O'Bannon's early Alien script: DVD version: Inside the Pyramid scene:

          INT. Pyramid

                                  BROUSSARD
                    Tunnel's gone - cave or something below
                    me - feels like the tropics in here, air
                    is hot and humid ...

          Struggling, he releases his purchase on the stone and begins to lower
          himself on power. He dangles free in darkness, turning slowly on the
          wire as the chest unit unwinds.

          HITS BOTTOM

          Broussard is standing on a dusty stone floor, surrounded by solid
          darkness. He flashes his datastick around - the beam reveals stone
          walls, which are carved with STRANGE HIEROGLYPHICS

          These images have a primitive, even a sacred appearance. Line after
          line of pictograms stretches from floor to ceiling, an epic history in
          an unknown language. Huge symbols dominate one wall. They could almost
          be Mayan. 

          Spaced at intervals are stylized stone statues of strange MONSTERS,
          half anthropoid, half insect.

          Broussard moves his light along the pictures on the wall. They depict
          other freakish HYBRIDS

                                   BROUSSARD
                    It's unbelievable! It's like some tomb
                    ... it's like a religion or something!
                    Hey, anybody there? Do you read me?
                    Standard!

          Annoyed, Broussard yanks off his breathing goggles, and leaves them
          hanging around his neck.  He takes a deep breath of the wet air.

(source: Online version of the early Alien script by Dan O'Bannon) 

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O'Bannon's early Alien script: DVD version:Dell's Data Stick Examination

                              ROBY
                    Maybe it's time we took a look at Dell's
                    datastick. 

          Roby loads Broussard's datastick into one of the command consoles

          Pushing buttons, Roby brings up the HOLOGRAPHS taken automatically by
          Broussard's stick as he probed the tomb. They appear on screens around
          the bridge

          The first datastick image revcals a dusty stone floor. Roby clicks
          ahead , reveals stone walls carved with

          STRANGE HIEROGLYPHICS.

                              ROBY (CONT'D)
                    (startled)
                    Hieroglyphics ...?

          Primitive, religious pictures. Line after line, floor to ceiling.

          In the center of the chamber - the plinth

                              HUNTER
                    It's a tomb...!

          The data-pictures arrive at the "urns"

          This sequence of stills reaches its climax when the parasite leaps out
          toward the lends - Standard, Hunter and Roby mutter sharply at the
          sight, after which the datastick drops to a useless angel and starts
          showing a series of blurs.

          CLICKETYCLICKETYCLICK - Roby runs back through the slides in a blur,
          stopping on a strip of hieroglyphs.

                              ROBY
                    Look 
                        (points)
                    Those are symbolized aliens ... very
                    stylized ... but if you look closely, you
                    can see the creature we're dealing with

          They lean forward in their seats

                              HUNTER
                    That star shapes thing. The parasite on
                    Dell's face.

                              ROBY
                    And see right below it? The oval design 
                    with the markings? It's a dead ringer for 
                    the spore casings

                              STANDARD
                    Eggs ....

                              ROBY
                    Eggs.

          Broussard's datasticks moves along the pictures on the wall. The star
          shapes are shown in conjugation with other forms ... attaching
          themselves to freakish HYBRIDS. Gargoyles

                              HUNTER
                    Now that looks like the one that came 
                    out of Dell

          Worm-like things - like the one that hatched from Broussard - are
          emerging from the hybrids

                              HUNTER (CONT'D)
                    What, are those things?

          A pause

                              HUNTER (CONT'D)
                                                                        
                    Females?

                                                                                                  
                              STANDARD
                    Hosts?

                              ROBY
                    Living bottles

          Roby changes slides

                              ROBY (CONT'D)
                    And .... that's the big one

          The one that got Melkonis

                              STANDARD
                    So then ... the "tomb" ... must have been 
                    some sort of ... egg storage place ... 
                    fertility temple.

                              HUNTER
                    What comes after the big one?

          Roby searches through the paintings and carvings. Click. Click

                              ROBY
                    Nothing. It repeats

          After the big one: more spore casings 

 

(Source: Online version of the early Alien script by Dan O'Bannon)

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O'Bannon's early Alien script: Online version: Inside the Pyramid scene:

  INTERIOR - PYRAMID - DAY

     Broussard resumes his downward climb.  SUDDENLY, HIS FEET LOSE THEIR
     PURCHASE AS THE WALLS OF THE SHAFT DISAPPEAR.

     The tunnel has reached its end.  Below him is an unfathomable,
     cavernous space.

                              BROUSSARD
                    (huffing and puffing)
               Tunnel's gone -- cave or something
               below me -- feels like the tropics
               in here; air is warm and humid... 
                    (consults his instruments)
               ... high oxygen content, no dust,
               it's completely breathable --

     Puffing with exertion, he releases his purchase on the stone walls and
     begins to lower himself on power.  Now he is dangling free in darkness,
     spinning slowly on the wire as the chest unit unwinds.

     Finally, his feet hit bottom.  He grunts in surprise and almost loses
     his balance.

     INTERIOR - TOMB - DAY

     Broussard is standing on a dusty stone floor, with a feeble column of
     sunlight shining down around him from the tunnel above.  Around is
     solid darkness.

     He flashes his datastick around.  The beam reveals that he is in a
     stone room.  STRANGE HEIROGLYPHICS are carved into the walls.  They have
     a primitive, religious appearance.  Row after row of pictograms stretch
     from floor to ceiling, some epic history in an unknown language.  Huge
     religious symbols dominate one wall.

     Spaced at intervals are stylized stone statues, depicting grotesque
     monsters, half anthropoid, half octopus.

                              BROUSSARD
               It's unbelievable!  It's like some
               kind of tomb... some primitive
               religion!  Hey, is anybody there?  Do
               you read me?  Standard!

     Annoyed, Broussard yanks off his breathing goggles, and leaves them
     hanging around his neck.  He takes a deep breath of the wet air.

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J G Ballard on Alien and H R Giger

leading from
Alien: Afterworlds of thought

a) Within the locality
World famous writer, J G Ballard, lived in Shepperton where the famous Shepperton film studios were located, and in the Kings Head pub hotel less than a mile from where Ballard's house was, the famous Swiss Surrealist artist H R Giger lived for several months back in 1978 while he worked on the movie Alien and J G Ballard was living in his semi detached house there at the same time as well and continued to live there.

b) JG Ballard, HR Giger and Alien 

i) When Ballard thought very little of the Alien movie
In 1984, a book "Re/Search no. 8/9" about him was published, JG Ballard had been interviewed and talked about film, he was asked about his view on to Blade Runner, and then he mentioned Alien, a film that he said he disliked,  so for a while, it seemed as if he didn't like this film at all

That year, David Pringle editor for Interzone magazine wrote to Ballard to query about a rumour he heard about that he had been offered the job of novelising Alien, and on 26th of February, Ballard wrote back stating that he was quite right , and it was when the shooting had just been completed, and someone had  brought the script over to from New York. He knew nothing about the film, he wasn't shown the film and when he read the script, he liked it even less. At the time it struck him as an unoriginal horror movie with almost no connection with science fiction. They offered him $20,000 but he found it easy to turn down. He found the film to be very glossy but empty at its centre.

