In the hottest days of last summer, they had built a maze at Shepperton Studios, and in the depths of the maze was Ridley Scott; short, with a red beard, an Enigma jacket and an accent faintly reminiscent of Tyne. & To wear. Once you got there, through the messy, winding tunnels, the setting was a blazing white antechamber with Ian Holm pacing in the middle, as distracted as possible. As Scott sat thoughtfully perched atop a giant camera, flanked by a script girl muttering dialogue, a section of the wall shifted and two armored figures advanced inside, carrying a stretcher. The alien invasion had begun.

Moved by the moment, Scott decided to do an extra shot of this important match. Its performers, Tom Skerritt (of Big Bad Mama and The Turning Point) and Veronica Cartwright (who grew up after being Rod Taylor’s doddering little sister in The Birds), fervently allowed themselves to be clad in coral-adorned spacesuits once again. water mist is sprayed on buttons and indoor plants. A few tunnels away, flight deck WE The commercial starship Nostromo consisted of beer cans, oriental posters, comic books and Confucius magazines. In stark contrast, the starship’s hold next door was the size of a Greek temple, with massive metal pillars and a view of impossible vehicles. The skeleton of a helicopter could be seen in the middle of a building, but the names of the other inhabitants of this huge parking lot were unreadable; They shone with a vague and unsettling beauty, clearly motionless and deceptively purposeful.

Quoted from his Labyrinth, Scott talked about Alien with the enthusiasm you’d expect from someone entrusted with nearly ten million dollars to make it a box office success comparable to 20th Century-Fox’s Star Wars. The first thing to make clear was that this was going to be an altogether more challenging film. Although the Alien’s exact appearance was intended to be a closely guarded secret, hidden from everyone including Fox executives, word had already spread of the scene where the creature bursts bloodily from a man’s chest. Scott said the film is a film about terrorism that is set in space but could take place anywhere in an isolated location where a group of people face the unknown and uncontrollable. The story Dan dreamed of O’BDark Star’s first year of fame, and not too many light years away from this film’s beach ball subplot, is the discovery of a deadly new life form on a distant planet, and its discoverers being eliminated one by one. One.

Scott’s backstory doesn’t take into account a fascinating first film made all those years ago. BPIExperimental Film Fund The Boy and the Bicycle was the designer of numerous films. BBC director of plays and some of the most successful television commercials ever created. His first feature film opportunity came with The Duelists, which was received cautiously by British critics and enthusiastically by the French. The Alien script, developed by David Giler and Walter Hill (director of The Driver), came to him out of the blue and he says it blew him away. “It was precise, completely direct, and did its job in a terrifying way from the page.” But there was a big problem inside: Alien.

“Who’s the alien? Anytime you get close to the monster in a horror movie, it’s a big letdown, everyone has a good laugh, that’s it. The whole atmosphere explodes like a balloon. There was no way I was going to approach the movie until we had an extraterrestrial that we could live with, so to speak.” Part of the answer, it turns out, was to have more than one Alien, a creature that grows like a tropical insect by going through a series of metamorphoses. But the secret of the creature’s appearance, and the associated whole alarmingly visceral look of the film’s environments, was revealed in the Necronomicon.

Science fiction fans whose tastes date back to the 1920s and early editions of the pulp magazine Weird Tales will talk to you in whispers about the terrifying ‘Necronomicon’ and its legendary creator, the Mad Arab Alhazred. His chroniclers included HP Lovecraft and Robert Bloch, but the contents of his lurid texts were never revealed until after the incident of the Swiss artist, sculptor, and one man. HR Giger fearlessly arranged for a simulated edition of the book during the godless 1970s. Giger’s artwork focuses on the concept of the ‘Biomechanoid’, a fusion between the organic and mechanical that returns Wells’ Morlocks to the Dark Ages to which they belong. His paintings depict erotic, obsessive embraces of literally self-possessed hermaphroditic beings, bound to, attached to, or growing out of the coils, pumps, and tubes of a technological nightmare. These unions are witnessed by phalluses with warty baby faces and placid fetal spectators. “We found our Alien through Giger. This is very special. “Scary and beautiful at the same time.”

But of course there were other contributions. For example, spacesuits were originally designed by one of the artists of the French adult comic Métal hurlant; also some ideas from Japanese samurai films were adapted, not surprisingly, by John Mollo, one of Star Wars’ Oscar winners. Ron Cobb, one of the most abrasive American political cartoonists, designed the starship interiors with input from Star Wars veterans Les Dilley and Roger Christian and Ridley Scott himself. Scott sketched everything out in storyboard form before others started working on the film. “Storyboarding is very valuable to me because it is like writing the script and provides an overall conscious model; Style emerges as you work. “Every scene is like an embryo, and the movie is another embryo.”

The Nostromo’s control room was filled with smoke, and apparently that’s what Scott liked. “Smoke mutes the color and creates a three-dimensional feeling. Creates planes, slightly emphasizes depth. “But it won’t happen that way,” he added hopefully as he disappeared into the thick fog, “it won’t show up on the screen.” His departure was witnessed by the distracted figure of Alien producer Gordon Carroll, whose previous successes include Cool Hand Luke, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Someone had called him from Los Angeles to discuss Alien spinoffs. “They were talking about Alien bath soap and Alien beachwear,” he said. “God knows what kind of movie they thought we were making…”