room to begin with.
SPAIHTS: I would literally come in and write some new pages...
...come in and talk to people about them.
Ridley would go home and I'd go down to the art room...
...and hang out with Arthur and his artists.
And we'd sip a glass of wine and talk about the monsters...
...and what they ought to be like and how we think the scene really looks.
And I would go home and come back in at 9:30 the next morning...
...and there would be paintings this wide on the wall...
...of the scene I wrote the day before.
ELLENBERG: That group then started in a very intimate way...
...that was really, l think, enriching for Ridley.
He took the process that he applies in all of his movies...
...in these kind of big design movies...
...he was able to take that process and apply it to a world of science fiction.
The concept work on this movie was sort of its own script work.
You know, and that was script work taking place alongside the actual script work.
Often l'd walk into that room of artists and I would see Ridley's footprints.
There would be Post-it notes and guys saying:
"That's gotta come down. Ridley wants this head shaped like that.
And this needs to be whiter, and that needs to be desexualized...
...and this needs to be darker and more haunted looking."
And artists would be tearing stuff up because Ridley had been through...
...and reinventing it with his vision stamped on it.
And then I would see that vision and see where Ridley was going...
...and carry that home when l wrote my new pages.
And at a flick they can go away and there'd just be a plastic window...
-...which will come back up if you want it. -Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Yup.
Screens would probably be just that simple.
-Yeah. SPAIHTS: In the first drafts of the film...
...where the monsters and the monstrous complications that our heroes ran into...
...were much more on the model of the classic Alien monster.
Eggs, facehuggers, impregnation, chest-bursting.
The entire complex of the Engineers that you'll see in the film...
...the pyramidal temple, the underground catacombs, the huge caverns...
...those weren't there yet.
In the very first conceptualization of the film...
...the exploratory ship made a search, found a beacon...
...and set down beside what would ultimately prove to be the shipwreck...
...the derelict from the first Alien film, the crescent-shaped ship.
In exploring that ship, our explorers got into trouble...
...and as they began to meet and find the remains of the Engineers...
...and ultimately a living Engineer whom they revive...
...they were tangling with menaces along the way...
...which were recognizable ancestors of the beast, the demon from Alien.
What l'm trying to do is reinvent the facehugger.
-Right. -Okay?
In the early phases, the project was actually called Alien: Prequel.
It was an early development. We didn't know, um, what it was gonna be.
We had parts of the script that we had read, you know, early on.
And there were chest-bursters. There were facehugger-type creatures.
There were things that were more directly-- You could correlate to Alien.
I had done paintings of a creature...
...that was gonna come out of one of the characters' chest.
You were gonna see these tentacles poking out.
And then it would pull itself-- It would open up the rib cage...
...and actually release itself through the person.
But, you know, Ridley felt it was too on-the-nose...
...and he kind of wanted to depart from that.
He wanted to do things that were more subtle, but scarier...
...and not as on-the-nose as the original Alien.
SCOTT: Those are the things that are decided around a table.
And then off that, all the rich stew...
...Lindelof comes in and goes:
"Ah, I really like the script, but we could do this, this and this."
And so Lindelof, foom, carves through it and suddenly I've got a three-act piece.
Three-act selling tool that I can make into a three-act film.
LlNDELOF: What if the sequel to this movie was not Alien?
But it was an entirely different movie that started running parallel...
..to Alien, Aliens or whatever?
So that while this would certainly take place in the Alien universe...
...and there would be all the bells and whistles...
...of what we've come to expect from what Ridley originally did...
...um, in terms of the tone of it, the way that it looked...
...but also in terms of how hypersleep works.
So maybe it's not a prequel at all, maybe it's an original science-fiction movie...
...that sort of trades in the same stock, but really focuses on the story.
That being said, all the things that I loved about Jon's work...
...was that he seemed very interested in this idea of the Engineers.
I think frankly that he was brought aboard...
...because, uh, at the time that I was working on that script...
...I had never had a movie produced.
And in the view of a studio head, untested.
It happened when we were in the homestretch.
Like, we think we're ready to go, um, and the studio had two thoughts.
They were like, "Let's dial back the Alien monsters and lean more on the Engineers."
And, "Let's get a known writer on this and bring it home."
Uh, which, of course, l didn't love, but which as an unproduced writer at that time...
...I had been told to expect from the very beginning.
So I wasn't that surprised.
And they talked to a number of writers...
...and Damon was the guy who got it, in their view...
...and really seemed to love the story for what it was, to understand its soul...
...and to be happy to carry forward in the spirit of what had been done so far.
Maybe it's a day later, because they're trudging to the next silo.
Uh, you have the birth of the silvertish that comes out of the body...
...of the Engineer and comes for her.
I think that's the end on the end.
The idea of taking Alien...
...which is just essentially this very cool, "ln space, no one can hear you scream"...
...it's terrifying, but on a thematic level, it's kind ofjust is what it is.
To take that and suddenly say:
"Now let's start to play with all these incredibly heady ideas...
...just about philosophically speaking about God and the universe."
And then, you know, you say, "Here's a bunch of humans...
...that are seeking out a race of beings who may or may not have created life on Earth.
And they're bringing with them this synthetic human that they've created."
You now have a couple of different generations.
And so you have this character, David, on the ship with them...
...who basically has a perspective of:
"Hey, l hang out with my creators all the time.
And you might be disappointed, I have to be honest with you."
Suddenly bringing that into the mix...
...which was very much there already in Jon's draft...
...I felt like, "Okay, let's make this thing about creation."
And that opened a tremendous amount of doors.
And certainly that was the movie that I think Ridley wanted to make all along.
SCOTT: They are religious.
Because the whole story is about who made them.
-Yeah. Right. -God made them.
MAX: What they discovered was never explained in the first movie.
So it was really a kind of blank canvas for us.
LlNDELOF: I do not write well alone.
And in this case, it's why l really love television so much...
...because it's such a collaborative writing process.
Since this was the first movie that I was really working on "alone"...
...um, uh, Ridley became the guy that I co-wrote the movie with.
SPAIHTS: You really are creating not just some characters and a tale...
...but a whole world, the universe in which they live.
And you're crafting spaceships and planetoids...
...technology and events that can't happen in this world.
You're really inventing from the whole cloth an alien species.
Their language, their cataclysmic fate.
Um, that's a great big canvas to paint on.
LlNDELOF: We had intense story sessions over the course of probably four or five weeks.
At least three hours or four hours at a time, three days a week...
...before I went off and generated my draft...
...which l wrote very quickly because by then l had such a clear understanding...
...going scene by scene.
And of course, I can't really think off the top of my head...
...of a more brilliant visual director working in the medium right now...
...especially for this kind of a movie.
And so l would just sit and listen...
...to how Ridley described how he saw the scenes visually.
And then I just kind of had to figure out...
...what characters were saying to each other...
...or how to get into those moments.
SPAIHTS: To be engaged in that act of world creation is a huge turn-on for any writer.
And then on top of that, to be engaged in that in collaboration...
...with a filmmaker of the magnitude and skill of Ridley Scott...
...and the team that he assembled, it's just a gift.
Hey, how you doing?
[English - US - SDH] Hey, how you doing?
Science fiction is much harder than doing the ancient world, for example.
Whereas, with science fiction, everything has to be invented.
MESSING: We tried to be truthful to the first film...
...but also give moments that were unique and new.
Some of that was in the color and the lighting...
...and opening up the atmosphere...
...and giving more scale and depth to the environment.
PROCTER: lt's not an aesthetic choice for Ridley. It's a thematic choice.
And our job was to kind of make that thematic choice visually palatable...
...and workable.
His attitude toward creating is very similar to the way we paint, actually.
Which is a lot by creating accidents and almost misdirection.
You know, trying to find a way of creating that's not the usual way.
SCOTT: Monsters are difficult because every goddamn hideous monster...
...has been explored.
Monsters. These are beautiful.
Until somebody comes up with something that's different. You go, "That's different."
MAX: lt was like a think-tank room that we were all set up in...
...in a building adjacent to Ridley's offices.
So that he can come and participate.
Everybody had their voice heard in that room.
I mean, you could cam-lever it from here.
You could just give it a structural post and it just cam levers the other way.
Then the part that you need to hit the ground....
MAX: The walls were lined with artwork.
We started off with empty walls...
...and slowly we ran out of space several times.
The discussions were round-table discussions.
Everybody had an opinion.
I was thinking that, the four tentacles, of having it just moving around...
-Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hm, mm-hm. -...would be really good acting.
It would give you options, that's all.
SCOTT: The design was one of the things I really enjoyed doing.
And so, between Arthur Max and finding his team...
...he got in these designers who are kind of cyber-world designers.
They design stuff on these marvelous laptops.
Arthur chose, literally handpicked, I think, honestly...
...five of the best in the business.
Absolutely superlative capabilities.
And because l can draw....
And also there's many reference photographs.
Arthur and I always work on a lot of reference photographs saying:
"Like this, like that, but not like that. Physically like this, but not like that."
And so you're suddenly getting absolute points of reference...
...saying, "Do me a sketch of this.
I know l didn't like that because l've done that before."
So how do you get off on something which looks slightly different?
It's really hard.
-That's a great little sketch. -Yeah.
-Thank God for art school. PAGE: Yeah.
MESSING: We would have meetings and then Jon Spaihts would come in...
...and work with Arthur and us and Ridley too.
It was interesting. I've never had a experience...
...where a director would sit next to me and literally draw.
And I would draw and he would draw. Then he'd say, "What do you think of this?"
And then we'd flesh it out more and then show it to him and he'd draw back over it.
Very few people are true artists in this industry...
...and he is one of them.
You know, he could design the whole movie himself if he had the time.
LEVY: We found that there was a lot of pressure on us.
And it wasn't given by anybody aside from us.
But we really wanted, visually...
...to tie in those two universes which are part of this one universe.
And the difficulty was exactly that, is that on the first one...
...you're into like a trucker type of environment that's very raw...
...and very bulky and things like that.
And we had to tie it in with a universe that's much more sharp...
...and very design-ly detailed.
And it was very tricky for us to do so...
...without feeling like we were gonna disappoint fans.
I mean, we are fans ofAlien and we don't want to disappoint.
It's got out of control with the build-up of liquid and calcium over a thousand years.
Although it was supposed to be a highly secretive room...
...with warning signs on the door and "do not enter unless authorized"...
...people came and went very freely, and ideas changed...
...as people came and went and encountered the latest thinking.
And there was an open forum for discussion.
That was, I think, very healthy and fertile.
SCOTT: l would go in there on a regular basis for a period of almost four months, actually...
...designing the absoluteness of the landscapes...
...the interior of the ships, the rooms, the suits...
...the creatures that we might see.
Everything was designed here with four or five people.
-Hello. MAN: Hi.
PROCTER: Ridley would come by with-- You knew Ridley was coming...
...because a tray of red wine would show up with enough glasses for everyone.
"Oh, l guess Ridley's gonna come by." Ha, ha.
I love the conglomeration of people in headsets.
PROCTER: To be working on such a grand franchise...
...you wouldn't necessarily expect the process to be so intimate...
...and kind of friendly, but it was. It was really nice.
You get an A for attitude.
[MEN CHUCKLE]
And he just thought that was all great.
These are storyboards...
...drawn by Ridley.
Some of them are just simple diagrams...
...helping to think through set designs and ideas...
...for intercutting between characters...
...and actions and locations in the movie.
And it's really a blueprint...
...a very simple blueprint, at this stage...
...to plan the movie.
I got lucky, in a way, because I came across a guy called H.R. Giger...
...29, 30 years ago.
And Giger had this one picture which I always thought was:
"That's it. That is it."
He'd already done it. lt was in a book.
SCANLAN: We know the ultimate, in a sense. We've seen that point.
To move back from that was a sort of comforting way of saying...
...we have to hold onto the Giger-type elements.
We have to hold onto the purity of the original...
...but at the same time, try and bring in new elements...
...things that are not necessarily backward from where we were...
...but are of a similar DNA.
SCOTT: How are you doing? -This is Laura.
MAX: We met with Giger personally.
He came over and we did a presentation of all our designs...
...and hoped he would react positively...
...you know, because we wanted him to be impressed with what we had done.
We discussed with him some fresco panels...
...based on some of the designs he had done for the first movie...
...that were never used.
Ridley had turned me onto some of the drawings.
Said, you know, "Can we do something with these shapes and designs?"
Ridley felt it was very important to involve Giger in the design of this film...
...and he really wanted to involve him in any way he could.
The other question is, when he's in the space suit...
...without the helmet, does his head start to change?
MESSING: We were trying to keep things in the vein of him...
...even though there was definite departures.
But he appreciated that, and he definitely--
Even a few pieces, he even said, you know, "That's mine."
This is Genesis.
This is his flight suit, this is his pressure suit.
-It's nice, huh? There's his pressure suit. -Yeah, yeah.
-But l took off this, which is yours... -Yeah.
...to say, how does he slide into that, into the shell?
-Uh-huh. -That's his shell.
This looks like a baby.
A bad baby.
[GRUNTS]
Anyway, it's a thought.
SCOTT: He saw what I was doing, l think he thought l was so far down the road...
...I think he was a bit amazed at how things have changed now...
...how fast things are moving.
And honestly, we just had to move quickly and move on.
There's a couple drawings here and there that he did which are kind of interesting...
...but fundamentally l just didn't have time. I had to move.
But l hope he likes the film because it's still based on his original id--
Or origins of him are in this film, which is the guy in the chair...
...who is the space jockey, that will always be H.R. Giger.
The pilot chamber is like a sacred cow of the Alien tradition...
...and it was with great trepidation that I approached the design for that.
And all the concept artists were high priests of science fiction...
...and were extremely critical of any outrageous...
...to be applied to their icon...
...their holy of holies...
...the space jockey chair and chamber.
PROCTER: Essentially what l tried to do was something that was as close as possible...
...to the original movie's version of what Giger had done...
...Giger's original illustrations...
...that preceded that sculpt of the original movie...
...but that also incorporated, you know, new functional requirements...
...that were simply not seen in the movie.
MESSING: A lot of research went into recreating that chair.
And, you know, you may have thought we just had archival reference...
...and we could just-- We had the blueprints. We didn't.
We had to dig deep to find reference...
...to reconstruct that chair as accurately as we could.
And then everything else from it kind of grew out of that.
And all the design changes were very challenging...
...but to keep it consistent with the original was quite a task.
PROCTER: The thing has to articulate vertically and come out of the floor...
...as this giant vertical thing that tips down...
...introduces a whole different set of concerns...
...for the layout of the various parts.
Giger had put in some, you know, gear-toothed kind of arcing elements...
...and some feeling of articulation to the three sets of rods...
...that support the cannon on the end that were definitely the starting-off point...
...for allowing that kind of an action, but still it had to be figured out.
Okay, if it does that, which parts kind of go with it?
Which ones move? Which ones don't? And how do the layers, you know, work?
I was able to actually produce a rigged model...
...of how this thing would work.
We shifted the emphasis of the biological forms...
...that Giger tended to play up.
We played those down...
...and we went more toward the mechanical forms.
Sometimes we would definitely clash with the production designer...
...where he would see, for example, for the whole Engineer architecture...
...in those basements, you know?
He would see something that's very monolithic and very, very simple...
...and Ben, Steve and l, we'd go much more towards a Gigerish approach, you know?
Which is much more organic...
...and much more, I would say, shocking...
...and almost, l mean, very weird, you know?
You see this in the design, in many ways, where it is a mixture of that.
Of very monolithic architectural, giant monolithic, and Gigerish world.
But in a way, l think it created for a very interesting look.
MESSING: In the chamber room, there was these pods.
We did a ton of versions, me and David...
...and I ended up kind of taking it over and was really fleshing out the details for it.
And Ridley wasn't sure. He wanted to orient it, you know, head to toe.
Where were the Engineers sleeping? How were they facing?
Why were they in here?
And we ended up, he said, "You know what?
We can just put this in front of the telescoping, you know, pilot chair...
...and it'd be a great story moment where you see these sleeping pods...
...but you don't know the purpose of it."
In Ridley's mind, it could be a different spaceship.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Maybe he's just changing it.
He doesn't need to explain why he's doing it. lt's for the story.
SCOTT: It was a skeleton in a chair.
And I said, "Well, no, it wasn't. It was a suit."
Said, "You think of space suits in a very conventional fashion.
If I'm telling you it wasn't a skeleton, but in fact it was-- Not an exoskeleton.
It's an organic suit, that's what it is.
I'm gonna show you how it opens and what's inside...
...because what's inside is a humanoid."
LEVY: My first reaction was to be horrified.
I was thinking, "He's taking such a cult thing...
...and what is he doing with it? This can't work."
And I think that's what he does best.
He takes something that you think you know...
...and he just turns it upside down.
MESSING: It's probably one of the most iconic figures in sci-fi history.
When Ridley was first talking about the idea of having this human figure...
...representing the space jockey character, we all pretty much hated it.
HUANTE: He had seen a sculpture that I had done...
...and this character was, you know, completely lopsided...
...and really muscular and blown out, and he loved it.
The photograph that I took of it too was, uh....
It was really hot. So it was really just--
You know, it looked ghostly.
MESSING: It was interesting but we didn't think it was really appropriate.
But then, you know, as the storyline progressed and Ridley was really....
You know, he was very confident about this.
He was not gonna-- No one was gonna change his mind.
It still retains that...
-...but it looks more helmet-like. -Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
SCANLAN: We call the Engineer an elephantine Engineer...
...because of the trunk.
It's the suit that the Engineers wear...
...in order to be able to travel in space.
And when they're not in that, they're wearing what we call a pressure suit.
So the design of the Engineer was driven from that perspective...
...that actually the big discovery is that this isn't a creature in its own right.
This is a suit. This is worn by another being.
MAX: l think Ridley found it more interesting if they were our creators that--
He kept quoting the Bible passage:
"And God created man in his own image."
SCOTT: l thought, if you're gonna be biblical about it...
...then is religion erased memory?
Was there really God, was there the son of God...
...or were they visitations of superior beings?
-Warrior priests or something. Mm-hm. -Exactly right.
And here is something slightly ominous...
...which is a serious pair of high-tech shoes-- Boots.
MAX: We got Neville Page involved.
Neville specializes in creature design.
And we introduced him to the physical anatomy...
...that was a brief from Ridley...
...that it shouldn't be like a bodybuilder musculature.
It should be like classical statuary.
When you look at them, they're very much more compact...
...and less over-developed...
...but exaggerated in every detail.
And so we try to express those...
...and overlay them with this classical veneer...
...to make them god-like.
PAGE: I spent a lot of time developing, you know, the ultimate head...
...which was classical-art driven.
We kept looking at da Vinci's work for that bulky, husky body...
...the strong nose, the small lips. You know it was like--
The names thrown out were David, the David sculpture...
...the Statue of Liberty and Elvis Presley.
And when you hear that as a brief, you're like:
"What the hell am I gonna do?" Ha, ha.
I understood, though, as you look at those three images, you go:
"Oh, l get it, l get it."
It's that specific mouth, that nose and these eyes.
MAX: He wanted them to be, in a strange sort of way, beautiful...
...and not frightening.
Frightening comes with attitude.
ELLENBERG: The first camera test with the Engineer...
...he scared the people walking around.
Not because he did anything. It was that unsettling.
Because you did feel-- The effect we were going for...
...in creating the design of those Engineers, manifested itself in reality.
Which is, it was deeply unsettling to see something that was kind of superhuman...
...kind of vacant in the eyes, blackened eyes...
...looking down at you and looking kind of upset at you.
The way in which it felt like an angry father...
...or angry parent was troubling.
It was, you know, a lit room. It was not like he was doing anything fancy.
It was just scary.
All the actors got to experience that and they got to interact with an actor...
...and have dialogue with those characters and not just talk to some blank screen.
RAPACE: I really like that it's really kind of attractive the same way...
...because they're beautiful.
You wanna go closer, you wanna touch them in a way.
You wanna kind of be embraced by them and that makes it much more interesting.
SCOTT: I don't like to repeat myself...
...so you're constantly evolving with these guys...
...who are really great creators in their own right.
So frequently we'll just talk or scribble, saying:
"No, like this, or like that." We've now got such a marvelous wealth...
...of encyclopedic wealth of information on any laptop.
Like, we designed a thing, this is called a Trilobite...
...by just going into deep-sea things...
...and looking at things which are marvelous details.
God's the best designer in the world.
You can't do better than God.
I think, you know, Carlos Huante's, Neville Page and Neal Scanlan's team...
...did a good job of trying to take this monumental task...
...of at least being on the same level as Alien...
...which was, you know, almost impossible.
Can l do a combination of the veins plus this?
Because this is changing cranium.
SCANLAN: Holloway's infected. He then impregnates Shaw...
...and from that, Shaw then gives birth, in a sense...
...to what we call the Med-Pod creature...
