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)

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The Sudanese

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Ridley Scott's Alien Monster

1. Dan O'Bannon: Finally he bought this big expensive picture book on some part of Africa, (see right image for a photograph from Leni Riefenstahl Nuba) it was photographs of some of the remaining native tribe that has somewhat primitive lifestyle.  There were all these really striking colour photographs and this particular tribe has a striking appearance.  They're all very tall and very black and there were some very, very impressive photographs of these tall, thin powerful-looking men with very supple, gleaming muscles.  They're very graceful, sort of sensual, and at the same time powerful and handsome, but almost ethereal, almost not human - very striking. That image burned itself into Ridley's brain, he liked that power of unearthliness and grace and strength.  he wanted Giger to see if he could do something around that kind of a shape of person.  Then they found their actor who is this seven-foot-African...
   
   
   FF: So the monster was actually designed for one person rather than with a visual image of a particular type of human in mind?
   
   O' Bannon: No. more along these pictures out of this book more of this Nubian black racial type.  The thing we liked so much was the grace of these black people. (Fantastic Films, US #11/ GB number 2: p14) 

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Bolaji Badejo from the Gold Coast

 from

Ridley Scott's Alien Monster

1. Ridley Scott:The alien had to be 7ft 2in. We found a man Bolaji Badejo from the Gold Coast who when stripped had a figure like a Giacometti sculpture and was 9in. taller than the height of the door. But where do you find a woman like that? (David Lewin, Daily Mail)
2. Giler : "We used a 6'10" native of the Gold Coast inside the monster suit designed by Giger" (CFQ 9:1 p19)
3.  Ivor Powell: "...and then this kind of choreographer friend of mine who, I'm not sure he was looking out for women in a particular dimension, he said, "I was at a bar the other night, and it was a sort of students bar, lots of students there and I saw this guy and I don't know what he was, whether he was Somalian, or some, he was some African and he was impossibly tall and skinny, you want to see him?' And so he sent him in and this quite sort of timid kind of guy, never been in front of a camer before and he ended up being our, you know, Alien." (Alien Makers II documentary)

   

   "“Homme qui Marche” by Giacometti

4. The Alien you don't get to see in ALIEN was played by 6'10", 26-year-old Nigerian Bolaji Badejo. Bolaji is a student of graphic arts in London, and has traveled extensively with his parents, to Ethiopia where he studied Fine Arts, and to the United States, including a three year stay in San Francisco. He landed the role of "The Alien" purely by accident, a turn of events that reads like a publicity agent's tall tale. The production had apparently put out a casting call for a very tall, very thin actor. Bolaji bumped into agent Pete Archer while having a drink in a London West End pub. Archer thought of Alien as soon as he spotted Bolaji, and offered him the chance to try out for the part. "As soon as I walked in, " said Bolaji " Ridley Scott knew he'd found the right person." Scott had been looking at basket ball players, and he tested Peter Mayhew for the alien., but it was Badejo's combination of height, slimness and an erect posture that cinched him the part. Bolaji was signed for the role in May, manufacture of the suit began, and the filming of the ALien started in August at Shepperton.Ridley Scott originally intended Bolaji to be part of a team of three artists needed to play the Alien, including a mime specialist and a karate expert. When other experts of Bolaji's unique proportions could not be found, a stuntman was substituted for the dangerous and physically gruelling action and Bolaji began to take miming lessons. (Cinefantastique 9:1)

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The Salamander People

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Ridley Scott's Alien Monster

 

Interestingly enough the idea of the Sudanese nubians had been in Ridley's mind since the time he was thinking about his film project Tristan and Iseult, a knights in armour film set in a timeless post apocalyptic future inspired by the comic book Metal Hurlant. The salamander people had long flicking tongues for catching insects. Later we will discover that the final Alien creature has a long tongue.

Quote source

1. Ridley Scott:  I wanted to use these sort of characters from the Sudan, very tall, very thin, very black and very strong people.  In fact, when it came to doing Alien, the man who played the alien, a fellow named Balagi, looked exactly like that
   
   Fantastic Film: How did these characters fit into Tristan?
   
   Ridley Scott: They live in the jungle, these guys, and they've got salamander tongues. They live off insects. Imagine a seven foot guy just standing quietly in a glad. He slowly turns and .... Whap! He takes a mantis off a leaf and crunches it in his mouth. (Fantastic Film US number 12/#2, p11

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The Chestburster

leading from:
 Ridley Scott's Alien Monster 

Michael Seymour; "After the first stage had died and 

left us, we can assume that it has layed its egg inside the 

human character's chest. So the next stage, which is the 

creature that gives birth to itself by bursting through the 

wall of John Hurt's chest, we referred to in our own private 

language as the "Chest-Burster"  

(American Cinematographer, August 1979, p805) 

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion c.1944

a) Ridley inspired by Francis Bacon

Ridley Scott had a situation to deal with, that if he wanted to be really scared, he had to have a very private thought. He had to think about what physically made him feel really uneasy that upset him in a primal way, and Ridley was someone who was not easily made to feel upset. But they looked at various painter's work one one that caught their eye was the Crucifixion by Francis Bacon from 1944 that showed three fleshy necks with jaws on the end and as Giger described it, rat's flesh. The primality of the painting if there was such a word was what interested Ridley. Ridley told Giger that he wanted something like that, and the idea was logical.

b) Giger's chestburser concept

Giger's first design for the chestburster based on this had more than one mouth. The mouth was the most important thing because it had to come out of the human body, to chew and claw its way out suddenly and unerringly. He thought that they looked like chickens without feathers and wasn't happy with them and then he tried to build the thing.

