The Furious Gods: Making Prometheus

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?

That's what stopped me doing science fiction...

...because l thought how's it gonna be different? How's it gonna be new?

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?

What we thought we knew in the first Alien...

...is just a tiny tributary of what's actually going on.

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.

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.

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.

Inevitably, it's a prequel.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

Yeah. -All right.

Why would you wanna find out about who these people are...

...and who made this and who made what?

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."

lt bowls it, so it goes down, hits the ground...

...starts to roll like a Frisbee across the landscape.

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?

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."

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.

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.

lt's very difficult to build a world of science fiction...

...when you have only a static object and a room to begin with.

I would literally come in and write some new pages...