...which was extracted through from her stomach.
That then grows into the Trilobite.
What's sort of happening almost in tangent with that is Fifield.
And Fifield's been exposed to the gloop and so he begins to go through...
...a sort of, you know, transformation independent of that...
...and becomes what we call the Fifield creature.
And that ultimately the Engineer crossed with the Trilobite...
...gives us what we call the deacon, and he is the penultimate--
As far as the film is concerned, the penultimate combination of all of this.
SCOTT: The idea of biting the umbilical. MAN: Yeah?
Think it's too much?
MAN: l think it's, you know, an interesting idea for the European version.
The evolutions that emerge from them...
...evolve to higher and higher forms, which you see illustrated here...
...eventually leading back to the original Giger alien.
So we're basically attempting to deconstruct Giger's alien...
...and show how it evolved from its humanoid host...
...both Earthly humans...
...and our space jockey Engineer species.
HUANTE: I go, "Oh, we have to have the precursor to the facehugger...
...that looks like this centipede thing that is--
Centipede of the facehugger who's got, like, a hundred fingers."
This thing just crawls around and that's the thing that attacks the guy.
Grabs him, grabs his arm.
Then we could have that cool 1 970s science-fiction astronaut...
...you know, looking at his arm.
This thing has grabbed his hand and, you know, that'd be cool, right?
And I know Ridley's all about that. He gets that.
SCANLAN: The Med-Pod creature was really a baby form.
He's an embryotic form or a baby form of this.
And Ivan Manzella did a number of sketches...
...and designs in ZBrush.
And we showed those to Ridley and I think we got lucky.
We showed Ridley something, and he said, "Yeah, that's great."
And so we had that design quite early...
...and that gave us the blueprint for where we would go later.
He just worked well as a design.
The fact that the tentacles are fused initially...
...and that they split and they continue to split...
...to create the tentacles later.
This is Ivan. He's working on the Med-Pod creature...
...which is obviously taken out of Shaw in the Med-Pod sequence.
We're inside a little room within a room, really, and this is our sort of fortress.
The work that goes on in here is the concept design for the creatures.
We're working on designs here in the U.K...
...we're doing designs that have been worked on as well in the States.
And it sort of all comes together and we get a sort of weekly visit from Ridley...
...where we sit down at the table, Ridley with his sketch pad...
...and we show him sort of work in progress.
He adds elements that he feels and points us in the right direction...
...and we carry on going.
There was one creature that Carlos and I...
...were kind of batting back and forth to one another.
When I was given Carlos' image to work with...
...Ridley said, "Just give me your own take on it."
You know, "Give me the-- What you think, alien should look like."
This particular-- "The baby," as it was referred to.
So I, if it's a verb, Gigered the hell out of it...
...and brought it in, proud as punch...
...that it's like, yeah, that really feels like Giger's aesthetic.
And Ridley was like, "No. No, no, that's not it at all."
Man, we were all over the place on Fifield.
I think I actually spent the most time on Fifield.
Ridley wanted variations of a Carlos thing that he did...
...which was a baby face.
And the baby-face character that was Fifield...
...was gonna have inverted legs and a bit of a tail.
It was like a very, very quick morph from Fifield to this monster.
Oh, that one is still the best. Carlos' drawing.
PAGE: That's mark one. That's the original. SCOTT: That's the best. Yep.
The concern was, for a lot of it...
...Ridley's feelings were that it looked too much like a goblin.
As soon as you get to that, it doesn't work somehow.
It's got a goblin. Somehow it's a goblin.
SCANLAN: lt looks a bit like Gollum. SCOTT: Yeah.
It's better than Gollum, actually.
And then we took it more where Fifield would be infected...
...still humanoid, limb length would grow...
...and we needed to keep some of his features...
...which, again, that's a real tough balance...
...because as soon as you start to morph it into a creature, they disappear.
So we talked about the tattoo...
...and making that tattoo, wherever it be, on the face or on his body...
...and having that become something that will allow us...
...to basically see that it's still Fifield.
Martin, that we saw earlier...
...is working on further sort of Fifield designs.
And again, back to Ridley on those...
...back to his, back to the sculpting process.
PAGE: At this point, it was clear we're not trying to do Giger's aesthetic.
We weren't gonna do the facehugger...
...and we weren't going to do any kind of metaphor to the first film.
But at the same time, this Trilobite creature...
...became, like, the uber-metaphor of the facehugger, in a way.
Because it's very tentacular...
...it's, in the same way, somewhat sexual.
And quite honestly, on that one...
...when l was done with kind of the face of it, if it even has one...
...it had the most vulvas that I've ever put into a design. Ha, ha.
It was a celebration of vulvas, really, which seemed appropriate.
It's just the way the organic mechanism works.
The fact that it had seven tentacles...
...that was a struggle for me quite a while...
...because we didn't wanna do just an octopus.
And there was a few images at the very beginning...
...where it looked just like an octopus.
But in the end, it was all about one pose that I did...
...to give it a sense of, one, locomotion...
...and make it look like there was power and strength in these tentacles...
...to actually lift it off of the ground.
How powerful can we make this look?
And between the combination of Weta's efforts and Alex Alvarez...
...I just looked at it and thought, "This thing's pretty bad-ass."
The deacon, the ultramorph...
...I think, really, from the beginning...
...Carlos kind of nailed it.
There were a couple versions of the alien that l--
The Xenomorph, the ultramorph, whatever it became.
That I-- lt was straight out of one of Giger's paintings.
I embellished a little couple things...
...but l kept it as close to his stuff as I could.
You have to. He invented the look.
SCANLAN: Sometimes, l think, your first impressions are often the best.
I remember when we joined the project there was a drawing in existence...
...of a rather silver-y, metallic-looking deacon--
The deacon being the description for the point at the back of the head.
--lying in a pool of fluid, and it was quite impressionistic...
...but it was great.
And I think we went down so many different alternatives.
When it came to it, nothing was better than that one thing.
That caught something.
PAGE: Ninety-five percent of our efforts on a production...
...are things that you never see because they're not correct.
And that's where all these, not mistakes...
...but finding what does not work...
...those are stepping stones, building blocks...
...to get to the right thing.
[English - US - SDH]
PROCTER: Alien, you know, for so many visual people, was like a landmark watershed thing.
I mean, it reinvented the look of science-fiction movies forever.
When you watch it and you're an artist or a visual person, the level of visual craft...
...and of the, you know, articulation of what's going on in the frame...
...and motion and light, it's so well done.
BURG: I got the feeling right away...
...that I don't think Ridley Scott just wants to rehash the familiar territory.
He wanted to capture the effect of the first Alien.
He was gonna take the same elements and present them in a new way.
The stylings that we were working on were reminiscent of the Nostromo...
...and of a lot of the Alien 1 aesthetic, but at the same time...
...just, you know, covering a much broader palette of different kinds of things.
MAX: You can do very flashy hardware, which means nothing, but it's:
"How do you apply that to the story...
...and where does it fit into the whole...
...so that you're creating a whole environment...
...that's credible and entertaining?"
[GASPlNG]
I was cast to do development for the human technology.
First thing l started on was the excavation.
They had these excavation pods. They were kind of like submersibles.
They were hovering around, and I assumed it was Mars.
And they're digging.
They shear off this cliff and there are hieroglyphs.
They approach Weyland to get funding.
Weyland doesn't have an office like in an office building.
So the first idea was that it was on this enormous habitat...
...you know, like a huge space station.
So they travel there in sort of a shuttle and they land...
...and we developed this enormous biosphere kind of thing.
It was a huge ring with farmland and lakes and things inside of it.
And the idea was that Weyland is already developing--
He's basically developing the solar system.
MESSING: Prometheus was actually called--
Originally, in the early script, it was called the Magellan...
...and it was this voyage and trying to discover uncharted territories.
And then Ridley decided to name it the Prometheus...
...after he had already named the movie.
MAX: The Prometheus is the flagship of the Weyland fleet.
Weyland, the character who's our chairman of the board of the corporation, it's his ship.
And on his ship, we decided it was gonna be state-of-the-art...
...with every conceivable facility...
...including a penthouse suite with cutting-edge medical facility...
...communication systems, scanning systems...
...infinite capacity for entering hostile planetary climates.
PROCTER: Good production design is so heavily driven...
...by the basic volumes of the spaces...
...and the needs of what the camera's gonna do...
...and the functional aspects of the storytelling...
...that Arthur was able to give us all the guidance we needed for all those things...
...and that last little bit of, you know, kind of icing, filigree, sci-fi techy stuff...
...that was up to us to help him with, but that didn't mean...
...that he wasn't guiding the ship in terms of what components were needed...
...and how big they ought to be and everything else.
Specifically, it's a ship of exploration that's got a lot of equipment.
What Arthur and Ridley said was that...
...you know, this thing lands and it opens up...
...and it becomes like a mobile factory. You know, it's like a complex.
And so l started thinking about oil exploration ships, oil rigs.
They're these huge platforms that float around on these big legs.
And that sort of became the very starting point of the shape.
MAX: I wanted to have some kind of animal aspect...
...like an insect that could land...
...but also have another level of image overlaying it.
It wasn't just an aircraft.
It also had a kind of identity beyond aircraft.
Great big cargo bays, almost like some insects carry their young...
...under their belly, like spiders do.
And so these pods would open up and it would be a modular system of pods...
...carried on an underbelly of a gigantic gantry crane...
...that would be able to fly and free-stand.
Probably the most difficult thing with this design...
...was the fact that it winds up standing on these giant pillars...
...which became the engines, but it can't fly that way.
It became pretty clear that the engines had to change their orientation.
The Nostromo had its propulsion engines...
...and then it had these other engines that were the landing engines.
And I thought, "Well, if we're gonna make this thing move around...
...what if there's just the main engines and they use that for everything?"
We ended up with this design with four engines which became legs, landing legs.
PROCTER: The kind of functional parameters that they wanted with these four...
...you know, VTOL vectoring engines and the feeling of a creature...
...kind of sitting on the landscape with these four big legs...
...you know, those desires were so clearly strong with Ridley and Arthur both...
...that I knew that whatever l adapted from Steve's had to incorporate that.
And frankly, one of Steve's models was extremely close to that concept.
And then it was just a detailing pass.
It was just figuring out what's the surface breakup and detailing...
...that will give this thing the scale that it needs, because it's huge.
And it has a fairly aeronautic shape...
...that makes it look like, you know, an atmospheric flying vehicle.
I mean, the Nostromo was like a box. It was chunky and it didn't--
It looked like it could land on a planet...
...but it was not meant to fly around on a planet, whereas this one...
...really could do long-distance sorties on a planet in its atmosphere.
But at the same time, it wanted to feel a bit like Alien 1.
At least in my mind, that's what I wanted it to feel like.
And it wanted to have a sense of scale...
...that traditionally they got by, you know, kit-bashing tons of little tank parts...
...and battleship parts and all kinds of stuff onto miniature models.
And so l took it upon myself to kind of really study pictures of the Nostromo...
...and I would literally kit-bash in Photoshop...
...whole chunks of the Nostromo skin...
...and lay that onto my illustrations to get that exact kind of...
...you know, pipe conduits running on the surface and all that kind of stuff.
The landing foot is made up of a piece of a Terex mining bulldozer's shovel bit...
...and pieces of World War Il German sort of train tanks...
...and all kinds of crazy stuff. I mean, I literally used the old methods.
MAX: We tried to do graphics with steroids on this one.
Very bold, on an enormous scale, including the exterior of the Prometheus...
...which is kind of based on the graphics from various fighter aircrafts...
...and bombers from World War lI.
PROCTER: I did it in a huge number of color schemes.
Ended up doing some stuff that was stronger than l initially was comfortable with...
...in terms of yellow stripes and things that were influenced by...
...beautiful Messerschmitts and different fighters from World War Il.
But l have to say that the use of the yellow...
...and the use of it with white and black, graphically, it's worked really well.
And what's neat is that it does relate back to some of the early concept work...
...of Chris Foss and Ron Cobb as well from Alien 1 .
Then l worked on almost all of the human interior sets...
...whether it be the Weyland-Vickers suite...
...which is up in the lifeboat that lives on top of the ship...
...or the medical bay or the mess hall...
...or the cryo-sleep systems...
...the bridge of the ship, which had this cool idea...
...that Ridley kind of brought back from Alien 1 of the extruding platform...
...which was very much like Ash's station on the Nostromo...
...but now we're using it, you know, in the bridge.
MAX: The bridge is one area where we actually looked at the design work...
...that was done for the original film.
Now, the Nostromo, as we saw when we saw the film screened...
...I began to appreciate the claustrophobia and how jammed up the spaces were.
In fact, Ridley mentioned how difficult it was to film in...
...but how rich it was because it was so tight and enclosed.
At the same time, he wanted a sense of scale on this version...
...so we had to be large but very intimate.
PROCTER: You know, the bridge design of Prometheus...
...is actually kind of a Ron Cobb bridge design from Alien 1...
...that got split into two things.
It got split into the bridge and then into Ash's pod...
...but originally it was sketched as one...
...and we actually kind of returned it in some way to that Ron Cobb form.
SCOTT: You got the desk, the cockpit...
...the main desk for Janek, the pilot, and his copilots...
...and the feed corridors up to that, and it's always limited.
You'd be amazed how you have to eke out your budget...
...because sets of that quality are very costly.
It's really knowing exactly what you want.
And if you know exactly what you want, you're gonna kind of maintain budget.
If you don't know what you want and say, "l might need it," that's when it goes up.
MAX: We wanted a window.
So we decided to introduce a gigantic wrap-around windscreen...
...multifaceted, kind of in the tradition of a stealth bomber technology...
...very jewel-like and faceted...
...wrapping under the skull of the insect carapace...
...and tucked under the chin, as it were, so that you could then also include...
...a gangplank viewing platform for the captain...
...and stand out and be able to look down on the planet's surface below you...
...as you cruised on over.
PROCTER: We definitely gave thought to how the different components of the interiors...
...fit into the ship in general.
A huge amount of what you're worried about when you're building sets...
...is how it fits into the stages that you have to build them in...
...and what's the height and what's the visual-effects needs...
...of how far away green screens are.
The bridge is a good example of something where the set itself has a lot of height...
...and then it has to be mounted up a certain distance to get certain angles...
...down below the glass looking up at the people, and then it's got--
You know, it needs the giant clearance of green-screen lighting all around it...
...and, you know, at least a 270.
MAX: And that all had to be put on engineering bellows...
...which are big, rubber, gasketed vibration pads...
...so that we could do turbulent vibration as we came into the atmosphere...
...and rock the whole ship.
And then that implied various elements of design...
...i.e., is the roof attached to the walls?
Are the corridors attached to the main space?
And we decided not to do that, to detach evertyhing from each other...
...so everything was a bit free to jostle and jangle...
...but we didn't know how that would really behave.
I thought it might start oscillating beyond control and smash itself to bits.
Fortunately, that didn't occur.
Then there was design of the vehicles to explore the planet...
...because in the end this is an archeological scientific expedition.
So the vehicles had to be able to cope...
...with every kind of inhospitable environment that you can imagine.
And how do we actually make a functioning vehicle?
And not only one vehicle but six.
It was very interesting to take a different take that was done on other movies...
...which is not something military.
The goal here when we worked on the rover and the other vehicles...
...was to have a kind of design that reflects something more like a National Geographic.
You know, a team of explorers and not at all something military.
It was more a take that was about explorers and something that had, like, high money...
...in order to build those vehicles, and something that's very technically sharp.
MAX: We ended up building three large rovers and some ATVs...
...which were all practical and would be used on locations.
We wanted them to go, you know, 50 miles an hour...
...with a dozen people onboard.
SCOTT: So all that had to be designed were the interior of those buses.
The buses are driven by electronics, so there's all the screens.
There's a million screens in every feasible space in that ship...
...and outside each of these vehicles.
MAX: So we went to the military, of course, because they have the best toys.
And then we got several different chassis...
...and did concept designs on each of them in sketch form...
...to present to Ridley, and this went on for about a month.
We got a load of notions that basically went...
...from vehicles that had passengers sitting on the outside...
...others that hovered and flew.
So there was a very free-ranging design phase that embraced all kinds of--
We didn't wanna put any limits on Ridley, saying, you know, "This is possible."
And he picked on a few basic ideas...
...and gave us some of his famous Ridleygram sketches...
...to discuss what the shape language was...
...and we developed from there.
We ended up on a Czechoslovakian surplus chassis...
...a vehicle called a Tatra 8x8...
...which is an all-terrain, all-wheel steering, broken-axel...
...high-speed military transport vehicle...
...and designed our body shell on that...
...based on an armored personnel carrier.
Not that there was gonna be any battle scenes...
...but the thinking was that these scientists and explorers of unknown planets...
...would be prepared to encounter anything.
We got three of them over from Czechoslovakia...
...stripped them all down of their old truck bodies...
...and then we blasted out in a great hurry because of the constraints of time.
I think it took us 1 1 weeks to build from scratch once we got the chassis.
Most car companies take about a year or two to develop a design...
...and then about a year to actually come up with a single prototype vehicle.
So that gives you a sense of how accelerated film process is.
A body shell that had a lot of input from Ridley...
...about the nuance of the proportions of windows and angles...
...so it had a very aggressive character with great visibility...
...and accessorized using all LED lighting.
We wanted to be state-of-the-art for film lighting...
...so all the lighting was custom designed and installed.
Every element of the vehicle is made from scratch...
...including the body shell, interior paneling, seating...
...and all applied to the basic Tatra chassis.
PROCTER: lt's very much about people for Ridley, this story, and not about...
...what could a crazy, bio-technological alien race look like and function like?
It's not really about that.
It's about this kind of religious pursuit of the main character...
...and her quest for answers.
MAX: There was a lot of craftsmen, a lot of artists, a lot of technicians...
...art directors, set designers, draftspersons who worked with me.
And without the craft skills that they brought...
...and the devotion to the work that they brought...
...it wouldn't be the movie that it is.
PROCTER: Ridley, because he created this universe...
...is much less precious about it than anybody else on the planet.
You know, all of us see it as something that's written in stone...
...and that has gone on to this incredible life as a franchise...
...and a series and comic books and all this kind of stuff.
To Ridley, I think he's aware of all those things...
...but fundamentally, it's still just a job he did in the 1 970s.
It's something that he came up with.
And if that's what it is, then he can change it.
[English - US - SDH]
[BELL RINGS THEN MAN 1 YELLS lNDISTlNCTLYY]
MAN 2: Twenty-six, take 1 3.
Ellie!
RAPACE: Ridley said to me at one point:
"l have fantastic actors in all parts. You know, even in the smallest part."
THERON: I think he really loves the process...
...of collaborating with the actors who are gonna play the roles.
So it was a really enjoyable experience to kind of create...
...and elaborate what was already amazing on the page.
MARSHALL-GREEN: I'm a fanboy ofAlien.
Of Ridley Scott's universe.
And it's one of the reasons I'm an actor and want to tell those kinds of stories.
WEYLAND: --you have reached your final destination.
My experience of doing futuristic films was down to Space Virgins on the Planet Sex.
It was a real learning curve.
Right, and then.... Okay.
-Yeah, that's all right. -And a little bit longer.
SCOTT: l was watching a film called Girl with the Dragon Tattoo...
...which l thought was particularly well done, the first one.
So I was very interested in the director...
...but l was even more interested in the girl in the lead, who was Noomi Rapace.
And I thought Noomi was particularly a combination of intelligence and physicality.
-That's very good. Yeah, back view. -Like this?
SCOTT: Yeah, that's nice.
Yeah. Good butt. Okay. So come around to the front.
RAPACE: He had just mentioned by the way that he was gonna do a prequel to Alien...
...or some kind of prequel, and I was like, "Wow, fantastic."
But l just l deleted that afterwards, like, "That's never gonna happen anyway."
I was really kind of high after meeting him because he's just an amazing person...
...and his presence is just so strong.
So I called my manager, I was like:
"Even if I never work with him, l'm happy because l had this hour with him."
SCOTT: She kind of really owned her part in Dragon Tattoo.
And I was surprised to find here was a very beautiful, very intelligent...
...very elegant woman.
And so off that, we got off to a really good start.
ELLENBERG: The studio naturally knew Noomi Rapace at that point was not a big star.
SCOTT: Sit.
ELLENBERG: And so there was a lot of discussion and debate.
So we did shoot a test ultimately. The studio requested it.
There was also, from their standpoint, I would say a legitimate question:
Could she speak English?
Hello, Mr. Weyland.
I'm Dr. lsabelle Shaw.
ELLENBERG: That was where the gang all got together...
...for this first moment in the movie, which was really exciting, with her and with Dariusz Wolski.
That was the first day Ridley and Dariusz had worked together.
You would have thought they had worked together for 20 years.
We shot two camera tests that he just liked a lot, and that was it.