But the truth be told, his own past experiences with Hammer films had put him off Science Fiction movies, he wrote a treatment for When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth, and so he saw them to be bad enough without having to novelise them, although he wouldn't have mind doing the novelisation for a scifi film like Alphaville.


ii) Ballard begins to think again
In 1987, he wrote a review for American Film saying " Alien is a tour de force of pure horror, a barrage of brutal eruptions (some literally so) that obscure the existence, behind the blood and terror, of an extremely elegant s-f film. Returning to Earth, the crew of the Nostromo is diverted to a remote planet and there unknowingly picks up the alien organism, which then proceeds to metamorphose its way through the cast until defeated by the courage and wiles of Sigourney Weaver, the s-f film's first feminist heroine. While all this is going on one has barely a pause to notice a host of fine details: the claustrophobic world of the spaceship, with its fraying camaraderie; the entropy of long voyages, time slowing down so that a brief conversation seems to last all day; the stylish interior of the Nostromo, a cross between a computer terminal and a nightclub; the final appearance of the alien, an insane mesh of ravenous teeth straight from the paintings of Francis Bacon that materializes just after Weaver strips down to her underwear. Dinner, fortunately, is delayed , at least until a sequel"

iii) Unoriginal horror film transforms into one of the most original horror films
In 1990, he talked about the matter the Alien novelisation in an article in the Independent (which was republished in his book A User's Guide to the Millenium in 1996) Someone thought about J G Ballard being someone ideal to write the novelisation for the film, he was approached but declined and the final book was written by Alan Dean Foster, he wasn't at all happy about the script that he felt outlined a hackneyed story about a malevolent stowaway with dialogue that rarely rose above "Chow-time. Where's Dallas? 'Topside.' 'Uh-huh'. However when the film came out, what amazed him was that not that someone decided to film the script but that he had been able to make a movie based on script with such empty dialogue. And so what seemed to him like one of the most unoriginal horror movies ever made back in 1984 had transformed into one of the most original horror movies ever made for him and the throwaway dialogue perfectly set off the terrifying vacuum that expanded around the characters. He compared the stylish Nostromo interior to a computer terminal crossed with a nightclub and compared the final appearance of the alien with something from a painting by Francis Bacon and this film would eventually appear in his top ten of scifi movies.

Island of the Dead (fifth version) by Arnold Böcklin

iv) Faux "David Cronenberg’s Alien — Novelization by J.G. Ballard"

Such was the fascination in the idea of an Alien novelisation by J G Ballard, that in 1993, on page 5 of #70, Interzone magazine still edited by David Pringle, announced a competition for the for the best short extract from an imaginary novelization of the science-fiction movie Alien as it might have been written by leading British novelist J.G. Ballard. The prize was a copy of the new edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (ed. Clute & Nicholls), . The response, for what was quite a demanding competition, pleased the magazine: over a dozen good entries were received. The clear winner, however, was Lyle Hopwood, who performed a clever double-twist: she not only reimagined the novelization as having been written by Ballard (rather than Alan Dean Foster), but she reimagined the film itself as having been directed by David Cronenberg (rather than Ridley Scott) and in the style of his movie Videodrome which came out back in 1983. (Click here to read the Lyle Hopwood's David Cronenberg’s Alien — Novelization by J.G. Ballard)


v) Paul Laville questioned Ballard on Alien
In 1995, Paul Laville asked Ballard about the fact that in Re/Search it looked as if he didn't like Alien, and Ballard was able to clear the matter up, perhaps not realising what he must have said in the RE/Search interview but he actually was talking about Ridley Scott's Blade Runner film which left too little to the imagination and the sets didn't convince him, while Alien he found totally fine and convincing.  

vi) Ballard asked about Giger
See HR Giger's Homage To Böcklin

HR Giger's homage to Arnold Böcklin's Island of the Dead

vi) Giger admires Ballard's writings
In 1997. HR Giger was mentioned in an interview with the Italian version of SFX magazine that JG Ballard was his favourite author

vii) Alien in Ballard's Top Ten Sci-fi films
In 2005, in his top ten scifi films for the Independant, he mentioned Alien with few statements borrowed and rewritten from his previous review,  that "This is a tour de force of pure horror in which Sigourney Weaver plays science fiction's first feminist heroine."  but instead of stating that the creature came from the paintings of Francis Bacon, he was able to declare that "The alien came from the imaginings of the Swiss designer HR Giger."

c) Loose Comparisons
Sometimes comparisons between their work have been offered such as by James Verniere in an introduction to an interview with J G Ballard for Twilight Zone magazine back in 1988. In 2012, Telegraph film reviewer Sukhdev Sandhu compared Giger's aesthetic to being a tacit dialogue with other pioneering work of the late Sixties and early Seventies such as JG Ballard's novel Crash. James Verniere, in his forward to his writeup of his interview with J G Ballard for the June 1988 issue of Twilight Zone mentioned that  "Like Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger, Ballard sees the twentieth century as a horrible, post-nuclear mutation - the monstrous offspring of that "rough beast" that slouched - not to Bethlehem - but to Hiroshima to be born."

