Aliens Expanded

Where's Apone?

Get away from her, you bitch!

We all knew, all the actors on it knew

after a week of work that we had something.

I know some people say they watch it every Christmas together.

They watch it every Thanksgiving.

So what are you waiting for? Breakfast in bed?

Isn't it shocking that we're talking about this 40 years later,

and it's a sequel?

I mean, there's gotta be something to it.

At the moment when the chestburster first erupts,

the entire audience just leapt into the air.

And Paxton turned to me and he was like, "Oh, dude, this is gonna be so awesome."

Stop your grinning and drop your linen.

My memory of seeing the completed Aliens was just shock and awe.

I want this thing to go smooth and by the numbers.

The experience was beyond adjectives, because it was just an assault.

If you're gonna only be in one movie in your life,

this was the movie to be in.

It was alchemy, it was magic, it was witchcraft.

Coming around for a 709-er.

Everybody was immediately aware that this wasn't just a hit movie,

but it was something even more important, something that would really endure.

These people are dead Burke.

Don't you have any idea what you've done here?

Jim has a way of pulling you in.

Multiple signals.

And once he pulls you in, he's not gonna let you go.

And I love the film.

The film had such an incredible momentum and drive.

I like to keep this handy.

For close encounters.

Without a doubt, Aliens is the best movie that I've ever been in.

I just don't think there's a flaw,

I can't find anything wrong with that movie.

And it made sense to me.

It's all of my design influences

and all of the story ideas I'd been working on.

I was born to make that movie.

Well, there goes our salvage, guys.

I've had a few, I would say fairly profound experiences in a cinema.

And one of them was the opening night of Alien.

It was at a theater somewhere in Orange County, a big cinema.

And what struck me so much was the sense of presence, of place.

You are there, you are inhabiting this spacecraft with these people.

The rigorous sense of detail, the blue collar aesthetic.

One memory that stands out really clearly

from that film is the plip-plop of the water drops

on the bill of the ball cap that Harry Dean Stanton's wearing.

And he goes into some kind of cooling room or condenser room

or whatever it is, and the chains rustling, clicking against each other.

And in that moment, that taught me a powerful lesson as a filmmaker,

how you create a sense of a tactile reality for the audience.

It's all about sense memory.

The atmospherics and the creation of a genre,

the psychological, claustrophobic

thriller of being locked in space was almost the first of its kind.

I could smell it.

Something about what I was looking at

made me feel like I could smell the oil and smell this and that.

And it was great, it was a great moment in movies.

You could feel it with Ridley Scott

that 2001 was inspiring him to make a film

that was reverent to its source material, that was serious.

That lived in sense of reality.

This is really a look that Dan O'Bannon developed

with John Carpenter for Dark Star.

Ridley ran with that.

He really took that to the next level with his wonderful lighting.

With Aliens, we had that as a jumping off point.

As early as the release of the first film,

there were plans to do another ship coming to LV-426.

A very standard sequel idea, which I'm sure would've worked fine.

They had an idea of the alien actually not having been killed in the first film

and returning to Earth.

They had an idea of the eggs from LV-426

drifting down to Earth in an Invasion of the Body Snatchers way.

Which sounds a little far-fetched, but it could have worked.

But it speaks for itself to see Ripley back in her particular story.

I was actually pitching something else to Walter Hill and David Giler.

They had given me something that they wanted to do,

which was Spartacus in space.

And so I went off and I did this whole genetic engineering story

about this underclass of genetically engineered slaves

that weren't considered human.

And I came back with this epic science fiction concept and they said,

Nah, we just want swords and sandals on another planet.

I mean, frankly, these guys were a giant disappointment.

They didn't really understand science fiction.

They had lucked into a science fiction hit,

and then they were pretending they knew about science fiction,

but they didn't really, especially David Giler.

And he said, "Well, we got this other thing."

He said, "Well, nothing's really happened on it in seven years,

but you could take a stab at that."

I said, "Well, what is it?"

He said, "Alien 2." Kinda dismissively.

And meanwhile, my brain lights up like a slot machine at Vegas

that's paying off a million bucks.

