Looking for the Alien's Nucleus

leading from

Ridley Scott's Alien Monster

i ) Ridley Scott: Originally I wanted a very feminine creature, long limbed in the style of Verushka (see right photo). The idea of associating danger and sexual desire, to have a creature that was  at once desirable and lethal and that was exciting.  It was the eroticism in Giger's work that had struck me immediately. Everything is merged, it's a very "organic" painting. All the while there were practical problems and, by general agreement, we had to give up the original idea. The alien was transformed into a man with a feminine shape - a hermaphrodite.  (Film Illustrated. v9. n99, Nov 1979, "Duelling with Death, The Alien World of Ridley Scott")

ii) Ivor Powell: "When we started out looking for the Alien, we were looking for something that had a sort of erm , the size , the build, that was incredibly slight, incredibly thin, erm, and exactly the opposite of that sort of quintissential Creature from the Black Lagoon which is a big stocky stunt guy, then you put a latex suit over him and suddenly he's out there like a bloody Michelin man, and they all look.. you know it looks ludicrous, so we had to start off, 'cause CGI didn't exist then, we had to start off with some... the person that put the suit on had to be A, impossibly tall, we wanted them to be incredibly long limbed, especially from the waist to the knee, and erm, so we started looking at women, and I...and  it fell on my job to sort of er, you know, to try and bring in women on, I remember one of the tallest models, and quite a well known model of the time was this woman called Verushka, and she came in, and well literally, there she was, you know, in a little pair of knickers, erm and we always asked her like to crouch down, Ridley had this idea that it would be like a sort of praying mantis, and the way when you sort of crouch down, the knees sort of are impossible high, so, like a grass hopper, and so we went through all these pre-ambulations of trying to cast women so lucky Ivor, unfortunate Ivor had to photograph and take polaroids of all these women in various states of undress, you know, for the Alien," (Alien Makers II documentary)
 
iii) Ridley Scott:When I started Alien I wanted to not only have a strong heroine, but I also wanted to make the creature female as well: two women battling one another would have had a great sexual connotation. (David Lewin, Daily Mail, 1/10/79)

iv) Ridley Scott: I wanted the alien in human form very sensual and take on a female shape. I had to abandon the idea because we couldn't find a female tall enough. (David Lewin, Daily Mail,1/10/79)

 

v) Dan O'Bannon: "The first thing Ridley did is he had contortionists come in. He wanted to see contortionists tie themselves in every possible knot and walk around and see if they could build a costume around a contortionist. He had two contortionists tie themselves together and walk around, And he had three contortionists tie themselves together and walk around. He finally concluded it was too awkward."

vi) HRGiger: Because you never use your first design, we went onto experiment with other things. We used performers from a circus, joining two guys together to get the monstrosity of the alien movement, but it looked really phony, not frightening. (FX O7 1999)