Quote sources

1. J G Ballard: Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979): This is a tour de force of pure horror in which Sigourney Weaver plays science fiction's first feminist heroine. The alien came from the
   imaginings of the Swiss designer HR Giger. (The Independent, March 2005) 
2. SFX: In che rapporti è con la lettertura di fantascienza? Quali sono i suoi autori preferiti?
   HR Giger: Ballard, senza dubbio. Ballard su tutti!
   Googletranslation:
   SFX: What's your relationship with the Literature of Science Fiction? What are your favorite authors?
   HR Giger: Ballard, no doubt. Ballard of all! (Cinema SFX #9, Gennaio 1997)
3. Paul Laville: I read in the Re/Search special that you disliked Blade Runner and Alien, two of the most influential sf films of the past few decades.
   JG Ballard:I didn't care for Blade Runner. The sets looked unconvincing and I didn't believe any of it. Alien however was a very fine film, totally  convincing.  (Interview by letter, July 1995)
4. J G Ballard: Years ago I was offered the chance to do the novelisation of a film then being made by a leading British director. The script outlined a hackneyed story about a malevolant stowaway, with dialogue that rarely rose above 'Chow-time. Where's Dallas?.' 'Topside.' 'Uh-huh.' What amazed me was not that someone had decided to film this script, but that he had been able to form any idea of the finished movie from those empty lines. Yet the film was Alien, one of the most original horror-movies ever made, and the throwaway dialogue perfectly set off the terrifying vacuum that expanded around those characters. (Independent on Sunday, 1990, republished in A User's Guide To The Millenium, 1996, p4)
5. James Verniere: Like Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger, Ballard sees the twentieth century as a horrible, post-nuclear mutation -- the monstrous offspring of that "rough beast" that slouched -- not to Bethlehem -- but to Hiroshima to be born. (Twilight Zone, June 1988) 
6. J G Ballard: Alien is a tour de force of pure horror, a barrage of brutal eruptions (some literally so) that obscure the existence, behind the blood and terror, of an extremely elegant s-f film. Returning to Earth, the crew of the Nostromo is diverted to a remote planet and there unknowingly picks up the alien organism, which then proceeds to metamorphose its way through the cast until defeated by the courage and wiles of Sigourney Weaver, the s-f film's first feminist heroine. While all this is going on one has barely a pause to notice a host of fine details: the claustrophobic world of the spaceship, with its fraying camaraderie; the entropy of long voyages, time slowing down so that a brief conversation seems to last all day; the stylish interior of the Nostromo, a cross between a computer terminal and a nightclub; the final appearance of the alien, an insane mesh of ravenous teeth straight from the paintings of Francis Bacon that materializes just after Weaver strips down to her underwear. Dinner, fortunately, is delayed , at least until a sequel (American Film, 1987, republished in A User's Guide To The Millenium, 1996 p22)
7. Re/Search: The movie Blade Runner was supposed to be representative of Hong Kong.
   JG Ballard: From Philip K Dick's novel, directed by an Englishman, Ridley Scott; who made Alien, a film which I disliked a lot. In a lot of these blockbuster SF movies that come out of Hollywood - the Star Wars type of movie - they leave out the imagination. (Re/Search no 8/9, p17, 1984)
8. Sukhdev Sandhu: The mechanistic precision of Giger's aesthetic owes a great deal to his training in architecture and industrial design. It appears to be in tacit dialogue with other pioneering work of the late Sixties and early Seventies such as JG Ballard's novel Crash. (www.telegraph.co.uk/ 4th June 2012) 
9. James Verniere: Allusive, obsessive, fetishistic, and often full of pseudoscientific imagery, Ballard's fiction reveals a world where sex, the family, even the evolutionary process, have fallen prey to entropy. Like Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger, Ballard sees the twentieth century as a horrible, post-nuclear mutation - the monstrous offspring of that "rough beast" that slouched - not to Bethlehem - but to Hiroshima to be born. And despite the inherent (and often petulant) strangeness of J.G. Ballard's fiction, the worlds he creates are hauntingly familiar. (Rod Serling's Twilight Zone Magazine,  June 1988)
10. David Pringle: Good stuff, Dom. Here's another quote for you... Ballard wrote to me on 26 February 1984, in reply to a query I'd made about a rumour I'd heard, namely that he'd been offered the job of novelizing _Alien_:
    
    "You're quite right about my being offered the novelization of Alien ‑‑ the shooting of the film had just been completed, at Shepperton I think, but someone brought the script over from New York. I knew nothing about the film, which I was never shown, and when I read the script I liked it even less. It struck me as an unoriginal horror movie with almost no connection with sf. They offered me $20,000 but it was surprisingly easy to turn down ‑‑ the film is very glossy, but empty at its centre. Anyway, my experiences with Hammer had put me off sf movies ‑‑ bad enough without having to novelize them, though I wouldn't mind doing the novelization of Alphaville, or even Huston's Moby Dick or Hawks's Big Sleep (Welles's Macbeth would pose some problems)." (e-mail sent to the JG Ballard forum at Yahoogroups in response to Wmmvrrvrrmm's post about this page here, 12th June 2014) 
11. On page 5 of Interzone 70 we announced a competition for the best short extract from an imaginary novelization of the science-fiction movie Alien as it might have been written by leading British novelist J.G. Ballard. The prize is a copy of the new edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (ed. Clute & Nicholls), kindly provided by publishers Little Brown/Orbit. The response, for what was quite a demanding competition, pleased us: over a dozen good entries were received. The clear winner, however, was Lyle Hopwood, who performed a clever double-twist: she not only reimagined the novelization as having been written by Ballard (rather than Alan Dean Foster), but she reimagined the film itself as having been directed by David Cronenberg (rather than Ridley Scott).(Interzone 75, September 1993)

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O'Bannon's early Alien script: Online version:Dell's Data Stick Examination

 INTERIOR - MULTI-PURPOSE ROOM

     Again we are watching slides in the darkened room.  This time Standard,
     Roby, Melkonis, and Hunter are watching the sequence of photographs
     taken automatically by Broussard's datastick as he probed the tomb.

     The camera reveals the "urns."  The climax of the sequence of stills
     comes when THE CREATURE LEAPS OUT OF THE "URN" TOWARD THE CAMERA --
     and after that the camera drops to a useless angle and proceeds to
     show a series of meaningless blurs.  Then the reel ends.

                              HUNTER
               That must have been when he got it.

                              ROBY
               The same thing must've happened to
               the creatures on the other ship... 
               except they took one of those jars
               on board, and opened it there.

                              MELKONIS
                    (clicks back through the
                     slides to a picture of
                     one of the "urns")
               At first I thought they were jars
               too, or artifacts anyway.  But
               they're not.  They're eggs, or spore
               casings.  Let's go back to the
               heiroglyphics.

     CLICKETYCLICKETYCLICK -- Melkonis accelerates through the slides in a
     blur, stopping at the one he wants -- which shows a strip of
     heiroglyphs on the wall of the tomb.

                              STANDARD
               I personally can't make any sense
               out of it... 

     CLICK.  CLICK.  Melkonis is changing the slides as they talk, showing
     different angles on the glyphs.

                              MELKONIS
               It's a crude symbolic language --
               looks primitive.

                              HUNTER
               You can't tell -- that kind of stuff
               could represent printed circuits... 

                              STANDARD
               That sounds a little fanciful... 

                              MELKONIS
               Primitive pictorial languages are
               based on common objects in the
               environment, and this can be used as
               a starting point for translation... 

                              ROBY
               What common objects?

                              HUNTER
               Listen, hadn't somebody better check
               on Broussard?

                              STANDARD
                    (rising)
               I'll do it.  The rest of you
               continue.

                              HUNTER
                    (rising)
               I'll come with you.

     INTERIOR - CORRIDOR OUTSIDE INFIRMARY

     Standard and Hunter come down the passageway.

                              STANDARD
               You know, it's fantastic -- the
               human race has gone this long
               without ever encountering another
               advanced life form, and now we run
               into a veritable zoo.

                              HUNTER
               What do you mean?

                              STANDARD
               Well, those things out there aren't
               the same, you know -- the spaceship
               and the pyramid.  They're from
               different cultures and different
               races.  That ship just landed here --
               crashed like we did.  The pyramid and
               the thing from it are indigenous.

                              HUNTER
               How could anything be indigenous to
               this asteroid?  It's dead.

                              STANDARD
               Maybe it wasn't always dead.