It was kind of challenging because it was in the warehouse. There was no sets, nothing.
ELLENBERG: Arthur Max put it together super simple.
We used a Panavision storage room at Pinewood...
...but it gave it a kind of industrial, creepy vibe.
WOLSKl: We just completely improvised something with whatever.
I had some LED lights that later on became a whole theme of the film.
I need to know what that thing said to you before it ripped your head off.
Noomi was great. She killed her scenes, and you saw the ferocity.
Don't talk about my father.
ELLENBERG: The power of her and her screen presence just kind of came out.
And Fox, to its credit, decided to back Ridley's vision.
You said you could figure out their navigation.
FASSBENDER: There's a really interesting quality about her.
There's a toughness there, but then there's a vulnerability to her...
...which l think Sigourney had in the first one, which was very interesting.
You know, there's a sort of maternal side to her...
...but then there's also this sort of, you know, warrior.
You can do whatever you need to do.
Everything.
YATES: With Noomi, we were very fortunate, look-wise...
...that we could actually-- Because we had access to her a great deal.
And she was very up for it.
So we went through every single look. Ha-ha-ha.
RAPACE: I had many, many costume fittings.
I need to be able to move and to be free at the same time...
...even though we need to have all this kind of equipment on.
We went through the futuristic look. We went through the Star Trek type of look.
We went through diagonals. We went through Eastern looks.
We basically came down-- And she is the only one that is doing this.
--to her wearing a flight suit.
Don't photograph it from above. You're photographing it from here.
-Yeah. Yeah. -Photograph from here, right?
Because then it always looks a bit....
See, l'm looking down on you like-- Okay.
There you go. See, that's a--
RAPACE: Ridley's very-- You know, he has a very clear vision.
When we're working, with the scenes and the costumes...
...and every little detail, it's like he knows what he wants.
But he's very open at the same time, so if l come up with something...
...he's always ready to kind of try that and think about it.
So it really felt like we were finding her look together.
And this mission, it's very practical...
...so l wanted to have hair that we didn't need to fix.
She hadn't done anything.
So if we can get to that with the blond one as well, that's really good.
-I agree. -But it's kind of--
-The dark one makes it much-- -Yeah.
Go straight into something that is quite close to me.
-And is really the opposite to... -Good for her skin color.
...Vickers, yeah.
So it was a balance between finding something that was quite soft...
...but not hardcore or boyish or masculine.
And I've never been red.
And Nana, the fantastic hairdresser we have...
...she brought so many different wigs and she had one red.
I was like, "Wow, well, but maybe not."
And Ridley saw it and he was like, "No, l don't think so. Not red."
And then we popped it on and he was like: "Oh, wow, yeah." Ha-ha-ha.
The red looks really good.
Her whole persona with this red hair that she has...
...is a completely different persona to had she been blond.
So it did have an impact.
Just really more the linear function of her clothing.
She's got long lines and she's got functionality...
...and she's basically a practical dresser.
[lNDISTlNCT CHATTER]
SCOTT: Finding Holloway, l don't know why it became quite difficult.
So I took a long time casting him because he was so important...
...and, you know, had to be the equivalent of Noomi in a funny kind of way...
...believing that they could be a couple...
...both on level of intelligence and that's gotta be real.
Finally Avy Kaufman came up with this guy, Logan Marshall-Green...
...a New York actor who'd only been doing stage at that particular moment.
Done a couple of films prior to that, but mostly a stage actor.
MARSHALL-GREEN: I didn't know what I was getting into.
I had auditioned with a scene in a Ridley Scott movie that was a science fiction.
So all l knew was that there was some interest in me...
...and there was a chance that I was going to be offered this opportunity.
And I'm reading the script and l'm like, "Well, this is a pretty good script."
I'm reading it and I'm about at page 80.
And I was like, "Oh, well, you know, I die."
Um.... That's too bad, but l still wanna keep reading.
And then I get to about page 1 00 and I had to stop.
I was like, "Wait a minute. Did l just read that correctly?"
It was just a moment looking out over the Hudson...
...where l realized I was in an Alien movie.
SCOTT: I met with him on a transatlantic Skype.
And liked what he had to say about it.
Then he actually read on Skype.
Then he was flown in to meet and that was it.
[TALKlNG lNDISTINCTLY]
MARSHALL-GREEN: I didn't wanna play him sick.
You know, with the standard symptoms of being infected with some life form.
I wanted it to come out in a way comically as well.
I think we do-- When we're sick, we fight against those symptoms...
-...of being down and depressed. MAN: V mark.
It's okay, babe.
I love you, El.
SHAW: No, Charlie! No! No! -Get back!
SHAW: No!
THERON: l had heard about this film and had actually talked to Ridley about it...
...just kind of knowing that I wasn't available to do it...
...but l was just really interested to hear what he was gonna do.
And I remembered at dinner he had pitched the story to me...
...and I was really just so impressed by it.
Then the film I was supposed to do pushed.
Ridley found out about it. And I was traveling at the time...
...and he sent me the script and I read it...
...and I came back to L.A. and we got on the phone...
...and had a good discussion about it.
And we just kind of built her that way, just kind of talking a lot.
And I went to London and we sat down for a bit with him and with Damon, the writer.
SCOTT: Vickers was a company person as well...
...who is kind of fundamentally isolated from the crew...
...by her own makeup of who she is...
...and she's very much a company person.
She lives in an apartment onboard the ship, the Prometheus...
...which, frankly, could grace a Fifth Avenue apartment in New York.
THERON: The way we kind of set her up right from the beginning is that...
...it's very clear and very evident that there's either an alternative agenda...
...or there's something that is not truthfully being spoken about with her.
This is Vickers.
She's a bit of an enigma, and l think that mystery was something that l really liked.
This is a beautiful ensemble cast.
And so you kind of try and find the few elements in your character...
...that kind of sets her apart from the rest.
And I do like that she really is in many ways the character...
...that kind of almost goes against or fights everything...
...that everybody else is there to do and excited about.
Hey! I said, what are you doing?
This is my ship and I told you to take us home.
She is a witch. She's really the ice queen.
You are a terrible lay, by the way.
It had always been our vision to make her look as sculptural as possible.
So a beautiful, beautiful silk mohair suit...
...in ice silver was obviously the way to go.
THERON: l feel like so much of how l kind of build a character...
...happens for me through Wardrobe and Hair and Makeup.
When she said, "l wanna build you this suit," I just thought, "Corporate suit."
And what she ended up with was this incredible futuristic....
It's like sharkskin silver, gray, shiny.
This suit was fitted to an inch of my body.
But there was something about putting the jacket on...
...that almost, like, made me feel like I was throwing my back out...
...because when I put it on, it just kind of sucked me into this posture...
...that just became Vickers.
And I would put this jacket on and it was just like Vickers just came alive.
MAN: Fourteen Charlie, take two, A mark.
SCOTT: The male housekeeper onboard the ship is called David.
He is a creation of the Weyland Corporation.
We don't hide the fact, because Alien 1, you know, had a character in there...
...who was played by Ian Holm...
...and at that moment, he was a hidden agenda of the company.
So I thought rather than hide the fact, it'll be more fun while everyone's sleeping...
...for this number of-- The distance that this ship will take...
...David will be there keeping an eye on things.
I'm king of the world.
SCOTT: One of the best actors we've got out there right now is Michael Fassbender.
And I just point-blank asked him.
And he read the script and point-blank said yes and that was it.
My only instruction to Michael I think was l said:
"You know, in essence you're a servant."
So his combination of that massive mental capability...
...at the same time as having to be servile...
...gives rise for some actually pretty humorous--
I think he's quite humorous.
FASSBENDER: What l was really wanting to work...
...with David as well is the ambiguity about him.
I want him to be like that guy that's so annoying, you know.
Like, "ls he taking the piss out of me or being for real?"
And I always want that. It's like you don't know with him what's going on.
That sort of ambiguity you want to have with the audience as well...
...where they're not sure, you know.
"ls there an agenda? Has this robot got, you know, human feelings?"
So just trying to sort of address all the areas correctly.
Michael Fassbender's one of the best actors l've ever worked with.
He has an immediate access to things that takes...
...on a good day, hours for most actors.
And in a not-so-good day, months...
...for other actors. He has just a real raw talent.
-Got it. Genius. Now cut. -Ha-ha-ha.
SCOTT: Action.
How long?
Sixteen inches, fully erect. It varies when it's relaxed.
-Let's get-- -Where would you like me, over here?
-I'd like you to remove your pants first. -Certainly.
[THERON LAUGHS]
Make it quick.
-It's the wires. The wires everywhere. MAN: Cut it.
[HUMS]
Morning.
FASSBENDER: There's a very easy relationship on set.
Everybody's having fun and sort of getting on with it.
That thing does bypass surgery. What do you need it for? Bypass surgery.
[ALL LAUGHING]
There is a young, fresh cast, but then we've also got...
...you know, heavy sort of Oscar-winners. Sort of, Charlize Theron.
And she plays Vickers, who's like this coldhearted bitch.
And she's not very nice to David either. I don't think anyone really is.
Basically we wanted that sort of immaculate, blond side-parting...
...and evertyhing is so precise with him.
In terms of his outfit, Janty came up with a very sort of totalitarian...
...sort of almost fascist-type sort of uniform...
...you know, where everything is just so and in place.
YATES: He was actually going to be barefoot, because why would he need anything?
But because of the line in the script that he gets into a space suit...
...and he does conform to the normal human apparel...
...we just kept him down to very fine lines. Very--
Again, the linear look, which matches his character, really.
Just jackets that are all-in-one, trouble-free.
And in the end, we used the flip-flop option.
LlNDELOF: I feel like most of the coolness of David...
...really was evoked by Fassbender's previous work.
As opposed to me saying, "This is what it's gonna be."
Because him playing that role as a synthetic human...
...just opened all these other creative doors and was just the greatest thing ever...
...so it's almost like the words that are coming out of his mouth...
...don't even feel like they're words that l wrote.
They're just words that Fassbender was whispering in my ear...
...as l was typing on my computer.
MAN: Seventy-nine Charlie, take four.
I'm just the captain.
Janek, l'd worked with once before on American Gangster.
Idris Elba. And Idris, l'd always admired his stuff.
I need a strong guy, a guy who could fly the ship.
I'd believe him, l'd buy him...
...into being probably ex-pilot of some kind before he joined up...
...with the Weyland Corporation where he did a few long hauls.
Fortunately for me, he said yes, so I was thrilled to bits.
And he evolves right through the three acts...
...finally turning himself into a bomb which will bring down the juggernaut.
The set of characters in this film is kind of vast.
I think Ridley's put together an interesting set of cast.
You watch these people, you believe them.
And Ridley's very good at directing these actors to seem like a team.
Or not.
FASSBENDER: Then you've got Rafe Spall and Sean Harris...
...two English actors who l was aware of their work.
And they're just great guys. They make a great pair.
I think they're gonna be, again, bringing a lot of comedy element to the film.
And also just the dynamic between them is very organic and very loose.
And that's the great thing about Ridley.
He allows you to go off-page, stay on-page, do whatever you want, really.
And if it works, it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't.
You know, and there's no pressure.
Then we've got Kate Dickie, who is in Red Road.
I saw her, she blew me away in that film.
Every morning we have to insert Michael Fassbender's head onto his body...
...in order to get him to perform.
Every night he goes home and his bloody head falls off.
I always forget, my creator.
Yeah, Guy's a blast. l mean, we just sort of end up telling jokes all day.
Check. Checks. Checks.
Union. Hey, union.
Bathing his feet. I think that was my most fun day.
Three Brazilian swimwear models...
...two Pygmies waiting in your room, sir, as requested.
-Only two? -That's all I could find.
Like, "l have the two Pygmies and three Brazilian swimwear models...
...waiting in your room, sir." And he's like, "Only two Pygmies?" Ha-ha.
[LAUGHlNG]
He's very easy to work with. He's a consummate professional.
I mean, again, his work speaks for himself.
Meredith, I've always despised that sarcastic attitude.
I was so happy to get him.
He can-- Guy can play anything.
And why not have a seriously intelligent, I mean, genius?
A man who's kind of a combination of, you know...
...Edison, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
PEARCE: He's the billionaire megalomaniac.
He's a man who thinks outside of the square.
And a lot of people do that in life, but a lot of people don't have the facility...
...or the finance to be able to actually act on that.
I believe that he feels that we've gotten so close, that we're getting closer...
...that it's actually possible to discover who it is that actually created us.
You know, the process that I had to go through was...
...quite a lot of prosthetic makeup in order to look as old--
You know, it was basically around about the 1 00-year mark.
So it was important to find a way to make that look as realistic as possible.
Which, you know, the Prosthetics team did an incredible job...
...but it takes five hours in a makeup chair to get it there.
I was a lot younger when I first sat down in this makeup chair.
[LAUGHlNG]
Just an indication of how bloody long we've been sitting here.
PEARCE: The difficult thing about playing somebody who's a lot older than yourself...
...is that people know how old l am, they know what I look like...
...so there's always gonna be scrutiny anyway.
I'm just hiding myself away.
I mean, I remember saying to Ridley:
"Why aren't you just casting some old bloke?"
But it was important for him at the time to find somebody...
...who sort of had a youthful quality, I suppose, that comes through.
And then once I talk about David being in the room, maybe l can wander forward.
PEARCE: But at the same time, manage something that was seemingly realistic.
May I rest in peace.
[CHUCKLES]
YATES: How l started with Prometheus...
...was really by vast quantities of research.
And it just all screamed to me:
"Prototype, prototype, prototype, as soon as possible."
Ridley was quite adamant that he wanted to avoid...
...the puffy space suit that is really a NASA space suit.
SCOTT: lt can't be too bulky. It's gotta be practical. They have to be athletic.
By then, they won't be walking around in suits...
...which are this fat and this thick to keep them warm.
You'll have such an evolution of capabilities by then, they'll probably be skintight.
He loved the skinny look of the NASA undersuits which in the '60s were silver.
And he loved that look, the very linear look.
It was more interesting, really. More technical.
And plus it gave the actors a lot more chance to be mobile.
Under the space suit, which has basically two layers...
...there is a neoprene under-undersuit.
SCOTT: And action!
[GRUNTS]
YATES: And it's a form of a biosuit, airprene, which is a neoprene which breathes.
So the actors would never get hot.
And we were able to buy this amazing neoprene from Taiwan...
...with a beautiful pattern on it.
And then all the tubes that monitor the blood...
...that monitor the oxygen levels, that monitor your heart rate...
...were attached in an orange tubing around the body.
And so it's quite a thing of beauty.
SCOTT: Action!
I'm so excited because the neoprene ones are the ones with all the orange.
You know, the rubber ones.
They don't get seen that often. They're supposed to go under our blue.
And they are just beautifully beautiful, molded, amazing.
SCOTT: l figured by then, you'll put a bubble on your head.
Why are you gonna create a helmet where you've got blind spots?
That's ridiculous.
When you wanna do that, you really want a globe...
...because the plastic by then will be absolutely bulletproof.
You're gonna have a helmet which has no blind spots at all.
And in that helmet, they've got video screens this big, like postage stamps.
Each one works, so in there, he can look at, you know, Fifield and Millburn.
If they wanna talk to him, he can glance at them to see them.
Around his neck will be all this technology which will whisper in his ear all the time.
YATES: To start with the helmet...
...the globe was very specific to Ridley's design, which is egg-shaped...
...which is more oval than any other globe or dome...
...that I've seen on a helmet before.
And integral into that helmet...
...are nine working video screens...
...X amount of tech being played on them.
What we've got here is our kind of basic shells...
...being fitted up with their internal dashboards and LCD screens...
...and all the associated electronics that drive the screens in here...
...the screens up in the domes.
YATES: There is lighting to suit our lighting cameraman so he can light the face.
So that was batches of LEDs that had to be installed.
PEARMAlN: Also there are some effects we can have on there...
...to mimic the flickering of the screens on their faces.
YATES: There's the air, which is run on two fans with battery packs in the backpack.
They blow up air into the sort of globe so you don't die. Ha-ha-ha.
They're wired for sound and miked.
It's our atmosphere. David.
I'm not walking around with this on my head.
SHAW: Charlie, please, don't do this. Please.
YATES: In this movie, there is quite a corporate presence of the Weyland logo.
We've used it on every single piece of metal that might be on the armor.
It's even on the boots.
They have Weyland logo T-shirt issue...
...that's just part of the stock from the spacecraft.
They also have trousers that are very overstitched.
And they have jackets which have a lot of overstitching.
The background of the Prometheus patch...
...is based on Prometheus, the fallen angel...
...and he has his wings outspread...
...and he's looking out into the universe, hoping to get back.
Something is manufacturing breathable air down there. That, mate...
-...is terraforming. -No, no. The bet was why we came here.
PEARCE: It really was a great group.
Fassbender's a genius.
I mean, I've worked with a couple of actors this year...
...and Fassbender just is extraordinary.
Noomi was fantastic. Really lovely, incredibly down-to-earth.
Charlize was hilarious. She kept talking about winning an Oscar all the time.
You have to kind of live this Gypsy life with a bunch of strangers...
...and there's something really amazing in that...
...if you can find that, you know, and enjoy that.
[English - US - SDH]
ELLENBERG: Every set you see in the movie was being prepared on a rolling basis.
And for a movie of this scale and this level of design, that was terrifying.
You walk onto a set, and the set's there, it's there. It's not a green screen or anything.
It's literally there. And you know you've just walked onto that set.
And that is absolutely-- That's alien. You're on an alien environment.
FASSBENDER: One thing that sort of did blow me away immediately are the sets on this film.
And I've definitely never been on any sets like it before and l don't think...
...I will in the future.
Ridley's decision to kind of do evertyhing practical...
...and build, like, the greatest alien playground in the world...
...it really makes the movie feel like...
...it's a companion piece to the earlier movie...
...because that's how he made Alien.
These things were over 40 feet high.
Some of the sets were 300 feet long.
SCOTT: The set is the proscenium.
When they walk on in the morning, the importance of costume...
...the importance of the set, the importance of the environment...
...I think is evertyhing.
England was the attractive place because it was 20 percent on spend.
So it's a great tax rebate.
You're still working with the same, you know...
...talented artisans, chippies, carpenters, highly skilled plasterers...
...highly skilled painters. The whole team there.
The whole bag of goodies that when you go to England is...
...I would think, now the best in the world, anywhere.
Always covering all categories and all trades.
It's where trade passes into art.
And also, working with the English crews is kind of nice. You know, it's good fun.
Go and have a cup of tea, just keep the operators here.
SCOTT: We ended up in Pinewood, which is-- That set is--
I've never worked on this since l did Legend.
So we had the Bond stage, which of course is 40 percent longer...
...than H stage at Shepperton.
So I fundamentally booked the Bond stage for 1 0 months.
And five other stages.
So we had-- And we also had the backlot.
Enough of a backlot to do some pretty marvelous stuff...
...from the belly of the Prometheus.
You've got this garage which lowers itself down.
It's, like, almost hangar-sized.
Out of which the ATVs come and the buses...
...which take our people onto the planet.
And everything else was a green screen.
ELLENBERG: We were green-lit, basically, at the end of October...
...and we were shooting it, you know, third week of March.
With nothing built. Zero.
We had designed a lot, so that was great...
...but we had built nothing.
Because we only had that five months, it was a madcap process...
...where every set would be done, struck, and we'd start the next one...
...and have that ready five or six days prior and onto the next.
So for a massive epic movie like this...
...it was done with a degree of factory precision that was remarkable.
HUFFAM: Our actual prep time from when we got the actual go-ahead to filming...
...was short for this scale of film.
So we were having to get it all done under a huge pressure of time.
Also here, in London, it's very, very busy.
Stage space availability was not good for us.
So every stage we've worked on has not had to just work for one set...
...it's, at a minimum, had to work for two and often had to work for three.
MAX: The Bond stage is the biggest stage in Europe.
Still wasn't big enough for us because we had a lot to get into them.
And so we decided to extend it by about another third as long.
This is one of those sets where size does matter.
And I'm sure Ridley would say it's big, but it's not big enough.
We had a lot to get into them.
We built a roof over the entryway and created a stage within a stage.
That's because we had to combine the interior of the pyramid structure...
...we had to have chambers and corridors suggesting that scale...
...combined with the interior of the juggernaut...
...which is basically a ship similar to the crashed derelict ship...
...the croissant ship of the first movie.
Additional 1 50 feet was very, very beneficial...
...because that's the entrance to this cave.
We had to be very careful about how we used the space...
...because there was never gonna be enough space...
...because the juggernaut was enormous in scale...
...compared to the Prometheus. More than twice as big.
And so we had to figure out how we could combine...
...with digital extension and 3D modeling...
...how we could create that sense of scale.
SCOTT: l designed the Bond stage with Arthur as a massive complex...
...from the minute you walk into what I describe as the hives...