You know what I mean? Ding, ding, ding.

I race home,

I get all my notes for this other thing that I had been writing on.

I called it E.T., believe it or not.

And then some other chump came out with a movie called E.T.,

or, at least I heard that it was coming out,

and I went, "All right, I'll give up that title."

And then I changed it to, I think, Mother.

And so I was writing Mother

because it was about two mothers fighting.

The mother alien protecting its young, and the mother human.

Giler had given me a one-line or two-line concept.

The same place where they found the derelict ship has now been colonized

and they lose contact with the colony and they call in the Space Marines.

And then, this is an exact quote,

"And then some bullshit happens, dot, dot, dot."

And I ran with it.

At the same time that he was writing Alien,

he was also writing Rambo: First Blood Part II.

So he had two different desks

and he played different music

to get him into the head space for the two different films.

There's no bones about it,

without James Cameron, without Ridley Scott,

and for all intents and purposes, without David Fincher,

but that's a different conversation, we would not have the films that we have.

But you can't make a monster film without an interesting monster.

You still don't understand what you're dealing with, do you?

Perfect organism.

Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.

The foundational work that H.R. Giger did on Alien

was really unsurpassable.

The fully developed language of biomechanics

mixed with sexuality and dread and psychological terror

that his images produced

was really like lightning in a bottle.

You look at some of the early concept art by Ron Cobb, who's a brilliant artist,

and some of the other things that Dan O'Bannon had developed

in the early days before Ridley was fully on as a director.

And it wouldn't have been the same.

It would've been probably one movie, and you're done.

I remember when I was a kid going into bookstores

with family and seeing a book by Giger,

and they're like, "No, no, no, no, no, you can't look at that book."

Giger did quite a bit of work on Jodorowsky's Dune project,

which fell through,

and it was Dan O'Bannon who saw his work and realized there's something there.

Certainly we see elements that are phallic,

we see orifices, we see parts

that actually look familiar to us as humans.

And yet the elements are distorted, they're grotesque,

they're exaggerated, horrific.

It was just so out there and beautiful, elegant,

erotic, strange, terrifying, beguiling, it was all these things.

And Giger himself was a very charming man and had a great sense of humor.

We were all very nervous because what Ridley Scott and H.R. Giger

and that entire team had done with the first film

was so monumental and so intimidating

that we thought we were imposters coming in.

I remember Cameron at some point flippantly saying,

"Yeah, no big deal, we can beat that."

I think we watched a screening of it, "We can do better than that."

And I remember thinking, "Oh, God, I'm glad he feels this way."

Aliens, it literally picks up,

apart from 57 years, where the last one ended.

She gets into the Narcissus, she gets into that little life pod, she flies away,

and we pick up with that life pod at the beginning of this film.

I've gotta find that delicate equipoise between it being my film,

but being a proper homage and respectful sequel to Ridley's film.

And I think we hit that balance and we did shift the tone more toward action.

That's okay.

How are you gonna out horror and out suspense Alien?

Never compete head on.

40 meters in, bearing 221, there should be a stairwell.

What if we brought this whole platoon of marines in,

had them armed to the brim?

What could go wrong? This is what goes wrong.

Whoever's alive,

-get the hell out of here, goddamn it! -Just shut up.

God, where's Apone?

How are we today?

Oh, terrible.

Well, better than yesterday at least.

Where am I?

I live and work a lot in my dreams.

Dreams are a source of story, ideas, and inspirations.

James Cameron is able to use dreams in a way that are relevant to the plot,

not as a false scare.

The audience goes into Aliens at that time

with the knowledge of that horrific scene with John Hurt from the first film.

And even though it doesn't pay off in that same way,

he really increased that sense of dread

when Ripley is having her dream

and she pulls the sheet off

and the chestburster is stretching her abdomen out.

That's where everybody goes, "Oh, no!"

She's internalized that horrific moment with John Hurt from her previous voyage.

It's almost like the chestburster is the thing

that she needs to get out of herself,

which is her trauma.

She's not the character you met in Alien.