Giger's Chestburster concept painting

c)  Roger Dicken takes over

The job of creating Giger's approved design was soon handed over to Roger Dicken. He was not too happy, to Roger, it looked like a plucked turkey, a veined repulsive looking thing with fangs, and that's what they said they wanted. There wasn't anything too complicated in the design though since all it had to do was force its way through the chest and then flop onto the table, so they decided that the best approach was to build it as a hand puppet, about three times life size, so that he could get his hand up into the neck. Obviously though, you couldn't have something the size of a large turkey coming out of a human chest but they would cheat the shot somehow.

H R Giger's sculpture for his chestburster design.
(Source: H.R.Giger's film design)

d) Dicken working from his house

He worked out of his home in Pangbourne, that was about an hours drive from Shepperton where the studios were. Dicken began work on the chest burster in Mid-March, sculpting it out of plasticene, and then casting it in foam plastic with a latex rubber skin. After spending about three weeks on it, he took it into the studio for a trial run. 

H R Giger's sculpture for his chestburster design.
(Source: H.R.Giger's Alien Diaries)

e) Dicken finishes Giger's initial concept

Giger's drawing was his interpretation of a Francis Bacon type thing and it looked very hideous indeed. It was covered in blood and hand a large underhung jaw with some really lethal teeth on it,, Ridley found it totally obscene and very frightening. However Dicken reproduced it very faithfully and what looked great on paper didn't translate itself very well into Dicken's puppet making. Dicken normally worked everything like a glove puppet and he brough this thing in and propped it on his knee. While he was talking, he kept moving the head around so the thing kept looking back and forth across the room, from Gordon to Carroll to Ridley and then up his nose. The thing looked winkled and ancient looking like a malevolent Muppet. The way Ridley talked about was Dicken was doing with it on his hand might make one think about the old Rod Hull and Emu act. So the whole thing was entirely comical for Ridley and the thing looked like some kind of plucked demented turkey. and Ridley feared getting a giggle at this time in the film and so they ditched the whole concept and started again.

H R Giger's sculpture for his chestburster design

f) Giger never gives up

Despite the fact that Dicken had nearly finished the smaller Alien forms, Giger still wished to create his own versions to make sure that everything looked the way he wanted, while he was working on the big alien,  on his work bench were his versions of the facehugger and the chestburster. Dan O'Bannon indeed thought that they were better than what was used on the film, especially the Chestburster. It was much larger in proportion to the rest of the body and the teeth were like oversized fangs, fully extended, a set on both top and the bottom, and it was certainly something design for biting its way out. Dan could imagine those fangs going through a piece of steel.

H R Giger's sculpture for his chestburster design

g) After a new chestburster design

So it went that because of the failure of Dicken's puppet, Ridley and the other decided to go back to the drawing board and re-examine the various illustrations and ideas and come up with something that they thought would be frightening. Ridley wanted to show more of a biological link between the baby which is what they were trying to design and what the final creature would look like. The monster that Dicken had created based on Giger's artwork was wrinkled and ancient looking like a malevolant Muppet, who can even imagine today how much it might have differed from Giger's artwork, but what Ridley wanted now was something that was a smooth object and when it came out looked  very rude and totally carnivorous.

Roger Dicken's earlier chestburster

h) Conceiving the final chestburster
Dicken was shown a Giger drawing with an elongated head, perhaps Necronom IV, and so he got to work trying the creature out with all sorts of variations without eyes, with eyes, with tails. Dicken fiddled around with sticking the tail on the head, trying it without arms, with legs, eventually coming up with something the producers liked.

Roger Dicken's earlier chestburster

Ridley drove over to Roger's house one day to have a look at it, It had a head that was pretty much a miniature version of the big one, and kind of an elaborate body with legs - like little dinosaur legs. It was just in clay at that point, and Ridley looked it over a bit and then reached out and pulled off its legs and so off came the legs as well, then he wadded up little pieces of clay like dolphin flippers and stuck them either side behind the head and appeared as spastic-like lumps , and then he said, "There - that's it"

Also to make it look as lifelike as possible Roger made it breathe by installing gills and a chest that was inflated up and down. As the large alien came equiped with those huge metallic teeth, Dicken had to fashion some chromium dentures for the smaller version, which were snapped onto the monster's porpoise-like face. They also decided this creature would have a head either titled down or tilted back because it seemed as Ridley would describe it, more obscene that way, more reptilian , more phallic. That final beast would have been a product of several people. Giger, Dicken, Ridley and even a little bit of Gordon Carroll.

