Alien ³ The Legacy Cut (1992)

So as you were saying, you saw it at the time in theatres, right? I can't remember where or when, but I do remember seeing it on the big screen, being really disappointed, basically. Because, to be fair, without David Fincher going on to become what he has gone on to become, I'm not sure we'd give it the second chance that we all do, really. At the time, it was just, what the fuck is this? just awful because it was um you know this was the first alien film i saw um i was at right age to be kind of aware of what was going on around me because i was like would have been like 10 years old when this came out so i hadn't seen alien or aliens and this is the one that really was pushed with marketing quite heavily um so i was kind of desperate to see it but i had to wait till the following year because you know wait for it to be on vhs to rent And I played the video game very much before the film, so I was very much kind of geared up to what Alien 3 would be, but the video game on the Sega Mega Drive and stuff was an all-out action game, but with Ripley with a bald head. So you're kind of like, oh, where's all the pulse rifles and smart guns? But I really enjoyed it for what it was, but because I hadn't had that experience of 1 and 2, I had no expectations other than the fact that these guys, these bald guys... on his prison were going to be chased by this alien and killed. And yeah, I didn't have that much of an issue with it. It was only kind of later on you kind of see the sort of the failings of the studio manipulating the film and changing it and not knowing what they wanted. David Fincher making a movie without a finished script. and this kind of mangled kind of edit what they've released theatrically you know even though it kind of it kind of made sense you had characters sort of disappear and you know for no reason um and you things didn't connect fully but it was sort of a working picture with start middle and end but it was um you know would you see them all together because it's way before resurrection you could the ending didn't really feel satisfying despite the music doing all its best to sort of make you feel that this is the finale and it doesn't quite deliver. But what I loved about, especially how the film starts, is the 20th Century Fox logo, which has its own bespoke kind of theme of the Fox with it and that builds into this kind of creepy... It's kind of wrong footsie, doesn't it? It did me anyway, watching it last night. I had no memory of that. And it really starts you off on it because it's a really ominous kind of... There's something slightly off about that fanfare. It's not just that it's different. It's just a bit off. And it really puts you on the back foot straight away. It's like straight away you're in trouble. Because the happy ending of Aliens is completely undone as soon as that Fox logo appears. This is not going to be a happy ride. And it still kind of bugs me that it doesn't really make sense how the alien egg got on there because... it's in an escape pod bit, right? Or it's part of the ship that then sets fire, then it sort of lets it out. But it didn't really... That was the only way they could explain it, by sort of fudging it in that way, because you don't think the Queen would have laid one on the... She would have laid an egg on the drop ship, right? So it doesn't make sense. But anyway, we're there. But I think what was most fascinating about this, with many movies that are troubled productions, they often are... how they make it is actually end up more fascinating than the final result yeah this is a this is a great example of that yeah well yeah and that's what i love about the idea of how this movie kind of originated with this wooden planet by you know vincent ward had these monks and stuff who were living on this world they created this kind of very bosh looking movie with this like you know cathedral like design and a world of very thin atmosphere where You know, you've got these kind of fields outside, which kind of would set up a wonderful chase sequence. And all these little bits he talked about, and then Fox had agreed to it, then they changed their minds and wanted to be a bit more generic. Weirdly, it was this kind of idea of Fox wanting to play it safe, but also had put all their eggs in one basket, thinking this was going to be their big hit movie of 1992. Which is kind of weird, isn't it? Because... Fox would generally have something that's kind of, okay, a PG-13 movie would be their big hit of 1992, not an 18 rated or hard R rated film. Without big names, frankly, apart from Sigourney Weaver, who, you know, as a woman is never going to be the, you know, no one would normally hang their summer blockbuster on a female character who isn't even in it really in an action movie anymore. But yeah, it's a perfect example of just wrong-headed thinking from the start. I think all the committee thinking, that's what led to the interesting ideas getting thrown out, like the planet with a six-foot atmosphere. I don't know if that's ever been done before, but that's an amazing idea. The idea that you could literally jump in the air and your head would be outside the atmosphere of your planet. The possibilities there are endless. And the wooden planet... full of monks, which is a really striking idea, but at the end of the day, makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. And it doesn't really belong in the Alien franchise, to my mind. Yeah, I think because down to the fact that Alien 1 and 2, there's always kind of based around sort of physics and reality to a certain extent, where things were believable, how you flick this switch and do that, and the monitors, and how things, and a sort of, you know, it wasn't clean like Star Trek, where you had this kind of sense of like, it's too far in the future, where... I think the idea of a wooden planet that has at the core of it this system that would keep them alive with this atmosphere would seem too far in the future for after aliens, maybe a thousand years. It's one of those things whereby in science fiction you can do what you want in science fiction, but you don't have to obey the rules of science, you don't have to obey the rules of today, but you do have to obey the rules of the universe you create today. And the universe was already created and that universe does not feature a wooden planet because a wooden planet is the stupidest idea anyone could ever have. It makes literally no sense. What substance is rarer in space than wood? But at the same time, it's a really cool idea and a really visual idea and create a universe in which you say that makes sense and do it by all means. But it doesn't follow James Cameron's aliens, you know, a bunch of monks on a wooden planet. No, but if you go back and watch, well, I'm not sure if you've seen it, but Vincent Ward's previous film, it dealt with monks and things like that. So he's all clearly bringing over ideas he's already dealt with to repackage into aliens. Because he came up with the whole idea on a flight, he had this entire concept of his. He literally pulled it out of his arse on a plane. Yeah, yeah. And then got John Fasano to write it. I didn't realise that, that John Fasano, the guy who made Rock and Roll Nightmare, which is one of the most ridiculous movies you will ever see. John Fasano wrote that script. I mean, my God, he must have had a brief moment where people were taking him seriously and they jumped on him, but that didn't last long. But you can see, like, during the course of this movie, where Vincent Ward's ideas are still kind of embedded in the film, because he's still credited as, you know, the story... is his own, but it's like, you can see some of the production design where you've got this kind of religious aspect, the guys are all religious as well, you have, you know, where their clothes, how their clothes are hung is a bit like monks as well, and they'd be getting all the big coats on and the hood, so you kind of, there is that sort of, the building blocks of what he'd wanted is kind of there in structure, but it's, it has become this, just a prison planet, which, you know, I'm not... that upset about if you look at the original concept and to this but i think it does kind of reek of let's play a bit safe let's kind of keep it i suppose continuity wise with aliens because once you see like um the mess hall or whatever the kitchen whatever it is you've got that kind of similar sort of hadley's hope design to some of the rooms um so they are carrying over some sort of elements of production look to this film um I like the idea of that. I mean, the prison planet, I think, is a great idea. And it's been done in a few movies. This is, believe it or not, probably the best of them. It's certainly better than Star Slammer. And it's a great idea. And it's a contained environment, which is crucial, I think, to Alien. And it's a contained environment that's completely different. It allows for a completely different set of characters. But they introduce these huge problems that they then have to deal with. And starting with, I don't know if we want to get into it already, but starting