10 Things You Didn't Know About Ridley Scott's "Alien"

After about a year’s worth of speculation and debates, the truth is finally out there: Prometheus, director Ridley Scott’s long-awaited return to science fiction (opening in theaters nationwide this Friday), is indeed a prequel to Scott’s 1979 sci-fi/horror classic, Alien. But aside from a few narrative connections, the two films couldn’t be any more different. Prometheus, with its starry cast (which includes Charlize Theron and Michael Fassbender), lavish visual effects, and expansive ideas rooted in religion and existentialism, is an extravagant spectacle of the highest order; Alien, by comparison, feels like an expensive yet subtly rendered art-house movie.

Released on May 25, 1979, Alien took a simple plot and shot for the stars. A ragtag crew of space miners, led by female hard-ass Ripley (Sigourney Weaver, in a career-making role), gets an order to detour from its trip back home and stop on an uncharted planet, from which a mysterious signal has been received. Once there, the Nostromo crew’s members fall, one by one, to a variety of extra-terrestrial threats, namely a tall, lanky, reptilian beast with no eyes and acid for blood.

Scott, in a real master’s stroke, spreads the flick’s scariest, most intense bits apart, opting for a calculated and undemonstrative style that’s the polar opposite to the louder, showier aesthetic used in Prometheus. His less-is-more style resulted in two Academy Awards, one of which led to a victory in the Visual Effects category.

With the release of Prometheus, there’s no better time to revisit the film that started it all. It’s certainly one boasting a fascinating back-story, covered excellently in a pair of 2011 non-fiction books, Ian Nathan’s exhaustive Alien Vault: The Definitive Story of the Making of the Film and New York Times critic Jason Zinoman’s ’70s genre cinema investigation Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror.

Using those two rich texts as resources, we’ve combed through the film’s history to assemble the following list of 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Ridley Scott’s Alien, assuming you’re not a longtime aficionado. If so, it can’t hurt to re-learn all about the masterpiece’s dramatic saga.

Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)

Follow @ComplexPopCult

The filmmaker most responsible for the film’s existence is actually Dan O’Bannon, not Ridley Scott.

The lore and reputation surrounding Alien usually center upon two names: Ridley Scott and Sigourney Weaver. The former, deservedly, receives endless praise for his subtle, restrained directorial approach, lending an unnerving quietness to what’s essentially a haunted house movie set in outer space. Weaver, for her part, is the flesh-and-blood face of the franchise, having first cemented her legacy as a revolutionary female badass in Scott’s 1979 series-starter.

Neither one of them would have ever had such an exceptional piece of material to work with, however, if it weren’t for the late Dan O’Bannon (1946–2009, pictured above, left, alongside artist H.R. Giger), who’s credited as one of Alien’s co-writers, but, in reality, is Alien's often, and unfairly, neglected creator.

John Carpenter played an indirect role in the project’s early formation.

All filmmakers have to start somewhere; for Dan O’Bannon, that “somewhere” was the University of Southern California, where he enrolled in 1970 to learn the ins and outs of moviemaking. And it didn’t take long for O’Bannon to make a very close, personal friend who shared his love for genre flicks: John Carpenter, who, of course, would go on to direct the classics Halloween (1978), Escape from New York (1981), and The Thing (1982).

Carpenter, working on a science-fiction-themed student film called Dark Star (released theatrically in 1974), asked O’Bannon to play the project’s protagonist, a kooky astronaut whose ship gets invaded by an alien. Made on the extremely cheap, Dark Star nonetheless showcased Carpenter’s talents to the masses once it screened for people outside of the USC campus, but what outsiders didn’t realize was that O’Bannon, on top of acting, helped to write and edit the film, as well as design the sets and conceive the visual effects.

And, as both Alien Vault and Shock Value tell it, Carpenter wanted to keep it that way. The Dark Star overseer refused to share directing credit with O’Bannon, thus creating a rift in their friendship and an end to their behind-the-camera alliance. The anger and bitterness caused by his Carpenter drama led O’Bannon to start writing his own sci-fi script.

It all started with the facehugger and chestburster aliens.

Before Ridley Scott’s name was ever mentioned, or the title Alien was in anyone’s thoughts, Dan O’Bannon met with struggling writer/producer Ron Shusett to discuss a potential collaboration. O’Bannon had been working on a sci-fi/horror script, but he was stuck with only a first act, so he’d hoped that Shusett’s input would help flesh things out and lead to a completed, sellable screenplay.