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Summoner of the Demon

leading from 

Alien: Afterworlds of thought

The ithyphallic beast in Necronom IV

a)  Finding the Necronomicon
One might stop to take a look here at Dan O'Bannon's story from his time working on Dune in Paris, about how Jodorowsky had found a PhD thesis that was a study of the actual Necronomicon thought by the public to have been a product H P Lovecraft's dreams and writings and soon he discovered HR Giger who was providing images of majestic demons of a Lovecraftian nature that inspired Dan with ideas for his Alien script. He would visualise it as a Giger painting and Giger would be the one to design the monster. (See: Dune and the gathering)

ithyphallic Pazuzu statue with erect male member in The Exorcist

b) Bring the demon to the public consciousness
As it went, Dan becoming quite serious about introducing the new demon into the public consciousness and of course what a demon it would be. If the Necronomicon study found in the library was as real as Dan might have wanted to believe it was and it had inspired Dan in some strange way to say what he did about it being a demon, we might start asking ourselves again exactly what exactly is the nature of this thing that Dan had unleashed.

c) Ithyphallic Demons with four wings
This demon would make the actions of Pazuzu who had been unleashed onto the public by way of The Exorcist in 1973 seem like funhouse evil, and Pazuzu turned out to be a character from Assyrian and Babylonian mythology, king of the demons of the wind, and son of the god Hanbi. Pazuzu stood with four wings extending from his back, and often shown with an erect male member and Giger's biomechanoid started out in the painting as a large erect male member extending from its groin (which Ridley compared to an umbilical cord)  and numerous pipes and winged membranes extending from the back while the creature eventually have an long tail that at times would extend from the front and have four pipes sticking out from its back and Giger wasn't quite sure whether they were wings or pipes. The four pipes on Giger's beast were there in his 1976 Necronom IV painting. What exactly was this all about? Are Pazuzu and Giger's Alien distant relatives with the same four winged gene, but the ones on Giger's Alien had transformed into useless stunted limbs? (see Pazuzu)

the ithyphallic Pazuzu

d) Bringing the Necronomicon to Public Consciousness
Decades after Alien,  Dan watched how there had been numerous books marketed under the name of the Necronomicon but when you opened them they turned out not to be the real thing and he became very impatient of these fictional Necronomicons certainly because they were unrealistic and as far as he could understand, he had seen something very close to a real thing. Towards the end of his life, he he spent a good ten years carefully translating the contents of the thesis into English and finally got it to a point where it was ready to be seen by the public at large and all that remained for him was to discover a way to market it so that people who wanted a copy could obtain it, before he passed on in 2009 and soon it is to be published by his widow Diane.

"Umbilical" Alien or "Ithyphallic" Alien

Source Quotes

1. Interviewer:Now, you have an obvious interest in Lovecraft and arcane things and Lovecraft's circle people as well. Can you talk about your project the Necronomicon a little bit, what drove you to start to do that?
   O'Bannon: Well now, i came across this project in a very mysterious way, back in 1975 I was in Paris working with Alejandro Jodorowsky, actually on a film then, and he was very much a mystic and you might say for a time he was my guru, and he discovered something in the Bibliotech National, a er, a document, and it was someone's PhD thesis and he brought it to my attention and I looked at it and it turned out to be a study of the Necronomicon, the real Necronomicon, the closest I had ever gotten to the actual original text, and I was so struck by this that I felt it needed to be brought to the attention of English speaking readers, so I spent the better part of ten years carefully translating this into English and I finally got it to a point where it's ready to be seen by the public at large. All that remains is a … to discover a way to market this so that people who want a copy can obtain it.
   Interviewer: So this document, was it written by multiple individuals
   O'Bannon: No, it was a, it was a PhD thesis of a student at the erm, was it the Sarbonne or something, i forget the…. he certain quoted many other individuals but it's primarily written, a long essay quoting substantial chunks of the Necronomicon from different translations obviously, the Latin translation, the Greek translation, the English translation, and this author had managed to obtain... the opportunity the book had originally copies, copy extensive passages from the, because it was then the last several years, a couple of books marketed under the name of the Necronomicon, but when you open them, they turn out not to be the real thing. So i became very impatient with these erm fictional Necronomicons and at least I saw the real thing  (2009 H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival: Dan O'Bannon's "Howie" Acceptance Speech)
2. Shadowlocked: Did O’Bannon’s Rules Of Writing ever make it to press?
   
   Dan O'Bannon: It did not. It’s just sitting over on a corner of my desk, gathering dust. Over the years I’ve read a couple of Necronomicons published. I bought and read them and I was very disappointed, and I finally got annoyed. At the very least if you’re going to write a nNecronimicon, it should be scary…I just started compiling notes, and by the time it was done I realised I had a book. It’s not a long book, but it shouldn’t be long. It’s certainly dense. I don’t know if you’ve ever read Jekyll and Hyde…?
   
   Shadowlocked: Yes, I have.
   Dan O'Bannon: When you read it, you feel you’ve read a novel, but if you go back and count the pages, you realise there’s only forty pages. My Necronomicon is like that; it’s very dense but it’s not hundreds of pages long, at which point it would become dull. So it’s almost done, but I’ve had various things in my life getting in the way of completing it.
   
   Shadowlocked: So this is something we can look forward to in the near future, maybe?
   Dan O'Bannon: Absolutely. It should have been done a year ago, but family problems intervened, so huge that I just didn’t have the time to write anymore. Things are starting to smooth out now again at last, so if I do anything at all next, it’s going to be to finish that and get it out. So much of it is finished, it’d just be a crime not to finish it... ( Shadowlocked.com 2007) 
3. Daily Grindhouse: Can you give us a feel for that project?
   
   Diane O'Bannon: It’s very interesting how he did this. He has a backstory on how he found it. It’s actually the dissertation of a PhD student. Alejandro Jodorowsky told Dan that it existed in Sarbonne (University of Paris library) and he went and found it. Now the student -the PhD student who wrote the dissertation – vanished. Nobody knows what happened to him. So, Dan felt free to take the information and use it. The PhD student actually found The Necronomicon. He wasn’t a believer, but he did the most research on it, so Dan is basically putting out his version of the dissertation. (dailygrindhouse.com 2011)
4. Dan O'Bannon: I wanted to raise movie monsters to a new level. I wanted to introduce a new demon into public consciousnesss, and I wanted to speak directly to the unconscious. That demon in "The Exorcist" was just funhouse evil. I very definitely wanted the audience to have a feeling of extraordinary primal evil, which is why I made it a sexual carnivore.  (Washington Post, July 29th, 1979) 
5. HR Giger: Mia created the wings or whatever they're supposed to represent (Giger's Alien Diaries, June 10th 1978, p207)
6. HR Giger: The four wings or tubes were broken and had to be attached with wires (Giger's Alien diaries, September 6th 1978, p539) 

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The Beast Within : Starbeast: Developing the story

Transcript of the section The Beast Within from the Starbeast documentary

Starbeast
Developing the story

Dan O'Bannon (1:12) I've going to films my whole life since I was a kid, I mean, er, I love movies, intuitively I knew it was the thing that I wanted to do more than anything, but the, um, the raising I had, my background didn't suggest that was a practical thing to do for a living

Ron Shusett (1:29) I was a theatre arts major in college, I wasn't a film major  at UCLA, and I did love theatre, but I realised after a while after producing a couple of plays that I had to stay in New York because that's where the investors are, and I hated the weather so much, the closest thing to theatre was film and I'd grown up in LA so I said to hell with that, I'm not going to live in that freezing cold, I'll go into film

Dan O'Bannon (1:53) I applied to USC, NYU, UCLA. NYU, UCLA blew me off, USC accepted, so O came out there and I was a student in the USC department of cinema, met up with John Carpenter. John Carpenter started to do this master thesis film, science fiction movie, I got involved in it and it grew out of hand, it finally got too big for a student movie, and so in the end, we ended up finding a way to put it into theatres and instead of the most impressive student film ever made, we had the least impressive professional film ever made.