with the idea of killing Newt and Hicks straight away. For me, that's just the worst idea ever. It's an absolute disaster. You can't start a movie by killing a 10-year-old girl you've already got a relationship with. Well, you can, but... If you do, the only way to maintain any kind of emotional truth thereafter is to have the surviving character, Ripley, utterly broken, completely destroyed. I mean, that's something Ripley doesn't get over in real life. There is no way to make her believable and have her get over that. Which means that our protagonist for the entire movie is a miserable zombie. And that's just not fun to be around, especially when everyone else is... some kind of religious lunatic or a British sex offender which this movie is nothing but British rapists American religious lunatics and a depressed woman who's just lost all reason to live and I don't want to spend two and a half hours with those people and that for me that's the whole problem with this movie much more than anything else it starts out on the wrong foot doesn't it completely they start out by creating a problem there's no getting around And it didn't have to be like that. I completely get... Sigourney Weaver was apparently very keen to get back to being on her own, as it were. And whilst Cameron had mooted these ideas and told Carrie... Is it Carrie Hen who played Carrie Hen? It had told her as well that he was brewing these ideas about how Hicks and Ripley and Newt would return to Earth and be a family and that's what Alien 3 would be. And... I don't think that works either. I think that's a bad idea too. Sigourney Weaver has explained that she sees Ripley as a loner type, and I agree with that. I think that's the right way to do it. I think they did have to separate Ripley. I know Michael Biehn is really upset about not being cast in this, and in the documentary he makes a passing comment about how Sigourney Weaver may have been behind that. You know, wanting to... It's only subtle, but he makes it. Well, he got paid more than Aliens just for them to use his face. You know, the sort of digital little face they have very much in a theatrical cut to sort of condense this opening. I think fundamentally they should have come up with a cleverer way of separating Ripley off, and they could have done. Indeed, the author of the novelisation did that. He kept Newt alive but separated them. I don't know how he did it, but... Well, we know there's other scripts, isn't there? Because during the genesis of this, I know David Garlis said they weren't really desperate to make a sequel, but everyone wanted a sequel, and they didn't know where to go with it, because where would you go after the second one? And they had other directors involved. I know they had Renny Harlin, who very much wanted to do the world of the aliens. He didn't want to be... But he found himself after a year not getting anywhere, because it was all just repeating what they've already... explored in the first two. William Gibson's script, which was then turned into a radio drama a couple of years ago, which people seem to gush over. I think it was a terrible script. Well, terrible is a harsh word, but it just didn't do anything really exciting for me. And it does bring over, obviously, Newt and Hicks stay alive, but Ripley's in a coma for most of it. So she's out of the movie and you've got like... bishop with like plastic knees and stuff it made no sense and like and the aliens attack androids and there's android hybrid aliens i'm like this is just insane but they did do radio drama you can listen to it rather but yeah it's not it's not great um obviously david tooey who did you know the riddick films he'd had a stab at it but i think i think the idea i think vincent's one was the most interesting but ultimately what we're seeing is a watered down version Off his script. Yeah, or a combination. A combination, yeah. Yeah, the prison planet was an idea early on. Was it Eric Redd? I can't remember who came up with it. Or was it Giler who came up with it? I can't remember who came up with it. But yeah, so yeah, it's an amalgamation really, isn't it? They seem to have taken the worst aspects of all the possibilities and slammed them together and then decided, actually, no, let's rewrite the script on a daily basis anyway. Yeah. But if you look at the teaser trailer for Alien 3... It's really misleading because it's going to say it's all set on Earth. You're like, wait a minute. That was obviously clearly done when they had no director or maybe a story set in stone because it became this. I think the problem was the main topic of discussion was that they set a release date. That was it. It was all down to marketing. We had to have this movie out in December of 92 or something. And the heads at Fox... I recall reading that maybe Rupert Murdoch had said, like, this has got to be the big movie of 92 or something like that. Because he's the head of the whole company, isn't he? I think, of owning Fox. I don't know how much control he had over... That would make... Do you know what? That would explain everything. Because you know what these companies are like. If someone that important, if the president of the parent company said, this is what's going to happen, you know all those executives are going to be running around in circles saying, trying to be seen to be doing good things trying to hide the failures and the stupid ideas they're having and that always just leads to chaos always because suddenly everybody's got an opinion and it's an opinion that they're going to potentially distort or change or as it proves to be unpopular or even completely deny and it does seem like there was more there were more producers as far as i can tell causing trouble on this movie than anything else i've dug into Yeah, yeah. I mean, the one producer that's interviewed quite a lot is Ezra. I've got his surname now. He's on here somewhere. Let's double check his surname. Is it pronounced Swedlow? Yeah, something like that. Yeah, yeah. I do apologise if I've mispronounced his surname. I think he was basically their man on the ground, wasn't he? He was like Fox's man on the ground. Basically to make sure that he's not overspending. And Ezra admits that he was a very different person back then. But he does come across as quite level-headed and quite fair with his kind of putting his foot down with Fincher. But it's interesting that all the cast and a lot of the technical guys really liked Fincher. Obviously, Alex Thompson, you know, the DP had come in to replace the guy who had photographed Blade Runner, who clearly had Parkinson's. But he said, you know, David was a little bit kind of short with him and Not very communicative, but Alex Thompson could photograph these large-scale sets with ease. He'd photographed Excalibur and Ridley Scott's Legend. I mean, Legend's one of the most visually interesting films ever made. But it's interesting that the executive producers, well, head of production was John Landau, who's unfortunately passed away recently at the age of 63. And he looked... I saw recently, like... a sort of promotion for Avatar 2. And he looked a lot older than he should be. I was like, oh, he looks a bit unwell. Obviously, he clearly was unwell. But he, apparently, what Ezra said, was basically brought in to break David Fincher, you know, and his, you know, his vision for the movie. And if he doesn't, because basically the argument was, you're misspending, you're misspending our money. We're going to put our foot down. And John Landau was, what, a couple of years older than David? Maybe he's like 32, 33, where David Fincher was like 28 making this. 28! You know, we're still doing YouTube videos in our 40s, you know. But it's like, you know, it's crazy how he managed, David managed to go up the ranks, you know. Well, he's a very talented guy, obviously from ILM and did music videos. And they hired him to do this because of his music video talents. And obviously they can hire him on a cheaper... you know fee and presumably think they can push him about a bit as well it's very much Marvel syndrome isn't it here's this guy who we reckon is going to be the next big thing he's a creative genius he's you know thinks outside the box he does all these interesting things let's give him a franchise movie and we give him the franchise movie and then they do nothing but second guess undermine argue and Fincher's whole line all along was quite understandably you've hired me to make this movie let me make it or you know hire someone else that's just not how studios work is and there's an extra problem here because it's obviously it's alien so it's a cash cow there's a lot of people and a lot of money involved but there's also a three-way dynamic because you've got brandy wine which is the production company which is david guyler and walter hill two men who do not take at all and then you've got fox who's putting up all the money and obviously it's their baby too they want and then you've got david fincher and all three of them seemed to be equally resentful of each other. There was no happy relationship there at all. And they all three of them wanted to do something different. And