The unfinished script’s title was Memory, and, per Shusett’s recollections in Alien Vault, it was a real humdinger. In just that first act, a small, hideous alien latches onto the face of spaceship crew member and, shortly after that, a pint-sized creature busts its way out of said crew member’s chest and hauls ass out of the scene. O’Bannon's unforgettable visual was inspired by his own struggles with Crohn’s disease, a chronic, painful gastrointestinal disorder that he equated to an enemy within, but he had stopped writing after the first act.

Over 30 years later, those first-draft scenes, wisely kept intact by Scott and everyone else who worked on the project, hold up as Alien’s most terrifying images.

Alejandro Jodorowsky, one of cinema’s most psychedelic visionaries, is one of the film’s unsung heroes.

Aside from Ridley Scott, the creative minds to which Alien is most indebted are Dan O’Bannon and Swiss artist H.R. Giger, both of whom worked diligently on the project way before Scott ever signed on to direct. And how did O’Bannon and Giger first connect? Through Alejandro Jodorowsky, of all people.

With his one-two punch of surrealist acid-trips-on-film, El Topo (1970) and Holy Mountain (1973), Jodorowsky, a Chile native, had solidified himself as one of the movie world’s weirdest, most indecipherable, and most daring auteurs. After the success of his two aforementioned pics, Jodorowsky wanted to “redefine science fiction,” and he turned his sights to an adaptation of Dune, author Frank Herbert’s intergalactic exercise in grandiose storytelling.

For help with Dune’s special effects, Jodorowsky reached out to O’Bannon, simply because he liked the latter’s film Dark Star. O’Bannon, a big fan of Dune, jumped at the opportunity, and it was during his brief stint on the ultimately failed Dune process (Jodorowsky’s ideas were, sadly, much bigger than his means) that he met Giger, another of Jodorowsky’s hired hands.

In the wake of Dune, O’Bannon got to work on his own original sci-fi project, called Starbeast, which was eventually re-titled as Alien and put into production under hotshot director Ridley Scott’s watch. And when Scott expressed concerns over the script’s initial alien designs (in his mind, they lacked “elegance” and “lethalness”), O’Bannon showed the filmmaker a book of his pal Giger’s work, titled Necronomicon; Scott was particularly blown away by the painting Necronom IV, which displayed a spitting image of what became Alien’s chief antagonist.

Roger Corman was once sought out to produce the film.

Back in the 1970s, the king of profitable and risk-taking science fiction was cinema was Roger Corman, the B-movie titan known for seeing projects to completion cheaply and efficiently. Once his script was ready for objective eyes, Dan O’Bannon sent it directly to Corman, in hopes of gaining the super-producer’s interest and getting his sci-fi property into production.

Corman, having enjoyed O’Bannon’s script, made him a reasonable (at the time) offer to handle the project’s back-end for $750,000. O’Bannon was ready to shake hands when Ron Shusett, his writing partner and close confidante, told him to fall back and look at the bigger picture. With the huge success of George Lucas’ Star Wars in 1977, major studios were itching for their own sci-fi blockbusters, and Shusett felt that their screenplay could entice fish bigger than Corman to bite.

And he was right—not too long after the Corman interactions, 20th Century Fox’s Head of Creative Affairs, and early champion of Star Wars, Alan Ladd, Jr., bought the script.

Ridley Scott wanted to make the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre of sci-fi films.”

Depending on whom you ask, Alien is either pure science fiction or cold-blooded horror masked in extraterrestrial dressings. Whichever side one falls on, though, there’s no denying the fact that Ridley Scott’s film is as visceral and horrific as genre flicks come, and that’s exactly how he intended it to play.

Before heading into production, screenwriter Dan O’Bannon advised Scott to watch director Tobe Hooper’s infamous The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as a way to see firsthand what the day’s ballsiest filmmakers were doing; prior to Alien, the England-born Scott had no horror experience, with only the award-winning historical drama The Duellists (1977) to his credit.

As the story goes, Scott sat down to watch Chainsaw inside the 20th Century Fox screening room; with the film playing in all of its grotesque glory, Alien co-writer Walter Hill, with a Coke and a hamburger in hand, stopped in to see Scott, viewed the movie alongside him, and never touched his burger or drink the entire time.

That full soda and cold patty convinced Scott that the Chainsaw model was the way to go. The result: Alien’s unforgettable “chestburster” sequence, one of cinema’s all-time great shocks.

Meryl Streep was the casting director’s other suggestion to play Ripley.