A lot of things bothered me about Dark Star, we had an alien in it which, ah, was a beach ball, it was a second try on that alien. I went away from Dark Star really wanting to do an alien that looked real. A couple of years down the line I decided to do Dark Star as a horror movie instead of a comedy and that was the germ of Alien.

Ron Cobb (2:59) : We got to talking, I realised that Dan was a cinema student as USC, and had...was in the process of making a kind of a spoof on 2001, a small film called Dark Star, and er, and he was suprised to find that my secret love was, was film and, er, particularly fantastic cinema always, always attracted me. So basically I helped out on Dark Star.

Ron Shusett (3:23): I hadn't heard about Dark Star, and somebody was telling me about these two brilliant young guys, and scifi was my love really, I like, I also like, er, suspense, but I went to see Dark Star, and I , and I spoke to Carpenter on the phone, and er, I spoke to Dan on the phone, but it seemed to me I had more of a rapport with Dan just from phone conversations, and , er, I told him that I had the rights the,  what would became Total Recall which was the original story by Phil Dick was called We can remember it for you wholesale, so he knew the story he said "i love that! yuh, so you got the rights for that?" "I said yuh" He said okay, I've got something I've gotta discuss with you that I have been working on for about a year and I need to make a breakthrough and maybe you're the guy who can make me have it happen, and that turned out to be Alien

Dan O'Bannon(4:11): I had this opening, I didn't know where it was going to go, I knew I wanted to do a scary movie on a spaceship with a small number of astronauts. Like I say Dark Star is a horror movie instead of a comedy. I had this creepy opening in which astronauts awaken to find that there voyage home has been interrupted , they're receiving a signal from this mysterious planetoid, an alien language, they go down to investigate, they get, um, stalled down there, their ship breaks down

Ron Shusett (4:45):  So I've got 29 pages written but I don't know you, I can't trust you to leave the house with this story, I know, you have nothing written, I said no, I've just got the rights to the story, I haven't tried to write it yet. And he said okay well you sit here and just read this, this is what I've got and I'm stuck on it quite frankly, but read this. So I sat there and I read it and it was very close to what we actually ended up with on the screen, those first 29 pages

Dan O'Bannon(5:08) The threat at the centre of the story, whatever this monster or thing, danger was going to be, was not at all clear to me at this point

Ron Shusett (5:16): First act was fantastic, I said, you know, possibly maybe I could help you with it, he said okay, I could help you on Total Recall, so we decided however we would tackle Alien first because Total Recall would be way more expensive because at that time we envisioned Alien could be a Roger Corman movie, just in one location, you know, several different rooms in an old warehouse

Dan O'Bannon (5:39): A Chilean film member name named Alejandro Jodorowksy, telephoned me from Paris, "Paris, France" "Paris, Texas?" "no Paris France" He had made an art film named El Topo which was very well received, and this man over this transatlantic phoneline claimed that he had the backing at the rights to make a feature film of Dune

Ron Shusett(6:10):And he loved Dan's work that he did on designing the special effects for dark Star, and he knew he had to do it at a budget with some creative people so he hired Dan to work on it, help him with his storyline and also with his special effects, and Dan went off within a few weeks. He went off to Paris and France and places and was working on the Dune project, There for six months.

Dan O'Bannon (6:31): And I wasn't the only there, he had gone to England and he had plucked up a, and artist who did covers for science fiction books named Christopher Foss, and for the first time I saw somebody whose stuff I liked as much as Ron Cobb's stuff. He had another artist he wanted me to meet. He had seen this guy's work in a, a show that was in Paris at the time. Took me over to, to really one of the fancy hotels in Paris, not the one I was staying at, where this artist named Hans Rudi Giger was staying while his show was on display in Paris. Giger brings up this little tin foil, he said "would you like some opium?", I said "why do you take that?", he said "I am afraid of my visions", I said "It's only your mind", he said "that is what I'm afraid of" He brings out a book, an art book, with his paintings in it, I started looking at this, and he and Alejandro go into a big discussion about Dune, I started looking at these paintings and it took a minute for it to register what I was seeing, but, ah, what I seemed to be seeing was very disturbing

Ivor Powell (7:48): The often told story of that was Dan of course working on the Jodorowsky in Paris for a year or two and it all collapsed,  and he went, you know he went home, er, with no money and whatever it is, and slept on Ron Shusett's couch

Dan O'Bannon (8:02) And I was in desperation, the only thing I could think to do, I had to sell a script

Ron Shusett (8:10): So he said, "light up the board Ron, I got this first act, and you like it", and he says, "I know, I know, you have a good mind. From these, just weeks and weeks I've worked with you before I left, and, and what I saw you've done on Total Recall which you did with a short story", ah" , as far as you got it, I know you can make the breakthrough for me."

Dan O'Bannon (8:28): Well Starbeast is one of those titles you, you know, you think of and then you (miming stick your fingers down your throat), you know, you throw them away. I was running through titles and they all stank, I didn't like any of them. One morning at three o'clock, Ronnie's appartment, I'm typing away, writing dialogue and the characters are saying "the alien ... this, and the alien ... that". Suddenly that word alien, just, just came up out of the typewriter at me. I said "Alien, it's a noun and it's an adjective" I said "yes, that's it, I have the title"

Ron Shusett (9:02) It's simple, it's one word, and no one's ever used it, and and and it never changed from that moment on, no one ever tried , the title stuck, and that was amazing to us even that, just that aspect of it.

Dan O'Bannon (9:13) I went back to storage, got my typewriter out, took it over to Ronnie Shusett's living room and wrote it up. Over the days and nights of the next three months, Ron keeping me alive by feeding me hotdogs

Ron Shusett (9:28) Dan said"somehow the monster has to get on board the ship, but in a way that will amaze everybody. And so I wake up in the middle of the night and said "Dan , I have an idea, " and he said "what, " and I said "the monster screws one of the people" and he says "what? what are you talking about?!", I said "he jumps in his face, plants a tube down him, and inserts his seed in him and later comes bursting out of his stomach." And Dan goes" Oh" (covering his mouth with shock and surprise) My god, it's the most amazing thing I've ever, nobody's seen anything like that!" and we just sat up all night, and then we wrote, and then in three weeks, we had what would, I would say is eighty five percent of the plot, the structure, we didn't write the screenplay right there, of what you saw became Alien, eighty five percent.

