Alien director Ridley Scott has admitted that he thought the sci-fi horror franchise had run its course after 1997's Alien: Resurrection – but Prometheus proved him wrong.
"I think, wrongly, on Alien I thought the old beast had worn out. Because when we did the first [set of films], it was me, Jim [Cameron], David [Fincher], and the French guy [Jean-Pierre Jeunet] – there were four. They wore out. The beast wore out," Scott tells Total Film in our new issue out on Thursday, September 12, which features The Penguin on the cover.
"And, in a funny kind of way, I found the beast partly by accident. Without that alien, you wouldn’t have ever had this film. With all the great casting in the world, when you have a film where it’s about being locked in with a creature – you better have the creature right. It can’t be The Creature from the Black Lagoon. And so many of these things are terrible. And it hangs on what that monster is, and also how you play with it when mostly less is always better for tension. And it’s easier to have a film that’s blood and gore with no tension. I tried to avoid that. And so it died.
"And I sat and thought, 'What a pity, because this is a huge franchise – maybe biggest apart from Star Wars and Star Trek ever – with legs.' Because there’s still a long way to go with it. So I sat down with Damon Lindelof, actually. We sat down at a table, and spun a wheel to see: where could we go? And it all began with Prometheus…"
Alien prequel Prometheus was released in 2012 and was followed by Alien: Covenant in 2017. The latest installment in the franchise, Alien: Romulus, was released last month and takes place between the events of 1979's Alien and 1986's Aliens.
Alien: Romulus is out now in theaters. And you can read more from Scott and a whole lot else besides in the new issue of Total Film when it hits shelves and digital newsstands on Thursday, September 12.
Check out the covers below:
Subscribers have the exclusive text-free cover on the way to them right now, with the issue then hitting shops and digital newsstands on Thursday 12 September.
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