My name is Terry Rawlings. I'm the editor of Alien 3.
And it was a thrill to work with David Fincher on his very first film,
which was a very difficuIt task, in a way.
And it was nothing to do with David Fincher,
who I think did an incredible job.
And I wish that he had fought for it harder in pIaces
because it became very difficult handIing sort of the front office at Fox. (chuckles)
They never Iet us properly complete the film in Pinewood Studios before we left,
so there were things outstanding for the film.
So when we first got it all together,
it just didn't quite work because of the areas that were missing.
My name is Alec Gillis.
I am the codesigner of the creature effects for Alien 3
of Amalgamated Dynamics Incorporated.
I'm Tom Woodruff, Jr.
I'm Alec's partner in Amalgamated Dynamics,
cocreator of the Alien effects,
and I was in the rubber monster suit.
I'm Richard Edlund. I was the visual-effects supervisor on the show.
It's the last movie we ever did totally photochemicaIly, actually.
(Gillis) Right. This was on the cusp of the digital age.
(Edlund) We did have some digital elements.
When the alien's head cracks at the end it was a digital shot. That was the only one.
- (Gillis) Styrofoam floor. - (Edlund) Yes.
(Gillis) We had a better Styrofoam floor for that
where we'd covered it with metallic dust.
It made a more interesting effect.
I've always been a little self-conscious of those Styrofoam floors.
(Edlund) Plus, that alien juice is pretty mean stuff.
(Woodruff) I think it's interesting that you can fly through space in a Styrofoam ship!
(Gillis) Hey, there's a glimpse... Was that it? That scan, that was a fun scan.
There it is - the multilayered sculpture.
- Are those your star fields too, Richard? - Yeah.
I'm Alex Thomson. I was the director of photography on this movie, Alien 3.
I actually got involved because the original cameraman was Jordan Scott Cronenweth,
who did Blade Runnerfor Ridley Scott, beautifuIly in my opinion.
But Jordan became ill in the first four days of shooting
and had to leave the production.
I was asked to take over,
and I was honored to be able to try and match to his lighting.
(Rawlings) All I heard, and I wouldn't know if there was any other reason whatsoever,
was the fact that Jordan wasn't welI.
We knew he had got Parkinson's. We knew he had that.
You could see he wasn't a fit man obviously when I used to go and talk to him.
He was a great character. I liked him very much.
I knew him from Blade Runner.
I'd met him on Altered States, too, cos Stuart cut that, didn't he?
But I'm convinced it was
the fact that he wasn't well enough to continue.
I know it was a sad loss, but at the same time, I love Alex's work.
I did Legend with him.
Yeah, and I Iove him anyway.
And I did The Saint with him.
(Gillis) I love this shot, and I love the fact that it's a model.
I just still feel that these miniatures have a quality that CGI spaceships just don't have.
Do you think that, Richard, or is that just me?
Am I being old-fashioned?
(Edlund) Well, it can and it can't. I mean, it depends.
On Air Force One I would never have made any models now.
It depends on the kind of stuff.
(Thomson) This is obviously special effects.
These are models shot by the second unit,
by Tony Spratling, up in the north of England.
(Gillis) So, yes, this is the footage of CharIes Dance's character
approaching, finding the RipIey character on the beach.
For this scene, we at Amalgamated, with our U.S. and British crew,
had to build a replica of Sigourney Weaver.
And it was based on a life cast of her, a head cast only.
She had just had a baby when we had a chance to do it.
That's actually-- I believe that that is an actress,
although I can't tell if that's a stand-in or our dummy.
But that, of course, is Sigourney Weaver.
But she had told us that she would be losing weight, so we had to...
She had just had the baby and we had to extrapolate
what her body would look like, and so you can see how accurate it Iooks in these shots.
There it is. There. That looks just like Sigourney.
It's funny, because we really labor over a lot of these things
and that's the real Sigourney. So I think that's about it for the dummy.
But it was a beautiful scuIpture.
Gary Pollard, who is a very taIented British sculptor,
sculpted that and it was used to save Charles Dance's back.
So that he could carry Sigourney. Those are all the little lice.
They're actually crickets, I believe, that ended up in Tom's suit.
Because the crickets were all over the place and when Tom was wearing the alien suit,
he had them crawling down his neck and into his briefs and all that.
And in fact, there's a fake ox here, coming up,
that was covered with the crickets as well.
And even when we shipped all of our stuff back to LA months later,
we opened the crate and there were full-grown crickets in the ox's body.
So they're very hardy and tenacious little-- Just like the aIien, I guess.
This scene makes me laugh a little bit,
because in the pre-production meetings, David Fincher was joking
that he didn't want any miscommunications.
He said, "This is a team of oxen, not dachshund."
He said, "I don't wanna show up on the beaches in Northern England
with 12 littIe dachshund. I want oxen."
Of course he tells it better than I do.
Again, Sigourney-- You can telI how lean she was in this movie.
She had really worked out and I guess she had just a...
I don't know if it was a few months, six months maybe,
after having her baby.
So this was what became of the beloved characters from Aliens.
There's Bishop and the rest of them.
All of which we labored over. And there's Hicks.
Yeah, that's MichaeI Biehn, that likeness.
A broken jaw and a twisted hand.
I think Fincher kind of liked...
He liked messing with the audience in that way.
I think it was his way of putting his stamp on it
by eIiminating the previous characters except for Ripley.
He wanted to create a world that did not make you feel safe.
He wanted you to be thrust right back into danger
and throw your equilibrium off.
Which I think is part of the reason why fans, when this movie came out,
fans didn't have a great reaction to it, because they expected something
more along the Iine of Aliens.
And as we know now, as we see how Fincher's films have developed,
he is a unique filmmaker, a unique director with his own vision.
And I think that's part of what he wanted to estabIish with this movie.
And there's the team of dachshund.
And that full scale EEV, which was a very cool prop,
very nicely detailed.
This is more of Richard Edlund's beautifuI shots.
All pre-digital. Actually, there were a few little digital components,
like the debris in the air, and so on.
But this was sort of the end of the optical era.
(Thomson) You notice in these sequences,
the camera is near the ground
so the ceiling becomes more important than the floor
and one is shooting up people's nostrils.
This was an approach David Fincher wanted,
which I think is terribly effective indeed
and makes it more distinctive than the other three, rather, in my opinion.
I tried to keep it fairIy shadowy, so that it looks moody.
Where I could, I brought the light from the top
because it's unusual for the light to come from the floor,
but one had to be careful about it obviously.
The difficulty was getting light into the eyes
so we could see what the actors were thinking
but not at the expense of the mood.
(Woodruff) I remember at Pinewood Studios when the sets were going up,
Fincher would have us walk through the sets just looking at the scope of them.
It was truly amazing to see these things go up.
(Edlund) Norman Reynolds is a great production designer. He builds the world.
It's very difficult to control him cos George would tell him on Star Wars
"Don't build that. We're gonna paint it", and the next day - "It's too late. It's built."
(Woodruff) When they sent us over, we said "Why are we going to London?"
They said "It's the sets, the set design, the artistry and the craftsmanship."
And it really was very true.
(Edlund) British actors is another good reason to go there.
Somehow the British accent does a lot for these movies, I think.
Vincent has had a deep, abiding interest in Luddite monks,
and had done a great movie calIed The Navigator,
where these monks dig their way through the earth,
coming out into the 20th Century. It was a great movie. But, anyway,
the original idea was that this was a wooden planet buiIt by the Luddites
and in the bottom of the planet, symbolically, the reactor was kind of hell.
The technology that kept this thing going
was emanating from the boweIs of Lucifer.
What drew me to the project first was that it wasn't a retread kind of sequel.
It was a completely new idea, and some of it survived in the final script.
(Thomson) David was entirely in control from the beginning. He put his stamp on it.
He was the director and nobody ever questioned it.
He was completely in control of the set and everybody hung on his words.
He was definitely doing it. There was no weakness in it at alI.
He was very, very confident in what he was doing and wouldn't be swayed.
He had this vision and that was what he was going to do.
He came under quite a lot of pressure from 20th Century Fox
to hurry up or do it the quickest way or the most expedient way, but he wouldn't listen.
He would do what he wanted to do, quite rightly, in my opinion.
As I say, his compositions are marvelous and the use of the frame, and so on.
David had been a cinematographer before he became a director, so he knew lighting.
He knew what was good and what was bad.
That's not to take away from David Worley, the operator.
His contribution was enormous as weIl.
My name is Paul McGann. I played GoIic in Alien Cubed.
It's fairly standard practice, particularly on such a big venture,
that things are necessarily going to change.
Until that point, I'd never worked on anything on that scale.
But there seemed to be these characters moving around,
particularly when Fincher was there, in unison, watching him or watching us.