I'm not sure any of them, including Fincher possibly, knew what it was that they wanted to do. They just knew what they didn't want to do, which is what everyone else was doing. Well, it was clear that David Fincher had, after this, had stopped talking about the film. He didn't want to talk about it. He disowned it in some way. But he has mentioned it a couple of times when people quiz him. He said this kind of... In London, he was ritualistically sodomised by the English crew. Because he was told that these guys have made the other films before. They know what they're doing. You should hire them. But David couldn't hire who he wanted, his team. So that became the point where you got this young guy... bossing around middle-aged men, older veterans, and what to do. And if James Cameron can't pull that shit off, there's no way David Fincher's going to, let's be honest. Yeah, and they become resentful. And you're making this film at Pinewood Studios during the winter. It's freezing cold. Everyone's getting ill. And you've got all these problems where you haven't got a script finalised. Things are changing every day. I mean, I'm not surprised David Fincher just lashed out. And he does lash out. You see him in the making of. He's just like... Fox are idiots and things like that. It's amazing. It's great. He doesn't give a shit. But David Fincher was already a wealthy guy before he made the film. He had a production company making music videos. He was like loaded. So he didn't, I don't know. He didn't need the money to make this, you know, to be, you know, he didn't need it as a payday. He was just like, he loved alien. I'm sure he had his sort of misgivings of aliens and how it kind of changed things perhaps, or maybe set up these, you know, this family setting. with Ripley, Hicks and Newt, and maybe you just want to squash that completely. We're going, she's going to be fucked straight away. You know, she's going to be screwed up, like, you know, without any sort of sense of hope to this movie. I think that's, I suppose, people's reaction was it was not uplifting at all. It was a very depressing movie. Exactly. And not just because you sense that everyone's doomed, and not just because it undoes the whole... happy ending. It undoes the entire point of Aliens because Aliens is about saving Newt. That's what Aliens is about at the end of the day. She's the only one who matters to anyone in that movie. Ripley doesn't give a... Hicks doesn't give a shit. They're trying to save Newt. So to start by killing her undoes all of that. But then they're big enough problems in their own right but then you assemble a cast without a single... likable character in it no one you can root there is nobody you can get behind or root for here but charles dance here is as close as it comes other than ripley well yeah and charles dance is the best character for me yeah in this film so of course he's killed first i mean oh yeah this movie is extraordinary for that you can literally if you put if you'd stack up all the characters in an order of how entertaining and great they are that's the order in which they get killed as well, basically. Apart from David Webb, I suppose, Morse, who kind of comes into his own towards the end, finally, after just being really obnoxious the whole time. Yes, and he survives, doesn't he, David Webb? Yeah, yeah. Which is great. I love the holes of the moat when they run into each other, him and the other prisoner. He's got the scissors the wrong way round. Fucking moron! He kills someone, you know. That's great little... I think there's little great bits of British humour in it, even if it's not written by any British people. I think there's kind of some sort of ad-libbing or sort of making up stuff along the way, perhaps. You can't not have British humour in it when you cast people like Brian Glover, who is just walking, talking British humour, in my mind. That's all he is. Yeah, I mean, fantastic, you know, in the episode of Bottom, you know, where they steal his gas. But he was, again, because of David's problems, he kept them away from the cast and crew, but did confide in Brian Glover, who was really helpful for David and just kept his morale up. It's other actors who had problems, even directors, sorry, who had issues with producers. And if you're working with Jack Nicholson, Jack Nicholson will defend you and support you. because he has the power to tell the producers to say no. Yeah, creatives are always going to stick together. Sigourney Weaver as well is full of praise for David Fincher. And the creatives are always going to stick together against the producers at the end of the day. Yeah. Ezra, the exec producer, said he saw David Fincher on the phone with John Landau and he hung up the phone and he got a knife and stabbed it into the table and just spread it across like that. And Ezra's like... oh it's a nice table and he's like and he says like you know like david you know i tend to like people at first i don't go in with like hating them straight away and david's like i like people but they but you know they stack well yes i thought what a strange comment to say you know um but obviously like when they were sort of putting this film together like editorially they they said this sequence here was just um the rough cut was just disgusting with the autopsy of Newt. The autopsy, yeah. The makeup guy who's used to Gaul was like, oh, he couldn't stand it. And why? But, I mean, why did they want to do that? I don't understand the appeal of... Maybe I'm getting soft in my old age, but I don't understand the need for... I mean, this is one of the first scenes in the movie. It's Newt's autopsy. Why? We don't need that. We don't need to see that. Yeah, I think she's just desperate to find out how, you know... They all died. She didn't believe that she had drowned. She's seen the marks, hasn't she? Or they were checking for marks on her face to see if there's an alien inside. And we all know, I think a lot of people even knew. Actually interesting, the magazine Cine Fantastique had done an article on this film. They covered it extensively. It was an whole issue. So many pages dedicated to it. And obviously Cinefex had well done a big... breakdown on the visual effects with Richard Edlund but the City Fantastic article had basically spoiled the movie they'd even reviewed basically the rough cut of it and talked about and they mentioned Hicks wasn't in it and all this stuff and people were furious that this magazine had basically spoiled it for everyone but yeah it's interesting reading it now because you know in hindsight what happens but at the time it must have been pretty disappointing and so you know going in i think a lot of people knew going in that ripley was going to die yeah i'm trying to remember now i'm trying to see the guy in the background there with these uh with the ox he's the guy from batman beginning he's yeah yeah he's a he's a yeah the the guy yeah batman throws off the top no on top of the building isn't it yeah of course he just goes he goes who are you yeah Yeah, oh God, he's cropped up in so much. I always think he'd be good to play Tom Waits in a biography. Oh, yeah, he's also in Guardians of the Galaxy, I think, was it the first one? God, he is, isn't he? Yeah, in a fanny suit. Yeah, he goes in with the thing to try and sell it to him, doesn't he? Chris Pratt does. Yeah. Man, the cast of this movie is something else, isn't it? I mean, for all of its problems, the actors they found to appear in it aren't really among them. Well, we've got a David Fincher regular in this movie, haven't we? Do we know who it is? It's Holt. Holt McElhaney? McElhaney, yeah. Is he in what David Fincher movies is he in, then? He's in Fight Club. Oh, God, he is, isn't he? I think he's in The Game, isn't he? I don't remember that one well enough. He's in David Fincher's Mindhunter, which is an incredible show on Netflix, which they did two seasons of and they cancelled. I was like, fucking hell, it's one of the greatest shows ever made. Um... Let me check. Oh, he's not in the game. Okay. He's in a few Fincher flicks. He's a regular. But yeah, I mean, you've got like... He's a really, really good... One of my things to mention was going to be Holt McElhaney because I'm a massive fan and he just doesn't seem to get the credit he deserves. He's so, and I didn't realise he was in this. I was like, I recognise that guy. But obviously, I picture him much older and kind of- He's very thin. Sturdier, shall we say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you've got Clive Mantle in this, you know, who, famous of Casualty, but was, you know, to me, he was in Superman IV, the first nuclear man. But I spoke to Clive over 20 years ago, and I said to him, what happened to you in Alien 3? You don't see him get killed. Because of the production, it basically halted at Pinewood and they went over to do reshoots in LA because he wasn't invited back. They just kill him off by having him scream down one of the corridors when the alien's chasing all the prisoners. So yeah, he gets no death scene. But yeah, certainly for British television, anyone who's familiar with British television, that