Ivor Powell (10:06) : And whether they drew from movies, they probably did like everybody, they drew consciously or subconsciously from things like "It: The Terror From Beyond Space" but they actually added the ingredient of the, this thing being incubated in a human being, made the whole damn thing stand out.

Dan O'Bannon (10:20) Ronnie wanted to be on board, once I'd written the thing. He saw it as a, you know, a viable thing he wanted to be involved with, so, we, ah, we made ourselves a little deal, you be on board as producer and we started trotting around showing it to various, you know, producing entities, we got pretty close to deals on a couple of times , on a couple of times but they fell through, well essentially because people on the other side were, um,  demanding too much, you know, they were trying to screw us

Ron Shusett  (10:56) So we went to Roger Corman's company, but then I think we were dealing with Bob Reamy who later became head of Universal, Corman was out of town, and he said "Yes!" So right, that looks like a pretty amazing success story, he loved that Dan's movie was good even though it didn't make money, he knew that I co-wrote this with Dan, though I never made any thing, movie, in my life and so I took my name off the other, and so we were going to make a deal, but we didn't get to sign the papers, or Alien would have been made as a low budget Corman movie.

Dan O'Bannon (11:23) A friend of ours named Mark Haggard, ended up with a copy of it in his hands, he used to be an independent writer/director.

Ron Shusett  (11:31) Mark said, can I read this great script, I'll tell you what you have". I said Sure, you know and we gave him the script and he, you , and he, let's just wait a few days and then we'll close our deal with Corman. Well he calls us the same night, "It's great, I've got an offer, I can get the money. I can get you the money immediately. So we looked at each other, and we, and we said" Oh look, we can't, we can't wait, we don't want to blow the deal with Corman, ah it's got to be a limited time" "Two weeks, gimme two weeks!"

Dan O'Bannon (11:55): Mark Haggard knew Walter Hill, the director of toughguy movies, gave it to Walter Hill, Walter Hill showed it to his partner David Giler, and then they showed it to their third partner, Gordon Carroll. The three of them had just formed their new production company called Brandywine Films.

Gordon Caroll (12:16): We had offices at the, at the ten Goldwyn Studios, now Warner Hollywood, and Walter's office was on the first floor ground floor, and after lunch one day he was sitting in his chair ruminating, er, with the window open, and er, a friend of his, er, walking down the alleyway, and he stopped and said "Walter!"

David Giler (12:39): This guy handed him the script through the window, and er, and, er, he read it, and, he, he er, said, wha'd'you... I may be out of my mind, he said, I think this, he says, but er, I mean,  the script is terrible but it has one great scene in it, read it and tell me what you think. I read it and I thought it was absolutely terrible, and , ha ha ha, and I called him up and I said, what are you, you are nuts, this is crazy. " Have you come to the big scene"  I said "Yeah yeah yeah, the thing jumos out and is on his face"" That's not it" What's going to come, I'm already on page 90? " and he said "keep reading" and I came to the chest burster and I called him back and I said "well, I see what you mean (chuckle)

Alan Ladd (13:17) He brought it to me and I thought it was interesting, a nice horror picture, it's outer, I mean, what could sound better? And er, they then completely rewrote the script from top to bottom

Dan O'Bannon (13:34) What i didn't understand when we made the deal , uh, Brandywine, Giler and Hill, was that Giler and Hill wanted more than to produce this film, they uh, I didn't figure this out , in fact after principal photography, but they targeted my script, they decided that they wanted all the credit for the screenplay, they didn't want me to have any. 

Gordon Caroll (13:59): Right from the beginning, David and Walter took a, did several drafts, and er, it was the whole character of the film, not the spine of it in terms of story even though that was changed quite a bit, but the whole character changed when Walter and David took it over

Dan O'Bannon (14:17): As Walter himself said, in one of his speeches he gave us during preproduction, he said... he said "the greatest thing I have to bring to this project is that I don't know anything about science fiction, and I don't like it." And that was certainly reflected in the various drafts that he did.

Ron Shusett (14:34): They took several cracks at drafts, and they, from all consensuses were getting worse not better because that wasn't there forté, they did recognise it was great, but they weren't good at making it better or in fact not making it even worse, to a degree, I'm going to modify that with one exception, they made a huge contribution, but in many drafts they did, most people felt it was losing it, but that happens sometimes because you take a shot and then you sometimes come back to what attracted you in the first place, they did it radically, they did eight different drafts.

Dan O'Bannon (15:06) For some reason I couldn't figure out, Walter Hill immediately started doing a rewrite of my script. I remember walking into Gordon Caroll's office and seeing a script on the desk and lifting up a page and it said "Alien, by Walter Hill". Gordon walks in, I said" Gordon, what's this? " Gordon looked very embarrassed, "oh you're not supposed to see that".

Ron Shusett (15:26):But they contributed one thing which one of the best things in the movie, and I will eternally be thankful to them, not only for starting the ball for financing, but to contributing this to the movie. What they invented was the robot that was not in the movie when the robot's..., Ash is the robot and his head comes off, that whole idea and scenario was theirs.

David Giler (15:47): We rewrote it top to bottom, I mean, all the dialogue, all the characters, the whole sense of truck drivers in space, the whole, erm, you know, plot with the, with the robot, the whole with Ian Holm, with all the rest of that stuff, that's all in the new script.

Dan O'Bannon (16:04) The only thing I could see he was doing, was just stirring around the elements. First thing he did was change the names of all the characters. One early discussion, Walter walks into the offices there at 20th Century Fox and he said "I hate all of those names in your script". He hates all the names, how do you hate a name? "Oh, I hate all those names" So he changed them all, course he didn't hate them at all, but he had the naive idea that if you changed all the names, all of the characters names, this would, would count some how as being a substantial rewrite of the material.

David Giler (16:40) With a story that's as often told as this kind of story is, you have to do it in a special way in order for it to be special, I mean that's, was, was our argument with,  you know, about the movie in general with, with Fox all the time, and I think they agreed, which was that you had to treat this kind of B monster movie as though it were an A movie.

Gordon Caroll (16:59) That script did not excite Fox enough for them to say "we want to go ahead and we want to make it". You must remember that this was pre-Star Wars, and er, we were confident, although we had other places where we could set the film up, we were confident that fox would hold differently with another rewrite and whatever would ultimately do it, we certainly, we certainly felt so, and uh, when Star Wars came out, was the extraordinary hit that it was, suddenly science fiction became the hot genre.

Alan Ladd (17:35) : I don't know that there was consensus one way or the other about science fiction, I mean, since I was a responsible party for making Star Wars when it was such a hit, concern about science fiction went away very quickly

Dan O'Bannon (17:49): They wanted to follow through on Star Wars and they wanted to follow through fast and the only space ship script they had sitting on their desk was Alien, so they greenlighted , wham!