i) Building the final chestburster
The final thing ended up looking similar to a porpoise . It was literally he head of the big alien with a tail on the end. But constructing it wasn't so simple, mainly because it had to be actual size and that meant it wasn't big enough for Roger Dicken to be able to put his hand inside and operate it. What he came up with was a curved metal rod which ran into a hand grip. About half way along - up where the neck - was a flexible steel spring, and then the rest of the rod went up into the head area and then down underneath the jaw to give it strength. He ran a wire through, through a series of eyelets, along the whole length of the rod and then down into a ring which fit around his finger, so when when pulled on the ring, the spring would make the front section bend over. On the front section, were the mechanisms for making the jaw open and the little arms move out. These were just activated by air.  He ran little air tubes through the model and connected them to rubber squeeze bulbs, so all one had to was squeeze one to activate the mechanism. There was also a little bladder inside the things chest so it could breathe and the bladder on each side of the head so the gills would pulse. Then he ran another tube up to the mouth and connected that to a bottle of fluid so that when one squeezed the bottle, saliva would run out. The teeth he made out of the epoxy and they were then metalised in a centrifugal vacuum machine. Everything was really very simple but what was difficult was getting it all to fit into this narrow sausage shape. It was also very difficult to hide anything. Normally, if Roger 'worked on a dinosaur model, or something similar, he could slash it open and stitch it back up - because it would have all kinds of scales and folds to conceal whatever had been done.  But this thing was so smooth, with hardly any detail, that if one made a mistake it was very near impossible to get inside again without destroying it.

 

Source Quotes  

1. Ridley Scott: I think finally, when you want to be really scared,
   you've got to have a very private thought. You've got to think about what it is that physically makes you very uneasy, that upsets you in a primal way. And I'm not very easily upset.. But we looked at various painters' works, and the one that caught us was by Francis Bacon, the three fleshy necks with the jaws on the end. The primality, if there is such a word, was what interested me. (Cinefantastique 9:1 p14)
2. HR Giger: "My first design of the chestburster had more than one mouth. The mouth was the most important thing because it had to eat out of his body. But we made it smaller and Roger Dicken built the small alien".  (Alien Collectors edition, p32) 


3. FX: What about the Chest-Burster?
   
   HRGiger: Ridley Scott asked me to do something based on a crucifixion painting by Francis Bacon, in which the only thing of the figure you see is a mouth and some flesh behind. He wanted something like that which could go into the stomach or come out of it. (FX,07,1999) 
4. HR Giger: The chestburster, that was a very heavy scene, l think the strongest thing in the whole film. The idea came from a painting from Francis Bacon. Ridley Scott told me about this painting of '46 - it's just a crucifixion - and one of the members has just teeth and rats flesh... He liked to have the chestburster like that. l did some designs. They looked like chickens. Something like chickens without feathers, but l was not happy with them. And then l built up the thing, and it looked like a small dinosaur. That was awful. l said ''Cut the legs.'' So finally we only had the head and a tail, and that was enough. (Alien documentary on Alien Quadrilogy)
5. HR Giger: The second [form of the] alien was born through the crab. Bacon did a crucifixion in 1945, and there is a kind of beast in it that has a head that is only a mouth. Ridley said he wanted something like that. it was logical. This beast has to come out, to chew and claw its way out suddenly, unerringly.(Cinescape vol3, #9, 
6.  Cinefex: Roger Dicken was given Giger's approved design for the intermediate form, which came to be known as the chest-buster. "To me , it looked like a plucked turkey, "Dicken remarked, " a veined, repulsive looking thing with fangs. I said: "You want me to make this? It looks like a turkey." And they said, yes, thats what they wanted. Well there wasn't a need for anything very complicated, since all it had to do was force its way through the chest and then flop onto the table; so we figured the best approach was to build it as a hand puppet, about three times life-size, so I could get my hand up into the neck. Obviously, you couldn't get something the size of a large turkey out of a human chest, but initially they were going to cheat it somehow."
   Working out of his home at Pangbourne, about an hours drive from Shepherton - Dicken began on the chest-burster in Mid-March, sculpting it out of plasticene, and then casting it in foam plastic with a latex rubber skin. After spending about three weeks on it, he took it into the studio for a trial run.
   
   "Giger's drawing was a kind of a Francis Bacon-type thing," Ridley Scott explained, " and it looked just hideous. It was covered in blood and had a large underhung jaw with some really lethal teeth on it - totally obscene and very frightening. And in fact, roger Dicken reproduced it very faithfully. The problem was that what looked great on paper didn't in actuality. Dicken normally works everything like a glove puppet, and so he brought this thing in and propped it on his knee. And while he was talking, he kept moving the head around so the bloody thing kept looking back and forth across the room - from Gordon Carroll to me, and then up his nose. The whole thing was entirely comical - it looked like some kind of a plucked demented turkey. I was frankly terrified at the thought of getting a giggle at this time in the film, so we ditched the whole concept and started again." (Cinefex 1, p43)
7. Cinefex: Once established on the Shepperton lot. Giger made a unilateral bid to reaffirm the intergrity of his highly personal vision by commencing to sculpt his own versions of the two smaller forms as well. - this despite the fact that Roger Dicken's renderings of both were virtually complete.  "He was trying to do all of them ," Dan O'Bannon affirmed. "He was, of course, working on the big one: but on his workbench he was also well underway on both the face-hugger and the chest-burster. They were exquisite pieces of sculpture, too. Better, I think, than that were used in the film. Especially the chestburster. Giger really gave that thing a nasty mouth. It was much larger in proportion to the rest of the body, and the teeth were like oversized fangs, fully extended - a set on both top and the bottom. I mean he was building something designed for biting its way out - those fangs looked like they would go through a piece of steel" (Cinefex 1, p47) 
8. Roger Dicken was given Giger's design and, despite his objections to it, he was asked to build it as Giger had painted it. Dicken constructed a hand puppet sculpted in plasticine, cast in  foam plastic with a latex rubber skin. Dicken showed Ridley Scott and the producers the finished puppet, and it was then that the decision was made to completely change the concept. (Alien Laserdisc Archive)