Any shenanigans or machinations behind the scenes tend to be kept from the actors,
but we were well aware of the atmosphere
and the changes coming down from on high. That said,
the atmosphere was good.
If there were changes in the strands of the story, then we'd get decent warning.
But it became apparent, even just after two weeks, that there was a chance that
that sequence we just shot may not make it, so we're gonna shoot another version of it.
It seemed expensive...
and just unsure.
I remember when I first met Fincher, Fincher was incredibly energetic.
It was at the start of this 1 2-month process.
I remember seeing him in LA towards the end of the thing
and he was exhausted, naturally.
But at that time, meeting him, he was fulI of beans, full of ideas.
Don't forget, Walter HiIl, David Giler, these people were very experienced filmmakers.
Any of the things that were happening,
obviousIy the advice Fincher was receiving was from highIy experienced people.
(Thomson) It was a nice idea
that Sigourney's wearing a contact lens in the left eye.
And the bruising, I think that's a rather nice touch there.
Most of the sets had ceilings on because we saw the ceilings so often,
so one used to have to hide the light where you could to the best effect.
This going in and out of light... I put a cukaloris on the lamp.
A cukaloris is a shape - just cutouts on a piece of wood.
It creates patches of light that she goes in and out of.
Sometimes it doesn't work
because the actors are concentrating on what they're saying,
and they forget to find a light on their faces.
(Thomson) The light coming from the top was a 7K Zenon lamp,
which gives you very straight beams, which I thought would be quite a good idea.
I shot it up through a mirror because you can't tiIt them down or the condenser burns.
But we had a mirror above the set and I shined it from the floor onto the mirror.
(Woodruff) This autopsy scene was a favorite of Fincher's, too, because we had
created a body of Newt
that had multiple layers of tissue, skin and musculature that could be cut through,
and the bones opened up.
It's a lot of graphic coverage that's not in the final movie.
The body of Newt was actually based on...
Alec and I had done a life cast of Carrie Henn during Aliens,
and whiIe we were in London Bob Keen's shop actualIy had a casting of the head.
We were abIe to get that and remold it,
so we were able to duplicate what the actress had looked like
some five or six years previousIy.
(Gillis) There is intercutting here with the real girl as well.
- (Edlund) She has a lot of fuzz on her face. - (Gillis) Yeah. Backlit fuzz.
(McGann) Even for whatever he was, 26, 27, he'd seen a lot of pictures.
He was a cineaste.
He told me about his background, where he'd come from and how he'd got the gig.
His ideas seemed very cinematic.
Even then he'd joke and say "This is a Hitchcockian bit."
"Here comes John Ford and here comes somebody else", so there are littIe nods.
It was the kind of energy of somebody confident and someone who is a fan.
When we'd work he'd say
"Remember I told you this was that scene from The Third Man?"
And you'd get it, whether it was some shots,
some camera angles, some bit of lighting.
It was nice. It was a bit of bravado, but he was very confident and decisive.
Good to work with, and he also knew and liked actors.
(Woodruff) When we finished the body of Newt with that big incision
we took the body outside and laid it in the snow and took pictures.
And we worked it into a Christmas card for David Fincher.
It said something like "Merry Christmas from the victim of a sIedding accident."
We were very clever! Not like today.
(Gillis) Well, this is much more tasteful than what the original plan was.
(Edlund) You heard the cracking of bones and that kind of thing.
(Woodruff) That's a great reaction.
I think that eye looks great, that messed-up eye on Sigourney is very effective.
(Thomson) Some people think that it takes longer to light because it's a wide screen.
Because it's Cinemascope, the lenses are slower than they wouId be normally,
but I don't find it that way at all.
I think it's... I generally shoot at about f-4 anyway.
A lot of people like to shoot wide open, but I don't.
I like the depth of focus that one gets at 4 or 5.6.
And I don't like to see two shots where one person is sharp and the other one is blunt.
I've never found it a problem to light to the Cinemascope demands.
I actually found a fitting which they use
in operating theaters for surgery and so on,
which I liked the shape of, but unfortunately we don't see it often.
I think there's one shot where we do see it.
It's a circular thing with, I think, four or five globes in it.
I thought the shape was terrific, but, as I say, we only see it once I think.
I never got it in the picture unfortunately cos they played it against the board.
I think when we cut wider we see it, whenever that happens...
There you go. There's the old lamp just for a brief moment.
I wish we could have played it more cos it's a beautiful shape.
Of course, it's the raison d'être of the light -
that's where the light's coming from, so you'd Iike to see it a bit more.
It's always the thing that we're fighting as cameramen, that we have a light source,
and when you find the film's edited,
you never see where the light is coming from.
I did a whole sequence on a picture with firelight, and we never saw the fire.
- (Edlund) Was it 86, his name? - (Woodruff) 85. His IQ.
- He's a lot of fun to watch in this movie. - (Edlund) Yeah.
He could get a job as an airport security guard.
(both laugh)
(Gillis) And the warden - was that Brian Glover? Is that who that is? -
was a wrestler or something?
Cos I know all the British guys on the crew were very excited to see him.
They loved him cos he was a wrestler.
(Woodruff) And everybody was excited from him being in American Werewolfin London,
and doing his lines over and over.
- (Gillis) That's right. - "That's enough."
(Gillis) "That's enuff."
(Thomson) I think by this time I'd said "Why can't we see the lamp, guys?"
And we pulled it into the shot.
It had a sort of curious bluey-green feeI to it,
which I kind of re-echoed in the close shots.
This is Lance Henriksen.
I bought the big winding staircase from this movie.
I had it shipped home and I put it in my house.
That big cast-iron staircase.
(Gillis) The decision to go away from the ox as a vehicle
for the birth of the aIien was, as I recall,
in our postproduction phase, because generally it was felt
that an ox is sort of a cumbersome, slow, non-threatening animal.
And that a faster-moving four-legged animal, more aggressive animal
would be a more interesting host for the alien
and that if it had picked up any of its host's characteristics
it would be better if it came, for instance, from a Rottweiler
than from a beast of burden, which was probably a good move.
Although all of this stuff with the ox
has much more scope to it, which I love.
And there's always something about the...
When you go back in and retroactively change a script,
it's like a house of cards.
If you can keep the whole thing from collapsing that's great.
But somehow, sometimes little changes make it a difference.
And not always for the better. But it's understandable.
I think that the creature...
You know, an ox... An ox alien... Eh, you know.
Not very interesting.
But it's actually quite a nice thing and it was weighted very...
We built it so that it had an armature in it that we couId just add more weight to it.
Sandbags and what have you.
It really was weighing at probably about 300 pounds for this scene,
because it had to... This actor's kicking it.
It can't just bounce around like a foam teddy bear.
It was a queen facehugger that was armor-plated
to look like it carried the embryo of a queen alien,
and we got to redesign it.
I think Gary Pollard sculpted that as well. Yeah, he did.
That wide shot of it is the only shot you'll ever see of it.
But once again, a beautiful dispIay piece in our display room.
(Edlund) There's a miniature about 40 feet wide.
Well, basically to shoot those kind of miniatures you smoke the stage,
and then you have lights underneath to cause that cone of light.
It makes it seem as though it's mighty hot.
It's an awfuI lot of work for that one shot,
but those are the kinds of shots that give a movie the scale that it...
(Thomson) And there's the pit, the molten-lead pit.
I had something like 1 ,000 amps under a large piece of tracing paper.
I don't know how many small units were under there,
but it's almost 1 ,000 amps
shining under that thing just to try and make it look really hot,
and aIso to give the effect on the faces
that the light is coming from that boiling lead.
(Gillis) And then, of course, the scene with the ox bursting...
I think that for the burst through, I believe we did 70 takes
where we had a section of ox ribcage that was rigged to burst open
in a very specific way, and I think that was the most takes
that we did, our unit did - it was second unit - on Alien 3 to get it right.
And it's a very quick cut.
You're trying to tell a story in the briefest possible time
and six frames becomes very important.
You can't just put anything on-screen.
I think that was one of the lessons from Ridley Scott on the first Alien
is that those quick cuts are almost subliminaI, but they're so important.
(Thomson) We used anamorphic lenses and the Cinemascope proportion 2.35:1 ,
which is a constant decision on the part of 20th Century Fox.
I like it because one can compose very well with the wide screen.
I love the actual format.
I think the images are quite nice.
Also, when the curtain goes back in the theater and you see a wide screen,
it means an event picture. It's not an ordinary picture.
But it's tricky with the alien cos you can't show too much of it,
otherwise if you see exactly what it is, it Ioses its shock vaIue reaIly.
Although towards the end of the film we see the shape more,
but they did a marvelous job with all that mucus and stuff.
(Gillis) There's some of the flesh, some of the ox flesh.
Yeah, there's that-- There's aIl those cuts now.
So now we're back into footage that was shot with the creature in LA.