you're going to see a lot of people you grew up with, ultimately. From Charles Dance, obviously the most... the best thing in it, really. But Brian Glover there is just so frickin' good in everything he's ever done. And weirdly, I know him best from Porridge, where he's also a prisoner. Although technically he's the warden here, but... Well, to many kids, you know, watching TV a lot, he was the voice of PG Tips, wasn't he? Yeah. And a Tetley. Was it Tetley? Was it Tetley? Yeah. Tetley makes tea bags make tea or something. Yeah, yeah. And he was a wrestler, wasn't he? He was a wrestler early in his career, yeah. And, of course, he's probably his most seminal performance is in Kez, isn't it? Ken Loach's Kez. To be kind of a big actor in this film, you know, a big role for him, you know, for people that many people hadn't seen before, he just smashes it out of the park. Oh, God, yeah. And he just comes on and plays Brian Glover, too. This is who he is in everything he does. I love how he's very matter of fact. And he's arguing with someone. He goes, listen here, you piece of shit. He just snaps. Perfect, like petty bureaucrat, middle management type. He really captures that. But Charles Dance, I can't believe David Fincher was absolutely determined to have Richard E. Grant in that role. which I remember reading about years ago and obviously doing the research, gone back into that and the feud he had with the studio over that. And I just can't, I can't see Richard E. Grant in that role. Can you? I love Richard E. Grant, but... Well, if we had him and Paul McGann, it would be with Dale and I too. And Ralph Brown. Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah. This is it. I mean, this is... When Ollie and I record these commentaries, we generally put a little poster behind us on Zoom relating to the movie, and I made a Withnail and I 2 poster, which is some artwork of Withnail and I with the alien attacking them. Because it turns out that that really is what David Fincher was going for as well, because he's a massive Withnail and I fan. Now, this shot here, when she wipes off the moisture, the condensation, sorry, of the... Oh, that's the original photographer's work. Is it Jordan Cronenworth? Yeah, yeah. I'm getting names wrong today. Yeah, Jordan's something unpronounceable. I've always thought of him as... But I think he had Parkinson's for a long time, but Ezra, the executive producer, turned up and goes, yeah, he's got Parkinson's. He has energy, he says, but he couldn't do certain things where a guy has to crawl into certain bits and measure the light and stuff. He just couldn't do that. You can't put a cinematographer with Parkinson's at the top of a ladder to check the light levels, can you? No, no.

So, I mean, I think Alex Thompson does a great job of sort of copying his style. And this stuff here in the kitchen or the sort of, you know, the eating area, it feels like elements of Aliens. It really does, doesn't it? Yeah. I was just going to say that this, particularly the scenes shot in here, feels like Alien and Outland, which feels just like Alien to me as well. But this really reminds me of the cafeteria in Outland. For sure. Paul McGann. But I mean, there's nothing wrong with the way it looks, is there? Clearly, the sets are absolutely fantastic. I didn't realise, again, until digging in research, that they are all sets. I figured that at least some of it must be some horrendous foundry in the north somewhere that they've found that's been abandoned since the... But no, it's all built. It shows you, though, like the first Alien, $8 million it cost. Also, we all know it was like four that doubled due to Ridley Scott's Fantastic storyboarding. Aliens, what, 16 million maybe? Yeah, something like that. So then it's gone from that to 50 million for Alien 3. And I don't know if that accounts for the reshoots. Well, 20 million of that they'd spent before they even started filming, didn't they? Because they'd spent 7 million on, according to the figures I've come across, they spent 7 million on sets for versions of the movie that were then abandoned. So the sets were just destroyed. And they spent 13 million, I read somewhere, on various script developments, which is easy to believe. If it's rolling over for several years, you've got all these big names coming and going. They're not working for nearly free. They're trying to get paid. So they potentially cost 20 million just to get the script that's utterly unintelligible and stupid. I mean, how badly can studios handle situations? And I presume they're kind of shooting this, what, late 1990 into 91 at Pinewood? It must have been, yeah. So you've got, during a recession, though, so the pound has dropped. So I imagine it was quite, the dollar went quite far at that point. And Batman had just been made there at the same time, you know, about a year before. So that cost, again, a similar cost, 50 million. But they had, they weren't just shooting at Pinewood. They apparently had... pretty much every stage at Pinewood taken over. And I mean, that just, that costs more money than you can believe, I think. If you want to hire out the whole of Pinewood, basically, you can't do that. It's interesting where you got with Aliens, where you got the British crew being difficult with Cameron. In the sort of making of this film, it kind of seems that some were like fully on board with his direction and style, others weren't but it wasn't like he had the same thing as the tea lady causing problems you know or people not wanting to watch his work to sort of justify why he's doing these things and what he's you know how talented he is as a filmmaker but it's this seems more the there's too many executives around trying to stop him misspending but they don't know it's it's like the argument um Richard Donner had said, like, despite the Soulkinds being difficult and trying to stop him spending money, he said they had no vision for this film. They didn't know what it was. And he knew what it was, and it's going to cost this amount. Where in this, I think the executives are just there to show that they are doing what they're doing, but also not actually understanding what he's trying to achieve with this. Absolutely. Absolutely. There you go. She's sitting right next to him. The halt. You know, the, the Mac, the big Mac is, I mean, Charles S Dutton as well. I mean, there's, there's such talent in this movie, Pete, Pete fricking puzzle threat who gets nothing to do. I don't remember that. I remember him having a lot more to do in this, but yeah, he doesn't Charles S Dutton's an interesting one. Actually. I would love to know exactly what inspired and influenced that character. because it struck me watching it before, the glasses he wears are... He's a Malcolm X type character, isn't he? But he's a religious leader. So the glasses there, first thing I thought, yeah, they're Malcolm X's glasses. Then I suddenly remembered, hang on, I picture someone else wearing those glasses, and it's Louis Farrakhan. So he didn't always wear those glasses. He's the leader of an Islamic organization in the States that back in the day, before 9-11 and before the whole war on Islam, back in the day was very popular with rappers and I think the African-American community in general. It was basically an arm of Islam aimed at African-American males. And Ice Cube was a member for many years and a whole bunch of rappers were. But he's a very controversial figure, Louis Farrakhan. And Charles S. Dutton has a vague look of him somewhere in a way that he doesn't of Malcolm X. You know, he's not that sort of slender, tall. No, no, no. It just made me wonder. What is the religion that they're meant to practice as well? Because it's never identified. It's never really explained. Yeah, I suppose it's just, to me, I always just thought it as some sort of form of Christianity. It's some form of Abrahamic faith, but there's nothing that points to Christianity specifically over Islam. That's the building blocks of Vincent Walls. It was a religious sect who had basically been pushed off Earth. No one liked their views and opinions. Exactly, yeah. So, yeah, it's kind of this generic religious cult, isn't it? But what Fincher wants to say about that is potentially quite different to what Vincent Ward wanted to say about it. And it's just one of the many confusions of this film is that Fincher seems to be determined to say an awful lot about religion. And I've never quite been able to figure out what it is he's trying to say. Yeah, yeah. It's all about having faith and being, you know, a celibate as well, but also this trying to correct their past, isn't it? Because they're all like... as Charles S. Dutton says, you know, I'm a serial murderer and a rapist. Yeah. So it seems to be an entirely selfish... I wonder if it's... What he's saying is that religion can be used entirely selfishly just for yourself to seek redemption, basically, and sort of be able to claim... Because he does say later on he doesn't care whether the alien gets back to Earth. He doesn't care what happens to everyone. No, he doesn't. He's extremely faithful, but he only cares about his... little community of 25 