...they're kind of domes.
And because l was always going for scale, evertyhing was big.
So the Bond stage was chalk to chalk. It was jammed.
KEENE: We got four or five big sets, all vying for space.
There is no space left in there. There's barely enough space for the crew.
[BELL RINGS]
MAN: Rolling.
KEENE: We're always fighting each other...
...trying to find a little corner to put a certain monitor.
A little corner to put your table full of equipment.
Let's start getting everybody out of the way who doesn't need to be here.
LlNDELOF: The first set that l went onto was the interior of the ship.
Of the Prometheus. So the science lab had been built and a number of corridors.
And I walked into video village and Ridley was just sitting there...
...with 3D glasses on and there were six HD screens.
Each one of them had a different camera.
I looked at them and I was like:
"Oh, my God, like, this is actually happening."
FASSBENDER: Walking around the spaceship, you feel like you're walking on a spaceship.
The Art Department and the carpenters and all the guys that have...
...put the work in have done a really stunning job.
Mm.
ELLlOTT: On the first day we walked onto set, I think there was a mutual feeling...
...of we were on the ship and-- You've all seen the film...
...so this was kind of daunting.
You know, we're about to do the first take and we're now about to do...
...the prequel of Alien.
SCOTT: And action.
ELLlOTT: But after that first scene...
...everyone establishes who they are and we just kind of get on with it.
MAN: B mark.
WONG: He chose a scene where we had all just woken up out of two years of hyper-sleep.
So we're all a bit spaced out anyways. So I guess that really worked.
And in some respects, we didn't really know each other, as well.
So, you know, the way they he planned it was perfect.
MAN: Marker.
Is this seat taken?
And that was thrilling because, you know, for all of us, we've grown up with Alien.
The idea of working with Ridley Scott and then to come onto the set...
...on the first day and to be on the spaceship was unbelievable.
So there was like 1 5 of us.
He wanted to do a thing where we were all queuing up and getting our food.
And he was like, "Okay, no rehearsal.
Let's just get three cameras on this, see what happens."
My fingers are still numb.
And then I've never been out this long before, so....
-No one's been out that long before. -Right.
That was thrilling. That was like, "We're in the Alien film."
You know, I mean, this is Ridley, you know, so that was really, really cool and exciting.
That was the first day. It was brilliant.
MAN 1 : Cut it. MAN 2: Cut it.
We broke for lunch and Michael Ellenberg said to me:
"Let's go over to one of the other stages," where essentially they had built....
In the script, it was originally called the ampule room.
There is no green screen. They just built it.
This entire stage had basically been transformed into an alien world.
I got tears in my eyes. I was like:
[GASPS]
Because it's almost like a piece of art.
With sci-fi movies, and it's out in space, and a lot of technique...
...and you can kind of lose the beauty. And you can kind of lose reality.
But l think Ridley is totally unique.
The whole design and the costumes and evertyhing...
...is really beautiful in a very cruel way.
And it helped me so much because you don't have to pretend then.
It's a short way into it.
SCOTT: Speed up the entrance a little bit all around.
SHAW: Stop. Don't touch it.
WOOD: Ampules come alive in the middle of the set.
We're gonna do a dozen, actually...
...of practical and not a visual effect. And it's basically corn starch and water...
...with a vibration underneath it.
Inside, you've got a container that's gonna have the fluid in it...
...that distributes it from the middle container out to the outside.
And that comes from a large reservoir off set.
The cover goes on the top and, at a certain point...
...to the director's discretion, a little air ram pushes the lid up a little bit...
...and black fluid will ooze down the side as well as the effect that you've got...
...on the top of the ampule.
SCOTT: We built more set than you might build, normally.
Because, I think, it worked out economically better...
...than actually saying, "Well, let's have this green screen.
We can do evertyhing digitally." Digitally is not cheaper.
MAN: Nine echo, take one, A marker.
MARSHALL-GREEN: Sometimes you can see the wires.
You know, you can see the science fiction...
...in a lot of movies that are made today...
...because the actors are doing it in front of a green screen.
As much as they're being told what is happening around them...
...you know, they're not attaching the thought to that environment.
I mean, they're acting in a void.
Which l think is always horrendously difficult...
...both for the actor as well as the director.
MAN: C mark.
MARSHALL-GREEN: In this case...
...we have the luxury of evertyhing is there on the day.
And we can attach the thought to exactly what's going to be seen.
KEENE: So for an outsider to look at the way we make the movie...
...would be pretty comical.
You've got a 7'6" guy covered in red dots...
...and it's purely so that they can track him...
...and create a computer-generated version of it later.
But at least we have something practical to play with on the day.
And that's great for us.
It's much better than, you know, having to just imagine everything.
SCOTT: It's the terrible twins. Wow.
Hmm. lntimidating, right?
BILLY: I'm gonna make you--
-Hello. -Hi. Billy, props.
[CHUCKLES] Put in lubrication as well.
ACTOR: Pay no attention to what's going on down there.
-Yes, they're fixing your testicle. -Perfectly normal.
SCOTT: The luminosity is great, isn't it?
FASSBENDER: I love that. SCOTT: Look at the skin.
He's got-- The veins are painted in. It's beautiful.
FASSBENDER: Ridley seems to like very much the idea of building it and having it there...
...so everything is sort of viable.
The texture of everything is there to touch, to sort of interact with.
That's the thing, watching him, you can see the texture and the feel of things...
...is very important to him.
Do we need this many people here, guys? Get behind the cameras. Move, move.
Anyone not doing anything, move down that corridor.
-Where's the gap that that can go in? -There are holes all over it. Keep probing.
DlCKlE: You're getting to see real, live things in front of you.
And things like the head exploding.
When we take an Engineer's head back and open it and it turns out that's not his head.
We open it up and inside is this head.
Well, then, l thought on the day that they would say:
"Okay, now you're gonna imagine this."
But they had the whole Animatronics Department.
So this head was literally twitching, and mouth-shaking...
...and blood-oozing, and veins throbbing, and....
So as an actor, it's a dream because you just can react to what's in front of you.
That shook you, didn't it?
[LAUGHS]
-That looks brilliant. -Yeah, it's amazing.
FASSBENDER: Never ending with these fucking doors.
MAN: Cut it.
KEENE: Everything we've created, from the large trucks, the space suits...
...everything comes research and development on the job.
There's nothing that existed beforehand. Everything's been generated from scratch.
From Ridley's imagination, from a set of drawings.
So there was nothing tried-and-tested.
There were occasional problems with the space suit...
...and helmets in the early days.
I hate this fucking helmet.
MAN: Cut it.
[MOUTHlNG WORDS]
Charging all of this enormous amount of tech...
...was an endless job.
These nine screens would go down, or they'd fuse the lights or the top--
Something would never, ever, ever be 1 00 percent.
MAN 1 : Fifteen...
...14...
...1 3....
[PANTlNG]
MAN 2: The other way around.
MAN 1 : Seventeen. MAN 2: Other way around.
MAN 1 : Sixteen. -Ugh!
Come on.
MAN 1 : Fifteen. MAN 2: Coming up.
[BELL RINGlNG]
Ten-second track. You're gonna sit now.
KEENE: Ridley's a great innovator but a lot of it is on the moment.
He suddenly sees something and that creates an idea in his head...
...and he suddenly wants that. And it's reacting.
It's reacting to the speed at which Ridley wants to shoot...
...is probably the biggest challenge.
And, you know, he keeps every department on their toes.
Get out the fucking way. We're shooting.
Have you got a wagger on a stick?
-Yeah. -All right.
HUFFAM: Ridley is a force to be reckoned with.
He has the most amazing enthusiasm for what he's doing.
The crew are infected with that enthusiasm...
...and everybody goes along for the ride.
And he keeps everybody at it all day long.
Did you get that?
His approach with Dariusz was to basically not alter their approach.
That's not to say they didn't consider 3D and didn't change...
...certain camera shots and designs and things that they chose to do...
...to take full advantage of it.
But to say they didn't limit themselves by it.
SCOTT: Shooting 3D and seeing 3D on-- The experience on the floor...
...with these big monitors...
...where in my little tent, I'd have three or four big, big 3D monitors.
So it's real-time shooting with 3D.
Then when l'm editing, I'm actually editing 3D.
So I don't know what the problem was.
It helped having Dariusz Wolski.
WOLSKl: What's necessary for 3D is that when you have four rigs...
...I had to have an instant switch to watch eight cameras...
...which is left eye, right eye of every rig at every time, 2D.
Because that monitors my lighting and monitors if the lenses are in focus.
And all this stuff has to be rigged to the stereo card.
And then everything has to be fed back to the video playback.
And that has to come back to two big 3D monitors that Ridley's watching next to me.
And for 2D monitors, you can watch four cameras at the same time.
But also he wants to-- He can switch from one camera to another.
So that requires a lot of cable.
And a lot of very, very, very intricate wiring.
It looks like a bad Heath Robinson, dodgy lash-up.
This guy couldn't make his mind up what he was doing with this thing, could he?
KEENE: The 3D element is a big factor.
You know, it's a more complicated process, it's a slower process.
So to try and make the film in the same timetable...
...as you would ordinarily make a normal film...
...is a huge challenge in the first place.
HUFFAM: The end results that Ridley and Dariusz are getting are absolutely amazing.
So I think it's been worth the effort.
But l would say it adds 1 5, 20 percent more time to your schedule...
...even with a director who likes to move as fast as Ridley.
Clear the door, please. Thank you very much.
KEENE: Some of the sequences we've been doing with windstorms...
...with creature effects...
...they're always gonna, you know, make a day go in a difficult way.
There's no-- You can't guarantee anything.
You've got almost three times as many technicians...
...as you would ordinarily have.
And Ridley likes to shoot with three or four cameras simultaneously.
So you're in small sets with a lot of cameras taking up a lot of spaces...
...and twice as many people manning them. Three times...
...if you include the guys at the back with the stereography machines.
So it's a lot more noise.
MAN: Quiet! SCOTT: Please, shut up!
Rehearsing. And action!
You think you're ready, almost always there's a problem...
...with one of the three or four rigs that are working.
John, if you hold that there. Just hold that tight until we lift it.
Sometimes the cameras can be a bit temperamental.
So sometimes we can lose a bit of time during the day because of that.
ELLENBERG: I think the biggest surprise, in a really pleasurable way for them...
...was that when they were doing big vistas and big landscapes, the 3D was fine.
But where they really were excited by it, and really, l think, it started to change...
...sort of some of their choices in the movie...
...was in the smaller, more intimate scenes on the interiors of the ship...
...because it opened up sets, it gave them a lot of different options to play with.
It gave them the opportunity to make the scares...
...that much bigger and pop that much more.
Because that's where you're looking to add dimensionality...
...when you're in these confined spaces.
So that's where he felt it really opened up...
...and the 3D did something truly three-dimensional...
...that you wouldn't get otherwise.
[lNAUDlBLE DlALOGUE]
WOLSKl: The biggest challenge was our wind test when all cameras shut down.
It was the scariest moment in the world.
[lNAUDlBLE DlALOGUE]
Our concern first was stability of the mirror with all this huge--
With us three feet away.
Then cameras were shutting down, but we've learned it was just basically...
...because we were using plugs that had a little bit of play.
So back to the drawing board.
Cut all the cables. Change the plugs. It was just madness.
When you have the hologram, it's gonna be more spectacular...
...with a low feedback, blurring hologram of not--
I love this light.
WOLSKl: When you work with Ridley, images are three-dimensional. They always were.
I mean, look at Blade Runner. I mean it was a three-dimensional film.
Some people shoot two-dimensional films...
...but he always shot three-dimensional movies.
There is a depth, there is a shadow.
He'd create dimensions in a lot of different ways.
You know, there's, what, 2000 years of visual-arts tradition?
[TALKlNG lNDISTINCTLY]
I would, actually, just clear the corridor and just move around the bend.
Barry, let's start with turning this one up.
WOLSKl: When you go to spaces, you know, like the juggernaut...
...and then you try to create light that it's as invisible as possible.
So, just basically, we've done a lot of stuff just with flashlights...
...just with lights and helmets.
And there was a constant battle of pushing each other because...
...he said, "Just turn the lights off, let's do the flashlights." You know?
So I said, "Great. I'm first for it. l'm game." But then we cannot see the faces.
[CHUCKLES]
Trying to invent invisible light that actually register the faces when you need it...
...and that just took the courage of both of us.
You know, how far you push it, where you back off...
...where you create the little lights so you can sense then the story.
And when you just turn them off, you know.
It's a constant creative process. It's not like we're gonna sit down...
...it's how we're gonna do this, this, this and this.
So it's constant reinventing things.
Everyday is new, new. He questions everything.
Which is better?
JARED: No, stay where you are till we move....
So, Jared, here's a question:
Is it better there or is it worth doing this?
Take one, A mark.
FASSBENDER: Dariusz is lighting it beautifully as well. So it's a....
That's the other thing when you're working on a Ridley Scott film.
I mean, the talent on set is pretty breathtaking, really.
I mean, in all departments, you know, everyone's at the top of their game.
And it's great to be able to come to work and just learn so much...
...from just watching all the various departments, you know...
...going about their business.
There's a scene when we're on the ship, and we're watching the screens.
And there's something pretty intense happening on those screens.
I'm sure a lot of directors would have just, you know, saved the hassle and said:
"Look here, on this screen, that's happening, so just do it."
But he's put together this series of animated shots almost...
...of moments in the film. And they look incredible.
It's basically the film, but animated.
THERON: He creates an environment where, as an actor, you have so many tools.
It was the scene where l'm watching my father...
...go out into space and get killed.
And it's supposed to play on this screen. It's just, like, a glass screen in front of me.
But l was like, "When are we shooting? When are we getting to it?"
And the second AD was like:
"Ridley's still just trying to get some of the images for you...
...so that we can throw it on the monitor for you to really see."
And I was just like, "Who does that?"
So many other directors would just be like, "This is your job."
Like, "Bring me emotion."
Like, "Your father is dying. There it is. Imagine--"
And he made a real effort to get as much of this animated footage of the sequence...
...to have that actually there on the day for me to kind of respond to.
JANEK: Let's bring him around, take a closer look.
This is what l'm gonna use for my point of entry.
Janek's ship has this airlock which, you know, easily could have been done...
...in green screen on a stage, but Ridley has built it...
...and it makes a world of difference.
Like, I'm looking at this thing like: Wow.
SCOTT: Okay, ready, and action.
ELLENBERG: What Ridley often talks about is...
...it's not as though movies became three-dimensional...
...the moment there was a 3D camera. That's ludicrous.
No one goes to the movie theater thinking they're watching something flat.
It works, and the better filmmaking works because you enter a world.
You've always done that. That's always been part of what real filmmaking is about.
DlCKlE: lt's such a big skill. There's so many technical things going on...
...there's so much stuff to deal with. He doesn't miss anything.
Any detail.
[TALKlNG lNDISTINCTLY]
MARSHALL-GREEN: Ridley is so intent on making this script great.
And he has cast people who he hopes will help him.
He just wants you to help him make a great movie.
He's really hoping you will help flesh out the script and these characters.
And choreograph this dance with him...
...that will be the best it can be, not just what he wants it to be.
This will be a hologram.
[English - US - SDH]
SCOTT: Three, two, one, action!
Come reset it.
Once contaminated, they are lethal killing machines, nearly all of them.
One could consider it to be no more than survival.
Confronted in a situation...
...any one of these aliens has a survival instinct...
...and its survival instinct is to rid itself of the enemy before it.
The Engineer, in particular, Ridley was adamant about being absolutely perfect.
SCOTT: You know, less is always better in these instances.
Today the makeup has even improved dramatically.
But above all things, you can also redraw things digitally.
SCANLAN: This is the Ridley factor, which is where Ridley will just come in...
...and just throw a curveball, if you would call it that, and say:
"Just grab that, do this, do that." And it will look great.
It goes against all of our plans, and we think that--
You sit there and think, "Crikey," you know.
And then you look at it on a monitor and it looks incredible.
[lNAUDlBLE DlALOGUE]
SCOTT: One department would tackle the, let's say...
...the Engineers and what-- Everything applied to them...
...and the other side would be more the monsters.
SCANLAN: The mechanical team is interesting on this...
...because digital technology is obviously stunning.
If you can imagine it, you can almost do it now.
But l think that Ridley has put an onus on trying do everything practical.
It was kind of a reawakening, I think, of a lot of skills...
...that were maybe starting to be pushed away, that--
Cable technology, which is where things are moved with cables...
...and servo motors and all those sort of things.
And so we've-- We're kind of going back...
...and pulling those skills back, and I think that's--
Everybody's kind of enjoying that.
Things kick off for us, in a sense, with the ampoule room.
As soon as the ampoules begin to bleed and begin to sweat...
...and the DNA is released...
...that starts life as little tiny, almost eel-like elements.
That then takes us to what we call the Hammerpede, and l think it's--
Again, his name was never really resolved.
Centipede, Hammerpede.
WOMAN: Okay. Hold it.
MAN: Go, go. -That's it.
We're checking the links.
WOMAN: I like the material. Touch that. MAN: l did.
We've got Fifield and Millburn in their scene in what we call a head room...
...where they experience these quite large reptiles.
SCOTT: l don't mean that. I'm saying, you know, dig out...
...a way around in front of the worms.
-Now, Steve, go down. Go down. WOMAN: Okay, back, back.
MAN: Hold the animatronics. -That's good. And swim away.
That's a cut. You can hold it up.
Okay, that's what we're doing. It's all good.
SCANLAN: To me, they were great aliens.
They'd start life as being like almost sort of, you know, placid little things.
MAN: A marker.
Shh-- Oh.
Hey.
Hey, baby.
SPALL: We took a week to shoot that, just me, Sean and Ridley on this extraordinary set...
...with these animatronics and like five different snakes...
...and a fake arm and this whole team behind this whole thing.
It was just a thrill. When you're 5 and you think, "l wanna be an actor"...
...it's the sort of thing you imagine you would do.
Okay, ready, and tight.
"Ow, ow, ow." All right. "Help me, help me, help me."
SCANLAN: Move around. SCOTT: Grab it.
Straighten out and break the arm.
-Break it now. SCANLAN: Right.
SCOTT: Yeah, that's it.
-Then, "Fuck." SCANLAN: Right.
-Two moves. Three is too many. SCANLAN: All right, now, guys--
He's always been a very hands-on, practical director.
So if you've got some creature that's wrapping around an arm...
...he doesn't wanna just give up and let it be a pure visual effect.
-Tighten. Floor. Do it. SCANLAN: Tighten. Tighten--
-No, no. Don't be subtle. SCANLAN: Okay.
"Okay, let's just wrap that round his arm and just pull it tight.
You know, just do it." I said, "Great. Really?"
You know, and he's-- Yeah, there it is. lt's great.
SCOTT: That's right.
The reptiles get onto Millburn's arm...
...and actually, in effect, by just sheer leverage, snap his arm.
SPALL: Oh, my God! Aah!
HARRIS: Oh, fuck!
SCANLAN: To break Millburn's arm, we-- It's an old-- It'd be an old gag.
Rafe puts his arm behind his back to hold a strap which gives us a shoulder.
We took a cast of his shoulder to make a cup...
...and to that we created a mechanical arm.
His elbow joint is a cable-operated mechanism...
...and so is the wrist and the fingers.
But the overall movement is through a rodded system.
So there's a person behind Rafe, tight in against his back...
...who's operating this movement.
And on top of that was a track which allowed the Hammerpede...
...to curl around his arm.
MAN: Rolling.
Oh, no. He's got silicone on his helmet.
SCOTT: Quick wipe on the front of Sean's helmet.
[LAUGHS]
SCOTT: That's it. Thank you. And rolling.
Somebody needs to clean Sean's helmet.
SCOTT: Keep the cameras rolling.
HARRIS: Unbelievable. SPALL: My God.
MAN: B marker.
-Okay, okay. You need to fucking stay calm. MAN: B mark.
-Be calm and put-- HARRIS: I ain't touching it!
-I don't wanna touch it. -Touch the thing, man, for God's sakes!
HARRIS: Jesus! -Aah! You're making it worse!
Fuck you! Okay, be calm.
-It's breaking my arm! -Jesus, it's strong.
-It's too-- -It's breaking my arm! Aah!
SCOTT: ln the snapping of the arm, he's screaming for Fifield to cut it off.
Cut it off. So it's stuck-- It's about that thick.
He gets his knife from his suit, cuts it off...
...and immediately, he's sprayed with acid.
[SPALL PANTlNG]
Oh, my God! Oh, my God! It's in my suit! It's in my suit!
It's going into my suit! It's going into my suit!
SCANLAN: As we shot that sequence...
...the mood sort of changed as the sequence unfolds.
Yeah, they were in a bad place.
I'll tighten it when l put my arm up. I can't keep it up.