And this was actually...
We built what we called a teenage alien
and retrofitted it to use in this scene.
Originally we built what we caIl a "Bambi-burster."
That's the teenage alien which spits acid at one of the guys in the vent shaft
and served us double duty here. And we built a little rod-puppeted version.
This is a CGI version, which we had the benefit of the CGI
in the 21 st century here, which we didn't really.
We built a rod-puppeted version, and we aIso tried a little dog in a costume.
We tried a whippet in a costume.
And he did pretty good at the audition.
Then once you got him in front of the camera
with all the rubber on, he kind of froze up a Iittle bit.
It was pretty funny. He was a nervous little doggy.
And once we got him in situ, with all those frightening chickens around him
in their cages, he kind of seized up and couldn't perform.
But we buiIt a Bambi-burster rod puppet, which was a one-to-one scale rod puppet,
which had some mechanical stuff in it.
I think we may have shot some elements with it.
But it was never comped, it was never completed.
The decision came down that they were going to go...
Use the Rottweiler instead.
And then when we got back to LA, we started building
Rottweilers and mechanical dog parts and stuff like that for the scene.
So here we were in London with no designs of the alien.
Just sort of a partial build list. We had crewed up
and we had an additional 1 0 weeks so we spent our time
sculpting dead bodies and doing the Sigourney dummy.
And in that time, we were working with Fincher on the design of the alien
and the ideas and testing things like the idea of a miniature rod puppet.
Could a miniature rod puppet work
to achieve the shots of the alien running
at high speed down corridors and so on.
So we would do tests like that. Also, H.R. Giger was involved at that time.
We were all trying to figure out, what's different about this alien
than was seen in the previous films.
What Giger did design specifically for the movie was the Bambi-burster.
That one pretty much served as the bIueprint for the Bambi-burster.
And then Steve Norrington sculpted it.
Also, there's an artist by the name of Chris Cunningham
who, I think he was about 1 9 when we hired him,
he was just a funny, high-energy kid who had actually worked for a couple of years
prior in England doing effects for Bob Keen
and working with Steve Norrington, and so on.
And we just saw this kid as a brilliant sculptor and painter
and he was doing mechanical design and builds and so on.
So we relied a lot upon him. He did the alien's head
and he sculpted the miniature rod-puppet alien
that Boss Films then photographed and puppeteered.
The British crew - we love those guys, because they're so...
The approach to the work is so different but they're hilarious peopIe.
They're really practical jokers
and they do great work as well.
(Thomson) The commissary or canteen, whichever you'd like to call it,
is one of the lighter places in this prison complex because it's lit from the top.
I purposely tried to keep the fluorescent lights above different colors.
I mixed the tubes so that it looked more run-down, less maintained,
like they'd just put in any kind of tube that they had handy.
I think the use of the frame is marvelous with the close-ups,
and the composition's terrific,
and this is mainIy, well, entireIy due to David Fincher.
He would position the camera meticulously on each shot.
Coming onto the production four days late, most of the questions had been answered,
in that I guess that David Fincher spoke to Jordan Cronenweth about how he saw it
and aIso to the production designer, and so on.
But that had been done before I got onto the production.
They were four days into shooting,
so aIl the decisions had been made.
So I was faced with just getting on with it, basically,
trying to match to Jordan's first conception of it.
(McGann) I went up to Pinewood and was introduced to David Fincher,
who, incidentally, I remember...
We stood outside this office he was using,
in this little corridor, and I stood Iooking at him.
I think at the time I would've been 30 years old,
but he could've been no more than 25, 26.
And we stood there and chatted and small-talked,
and I thought "This kid's nice."
And he said to me "Are you waiting for me to take you in to meet the guy?"
He said "I am the guy."
I was embarrassed, but we laughed about it, but we got along instantly.
Then he took me into this office,
where I remember on the walls there were drawings
and there was a model on the desk, a kind of Chinese puppet theater kind of model,
which he got behind and operated.
He seemed very... Well, he is very briIliant, very taIented.
(Woodruff) So this is the scene where we get to see the aIien in its next stage of evolution.
We created a puppet just from the waist up
because it's only seen inside this air vent when it spits acid at this guy.
This was the puppet we used when it first comes out of the dog,
and there's a close-up of the dog chestburster when he hits the floor.
We got a little extra use out of this.
The difficulty with this one was that we created a whole transIucent, urethane head.
We wanted to get that feeling of this translucent, pulpy, alien look to the head,
and we did it with urethane. Unfortunately it's very heavy.
It's got a good look, but became an unwieldy,
difficult puppet to maneuver and operate.
(Thomson) I think this moving fan was a great idea on Norman Reynolds's part.
A marvelous effect with the sort of fan shapes going around.
It helps to set the mood and, because it's moving, it gives excitement, and so on.
(Edlund) Don't look too close, now.
(Gillis) There's aIways somebody that sticks their head in the hoIe, isn't there?
(Edlund) Oh!
(Gillis) There was a makeup on that guy's face, too.
But it was hard to see.
(Edlund) Well, that's a classic example of less is more,
like the hugger in the original Alien.
It was a few frames, but it sticks with everybody forever.
(Woodruff) Yeah, that was great coverage and editing.
It really makes the puppet work well.
(Edlund) We always depend on editors and sound-effects people to make us look great.
(Gillis) You watch this stuff in dailies and you go "How's it ever gonna work?"
And then the sound effects of whipping tails...
Jim Cameron used to say that as a way to make us feel better after a shot -
I think he thought he made us feel better -
"Don't worry. This is aIl 70% sound effects."
I guess that means we only accomplished 30% of our goal!
(Thomson) It was a marvelous cast, actually.
I'd never worked with Sigourney before,
but she's quite intense about what she does.
She cares a great deal.
It would be very easy, having established Ripley,
to just walk through it and say "Well, RipIey does this and Ripley does that."
But she reaIly searched for the meaning of what she was doing.
A consummate actress, I must say.
And Charles, of course, was most beautifuIly cast as the doctor.
He's very accommodating.
He knows filming, he aIways hits his marks and he's very kind and considerate.
He knows everybody's name on the film, right down to the girl that gets the tea.
He's very, very nice. AbsoIute gentleman.
Actually, the coIor of the sets helped what I was trying to do, because they were gray.
White walls are terrible because they sing back at you, but this gray helped.
I could get light onto it, and yet it wouIdn't blow back on me.
I think it was very brave of Sigourney to agree to shave her head.
Not many actresses would have that kind of courage.
And she still looks good even with no hair.
Brian Glover is a very strong presence, I must say. A great actor.
I think he used to be a wrestler or a boxer at one time before he became an actor.
(McGann) I liked Sigourney Weaver. She was clever, charming, intelligent.
She seemed, um...
I even liked the impression that she was, in fact,
rather more for theater in New York and literature,
than this particuIar lark.
She never said as much, but I always got the impression it was all, not beneath her,
but, you know...
Movies are OK, but theater's where it's at. I liked that.
We had some good conversations and she gave as good as she got, as is well known.
She palpably had power, control, but never wielded it or made you feel uncomfortable.
No, she seemed charming and good to work with. A fine actor.
If she didn't like you, you'd soon find out about it,
but then this is a professional scene, a professional outfit. I liked her.
She demanded respect, and she got it.
And these changes'd come by, these script changes,
and we'd hear news from the front,
and you'd take it in your stride.
Where my character was concerned, Golic,
there was this whole other subplot of the story for people who may not have seen it.
When we shot the footage, Golic escapes from the sanatorium,
from the hospital wing.
He kills somebody, breaks out of there
and he goes to where the monster is incarcerated
and manages to free the monster in order to appeal to the monster, to join forces.
A "You and me, monster,
can go and kilI them all, they alI deserve to die" kind of scene.
We shot this scene.
Again, this is nothing unusual for a picture of this scale.
We shot two or three different endings.
If you were undecided, you would decide later.
This is fairly standard, but it kept you on your toes.
And also you could run a sweep as to which ending they were going to use.
If you were lucky, it might be yours! It was like a multiple-choice thing.
I worked on a Spielberg picture once, and it was exactly the same circumstance.
Spielberg is good enough to call on the telephone and say
"You know I told you I shoot three pictures at once? You ain't in the final picture."
But what can you say?
You enjoy the experience. You put it down to experience.
WiIl I be A: in this picture aggregateIy for 59 minutes,
or will it be B: four and a half? Most of my footage will end up on the floor.
Same gig. It's just down to Iuck.
The atmosphere was good and we laughed a lot.
It was Boy's Own stuff - there were no females, apart from Sigourney.
The atmosphere was very male,
which does drive you nuts after three or four months of it.
It was like being a kid, but if you can't generate that kind of vibe...
Fincher understood that absolutely.
That's what makes him a great director - he understands acting is play.
