Alien 4 (1997)

Hello. My name is Jean-Pierre Jeunet. I'm the director of Alien Resurrection. Hi. I'm Dominique Pinon. I played Vriess, the guy on the wheelchair. And I'm Hervé Schneid, the editor. My name is Sylvain. I was a storyboard artist and a concept artist on Alien Resurrection. This was designed, composed, shot almost entirely and never used, because we couldn't complete it for budgetary reasons. But initially, in the first opening of the film, we looked at the mouth. The mouth of an insect. Except we didn't know it was an insect. We mistake it for an alien creature. And the camera backs out and actually reveals a little bug. And in one camera move, as it keeps on backing up, we see a finger crushing that insect and sticking the insect into a straw. And splattering that insect against the glass as we recede... And we go all the way back into outer space and actually reveal a giant spaceship, which is where the story begins. I remember especially about the main credit. When I arrived in LA, I was waiting for an offer from the studio. You can imagine - a poor French guy like me, I was very scared. I was in a hotel, waiting for the answer, and I didn't sleep because of jet lag and because I was scared. I thought "OK. To prove to myself I am able to make this film, I have to find a good idea for the main credit, for the first shot." Immediately, I found the story of the guy alone in a big spaceship, with the milk shake and the pipe. He scratches insects, he puts them in the pipe, he blows the insect on the camera. I was very happy about this idea. I told this idea to the studio and they were happy, too. We began to work on it, but it was very very very expensive. One day, my line producer told me, if you could find another idea, because we have not enough money to finish this idea. This is a secret - I was pretty relieved. In fact, I think it was a little bit too funny for the beginning of Alien. I didn't say anything to the people. I said "You want to cut my idea?!" But, in fact, I was very happy, and I prefer the credit we have now. This is a model, and at this time, we hesitated about to use CGI or models for the spaceships. And Pitof preferred to use models. Maybe it was one of the last films with spaceship in model. That was very impressive. I came once on the set while you shot the models, and it was really big. - Yeah. Not really big. It's never enough big. And Pitof made a lot of parts, and he mixed the different parts.

Pitof, was that making fun of Americans, the way those soldiers are chewing gum? Yes, sort of. It's very Jeunet. And they're chewing in sync. And it's... Yes, it's... - Making fun of Americans. Tom Woodruff and Alec Gillis made this fake Sigourney. It was a real pleasure to work with this guy. Here's our first shot. The body of this little girl was based on photographs of Sigourney as a child. Then we worked them into a sculpture based on a life cast of an actress that the casting agent got for us. Look at this beautiful morph. Oh, yes, indeed. We morphed to Sigourney as an adult. That face looks an awful lot like the way she looked in Alien 3, when we took a life cast of her. That's right. And we used a body double to cast the body, didn't we? That's right. And we used a body double to cast the body, didn't we? This is the surgery scene. That was a nice little mechanical chest I made with some digital help there. The laser beam is digital. So it's part of my stuff as a second unit director. That's right. This was a fun little surgery scene, with some of the interactive tissue. Silicone chest that was laid on top of Sigourney. I love the look of this. Darius Khondji did a great job. The way the slime looks is almost metallic-looking. It's got such a beautiful reflectivity. Isn't that great? I love this. It's really disgusting. How it's... Then pop! The head pops.

We had a larger size for this close-up. They ended up making some oversize pinchers to hold it as well. But it gave us the detail we needed to articulate the face and have the head extrude from that silicone sheath. Nigel Phelps the production designer worked with Darius Khondji the DP. They worked during the preparation. It was very important for Darius to have some sets with the light included in the set, because there's some small corridor - it's very very small, very tight - and it was very important to include the light.

Darius came to the set as it was being built, and Nigel would explain some of his intentions. Darius made suggestions and they created opportunities for lighting. They were like two siblings, plotting. It works well.

This was actually a tunnel. You can see the floor on one end where the light is glowing. And this was actually just a vertical tunnel which was stood straight to make it into a tube. I love this scene. It's very different with the other Aliens. Sigourney loved to do that. She was almost naked when we shot. She is very courageous. She tries everything. She is ready to do everything, all the time. This is a set that was reused. In this instance, this is the birthing room for Ripley. This is a very symbolic and beautiful, almost religious, image of her coming to life. This was designed by Darius and Jean-Pierre - dreamt it up and shot it, quite late in the day, actually. It's actually very stunning. It's quite beautiful. What we're looking at - the light glowing from the floor and fanning in the back - is exactly where Darius and Nigel gave each other opportunities to generate so much excitement out of these openings, where, basically, light actually comes alive in the metal everywhere you look. I love Brad Dourif. I was a fan. All my life I will remember the test with Brad Dourif. He was perfect. I saw a lot of actors for Wren, the bad guy, and I saw a lot of actors. It was a pleasure because I made some tests with them. It was only because the studio didn't want to pay a lot for the main bad character. I remember, I proposed to the studio it was a good idea to have a woman for the bad guy. It was a good idea, but at the end the marketing service said "No. Definitely no." "Because you have two women in this film, two heroes, and not a third one. Definitely." Too many women. - Yeah.

I remember these signs - this is the psychological tests - and Jean-Pierre had something specific in mind, in terms of the primitive drawings of apples and pears and cows and cherries and things. He went through an amazing amount of artists trying to get primitive-looking drawings of fruits and little tidbits. It turned into such an assignment. He couldn't find anybody who could nail that style. Which had something to do with what he had seen as a Child - basic, primitive illustrations, which actually come back in his film Amélie. We get a sense of that naive, childlike graphic thing, which comes from a children's book, which, I think, is a really big deal in Jean-Pierre's imagery. I love Dan Hedaya. I love the Coen brothers' movies. You remember, he played in Blood Simple, the first movie of the Coen brothers. Interesting casting. I wondered if Jean-Pierre would have picked Dan Hedaya had Jean-Pierre grown up in America and seen Cheers. I love the lighting. You had a lot of lights coming up from the floor. Exactly. We used an optical process, and the folks were very nice with me because they made all the prints in the world with the process. And it was very expensive. And they made maybe 3000 prints with the process. The name of the process is ENR. It was invented by Storaro, the Italian DP.

This is an idea of myself. A stupid idea, you know, to open the door. But I am pretty proud about this stupid humor. Jean-Pierre loves little gags and tidbits of funny ideas. I think he dropped quite a lot of them. This was definitely one of his. We will discover the queen. For the queen, I remember, we didn't build the queen. We used the old queen from the second film, and we had to find it. A fan kept it - the queen - in a garage, and we had to bring it to use it. We had borrowed it from Bob Burns. Jim Cameron had given it to Bob Burns - a famous movie memorabilia collector - and Bob was gracious enough to loan it back to Fox. We repainted it, put some iridescence and interesting colors going on in it, and rebuilt it and refurbished it for him. But thank God for Bob Burns. It really saved the day. I love this shot. I love the sound. The sound effects are amazing. Leslie Shatz made the sound of the aliens with sounds of monkeys and lions and something like this. And pigs? - Maybe, yeah. All the crew were French, almost. It is a French film. - It was. Made with American money, but French. - Absolutely. Everybody spoke English except me. Your main worry on the film was not to understand every word that the actor was saying. You were very preoccupied by that. To be sure that... You were happy when you saw the film with subtitles. When I saw it on DVD, at the end, I understood the story. I thought "Oh, it's pretty good." It's a joke but - you remember, Herve - sometimes I asked you: "What does he say?" in the editing. I think that whole kitchen set, if I'm not mistaken, at some point doubles as a basketball court. So in the tradition of good English movies, basically, a lot of stuff is being reutilized. Which is a terrific way to expand your sets. I used, like all my films, very short lens. I love the short lens. And I love to put the camera very close to the floor. Sigourney is a great actress. I remember, when I met her for the first time, I did a stupid suggestion: "Maybe you could act like this." She looked at me and she said "No, Jean-Pierre, I'm going to act like this." She showed me, and I thought "OK. I have to follow her." And all the time I modified the script to help her. It was a good relationship. She helped me all along the shooting. Obviously, she knows Alien by heart, she knows Ripley by heart, because she made the four. I saw JE Freeman, this guy, in a Coen brothers movie, too. I think he was in Miller's Crossing. Before the shooting, we made together a reading, and it was the best lesson in my life. He was so professional. I would like to have a tape today of the reading. He was perfect. The thing about this film, which I found staggering, is the premise - I'm not sure what the point is - the premise is that this is 200 years after we last saw Ripley.