SCOTT: Here we go. Rolling, and action!
-Aah! -Shit!
[SCREAMlNG]
Cut it off! Cut it off!
Cut it off! It's breaking my arm!
Oh, my God! Oh, my God!
-Shit! Oh, my God! -Shit!
SCOTT: It melts through his helmet.
He goes down facedown in the black goop...
...and the other half re-forms its head and goes inside the suit...
...and attacks Millburn from inside the suit...
...getting inside his face helmet.
SPALL: l had to do the live cast, which is sort of a strange mix...
...of being unpleasant and pleasant at the same time...
...if you can sort of breathe through it.
Someone wraps all this shit around your head.
It's pretty weird.
[SPEAKlNG INDlSTlNCTLY]
So isn't this pleasant?
[ALL CHUCKLE]
MAN: Yeah, we got this part.
This is all eaten away.
SPALL: The expedition team find my body the next day.
They turn it over...
...and the big snake comes out my mouth...
...but Ridley didn't tell the actors that was gonna happen.
Three, two, one.
-Okay. With lots of glue. -Bang. Pfft.
Yeah. That comes out.
I'll shoot it like that while it all goes separate.
By the way, do not tell her what's gonna happen.
SCANLAN: Sure. -We're gonna get one shot.
Don't let anyone tell her or you're dead.
I'd rather tell some actors.
KEENE: Then don't show them the storyboards. -No.
Just say something will happen.
Everybody hear that?
Don't let any actors see the storyboards today, guys.
Kate had no idea that that was gonna happen.
SPALL: He just said, "Right, we're gonna roll on this.
Go and turn over his body."
So then what happened?
-B mark. -C mark.
And it's horrific. He's been literally eaten away.
There's this massive hole, kind of his mouth's filled with broken teeth.
I mean, it was gross.
Really, genuinely gross.
SCANLAN: We had the Hammerpede on the end of a wire...
...on a filament wire.
It was loaded into a dummy of Millburn that was rolled over.
So one would think, "Okay, there's something fishy, literally, going on here.
There's a wire from somewhere.
Three, two, one, pull.
SCANLAN: We were on an intercom to Ridley.
And he was watching the monitor and kind of--
You know, there's that wait. Ha, ha.
Just at that point, I think I see a movement in his throat...
...so l kind of go in to see what it is.
[DICKIE SCREAMS]
And this thing...
...I mean, literally about that...like, leaps out.
I mean, I literally screamed the place down.
Genuinely terrified.
DlCKlE: Did you see wire in there?
MAN: Something was not right. Come on, what's going on?
[ALL LAUGH]
DlCKlE: Even though in your head...
...you know there's tricks going on and it's all happening...
...it was so set up so amazingly.
SCANLAN: Fifield was interesting...
...because Fifield was considered to be something that was the midpoint...
...between the Deacon at the end and the Hammerpede.
Something's happened to him, and it has begun to transform him and--
We went through numerous designs for Fifield.
There it is. It's when you get the jaw working with, like, the sharp...
...which will unhinge from here.
HARRIS: Originally, it was gonna be a CGI thing.
It wasn't gonna be me at all.
But as the weeks went on, we started to think:
"Maybe it's better if it's an acting thing."
So we started to do some tests, just physical work...
...and we filmed some stuff.
Ridley saw it and kind of liked it.
SCANLAN: What was interesting was that Sean Harris is such a superb actor.
The general feeling was it would be much better to hold on to the actor's features...
...hold on to all of the things that he would bring to the show...
...but to begin to show almost, really, that he was heading...
...towards the Engineer that we see on the inspection table...
...when the head explodes.
That ultimately, that is gonna be--
That's gonna happen to Fifield at some point.
Whatever was happening to that Engineer is now happening to Fifield.
His head is becoming horribly contorted.
He is losing himself to the alien within him.
The med pod creature is a combination of the DNA that is infected...
...that Holloway becomes infected by and Shaw.
SCOTT: When it gets to a point where she realizes...
...that she is literally impregnated by Holloway...
...with a very unusual embryo...
...she has to go into this med pod...
...and give herself to this machine and do a cesarean.
RAPACE: Before l start a movie, I prepare and I think...
...and I do all my kind of homework...
...my brain work.
And then when we actually step into the actual work and the scenes...
...it's more emotional and physical.
That's my way of letting go of control.
SCANLAN: So he's extracted out. -Yeah.
SCANLAN: To there. -Yeah.
MAN: He'll be in there. SCANLAN: He'll be in there.
And then something will come in.
SCANLAN: It was pre-visualized.
And it was a sequence that we-- Everybody involved...
...used that shot-by-shot methodology in order to be able to do it...
...because there's an enormous amount of technology...
...having to be laced through to be able to do that...
...because we didn't want to do rod removal.
We wanted to try to shoot the whole thing for real.
I think it's squid, certainly from the mechanics of how we built him...
...the tentacles were based, movement was based, on that.
I think the animation of the pre-vis was tremendous...
...as far as giving him character.
MAN 1 : B mark. MAN 2: B mark.
SCOTT: Action! And scanner.
RAPACE: First, I was actually on the table...
...and I was using my own stomach to kind of move it in a very weird--
Just blowing it up...
...and kind of using, you know, my muscles in my belly...
...to kind of move it in a weird way.
First, they're kind of planned to do that with my dummy...
...but when Ridley wanted me to try things, he was like:
"Oh, that's really disgusting." Ha, ha.
"You're quite good at this. Let's do this."
Stomach.
Oh, come on. Come on, get it out!
There is the point in which we need to, you know...
...we need to cut into Noomi's body.
We need to actually perform the cesarean.
So we live-cast Noomi in the position that she will be in at the moment.
-All right. -So that's her neutral position.
And from that, create a silicone dummy...
...which is painted and textured to look exactly like her.
If we can get these arms down, she can use her real arms and be reacting.
-And then, you know-- SCOTT: There'll be motion, right?
-I'm just gonna cut across here. -Yeah.
That's actually a good old classic movie trick...
...which is that it's Noomi's head and the body of a dummy.
I was kind of sitting in a very weird position...
...with people under the table doing things, you know, between my legs.
Above her is an arch, which we mechanized using cable controls.
Cable controls, being that they go to levers...
...and by actuating a lever, you can move something at the other end.
We were able to bring that arm above, lower it down...
...and grab hold of the embryotic sac, and then draw it back up.
SCOTT: Keep going up. Keep going up. Keep going up.
Get your hands away.
Lose it. Lose it for a second.
Head back. Head back.
Come back. Come back. Come back again.
And lose it again. Come back.
[SCREAMlNG]
Cut it! Cut it, cut it, cut it. Very good.
SCANLAN: Once we'd taken it out of her and it was dangling from the arm...
...waiting to be born, as it were, or freed...
...that was achieved by bursting that sac.
Actually, it was burst using a very, very sharp razor...
...which will have been removed in postproduction.
And that allowed the sac to instantly burst...
...and spew all of this sort of fluid.
The first thing we had to do is to get the creature inside.
And to get the creature inside, we had to roll it up in a certain way.
It was a little bit like origami. We had to find the right way to fold him...
...so that we could guarantee that on every shot he would look the same.
That was then introduced into the condom.
And then into the condom, we then added the fluid...
...and all the other little bits of skin and evertyhing else.
At the same time, we had to continue to draw on the condom...
...and get it as tight as we could.
The tighter it was, the more violent the release and more beautiful it was.
You could-- The condom becomes completely clear with liquid.
You could then see the creature sort of wallowing inside this fluid.
-Then we'll mimic it. -I think you need more of this.
And then if this would just stick to it. So then you're gonna lay liquid on it.
-Something before it comes out. MAN: Yeah.
RAPACE: I get him out.
And there's a moment when I feel like this thing is looking at me...
...and I realize, like, "Okay, you want me dead."
[SCREAMlNG]
I think as Ridley described it, it was that having been born and extracted...
...at the point in which she screams, he realized he's an unwanted child. Ha, ha.
[SCREAMlNG]
John Hurt got off lately, didn't he?
They have done such an amazing job, so it felt--
I almost started to believe in the situation...
...and forgot l was hanging and everybody were in a situation with my feet down there.
I saw my feet, you know, on the dummy, and I was like:
"Why can't l move my feet?"
Because it's-- Because it really felt like me.
I think I had my hand on her breast...
...and I was sort of hand-on-breast talking to Noomi...
...and someone in the monitor shouted, "This isn't right." Ha-ha-ha.
This really isn't right, and then you realize...
...when you look at the monitor that it didn't look right.
Inside all the tentacles are a series of discs...
...and each stage has a number of cables, normally four...
...that give it left, right, up and down motion.
So by stacking them together...
...you can get what's called an S-shape or a complete curl.
So all in all, there was about, I would have thought, 60 or 70 cables...
...running to the tentacles through the body of the creature.
They were connected to a series of servo motors.
The servo motors replaced the human operators.
And the whole system is then operated through a remote-control system.
Effectively, a number ofjoysticks, using what we call electronic expression makers...
...allows one or two people to mix all of those motors together...
...in a predetermined fashion.
So that when they move the joystick in one particular way...
...they'll get one expression.
They move it in another, they'll get another.
And by moving between those different motions, you can get a whole array...
...of different sort of activities out of the creature.
The big decision is-- Blood is red, obviously.
Do you go red?
As soon as you go red...
...then the blood stakes immediately go much, much higher...
...than if you choose an alternative color.
If we used ambers, if we used milky solutions...
...all of those things can be quite off-putting and are obviously unpleasant...
...but it's not bleeding.
So we decided we'd take two approaches with Ridley.
One was that everything we did...
...we did as an amber or a milky or a clear take...
...and then we'd have our second version, which was blood red.
And in many ways with blood, you can never not have enough.
SCOTT [OVER RADlO]: Pull the umbilical out. Pull the umbilical out.
SCANLAN: Everybody gets excited when blood comes on the set.
The whole pitch of the set builds up...
...and I think that you get one or two conservative takes...
...and then, ha-ha-ha, you open up the floodgates.
So you just keep going until Ridley's happy that, you know, he's just--
He's completely, you know, doused evertyhing and everybody.
MAN: D mark.
[PANTlNG]
It's the most aggressive scene in the movie...
...and it's fundamentally a real cesarean.
And, you see, pretty graphic.
[SCREAMlNG]
RAPACE: But it was really hard. I was quite empty after the week.
And we did that for a week, and I--
It really got into me.
I was dreaming really weird nightmares.
MAN 1 : Round of applause for Noomi. MAN 2: Nice take. Give me one more.
MAN 1 : You're on there next, Max. Get your trousers off.
[ALL LAUGH]
RAPACE: I said to Ridley the week after, I was like:
"l never thought that it could be so fun, in a way, to do this really sick scene."
MAN: What's going on with John Hurt?
SCOTT: The prosthetics in this and the makeup in this are absolutely phenomenal.
I've never seen makeup like it that was applied to the Engineers.
The Engineers were-- You know, Ridley was really demanding a very high standard.
And we developed a technique of prosthetic application...
...probably about seven or eight years ago...
...which has led to the ability to actually do these kind of prosthetics...
...and do them pretty quickly, so....
Four hours to get the Engineer ready is very quick.
We had been using a guy who's 7-feet-2...
...for the majority of the film, the Engineer that they awaken.
We really refined the prosthetics down to make him very beautiful...
...and very unusual-looking.
And it's not something that you hit straight away.
You know, you have to keep going back and working on it, so....
Again, our process allows us to do that.
So we can make something, mold it, cast it, test it...
...if it needs refining, then we can go back and refine it without having to start again.
This allowed us to sort of tweak it and perfect things.
And we've just-- That's all we've done.
We've just made it as perfect as possible.
WHYTE: The silicone prosthetic application takes about four hours...
...and then l have to get into the costume...
...which is a two-piece costume.
Legs and arms and torso. That's all zipped up...
...and then l'm glued into the hands and the neck and the feet.
So altogether, it's about five hours.
O'SULLlVAN: We produce master copies of the modeling in a hard form...
...and then we can reengineer it.
So with that hard form, we can go back, we can polish everything.
We probably had a team of fabricators working on the thing for six months.
You know, they have worked out the best possible design...
...to create a perfect movement.
Ease of getting it on.
It's gotta be-- You know, you wanna be able to get it off.
We looked into incorporating cooling elements into them...
...but the particular guy, lan Whyte, that we're using...
...is very used to wearing suits.
Welcome to my life.
The surface of the suit is transparent...
...so it's got like a translucent layer like skin.
So that would be the difference between the stunt suit and the hero suit.
The stunt suit would be more painted.
The hero suit actually had a cast skin, transparent skin over it...
...which gave it a lot of depth and made it look quite sort of squid-like.
FASSBENDER: Ian and John did a fantastic job.
You know, I was very impressed.
And just his movements as well.
You know, they were very specific, and he really got into the part.
SCANLAN: The trilobite as an animatronic character would have been possible...
...but it would have been an enormously complicated...
...and enormously difficult thing to have shot.
And in some ways, there was no-- There's no point.
When, you know-- In a bygone time when there were no alternatives...
...that would have been the route.
But now with CG, I think we all chose early on...
...that this was a character that would be fantastic in CG.
So we only took the design to a point of reference, really.
A finished point of reference...
...but we didn't go into the finer details of things...
...like the certain elements that existed on the tentacles...
...which we brought to life in CG.
Opening up and seeing all the textures inside them.
We didn't do that. We chose a much more sort of neutral look to it...
...but took it from the 2D right away to a full sculpt...
...through the molding process.
It's sort of like the way through which we finished artworking a character.
It was posable and moveable, and we did use it in a few shots...
...but its real purpose, l think, was to serve as a lighting...
...and a visual textual reference for CG to take on and take from there.
SCANLAN: Okay, let's bring that body around. -Okay.
SCANLAN: Perfect. And the next one.
Just like that. Good job.
MAN: And then l grab him. -Feeds in. No, no, you've got it.
So do what we did before, right?
MAN: Yeah. -Okay. Then we go through....
Step through, step through. Keep going.
Okay, good. Now we go down. Down.
SCANLAN: What we had originally thought was that maybe...
...for the sequence with the Engineer's fight with the trilobite...
...we could use elements of the trilobite...
...for the actor and the stunt guy to sort of, you know, work with.
MAN 1 : And action!
MAN 2: Are you blocking the door? MAN 3: Don't know.
MAN 1 : All right. Okay. Now.... MAN 2: He's blocking the door.
Right, we need to knock this door off, knock her somehow.
As Shaw's being attacked by the Engineer...
...the trilobite is clearly becoming aware of something happening behind the door.
We were using sound effects, l suppose, as well as some visual effects...
...shadow effects, as well as the odd glimpse...
...of a tentacle passing across a window or something like that.
So that would have been us in the background...
...effectively in the next room...
...bashing tentacles against the little--
That's pathetic.
And again. Hit it hard.
You're missing the fucking glass.
Go on. Ready?
-That's a good one. Okay? MAN: Nice. That's a good one.
All right. And do it again.
One more. Last one. That's it.
The med pod creature that came from Sean and Holloway has grown.
It's impregnated the Engineer...
...and mixed the DNA of the Engineer with that of the trilobite.
It gives us what we call the Deacon.
We started to sculpt that as a full-sized sculpt.
Stood about 4 feet tall.
We built two versions of him.
We built one version which went inside the sac...
...which was born out of the Engineer...
...and a second version, which is what we call a rod puppet.
So the sequence begins with the Engineer lying on the ground, dead.
The trilobite's crawled away and died somewhere in the corner.
And the creature begins to sort of want to liberate itself.
So the whole heaving of its body on the ground was the first sign.
So we built a full-size Engineer, and he was an animatronic.
Everything is weighted and evertyhing is jointed...
...so that it will only move in a way that we would move.
So he's-- He was a heavy lump on the ground.
When the Deacon is born from the Engineer...
...he's still connected to him with his umbilical.
So his umbilical passes from the stomach of the Deacon through the embryotic sac...
...into the body of the Engineer.
SCANLAN: And then slip, Rachel. Slip.
Okay. And again. Try again.
MAN: Yeah. SCANLAN: Go.
Ready? Keep the head down. Keep the head down a bit.
Yeah, keep the elbows down.
MAN: Okay, and up. SCANLAN: No, no, and up. Up.
Good. Okay.
SCOTT [OVER RADIO]: Open the mouth. -Open the mouth.
-Go on. -And turn.
-Right. Left. -Turn it. Turn.
-To the left. -Turn it.
And cut.
Excellent.
Brilliant.
SCANLAN: We shot that sequence a couple of times.
We shot him rearing up, almost to a stand...
...to get to the next cut.
It always amazes me what I'm looking at when l look...
...when you're shooting something to what you can see on the monitor.
He's, yeah-- The genius that sits between the two is amazing.
Yeah, it's fantastic to see the playbacks.
Because CG is such an all-consuming technology...
...I think that in previous projects, it was more about...
...being able to support the CG and to just fill in the little gaps.
Whereas on this one, it was very much a case of we can do it without CG.
[SCANLAN LAUGHS]
I think with any prosthetic is that you've always got to work...
...with the person that's underneath.
You've got preserve the actor, and they've got to be able to act.
[SPEAKlNG IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
SCANLAN: One of the ingredients that made this project so enjoyable for me...
...was to work with a group of people that came on to the project...
...with wide-eyed, full of enthusiasm, just, you know, thankful for being part...
...of what was, you know, a piece of their movie history...
...and just welded the whole thing together and made my job possible.
The fact that l could go and stand in front of the firing line and say, "We can do it"...
...but knowing that when l went back to the workshop...
...that that would be greeted with, you know, an enthusiastic band of people.
[lNAUDlBLE DlALOGUE]
[SCREAMS]
[English - US - SDH]
MAN: Three, two, one, action!
The burden for this movie was gonna be casting a woman...
...who, fundamentally, you believe is an action lead.
I can't see anything.
Things don't always go according to plan.
I mean, what, after, two, three, four takes at making it work...
...you can go to him and go, "Ridley, you know, we can make this work."
It is quite brutal and it's quite-- It's very in-your-face in places.
[GRUNTING]
MAN: Three, two, one, action.
ELLENBERG: There is a version of kind of a female action hero...
...that we see a lot in movies now...
...that is fun fundamentally, uh, but exists as a kind of pop creation.
In this case, the whole point was to play this from a place of reality.
So you were there.
If the movie's gonna scare you, you have to believe it's happening...
...have to believe a woman would go through this...
...and believe a woman could survive this...
...and defeat whatever she was facing.
RAPACE: Like, Ridley wants it to be real...
...even though the situation is totally unreal...
...and out in, you know, in the future and evertyhing.
And action, action.
INCH: When I talked to Ridley about that storm sequence...
...he said, "You know, think of a-- A storm...
...that's stronger than anything you could ever imagine in your life, you know...
...that you can't stand up in it, it blows you away.
If you put a vehicle in it, it tips it over."
So he was after some kind of really dynamic sequence.
Normally, it's just a little car park beyond at the back of the 007 Stage.
But what they've done to this, they've kind of leveled it out...
...and we'd gotten all these shipping containers, four or five high...
...and we turned it into this massive sort of green-screened area...
...so it then doubled up for the planet area.
Because once l step out, that's the gag, right?
INCH: Actors act, is what l've learned...
...so once they get into that moment and you've talked all these things through...
...about, "You guys, you've got to go really slowly and do this and do that."
All those things can go out of the window because they're in the moment and acting.
All of a sudden, they're giving it too much beans...
...and spill themselves out, it's an accident waiting to happen...
...so l kind of like to put a lot of safety methods in there...
...whereas we'll put the restrictor so it can only go a certain speed.
MARSHALL-GREEN: There are elements where it could get very dangerous...
...but you have an incredible crew and you bust your ass in the stunts.
I mean, Noomi is like myself, we wanna do as much as we can...
...that we are insured to do...
...and so, you know, I watched my stunt guy jump off the ATV...
...and I tried to make sure I did it just as good if not better.
INCH: They were tracked ATVs, difficult vehicles.
We had to jump it off a ramp and it would--
You know, one moment they would grip one side and not the other...
...and so he did a little bit but not a huge amount.
To me, that was the biggest action sequence in it as a set piece.
As they were arriving back from picking the head up...
...they jump off the back, the head gets blown away.
So we would rehearse that with our doubles.
Basically, she gets-- Stands down, she gets jerked off the ground...
...and then she gets blown, tumbling down towards this big stanchion...
...which is the leg of the main spaceship.
She gets pinned against that.
And then Holloway sees that, comes out on his bike...
...jumps off the edge of the ramp there, gets-- Drives down to her...
...wind bowls that over.
WOOD: That was a lot of work for us there.
We had four massive, big aero-wind machines up there.
Probably 1 5 to 20 guys, all throwing vermiculite and dust.
So that was pretty full-on, um, with all that work, and at night as well.
RAPACE: The pieces that were kind of in the storm were hitting me.