In the end, you generate this atmosphere and you shoo the actors out.
You shoo them into it. That's how it went.
I thought he did fantastically well just to hang on to his confidence and to his style,
and I think he's been vindicated as well.
The picture, from what I could see, was good.
I'm gIad as well to see that the opinion of it amongst viewers and ordinary people
in the last ten years seems to have grown.
People's perception of it, people's regard for its qualities has actually improved.
It's become a picture that, perhaps, now is viewed as very underrated.
Years later it's held up, it's held up well.
(Gillis) Tom and I were very interested in using materials that were more transIucent,
and that led us to create a Bishop dummy here
that was made out of gelatin.
The only problem was that geIatin doesn't do weIl in steam and rain,
and if you'll notice there's steam and rain in this shot, but there wasn't supposed to be.
(Woodruff) Not at first. We got the go-ahead that it'd be OK.
It was gonna be cooI and dry.
(Gillis) See that little rag around his wrist?
We had to wrap that around his wrist cos his wrist just spIit in haIf somewhere in this,
so we had to kind of dress it around.
The whole thing was melting!
(Woodruff) Take after take, he was losing a layer of skin with each successive take.
(Gillis) We shouId have been warned because Yuri Everson, one of our main guys,
was working on that modeI in the studio,
doing some meticuIous work with the gelatin,
and he had a desk lamp posed right over the head.
When he moved the desk lamp, it was a little too close to the face and it all sagged,
like it was palsied from a stroke or something.
So there was a little bit of a history to that choice of materials.
(Thomson) This is a set that was built on the 007 stage,
which is metal clad with concrete floors.
It was very cold anyway, even in summer.
The actors get a sense of how cold it is because it is cold.
Another great set by Norman Reynolds. Full of mood.
It's difficult with these magnesium flares.
Obviously, they're so hot that when you pan onto them, they give you a reflective ring.
In fact, I didn't mind the effect. I thought it was quite good.
It doesn't light the actors, but it's effective to see it.
In fact, lens flare is a mistake,
but it's because the lens is made up of different sections of glass,
some convex, some concave.
Often when you get bright light on the edge of the frame,
it reflects back through the elements of the lens
and creates that kind of ring effect.
You sometimes see it when people pan on exteriors with sunshine.
When they pan across the sun, you get the same effect back in the Iens.
Generally speaking, I find it unpleasing,
but in certain circumstances it can work for you, as in this case.
I think it's quite acceptable that we see these flares, as if the light source moves,
because the reflection comes back through different parts of the elements.
But I think it's acceptable in this case, and, in fact, enhances the image.
Normally speaking, on exteriors, I would do everything to obviate that.
(Gillis) This was the first appearance of the adult alien.
This was the one where we had Tom in the suit and on a little teetertotter
so that he could rise high above the guy.
Quick cuts, as is the usuaI for these films,
but it's nice to get a sense of scale out of it.
Fincher was interested in putting the creature in different positions.
In the attack scene, as I recalI, he's on the floor and something strange goes on here.
There he is, on the teetertotter.
And there he is, sort of, who knows what he's doing.
Fincher loved the idea that you couldn't teIl.
The guy was hanging upside down and Tom was tickIing him or something.
- (Edlund) We had the one on the ceiling? - (Woodruff) Yeah.
(Edlund) Tom could actually run through shots in his suit.
I remember you standing there with your Adidas shoes on, other than the alien suit.
(Woodruff) They were Nikes. I still get sponsorship money from Nike.
(Edlund laughs)
(Edlund) But we buiIt at one-third scale.
There it is.
(Gillis) That's the suit still.
(Woodruff) This was a fun shot where you can see
the alien up on top tearing into this guy.
We were up there for a good part of the day because I had to have leg extensions on
because there's one leg hanging over the wall.
We got to a lunch break, and I stayed up there in costume during lunch.
(Gillis) And this is the mechanical Bishop. This is one we built animatronically.
We talked with Fincher and decided to go animatronic on this, as opposed to makeup,
so that we could really crush the head in.
The idea was that she jump-starts him by hooking him up to some battery devices.
Parts of this are... That's our geIatin guy again, a dummy guy.
(Woodruff) That's my hand, right there.
(Gillis) We built one in London for these connecting shots,
but we didn't feel that we would have the opportunity, the resources
to build it quite the way it needed to be to do lip-synch and this kind of facial emotion,
so when we got back to LA we built one.
Dave Nelson was the mechanical designer.
David Anderson did a sculpture of the Bishop character,
basically working from reference from an old head cast,
but it's got about, I think, 25 servo motors in it.
Fincher really wanted you to feel reaI pathos for him,
he kept saying like Robert Kennedy when he was shot.
We had all the white blood pumping out.
- (Edlund) It was a great sequence, guys. - (Gillis) Real hand in the foreground, um...
Again, translucent skin materials.
This was urethane. This was before silicones.
We really started using silicones with animatronic skins on Death Becomes Her,
which was about six months after this.
So this was urethane. It was stiffer, but still had some translucence.
There was a beautiful profile shot of this that Fincher opted not to cut into the film,
but it really showed the translucence of the skin.
(Henriksen) There's a scene in here where the Bishop doll is aIl trashed up.
I did that voice for the doll.
(Thomson) I was quite pleased with this practicaI lamp,
which is creating the source of light on Sigourney's face,
as you can see by the moving shadow on her forehead, created by the practical Iamp.
I'm pIeased because normalIy you'd like to film a scene
with the lamp itself but the source becomes so bright it flares out the lens
and doesn't give you the effect required,
so you have to augment it with another kind of lamp.
But you reaIly get the feeling that she's lit by this lamp.
The separation between the shadow side of her head is created
by just lighting a bit on the wall behind her, so that you see the shape of the head.
I think it's quite an effective shot.
Not on this particular picture,
but when you have actors with false hairpieces, often you can see the join.
You have to help it with the lighting by just shading it a bit
or changing the angle of the light so that you can't see
the neck join, in a wig for exampIe.
And quite often contact lenses are quite noticeable.
If the light's at an acute angle, you see the edges of the contact lens,
so you've got to help that as welI. Those little things, you know.
You have to keep your eye on the actors
all the time because they're not aware of how they look,
and aIso they get so absorbed in playing the part
that they forget quite often their instructions about lighting.
You can only suggest it, you can't tell them what to do
because you're there to help them.
It's part of the artistry of a cinematographer,
if you have a leading lady who's probably getting on in years,
you have to put the light where they'd look their best,
unless, of course, they are playing a part where they have to look bad,
but that's rare.
You have to kind of iron out the wrinkles if you can, make them look their best.
This is not confined, of course, to female actors, but male actors as well
cos they get old in the same way that anybody else does.
Outside the window, of course, is a backing, a painted backing.
It's not actually a set.
It's quite nice because the window beyond that you can see
has got silver paper on it,
which we Iight to make it Iook as if it's a lit window.
Also, you have to balance the practical lamps on set.
If they're too bright, they flare back
on the lens so you have to get them to a spot where they look
as if they're lighting something, but they're not actually.
Also, you have to know
how deep the shadows can be and stiIl see detail in them.
It's nice to have deep shadow, but you've still got to be able to see the eyes.
And I think the balance here is quite nice.
It's a nice sort of soft crosslit thing,
but you can still see the other eye and you know what they're thinking.
And also, of course, the continuity of sequence...
You show it through each shot separately,
but you have to maintain the feel and continuity of light in each different shot.
(Woodruff) So this scene has some great overlapping imagery of effects.
The first thing we'll see is the alien creature as it makes its way into the hospital room.
It's done by seeing reflections and distorted angles of it
through the different medical instruments.
And it was a...
This was a stunt man coming down on wires for part of it.
Then he would invert,
and then I was in the suit doing the actual attack through the plastic curtain.
(Edlund) There's a miniature shot of the alien running up,
then it cuts to a close-up of Tom.
(Gillis) We did do a fake head of CharIes Dance - it's coming up here in a minute -
where the creature punches a hole in his head.
And we had to do a head cast of CharIes in an extreme expression.
And as I recall, he was great about it.
He's actualIy, for as serious as this character is, he was a very jovial guy.
(Edlund) Yeah, I guess it was like an animatronic head, dripping.
In order to do this movie, we built a complete siIent motion-control dolly
that couId go at running speed, which we wound up never needing to use.
You could actually run with it at high speed and it would repeat,
and it was quiet enough to shoot sound.
Of course, when we got to England to set it up for the first shot,
nothing worked.
We were tearing our hair out and found out the system wasn't grounded
because they had run an extension cord into the hallway.
But then, once we found that, we didn't have any problems.
But that was in order to enable us to shoot scenes with pans and tilts,
and then scaIe those moves to shoot
the scenes back at the studio
with a rod-puppet alien one-third scale...
with a moving camera, so it wouldn't skate around in the scene.