Unsurprisingly, the lead character of Ripley was written as a man, and, moreover, Ridley Scott flirted with the notion of killing Ripley off during the film’s third act. Eventually taking the opposite approach on both accounts, Scott found himself in a state of panic, as the production was merely three weeks away from principal photography and the only piece of his cast still missing was the woman who’d embody Ripley.

After an extensive audition process, and the anxiety that 20th Century Fox would can his ass if he didn’t pick an actress in time for the production’s rapidly approaching start date, Scott narrowed his field of vision down to two suggestions, courtesy of casting director Mary Goldberg: Meryl Streep, a hot up-and-comer at the time who had Hollywood’s elite buzzing from her work in 1978’s The Deer Hunter, and an unknown off-Broadway stage performer named Sigourney Weaver.

At the time, Streep was the obvious first choice, but there was one problem: the actress’ actor husband, the massively respected John Cazale (The Godfather, Dog Day Afternoon, The Deer Hunter), had recently passed away from lung cancer (in March ’78).

All involved with Alien felt it’d be in poor taste to proposition Streep with their project in her time of mourning, so Weaver, as the studio brass nervously waited, was brought aboard the Nostromo set to test for the part. A few boardroom meetings, and a humble salary of $30,000 later, and Weaver was officially Ripley.

The adult alien is, believe it or not, a giant penis.

H.R. Giger’s iconic creature design for the film’s homicidal adult alien remains a work of pure genius. Just look at it—all teeth, with skinny, manlike legs and a reptilian disposition, the imposing figure is devoid of any eyes, erasing any and all chances of earning its sympathy or reading its emotional state. It’s solely out to kill, and its acid blood doesn’t help its victims’ causes.

But take a closer look at the alien’s head—what does it resemble? What’s long, has a hole at its end, and a fiery liquid when provoked? We’ll let Alien star Sigourney Weaver supply the answer, courtesy of a quote from Ian Nathan’s Alien Vault book: “I remember when I first saw the sketches… I thought, ‘This is a giant penis!’”

And Giger, in philosophical manner, doesn’t deny the sexual innuendo. “Any object has sexual symbolism,” he says in Alien Vault. “I hate violence but violence can be played out in sexual play.” So, yeah, the big skull (attached to that ghoulish frame) that looks like a wiener, was born from a man’s chest, and hunts down a lonely, scared female is, in a way, a creepily phallic metaphor. Sigmund Freud, be damned.

The look and feel of the Nostromo ship is shamelessly inspired by Stanley Kubrick.

A genre filmmaker paying tribute to Stanley Kubrick? What a shock! Excuse the sarcasm, folks, and let’s acknowledge the fact that Ridley Scott directly told his set designers, as well as concept artist Ron Cobb, to closely look at the interiors seen in two of Kubrick’s most celebrated movies, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Dr. Strangelove (1964).

In 2001, Scott responded to the spaceship’s realistic, earthbound look and feel, which went against the otherworldly, high-concept vessels of the Star Wars world; with Dr. Strangelove, the director took a liking to the military aesthetic of the film’s sets. Combining those two influences, the Nostromo’s physical presentation is appropriately gritty, an elaborate flying labyrinth hard-wired for NASA-infused nightmares.

Originally, the studio wanted Scott to cut out the now-infamous “Space Jockey.”

In other words, back when Ridley Scott was pushing through Alien’s production process, 20th Century Fox almost prevented the eventual existence of Prometheus.

Scott’s 2012 flick, inarguably an Alien prequel, hinges its mythology and plot on the once-enigmatic shoulders of the “Space Jockey,” the mysterious, hardened corpse found amidst a derelict spaceship by the Nostromo crew. Without providing any background information about the specimen, the Alien filmmaking team supplied one of sci-fi cinema’s all-time great questions: Who exactly is the Space Jockey? And, furthermore, what exactly was he trying to do before he died inside his flying saucer?

The answers to those inquiries are provided in Prometheus, and it’s ironic to think that Fox’s biggest movie of 2012 is rooted in something the company once frowned upon. In the executives eyes’, the enormous (26 feet tall), and expensive (costing $500,000), Space Jockey set was a waste of space and dollars—why not just leave a massive crater in the ground? Scott and producer Gordon Carroll, bless their souls, fought to keep it in the picture; in addition to its what-the-hell-is-that intrigue, the Space Jockey hinted at a much wider narrative scope that could be explored at some point. And what better time than 2012, right?

It’s also worth noting that the Space Jockey imagery and general concept originated in the late Dan O’Bannon’s initial Starbeast script, further proving that he was, and still is, in fact, the heart and soul of the Alien universe.