people. He'll die for them, but he's not going to lift a finger to save the whole of planet Earth. I did love this bit here, when you see him cleaning it. And he's screaming, and suddenly you see him just get cut up in a second. But the problem being with this film, I think David Guile put it quite nicely, was that it's not really scary. Yes, that's on my list of problems with this movie. It is not remotely scary, ever. it's a bit gross in places and it looks you know like a horror film should it looks like greasy muddy and just gross just nasty to look at but it's not scary and i don't think it really delivered on the genre expectations we've got some you know good editing going here it gets diced boom and it cuts you know and uh but yeah i was never scared by it The first Alien will scare the shit out of you, and the second one was just so intense. But this one doesn't have that intensity. It's strange, isn't it? But not only is it not a horror film, it isn't really a science fiction film in any interesting or meaningful way either, because they've almost deliberately created an environment where science fiction can't really play a role, because it's so... knackered and dilapidated and broken and nothing works so there's no technology there's no you know they don't use technology in any kind of clever way to to try and stay alive or to battle the alien so it isn't sci-fi isn't horror it's essentially a character study of a woman in breakdown almost with this yeah with you know with a monster running about in the background yeah yeah yeah it's got this science fiction type backdrop, but it doesn't, yeah, as you say, it doesn't really deal with the genre. Yeah. It's, it's kind of a sort of depressing drama. Yeah. But, but I'm saying that like, oh, it's depressing and stuff. I still find this film entertaining. I still like it. You know, I, it's, I think it's just down to the performances. The performances carry you through it. And that's, that's why I think the film is so well cast. that you know i can sort of circumvent those kind of problems but i again it's another it's just how it was made sort of always kind of fascinates me and it's the one that because i was it came out when i was you know when i was fully aware when it was released and so forth it was always being some sort of fondness towards it where the other two were just like but you're too young you know or maybe wasn't even born when it came out so it's something of the past where this felt very sort of modern considering it was only i mean what was it six years after aliens came out yes you're correct yeah it does feel like a lot longer somehow when you look at it the aesthetic the i don't know that the finish the the look of every everything feels maybe because aliens is kind of a secret low budget movie it's i'm only slowly getting my head around because in my memory in my mind aliens is this huge extravaganza But the last few times I've watched it, I've really noticed how rough around the edges it is. Oh, yeah. You've got that sort of Roger Corman little bit to it. I think that's just down to David Fincher because he was doing such interesting music videos with Madonna, like the Vogue stuff. It was like one step of the curb, one step ahead of everyone. And seeing this, this is like what you'd probably see... in the later part of the 90s, in terms of progression of photography and style. And he's already doing it in 91. So he's like, that's what I've got him. Because this is what the 90s is in terms of filmmaking. That's it, isn't it? Yeah. I often find myself thinking, why hire a director based on their visuals alone? Hire someone who can actually direct actors and... show them what good visuals look like you know it's my simplistic way of looking at it but you can't do that can you you've got you've got to have you've got to somehow have it in you you know somehow have that eye that you know that even someone like james cameron might not have yeah yeah yeah for sure it's interesting when i when i was a kid and i was reading video game magazines on a regular basis the writers reviewing the game would also comment on the film and they say oh it's a massive letdown all this stuff very much similar opinions to yours when you had originally seen it so it was this everyone watched it and come out going no one felt upbeat everyone was depressed and just sort of fed up you know and just like oh my god that is that's the end of it we're not getting any more alien films you know what i mean so it i suppose it would have been felt like a huge downer for a whole fan base You know, nothing's going to happen again. I so clearly remember thinking what a strange film this was because nothing really seemed to happen in it. And, you know, I was too young to... I'd have been 14, I think. Is it an 18 or a 15? It was an 18. It was an 18. And it's still an 18. My local cinema didn't give a shit about stuff like that. Well, Rob, you are frightfully tall, probably when you were 15 or something. I saw this with a couple of friends. Afterwards, it just left our minds completely. I probably didn't think about it again until the video came out and then was disappointed all over again. I'm so happy they did actually release the additional footage because for years on forums... late 90s there was a vhs work print going around of alien 3 which had a lot of these scenes in it and some of those scenes in that extended cut on the work print aren't in this because this is just a vhs copy of a of a print and that was all the talk was like oh my god how we get to see this you can find it on archive.org the work print um but seeing you know alien 3 and it's as close to it gets close to david fincher's kind of vision, or I think the script Charles de la Zurica had kind of worked from. It made me appreciate the film more, I think, in its current state, in its extended cut. The theatrical cut I felt was, you know, when you sort of compare the two, it's missing a lot of stuff. But it's stuff they left out of the theatrical cut in this cut. So there's kind of, I think maybe for some fans, there was still like a... you know, a compromise between the two edits. Maybe some people would prefer to have the dog. The dog kind of runs, again, runs really fast. So that would symbolise the dog and not Knox. You know, it's a very different beast, wouldn't it? It'd be a big fat thing when it comes out. It's like a big lumbering around. I feel like we over, a few people in the documentary anyway, kind of apply more importance to the host creature than I do psychologically. I get that it's going to absorb the DNA of its host and that's going to be reflected in what it looks like and even its characteristics and so on. But I don't, you know, I'm not, as far as I'm concerned, this could have come from an ox or a dog or any other four-legged animal, really. It's not, you know, it doesn't have to be that accurate. It just came out of a flea. Yeah, that would be interesting. The weird thing is that Fincher didn't... didn't like the ox scene either, apparently. He preferred the dog scene, but they've taken the dog scene out and put the ox scene into the cut that isn't the director's cut, but that everyone tries to make out is the director's cut. Yes, but then that keeps the continuity of the opening with the ox pulling the ship. In the theatrical, it's a big crane lifting it with a dog on board, and then you see shades of it. But earlier on, we got to see the ginormous facehugger, which is the super facehugger, which lays queen eggs. This sequence here, with all its faults, the dialogue is brilliant in this, I think. And that's what's really good writing of dialogue. I don't know if it's David Giler's stuff, because he rewrote some of it, the drafts. Yeah. And it's these little moments here between Charles Dance and Brian Glover, which I think are great. And points to something else we haven't mentioned, which is very British, along with the humour of these actors. the class, the reflection of the class system. That's something that I didn't, I'd never noticed watching this before, re-watching it again recently. I love, I mean that, an understanding of the British class system explains everything you need to know about the relationship between these two characters. So the... The warden, the one with authority, is profoundly working class. You might not pick up the accents, you'll be familiar if you're not British, but this is as working class as you can get, Brian Glover. He is the poster boy for working class. Whereas Charles Dance has this incredibly debonair, civilised, classically upper-class characteristics and speaks in this beautiful received English. So the needle between these two is entirely based on that, I think. Brian Glover feels a little inadequate or a little, you know, he's got a bit of a chip on his shoulder, basically. Yeah, sees him as a threat in some way. But, you know, he's got one up on him because he knows his secret. Yes, exactly. And doesn't he enjoy knowing that? Oh, yeah, exactly. I love the bit where he's let Ripley out while wandering around and he sort of berates him. You've got to be walking around, these guys are hard on. Not even looking at