(Gillis) I think this rod-puppet technique is very interesting.
I think it still has some validity now, even in the digital era.
- (Edlund) Yeah. - And probably now, I don't know...
Well, I guess you'd stiIl have to do the motion-control stuff to match moves.
(Edlund) Or track it now. If you're gonna do a CG character, you can track it.
(Gillis) But you wouldn't be able to track like that
with a miniature puppet, would you?
(Edlund) You'd have to use motion control. It's a real mechanical lollapaIooza.
(Gillis) But there is a nice presence to it that reaIly looks like a physical thing.
It gets around some of the difficult issues of CGI, in that the lighting is pIaying on it.
(Edlund) And the director can direct it.
Fincher could come by and direct the puppet.
Five guys, you know, operating this character against bluescreen,
there were some pretty bizarre mountains of equipment to get these shots working.
And flags, and stands, and wires everywhere.
Nothing like the old needle to make your skin crawI.
(Gillis) Swiss-made, too.
Something's happening.
- (Edlund) Here he comes. - (Gillis) So there's the alien.
Here comes Clemens' head.
We had a pneumatically operated attack tongue.
There it is.
And here comes the shot of the first rod puppet.
(Edlund) Right. It was quick.
(Gillis) It was. And then into the animatronic head.
That's that shot that they used so much in the advertising.
(Edlund) Right.
Mm.
(Gillis) I think that quick cutting works very welI. I like that.
(Edlund) If you leave the audience with not having seen enough,
then their own imagination fills in what you want them to.
If you show 'em too much, they get tired of it.
(Gillis) This attack was actually the first thing we shot - wasn't it, Tom? -
with the alien,
and as I recalI the paint didn't quite match the arms.
I'm aIways feeIing like I'm seeing paler hands than arms on this shot.
I think this was a stunt man, on wires, reaching down...
(Woodruff) Hanging down, upside down.
(Gillis) So, you can freeze-frame it on DVD,
and I think you'Il see a clear demarcation between glove and suit.
Or maybe you won't see it. Maybe I only saw it.
(Woodruff) You worried about nothin'. (Gillis) I guess so.
I was given not enough information.
My mind filled in the gaps.
(McGann) Ten days in. Things became slightIy problematic.
Maybe problematic because, maybe I was doing a hammy American accent, or...
I remember there was something.
I can't remember the exact circumstances, but we had to stop for half a day.
And I got the impression that Fincher was too kind to say it, but it was my fault.
I was sent to the dressing room for a lie down.
We'd already shot some footage of Golic in a straitjacket
and I'm doing the thing with the teeth, and the Charles Manson accent, as I saw it.
But anyway he said "Paul, there's a problem."
"There are problems" and then he said, "Can you do it like a Brit?"
I remember he said "Drop the accent." The accent was obviously awful.
But I remember he said to me "We've got a problem."
"Americans have a problem with this image of... this Mansonesque thing, if you will."
He said "You don't wanna relish it too much."
"It's a little bit... It's this fine line, all the time, of entertainment laced with..."
"You don't wanna make things too real."
I think he was being very kind. He said "You're playing it too well."
"But we wanted to play it for laughs slightly more."
But these are pretty standard things between directors and actors, say,
when things are slightly problematic.
(Gillis) This movie seems to have...
My take on it was it was more popular in England and Europe
than perhaps the second one was, or that at least they admire it more.
And it is the movie that seems to grow on people.
It's not what people expected, but they can't deny the quality of it,
and that it is really a pretty uncompromising vision.
It's just relentlessly grim, which is exactly what Fincher wanted.
- (Edlund) And it was gonna be the last. - (Gillis) Yeah. Yeah.
Which was why the whole suicide thing at the end.
(Edlund) Right.
(Gillis) Which I thought was a very bold idea from the studio - to give them credit -
to say yes to that, Fincher and Sigourney, you know.
I thought it was very brave of everybody.
(Edlund) And she was the harbinger of the new look.
You know, the skull head.
(Gillis) That's right.
(Edlund) And when they had to reshoot the scenes at the end,
she had to wear a skullcap.
She wasn't gonna do that again.
(Gillis) Right.
(Gillis) Richard, you enhanced some of this stuff, didn't you?
(Edlund) Yeah. We built the whole thing in black armature and now it's gonna blow up.
(Thomson) Here we have the beginning of the fire sequence,
which was quite an operation, really.
It was actualIy quite dangerous because one time we had a backdraft, I think they call it.
And a couple of the guys got burnt, incIuding one of the firemen.
So these stunts were all shot by the second unit,
in the capable hands of my dear friend Tony Spratling,
who did a beautiful job here.
Obviously, we shot the stuff with the main artists,
but Tony matched my images beautifuIly, I thought.
Tony Spratling, of course, had done two or three second units for me on other pictures,
so we know exactly what each other's thinking.
So our colIaboration is always quite successful.
We don't have to speak too much about what we're going to do.
He's a very good man.
(Gillis) Yeah, we were there for the set-up of it, and we thought
maybe it would be better to watch this from behind the video monitors.
But there were some huge explosions.
They're aIso really seamlessly embellished by Richard Edlund
and his guys at Boss FiIms, where they were shooting some miniature explosions
and comping them in over the existing explosions. Really beautiful work.
(Thomson) It was quite a sequence, this.
And obviously, you know, as I say, difficult to shoot.
Well, I mean, you can't underexpose flame.
Flame is always going to be very bright.
But the thing is to get the surrounding colors to match the firelight, so to speak,
to suggest that the light is coming from the fire.
Cos you do have to augment it. You can't just Iet firelight do the job.
You have to also... Cos it's so bright that it just flares out everything.
So you have to color the Iamps, make them warmer,
more orange to match the firelight.
And the thing is to go for a deep exposure, if you can,
to bring the light levels up,
so that the flame is more orange.
Because if you shoot it wide open, the flame is so bright that it just flares out,
becomes so white it doesn't look like firelight, you know.
So you have to color the Iamps and get a good exposure
so that you bring the Ievel of the flame down to make it look natural.
(Gillis) This really was the last time not working with digital.
This was for the most part, a practicaI movie.
Even the shots of the alien running around,
which would normally be done digitally now,
were all rod puppets photographed against a blue screen
and composited optically in.
Things Iike the alien shadow, or earlier in the beginning of the film
the debris bits flying through the air, those were added digitally.
So it was little touches of digital work starting,
but remember this was before Jurassic Park, this was even before T2.
We were working concurrently to T2. So the digital revolution had really not hit yet.
And a lot of people have assumed that the creature is digital.
But a lot of people were disappointed to discover it wasn't.
Even though there are many shots of the miniature creature
that look every bit as convincing as the best of the digital stuff.
Since then, obviously, we work a lot with digital companies overlapping.
But I still believe that it's the mixed bag is the best way to go.
When you have something practical, when you have an animatronic performing on set,
you set the bar for the digital artists.
They are now not working in a vacuum,
they're now not imagining what the lighting would be like
or trying to duplicate by looking at images of silver and gray balls
photographed on set.
You've got it right there. You know what the slime looks like,
you know what the weight of a creature looks like as it moves through space.
You can see it contacting actors and interacting
and the digital work always looks better when there is a practical piece to refer to.
That's not a popular thing to say in a room when you're bidding on a project,
when you're talking with the creatives, because, unfortunateIy,
the industry in digital effects is huge and there's a lot of overhead to pay for.
And there's a lot of people who promote exclusively the digital approach
because they have a lot of expensive equipment
that they get rid of every two years, because the next piece comes along.
And they gotta pay for it. I don't think that's a good way to make films.
I think that what you need to do is you sit around with the director and creative team
and you decide on a shot-by-shot basis what the best approach for the movie is.
Not for your company, not for promoting a technique.
And that's why Aliens to me still holds up.
Because that's exactly what the process was there. It's what's the best technique
for this shot. Aliens is a completeIy practical movie.
And there's a lot of great stuff. Not that it couldn't benefit nowadays by digital,
but it certainly is dynamic and holds up.
But then we are-- Tom and I have a company
that we have intentionally stayed at a certain scale.
We are intimately involved with every detail of the work that's produced here.
So I kind of have a little bit of a anti-corporate mentality.
But unfortunately that's what the effects world has become.
It is corporatized.
And it is... They are dream factories.
That's the term that people love to use
and to me it has a kind of rotten undertone to it.
So we're going to stay here as long as we can
doing high-quality practical work, real work.
And as long as peopIe see a value to it, we will be here to contribute to it.
And hopefully not sink in to this conventional wisdom necessarily
that does seem to pervade effects these days.
(Gillis) So these in this extended cut, I do think you get a better sense
of who these characters are.
I think one of the problems with the film is that,
by the time the third act is coming around,
you see a lot of bald-headed guys getting killed.
But they're fun characters. They each did have an identity.