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part of Ron Shusett transcript from the Ask Mr Kern show

1. Ron Shusett: And here's the best part of it all, Okay. we worked on his first for months, (signing off(?)) and we couldn't get,  I couldn't, er, er, by that time he was so broke he was living on my couch, and my wife was supporting both of us, two rooms, my wife and I were sleeping in the bedroom and he was sleeping on the couch, and we were just grinding our brains and saying, Dan.. "come on Ron, light up the board, I know you could help me crack this, I've seen how your mind work...., how does the alien get on board, how does he, how do they have to deal with it?" and I just, and finally I said, Dan, it's three o'clock in the morning, I'm exhausted, I said let's try again tomorrow. This is the most amazing part of it , okay, and I went to the other room and slept, and I'm positive, me, this is proof that it's not a dream, your subcon... your mind works on the problem while you're sleeping, it's just that it's in the dream state, in the sleeping state, your subconscious is freed up, because no... in about two hours I bound out of bed at five in the morning, this is absolutely true , I said "Dan, Dan, I got it, I got it, I said, "it's the solution to the whole movie", and he said "what is it? How does he get on board?" I said, "Okay, he impregnates one of the humans. " He said "what! well, how in the hell, you know, how's that going to be, an alien impregnating..." I said "yuh". Then I described this factor in some form, I don't know if I came up with eggs, I might have, some form there's some life left in it, even though it could have been there millions of years, it detects, it's translucent, you remember when we finally designed it. Anyway I pictured this crab, I said to Dan, much like you eventually saw, a crab creature with a nob, tube in it and it jumps on his face, inserts the tube in his mouth and plants its seed, and then they get it on board, the human, it's blocked out, they can't, the autodock can't see, they obviously realised, they said, keep him alive and we don't know it's a, there's something growing there, we can't tell, 'cause there's an inky substance that like an octopus gives, and then I said well "Dan, what happens by this way, you'll have a human giving birth to an alien" and the first thought was that we'll operate on him and take him out and Dan said "No, No, what happens is that he doesn't have to operate, in the middle of the movie he comes bursting out of his chest", and we both looked at each other in mutual horror of what we created and right then we knew the whole script would be finished and it would be everything we wanted it to be, that among everything, a sort of collaboration between once I came up with impregnating and I said to Dan, no one, you ask how he gets on board and nobody's seen a moment like that in science fiction history Dan, we both held our mi... and that turned out to be the making of our careers that moment, in three months from that moment we had the script ready and it all lived up to that first twenty nine pages. (Ask Mr Kern show October 27th 2012 Part1 , 17mins in,. http://www.askmrkern.com, )

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Alien Evolution version 1 (first fifteen minutes) (conception)

Mark Kermode: In 1979, Cinema goers were scared out of their skins by a stylish scifi shocker whose publicity warned that in space, no one can hear you scream, pictured somewhere between 2001 and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Alien was an acid burnt antidote to the dewy eyed optimism of Close Encounters and Star Wars. This was future fantasy with razor sharp fangs, a ground breaking genre classic which gave nightmarish form to unspeakable anxieties which witness the birth of a new breed of screen heroine and which would spawn generations of shape shifting sequels far more than a mere fantasy fright fest, Ridley Scott's intelligent chiller would become one of the most talked about scifi films of the century, provoking highbrow intellectual debate and down to earth audience reaction in equal measure as it boldly went where no movie had dared to go before.

According to legend, the seeds of Alien's extra terrestrial were first sewn back in the early 70s when film student Dan O'Bannon collaborated with future horror maestro John Carpenter on the cult scifi movie, Dark Star, the tale of world weary truckers in space which would be hailed by critics as a satirical repost to Kubrick's stately 2001. Denied a co-directorial credit on Dark Star, O'Bannon began nurturing dreams of producing his own scifi movie project, a B-movie romp originally titled Star Beast which drew inspiration from class creature features like "It", "The creature from the black lagoon", "The Thing from another world" along with lesser known cult favorites like Italian maestro Mario Bava's "Planet of the Vampires"

CONCEPTION

Dan O'Bannon (02:38): There's a life time of movie going and story reading in Alien, and the picture was fresh and had been out a short time, a lot of people speculated just to exactly where I stole it from, with a, most people concluding that, erm, that it was stolen from It, the Terror from Beyond Space, the truth is, it was stolen from everywhere

Ron Shusett (3:03):  The first film that comes to mind is Invasion of the body snatchers by Don Seagle. The pod people. Night of the living dead. It, the creature from beyond space. The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Dan O'Bannon (03:13): The big standard at that point for any type of special effect or space movie was 2001, which was, um, a couple of years old as I recall at that time. But, er, one idea which... I had never seen was the idea of a used future. I basically recast Dark Star as a scary movie instead of a comedy, in line with The Thing, that type of grim tone of a few people trapped in a small technological space, while this really scary something is... is coming at them

Ron Shusett (4:15): We needed something horrific and visceral on a level that would not be, just a leave it as a corny B movie, so we needed something: number one, incredibly spectacular and bizarre.

Dan O'Bannon (4:25) I had the material necessary for the , for the first half of the script, a kind of forbidden planet situation where one of our starships lands of a mysterious planet, gets stranded there, bit by bit becomes involved with some mysterious and threatening organism. Had that over a xxxxxx pretty good, but I really didn't know what to do with the second half

Ron Shusett (4:57): Dan put his finger on the problem he said, I knows what happens, has to happen next, is the creature has to get on the ship in an interesting way. But I have no idea how and if we could solve that, if can't be just it snuck in, then I think the whole movie will unfold, come in to place. 

I went to sleep and I'm sure it isn't dreaming, it's a... the mind is functioning subconsciously, and in the middle of the night, so I woke up and I said, "Dan I think, i think i have an idea," and he said "what?" and I said "well, uh, the alien, the alien screws one of them" he said, "what are you talking about?"Well jumps in his face and plants the seed in "

Dan O'Bannon (5:42)"As soon as I heard it, I thought, oh well, that, that's it. That was one of the ideas that made it possible to uhm, make this thing worth doing at all. This is a movie about alien interspecies rape, that's it, that's scary, that scaring because it hits all of our buttons, all of our unresolved feelings about sexuality, all of them.

Mark Kermode (6:14) : Although O'Bannon and Shusett had originally envisaged Alien as a low budget fantasy flick in a style favored by independents like Roger Corman, producer Gordon Carroll thought it was bigger than that, believing that the project had the makings of an A-list Hollywood studio picture, Carroll encouraged Brandywine partners David Giler and Walter Hill, director of action hits like "The Warriors", to finesse it into something that Star Wars distributors 20th Century Fox would be willing to make a major investment. Exactly who was responsible for the finished script has become a source of heated controversy, but O'Bannon remained certain that Alien finally got the go ahead simply because it was in the right place at the right time

GESTATION

Dan O'Bannon (6:58): I know why Fox went for it, Fox didn't expect Star Wars to be such a, a runaway hit, but of course, when it was, they wanted to follow through very quickly and the fact of the matter was, that week, that month, there was a paucity of spaceship scripts, f.. er, floating around Fox. Mine was there, it was there, it was on the desk, and um, that's how it got the green light. They were patently baffled by it, but they wanted something out of it for themselves.