   

   Dicken's final chestburster 
   (source: H R Giger's Alien Diaries)

9. Ridley Scott "We went back and re-examined various illustrations and ideas, and tried to come up with something we thought would be the most frightening, I wanted more of a biological link between the baby which is what we were really designing, and what the final creature would look like. And I wantd it to be a very smooth object. The other was all wrinkled and ancient looking like a malevolent Muppet. And when it came out, , I wanted it to look very rude - and totally carnivorous. So to be honest, that beast was very much the product of several people - Giger, Dicken and me, and even a bit of Gordon Carroll."(Cinefex 1, p43) 
10. Ridley Scott: "We decided that the big chap, in embryo form, would have a head either tilted down or titled back. We tilted it back because it seemed more obscene that way, more reptilian, more phallic. " (Starlog, September 1979, p25)

    

    Roger Dicken's chestburster with black eyes and
    small arms (Source: H.R.Giger's Alien Diaries)

11. Dicken was beginning to have misgivings about the collaborative nature of his Alien involvement, but nevertheless plunged into the revised chest-burster in mid-April. (Cinefex 1, p44)
12. Dan O'Bannon: "Ridley ran over to Roger's house one day to have a look at it, It had a head that was pretty much a miniature version of the big one, and kind of an elaborate body with legs - like little dinosaur legs. It was just in clay at that point, and Ridley looked it over a bit and then reached out and pulled off its legs. Then he wadded up little pieces of clay like dolphin flippers and stuck them either side behind the head, and said, "There - that's it"" (Cinefex 1, p44)
    
13. The secondary alien form, the "chestburster." which explodes from Kane's body was built by Dicken from a design suggested to him by Ripley Scott. "Ridley decided  the 'chest-burster' should look something like the Giger drawing with the elongated head. " said Dicken. The creature was tried with all sorts of variations without eyes,, with eyes, with tails. Dickem fiddled around with sticking the tail on the head, trying it without arms, with
    legs, eventually coming up with something the producers liked. Its arms came off, and Scott wanted the body to have spastic-like lumps; also to make it look as lifelike as possible. "I made it breathe by installing gills and a chest that was inflated up and down." As the large alien came equiped with those huge metallic teeth, Dicken had to fashion some chromium dentures for the smaller version, which were snapped onto the monster's porpoise-like face. (Cinefantastique vol 9 # 1)

    

    Dicken with his Chestburster 
    and Facehugger creations

14. Roger Dicken:The final thing ended up looking sort of porpoise like. The head of the big alien with a tail on the end was literally all it was. But constructing it wasn't so simple, mainly because they wanted it actual size and it wasn't big enough for me to be able to put my hand inside and operate it. What I came up with was a curved metal rod which ran into a hand grip. About half way along - up where the neck would have been if it'd had one - was a flexible steel spring, and then the rest of the rod went up into the head area and then down underneath the jaw to give it strength. I ran a wire through, through a series of eyelets, along the whole length of the rod and then down into a ring which fit around my finger, so when I pulled on the ring, the spring would make the front section bend over. On the front section, also, were the mechanisms for making the jaw open and the little arms move out. These were just activated air.  I ran little air tubes through the model and connected them to rubber squeeze bulbs, so all you have to do was squeeze one to activate the mechanism. There was also a little bladder inside the things chest so it could breathe and the bladder on each side of the head so the gills would pulse. Then I ran another tube up to the mouth and connected that to a bottle of fluid so that when you squeezed the bottle, saliva would run out. The teeth I made out of the epoxy and they were then metalised in a centrifugal vacuum machine. Everything was really very simple. What was difficult was getting it all to fit into this narrow sausage shape. It was also very difficult to hide anything. Normally, if you're working with a dinosaur, or something like that you can slash him open and stitch him back up - you've got all kind of scales and folds to conceal whatever you've done.  But this thing was so smooth, with hardly any detail, that if you made a mistake it was damn near impossible to get inside again without destroying it.(Cinefex 1, p44)
15. Dixieme Planete : Quel a été le point de départ de la création du Chestburster ?
    HR Giger: Ridley Scott m'a demandé de faire quelque chose rappelant le «cri», une peinture de Francis Pike représentant une bouche ouverte. Je me suis exécuté, mais je trouvais ça moche ! Puis les techniciens anglais ont adapté ma tète d'Alien pour en faire ce que l'on voit à l'écran. (Dixieme Planete 31)
    Translation :Dixieme Planete : What was the starting point for the creation of Chestburster ?
    HR Giger : Ridley Scott asked me to do something reminiscent of the "cry" , a painting by Francis Bacon representing an open mouth. I carry it out, but I thought it was ugly!
    Then the English technicians have adapted my Alien head to do what we see on the screen.
    (N.B. Francis Pike would be a misinterpretation of the name Francis Bacon and the painting referred to as the "cry" doesn't make sense, there is no painting by that name by the artist but he might be talking about Francis Bacon's Crucifixion which is what is usually talked about in relation to the Chestburster, or is there something else being talked about here? The interviewers would have not had a clue what was being talked about by the looks of it!)