And particularly, I think, Golic.
The little crazy guy got some of his stuff excised a Iittle bit much.
When he releases the creature, you see that he's nuts.
And his experience in meeting the creature,
he has sort of interpreted it a littIe differently
than someone who's not quite as bent might,
and so therefore he feels it's his duty to release the creature.
Sort of like a Renfield and Dracula kind of relationship,
which I thought was interesting.
And it added a little bit of cIarity to this whole scene here.
This is, again... Look how beautifulIy this stuff is shot.
Fincher was very much into these browns and sepias.
Well, the alien in Alien 3
was stilI more of the blackish...
The black, black alien.
But because of the Iighting and the color timing and so on,
he does pick up this sort of overall sepia tone
of the color scheme of the film.
Whereas in the second film, even though there were browns
in the body of the alien, there was a lot of blue light
that was being used, and that reflects off the glistening slime.
So they feel more blue-black.
And this one feels a Iittle more sepia.
And actually, in Giger's work, if you look through Necronomicon,
you really do see two different tones.
You can see the blue-black and the brown-black.
And so we opted more towards the brown-bIack.
And, again, every one of these films...
What's great about the Alien series is that every one of the films
has the stamp of each director on it.
No matter how you interpret that, or whether you like that or not,
each movie is stylistically its own film.
All owing to the original, but still maintaining some of its own quality.
Alien 3 is one of the few movies in my career
that peopIe keep coming back to. I keep hearing that.
When we bring peopIe through the studio or talk about what we've done,
very often people will say, "You know, Alien 3, I didn't like it when it came out,
but I saw it again recently and that is a great movie."
And I think it's true. After Aliens peopIe were expecting a very different film.
They were expecting something that was maybe more action,
kind of a fun rollercoaster ride.
And they made some very bold choices, I thought.
Like, welI, hiring Fincher for one thing,
who had not directed a feature film prior to this.
Killing Ripley, that was pretty daring.
And I think once you can evaluate it on its own terms,
as opposed to what your expectations were,
people do realize that it is a strong film.
Not that it doesn't have its problems, but it's got a lot of great things going for it.
And we have a real deep connection to this movie and we're very proud of it.
This scene has a glimpse of an effect
that we did to show an interior body scan.
And the idea was that it would show a queen alien chestburster
nestIed right next to Sigourney's heart.
And its heart is beating as her heart is beating,
and we built a little interior body.
There's some of the interior down by the pelvis.
And we actually hand-puppeted the beating of the heart,
and then we had a littIe bladder inside a transparent alien puppet.
That's her intestines, I think.
But it was used on a monitor and it becomes a little harder to make out.
I think Jeremy Hunt sculpted the body parts,
and Gino Acevedo sculpted the little alien.
Let's see if you can really tell what it is.
There's the beating heart. There's the upside-down little alien.
I don't think you can see its heart beating in the way the film was processed,
to give it a negative kind of look.
But it was fun. I think Richard Hollander
at Video Image photographed it and...
- (Edlund) Processed it. - Double exposed it to create the layers.
(Edlund) I think it camouflaged it so you can't reaIize what it is.
(Gillis) But it gives it an interesting look.
(Edlund) Mm-hm.
(Rawlings) You can see the tribute to Alien 1
when you see the way this was shot.
It was like the time you took over everything.
But we've moved forward to a different time, and they'd had Alien 2,
which was a completely different movie.
A great movie, I think, but a completely different styIe.
And to revert back to the original style that we had for the first one,
I don't think was acceptabIe at the time, and that was the problem.
David often said to me it was one of his favorite films and Ridley was his hero.
And when we started work on the fiIm,
I could tell that he wanted it to be as Alien was.
I mean, obviously a different story, but with the same sort of tension,
the same sort of pace about it.
And that's what we tried to achieve.
Cos wasn't it gonna be directed by Vincent Ward?
Yeah. Cos I met with him about it,
then I didn't hear any more about it and then they said this young man's gonna direct it.
I got phoned up to meet with this director of Alien,
but through him I got a phone call to meet with Vincent Ward.
He was in London. I met him and we talked about the first one,
and generally about work.
And I left him.
It seemed very amicable between the two of us,
then I didn't hear any more for ages,
and I finally got a call to say that the directors had been changed.
It was now going to be David Fincher, and I'd meet with him at Pinewood Studios.
And I liked him as soon as I met him.
Then after we'd been going for a short while,
the line producer was changed and Ezra Swerdlow came in.
I cannot remember who the first one was.
(Edlund) The Sulaco was left from the last movie.
We had one shot of it to remember it.
It had to be modernized and tricked out for this show,
and there it is.
(Gillis) You borrowed that back from Bob Burns, who had been given it?
- (Edlund) I think you're right. - (Gillis) Burns really helped this series out
cos on Resurrection we also got the queen-alien head
that Jim Cameron gave him,
and refurbished that.
Thank God he's around. He saved Fox a lot of money.
(Edlund) That was nice of him.
At Fox there's some wonderful people, and good that they saved a few bucks.
(Thomson) When you're setting up a shot, sometimes you get an accident.
Somebody wrecks something and you think "Oh, let's do that."
That's a Iovely thing about filmmaking - you have the ability to change your mind.
And there's certain things that happen by accident
that are just magic.
I'll always remember Conrad Hall talking about putting a Iight through a window,
and this guy's in a room, and it's raining outside and it created tears,
shadows of the rain dripping like tears on the man's face.
Purely by accident.
(Woodruff) There were elements here that were shot months and months apart.
She sees, or she thinks she sees,
the alien tucked up here among the ductwork and pipes.
It was a miserabIe sequence. I had to be in this suit, completeIy still,
while David shot her POV.
But, again, we had dumped these crickets aIl over the suit.
This is the scene I remember most vividly.
The crickets had crawled down through the neck in the suit and I could feel them.
It's like they were moving between my skin and the suit.
I know these things weren't biting me, but you could feel their little claws digging.
- (Edlund) Their evil intent. - (Woodruff) I knew they were after me.
(Gillis) There was some oxygen deprivation too,
cos he couldn't really breathe as well as he should have. He was all crammed up...
(Woodruff) All this stuff of Sigourney, shot in London,
I'm up on top of that ledge overhead,
waiting for this moment to crawl out and fall on her.
This is the cricket shot.
(Gillis) So this is a mislead here, right?
(Woodruff) I was crying, I was weeping inside that suit.
These lines, I remember hearing them over and over during each take,
and I was wedged up in this Iedge.
And Alec was behind me, giving me something to push off against
so I could crawl down and drop off in front of her.
(Gillis) Yeah, but the cue came, right?
And you, Tom, I couldn't believe it, you were asleep, weren't you?
(Woodruff) It wasn't sIeep as much as I had gone unconscious from the lack of oxygen.
(Gillis) It was oxygen-deprivation apoplexy.
- (Woodruff) It was amazing because... - (Gillis) He was asleep back there.
(Woodruff) Look how motionless I am.
(Gillis) The only reason he gets up to make his cue is that I pounded him on the foot.
His foot was hanging over.
(Woodruff) I'd hear "Action", and Sigourney,
and I would just pass out, take after take.
(Gillis) Well, that's what good dialogue does, Tom.
(Edlund) There a masochistic aspect to this.
But it's so worth it when you sit in the theater and see the audience crawl.
(Gillis) You make them squirm like the crickets did you.
(Woodruff) I am the cricket on their skin.
(Gillis) Wasn't that the song from Beaches?
(Edlund) But it is amazing how much stuff goes on behind the scenes,
that nobody's aware of at all,
that's required to get all this stuff to happen.
And it just fleets by, but sticks in the mind.
(Woodruff) Sometimes.
(Gillis) It's good that people aren't aware of it.
(Edlund) Oh, no. Of course not.
But that's what we're talking about today.
- AIl the nightmares that we... - (Gillis) Yeah, right.
(Rawlings) We couldn't get them to give us permission to shoot what we needed for it.
Then they said "What do you need to make this work?"
And we sat down and discussed this, obviousIy, David and myself.
We knew the things that they hadn't let him complete when we were shooting originally.
So we said "What we need is A, B, C, D, E."
We need to shoot these sequences.
So they had a meeting, and they said "Fine."
"You can shoot A, C and F, but you can't shoot the others."
So, of course, what do you do? You start up, you shoot those.
Then when you put that together,
you needed the ones they wouldn't let you shoot.
So it just went on and on and on.
It's always disappointing when you put so much effort into these films.
Every film you do you put a lot into it, a lot of yourself.
And when it's jeopardized by people other than yourselves...
If you've shot it wrong, or you've cut it wrong,
you got no one else to blame.
But when you're in the hands of others, you cannot change their point of view.
They have the cIout to do what they want with it.
It's just tragic when you see what they can do to so many films.