her throughout any of that. It's like he's so just resentful and disdainful of her very existence in his perfectly ordered little world. Nothing could cock up. this environment more than a woman being played. And that's something they don't do an awful lot with, I think. I mean, they do some stuff with it. I think the fortunate side of this is that they kill off the interesting characters too early. And they had loads of bald prisoners they could have used as bait. Yeah, exactly. You could have had Brian Glover hanging around and Charles Dance to sort of, you know. But then, you know, if you take those two away, you've got Charles S. Dunne. who, again, is incredible in this. So she does have someone to play off. Sigourney Weaver does. And 85, you know, and so forth. But I think it's just these kind of characters who are well-written are sort of taken out of the story too soon. I've got a theory about... Because I can't figure out why Charles Dance needs to die so early. It doesn't make any sense to me. Maybe there's conceptual reasons I'm not grasping. But I've got a theory... and it might not be very popular because it doesn't reflect very well on Sigourney Weaver and everyone, including me, loves Sigourney Weaver. But the more I've read about her and seen people talk about her in documentaries and so on, I think she knows exactly how to play this fucking game and she is brutal. She takes no fucking prisoners. The two big kerfuffles prior to making Aliens and this movie was her saying, no, no, no, I'm getting fucking paid. I'm getting paid a lot. just to shave her hair, you know, right? I want another 40 grand. You know, she doesn't muck about. So she, like all actors, and all actors I've ever met are the same. They all have this insecurity. They all want to be the centre. They don't want to share their scenes. They want as many close-ups as they can get. They want to be the focus of everything. So Ralph Brown has talked in passing and implied, very vaguely and loosely, but I think very clearly implied, that his character was made stupid halfway through shooting, possibly because he was becoming too sort of central. He was taking too much focus off Sigourney Weaver. So he needed to be made less sympathetic and less whatever. So potentially Sigourney Weaver may have said, I don't like how much attention this character's beginning to get in the script. I think we should do this. because that's what he seems to think. And when you tie that in with what Michael Biehn says and what someone else said about him, from something to do with Gorillas on the Mist, I remember in a documentary years ago, but I'm just wondering if Charles Dance, you know, she was a bit concerned Charles Dance was becoming too much of a main character, so let's kill him off. Well, yeah, I mean, well, David Garlis said, oh, this guy was supposed to be written for some sort of comedy, but Fincher was playing Ralph Brown as someone who's actually quite straight and would have more of a role in the film. Yeah. There's Holt McElhaney's big moment. Got to educate the brothers. I mean, this is... I don't know why a scene like this needs to be in an Alien movie, if I'm honest. Her attempt to be raped. Yeah, well, maybe it's because I've spent the last few weeks watching nothing but barbarian movies, and I was kind of looking forward to something a bit less rapey, and then we watched this. I did like Paul McGatter's flying kick that vending machine. Which is good. See, this moment here, again, you've got a scene, which is basically like an alien where... Oh, what's his name? Oh, God. The guy who's the head of the ship on Alien. What's his name? Dallas. So he's gone to the vents to find the alien and he's getting that beep, beep, beep, beep sort of sound. And this is kind of, again, like an expansion of that where they basically see something and they're running and it's going to chase them. But again, it's a bit gross where you just sort of see the head swing back and all this blood just goes on the guy's face. But again, it's not... scary. There's plenty of gore. There's plenty of blood. There's violence. But yeah, it's not scary. I don't think David Fincher knew then. I mean, he must have known this was meant to be a horror movie, especially if he was a huge fan of the original. He must have been planning, hoping, intending to make a horror movie. You've got Terry Rawlings editing the film. He edited the first one. So he's not... Terry's not like... inept when it comes to editing a scary scene. So he's an absolute pro. He sadly passed away. It was a massive shame because I would have loved to interview him at some point. But yeah, something's happened in doing the execution of this. If you watch Zodiac, I think one of my favourite films by David Fincher, he creates some really tense moments in that. Whether it's scary or not, he definitely knows tension. I mean, the game as well is just... It's almost a lesson in tension at times. Yeah. Also, it's a ludicrous plot, though. It's so silly. The game is a weird story, man. But it's kind of really interesting and just different. But, yeah, there is something that's kind of gone wrong with this in terms of, like... Maybe this is the time for my other unpopular opinion, which is that in a lot of ways and a lot of times, this isn't a very well-directed movie. And I wonder if... David Fincher kind of lucked out a little bit in that he maybe didn't do the best job in some respects and it's been kind of concealed or papered over by the fact that everything else is so shit and everyone hates it so much that he kind of got away with being a victim rather than a perpetrator of a crime there. So what would you say are the telltale signs of something that was badly directed in this? Outsiders, maybe, where the horror isn't working. It's so hard to pin these things down, isn't it? But I'm not talking about the choices, like stuff like killing Newt and getting rid of Charles Dance or whatever, or the fact that it's so confused. But like you say, if you take an individual scene, there isn't a scene in this movie with any kind of sense of tension, to my mind. And... There should be. Why isn't there? It's not the actors. It's, like you say, the editor. I think the score, by the way, which we haven't mentioned yet. I don't know what you make of it, but I freaking love the atmospheric side of it. I don't know about the themes. I didn't really notice them too much, to be honest. But the general sort of ambience is brilliant. Yeah, I love... Yeah, I mean, Eric Goldenthal combines electronic with, like, orchestral stuff, but also... uses a lot of weird sort of percussive instruments to create sound effects, and that's where they had a major sort of argument about the sound levels of the sound effects of the music, because the music's also creating sound effects, and what would you then level out and balance with the sound effects? But yeah, I think this is probably the most lush score out of the three, because even at the end when she... dies or sacrifices herself. It's a really emotional piece of music. I think it's a wonderful score. I've flip-flopped a lot on the scores. I mean, I still love Alien because that theme. But this one, that intro music, the title theme, that sort of synth, I love that stuff. Really good. I think it's probably, yeah, I think the score's doing a lot to save the... save the movie like you say it kind of blends into the sound effects and it at times becomes I'm going to get this the wrong way around aren't I at times it becomes diegetic I think that's the right way around it sounds like it's crossing the line between whether or not this is meant to be a layer of music imposed from the outside for us to hear, or whether it's actually coming from the scene, whether it's actually within the context of the movie. It crosses that line and blurs it, and it's really freaking freaky at times as well. It's scarier than anything happening on screen, in a way. That's what Jerry Goldsmith once said. Someone asked him, what if the film isn't doing its job? He goes, well, I've got to do my job even more to make it work. Maybe that's where this comes from, yeah. But what I was saying about the director, I just found my notes on it. I literally just wrote down very, very quickly a couple of thoughts I had. The pacing is weird as hell, I find. When there's something going on, there's a couple of long sequences in particular where the alien's running about and they're running about and stuff's happening and it's great. But when stuff isn't happening and it's a character scene, the pacing just never seems to be... quite right so it's never consistent it's and it never engages i don't there's no energy it's not the the actors are doing big performances and you know they're interesting performances and so on but somehow they're doing it in a scene that doesn't have any energy and and it doesn't seem to have the right pay there's no impact to it it's it's a strange thing it's yeah and i don't care about them as well i don't care about any of these characters and i don't know why I wouldn't say I don't care about them. I was always upset that Charles Dance dies, Brian Glover's taken out too