It was really hard and it felt like somebody was punching me.
So even though it's a "fake" situation, you get really bruised...
...and, you know, sore and, uh, we were shooting night time.
It was dark and really cold.
INCH: It was a night shoot.
We were working with the elements, those wind machines...
...and they changed what we did with the wires quite a bit.
We couldn't shoot that on a set...
...so everything I put towards that, we had to basically--
I had to create a grid over the top of this exterior set.
So, what l'd done basically was I brought in a load of mechanical winches...
...which give the ability to be able to lift somebody up in the air...
...fly them across the ground, jerk them off the ground, tumble them.
Because of the tight schedule on that movie...
...that set was never really finished until the day we shot on it.
So I was having to work rehearsals in the evening on that set...
...while those guys were basically making the set during the day.
RAPACE: We were actually rehearsing and working that sequence...
...before we started to shoot the movie...
...and we were, you know, hanging on these wires...
...and going back and forth, and I think, you know, all this is really fun.
I enjoy it and I wanna do as much as I can.
My stunt double is fantastic, but l really wanna do it, so l was like:
But sometimes, you know, they can't let us do everything...
...because if I get hurt, we--
You know, if something happened to me, it could kind of-- Big disaster.
INCH: I was lucky with that double, to tell you the truth.
When I actually first did some test stuff for Ridley for it...
...I actually brought her in.
That was before they'd cast Noomi and we shot with test stuff with her.
And, like, two weeks after that he was talking about Noomi...
...and he said, "l wanna have that double...
...because you can shoot on her. She was amazing."
The tumbling and bouncing around stuff was, you know--
That was all her double, but then, you know, we still got moments...
...of being on this when we were doing the rescue...
...we used all of-- Pretty much all of the actress...
...and the same for, um, Charlie as well.
You can program those winches so that you could, you know--
I can pick somebody up and bounce them around the rooms here, very, very safely...
...so it is something you can use with the real actor...
...but they need to have time to feel comfortable...
...and, you know, feel comfortable with what they're doing, so it was a--
You know, we didn't get a huge amount of rehearsal time with them...
...but l think David, Michael Fassbender, he--
We had one day's rehearsal with him...
...but he nearly did, I think, 90 percent of his own stuff.
He did an amazing job, actually. Really, really amazing job.
FASSBENDER: It's a lot of fun. You get to do wire work, which is good fun, you know...
...once you get evertyhing tucked up out of the way in the harness.
It's not looking too good for them...
...so David just sort of goes about his thing and he puts a harness on his back...
...and opens up the door of the spaceship, and goes out and saves their lives.
But, you know, it's wire work...
...so you just have to sort of allow yourself to go and enjoy the ride...
...and it sort of takes you along.
Open the door. Open the door.
-Jesus, that's scary. SCOTT: That good?
That is so scary.
INCH: This is when they found out that Charlie was--
All the way through that mission, Charlie's kind of deteriorating.
He's kind of-- Stuff's happening to him, he's feeling ill.
He's basically been impregnated by the alien.
[SHOUTS]
INCH: They're rushing to come back onto the ship.
Vickers has heard what's going on.
They're on all the intercom on the way back in...
...and she's basically meeting them at the garage.
-What the hell? SHAW: Unh.
VICKERS: He's not coming on this ship.
KEENE: lt's a particularly tricky scene for Noomi emotionally...
...because her love interest in the film is being burnt to death...
...and also for Charlize because we actually gave her a practical flame thrower.
If you need to turn it on and off...
...if anything happens to go wrong, just switch that off and drop it.
-I don't like the words: -Ha, ha.
-"lf something happens to go wrong." -It's just protocol.
So we had a little rehearsal, put her in a fire suit...
...and made sure she was comfortable doing it.
I'd had a stunt double for her...
...and we were just messing around, Ridley and l, and Ridley went:
"Wouldn't it be cool if we could get the shot...
-...of Charlize setting him on fire?" -Action!
MAN: We can use that one. That was best.
Yeah, that was, um, my last day of shooting in London, actually, when we did that...
...and I'm sure they made it the last day just in case something went aflame.
Setting anybody on fire is hard enough, you know.
I mean, the preparation that goes into a full-body burn is quite intense.
Obviously, he's got all the gel suits on, he's completely protected...
...but the reality of any burn is it's a very dangerous thing to do.
MAN: Action, Florian!
End.
Time out.
THERON: He's gotta step closer to me before I do it.
MAN 1 : Let him get closer.
-Okay, camera's running. Up! MAN 2: Ready?
Three, two, one, action!
SHAW: No!
KEENE: The fear that something had actually hurt the guy...
...and I think that came across. Um--
One of the moments in the film where Charlize's character...
...shows some vulnerability...
...in that she's-- You know, she's actually killing somebody.
And you could see that in her eyes that she didn't like doing it.
She was uncomfortable doing it and when we cut...
...and we put the stunt man out, she was quite freaky...
...until the moment when the stunt man put his thumbs up and said he's okay.
Oh, my God, l'm so shaky right now.
MAN 1 : You got that? They're good? MAN 2: Yeah.
THERON: Not my favorite thing, I have to say.
I had, like, a little moment of, "Ugh, this is badass and I'm really badass...
...because l've got this flamethrower...
...and I'm just being a badass in a Ridley Scott movie"...
...and then l went, "Okay, don't want to burn this guy...
...and I wanna be able to live with myself."
And this-- You know, these stunt guys are crazy. They're just insane.
MAN: Very nice. -Burning through all those layers.
INCH: For us, as stunt people, that's what we do.
We get set on fire and it's no big deal.
But for someone to actually torch somebody...
...it's a big deal for them, you know.
You're kind of trusting in me saying that:
"Yeah, he'll be fine. We've got this special gel.
He's all gelled up. You know, he'll be fine."
THERON: The flame was so hot that I had a space helmet on...
...and I could feel the heat, like, through the space helmet...
...and he's just lying there.
-I felt it through the-- Through the.... WOMAN: Yeah, l know.
MAN 1 : Nice one. This one-- MAN 2: l'll show you.
THERON: No, l would like some vodka. MAN 2: Okay.
THERON: After one take and l was like, "Did we get that? Did we get that?"
I was like, "No more." Then, of course, Ridley is just like:
"Now we're gonna put seven cameras over there, you're gonna do it again...
...and then we'll do it here," and I was like: "Don't want to burn this guy anymore."
MAN 1 : A marker. MAN 2: A marker.
MAN 1 : All right, shooting now. MAN 2: Shooting.
INCH: Fifield was another big workshop moment for us because l think we--
Because there was a lot of processes when we were talking about that...
...the visual effects, as to what they were gonna do...
...with the look of this character.
Originally, it was gonna be a full-on CG character...
...so we were gonna basically shoot the action...
...without anybody and then shoot a plate...
...and then they were gonna put the creature in there.
And then we got talking, and, like, Ridley was saying:
"Let's see what he can bring to it, bring to the table."
I started workshopping with him...
...and we'd shoot some moments of him kind of going crazy, as Sean does...
...heh, and, um, they loved the idea of him...
...using some part of him within that moment.
So it starts off in a really cool way.
These two guys are not sure what's happening.
They're walking out, down the ramp to have a look at what's going on.
The next thing you know, this creature just rears up.
You're unaware so far. Keep going.
-And click the body, and up higher. -Whoa.
Yeah, higher, higher.
All right. All right. That's it. That's nasty. You're nasty.
Which we still haven't seen really what it is yet.
And then it just goes to town on them.
[YELLING]
We smashed helmets, ripped heads off.
It was guys running into pick up axes as it runs down...
...and another guy is setting him on fire and he disappears around a corner...
...and the next thing you know, he's flying off of this truck...
...and they're shooting him and he's on fire.
As Fifield's running through the garage...
...we've got these mechanics running and getting flame torches.
And then as he runs around the corner, we'd clip him with fire.
So then from then on in, that was probably, like...
...maybe a quarter of the way through the sequence.
We did this with Sean as well.
I've glued him up and we've set him on fire.
And pretty much for the whole scene, we're just going:
"Yep, he's still on fire. Keep him on fire." Ha, ha.
MAN 1 : Let him go. MAN 2: Action!
INCH: So Sean's kind of like, "l'm acting and then I've got my arm on fire...
...and I'm trying to project these moments to her"...
...and I'm like-- So l'm trying to look at him going like:
"Sean, you've gotta make sure you're, you know--
Let me know when you're getting warm." And he's into his acting moment...
...so l'm trying to judge when the right time is and call--
You know, do the safety call when l think he's had enough...
...to come in and put him out.
But he must have done 90 percent of that sequence with him on fire.
It was just-- lt was off the wall, that sequence, l think.
[GUNFlRE]
MAN 1 : Time out.
MAN 2: B mark.
MAN 1 : Action!
MAN 2: Time out.
INCH: The guy that plays Engineer, Ian, he was--
He came to this project without me really knowing him or knowing of him...
...and me being really concerned about the fact...
...that this guy, he was 7-foot-4...
...and I'm like, "How am I gonna double him?
What am I gonna do?"
You know, and he's got a real integral part in the movie.
He has the fight with Weyland and picks those guys up.
That. So we just-- That.
I'd say 90 percent of his work is stunt-orientated...
...and I was like, "How am I gonna double this guy?"
-Are you all right? -Ha, ha.
-This suit is like-- -Makes the noise.
Jesus Christ, thought it was your neck.
INCH: So I said l need to meet with him and we need to talk...
...and start making sure that I'm happy that he can do all the things.
Otherwise, l'm gonna go on a global search for a giant...
...to double another giant.
MAN 1 : ls that the only issue? The actor-- MAN 2: l can leave you there.
INCH: In story terms, he's kind of 9-foot tall, you know...
...so l'm like, just sort of playing around with ideas with Ridley...
...and going, "They don't know how to fight, but they can move?"
He's like, "Yeah." I said, "But these guys--
At that size, they're just gonna be really strong...
...so they're just gonna pick stuff up and just bowl them out of the way"...
...and he's like, "That's exactly what it is."
The body will drop here. But l was saying that's where one of these should be...
-...cutting me off if I'm the giant. -Take the platform out?
See the body, yeah, see the body falling, thrash.
This one, you get it right in here, and Danny's over there...
...hit him and see his body going down there as well.
But if he goes, wallop, and then drops the head there.
SCOTT: Yeah. -Do you know what l mean?
-So if l can't get here-- SCOTT: And get him run past that--
MAN: He can walk between the head of Mike and Weyland you mean.
Pfft.
INCH: I really enjoyed that sequence because, again, that was like--
We were-- They've taken Weyland, Weyland's in these calipers...
...he can't move properly, they bring him forward...
...and it's kind of like, you're never really sure...
...where that sequence is gonna go.
He comes in and it's a really calm bit of that...
...where he thinks he's met his savior...
...and there's a lovely sort of engaging moment...
...of him sort of touching heads and so forth...
...and it just goes into-- Unh! --head coming, ripping off.
MAN 1 : And action!
-Now cut. MAN 2: Go!
MAN 3: Okay, got it.
[BELL RINGlNG]
MAN 1 : Action! INCH: And he clubs Weyland.
Next thing you know, Ford's flying off the stage.
[CRYlNG]
[GUNSHOTS THEN BELL RlNGS]
INCH: And then Branwell gets picked up and chucked off.
And it came out of nowhere. I really enjoyed that.
I got through the piece that we did with Fifield...
...and then l just sort of started to channel my energies towards the end of the movie.
This Engineer versus Shaw trilobite sequence.
MAN: Action!
[BOTH GRUNTlNG]
[SPEAKlNG INDlSTlNCTLY]
Hull breach. That's you, you go:
INCH: Those moments of them working together was really interesting...
...because Noomi's, like, 5-foot-1 , heh, and he's, like, 7-foot-4...
...so he just looks monstrous to her.
MAN 1 : B mark. MAN 2: B mark on the end.
MAN 1 : Holding eight frames.
MAN 2: Set. MAN 1 : Set.
Set, set, set. And action!
B mark.
INCH: We were capitalizing on his strengths...
...but he still moved really quickly...
...so, you know, he could still grab, and grab hold really quickly.
But whenever he got hold of anything, it would be--
Not a punch or a kick or a-- You know, it was a pickup and a throw...
...so we were just slamming bodies against walls, pulling legs out.
He gets stabbed with the ax.
It doesn't even affect him. He takes the ax out.
He just keeps coming. He was just a sort of demonic strong thing...
...until he gets into the room with the trilobite.
[BOTH GRUNTlNG]
INCH: Ridley just said he wanted it to be like an enveloping moment...
...something that is just permanently kind of suffocating...
...so we played around with all these ideas of keeping him...
...sort of stood on his feet all the time and keeping him wrestling...
...until we came to this. Actually, it was Ridley that came up with it.
I'd love to claim the idea because l think it worked great...
...but it was this-- Like, Ridley said, "What about if he starts--
The trilobite comes and he grabs him...
...and it just starts lifting him up to the ceiling?"
MAN 1 : Do it slowly. Do it slowly.
[GRUNTS]
MAN 1 : Now cut. Cut it. MAN 2: Go ahead, Ian.
I don't think I'm supposed to be like this.
INCH: The whole angles and dimension of it just changed so much...
...because lan was such a huge, you know, 7-foot guy...
...and we ended up having him walking up the walls in this building...
...with this trilobite strangling him...
...and it just added a great dimension to the whole fight, really.
We'll give you that moment, when you're at the door...
...and you go, "Agh!"
You do that. Register that-- It'll be in your face, that's lovely, you know.
-Give that sort of bit more franticness to it. -Cool.
When you come in here....
[SPEAKlNG INDlSTlNCTLY]
Just a couple up here, yeah.
You look in right up here, like that. And, you know, it's-- Fight back.
MAN 1 : And action!
And now!
[GRUNTING]
MAN 1 : Cut, cut. MAN 2: Cut.
Cut it.
MAX: The other section, which we shot in the central highlands...
...in the Hekla Valley, was more to do with the crash sequences...
...that were done by a combination of work on the Icelandic landscape...
...and the backlot at Pinewood Studios...
...where they abandon, after having crashed into the Juggernaut...
...the, uh, survivors of the Prometheus...
...in their escape pods...
...find themselves on the planet's surface for the first time.
-Prometheus, come in. -Shaw.
This ship is taking off.
Listen to me. This ship is taking off. You can't let it go.
-Yeah. MAX: The location that I found...
...was about two kilometers off the end of the service road...
...that was about 45 minutes off the paved road...
...which was six hours away from Reykjavik.
INCH: We were doing some of the post-Prometheus crash...
...and we're having bits of spaceship laying around...
...and we were doing a lot of running with Shaw and Vickers...
...before the big doughnut came down and crushed Vickers.
MAN: All right, roll!
INCH: It looked fantastic because it's all volcanic rock...
...and it felt like you were on some kind of other planet.
[YELLING]
No, no, no.
We got a set piece that we then dropped on top of the actress...
...to simulate her being semi-crushed by the Juggernaut.
I think it should be a real wide angle. Wham, just-- We have to drop it on her.
MAN: Action!
INCH: And then crawling out from underneath that...
...and then continuing on for the--
You know, where we start to see her on top of the iris...
...which is cracking open, which we shot back in the U.K...
...with this big jump over a chasm.
Then we just see her with the, um, iris opening up...
...running away from all of that...
...to tie into basically her getting the Prometheus to take off...
...and crash into the Juggernaut.
RAPACE: Yeah. SCOTT: Now you're gonna drive the ATV.
That was shot in a valley in Iceland where you're running around...
...in what fundamentally is a volcanic cinder valley...
...and then you've got to put everything in around it.
All l used was the ground.
Arthur Max went in with his crew...
...and they laid out what was a causeway.
MAX: All our vehicles were actually running down a road...
...that we created in the landscape...
...and sculpted and landscaped with our Greens Department...
...and populated with a couple of dozen pinnacles...
...which eventually were extended digitally.
[SPEAKlNG INDlSTlNCTLY]
INCH: It's all the driving stuff, actors going in and out on ATVs...
...and, uh, rovers returning, so different formations of that...
...which will lead us into the piece with the storm...
...chasing them back into the garage sequence.
We're using David doing some riding stuff on the ATVs.
We've had Shaw as a passenger, and Holloway bringing him back in.
SCOTT: This is the best unit l've worked with for a very, very, very long time.
All of you. I mean, I know most of you anyway...
...but actually, it's been very enjoyable for me.
Particularly enjoyable, this film.
And, uh, the start of every film is always a challenge...
...but you're such a great lot in knowing what you're doing...
...that the whole thing's been a fantastic ride.
Thank you very much.
[English - US - SDH]
MARlS: We were wrapping up Robin Hood when he came to me...
...and said, "You know, l've got the Alien movie that l'm starting up next.
Are you interested?"
And it's kind of like, "Wow, l can't believe I just got asked by Ridley personally.
Do l want to do his next science fiction movie?"
STAMMERS: The visual effects work just seemed to be spread everywhere.
I mean, there were a lot of things that were ambiguous...
...as to how much Arthur could build, how much Ridley could shoot practically...
...and it was clear that there was gonna be pretty major visual-effects shots.
MARlS: He really said, "You know, let's go into it thinking...
...here's the world l wanna show, and things we couldn't do...
...on the first one. Let's show it for real this time.
Let's make these grand environments and giant spaceships."
SCOTT: I'll never be the same again.
I mean, green screen has proved to be phenomenally well done...
...between Weta and MPC in London.
Fundamentally, these two companies have tackled...
...what amounts to almost 1 300 of very sophisticated effects shots.
It lived absolute to my expectations of what was digitally drawn 1 3 months prior.
And if in doubt, let's say one of us wouldn't like that...
...they'd show this big glossy literally photographic version of what l wanted...
...just keep tapping it.
I'm a great believer in doing my R & D. And sticking with my R & D.
SLOAN: As far as cooperation between...
...digital and practical effects on the film went...
...we had an amazing group of people doing practical and visual effects...
...and we constantly talked to each other.
It's very hard to see the takeover between a practical and a digital shot.
MARlS: The opening prologue was gonna be a full digital Engineer...
...because we knew he's gonna decay so much...
...that it wasn't gonna be realistic.
Right from the beginning, we previs'd that sequence.
Looked at the Art Department's concepts. We had an idea what he wanted to do.
And then it was just a matter of what the final look would be.
So it was a great reference all across the board.
Ridley shot the whole performance live for real with a real actor.
And we shot clean plates without him.
And Weta used the clean plates to recreate the CG version of the actor's performance.
They matched the animation to his performance.
And you could put the two side-by-side.
Ridley wanted a very aggressive taking over of his body.
And we knew we had to get into a molecular level...
...to see, you know, his component parts were being torn apart.
You know, molecule by molecule, by the infection with the goo.
So the main things that we were looking at...
...is firstly grounding it in reality...
...and using reference for each of the types of DNA...
...because we have such a short amount of time...
...to tell the story of the DNA getting infected, breaking apart...
...and then reforming and recombining to show Earth DNA.
We had to make the designs of the different DNA...
...quite different and quite graphical, quite illustrative of what they were.
So the Engineer's DNA, you know...
...we thought, "This needs to be quite sinister."
But we know it's gonna get infected and the infection has to look...
...you know, more messed up than the Engineer's DNA.
So, you know, we were using--
We used quite a light color palette for the Engineer's DNA...
...and then the infection comes on as very dark, and as very melted-looking...
...and it starts to distort and then break apart the Engineer's DNA.
Ridley actually said to us for that section, "lt has to feel like war in there."
The DNA just being torn apart...
...and just ripping itself apart in as many different ways as possible.
One thing about the particles that Ridley really wanted...
...to kind of hit in terms of the way that they move...
...he wanted to get a sense that they weren't just falling off him.
He wanted to give a sense that they had a little bit of intelligence, almost.
He said we should look at starlings...
...and he saw some great footage of starlings...
...the way that they flock and move. Ridley liked that sense of motion.
And that's what Weta used as a reference for how those would animate.
It always had to escalate.
So each shot needed to be much more advanced than the one before.
It got to the stage where parts of the Engineer...
...would just tear open and there's a shot where, you know...
...his back just opens right up, you know, so you could see his spine.
You know, being able to contribute ideas like that...
...and you'd put them in front of Ridley and say:
"Well, how about we just have his back tear open?"
And to have him come back and go, "Yeah, that's great!"
You know, it's just fantastic to know that some of the ideas that Weta created...
...are, you know, getting into the film.
STAMMERS: Ridley loves to shoot as much practically...
...and for evertyhing that we had in the film.
There was a practical version of that, though, he could shoot with...
...but at some point, we always knew that we're gonna have to take over to CG.
There's the spaceships, the Prometheus...
...that was a given that we were gonna have to do that.
There were so many scenes, so, you know, we said:
"Let's invest all the money into building really great CG versions of these ships."