"Should we be concerned about showing that we've actually moved forward 200 years since we've seen Alien?" His answer was no. The Betty and all these miniatures were created by Nigel Phelps. The funny thing is, The Auriga, the big ship, the first drawing he made was vertical. Because of the format of the movie it was complicated to shoot. Jean-Pierre asked Nigel to redesign completely the ship to make it horizontal, and it could fit in the Cinemascope screen.

I'm Ron Perlman. I played Johner. I called him Johner. I'm Leland Orser. I play Purvis. I always wondered how he did that with his voice, Michael Wincott. He does that in every picture. - Good actor. Very good actor.

There's Dominique. - There he is. Amazing actor. Who grew up in Georgia, as a matter of fact. Soviet? - No. As in Southern United States Georgia. There he is.

This gun - "Taxi Driver" guns we called them - they were inspired by Robert De Niro's wonderful Taxi Driver shoot-out, where he's actually got a device like that.

Dominique Pinon plays in all my films, and for me he is the perfect actor. He's so inventive, so nice, so perfect. It was amazing for me to bring this actor to the States, because Sigourney Weaver and the studio asked me to have Dominique Pinon. I told this story a lot of times, Dominique, but it's true: I didn't hire you, the studio wanted to work with you. I was very happy, obviously, but, I remember, when Sigourney wanted to call you by phone, and we called you in Paris and you didn't believe me. You said... "No. It's a joke." I remember very well that call, actually. The studio were a little bit worried about Ron Perlman. They appreciated the guy, but they weren't sure it was the right guy for the character. By luck, it was the first day of shooting and they saw the dailies. They came to see me on the stage and they told me "You're right. He is perfect." The set is basically what we call the Betty cargo bay, which is just a lovely, beautiful industrial piece of design. All the rust in the back of it. It's hard to convey just how incredible it was in real life, when you walk through it. It was just absolutely staggeringly detailed and gorgeous. Pitof, none of the ships were digital. That's all models? Pitof, none of the ships were digital. That's all models? I would like to make more digital stuff, but Nigel really wanted to have the real texture. I guess he was right because... They're beautiful. They are gorgeous. Is that background digital? Or was that a model also? The background is a mix with the digital and models. We had a model, but the size had been enhanced in postproduction. Also, it's a lot of layers of small things to make the texture real. So it's not just shooting the miniature as it is. There's a lot of work after that - to have the texture, to get the smoke, to give the depth, and all these things. Is shooting miniatures more time-consuming than doing it digitally? It was more efficient to shoot miniatures because the technology of digi was not as flexible as today. The idea about this film is that these guys are a bunch of hoodilums that are smuggling weapons on board a military ship. The thought was: they'll get strip-searched, and they have to have weapons at some point, so Jean-Pierre's take was that the only way you could bring weapons is by hiding them in plain sight. The two places where he thought you could hide them was a Thermos - which somebody is carrying, which turns out to be a gun - and the wheelchair. The thing about the wheelchair was designing it as a breakaway piece of technology, where every piece could reassemble itself into a weapon. Although the idea's really good, at some point the focus on that was a bit lost - you see all the characters breaking out weapons. I'm not sure how clear it is that they're recombining the wheelchair. But that's the way it was designed, as you could actually take pieces of it apart and snap them into weapons when the scene demanded it at some point. That little wheelchair was built on a structure which we called a mule, which is a six-wheeled radio-controlled robot which is a six-wheeled radio-controlled robot that's designed to lift enormous pieces of equipment in industrial settings. That mule was available to us, so Fox said: "If you can design the wheelchair around this, it'll save us money." So that's what we did.

I like this shot. It's one of my favorites, because it's very fucking stupid.

I do have to ask, you know, why they would transport a little cube of jelly as opposed to a container of liquid. That's a big question. - It was square. That's a real big question. But anyway, the effect is funnier. - Yeah. At the beginning it was more complicated, but because of the time-consuming... The effect was very simple. We just had the glass with water, and then the cube, and then to check a little bit the water to have some effect, and a quick morphing in post. It's efficient. I love this one. I remember the story about the lemons. Dan Hedaya found this idea during the rehearsals. It was a good idea, but he had to eat lemons all the day. At the end of the day he was sick, because he ate maybe five, six lemons... to match the shots. But Michael Wincott had to smoke all day. Yeah, but it's not foreign for him. -

The bills that have just appeared on the table are also something that was concocted by the Art Department. I think Bill Boes might have done that. Sort of an inside joke, but actually the face of our producer, Bill Badalato, Sr. appears on those bills. I think we all ended up with money, fake money at the end. It was a gift from the Art Department or something. I have a bill somewhere.

For this shot, the previous one, we used a 10mm, to get the depth of the spaceship, because it was very close to the lens. And it worked pretty good. At the beginning, with Nigel Phelps, we wanted to build huge corridors, a lot of different corridors, and obviously it was expensive. At the end, we had only two corridors to make all the movie. It works, because we change the light, some details. That was really surprising, when you came to the set and saw it. I was very worried, because sometimes I saw the dailies, and with the 10mm it looks very big, huge, and when I came back one day after the morning, I said: "But it's not the corridor I saw yesterday. It's too small." "It won't work with the audience."

Pitof made this shot with the second unit. Pitof was a special effects supervisor for Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, and now he's a director. At the beginning, he made the shot just for the small things, the creature, and little by little, day by day, he began to make some big scenes. Jean-Pierre said to us that he thought that the eggs in Aliens, I think it was, which we worked on, were lifeless, mechanical. So we said "OK..." So we put all this squirming stuff and bladders in the lips of the petals. So there's lots of organic movement in the lips there, and inflated bladders on the inside. A lot of layers of silicone - especially inside - to you give the feeling of all the gelatinous layers of this inner egg, before we see the facehugger... I was ashamed, Pitof, this day, because I had told you that we'd put a facehugger tail in there. Somehow it didn't get packed with everything. At the last minute I discovered it, and you said "Where's the tail?" And I went "Oh, it's in Chatsworth." Yes, I remember that. You do remember that? I let you down. Sigourney Weaver was so proud to do everything herself. She wanted absolutely to put the ball inside the basketball without special effects. I was very worried, because I thought "We are going to make maybe 200 takes." I said: "Sigourney, we won't use a machine, but please work with your trainer, because I don't want to spend a lot of time." She was so upset about that. She wanted to do so herself, she did that. It was amazing. You will see Ron Perlman... No, you won't see it, because... I had to cut before. The close-up of Ron just after the basket is just incredible. I used it until the last possible frame, because the frame afterwards he was so astonished.