early, and you sort of... You come to appreciate some of the prisoners, just down to the fact that, one, they can be funny, you know, and the performances are good, but it's the sense of, like, it's not the same effect where, in Aliens, I don't want Bill Paxton to die, I don't want Michael Biehn to die, I don't want Newt to die, Carrie Henn, sorry. So... Yeah, it's a different type of emotional connection, I think, with that. And it's also hard to root for prisoners who are rapists. Exactly, especially when they're not really given any kind of redemption. There's no redeeming arc, really, for anyone other than David Webb, who... Yeah, yeah, who basically is a mouthy guy in the background who then becomes more centre stage. you know, and he's, you know, seen to be quite caring towards Ripley near the end where he knows something's going to happen, you know, and when the company, that was their sort of, Carol said, the other producer of Brandywine, he's sort of, the idea of the third one was really about the duplicity of the company. Again, the company's only there in the background again as a way to sort of, they're introduced near the end because Ripley that takes x amount of weeks or days for them to travel across space so they've already been alerted by Brian Glover you know saying we've got these prisoners or whatever um but yeah again it's not we explored that much again with the company um they had the opportunity to though didn't they so this is it it's if it's all about the duplicity of the company then you need to do more than have one character talking about the duplicitousness of that company You know, it can't be about the duplicity of a company that isn't even featured until the last 10 minutes, that has no role to play until the last 10 minutes. And their only motive is to make it a weapon. That is it. And I always think they felt a bit of a simple objective. A simple objective that also doesn't really ring true in terms of providing motivation to Ripley. doesn't really ring true to my mind because her whole motivation throughout the movie is we have to stop this alien from coming into possession of Weyland-Yutani because they don't understand it. It will escape and it will kill everyone on Earth. That's what her concern is. She never talks about her concerns with regard to it being turned into some sort of bioweapon and used immorally by the company. She's talking about how if it gets to Earth... it will kill everybody. And I... Why? I don't... How? I don't believe... How can a... We're talking about one alien being transported back... Which can be killed by a smart gun. Which can be killed by a smart gun, being transported back by people she's decided don't know anything about it and will underestimate it. She doesn't... She has no reason to know that. And I would... Fine, they're going to come. They're going to... take it they're going to put it on a ship in a big cage they're going to take it back like i can't see how it's going to escape but even if it does escape a few people get killed and then it gets killed it's it what she's talking about so the the alien queen has to escape then it has to find and create a nest then it has to lay its eggs without anyone ever finding it Somehow it has to, without anyone to serve, without any of its minions to serve it and keep it alive, it has to stay alive, laying eggs whilst it's nailed to it. It just isn't a threat. It's not a threat that I'm worried about as a citizen of this planet. Yet the entire plot revolves around Ripley preferring to die than allow that to happen and expecting all these prisoners to be of the same mind. Well, it's kind of like this scene here where she's telling Brian Glover about what she's encountered and... the trailer line, you have no weapons of any kind, which is in every TV spot. But his attitude is just like what someone would probably say. It's got acid for blood and it's quite nasty and all this stuff. Why should I believe you? If I was Brian Glover, I wouldn't do anything Ripley says at any point in this movie. This facility is enormous. There's all kinds of places you can... hide from it. There's all kinds of places it can be trapped. Do that. Fine. They trap it and then another plot point, I can't stand. Paul McGann. We've got it trapped now and we need to set it free for the movie to carry on. So how do we do that? Well, we'll just have a loony guy let it out. It's so lazy and stupid. Well, that's why Dave Fincher cut it out, apparently. And they put it back in for this because it it basically has Paul McGann disappear from the film, if that... Yeah, he's one of the characters who just disappears. Well, again, the continuity, you know, in the theatrical cut is kind of, you know, a mess. But David Guiler makes a really good point as well, saying he hated that scene where they trap it, because it... it makes the alien less threatening. It makes it less intimidating if you present it as a thing that can be caught. I'm with Giler on this. Not only does it make it... It emphasises the fact there's just one of it. It's not as stupid as some animals, but it's still pretty stupid, frankly. It can be outwitted, it can be trapped. It's this easy to gain an advantage over it. I think that does devalue its threat to some degree. Yeah, well, what Terry Rawlings said was like, yeah, you know, it showed you that they could trap it, but you know it's going to escape. Thus it gives that tension to it, I believe. Yeah, you know it's going to escape. That makes sense, but... It doesn't undo the fact that it devalues the threat and it doesn't excuse the fact that the method they use to have it escape is stupid. They do imply that Paul McGann's character is a nutter. So for him to switch and sort of let it go would make sense for the objective of what you would do. And obviously because everyone's all been... manipulated to be very religious to believe in this particular way of thinking um you're going to get nutters at the core of it really um it's unfortunate here again it's where charles dance is going to die and it's kind of cut a bit short like because we see the behind the scenes it's a lot more grotesque maybe it's actually kind of wise to sort of just give you flashes of what it does do because you see it the mouthpiece penetrates his skulls and they just gets dropped and um You see the alien. It's weird, but with the effects in this, Richard Edlund's company, Boss Film, and also we get to see it when it's running around this kind of rod puppet, blue screen rod puppet. And you've got Tom Woodruff in a suit. But there's also elements with the optical stuff where you see in a minute where she goes up against a wall and the alien comes towards her. The scaling perspective of it is not right. Yeah, yeah. And then it gets really close to it. It's got the... the trailer shot isn't it where just you know the bitch is back and you see you know it was obviously recognizes that she's got an alien inside of her um but people it's so funny like when i've posted stuff on socials about alien 3 people say oh the cgi in the film is terrible like there isn't a cgi there's actually one cg shot yeah you see the the skull go like crack about to break because of the from hot to cold whatever I was going to ask you about this, actually, because watching that documentary, which is the first time I've seen, again, the documentary in 20-some years, whenever it was made, actually, they were really bigging up the rod puppet thing, and I'd just watched the movie, and I was thinking, but what about the CG then? They're really implying that there's no CG in it, and surely there's two shots in particular I can think of. I'm thinking, that... is classic early 90s shit cg you know it's it's it has to be but then doing more and more research either either they've really buried the fact that it is is i know the shot you mean that that is cg with it when it cracks that you know the cranium gets the cold water on it and it But there's a bunch of shots when they're running about in the corridors later on where... It's on the ceiling. Yeah, it's on the ceiling and it gets the door slammed in its face a couple of times. And I would have bet money that those were CG. Not because they don't look like rod puppets, but because it's lit so horribly. It's exactly that early 90s CG, which they still do it now. They just can't help but... overlights it and it just looks wrong i think i think it's bad optical optical effects i think yeah they have confirmed there's only one fx shot that had cg um but there's a couple of shots where the raw puppet works really well but others where you can kind of see the limitations of the optical process of doing that because i had that is weird laser disc playback for capturing the footage it was very strange you know i don't know how it didn't make sense to me that's a good setup though when it's in the bed And the weight of it goes through the mattress and suddenly, boom, grabs him. So he is tied up there, isn't he? Oh, he talks his way out of the thing, doesn't he? I remember now. So this bit here, when she approaches her, you've kind of got the scalings off. So... How can that not be CG, that one shot then