The Facehugger sold to Chris De Burgh at Bonhams  on 13 Jul 2004

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The Facehugger

From

Ridley Scott's Alien Monster 

Michael Seymour: The first stage, 
when it initially appears and leaps 
from that sort of egg shape and plants 
itself onto the face of a human, is a 
curious, grasping , crablike sort of 
hand creature. We called that first 
stage the "Facehugger" 
 (American Cinematographer, August 1979, p805)

O'Bannon's sketch, Egg with facehugger

a) Surprise Phonecall

Dan O'Bannon who was in LA and H R Giger who was in Switzerland were communicating via phone. Giger noted a 30 minute conversation that took place in July 1977 when Dan called him to talk about the Alien film project. Dan explained to Giger what happened to him once the Dune project was over and he went back to LA and fell ill with a stomach complaint. He would send a letter telling him about the project, one copy in English and another in German, and Giger would be able to see if the project was for him.

part of Dan O'Bannon's letter

b) Thousand Dollar Cheque 

Out of the little money they had at the time for the project, Twentieth Century fox had finally sent Giger a cheque for  $1000 to get started on paintings of designs for the Alien movie, so that he didn't have to feel as if he was working for nothing as he did on Dune. He sent a letter to H R Giger with descriptions in basic English of what he wanted the Facehugger to do, that it was supposed to be small, and it was like an octopus like creature that would leap onto the person's face, wrap its tentacles around behind the person's head and then it would have an organ that was an ovipositer which would be shoved down the person's throat.

work 364a, Giger's facehugger sketch

c) Giger's first idea

Giger took note of the descriptions that he had been given as well as the sketches. He understood that the creature was supposed to jump out of a big egg, so he thought that it must be a creature large enough to fill the egg, and when it jumped out, it has a tale like a springfender or a spring as in a jack-in-the-box.

The facehugger's form would bedetermined through its function, following his background as an industrial designer, everything must have a function. He was thinking that if something that jumps out and then holds onto someone's face needs fingers or hands. Giger liked long fingers and so he gave the creature these. Normally if someone is sitting on another person's face, that other person can't breath through the nose, and would automatically open his mouth. Then the monster goes down. 

work 365a, Giger's Facehugger sketch

d) Trouble up at the airport customs

A few weeks later, Giger mailed large photographic transparencies to O'Bannon and others at Fox. When they arrived at the airport, the custom officials didn't understand what they were and were alarmed. They had to personally come down to LAX and pick what H R Giger has sent up,

LAX airport 1978

e) Vision of the fingers

When Dan O'Bannon finally got these photographs for the designs he had done for the facehugger and he held them up to the light where he could see them, and was stunned at what he saw, there was the lobed creature attached to the face of a person, but instead of tentacles, there were fingers! It was these fingers that amazed Dan and and as soon as he saw those fingers he knew that he would do whatever he had to do to get those fingers into the film.

work 364

f) Eclectic design

A big meeting took place, with Roger Dicken being told what the creature should look like and he had no idea what to make of it. Finally Ridley Scott pulled out Giger's Necronomicon as a guidebook  and he pointed out various parts that he liked. Dan O'Bannon could see that Roger Dicken was very confused about the whole thing so he decided to ask Ridley if he could have a go at drawing the creature from the elements picked out by Ridley, he said "go ahead" so Dan went over to the art department with Roger Dicken, they took a drafting table and a huge piece of paper with some pencils. He drew two heads on the paper and then opened Giger's book and put it down before them. He said "Ridley wanted part of this body, right?" and he sketched it out, he drew the fingers that Ridley liked and he added the tail as well.

work 365

g) Joe Petagno's contribution

Joe Petagno, artist well known for his Motorhead album covers remembers being involved in the concept design process for the Facehugger when H R Giger was not around at Shepperton. He is known to have drawn a version of the Facehugger on Kane's face with a long penis like rod going down his throat to impregnate Kane with its offspring.  It was said that it was just the way writer Dan O'Bannon wanted it but Ridley Scott decided against it due to it being too explicit. Dan was known to not happy about the situation.

Ridleygram showingthe facehugger's underbelly see the genesis of the design  for the sculpted underbelly

h) Giger arrives from Switzerland

As they put together the concept, Giger came in, his plane had arrived from Switzerland and he had with him the designs for the facehugger that he had been working on and they so happened to be similar to the designs that Dan had sketched with Roger. Giger's version had an eye on the back, and looked more like the palm of a hand. Dan looked at Giger and said "Oh that's good!" but Giger looked at the designs on their designs on the drawing board and said "No, that's much better" which pleased Dan immensely. Dan asked "should I continue with it" and Giger replied "Oh yes", so the drawing went on replacing Giger's concept.

i) Giger's Facehugger design

Giger's idea was that the creature was going to be very smooth and slimy with eight long, fine but

strong fingers, as if it were made from two hands, however the main difference between his idea and the final one was that his was going to be translucent. He started building the chestburster and the facehugger , he had to give up on the chestburster, it was known that his design for this was going in the wrong direction however which left him unsatisfied with it, but the the reason he gave up on the facehugger was that the producers wanted him to get the big Alien finished in time.

HR Giger's unused facehugger designs

j) Cobb's skeletal understructure

Dan O'Bannon with the design he was putting together realised that there was the need to create a skeletal understructure for the creature that it would need to hook the fingers onto,  and Ron Cobb sketched some ideas that worked as a solution that Dan drew out. He drew everything in life size and they went with that. Dan O'Bannon considered the creature that they created as something eclectically constructed from what Ridley and Giger wanted with ideas from from Ron Cobb and Roger Dicken. Once they put it through the blueprint machine, Ridley okayed it and Roger went off to build it.