I love this shot because it's a simple effect. The ball is on the hand at the beginning of the shot, we do just a pan, and it works. I remember, Sigourney Weaver didn't believe me. She told me "Jean-Pierre, it doesn't work. It's so silly, so weird." I said "Believe me, I am sure." But I was pretty worried about this shot. And it works. There's a shot that you could claim, Pitof, as a digital shot, except it's real. When she throws that ball? It's amazing. This shot was supposed to be digital. What Jean-Pierre wanted is to make an impossible throw. Sigourney did it for real. This shot is real. Look at that. How many takes? I think it was six takes. - Six takes. Yeah. I was here when we shot that, and I feel in her eyes that something was weird. And she made it. Wow. - I had a little problem with Sigourney. The ball is going out of the frame and then back in the frame. I said "Sigourney, I'll fix that and I'll make a perfect path." So you feel the impression that the ball is always in the frame - like this ass - and... That's a silicone butt that we made. That's my favorite shot. I love this part of the film. And... Tell the story of this shot, Hervé. That's one of the famous Jean-Pierre Jeunet's favorite scenes, where somebody's putting polish on his shoes. When I got the rushes, I said to Jean-Pierre: "Well, you remember you did already that scene before." And you just didn't realize it. You didn't remember. The design of the wheels, something Eric Allard had developed way back, right after Short Circuit. Each wheel, instead of treads, they had ball bearings that would roll independently, so it could turn and maneuver. I think he had it patented, and I think NASA was using the design as well. This is a stupid idea. When you arrive in the States the first thing you see is the TV, because you don't sleep. And what do you see on TV? This kind of show. This miniature was not very big. This was pretty small - three meters diameter. That's nine feet to you non-metric folk. And this - you composited Aliens. Exactly. That's miniature and greenscreen. A very composite shot. Was a lot of passes to have the light and the texture and the depth and the atmosphere. For the alien, obviously, it's man in suit. It's very difficult to shoot an alien with a man inside, because it looks like a man inside. You are obliged to shoot very close. Here's Tom Woodruff. - Here's Tom. You were talking about being on the set. Here's the deal for me: being on set in these suits, it's even more claustrophobic than being on set, because I'm literally... I've got some slots for my eyes and breathing, but there's no real interaction between what I'm doing and anybody else on set, in terms of talking or just getting a break. I can interact with the actors and they can respond during the course of the action, but then, once the shot is over, it's like total isolation. But people love you when you're in the suit, Tom. Brad Dourif was great here. It was creepier for me on my side of the glass than it was for him being on his side watching me. I like Brad Dourif in this film. Yeah, he's twisted. Wonderfully imaginative actor. Brad and that creature were dating for a few months right after they completed this scene. I love what Darius did - the slime. He put a lot of care into shooting these and designing the lighting. He, at times, would almost build a cage of fluorescence around the alien, so that you'd get a million little kicks off of the slime. so that you'd get a million little kicks off of the slime. He kept coming back to us and asking for thicker slime, because the stuff in the other movies was too runny. He wanted a quarter-inch build-up, so we went to a slime that was almost like gel. It really had a different look. It was a pleasure to work with Winona Ryder. I remember, sometimes I tried to direct her, and she told me: "Jean-Pierre, take it easy." "I have a lot of imagination. I'm going to give you some improvisation." Remember, at the editing room, everything worked, all the time. In this scene, Winona was feigning drunkenness so she could slip out. Since she's a robot, she can't be drunk. This is a nice shot with the 10mm. It was a very short corridor and it looks so huge. This is a matte painting from a French guy, Jean-Marie Vives. He worked on Delicatessen and City of Lost Children, too. It's fascinating how there's a hint of City of Lost Children in the look of the sets. That's what I love about style, ultimately it just permeates everything that somebody does. That's a clever idea. That's gotta be Jean-Pierre. Very Jean-Pierre. It's great. This set is pretty high, and we used it again at the end of the film in the chapel. The same set but horizontal. - Really? Yeah. - I didn't know. When Jean-Pierre started the movie, he spoke little English - he always had an interpreter with him - and by the end spoke better English than me. Than I. - You see? That's what I'm talking about. It's amazing, because he didn't speak a word of English when he started. Sigourney Weaver loves to have the director very close to her. She hates when the director is very far away behind the video. It was a very good relationship, because, I remember, after a take she looked at me and it was unnecessary to speak. Just one look and we knew if the take was perfect or not. It was unnecessary to speak about the take - just a look. This is a scene that's almost vaguely erotic between Ripley and Call, the two females discovering each other inside of that tube.

I remember, I had to fight against the studio to get the smoke on the knife, because it wasn't on the budget. Here, same thing, it's for real. Sigourney gets it through the hand. No. Of course it's a cheat. On one side it's a retractable blade and on the other side it's a real one. A CG blade. So we CG-ed the second part of the blade. And the smoke is CGI? - The smoke is CGI, too. Lot of times, those little effects - like that - are the ones that have the most effect. Yeah, because it seems to be normal. It would be possible to have a fake hand... They talked to us about that, and it was impractical and too costly, because to give the hand enough life so it didn't look artificial was a lot of work. And to make it move, then stop... Too limiting in your shot. That was a great approach. On the shooting, it didn't take a longer time than just to play it. So it was very cost-effective. Tom, didn't you get together with Sigourney about the style of her movements? Yeah, right, because of her alien heritage now as a clone. We talked a little bit about movements that she saw me doing in the alien suit. We tried to find a way to integrate some of those into her performance. There's some later where she's swimming, there were some movements we worked out. Also when she escapes from her cell, there's an element where we were figuring out: "What is it about the alien when it's retreating that's the most noticeable feature?" The tail. And without a tail, we ended up doing something where she kicks her leg out as she's moving into the chamber and escaping from her cell. In the preproduction, I did some research for Jean-Pierre on animals, to find out the way for the alien to move, to find a halfway between feline and insects. So we did a lot of research on footage, to have an idea of this hybrid between feline and insect. It was cool. I met Ron Perlman in The City of Lost Children - he played One. I love him. I can't wait to work with him again. This isn't a modest thing to say, but I like the way the guns look in the film. Jean-Pierre's idea was: he'd seen the guns get bigger - especially in the second film - and he thought it can get quite absurd if we go too far, so it'd be a nice idea to shrink the sizes again and have guns that are more about efficiency. He wanted guns that snapped when they fired. He wanted to feel and hear every bullet as it ricocheted and hit the floor. He wanted something that was a bit more credible than the giant "Rambo" guns. So we designed with that in mind. It was something that felt very basic.

This idea about the bullet on the roof - it's a little bit later - it was an idea from the first version of The City of Lost Children. We didn't use it. I don't remember. In fact, it was a very good pool player, and he used a gun to kill the people, shooting on the roof exactly like this. I used this idea on this film. Yeah, but you didn't shoot it. No. It was in the first draft. Suddenly I thought I was going crazy. The weapons were based on existing ones. I remember leafing through encyclopedias of guns, which were given to me by Steve Cooper, art director. I guess somebody thought "We'll get around to the weapons." Actually, I jumped off the storyboard on to the weapons because panic was setting in. People were saying we needed to get them going. So Steve Cooper brought in all these volumes of books on handguns, rifles, whatnot. I started doing little sketches one afternoon. I think I did one page with eight or nine guns, and out of that one page almost everything came out. We showed them to Nigel and he said "Why don't you expand that one?" Then we started detailing them, and then finding ways to stick them into the wheelchair wherever possible. This was great, cos Tom would always play the hero alien. We had Mark Viniello in one of the other suits, and David Prior was in another one, but Jean-Pierre wanted to keep Tom as the main performer. That was that torso we made with all the guts and the... That's self-explanatory, isn't it? This was a neat effect. This was a prerigged floor with an elevator that would lower all the guts and so on. It would appear as if the thing was melting, but it was a simple little rig. See? They never learn in these movies, do they?

Sometimes I was worried about the humor. For example, for this shot, I asked me if it works or not. It was a big relief during the first test screening, because everybody laughed. It's too bad that Brad Dourif has to disappear so quickly. I'd have loved to have seen him go on for the rest of the film.

This one I love. With the hair on the shoulders - it's great. I asked him to take his T-shirt off, but he didn't want. Another scene from Pitof. In fact, he made everything. He made one scene with me. - Exactly. Later on. This guy was great - a flash-frozen soldier. We were lucky this guy was so big. We could hide his arm behind his back when we added the artificial extensions to his limb so his hand could break off. This was breakaway pieces. Garth Winkless did a lot of design work on this. I think, Steve Kuzela as well. I remember, I asked the studio about the violence. They told me no problem with the violence, because for this kind of movie... the teenager wants violence. They want to have gore, gory shots, and this kind of stuff.