When you see films that failed, you think
"I'd love to see what their originaI concept was",
because you'll never know.
When Golic cuts the guy's throat, and goes in and Iets it out,
you never see him let out.
They cut that out and I cannot remember why they didn't want that in.
I wish I could remember who suggested it should come out.
It must have been insisted upon by the front office.
And they kept on having us try things and do things,
and it became a fight between the office and the cutting room.
I thought it was a very happy set.
I didn't hear of anything that was going wrong.
These films are difficult. They're difficult to shoot,
and then, to work on them, you need time to make these things work.
It's not like a dialogue film where it either works on the words or it doesn't.
It's far more compIicated to get this mood across.
(Gillis) We also had to do a replica of CharIes Dutton
for a scene where originally you were gonna see his head get bitten by the alien,
but Fincher changed the approach on that and you see him in the wide high shot
getting attacked by the alien in the lead mold.
(Rawlings) It was great. I liked working with him.
I think, I mean, he would have to say, but I thought we worked together very well.
I was thrilled to be working with him, and...
Yeah, he never pressurized me to do it,
and we didn't, we didn't fall out ever.
No, I think it worked very well.
He obviousIy had his ideas, which I tried to translate and make work.
And he listened. He was very good at listening to what you would suggest,
and "Show me", not "This is the way it's gonna be."
He'd say "Show me your idea."
I thought we became good friends.
We used to spend lots of time together when it got to visual-effects stage,
going through this Alien stuff.
And...
I don't know. It's just sad that...
Well, it was sad then, but this is great to see this now.
(Edlund) For the running alien shots we received
a one-third-scale model of the alien,
which you'll see here.
(Gillis) That's a great shot. It's really creepy.
(Edlund) That's one of the first shots we did in motion control.
(Gillis) Five of your guys were puppeteering that. Rods came off of the limbs, right?
And you guys would shoot it at high speed, like 40 frames or something?
(Edlund) We shot some at less than normal speed, some at higher speed.
But we had to control... We had to have depth of field, and...
Because we were close to the thing...
But before all that, we had to figure out how to make it move,
and we'd done all kinds of studies of gazelles running,
and aIl kinds of animals running and walking,
because it had an extra knee like a camel leg, right?
So...
(Gillis) There's Tom. There's a beautiful shot where the doors close behind it.
It just has a beautiful fluid move - this one.
That's gorgeous. That's one of my favorites.
(Rawlings) I loved that Steadicam stuff down the tunnels,
and the points of view of the actuaI creature.
And the way they worked it so they could switch from 24 frames to three,
just like that.
Incredible. Yeah, and it'd spin round.
(Edlund) The other shot of the Sulaco.
There's a painting with the radar dish
as a miniature in the foreground.
(Gillis) This is another nice shot with the torches...
(Edlund) This is the one where he's hanging on the ceiling.
(Gillis) Interactive light and stuff.
(Edlund) That was... Matching all that... That was really...
- (Gillis) And all that's optically printed, right? - (Edlund) Right.
Here we'd pushed the photographic process about as far as it could go,
and we were having problems that we'd continualIy had,
and I was praying for the digitaI revoIution to...
(Gillis) That one's one of the less effective shots.
Was Fincher on set when you puppeteered those shots?
(Edlund) For some of it, not aIl of it.
But Laine Liska and his four cronies, Bill Hedge and...
Forgotten the other guys' names now.
Rick Fichter was my cosupervisor on the show.
Did real good work.
(Gillis) There's another good shot comin' up here where it runs across
the raiIroad tracks.
(Woodruff) For some of these, you had plates shot,
where I would run through the scene in the alien suit, for Iighting reference.
And I remember this one, running through, and I had to...
I was almost blind in the costume, looking out through holes in the neck.
And I had to run over the tracks, and aIso make it through the doorway,
and there was at least one take, where I slammed into the side of the door.
I was bruised for weeks.
My whole shoulder. Slammed into it at full speed.
In the take I bounce back, take a couple steps, and then run through the door.
(Edlund) Here he comes. This shot is over in about... It's comin' up.
(Woodruff) I was disappointed you didn't have the model alien bounce off the wall.
(Gillis) There he goes.
- (Edlund) 20 frames. - (Gillis) If that, huh?
(Thomson) The very warm light at the far end of the set,
I had red filters on the lamps to try and suggest heat
cos they're trying to induce the alien into that pit
so they can destroy it with the molten lead.
So I was trying to give the feeling of terrific heat in there.
(Gillis) That's digital debris flying in the... Is that right?
(Edlund) Yeah, I think it was actually digital debris.
Looks kind of funky actually, to me, now.
(Thomson) And also cIaustrophobic.
After a couple of weeks in these corridors, we were all getting a bit fed up with them.
(Gillis) How many shots of the miniature alien did you do?
(Edlund) There must be 40 shots or something like that.
This stuff is pretty effective. Fincher just puts the anamorphic lens on sideways
on the camera and you get that strange wide-angle look.
(McGann) When you work as an actor on pictures,
for those that don't do it, it might be interesting:
an actor comes in in the middle of the process.
A film might take three years from its inception to when it's screened.
An actor might come in for six weeks, in the middle of that three years.
And there's your contribution.
What happens before and after is not in your control.
By the time this picture came out, I was working on something else.
It's well known that performances and pictures are really made in the editing.
In the editing suite, in the editing process.
(Edlund) Claustrophobic shooting, in all those tunnels for weeks.
(Thomson) This alien point of view was shot with a prime 1 0-millimeter Iens,
which is distorting, and we did a bit of Steadicam.
The Steadicam operator was running down the corridors to get a sense of speed.
He did a marvelous thing, which I thought was very cIever,
that he flipped the camera over whilst he was running,
which I had never seen before.
A very effective move, and, of course, with the running,
sometimes the lamps were kicked by the actors or by the crew running.
It was quite a difficult operation.
(Edlund) Blood spattering, here.
(Gillis) Fast and furious. I think we had a dummy for this.
All you see is his legs, but... That's good there.
(Edlund) Another matte shot.
Many elements for that shot.
It's interesting, there's a couple of movies that were saved
because the effects props didn't work very well.
And one was Alien.
In the movie Alien,
if you had the camera on that thing for more than a second it gave itseIf away.
Ridley set it up so you saw it for less than a second.
And it actually made the movie more...
(Gillis) That first movie really helped establish
a technique for this horror-action stuff.
(Edlund) And Jaws was a nightmare for Steven.
He couldn't get this big rubber shark to work.
But the few frames that it did worked really wonderful.
Whereas maybe, if it had worked better, he'd have overdone it.
Left it on the screen too long, which is always the...
(Gillis) There's Tom tearing somebody apart in the background.
(Edlund) Noshing.
(Gillis) This is where she actuaIly wrestles with its tail, isn't it?
Steve Norrington buiIt this tail.
Took a couple of guys to operate it, with big lever controls. CabIe-operated tail.
With a very sharp and hard blade tip on the end of it.
But one of the great things about having Tom perform in the suits
is that because he's the cocreator, codesigner of the effects,
he has a vested interest in making sure the performance is right,
and it allows us also to not build in zippers or connectors
or whatever that would be unsightly.
And he also doesn't mind having stuff like this poured all over him.
(Woodruff) A lot of these weird alien moves that work because it's just so frenetic...
You're in close, and they're cut welI,
but it's a lot of slamming myself around inside this little corridor.
And you're seeing all the textures and colors.
(Gillis) Didn't Fincher do some stuff with 90-degree shutters?
- There's the puppet. - (Edlund) That's the one puppet, yeah.
(Gillis) 90-degree shutters to create a chattering movement out of the alien.
- (Edlund) Here's another puppet shot. - (Woodruff) I don't know.
(Edlund) Puppet. Puppet.
(Gillis) Remember Alex Thomson had some snoots
he'd put on hand-heId Iights and shine 'em?
You had a guy shining 'em at the mouth of the alien,
so you could realIy see the teeth pop.
(Edlund) Yeah, he's a real vet. Alex is a good cameraman.
(Thomson) Here, I used these red filters on the lens to try and give a feeling of heat,
some of which gives you those deep blacks, which Iooks very nice.
You have to be careful, cos if you shoot something with a red filter,
the focus shifts, and you can't get anything in focus.
It makes everything Iook out of focus.
So you have to mix the red with a little bit of yelIow,
just so that you can hold focus there.
As you can see, they are still a littIe bit soft,
but it doesn't matter, cos it's quite a nice effect, I think.
(Woodruff) When we would suit up in the alien suit, the whole body was one piece.
It was open at the wrists, ankIes and neck.
And we would glue the hands and the feet on,
and keep them on for most of the day.
Part of the reason was that we didn't wanna keep pulling them off, and putting them on,
and building up layers of glue and breaking down the suit,
because they were cosmetic blends, we didn't want to see the edging of them.