Dicken with his Chestburster 
and Facehugger creations

k) Roger Dicken's own concept

Roger Dicken did have his own concept for a facehugger that would have been different and more in keeping with his own aesthetics as a monster maker. He would have like to have made it a little more scaly  and have little barbs like rose thorns on the leg and down the tail. Since this creature was self preserving, he felt that you shouldn't be able to get hold of the creature. He also would have like to have like there to have been barbed fingertips inside of smooth human type nails that they wanted

The tail was moved simply with a wire and Ridley wanted to fill the sacks on the side of the creature with slime, but he put it in the sacs and it clogged up the air tubes which made the sacs pulsate. They used surgical jelly on the hugger to get the slimy gooey effects

Colour photo of Roger Dicken with Alien life forms (source: blackholereviews.blogspot.co.uk/)

Sources Quotes:

1. H R Giger: Early Design. July 1977 I get an entirely unexpected telephone call from Dan O'Bannon in Hollywood. He speaks very slowly, so that in spite of my poor English, I can understand the important things in store for me. He is talking about a new project for a film called Alien. He tells me that, when the Dune project broke down, he went back to Hollywood, and soon afterwards he was very ill. A tiresome stomach trouble. He had lain sick in bed at the home of his friend Ron Shusett, and had still managed to work out the Alien story with his friend's help. When he was better, he had written to the SF Horror Story and made the suggestion that the fearsome Alien monster should be created by me. Brandywine Productions, consisting of Gordon Caroll, David Giler and Walter Hill, were approached to put up the capital for the production of the film. He says he will let me have a letter setting out the main things he would want me to create. Unfortunately there isn't much money available yet, but enough to advance me a thousand dollars, so that I shouldn't feel that I'd be working for nothing anymore. However, first I have to wait for the letter, to see where the whole thing is really going to interest me. We are about half an hour talking on the telephone. Now I wait excitedly to see what will happen next. (Giger's Alien, p8)
2. HR Giger: 11 July 1977. O'Bannon's letter has arrived. One version in German and one in English. Also some explanatory sketches by Ron Cobb (who also had been working with Jodorowsky) and by O'Bannon himself. The cheque for the promised thousand dollars has also arrived. Now I realy must get down to work (Giger's Alien, p10)
3. HR Giger: The story tells of spore capsules (eggs) inside a pyramid. This gives me the idea of using the Swiss egg-box for the basic structure of the pyramid (plate 363c). The eggs themselvs, which according to O'Bannon's sketch (plate 363b). (Giger's Alien, p10)
4. HR Giger: Plates 364a and 365a show the first sketches, as Alien I, the Facehugger, jumps out of the egg. In a good design, the function of the object ought to be clearly visible, so I give the Facehugger a tail to be used as a spring for taking off (like a tail on the jumping devil toy, plate 364a. ). The Facehugger, which clings to the face of its victims, gets spidery fingers on both sides (plate 363/364/365).  (Giger's Alien, p10)  (click here for work 363)
5. HR Giger: Once it gets its claws in, the Facehugger sinks its tube-like proboscis into the throat of the victim to deposit its embryos. Plate 364 shows how it uses a pince-like mechanism to force open the mouth. Plate 365, a variant, shows the sack in which the embryos are formed.(Giger's Alien, p10)
6. HR Giger:These are my proposals for the job they have given me. I have transparencies made of the pictures, sketches and models, send them to O'Bannon, and wait.(Giger's Alien, p10)
7. HR Giger: Still no answer from Hollywood. My book H.R. Giger's Necronomicon (in the French version) has just been published. I send O'Bannon the first copy, the ink is still went from the printers. (Giger's Alien, p10)
8. HR Giger: The Face Hugger, that was my first thing I did for Dan O'Bannon when he sent me I think about a thousand dollar to do some paintings for Alien and er, he gave me an explanation and erm drawings, and he said that it's jumping on a big egg , the egg is about that, so I thought that must be quite a big monster, so I did an enormous facehugger like a... and erm, he was jumping, I thought he could jump when his tail is like, is curved like a springfender or whatever, a jack in the box. (Alien Quadrology :documentry)
9. HR Giger:The first creature is like a crab sitting in the egg, I worked as an industrial designer in Zurich, so when they told me what the alien had to do, I could see the beast in terms of its func- tions. I designed the face-hugger with a tightly coiled tail so it could jump out of its egg, using the tail as a spring. I gave the first one a tail the shape of a spring, because its function commanded that it could jump out at the face. And also two hands so it could grab a hold of the head. (Cinescape vol 3,#9)
10. Dan O'Bannon: (35:53) I'm over here in LA, Giger's over there in Switzerland, we're communicating on the phone, Twentieth Century Fox has finally sent him some money to get started, and I sat down and wrote out some very simple parameters for what I wanted him to start designing, and I described in the simplest terms what the Facehugger was to do, that it was supposed to be a small, sort of octopus like thing that would leap onto a person's face, wrap its tentacles around behind the person's head and then it would have an organ , an ovipositer which would be shoved down the person's throat. ( AQ and BR commentary) 
11. Dan O'Bannon: SPORE PODS. These are leathery, egg shapes objects about one metre tall, which contain the larva of the Alien. They have a small"lid" in the top, which can pop off when a victim approaches.(Giger's Alien)
12. Dan O'Bannon:  THE ALIEN, FIRST PHASE. This is small, possibly octopoidal creature which waites inside the Spore Pod for a victim to approach. When someone touches the Spore Pod, the lid flies off, and the small Alien (First Phase), leaps out and attaches itself to the face of the victim. (Giger's Alien)
13. Dan O'Bannon: A few weeks later, Giger mailed these large photographic transparencies to us at Fox, they came through through customs, they didn't understand what they were and were alarmed, we had to personally come down to LAX and pick these things up, and I finally got these photographs that Giger had made for the designs he had done for the facehugger and I held them up to the light where I could see them, I was stunned at what I saw, there was the  (37:00) There was the lobed creature attached to the face of a person, but instead of tentacles, there were fingers! fingers! As soon as I saw those fingers I knew that I would do whatever I had to do to get those fingers into the film, ( AQ and BR commentary)  
14. H R Giger: Later on he said that, er, I should do it smaller, so I think something with human hands is always scary , so I , I had the finger, long fingers what is the most important part of the facehugger, and then it's a part, there's the little sexual like, yuh, and erm, the tube for erm that this beast has to... to... to... put in the... in the mouth, and then late, I had this hands in front, and then Dan O'Bannon draw them side... sidewards, that was better (Alien Quadrology  documentry)
    