David Giler (7:35)Walter read it and he said,"well you'll think I'm going to sound crazy, I think we've got er, this , this script is just awful, " he says "but it's got one great scene in it, that maybe it makes it worth doing, you'll tell me if you think I'm nuts, right. " 

So I took it home, and er, I read it up until page 95 or something like that, I called Walter, 

I said "this is absolutely nuts, this is terrible!"  

He said well did you come to the big scene, "well" 

I said, "you mean where the thing jumps out on the guy's face". 

He said "no no, that's not it, keep reading." 

"I don't want to keep reading, I'm on page 95 now." 

"Keep reading". 

So I came to er, what we came to call the chestburster and I got it , 

I said "No, no, I think you're absolutely right, this is perfect in fact, you know, we're talking about big grossing movies, this could be the grossest movie of all of them."

Dan O'Bannon (8:28): They rewrote a lot of the dialogue, changed the name of the characters, added Ash the android and changed an arbitrary number of details in an arbitrary manner. I got, I got, that's the best I could tell you.

David Giler (8:50) The characters were wooden and the dialogue was bad, so we, uh, optioned the script from O'Bannon and Shusett, and er, er, and fixed, and took it home, fixed it up and, it's kind of a long process.

Dan O'Bannon (9:04): So my script with the, with the surface details all kind of bunged up, and , and, and, and broken and and bent, you know, so that dialogue isn't quite as good and this transition doesn't quite make sense, kind of a, my script, er,  after it's been in a car accident. On the other hand, the whole mood, and tone and feel of the thing has survived essentially unmodified, I mean I remember what I was thinking and feeling when I was writing that thing, and I can see what's on the screen.

Mark Kermode (9:40): With the formerly low "red" B-movie blossoming into a major studio feature, the producers started looking for someone with a unique vision to helm the venture. While O'Bannon himself had once been in the frame as a potential first time director, the attention now fell on Ridley Scott, an English man with a background in graphic design and advertising whose own first feature The Duellists had been acclaimed as rivaling Stanley Kubrick in the style department

David Giler (10:08): We felt that this was a simple enough story, and that if you had a good enough actress in it, if it was really about how g... how good could somebody make the monster look, the effects look, could they make the monster believable

Ivor Powell (10:23): One afternoon the script arrived and I being the scifi fanatic and Ridley, to be honest, not being the scifi fanatic, erm, we had a bit of a wrestling match, with this, er,  with this script which of course inevitably Ridley won.

Ridley Scott  (10:35): On the front cover was Dan O'Bannon, Ron Shusett, and er, I think I sat down on Saturday morning and er, took me about one hour and twenty minutes to read it, and er,  I knew I was going to do it

Ivor Powell (10:50): I then had to sit in the erm, adjacent office and listen to him, basically saying "Fuck Me!" and all that and so I knew, I knew it was interesting

Ridley Scott (11:02): I didn't even take it on board, that erm,  it could be anything but the way I wanted it

David Giler (11:08) : There's a kind of pain staking attention to detail in you know the stuff that he did, everything looked great and looked convincing and realistic, you know, and real, so that's that why er, er I thought Ridley would be good for this

Veronica Cartright (11:22): Ridley is so detail orientated erm, that er, he's, his eyes go to everything that's on the outside, and I think that probably comes from his art directing days and from the days that he did lots of commercials and things

Harry Dean Stanton (11:37): Ridley's got his total act together, everything, dialogue, end crew and technical part. He's, he's a master

Ridley Scott (11:48): Someone has to drive the bus, someone has to have the passion to go "Now, go that way, we gotta do this, we gotta do that" okay, that's the driver, you've got to have that otherwise it will get watered down


Sigourney Weaver, (12:03): You have only to meet Ridley Scott and get him talking before you think, I want to work with this guy, he had er, you know one basic line that he had to say a few times which was "I don't fucking believe it" you know, when he said that, you, you, you know he wanted something that was alive and that was b...  totally believable

Terry Rawlings (12:30): Ridley obviously is loaded with talent, he was loaded with talent before he started it, and he took it to a stage which I am sure they would never believe that would go, they thought it was g... I'm sure they thought they were going to make a little horror film that would pop out and that was it.

Ridley Scott (12:46): You can't cut away, you've got to see it, er, because that's what we're doing, we're doing an R rated movie, it's my job to push it right to the edge

Ivor Powell (12:55): We watched Tobe Hooper's er, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I know that he saw and I think he obviously, I think he got something out of that, and related to that,

Ridley Scott (13:03): I saw that when I was preparing to do Alien and , er, I was sitting in one of these teeny screen rooms in, um, Fox, erm on day, and I looked at this and that and I kept discarding films, you know, no, that's no good, you and then I heard about Texas Chainsaw Massacre and I'd er, I'd, I was also very intimidated by the poster, just, I think was the pig face and the saw, I thought, Gadd, I think it's going to be really tacky, ghastly blood bath of a movie which I was, always, uneasy about looking at, and when I finally saw it, I thought it was an amazing movie, you were uneasy from the first second, as soon as they picked that guy up in the car, it's like scarier than hell

Ron Shusett (13:46) That profoundly scared you to your soul. it should have been just schlock, but the scares were just so horrific.

Ivor Powell (13:51): I think it had a certain, er, documentary reality about it, which really erm, you know, hit home

Ron Shusett (14:00): He would say and he said to me, "I wanted it to be riveting, so commercial, but it's going to look, I guarantee you, like 2001" and I guess they believed him. 

Dan O'Bannon (14:11): They directed through the camera, he didn't want to stand at the side of the set and watch the thing he staged, he wanted to see it through the eyepiece that was filming it. The degree of, of control that he exerted over the visual look of the film was was a revelation to me. He could produce miraculously realistic fix realistically and simply because he understood the, the lighting and the the photography that medium so well.

Mark Kermode (14:50): While Scott's visual artistry would provide the look of the film, the physical form of the alien itself would be defined by another transatlantic trist which would inject Swiss genes into the embryonic process by artist H R Giger

Ridley Scott ( 15:18): The biggest overriding fact was that if you haven't got the old monster, you aint got a movie, okay, if you've got a monster which is okay, you're dead in the water


Ron Shusett ( 15:28): By this time, erm movies had became sort of corny to have the alien monster and what we did was bring it back bigger and brighter, more grandiose and believable and one of the keys was the design, Giger's design.

Ridley Scott ( 15:45):I started to see conventional things on paper, I wanted to go away from that, and the Dan kind of showed me a book "on the other hand, there's this which is kind of odd, I don't know what you're going to think about it"

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