The Prometheus' design of it came purely from the Art Department.
Steve Burg and Ben Procter were responsible...
...for, you know, building and detailing the ship...
...to a point where we had really good approved concepts from Ridley.
MARlS: He actually built the model himself...
...and used that to give to MPC...
...who was hired to actually create it for the feature.
HENLEY: lt was a great opportunity to show, you know...
...our potential on what we could do with computer graphics on spaceships.
We were given some very cool concept designs...
...which had a fair amount of detail.
But through the film and the previs and getting the storyboard from Ridley...
...there were shots that were extremely close.
We had an awful lot of coverage of it.
So we had the design based...
...from the concept guys and we built it to that stage...
...and then we had to go in and in and in, closer and closer.
DOMENECH: And zoom into the cockpit. We have a rough interior.
You can sort of see the seats in there.
MAN: lt's very cool. DOMENECH: lt's a very, very heavy model.
It is a very, very large ship, so it looks like a jet fighter sometimes.
So VTOL ships who can do vertical takeoff and landing...
...and it's got these four massive legs, like, the engines.
So it's like we have to make it look cool where at the same time...
...it cannot really be super agile because that takes the size away.
And with all the landings-- It's, like, we did it as slow as possible...
...without making it look boring.
So it's agile, at the same time, it has to look massive.
DANESE: Selling the scale of it...
...you wanna feel something massive is landing on this dusty planet.
We had to do this huge amount of dust raised by the ground.
So, really, the scale of that shot is given by how the dynamic of the dust...
...and the tiny points and the tiny rocks are moving.
When we're getting close...
...you need to see the detail and there's so much texture time...
...went into adding scale to the ship to make it feel like it was big enough.
HENLEY: Maybe we need just a sense of a little more specular in some of these areas...
...that are quite smooth.
Just very subtly change the value, you know, in the highlights here.
That was a big challenge definitely for building it...
...because it's a task that you could just go on and on.
But, you know, the final result is great and MPC did a fantastic job on that.
HENLEY: Planet from above as you fly in.
Ridley found a particular moon of Jupiter...
...and so that became the model for the gas giant.
We shot things like ink swirling to get, like, nice fluid patterns.
And we wanted to have the rings...
...so we analyzed Saturn rings, but tried something slightly different.
Ridley had gone talked to some NASA guys...
...about what it should be out there in space, what it should be on the planet.
He had all this feedback that he was very excited about.
STAMMERS: Planet environment was incredible.
Steve Messing was one of the concept artists...
...responsible for most of the planetscapes.
It was clear that it was gonna, you know--
If something real was gonna be shot, it was going to be heavily manipulated.
The whole planet environment was gonna require quite a lot of visual-effects work...
...to join different landscapes together...
...add atmospherics and weather and lightning, and things like that.
Ridley's main-- He first brought forward...
...was that it was gonna be terrible weather on this planet, and that was our basic brief.
STAMMERS: We've put a lot of effort into designing with Ridley.
All the landscape was kind of based on him really loving Wadi Rum in Jordan.
HENLEY: There was a photo that Ridley had found somewhere...
...of some really interesting mountain landscape...
...and he'd drawn in some pyramids in the middle of that valley he found.
And that became kind of the thing that we wanted to create.
STAMMERS: l went to Jordan with an aerial unit and MPC's supervisor, Charlie Henley...
...and we shots thousands of thousands of stills.
We shot loads of plates as well.
So there's some real plates of Jordan untouched...
...and then there are areas where you see a sandy desert as the ground.
We've replaced that with digital versions of what we've shot in lceland.
Hey, baby.
STAMMERS: The creature work was--
You know, there's a good variety of creature work.
Neal Scanlan's team, the creature supervisor...
...had a number of tasks to create, and Hammerpedes are a great example.
You know, Neal's team did a fantastic...
...fully animatronic version of the Hammerpede.
Puppeteered versions...
...things that could be wrapped around Millburn's arm...
...that we could, you know, puppeteer for real, pull through, so....
We shot most of that scene with the Hammerpede...
...with a practical Hammerpede there for the whole time.
MARlS: Ridley really wanted to try and do things real first...
...and where it would fail, then he would want us to do it digitally.
STAMMERS: There were certain limitations of things he couldn't do.
The way that the mouth kind of uncurls and opens up...
...we could only see it from behind sort of, you know, doing kind of this--
You know, MPC ended up doing the frontal version...
...where it unfolds and opens up...
...then we cut to the rear view which is practical.
So we're cutting from practical to CG a number of times...
...and then, obviously, there's a point where the head gets cut off.
At that point that's where we just take what he had and it's like, "Okay."
Now we go CG, we gotta regrow a new head.
The head is gonna then burrow into the acid burn hole that's in Millburn's arm...
...and once it gets into his helmet, that's all down to us to take over...
...and, you know, Rafe Spall did a great performance...
...in reacting to something that he had no idea...
...really what it was gonna be doing.
Now, he knew it was gonna end up being rammed down his throat...
...so he gave a good performance for that.
You know, really a pretty disgusting shot at the end of it. It was great.
MAN 1 : Oh, that's horrible! MAN 2: Ooh.
-Ooh. MAN 1 : Ooh. l don't like that.
[MEN LAUGHlNG]
Well, I do, but--
There's just far too many Freudian interpretations right there.
[KEYPAD BEEPlNG]
[WOMAN PANTING]
STAMMERS: The Med Pod. What a great sequence.
I mean, truly, truly disgusting...
...and that was a great moment in the script.
And, you know, it's like, "Wow, this is gonna be cool."
Scene 1 08, the Med Pod.
The Med Pod was the first thing that I saw any previs for...
...or anything of the film.
I just saw the previs sequence of Shaw entering the Med Pod.
It cuts her open. lt pulls this thing out. It starts screaming, she starts screaming.
The blood going everywhere.
That was my introduction to Prometheus. That was the first thing l saw.
Along with, you know, we are hoping for a PG-1 3 rating.
STAMMERS: Ridley, you know, really wanted it to be quite graphic as well.
We did quite a heavy previs on this sequence.
In fact, a team from Halon did a great job of prevising the whole sequence.
And we previs'd it as an R-rated version and we previs'd it as a PG-1 3 version.
The Med Pod was one of the most exciting sequences to work on...
...because it is very analogous...
...to the chest-bursting scene in the original Alien.
So we really took a lot of care to make it look as real...
...and as gruesome as we possibly could.
Weta picked up that sequence and just did a great job with, you know...
...doing great CG robotic arms that are interacting with her.
You know, the whole scanning motion and laser-cutting...
...the spreading, and the claw that comes in to pull out the placenta.
That's all there. Sort of full CG work at that point.
There's a lot of subtle things going on through the sequence.
Firstly, Noomi is actually quite a proficient belly dancer...
...and what we've done is put some enhancements onto that...
...so you can see the trilobite just nudge against her flesh from the inside...
...and put the odd bulge in.
STAMMERS: This sequence is, you know, is incredible.
Neal Scanlan's team just gave us the most incredible practical things to work with.
I mean, you know, fully animatronic baby trilobite with a placenta...
...and a placental sac that's full of goo.
It's just-- lt was great. There were some really good things.
Having the on-set reference that Ridley shot gave us a lot of confidence...
...to know what he wanted and be able to replicate that...
...and be able to deliver something that we knew he'd be happy with.
STAMMERS: The staples are brilliant. We talked about that, you know, with Ridley.
The practicalities of what really would be in terms of futuristic surgeries.
Like when you've got this fantastic Med Pod machine that can do...
...you know, any number of things, yet he still wants staples?
But he just loved the idea of staples.
It's just that thing of like, seeing that staple gun gets you...
[lMlTATING STAPLING]
...and you know, sticking staples in her stomach was just brilliant.
That baby trilobite grows really, really quickly.
And I remember a moment when we went over to Neal's creature shop.
When he was sculpting the original version of that, it was a lot smaller.
I think we were all thinking it was a bit big already.
And Neal said to Ridley-- He said, "l'm really concerned about the scale."
And Ridley said, "Yeah. Yeah. We should make it bigger."
And he was like-- Neal was like, "Oh, okay."
MARlS: Neal essentially built pieces, gave us all the reference we needed...
...and we just gave that to Weta...
...and Weta built it and then on top of that they put their textures...
...because Ridley wanted that peeling, flaking skin look to it...
...which was really hard to do prosthetically, so....
You know, Weta finished all that off...
...and they had a great basis from Neal's stuff.
STAMMERS: You know, the battle between those two becomes this great struggle...
...and he's just overwhelmed.
You know, Ridley had a great idea for that sequence.
You know, he should get his feet up on the door.
"Get his feet up on the door. He's pulling back."
And you get these sort of great shots where you could really feel the struggle...
...of him just trying to pull back away from this thing...
...and, you know, braced up against the door.
It's a great moment.
HlLL: One of the main design aspects with the trilobite...
...was to really get a sense of tension and strength...
...in this quite squishy, you know--
He has a vertebrae, but down his tentacles he has no bones.
So we needed to make sure that when his tentacles are very stretched out...
...that we get a sense of the musculature...
...and when it was compressed, when he was all squashed up...
...you know, you see all the folds and wrinkles in the skin.
STAMMERS: They had a real challenge...
...to animate the trilobite's performance to match...
...what lan Whyte was effectively doing with nothing.
Definitely a tricky sequence for sure. But...
...again, that worked out really well in the end.
[CHATTERING]
The Fifield creature, it was another beat that Ridley wanted an action sequence.
And he conceived this as a short beat just to keep the pace of the film going.
And we need an exciting action moment.
And Fifield's transitioned into something slightly more alien.
It was a bit ambiguous as to which way it was gonna go.
MARlS: The original intent was that any kind of gross movements:
Big running, jumping, things like that would be a digital character...
...which they would build one on set which would be shown here...
...as some sort of prosthetic.
We would go across to that and just match to that...
...and then we'd do his digital motions so he could run properly how Ridley wanted.
Ridley kind of wanted to take it more into an animal realm for his motions...
...sort of kind of baboonish things like that.
STAMMERS: There was one image that Ridley kept going back to...
...which was what he refers to as the "baby head."
And he kind of loved that image.
And, you know, the design kind of really worked, worked and worked around that ...
...for a long time and when, you know, we're getting closer to shooting...
...we were still not at a point where we had, you know, a final design for that.
SLOAN: When we started on Fifield...
...he was kind of big, kind of mean, kind of fast.
That was pretty much all we had at the beginning.
We ended up having the actor, Sean Harris, who played Fifield.
He was in a prosthetic makeup and with sort of blackened-up armor...
...and he ran through the entire sequence for us.
Sean is incredibly intense, as well.
Anything you'd wanted, he was fine. "Fifield needs to be on fire."
"That's fine. Set me on fire."
SCOTT: I can design the whole thing...
...see it shot with the actor in makeup, in full makeup...
...see how he does...
...and then do a combination of elements of the actor...
...in relation to some digital enhancement.
-Um, or not. FERNANDEZ: The first brief of Fifield...
...was more or less human, more or less alien.
Ridley was not locked in on the concept yet.
So development continued at Weta.
One of the big things was getting right balance in the face.
Like, between seeing the actor and having the--
Maintaining the alien design on the outside...
...because he's transforming into the alien.
HlLL: We sort of came up with a sort of withered remainder of a head.
And then over time and over a few design iterations...
...it became more important and the head actually shrunk...
...to the point where the outer exoskeleton head was actually quite tight...
...to Fifield as a kind of distorted human.
FERNANDEZ: While on the body side of things...
...really, it comes more down to, like, proportions.
Limb length, like joints, the setup of the legs and the arms.
So that show the alien features...
...but still enable us to do all the crazy movements he's gonna do.
There were times when we're designing, "l don't want something too monstrous.
It's gonna be quick, we're not gonna see much."
Funny if the actor is winning.
The digital enhancement is excellent...
...but it looks like a monster.
Whereas, the actor still looks like the actor...
...and what he does is pretty damned good.
So both are done, but l'm able to look at them both...
...and say, "Okay, which is the most effective?"
A few comments were kind of like, "You know, we wanted to see Sean Harris."
Like, he's a great actor...
...and provided a sense of character and realism to the shots.
And they felt like seeing a CG character at that point of Sean Harris...
...almost takes you out of the movie.
Weta did a fantastic job of creating a CG version of Fifield.
And it's-- You know, he's really disgusting.
Ultimately, what you see in the final film is Sean Harris in makeup.
The Deacon's birth was another one of those sequences...
...that people are waiting for.
STAMMERS: l remember seeing early concepts of the Deacon...
...six to eight months before we started shooting. We're not that far from what it was.
I mean, it still had, you know, no eyes and an elongated head.
MAN 1 : Close the mouth. Close the mouth.
-Close the mouth. MAN 2: Mm. Yummy.
MAN 3: Up. Up.
Neal's team again, you know, built a full prosthetic version...
...of the Deacon for the birth of it from the Engineer.
And what you see in the film is something again where we shot...
...everything practically as much as we could.
MARlS: Ridley said, "Yeah, we'll do that for real and as much as we can."
So they puppeteered the Deacon.
He stands up and he starts screaming. It was great. They did a fantastic job.
There was a couple of things that we had to add to it.
Weta essentially took a digital scan of the creature on set, the puppet...
...photographed it and they built a version that matched to it exactly.
The Deacon is actually described as an ultramorph.
You know, it's come out of not a human, but from an Engineer.
So it's much bigger and stronger...
...and much more developed than the xenomorph.
But it's still just been born, and it's still finding its feet.
So quite literally when we first animate it...
...it needed to sort of scrabble around as if it was a newly born...
...standing-up-for-the-first-time animal, to get him on his feet.
And the first time he talks.
STAMMERS: A lot of people think, you know...
...it's just trying-- A precursor to what was designed as the alien.
But the jaw is actually based on a goblin shark.
You know, Ridley loves that motion that it has.
And it has this lower jaw that sort of unlatches...
...and a secondary jaw comes out...
...and that's totally where the Deacon's jaw is based on.
STAMMERS: The scene towards the end of the film when the Prometheus is taking off...
...and the Juggefnaut is taking off, we see the Juggefnaut for the first time.
It's the best action sequence in the film.
It's long, there's lots happening, there's a lot of drama.
And, you know, it's the first time that we really see the Juggefnaut...
...in detail emerging out of the silo.
Shaw is kind of running up the hill out of the way.
You see this thing emerging behind her. It's a fantastic moment.
MARlS: Going into it, he always knew that it was gonna be a big event.
We had talked about doing a miniature for it...
...because we knew we could get pieces of it.
But we're worried because of the amount of detail on that ship.
It's so complicated to build. We'd get one or two takes and we wouldn't be happy.
MPC did some fantastic CG destruction.
And they sold me on the idea that these guys can do it.
HENLEY: The original derelict was the basis for the current Juggefnaut that we built.
What Ridley wanted to do in this film was bring in a much higher level...
...of detail and scale.
STAMMERS: The Juggefnaut was real difficult one to get the scale of...
...and it's a thousand foot in diameter.
How much sort of detail do you get on something of this sort of size?
Of course we'll see the Juggefnaut has a very specific design...
...that we were trying to maintain from the original Alien.
So we had to go in and put so much of that little piping detail work...
...around the exterior.
The whole Juggefnaut had so much detail to it to maintain the huge scale that it is.
HENLEY: One of the biggest challenges...
...was understanding the scale of the Juggernaut...
...and being able to have the cameraman visualize that.
When we brought it back to MPC...
...and analyze the shots and laid it out in post-vis...
...we found that the Juggefnaut was almost always completely out of frame.
SCOTT: l'm very happy with the sequence as it occurs towards the end.
You know, because a lot of this is on paper...
...and you draw it and think...
...well, if the Juggefnaut was rammed dy the Prometheus...
...because the Prometheus has to use itself as a missile to bring it down...
...and in so doing, Janek, the crew and who is left...
...Chance and Ravel...
...will sacrifice themselves for the good of Earth.
It's that moment where we're into some pretty big effects work.
And that whole sequence is a big one for us.
The great crumpling motion...
...as the nose of the Prometheus rams into the Juggefnaut.
The way we crumple our ship against the other one...
...to make it hold and strengthen to make it look like there's things inside--
We have our own destruction tool here at MPC.
And we just model invisible objects inside that's supposed to be the structure...
...to help it maintain form while it's being crushed.
Luckily, inside the ship, there's not much stuff modeled in the sides...
...so the explosion comes in pretty quick and helps us hide the hollowness...
...of the whole ship.
STAMMERS: We pull back and we--
You know, we're back with Shaw and Vickers on the ground...
...and they're witnessing the explosion up in the sky...
...and then the debris starts raining down, and we're into just absolute mayhem.
PANlS: The Prometheusjust explodes into billions of pieces.
Just like pfft, in the air, and then that's all the pieces...
...that we have to bring back in the ground and just explodes.
And a lot of little debris hitting and it's--
They escape a few while they're running.
All these pieces are trying to hit them and they just dodged them.
SCOTT: Of course it doesn't end there.
The Juggefnaut falls to earth like a giant horseshoe...
...and starts to roll.
DOMENECH: This is post-vis. That's how we took the plate...
...and Art and Animation Department, we made a rough version...
...of what it would look like when it's rendered. All this is real.
And then you guys from Art added extra pinnacles.
They're called pinnacles. They're rock formations.
They're like volcanic rocks.
You can see the explosion elements there.
You can see the meteorites we added.
That's the Juggernaut.
And you can see the pyramids in the background.
It's all a virtual environment.
SCOTT: And l always thought that's a great idea, but can we pull it off?
So applying my boards to their designs of the Juggefnaut...
...suddenly the whole thing starts to evolve and become feasible.
Now it's the most spectacular sequence of the movie.
[English - US - SDH]
THERON: l really feel like it's a movie that, uh, stands on its own.
It really doesn't feel like it's trying to set up a story...
...or kind of continue a story.
SCALlA: l felt the way the Alien franchise was developing...
...that there was nothing more for them to say.
But when he saw an idea behind this universe and this world...
...where he could create something and contribute something new...
...then he jumped on it.
SCANLAN: There are strong references, visual references to the original.
Whether, ultimately, it links the story together is not necessary.
It's not necessary that this ticks all the boxes.
I think I'll be allowed to show my face at Comic-Con next year.
It was something l was very aware of as being an enormous responsibility...
...to the lexicon of sci-fi iconography.
SCOTT: We began almost two and a half years ago without a story, without a script...
...and here we are two years later.
It's pretty damn good and pretty fast, given the scale of the production.
And given the fact that I was particularly nervous...
...about returning to the genre after all this time.
We got to the point now where we know what we want to do because we're there.
We're at about two hours and eight minutes right now, which is fantastic.
You might, out of this whole thing, slender 45 seconds, maybe.
A minute, if we're lucky.
So we're really getting to the point...
...of absolutely fine, fine, fine, super-fine tuning.
It really becomes the choice of the filmmakers...
...Pietro and I, to finally decide which hole it's gonna go in through.
MAN: Right, that's what it is.
-Um, and you feel good about it? -Yeah. l feel very good about it.
It's very unusual. lt's different.
The great thing about this film is it's really, really fresh.
Because l-- The reason why l didn't do science fiction for years...
...was it was a recycling pot of familiar stuff and familiar ground...
...and rarely do you have something new.
And I think what's interesting about this one is it feels new.
So you came after all.
SCALlA: The idea of Prometheus, the Titan stealing fire from the gods...
...and giving it to humans, it's about knowledge.
It's the same Genesis story about, uh, Adam and Eve.
You know, the tree of life, the knowledge of, uh....
Answering those questions, that-- The knowledge of the gods.
Well, we can't. That's the mystery.
Really, what, uh, fascinated me was the idea of hubris.
VICKERS: lf you're really going down there, you're going to die.
SCOTT: You know, if you really wanna clip this, I was wondering...
...that when you got him going from her saying, "I am now"...
...to the screwdriver, what about go-- Cut to the door opening? Voom.
Then Charlize is standing there.
SCALlA: lt's a little screwdriver. -Yeah.
SCALlA: l thought so. So just cut it-- -Yeah.
-Just keep it moving. -Yeah.
Keep it moving. Yeah.
You know what? Leave it as it is.
It almost looks like that screwdriver opened the door, which is kind of amusing.
SCALlA: Let me show you. I mean, I can see it with a fade.
Better. Better.
-Better. SCALlA: Let me add some head, then.
SCOTT: Yep.
This is the Stanley Kubrick scene.
DAVlD: Yes, sir.
SCALlA: Both for me and for Ridley, for everybody on the film...
...it was a learning process to go through this stage.
Now, this, uh, is a fully digital show, shot on Red Epic digital cameras.
SCOTT: You've still got to be careful with, uh, digital...
...because you think, "There it is. Fantastic. Looks great."
You've really gotta watch how you project it. You really still gotta watch the light.
Otherwise, it just-- And looks like mush.