15. Dan O'Bannon: I thought that the Facehugger deserved to be given a great deal of our attention, I thought it was a very important element in the story and nobody seemed to be finding the time for it. Giger's energies at that point were going in to sculpting the full size alien, the life size one, the one which was manshaped and the face hugger wasn't being designed.(Giger's Alien, p10)
16. Ace: I have seen the preliminaries for the new album's cover. It strikes me as very Gigeresque. Was he a major inspiration for this piece? What were the inspirations?
    Joe: Sorry, but I was working on the Alien the movie at Shepperton studios with Dan O Bannon before Hans Rudi was invited along and Motorhead was, as mentioned earlier, concieved 3 years before Alien was even thought about! Geiger's a very accomplished artist, but lets not get carried away!! (source:www.imotorhead.com/)
17. Richard J. Taylor: An artist named Petagno drew up the original design of the face hugger on Kanes face with a long penis like rod going down his throat impregnating Kane with its offspring.  The design was just the way writer Dan 'O Bannon wanted it but Ridley Scott cut it out due to it being too explicit.  Dan was generally pissed and the design was replaced by some shitty stock footage of blood pumping through veins.  Its interesting what you can learn from Sounds Of Death magazine (source http://www.oocities.org/hollywood/lot/9587/revA.htm)
18. H R Giger: 3 June 1978, Shepperton Studios. During a sleepless night, I've made sketches for the constructions of the monster and begin to model one of the Facehugger's long fingers with a wire frame, plastic tubes and plasticene (Giger's Alien, p54)
19. HR Giger: 29th July, 1978, Shepperton Studios. I agree with Scott to make the Aliens translucent. One should be able to see the skeleton, the blood circulatory system, the organs, etc. The skeleton has been cast in plast and I am starting to design the Facehugger's skin when - how could it be otherwise - the order arrives from production to stop work on the facehugger immediately and devote myself exclusively to designing the large monster, Alien III. (Giger's Alien, p54)
20. Roger Dicken was working concurrently on the face-huggers. In the absence of anything more definitive, he had been given Giger's original concept paintings, which were greatly out of scale, along with some instructions from Ridley on what modifications needed to be made. The guidance, however, proved inadequate to the task. (Cinefex 1: p47) 
21. Dan O'Bannon :There was a big meeting, and everybody was talking at the same time and trying to tell Dicken what the hell it should look like. Finally Ridley pulled out Giger's book and said: "Look. I want these fingers here on this page: and I want that over there for the back: and then I want the tail from this other page." And Dicken was just confused. He couldn't absorb it all the way it was being thrown at him. So I asked Ridley if I could take a try at it, and he said "Go ahead". So I went over to the art department with Dicken and we took a drafting table and a huge piece of paper and some pencils. I drew two heads on the paper, and then I opened Giger's book and put it down in front of us. "All right." I said. "Ridley said he wanted part of this body, right?" And I sketched it out. And he liked these fingers. So I added the fingers. And he wanted this tail.  (Cinefex 1: p47)
22. Giger: At school I worked as an industrial designer so everything must have a function. The Facehugger was determined through its function. You have to show that. I was thinking that something jumps out and then holds onto someone's face needs fingers or hands. Normally if someone is sitting on your face, you can't breathe through your nose, so you automatically open your mouth. Then the monster goes down. So it looked a little bit like a crab or a spider. I like long fingers, so it had these long fingers, then two hands and a spiral tail. That was it, The hands hold onto Kane's face and the tail wraps around his neck.(Clive Barker's A-Z of Horror, p70)
23. Dan O'Bannon :Well, while we were doing this, Giger came in - his plane had arrived from Switzerland - and he had some new designs for the face-hugger. And they were very similar to what we were putting together on the drawing board - not identical, but similar. His had an eye on the back, and the shape of it was much more like the palm of a hand. I looked at him and said "Oh that's good". Then Giger looked at the thing I was sketching with Dicken, and he said, "No, that's better, that's much better." I was really flattered. So I said "The I should continue with it?' And he said "Oh, yes." So we went on. When it came to trying to figure out what kind of skeletal understructure the thing would need so the fingers could hook up, I got Ron Cobb over and he scrawled out his ideas - which as usual were excellent. The I cleaned the whole thing up a little and did it in ink - exact size - and that's what we went with. I was really pleased, because I had eclectically constructed the face-hugger out of the things that Ridley wanted and the things that Giger wanted, and some good ideas from Cobb and from Dicken. Then we put it through the blueprint machine, got Ridley to okay it, and Roger went off and built it. (Cinefex 1: p47)
    