So once I was in, including the neck, I'd be in for a good part of the day,
and just stay inside the suit.
Here you can see the whole body, and it works pretty well,
because of the angle and of course, the cover of smoke. The more we hide...
I really Iike the imagery of it, with the big long tail and the spine and everything.
(Thomson) We're now coming to the gallery where the lead is going to be poured,
and I'm trying to give the effect of this extreme heat, from underneath.
There goes the lead into the hole.
A lot of smoke and steam in the effect.
I tried to get some light onto the lead, to bring out the silver,
but in fact it wasn't terribly silver, so I couldn't quite get that effect,
but I don't think it matters anyway.
You can feel that it's hot and burning.
(Woodruff) It was all just gallons and gallons of methyl ceIl
that had been tinted with an aluminum coloring.
And we did have a stunt puppet that was built to take the initiaI impact,
but we did some shots where the weight of all that material was not that huge an ordeal,
and we were able to do it with me in the suit.
(Gillis) And there's a cool thing comin' up here, isn't there?
Yeah, that was that CG puppet. That was a rod puppet covered with...
- And then here comes Tom, covered with... - (Edlund) CG Iead.
And here he comes up the ladder.
(Gillis) You can see that aluminum powder's making Tom sick with every step.
(Edlund) And then our only CG shot in the movie.
- (Gillis) Full 3-D CG, is that right? - (Edlund) Yeah. There. Quick shot.
(Gillis) Actually, didn't we build a rig and you put the cracks over it?
(Edlund) No, that was CG animation.
Not a great shot in retrospect.
(Gillis) You know what, though? I mean, 1 992?
(Edlund) It was, yeah.
And then we had Sigourney on the stage to shoot her in bluescreen,
and she signed a picture for me
"Help, get me the hell out of this movie!"
- "Love, Sigourney." - (Gillis) We see bald-cap
shots soon, that were shot months later in LA.
And Greg Cannom did a beautiful bald cap on her.
(Woodruff) More than a bald cap - it had to have that stubble.
It was much more difficult than a baId cap.
(Edlund) You'd think he'd done samurai movies with the quality of the bald cap.
(Woodruff) This was fun, having Lance back in the role too.
And it's so brief, when Lance gets hit with this Iead pipe.
But we showed his ear had become dislodged,
as Fincher wanted to show that this is the real guy, and not a synthetic person.
(Henriksen) The script had Bishop I and II.
And to pIay the creator of Bishop, who wouId be this guy,
I literally didn't have to do anything, as an actor,
because to pIay the creator of a guy you make Bishop in your own image.
You'd buiId an android in your own image.
It's like when you read the Bible - it's God made man in his own image.
And I thought the outrageous part was Fincher being...
He was a young guy, 27 or something, and when he talked to me about this scene
he was so articulate and so supportive,
I was shocked, because he was such a young guy. He sort of saw inside you.
It was a realIy amazing thing.
(Gillis) For Lance's human character,
when it's revealed that he is actually a scientist
who the Bishop model was patterned after, Fincher wanted a wound.
So we created a torn ear where the whole ear was lifted forward.
And Nick Dudman applied that beautiful application on it
and some blood tubes and that sort of thing.
(Thomson) Obviously I've got flicker boxes working on these lamps,
to give the effect of firelight and the hot furnace.
You can just see it in the background. You can see the light fluctuating.
Just giving the effect.
Once again, it's nice to flicker on several sources at the same time,
because if you do it just on one lamp, it never looks quite right.
It's either too regular or too irregular.
But if you use one more than one lamp at a time, it comes across much better.
(Henriksen) When they hit me in the head with a steel bar here,
they had to put an ear on me, and they used Jack Nicholson's ear from Batman.
And for Sigourney, to see her again - she had had a baby, she had softened,
she was the sweetest person.
It was an incredible revisit to Pinewood.
(Thomson) This is a curious kind of situation for me.
In a moment we're gonna see a wide shot incIuding the pit of molten metal,
and I had a lot of lamps done and some tracing paper.
And a lot of light underneath,
but it still didn't look like a bubbling molten mass.
And I called David Fincher over and said
"I don't know how to photograph this, because you can see the scaffolding."
Then you couId see the different source lamps and he said "Oh, that's alI right."
Then just took his finger to his nose and got some nose grease and popped it on the lens,
and diffused the littIe spot where the furnace was. And it Iooked great.
I was grateful to him for that.
I think you'll see it a minute, in this wide shot.
There you go. That's the shot.
This is a stunt man, who was a really good physical match for Sigourney.
- I mean, he was tall and sIender. - (Edlund) Yeah, right.
(Henriksen) I didn't know who to care for.
I was shocked by the movie, because every guy was a rapist or a murderer,
and then Ripley ends up sleeping with a doctor,
who injected all these people and they died. And so I didn't know who to care for.
It was like nihilism on top of nihilism.
I mean, you couIdn't care for the monster, and you couldn't care for the people,
so I left the theater thinking
how sorrowful the whole thing was.
I mean, again, the image of lead at the end, the vapors from lead.
If you can die from lead paint, imagine what you could do from lead vapors.
(Gillis) It looks great. The cinematography's great, art direction's great.
I think probably the biggest advances have come in the creature stuff.
Even in Resurrection, our stuff was a lot more sophisticated and subtle.
And certainly, with being able to do a CGI alien in that one...
(Edlund) It gives you... Well, you're not trying to put five pounds in a one-pound bag.
(Gillis) What is still very interesting to me is this really is a bridging movie,
in terms of that rod-puppet technique,
that it really does have a connection to the physicaI as well as...
You were starting to do digital stuff in this.
In fact, I remember in the Academy screening,
people were very interested, and asking "Was that an all-digital alien?"
And I remember when you said "No, it was..."
and you noticed there was a disappointment in the air
that it was not quite there yet - the digital work was not quite there yet.
(Edlund) Oh, I announced that this was our last photochemical project.
- So, I mean, that was... - (Gillis) That's significant, yeah.
If you line up alI of Fincher's movies, you can see that it's a Fincher movie.
I still think he did a great job with this.
Not a lot of people could have really pulled it off,
given the obstacles that he was facing. I think he did a great job with it.
(Edlund) He did have a great team, from production designer, camera, you guys...
(Gillis) And you. Don't forget that, Richard.
I know you can't say it yourself, but we can.
(Edlund) Well, I can say you guys. And the track is good too.
You know, Goldenthal. Elliot Goldenthal.
You know, the creature work that you guys are doing now is better than this work,
because you've just been able to play the violin for longer.
If you could start again, you'd have done it differently.
Cos that's the interesting thing about this kind of work -
you figure a way to do something,
and later you figure, I could have done it this way, and it would have been better.
(Woodruff) And even within the context of when this was done,
I think had we finished this movie, and then started immediately right after,
and done it all again, even without any advances in materials or technology,
we so would have done things differently.
It's like anything: the more often you do it, the better you get at it.
(Edlund) What draws me to this business is that it's aIways prototypical.
Everything you do, you haven't done. So it's always interesting and new.
(Gillis) You build off your experiences,
but you Iook for ways to put a different spin on it.
(Edlund) And you're working with a different psychology of people too.
Every director's different... It's like a family.
It's interesting how movies create a family of people, all these crew members,
and they all come together and become this interwoven, weIl-knit group.
And then at the end of the production, they explode.
Then you work together again, but never in that combination.
(Gillis) But it is fun. When we see you here in the hallway,
it's like, "Hey, there's Richard."
And you recall those experiences. It's almost like being war vets or something.
And you say "What happened to...? Where's this guy? He still alive?"
(Edlund) It is Iike going to war, except your enemy is time and money.
(Woodruff) I'll bet you don't hear this kind of warmth and love on the other audio tracks.
(Henriksen) Walter Hill called me and said "Come and do this part."
"Just go to England, have a cup of coffee and a doughnut and come home."
And it ended up being a whole month.
And I made four round trips to England in a month,
to do this part.
The only part that bothered me was being more like Burke, where I'm a corporate guy.
I didn't like that very much.
I don't like playing corporate anything.
(Edlund) The American Humane Society was involved.
Which ones were those? Not the ones in England.
(Woodruff) They were on set documenting everything,
when we did the reshoots here with the Rottweiler,
and having a representative there when the dog's face was shaved,
for finger and grip marks.
(Gillis) The Society was responsible for insisting on the sedative for the dog,
cos Fox just sent over a hammer.
(Edlund laughs)
(Woodruff) It is good to say no animals were hurt in the movie,
and then we'd go out and just beat animals all night long.
But it wasn't for the movie, it was just for fun.
(Edlund) I loved Harold Ramis' comment
that no animals were hurt during this movie, but many hundreds were eaten.
(laughter)
[ENGLISH - US - SDH - COMMENTARY]