I remember that chair was pretty dangerous, because it was very heavy. And so it was either controlled by me, or, in certain shots, remote-controlled by a guy, because it would have been very dangerous if I controlled it in certain shots... just with one finger. Dan Hedaya was gonna get it. There was gonna be a blood splatter on the window and he would get sucked through. We developed a series of makeups for him. But Jean-Pierre decided that the death was too spectacular for a secondary character, so he gave that death to the newborn.

Sylvain Despretz, he works a lot with Ridley Scott's design, this chair. I love the idea with the weapons hidden on the char. These were tough shots - to show enough of the alien, but not give it away. The problem with the alien suit is that if you show too much of it, it's very clearly a guy in a rubber suit, but for wider shots, it was done effectively. Where you see the shadow, it was a matter of lighting so it wasn't revealing the body, but only the shadow across the grid. As an actor, I haven't seen often the monster on set. Remember, Jean-Pierre? As an actor, I haven't seen often the monster on set. Remember, Jean-Pierre? I remember, we changed the sense of the scene during the editing. He was supposed to listen, or to see an alien, and we put some different sound to explain the aliens are escaping from the cell. That's true. I don't like to do that, because an actor plays something, and if you change the sense it's not good. But that was good, because it added to the pressure he had to face, knowing that the complete ship was coming under the aliens' control. Another stupid idea. I love that shot, the Steadicam, where we speed the picture. Pitof put some flames from the guns, because the guns didn't work. Never. The actors had to pretend to shoot. It was a bit breakable as well.

This shot, also, is a composite shot, with matte paintings and real stuff. Tnat was the first digital alien, right? - Uh-huh. And that's Blue Sky, right? - Yes, it's come from Blue Sky. This is a nice shot. - This grenade is digital, also. It was VIFX, another company. This is full digital.

The guy who did this explosion, he made the explosion of Star Wars. He was a specialist of the explosion of miniature. He was so good. He has a book and you can choose the... Choose the color... - Exactly. There is a story about the death of General Perez. At the beginning, it was a big deal. He was sucked by a hole on the spaceship. In fact, I kept the idea for the ending with the newborn, the new alien. I proposed to the studio a very cheap death for General Perez - I love this scene - but the studio didn't like it and they wanted to cut it. I proposed to Tom Rothman, I said: "OK. You have to ask the audience for the next test screening." It was in Las Vegas, if you remember. By luck, the audience loved this scene on the screening, and they saved my life, they saved this scene. We kept it because the audience is right. The shot was quite funny afterwards - we cut it here - afterwards he kept looking at his brain and then fainting in a very very humorous way. That was very nice. - It's a little bit too funny. But I love that. I remember, Sigourney didn't like it. I can't avoid humor, because I love it so much.

It was a new challenge to put humor in an Alien movie. I was a little worried about that. Yeah, because you can't keep on straight action. It's part of life. This is a traditional scene in an Alien movie. I thought about the first one when Harry Dean Stanton is looking for the cat, and I wanted to find this kind of spirit. This kind of stupid surprise - it works, all the time. It's very easy. I am a little bit ashamed about this idea, but it works. You did it another time, when the newborn suddenly appears behind... I don't remember whose shoulder. Winona.

It was a bit longer, this scene. - We had an additional hole. Exactly, an additional hole. You can see something strange on the hole, because... You can see something strange, because he's grabbed by the feet by the alien through a hole which doesn't exist here. He had to walk for an additional 10m or something to get there. It was too long. That was one of the remarks we had from the first test screening. They made, if I remember, something like 100 remarks. I remember, sometimes we were defiant, but we were pretty upset. And sometimes we said "They're right." And sometimes we said "They're right." We were very upset at first, but looking at the questions which were asked, we realized that, each time, it was somewhere where... we thought it could go like that. In the time we had for doing it, we thought it was OK. As we could have more time, that was... Most of the notes, we found an answer. We never really followed the propositions we had, but we found the creative answer to the question asked. I think that was what the studio was waiting for us to do. But it was a good lesson for me and for us. Since that time, for each film I'm cutting I'm organizing previews, which is not in the French tradition. For Amélie we did some test screenings. In fact, I copy the answer from Hollywood, but the big difference is: I have the final cut, I can choose. The difference is on the use you do from the answers. Exactly. But we don't have to complain. - I love this idea. This is a simple shot that was hard. That head was long and heavy, and trying to keep it smooth and even and not drag across Michael's face, and make it all the way up to that opening in the chest. You always said that this cut, the final cut, was your cut. We did it with the production notes and... If the studio would ask me to make a director's cut, I would say "That's mine." Yeah, that would be a problem, because we're very happy with what we have.

I was thrilled when I watched this scene, because Ripley was carrying my gun. I can't tell you what a charge that was. It was great. I was, one night, looking at Sigourney Weaver and she was harnessing this gun, and I thought "I designed this." I was back to being a kid watching the first Alien movie, and thinking about Ripley running down the corridors, dreaming about what that meant. Many years later, here I was in Los Angeles, and Sigourney Weaver was playing Ripley, and she was harnessing my gun. It's hard to explain, but it's such a high. This is like traveling through time and grabbing the kid inside of you and saying: "Here's what you've been missing." "Here's something for you and for years of frustration - wishing to make something out of your life that's very specific, and the obstacles." And suddenly there's this woman - she doesn't know I exist and couldn't care less - but she's got a prop, and it can mean the world to somebody. Nigel Phelps, the production designer, designed chunks of corridors, and this was really the essence of what the set of The Auriga was about. Some chunks of it were actually reusable. The whole idea about this set was that you can make it go on endlessly - there's different layers and levels. One of the original design ideas that Nigel had, which he explored with Darius Khondji, was that as the story progresses and as the characters go through the ship the walls change colors and become more and more ominous. Since Darius uses a very specific lighting and processing technique for his film - by which he extracts the blacks and reprints them later to get that very very crisp, sharp contrast - the idea was that the walls would be painted and the paint change as the film progressed. They actually tested this and Darius shot plates, and we experimented with the exposure, etc. They collaborated closely. Ideas that one had were integrated by the other. Frequently, Darius would come down to the set as it was being built, and Nigel would explain some of his intentions. Darius would make suggestions and they would create opportunities for lighting. It works extremely well, actually. You could walk through that set and it was prelit. You could have taken a home movie and it would look like a million dollars. It was unbelievable. I remember, Sigourney laughed at this time because I misspelled a word. Instead of saying "Easter bunny", I said, for two or three takes, "Eastern bunny".

Funny thing about Jean-Pierre is - a lot of directors storyboard - but what struck me about the way he approaches filmmaking, and this was set up right from the beginning, is he storyboards absolutely everything. At the end of the storyboard, Jean-Pierre binds the script into a comic book, where all of the dialogue from the script is lined up with every frame. The storyboard becomes drawings and text, and that's what he gives everybody. Everybody on the set had this document, and that was the script. In the beginning, Jean-Pierre said: "This storyboard is everything that I need to shoot in order to know that I have my film." "If I can't get anything else, these shots are what I must have in order to cut my film." This is with the understanding that on top of that are "B" cameras and pick-ups, little details of... The cameraman basically picking up whatever he can as a scene is being shot. I find that unique, because a lot of directors don't like to be bound by the storyboard. They do it to think about what they'll do, and then on the day they do something entirely or somewhat different. Whereas, I think, Jean-Pierre is very religious about first boarding and then filming. And it's that simple. He would come to meetings with very very crude little sketches and say: "This is how I see it. This is how I want it broken down." As storyboard artists, we took his thumbnails and turned them into more solid drawings, so that the crew would have no trouble seeing what was going on. But, basically, he was very determined. He knew pretty much how the scene unfolded, and there were few corrections. Once he'd decided "This is how I'm gonna do the scene", he just did it, and that was it. So, shot by shot, if you take the storyboard of Alien Resurrection, every take is something that Jean-Pierre intended to direct from the beginning. I don't remember him doing a scene that was storyboarded and saying "Do it differently." We are going to arrive to the clones scene. I remember, Sigourney told me: "I accepted this film because of this scene when she looks at the clones." Tom and Alec made a lot of sketches for these clones, and they built it. You can see on the eyes of Sigourney Weaver some small light points on the eyes. In fact, it was a ringlight we used for the beauty of the skin for Sigourney. That was beautiful, the effect in the eye. It's like a special effect. Some people asked me: "Is it because she is an alien? Is it because she is a little bit like a robot?" No. It was just for the beauty of the skin.