24. Roger Dicken: The facehugger was sculpted in plasticene. Then I made a plaster cast and a slush rubber mold which I strengthened with fiberglass on the underside, ending up with a hollow crab-like shell. Inside was a metal spine going down the middle, with little metal sections on it to hold the articulated fingers. All eight fingers were cast from the same mold and were latex covered, with aluminium armatures pinned at each joint so they would be absolutely flexible. These were sprung closed under tension. Then , from the tip of each finger, there were wires going up inside, so when you pulled on them, off camera, the fingers would open up and it could clip over the actor's face. To help hold it on, I put little eyelets in the fingertips and we ran rubber bands between them -  under the head where they wouldn't show. The tail was just a flexible cord covered with foam and latex. All together, I  made four or five face-huggers - one only that was fully articulated, one for underbelly shots, and about three dummy models that just had wire armatures so the fingers could be positioned ." (Cinefex 1: p47)
25. Roger Dicken: My own concept of the face-hugger was something a little more spiny, the claws - something you couldn't get ahold of even to try and pull it off. Self-preserving, in fact. To me, those long skinny fingers just didn't give the feeling that this thing had the strength to really cling onto someone's face like that. But that's how Ridley wanted them - thin and smooth. I'd also liked to have seen some barbed fingertips rather than smooth human-type nails they wanted. (Cinefex 1: p47) 
26. H R Giger: It was going to be very smooth and slimy with eight long, fine, but very strong fingers. The main difference was that mine, was going to be translucent. I wanted the inside to be visible because it had a sort of skeleton under the skin. After I'd started building the two small ones, though, the producers stopped me because they were worried that I wouldn't get the big one finished in time. (Cinefex 1: p47)
27. H R Giger: 15th August 1978, Shepperton Studios. The Facehugger has been finished by Dicken according to my initial directives. Not a trace of transparency but, in view of the means at our disposal, a perfect job. Scott's comment: I can work with that. Once again, I am surprised at how a material like latex, with a bit of jelly, smoke and a few strings ( to make it move like a puppet) can give the illusion of life. (Giger's Alien, p54)  
28. Ridley Scott: We wanted to be sure it looked like an animal, so we designed very much from the point of view of something which had come out of a womb. For that reason we decided to use the natural flesh tone. We tried coloring it in various other ways ans it always looked hokey - and less frightening, somehow. I think it's very effective now, half armadillo, half hard shell back; the pair of testicle like lungs and the real killer is that stinger tale. (Cinefex #1, p55, 9th para)
29.  Starburst:  What about the Facehugger which is the first alien we see after it has burst out of the egg and attached itself to Hurt's face?
    
    
    
    Roger Dicken: That was O'Bannon's design I think but as I say there were so many people on that film. I do know that O'Bannon drew something up and I built it. I would have liked it to have been a little more scaley and I would have liked to have little barbs like rose thorns on the legs and down the tail. As the alien was so self-preserving, you shouldn't be able to get a hold of the thing. I felt that in the film this wasn't well brought over.
    
    
    
    Starburst: Perhaps this was compensated for by the acidic blood that spurts out when they try to cut into the legs of the creature. Certainly that thing clinging to Hurt's face is an horrific image
    
    
    Roger Dicken : Image, yes, But I didn't feel they showed its strength enough
    
    
    Starburst:  Did you do the alien coming out of the egg
    
    
    Roger Dicken : Well, I was down to that scene. Ridley was going to use some footage from the Oxford Experimental Film Unit of embryo chickens forming, showing blood filling the capillaries and so on, and superimpose it over the egg interior, but that wasn't used. I don't know what came out of the egg or who did it, it happens so fast.
    
    
    
    Starburst: Did you do the scene where Hurt is lying on the table and the Alien shifts around and gets a better grip
    
    
    Roger Dicken : The tail was moved with a wire, that's all. We had some problems that day. Ridley wanted to fill the sacks on either side  of the hugger with slime. They had a big tub of this stuff imported from overseas, possibly to use in other scenes as well. When I put it in the sacs, it clogged up the air tubes which made the sacs pulsate. We used surgical jelly on the hugger to get the slimy, gooey effects. (Starburst #15, pp.9 - 13)
30. Giger: At school, I worked as an industrial designer, so everything must have a function. The facehugger was determined through its function. You have to show that. I was thinking that something that jumps out and then holds onto someone's face needs fingers or hands. Normally, if someone is sitting on your face, you can't breathe through your nose, so you automatically open your mouth. Then the monster goes down. So it looked a little bit like a crab or a spider. I like long fingers, so it had these long fingers, then two hands and a spiral tail. That was it. The hands hold onto Kane's face and the tail wraps around his neck. (Clive Barker's A-Z of Horror, p70)
    

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