SCALlA: We had to, uh, reinvent the data flow, how we would import the images...
...and, uh, there's a whole other step on the set...
...in terms of ingesting, you know, the, uh, raw media files...
...putting them in stereo, giving it back to editorial.
We would be working in HD.
When you think about, you know, multiple cameras, you know...
...almost 5K resolution...
...and Ridley shooting with four cameras, I mean, it really adds up quickly.
DAVlD: A superior species, no doubt.
SCALlA: For me, the most important thing was to watch dailies in 3D...
...to really get the sense of what these 3D images would look like.
We had a great, you know, 60-inch screen.
I had all my monitors balanced and color graded properly...
...so that what Ridley would see on the set...
...or what Darek would see on the set would be exactly the same...
...as we would see in dailies.
I just remembered the first 3D shot that we put up...
...and I saw is David putting his hand up in dark...
...and the door opens up and he walks in.
And it's such a beautiful shot, just in 3D.
And it was like, "Ah."
You know that feeling that's just like, "Oh, great. This is gonna be great."
It was like literally just opening the door into this world...
...and you're gonna go with it.
And Ridley saw it and he was like, "This is gonna be cool."
The first cut, I have to say, that, uh, unlike some other films...
...actually came together, uh, rather quickly...
...and, uh, it wasn't extremely long.
I think it was probably slightly over two and a half hours.
Whereas usually the pictures always end up like around three.
It was very easy for me to go back and make the first cut...
...and eliminate a lot of stuff.
SHAW: A woman in Africa told me the story of how the world came to be.
SCALlA: When l showed it to Ridley, he said, "Oh, it really works.
I think we have the engine. There's no problem.
It actually really fits."
I was always aiming to make it, obviously, a lot shorter than that.
I mean, I think that the goal was always to be around two hours.
The first stage of that cut...
...of taking the next half hour out from two and a half...
...1 5 minutes is fairly easy...
...because certain scenes become really apparent that you don't need.
For example, the Janek and Vickers scene...
...because the movie was going somewhere else...
...and I didn't wanna go on the brakes then, so--
And Ridley recognized that as well. He said, "That comes out."
JANEK: It was your turn to push the button.
Why did you decide to tell me that story now?
Because you killed a man today.
[SHAW GRUNTlNG AND YELLING]
SCALlA: That scene was, uh, you know, storyboarded with Ridley as a previs.
And, uh, Ridley showed it to me...
...and I was already shocked then, heh, when l saw that.
"l don't know how you're gonna shoot this."
To me, it was about content. I wanted to see the strength of this woman.
For me, it was trying to be very accurate to the performance that Noomi gave.
Amazing. I mean, it's such a physical expression.
I mean, when you see her body, uh, contort...
...and when l see the vein on her neck pulsating like that...
...and seeing the upside-down shot with her mouth opening.
You know, the connections to that. That pain, to me, was very, very physical.
I didn't wanna cheapen it or shortchange it...
...or worry about, "Oh, it's gonna be too much."
I mean, it's realistic.
And, yes, maybe it's hard to watch...
...but that's the drama of it.
I'm looking at what she's going through.
[SCREAMlNG]
SCOTT: How scary l'm allowed to be depends on what the MPAA say.
Obviously, that will always be in negotiation...
...but it's trying to keep up with what was the original...
...which was, in those days, was pretty hard-up.
[ALIEN SCREECHES]
The rules have changed today.
The realities of the MPAA and the rules-- And I don't make them.
--make it such that minimal amounts of blood...
...for whatever reason, that is a bright-line rule.
It's a scene that seems like naturally would be enhanced by some blood.
Just being pure and simple.
It is disgusting. lt is terrifying and scary.
And, yes, you can do a lot of that with sound and the rest of it...
...but at some point, it can become cheap not to show it.
Because it can become cute if you're not showing it.
MAN 1 : Drop it. Drop it. SCOTT: Hand, Noomi.
MAN 1 : Drop it.
MAN 2: That was a bit bloody.
-That was Sweeney Todd. MAN 3: Bloody hell.
[ALL CHUCKLE]
The basic math of this stuff is only release it R if the movie has to be R.
If there is a way for it not to be R, make it PG-1 3.
There's a straight business conversation about it...
...and it's a difference of hundreds of millions of dollars in worldwide box office.
So that's just a reality.
And suffice to say, Fox, being a responsible financial entity...
...would prefer the version that gives them the most number of hundreds of millions.
You gotta make sure you're covered, and you've gotta argue your case.
It's pretty, uh, aggressive. Pretty hairy.
[SHAW PANTlNG AND GROANING]
SCALlA: lf there is a discussion about, uh, the rating, you know, they have to go back...
...and go through the whole process...
...of, you know, showing different versions of, like, reduced cuts.
But then, it really comes down to the fact, like, what movie do you wanna release?
Do you want to show a watered-down version?
I, uh, believe that what Ridley shot...
...and the integrity of the scene should stay the way it is.
MAN 1 : B camera mark. MAN 2: B mark.
SCOTT: lf we leave, take that up from here. MAN: l wouldn't wanna take that up.
We must leave!
And what would Charlie do...
SCOTT: "What would Charlie do now?"
...now that we're so close...
...to answering the most meaningful questions...
...ever asked by mankind?
SCALlA: Weyland, having been woken up, meeting Shaw.
Shaw, have you no-- Have you lost your faith?
Shaw determined to go back out.
Vickers meeting Weyland.
At the same time, after all of that...
...we had to have Fifield at the bottom of the garage...
...attacking the crew...
...and time it, so that by the time all the other scenes are done...
...they come down the elevator, and they're faced with Fifield.
MERCENARY: Put that thing down!
Tricky to do...
...because simply in terms of movie time, there was so much material to cover.
We struggled with the position, the structural position of that...
...and at a certain point, we tried it in different spots.
But, uh, ultimately, l figured out that l wanted to make it happen simultaneously.
And we found-- I found a spot that after the cesarean scene...
...I could intercut between her being somewhat delirious...
...with Fifield's fight downstairs.
That allowed me to do the intercut is to make the Fifield scene much shorter.
Not so little. To be able to jump in action.
To make it more violent and aggressive.
Then we leave for a very long time. You leave, uh, with a cut.
You're hovering around maybe 2:1 2, 2:1 5. That feels good.
Still has a lot of things, but you try to address other things.
Clarity, dialogue, character, storylines, so they all track.
SHAW [ON MONITOR]: They gave us life. Someone....
Someone killed them.
That's good. "Gave us life" works well on the screen.
SCALlA: lt cuts it down a little but-- -It helps it a bit. Yeah. Yeah.
Then, like on any picture, the last month...
...right before, uh, we go into our pre-dubs and final mix...
...there's one last push when the film has settled...
...where you start taking out a lot, and it's surprising.
You think, "Why didn't l do it before?"
But when you get used to the film and things settle that in the last month...
...we took out literally, about, l would say--
Even with the additional reshoots that they had done...
...I was able to take another 1 5 minutes out.
And right now, we're under the two-hour mark.
When you make your last pass...
...anything that shouldn't be there, you have to take out.
Yes, you'll miss it. Yes, it would give you something else.
But, you know, those are the decisions, ultimately, that the director makes...
[CHUCKLlNG] ...and, uh, hopefully, they're the right ones.
That's good.
Oh, my God.
[PLAYING DRAMATlC MUSlC]
SCOTT: l've invested in the talent of Marc Streitenfeld...
...for the last three or four movies...
...and he's done a marvelous score for us this time.
This has been a real challenge for him...
...because it's become a combination of symphonic.
Marc comes from a point of view of having marvelous sounds.
He's got great sounds in his head, not just musical things.
He applies sounds to music, and I kind of like that way of thinking.
But in this instance, you've gotta--
You're almost obliged to address the fact that part of it has to be symphonic.
STREITENFELD: There's a few, uh, pieces that I wrote really early on...
...where l had those sounds in my head, and sound ideas that l heard.
When I talked to Ridley about this sound first...
...and it was kind of this pulsating sound.
When the Engineer drinks the DNA liquid, um, it's, uh--
In a way it's beautiful, but in another way, it's very aggressive and violent.
But that was exactly the spot...
...where we actually used that, um, you know, that heartbeat.
That kind of-- That was associated with, you know, the Engineers.
And then it went into a, you know, more, um-- Something more, um, ethereal...
...that, you know, led to the creation of life and, uh, the first forming of DNA in the water.
When we first arrive, um, at the planet in the distance...
...and, you know, the shutters open up...
...and David, uh, gets a first glimpse of the planet they're gonna go to.
And, uh, to me, it was an important moment for David.
In his face, you actually see that this means something to him.
And that, um, you know, he has an expectation of something.
I think that's something I tried to keep alive through the film...
...that David actually, um, has something he is looking for himself personally...
...and not just as a robot or a servant...
...but, um, that there is actually some identity to him...
...and he is looking for something.
You know, I love Jerry Goldsmith's score in Alien, and, uh...
...there's something haunting, but it was so integral part to that.
It wasn't about copying that, but l, at one point, l had the idea...
...that I wanted to pay a little bit of an homage to him.
So, for example, I thought that when Weyland comes up...
...and introduces himself on the hologram, that I wanted to use that as a signature.
WEYLAND: My name is Peter Weyland.
I am your employer.
STREITENFELD: I love the Goldsmith score...
...and, uh, I listened to it a few times before I started working.
It was an amazing part of that film.
Studio One downstairs in Abbey Road is just a special-sounding room.
It's one of the best rooms, uh, in the world...
...and, uh, it makes a big difference, uh...
...you know, to record in such a great environment.
It's the final day of scoring today. We've been going for about 1 5 days.
This has been a big old undertaking.
[PLAYING DRAMATlC MUSlC]
STREITENFELD: I'm constantly making adjustments to the orchestra, the sound...
...to the color of, uh, what you're hearing.
And, you know, that doesn't really stop.
I do it while I'm recording. l do it in the mix. I mean, that's an ongoing process.
I think it's too detached. lt needs to be more of a flow, a legato flow to it.
Marc is about melody, and there's a very strong melody...
...that runs through this that is used in many different ways.
There's also some very strong motivic, um, development...
...some themes that belong to the alien...
...that creep here and there when the alien is referred to.
STREITENFELD: The Deacon moment at the end is, obviously, a great moment...
...to do something really disgusting, heh, and so that was great fun.
I recorded that moment, you know, with all kinds of different layers...
...with the orchestra to make it as creepy as possible.
For any fan of, uh, you know, the Alien films, that's just an iconic moment...
...when the Deacon comes out, out of the Engineer.
So that was definitely a great moment to score.
SCALlA: l thought that once we get into the sound design...
...that the sound design itself would be dramatic in use.
So there will be parts where we won't have music...
...where the sound will do, you know, the heavy lifting.
There's some great rhythms you've got. Play them up...
...because they're like machines, but they're almost musical.
A bit more crisp with the door: ching.
Keep that morphine haze going.
WEYLAND: ...then surely they could save us.
-It makes him slightly sinister and intense. SHAW: Haven't you told him they're all gone?
They sound too much like your common-or-garden...
-...staple gun you've got on your desk. MAN 1 : Yeah. Nail gun.
You need a high-tech sound.
MAN 2: More high-tech and complex. -Yeah. Right, right.
Keep the overlap stuff up going in the truck.
What we could add is just maybe Holloway. A little bit more screams.
We don't have anybody else talking, so maybe just Holloway and just a few, "Aah."
STOECKlNGER: My interaction initially was with Pietro.
Going through the film not with Pietro, but just on my own...
...and picking and choosing moments that inspired me and the sound team...
...that I'm part of to go and start creating sounds for.
HEMPHlLL: For me, Prometheus, as much as l love the first Alien film, it's a very different film.
For me, it was more intriguing in a classic sci-fi sense.
They're going off on this adventure. We tried to put that into the track too.
For us, it was a real challenge for Mark Stoeckinger and Ron and l...
...and the people who put the track together to live in that realm of sci-fi heritage...
...of sounds that you've never heard before.
A lot of it, we tried to pick musical sounds.
We're live.
Because sci-fi has a real tradition of musicality in the sounds.
STOECKlNGER: Prometheus was a great collaborative experience.
Everybody, no matter what their specialty was, what their department was...
...everybody had ideas and shared.
Ron Bartlett has this great musical background, this great singing voice.
When we were starting to meet about the film...
...I was telling him about things we were doing and sounds we were looking for.
Even some of the struggles we were having.
[ENGlNEER SPEAKlNG IN ALIEN LANGUAGE]
We had the actual actor's voice in there at first...
...and it was just a normal guy doing his thing.
He would say-- He learned all the Sanskrit words and everything...
...but he didn't have the deep, really resonant voice...
...and it wasn't processed or anything.
So for the temp mix, I said:
"Hey, why don't I go home in my studio and I'll do some deep...
...really, you know, heavy voice that gives him some more size."
STOECKlNGER: So Ron started off by recording...
...this incredibly deep voice he can recreate...
...through this chain of, you know, compressors...
...and tube valve amps and whatever.
I don't even know what it is. I know what the outcome is, it's awesome.
[ENGlNEER SPEAKlNG IN ALIEN LANGUAGE]
BARTLETT: What about now at the end? He does all these-- l'm like, "Oh, boy."
Now he's speaking Sanskrit and he doesn't match the other guy.
You know, so I learned all the Sanskrit words that he said...
...and redid them all exactly...
...then they cut that part out. Ha, ha.
WEYLAND: No! No!
BARTLETT: And then they put back in a lot of other ones...
...then they're in holograms and talking.
So then l had to be each guy, ha, ha, because they had to be the same processing.
So I looked up on the lnternet all these Sanskrit sayings and words...
...that were related to what they might be saying...
...and come up with some cool things.
I even got the word "alien" in there.
[SPEAKS lN ALIEN LANGUAGE]
Typically, you don't have your rerecording mixer going home at night...
...and spending all hours at night probably in a microphone going, "Blah."
[SPEAKlNG ALIEN LANGUAGE IN DEEP VOlCE]
You know, like, really deep down there like that.
Here l am, him chasing a cut. Did you miss that?
HEMPHlLL: Ridley loves contrast.
One of his favorite moments in the film is, uh, in the orrery...
...when it just shuts down, and David is left standing there.
Ridley just loves that moment.
And then, you know, David starts to hear the sound...
...of the heartbeat of the Engineer.
The huge levels of dynamics we used were very effective.
At the end, there's a large creature attacking somebody.
You want him to be scary. You want him to be powerful.
So you use certain sounds that will do that.
And we would give weight to a lot of things...
...like if, you know, a big tentacle slaps the side of the thing...
...it's gonna be fat.
I did watch the original Alien, but what l did--
So I had it on my iPhone and I listened to it...
...without even watching it, a couple times through.
Just to see what things stood out to me, or what things were unique.
Ian Holm gets his head ripped off...
...or David in Prometheus gets his head ripped off.
The voice changes because it's no longer connected...
...to the mother computer board anymore.
DAVlD: I know.
Have a good journey, Mr. Weyland.
I filled my mouth with water...
...and just put a microphone and gaggled and garbled...
...and that made this kind of sticky, wet sound that we processed.
It just makes a little, like, electronic.
DAVlD [ON RECORDlNG]: Have a good journey, Mr. Weyland.
-Turn the speakers a little bit. -Problem is--
I think it's-- What's actually a reenactment from this moment on...
...because he really becomes a machine.
DAVlD: Have a good journey, Mr. Weyland. STOECKlNGER: Does this change?
-I like when you add this. DAVlD: Mr. Weyland.
Have a good journey, Mr. Weyland.
-That's that flutter. -Yeah. Yeah.
Paradise.
STOECKlNGER: We used all sorts of things they might have used in 1 979.
Guitar pedals and weird flanging units...
...to affect David's voice to make it sound severed and weird.
Nowadays, we deal with computers and evertyhing is automated.
Well, guitar pedals aren't automated.
So every time it would go through the chain...
...it would change for Ron...
...and he was adjusting it, or I was back there adjusting it.
And so it was like a live performance at times, just mixing in the movie.
HEMPHlLL: The way Ridley likes to work when he mixes is...
...we've obviously got a lot of material, a zillion tracks and whatever...
...but we wants to go and flow.
He doesn't wanna, you know, stop and start.
He wants to see what happens and see us perform with sound.
That if we make mistakes, fine, but it's all about the concepts.
You finesse-- You can finesse later, whatever...
...but get the concepts right.
So the tempo is very fast with Ridley.
You have to be audience.
You have to watch the movie as an audience and respond to it.
We're not technicians. That's not what we do.
We're moviegoers and we're storytellers.
And we watch that film, we put our hearts into it...
...and what the characters are doing, what's going on.
And we mix it as if we were an audience member.
[VlCKERS YELLING]
VICKERS: No, no, no!
[SCREAMS]
KEENE: The original Alien film was one of the most influential movies of all time.
So there is always gonna be a lot of lnternet buzz, a lot of fan buzz...
...about, you know, effectively, you know, Ridley making a new Alien film.
FASSBENDER: It's almost become its own mythology, you know.
That first film had such a huge impact...
...and sparked the imagination of a whole fan base...
...that they've remained loyal to it.
This is what l found with sci-fi-comic-book- superhero sort of fans, they're very vocal fans.
And they're also very passionate, and they're also very loyal.
THERON: They're a bunch of nerds, and I love them for that.
I love them for that.
I think there's something so incredibly special and undeniable...
...when you have a fan base who loves the genre.
ELLENBERG: The speculation on the lnternet for the movie has been, frankly, fantastic.
It's been interesting to us, occasionally amusing when there's really strange stuff...
...but showed how much both passion there is for the subject...
...how deeply the previous movies had affected people...
...and what yearning there was not just to see those stories continue...
...but frankly, to see that quality and level of science fiction return.
SPAIHTS: It was the first time I had touched something...
...that was so alive in the imagination of a fan base...
...that people were anticipating it long before it came out.
My notes from meetings and even, like, slips of the lip...
...by which l might divulge plot details, had monetary value, had cultural value.
People were ravenous for them and making stuff up on the web.
And this is the first time that l had ever sat in my room by myself thinking...
...knowing that there were tens of thousands of people out there...
...wondering what l was up to, and waiting to see it.
And that's a very different way to write.
I've been coming to the Con since, uh, the mid-'90s.
And I waited in line like much of you did, uh...
...to get into this room and others like it...
...and, uh, although it's pretty awesome to be up here presenting to you guys...
...I just want you to know that my heart and soul are still in the audience.
LlNDELOF: If you put 1 0 fans...
...people who just know the Alien franchise backwards and forwards in a room...
...and you basically present to them, "We'd like to do this."
There's no single idea where you will get...
...you know, 1 0 of them to say unanimously, "That is a rad idea.
We're on board with that." You get frozen by indecision.
So at the end of the day, you basically say, "l'm a representative of this jury.
I'm the foreman.
And since l'm a fan of Alien...
...if it can get by me, then l'm gonna be okay with it."
And the fact of the matter is, the last thing that Ridley Scott wants to do...
...is piss off the people who, essentially, for the last 25 years...
...like, sort of idolized this movie.
Would any of you guys like to talk a little bit about Prometheus?
ALL: Yeah! -Anybody interested?
Prometheus attempts at giving an answer.
It's a bold statement to say what we're saying in this film.
MARSHALL-GREEN: I think we're very fortunate because we get to bring it back...
...with philosophical questions and not another take on this creature.
THERON: Ultimately, if we were ever in a circumstance...
...where we got that close to understanding where we come from...
...I think the biggest question would be, how do you adapt from what you thought...
...or what you were taught to believe, or what your faith tells you believe?
Perhaps the whole thread of, uh, this movie...
...is a cautionary tale about the perils of playing God.
SCANLAN: I feel like l'm working on the original film.
I feel that's what's happening, that's what's--
We're on Alien, and it just happens to be different.
It was 30 years ago he made the first one. It's coming back to a bit of history for him.
PEARCE: Ridley is definitely a visual director. There's no doubt about it.
I mean, he has the most extraordinary vision.
He really is able to create worlds that other people can't.
But not at the expense of the actors.
SCOTT: We have all these funny little ideas and they all kind of start to interconnect.
That's the most enjoyable moment.
I think that's what is marvelous about my job.
People say, "Well, you've been on this now for 14 months and almost at delivery.
It's pretty quick for this kind of movie.
Do you never get bored?" And I said, "Never, ever get bored...
...because every day has a whole new set of problems."
You get to see your conception comes together...
...and it lands and you can polish that ball and make it beautiful.
LlNDELOF: Will it be a little bit frustrating, the ending of Prometheus?
Absolutely, but we all embraced that that was a really, really good thing.
RAPACE: It actually brings up questions about life and death and religion.
SCANLAN: It's a Ridley Scott movie...
...and in many ways, that's all it needs to be.
Big things...
...have small beginnings.
[English - US - SDH]