I think this is one of my favorite scenes, this thing in the med lab, where Ripley goes in and finally discovers what her true origin is, and where the audience discovers it, too. I think the reason I like it is because it's such a... Because we had a lot of creative freedom in coming up with the look of these alien clones. That was a big deal, to be able to go in and design all seven of these things, and have each one be so different. There was a lot of research into birth defects, as well as all the physical alien attributes that we would combine in various ways. We really wanted to get a feeling of pathos out of each one of these sculptures, so that you would see the pain and the torture that the evil corporate scientists had put these poor ghastly creations through. We had some great artists working on these, too. Jordu Schell was really key to the designs. Chris Cunningham did conceptual work on it as well. Steve Wang sculpted. Steve Koch. Mike Smithson did a great job sculpting as well. Mike Larrabee was painting. Didn't he paint all these? Him and Jim Hogue? Beautiful. These are all made out of translucent silicone. So many layers of skin to give them the right levels. The set design is just beautiful in this scene, too. Also having these things in these tanks of this badly-colored liquid is... It's made it very cool. Then the number seven clone, which was great, because Sigourney is so willing to stick her neck out and go through the grueling rigors of makeup, and she's OK making herself look bad. This was a mechanical body, with a silicone skin, that was grafted onto Sigourney. She was coming up through a slant board, through a hole in the table. Tom and I applied the neck makeup, along with Linda DeVetta, Sigourney's makeup artist. I really love the breathing mechanism on this in particular. The tube of liquids coming out of her body, there was some discussion as to whether or not we could get away with that. But look at her. And she sells it so well on both sides of this scene. Then we had to torch the actual one, didn't we? We built a stunt one for the fire gag, but, because it was so close in frame, we looked at it with Jean-Pierre and he said: "I know you want this for your display room, but it's gotta be in the foreground." So we said "Yep, you're right." And there it went. - That's it. We did get it back. It kinda turned into like an overcooked marshmallow. Luckily, for the rest of this scene, we got to make blow-up dummy copies of all of these clones. Look at her go. What impresses me about Sigourney is that she's... Look at the emotion there, while she's firing a big-ass flame-thrower. You know? It's really... She really makes this series, I think.

That's beautiful.

And then Eric Allard blowing up those containers.

Can you imagine? This is almost 20 years later. She's still playing Ripley. Yeah, and you have to understand, this is take after take, after day after day with this emotional commitment. Very, very heavy. All the permutations from where that character started in the Ridley movie to where she sort of journeys, leading... This is, like, the culmination of it all. The future and the present and the past all sort of melding together. And you're right, she really... You see sequels, you see people kind of walk through them. She's... you know... She has a notebook filled with... She keeps herself up to the moment, connected with her character, for every take, every scene, every day of shooting. It's an amazing thing, especially in a genre like this, in sci-fi. It's not like Terms of Endearment here. But just as an acting exercise to play the same character for almost 20 years, as you grow as an individual and you see that character in so many different situations and grappling with technologies and the relationship of where she finds herself with regard to her humanity. It's fascinating and she is in this film. Her commitment to it is off the chart. These were the victims of the chestbursters. We had to come up with a very simple way to do this because of the numbers of them. We sort of took our cue from those T-shirts that came out after Alien and Aliens that just had these rubber bones applied to them and we made these slip-on appliances that had the broken-out ribcage and all the guts. We made a male and a female version and I think there were a couple of guys that ended up getting women's torsos on them. They were lucky. There he is, ladies and gentlemen. The beautiful and talented Mr Leland Orser. My friend and, if you knew him, yours. This is Leland Orser. I love this actor. I saw him in a very small character in Se7en of David Fincher. For this scene I used maybe four cameras because I had just one day to shoot this. I remember. I hate that because I prefer to shoot with a short lens very close to the character but I had no choice for this scene. I had quite a lot of material for this one. This is pretty rare I use many cameras, because I prefer to make a storyboard to be very precise, and usually for all my films I put maybe at the end one minute and a half in the garbage, especially with Amélie, the last. But I remember at the editing room you didn't have a lot of material. I prefer to shoot exactly what I need and it's better for everybody. You save money. You save time. You save energy. I don't understand a director - they make some film with three hours and you have to cut one hour at the end. It's so silly. I prefer to think before. That's the reason I like to make a storyboard, because it's a pretext to find ideas when you have the time to think. Because when you are on the set it's too late. You have to run. The master is the clock. It's too late to find ideas.

Almost everything was designed to be four, five times bigger than what it ends up being in the film. As budgetary bad news came in everything shrank. Pretty much every set invented in the script is in, with the exception of one or two. But everything is a lot smaller than was intended. What's in-fucking-side me?! A parasite! I love this sentence. It was in the trailer. I worked with Darius on City Of Lost Children. Then he went and did Se7en, which was just spectacular from a cinematographic... How would you say that? - I'd say, uh... "A good picture". Yeah, it was nice to look at. Beautiful film. And then he came and did this with Jean-Pierre again. You were in Alien because you did City of the Lost Children with Jean-Pierre. Correct? - Yeah, probably. I worked with Darius on Se7en. - You worked on Se/7en. You were spectacular in that film. - Thank you.

That's hard stuff to have to act. Yeah. That was hard. It's like "You have cancer. You have AIDS." "You're terminally ill." That's the news you get. That was how I thought of it. You got 300 pages of exposition that have been delivered to you in 45 seconds and then you get to react to your imminent death. But go on with the next scene. - Not a lot of guys could have done that. And we approach the underwater scene. For the next set, the small set... At the beginning, with Nigel Phelps, we imagined a huge set. At the end, it's a very, very small set, because sometimes when you have not enough money to make a big set, it's better to make exactly the opposite, a very, very small set. And that's the case.

So this water stuff was supposed to take, max, how long? Cos they had it slotted for - what was it? A week? Was it a week and a half? And then it ended up taking twice or three times that long. I think it was two weeks on the schedule. For me this is what the movie was all about - the water. We met before the movie in swimming pools and learned how to underwater... how to use a hookah and how to scuba. It seemed like eternity when we were doing this, like we'd never get out of it. It seemed like we were doing it forever. This was actually the first thing we shot after we shot all of the underwater stuff. So this was the last underwater stuff that we shot. Yeah, this was the last of it, was setting up the sequence that took two and a half, three weeks to shoot.

There is a funny story. You will see Kim Flowers, the woman. She dives after the other character. I had to find an idea because the first day of shooting Sigourney wasn't happy about her costume. She saw the costume of Kim Flowers and she said "But that's exactly what I wanted." I said "But Sigourney, we show you the sketches and you refused this costume." She said "I didn't understand. I want this." In one day we had to build another costume for Sigourney. But this day we had to shoot with Kim Flowers. She had no costume at this time. We had to invent another costume for her. I had to find another idea to justify she was late because she is not on the next shot because we had to build a costume this day. You know this kind of story? The water was very warm. I remember when we first got into the water it was too transparent. They had to pour in milk and garbage in order for the camera to pick up the actual substance of water for the light to hit it and give it texture. We were virtually blind under here. You would swim towards a light. That was it. You could not identify a single object underwater. You couldn't see your hand in front of your face. No. I think they put flares down on the ground for us to see. You'll never get a shot of them but...

So acting like you can see something when you can't see something. That's great. Was it a practical? - Yeah. We built some wax aliens to blow up for that moment when they blow up. The explosion's practical and the bubbles are real. Everything was really here. Tom was in this underwater - in the suit as well - for a couple of shots. That's a beautiful shot. - How deep was it? 15 feet? In a closed set. You couldn't swim to the surface if you wanted to. The difficult thing about this was that the rehearsals you performed with a mask on and breathing from a breathing apparatus. They were all calm. You were marking what you were going to do in that particular shot. You were gonna swim from here to here. This was your action. When they were satisfied that everybody knew what it was they were supposed to do, there's a countdown from six where you're asked to take six deep pulls of the oxygen. When you get to two the mask comes off. Then you're blind. The mask comes off then so there's no bubbles in the shot. You hold your breath for as long as it takes for them to slate, then start the action. In postproduction we put some noises, some voices, and we recorded the voices in a swimming pool with pipes, like... ...to put the pressure, to feel the pressure. This thing - there was no escape from this. You swam up into that thing. The only way to get out was to swim back down and out. Waiting in the wings would be stunt doubles with hookah masks for us, once the shot was completed, to give you air. In rehearsal you could go longer. It was calm, you were swimming gently. Once you were acting and the energy was up you used more oxygen and there was less time to stay under. Virtually every shot in the sequence you're in jeopardy, so the stakes are high. You're operating on pure adrenaline, which is not the case in a calm rehearsal. And then you got Jean-Pierre on a microphone screaming: "I want to see bubbles because they are making it look like you are afraid." So the bubbles are created by you getting rid of your whole store of oxygen and you're only good for about half of what you were during rehearsal. Made it difficult. I don't know about you, Leland, but I for one ran out of air on five separate occasions. Yes. - And started for the surface. Unfortunately the surface was a ceiling because this is a kitchen set. So there was no escaping it unless you knew where the escape routes were, and since you're blinded and disoriented as to where you are at any given time... I was literally saved five separate times by stunt divers who saw me panic, saw me swim for the surface, saw I wasn't gonna make it, followed me and stuck this thing in my mouth. We each had one assigned to us. I just remember the one time that the guy who was assigned to me that day decided to take a bathroom break during one of the takes. I ran out of air and there was nobody there. Remember? It was your stunt double who gave me... I shared air with you guys. He was so used to saving my life that he was just on guard.

So out of the water and up onto the tower, up onto the ladder. From underwater to sparks and steam. After three weeks of being underwater we ended up... For another two, three weeks on this set. Climbing the ladder. High, too. Perilously high. Like, three stories high. The stunt people on this film really earned their keep. Big stunt. Big, big stunt. For real. We showed just Winona falling in the water, and I just remember staying up there with the stunt girl doing that thing. I was very impressed by what she did because I was at the same height. Oh, God. And I saw this little hole there and I thought she would never... Every day we received some sparks from the top and it was hot, if I remember.

Has anyone other than me broached the idea of... of peeing when we were stuck in that pool for two weeks? Did you pee in the water, Leland? - It was kind of an honor system. I never broke it. - It's five years later. On the record, I never peed in the pool. I'm never gonna speak to any of these people again. Did you pee? I never peed. There were times when we were in there for an hour and a half, two hours. Under our costumes were wet suits. - I didn't pee. It wasn't that I was uncomfortable peeing in the pool, but in my own wet suit. So you did pee? - No. Not for the sake of the pool. For the sake of the suit. That's a little makeup where we had to put Gary into an appliance to show his face all eaten away by acid.

I love this shot. - That's my favorite stupid joke. I love it. - Yeah. It worked a lot in the theater. And everywhere. On the audience. This is actually me doing a 180 reverse sit-up hanging by an iron rung of a ladder which is about a quarter of an inch in diameter. Meanwhile, the next day, I went to take a shower. When I got to washing the back of my legs, I was cut all the way to the bone. There was nothing but blood on my legs and I just want... If anybody's still watching this film at this point and listening to this commentary I'd like for each of you to stand up and give me a round of applause. This alien you can see on the ladder is in my house in Normandy right now. I am very proud and happy to have this guy in my house. When I moved, the guy opened the box and I said "You are going to have a big surprise." He saw a foot of the alien and he said "Oh, an alien." This is a really beautiful act by Gary's character, sacrificing himself for Dominique Pinon so that he could be in Amélie. That's the only reason he did that. That was a rough stunt too. We had to drop the dummy first and the stunt man had to follow it in. We had to make sure it was heavy enough to clear so he wouldn't hit his head going through that opening. I remember during the test screening we had a very, very funny note in a paper. A guy said, um... "My... The scene I don't like is when Winona Ryder died", because I suppose he was in love with Winona Ryder. "But my favorite scene is when Winona Ryder comes back." And another guy said "My favorite scene? Explosions."

I was very proud to watch the film in Chinese Theatre for the first time. I remember American audience has the habit to buy some popcorn during the screening. I was shocked. I wanted to say "You are going to miss something." "Go back to your seat very quickly, please." We were just full of surprises here in Alien central.

This effect took some convincing because it was a body piece that she wore that actually built her out several inches. But we knew that, from the correct angle, it would have some depth to it, and Jean-Pierre had Sigourney put her hand in it just to help convince, to show that that wound had some depth. But if you looked at it from sideways she'd look like she was pregnant. This is something Moebius told me and I think he's right. He said nobody, ultimately, can object to you doing a really, really beautiful tight set of drawings. It'll never be used against you. This is not something that anybody will blame you for. And I think he's right. I think that if you can, there's every reason to push your work to the furthest extent possible. That's why Jean-Pierre manages to get a frame that looks like this. It's because he's interested in designing to an extent that he's not cutting corners or saying "What's the use of this? Why bother lighting it like this?" "Why bother getting Khondji to process the light and grading of the film to this degree so you get this golden image with such beautiful blacks?" There's always somebody who'll argue against making that kind of an effort. But do you want to listen to them? Are these people working on your behalf when they say it's not necessary? You have to look at the final result. If somebody says putting preparation into designing frames and composition and boarding a movie, if somebody says that's useless, then look at their films and decide by the look of their picture whether or not you agree. You don't have to take it on face value. Actually, I can sort of guarantee that my favorite directors are people who, one way or another, spend a lot of time planning out their shots graphically one way or another, spend a lot of time planning out their shots graphically before integrating their decisions back into the script and making sure that these decisions have been budgeted and paid for, and will be there on the day of shooting.

So, for this shot where Ripley has to access the computer through Call, we made a fake arm out of silicone, down to the point where... This is the fake arm with the mole with the attached tendril to show the opening port. And then it's held up against Winona's body so she could slide the probe inside. When it gets to 270 degrees, take it out of the oven.

I wasn't sure about the voice of the robot on the ship, and it works. It's OK. We did a lot of tests for that. We tried a lot of things. That's one of the ticking clocks: Purvis's - my character's - chestburster. Never knowing when it's gonna come out. It added tension.

It's amazing - the set was not big. So it was built like an H with some crossings, and we'll change angles and stuff. Then you have the impression that it's bigger than it is. But it's always the same shots. I love the Betty. It was a cool design It's very Japanese-looking, like an insect or something. Nigel Phelps made some sketches from the Auriga. It was very interesting, but it was a vertical ship. At the last moment, I understood it was impossible to shoot it in wide-screen, and they had to design another ship very quickly. Sylvain Despretz, the French guy, made a sketch, another kind of Auriga, and it was the one we used.

The story of the alien reproduction system, it was pretty difficult to understand. I am not sure I understood. I remember we had to do some questions during the test screening to understand the story, even for ourselves, and we modified some details to understand. I'm sure even Joss Whedon is not able to explain everything. Is she the mother of the alien? Is she the lover of the alien? It was both. We played with everything.

It's a pleasure to shoot Winona Ryder because she has a sweet skin. She is like a deer. When you shoot her with short lens it works without problem because she is so beautiful.

What I was told about their relationship is that Winona is a robot and she's not fully human. She's almost not human at all. So she's fascinated by humanness. Anything involving fear, faith and sensuality. On the other hand, there's Ripley, who lost her daughter, who is no longer fully human, who is now part monster, part human, who sees an opportunity to meet halfway with this little girl, and they can, together, recombine a kind of relationship about what the other lost. That's what I was told it was about. They were complementary. Winona saw in Ripley a sort of human mother, some connection with humanness, and Ripley saw in Winona her daughter.

At the beginning I thought "Okay, they are going to fire me after one week." And, no, because it's like another movie. After a while, you are inside and you work, you're friends with good guys. And it's just a process. Like when I did my first short film. But when I made a short film, we were five. And for Alien Resurrection, 905 people. But, then again, it's the same thing. And I'm very proud, because for me, it's my own thing now. I am very proud because I did it. It was so heavy, so big, and the inspiration was Giger, and he is very happy about the film. I know, because I met him recently in Paris, and I'm very happy and proud of that. You wonder about what it's like to direct a film in a language that isn't really your mother tongue. And you wonder whether or not somebody fully understands, um... It's interesting. Something I've wondered. I don't know if Jean-Pierre is actually familiar with all of the actors

You are going to see in a couple of minutes the nest. It was a kind of homage to Giger because in the script it was an action scene and I didn't like it. I prefer to imagine this disgusting nest with tails and parts of alien. It was really disgusting with lots of slime and Sigourney loved that, to jump on this very disgusting nest. I love this idea when she catches the tongue. It hasn't happened yet, but this whole business about getting Ripley away from the rest of the pack... She falls into this ocean of alien... alienness which I quite like, actually. And she's supposed to sink into this like into an ocean, which was a precursor to this bit at the end of the film where they were floating in alien goo and the aliens swam in it like crocodiles. This shot seems very easy. It was a nightmare because it's a Steadicam. You can't see the crew, you can't see cables. You can imagine the nightmare because we turn around Sigourney and Winona.

There's what Jean-Pierre called "the vipers' nest" - a seething mass of alien texture. We built a 20 by 40 set piece that had articulated pieces worked into it. Tails and I think we had... I don't know if it was Tom. Was that you in an alien suit? Yeah, we had me and Mark Viniello in costume. Empty heads lying there. Sigourney was lowered down through a diaphragm and she disappeared. We've had people ask "What exactly is that?" and we said "I don't know." It's kind of like a nest, kind of like a... I don't know, a Spawning ground. Who knows what it is? I love this shot. Sigourney too. I remember the studio wanted to - do you remember? - cut one or two of them. These shots? - Yeah. I called Sigourney and she said "If they want to cut this scene I won't make the promotion." And we kept it. With the music it's pretty nice. Kind of romantic, though, isn't it? - Yeah. I made that instead of another action scene. I prefer this kind of poetry. It's pretty weird, pretty strange.

So this is the ominous return to Earth, which is something we've all anticipated for a long time in the Alien saga. Initially, in the first few drafts of the script, the Betty was gonna crash back onto Earth. There were various possibilities. One of them is that the Betty was gonna land in some sort of space junkyard, like a desert boneyard, the sort of place where currently you'd see carcasses of airplanes, except this would have been spaceships. Some of that was just an opportunity to show futuristic Earth without dealing with it. Tell you where you were but not have to deal with designing futuristic life on the planet, which is kind of barely touched upon in the second Alien movie. Again, you get the feeling that people wanted to get away from that problem. Nobody ever wanted to actually go back to Earth and wonder what it looked like. Here you can see all the training Raymond did with the army guys, cos he really knows how to handle the guns.

His time has come. I love the fact that Purvis becomes the hero. The weakest, meekest little feller. This was Jean-Pierre's idea. He liked the idea of a guy with a chestburster coming out of it, turning that into a weapon. It's probably the only time a chestburster comes out in a movie that you cheer because it kills the bad guy. So for this we had to not only deal with a chestburster, but a fake head of Freeman, who's the guy that just got punched.

This shot was a complicated one, to be able to get inside the mouth. There he is. Oh, look at that. Oh, it's beautiful. Birth is a lovely thing, isn't it? It's a miracle, really. - And that's the end of me. It started with the camera in my throat, pulling it out, and then reversed the film. Oh, is that how they did it? - Yeah. This scene was gonna be shot upside down. All these cocooned humans were actually upside down above a pool of blood and guts and alien goo that was quite liquid. As we drew closer to the end of the shoot, which pretty much happened chronologically, Ripley was supposed to be upside down on the wall, free herself and wind up on the floor. The reason is it became too complicated and too costly to turn the set into a liquid set. It would have had to be waterproof and that cost too much money. But the whole idea is the queen was lying in that pool of goo. All you saw was her belly just stick out of the water and she gave birth like that. Ripley fell into the pool, freed herself and then battled a few aliens. But there were all kind of logistical problems. If the actors were hanging upside down, you'd have had to have had swiveling panels on the walls so you could relieve them from that position every few minutes. So it was just too costly to build. When you have some close-up on Sigourney, the set was unfinished, and she had to imagine exactly what's happened in front of her. I remember we worked exactly like for a silent movie. I spoke with her. "And now the newborn moved, and now the queen is going to die." And she listened to me. It was pretty funny to make. Pitof made all this, this scene with the newborn. So this is the birthing of the newborn. The concept behind the newborn was to show a creature whose genetic makeup had been as affected as Ripley's had been, but in the opposite way. Instead of it being a human tainted by alien DNA, it's an alien that's been tainted by human DNA. Even down to the eyes. The big concept change on this was to show an alien creature that had eyes. So much has been made of the fact that these things don't have eyes and there's no way of telling how they're aware of what's going on around them. But because this thing had been tainted, Jean-Pierre's feeling was that the eyes would be a great way to lock that whole idea in. A rather momentous event in the Alien saga. This was a big day. We had 30 puppeteers to do the queen and the newborn. The newborn was completely hydraulic. I think we had ten puppeteers on the newborn and maybe another ten on the queen. We had another handful inside that egg sac. I think it was 30 puppeteers. - I guess it was 40. Yeah, 30 or 40. I had five cameras. It was a crazy day. Pitof, you directed most of this. We did some stuff with Sigourney like this over-the-shoulder stuff, but then everything else was broken down into pieces. You told me the story of Sigourney when she acted with gorillas. Exactly. She made a film with gorillas and she knows you have to avoid to look on the eyes of the beast as always and she looks on the side. Was that an accident? I don't remember if it was something that was directed or... Sometimes we'd get weird little lurching movements. I can't remember. Oh, there's that tongue.

We built a miniature version of the newborn as well that we never photographed. We didn't have the time or the money, I think. There was a lot of hard choices being made. Jean-Pierre's idea for the newborn was that he wanted it to be like a toddler that was curious and prone to tantrums and completely unaware of its own strength. And, like toddlers, eat people's heads. I remember at the beginning we thought about Sigourney inside a cocoon, but when we arrived on set in the morning, she told me "No, it's a mistake. I can't stay in a cocoon. It's a mistake." We had to improvise something. We had to improvise something. It's not easy for a director to change their mind when you have a lot of special effects and these kind of sets. It's pretty difficult. But she was right. We had all these technical words to say in English, which is very difficult for a French actor.

The production designer was Nigel Phelps. I was very happy to meet him because he was so close to my spirit. When I met him for the first time, he present me some sketches he did for, I think, Batman, and it was so close to The City Of Lost Children, it was exactly the same spirit. And he was a good friend. We stayed friends. Now each time I come back to LA I see Nigel and all the crew. It's pretty rare to stay friends when a film is finished. Sometimes you don't see again the people, and it's not the case with this film. It happens with you. You like to work with the same people. You are the only one who did the four films, with Dominique. Dominique, we are, tonight, the three of us who did all four films.

It was a very small set. It was pretty difficult to shoot on this set.

The newborn was supposed to be digital, and, again, for budgetary reasons, it was decided Jean-Pierre would have to do everything with the newborn as animatronic. I think it was a problem for him because initially he wanted to have a real chase. He wanted Ripley to be chased down the halls by this thing. The beast was so big, the animatronic. It was a nightmare to shoot the scene when he tries to catch Winona Ryder. I remember I had to improvise, to change my mind, and it wasn't an easy time for me. I cheat on this shot because it's like a point of view of the newborn and it's fake, he is inside.

There's a shot in here that Jean-Pierre told us about where he said that they had to go back and digitally remove the genitals of the newborn. Oh, yes. - Because it was, uh... He said even for a Frenchman it was too much. It was gross. - Objectionable. The studio had a problem with the genitals on this creature. Jean-Pierre wanted this creature to look like a mix of human and alien DNA, a mix between an old and a young person and male and female, so its genitals reflected the male-female aspect of it and the studio had us tone them down at one point. It's probably the only digital genital-removal shot in history.

There's some of the pathos and the sympathy. Jean-Pierre wanted this character to be able to go from looking ferocious to looking sad. That was kind of the fun of this. Some people didn't like the newborn. I understand because he's a bit different than the other alien, but I like his character. Poor Distephano's brains get squeezed out. We made a fake head of him and really labored over that splatter that you just saw.

Maybe two or three years after the shooting, I watch the film one more time and just at this time I thought "But it's very gory. It's disgusting." Because when you make a film you don't see this kind of stuff. You see just the special effects. But after three years, I began to feel how it's disgusting.

You can recognize the gesture of the newborn. It's exactly the same gesture as Ripley at the beginning in the cell when she plays with Winona.

The eyes of the newborn slid in and out. And now the love scene. On this shot you can see all the newborn. It's the only shot because we erased in postproduction the crane. Here he is taking a couple steps. He was supported by a boom and rod-operated. Dave Penikas was the mechanical supervisor on this, and Yuri Everson supervised a lot of the construction steps of it as well. It's difficult because of all the hydraulics involved in making it move, and having it move so closely to the actress, both Winona and Sigourney. We had a lot of safety concerns in building this thing mechanically, and also in the operation of it. We ended up with two computers to operate this creature, one at the puppeteering end and one on the puppet, to continually make sure the data being fed to the puppet was not able to be misinterpreted and have something move in a completely opposite direction. Jean-Pierre really wanted to convey a confusion and sadness from the creature, where he doesn't understand why he's being sacrificed like this. We had a variety of puppets ranging from our hydraulic character to rod-operated puppets. I think there was maybe three different phases of puppet here. So now this is the ending I found at the end. You can understand it was the ending for the General Perez, for Dan Hedaya. During the shooting I wasn't sure it was working. Now when I see it I think it's good. Because Tom and Alec had to find some new technology very quickly because we found this idea very late. And all the stuff coming out of the newborn have been shot in liquid to have this zero-gravity impression and a lot of different things. I thought that that was all digital, those shots right there. No, that's photographed and it's digitally... It was mixed digitally but all the elements are elements I shot... You need a tank for this zero-gravity feeling. Right. But it had a lot of layers together to have the amount of stuff.

Could we tell what part of Earth has been destroyed needlessly in this shot? Where is that supposed to be? - Uh... I think it's, uh... France. Yeah? - No. - It was Paris. So, all these scenes - a lot of fire - we shot separately to really have these big flames, when we are on the miniature, to really have this re-entry impression. Is that shake added afterwards? Yeah, some were done with the camera and we added some more in postproduction.

It wasn't easy to find a good ending. The first one from Joss Whedon was very expensive, on Earth. I know the studio wanted to finish on Earth. It was the first idea. I know the studio wanted to finish on Earth. It was the first idea. But I knew from the beginning it won't happen because it's too expensive. I preferred from the beginning to finish on the spaceship. I know it was a little bit too close to the second one and the first one too. I think it was more clean to finish like this, more than to have an ending, very cheap, on Earth. And, at the end, I prefer this ending. But we wrote maybe four or five different endings and... I had a crazy idea with a car crash but with spaceships. It was pretty funny but, one more time, too expensive. Dominique, I remember I didn't tell you "Ron Perlman is going to kiss you." It was a surprise. - Yeah, it was quite a big surprise. My love story with Ron is ending. Very good. It was meant to have another ending. When we really started preproduction, the ending was on Earth. Jean-Pierre was not happy with the ending so there were several options and at the end Jean-Pierre shot a studio version with the two girls on the earth after landing. Initially the Betty was to crashland on Earth. Because the whole idea was to actually move the whole Alien myth down to a new level and leave a door open, which was Earth. Which you sort of get at the end of this one, but it's still very ambiguous. But in that initial script, it wasn't. The whole idea was that you've now landed on Earth by the end, the last page, and you sort of know where the next film is gonna take you. And the green-screen shot was actually the last bit of shooting from, you know, the sort of main production schedule. And it was Ripley and Call crashlanding. And they come out, and they just sit there. And in the distance is a city. And they come out, and they just sit there. And in the distance is a city. And they haven't gone to it yet, and this is all about Call, has never seen the Earth because she's a robot. The studio, Fox, was really keenly amused with the idea that Jean-Pierre was French and that all of his sort of French-ness could be tapped into. And one of the ideas, for instance, they had at Fox was, why not crashland the Betty somewhere near dunes or something where all you see is part of the Eiffel Tower rising out of the sand? I can tell you something to finish. For the French crew it was an amazing adventure, and it was the best year of my life. It was SO... We lived... We were living during one year. It was... a special... a very... It was an incredible challenge? Incredible challenge. And we did it. It was good.

I think there's definitely a lot of work in this, isn't there? Oh, yes, a lot. I think it holds up pretty well in terms of those visuals. Yeah, it's very... I'm very happy because it's a very Jean-Pierre Jeunet movie. The feeling is very his feeling, and it's great to see a movie which is as well known as Alien and a saga like Alien is, and each director can reprint his own universe. Fox has hired a wide range of directors on these. Each one has really made it their own. You were with Jean-Pierre... You knew Jean-Pierre when he was being offered this. Was that an exciting thing for him, or did he have to consider it? It was really exciting. For a Frenchman to make an American movie is exciting. But it was difficult for him in terms of speaking because he didn't speak English. So that was very complicated. And after a while... Now he's married with an American girl so he was teached directly by her, by his personal professor. I suppose sometimes he pretends he can't understand. Yeah, he can pretend. - Yeah. Now he's married. Was there any issue with you coming with him? Cos obviously you were his trusted effects supervisor. Did anybody question that or say "There's people in Los Angeles that can do it"? Or was it part of his deal? - No, it was quite easy because Jean-Pierre wanted part of his crew and the visual effects were very important. The studio was happy of what we'd done on The City of Lost Children and they really wanted to have the same type of effects, so it was kind of easy to be there. Also, I don't know how it works now, but at the time there was no union for visual effects. So it was easier. - Right. I don't know if there is a union now. Not for effects supervisors, although I hear it's in the works. So how did you like working with American crews? Be honest. Uh, I'm back. - You're back. I'm back so I liked it. - Yeah. You liked it. Good. We had a great time with you guys. We really appreciated your sensibilities. Jean-Pierre was very kind to us. I couldn't believe it at the premiere when he thanked us. That was very kind of him.

I like the one thing with Dominique when the door opened and... What does he say? "Who were you expecting? Santa Clowse?" And it's like "Santa...?" Didn't he also say... The Eastern bunny. The Eastern bunny. The Easter bunny. Somebody printed up T-shirts. "Who were you expecting? The Eastern bunny?" Funny.

All right. So it's on to Alien 5. Da-da-da!