of it? It really looks like CG to me. Yeah, it's a puppet. I don't think it would have had the compositing. The compositing is key, isn't it? I don't think the compositing would have been CG at that point. It would still have been optical. Because this is getting done at, like, 91, I think, the later stage of 91. Because this was a year in editing. them trying to salvage the film, you know. This moment here where she's running down the corridor, you've got the sound of the score, which is making all these banging metal, also her running footsteps and touching stuff. You've got this kind of cacophony of noise, you know. I love it. I absolutely love that. Yeah, I love it. But it also shows you the nightmare of balancing what is sound effects and what is music, you know. It's another Tom Waits reference, really, because it does, at times, it really does sound like Some of Tom Waits' more extreme or experimental stuff. Get this raving woman back to her infirmary! And just grabs him. He's like... I love it. And it's just like... Was it Darren? You said Darren Webb, wasn't it? You know... Who's the guy? The surreal guy who survives. Oh, God. Not Darren. Oh, God. What is it? Danny Webb. Danny Webb, yeah. He's just like... Fuck! What do I know him from? I can't work out. I feel like I know him really well, but I can't see what it is when I look at his... He's in Valkyrie. He's in the Robin Hood film that competed with Prince of Thieves. I feel like it's a TV show. He's in Plebs. He's in Plebs. That's a good TV show. He's in a lot of stuff, man. Loads of stuff. I think I might be confusing him. A lot of TV. That's the same thing with Clive Mantle. A lot of TV. their career it's a tv guys generally yeah brian glover as well yeah and paul mcgann ralph yeah yeah paul mcgann is like you know weirdly played doctor who once but probably still the longest standing doctor who by having to do all the the radio stuff right good point yeah i've never seen that episode doctor who when it showed on bbc one for the first time i was like ah this is weird The least surprising grab from above ever in any movie, I think. Everything. The way he's talking, the way he's... The position of the camera. I love where he's cleaning it. He's looking up. You know what I mean? I love that. You'd do that. No way would I go in there, you know. They don't actually show you the sort of... Because wouldn't the alien itself make a nest to... hide, you know what I mean, and take its victims, but you don't see any of that. Yeah, it doesn't really have the characteristics of the alien, does it? Also, it seems like it just wants to kill everyone. It doesn't seem like its objective here is reproduction and finding a safe nest and all this stuff that it should be. It just wants everyone dead. A very shallow objective, isn't it? For the alien. It all comes alive again. It's been alive again for a little while now. The energy is somehow in it and everything's working. The energy comes from them because Sigourney's got no energy, has she? Not on purpose to say, oh, I'm not bothered to do this, but she's just basically got like... She feels like she's got a horrible cold. Exactly, yeah, you can't... This goes back to my fundamental problem with this movie is you've got a choice. You can either keep the emotional truth and have Ripley a character you just don't want to spend time with, or if you're going to kill everyone off, you've got to figure out a way of... Maybe you skip on a year and she's like, oh, I don't know what you do, but this isn't the character that you want to spend time with, to my mind. Well, it's interesting with Ripley, you know, in the first, well, she's often come across as a very transparent character. She's not one to hold information back. You know what I mean? In this, she's held information back from Charles. And she only told Brian Glover down to the fact that he was easy in control to sort of, you know, for her own well-being. But now she's actually being, okay, right, I'm going to tell you what. the problem is but she's still not giving them everything information and she's not doing it for to try and create tension and to cry try and create drama and so it there's no because she doesn't have to say there's an alien on my ship and it impregnates you whether it does this it can just be a a wild animal or something you know it's so frustrating when charles dance She's close with Charles Dance and he's asking and she knows all this stuff and it's just, just fucking tell him. Just tell him there is something dangerous and we need to be aware of it. We need to be looking out for it. We need to be looking out for signs of it. It made me just dance to the fact that she is in like, she's got this thing inside her. She feels like shit and she's just like, I can't be bothered. I can't be bothered to tell you everything. I haven't got the time. just one of those days isn't it you know it's funny i don't know if you um i can't remember where i came across this particular nugget but apparently uh david geiler in his various battles with fincher in the studio apparently fincher put the put the phone down on him and said that's what happens when you listen to a fucking shoe salesman because of his nike adverts Oh, I love David Giler. He was a shame he passed away. He's like the best out of all those documentaries, having him. Because he's just so, like, couldn't give a shit. He just says what he thinks, doesn't he? That's what I love about him, yeah. But it's also, you know, we talked about earlier on with, you know, especially your disappointment at the time, but also audiences with finding out that Hicks and Newt had been killed off, so somewhat very carelessly. And, you know, to show that they distinct care about these characters. We're just going to have this kind of horrible situation straight away into the movie. But also, decades later, audiences had the same thing with Prometheus, where they got us to invest in Elizabeth Shaw, great actress, great performance. And then come Alien Covenant, she's gone. She's dead. You know... You only find out what really kind of happened to her through a little tiny flashback in the film, but also just as a prologue trailer they put out that was directed by Ridley Scott's son, where they're on board the ship and they're trying to fix things. She's fixing David. And what else was there? Some other little tidbits before they arrive on the engineer's planet. So that was just released as a trailer. It wasn't part of the movie. So if you haven't seen that trailer, you just go straight into Ellie Covenant. She's dead. She's gone. And it's like, wait a minute. That's what James Cameron was like, annoyed again, really, because he'd invested in Elizabeth Shaw and she's gone in the next film. So yeah, it kind of happened again. It's just like, I don't know what they're doing with sort of like, they just want you to, they get you to invest in the character and then they're like, well. You can't be invested that much. We're just going to cut it off and then introduce a new set of characters. It's kind of insulting, really. They think that we can be played like a violin. And it's, yeah. Learn from mistakes, guys. Charles S. Dutton does look kind of intimidating as well, doesn't he? You can believe that he'd... In fact, he was a convict, wasn't he? Did you know his history? He had served... He had done prison time, hadn't he? Yeah, he did. If memory serves, he was jailed for manslaughter, but then got into a fight with a prison guard or something and got a really long extended sentence, much, much longer than the original one. He served seven years. Is that right? Yeah. But then he went back into prison for three years for having possession of a deadly weapon. Right. Which could have been like a broadsword or something. a mace he's one of those uh prisoners who sort of finds themselves inside and i think he discovered acting inside didn't he and then dedicated himself to it afterwards that's why he's so like just hench and brutal in this you know i mean he's just putting calling on his past or something i don't know well but yeah he's like you know when he says you know the f word you know he means that yeah this doesn't he it's

But we had, you know, behind the scenes, like Stephen Norrington working on this. Really? No, he worked on Split Second. You know, he worked on this. The effects? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Designed some of the aliens and stuff, touching them up and, you know, correcting things, I believe. Yeah. What do you make of this, the alien design in this? We've mentioned that it's four-legged and it... I don't mind it. I mean, it's kind of, it's just basically a taller version of what we've seen from Aliens. And it's kind of like orangey blacks and, you know, kind of gungy looking. But it's very different to what Giger had designed for this film. You know, he goes, it's very erotic. He's got these lips and... Oh, God, yeah. I've had enough of H.R. Giger talking about eroticism while referencing his own mouth. I do... these big tubes and you know and uh i like it's very cat-like wasn't it like a you know like you say like a jaguar i suppose wasn't it with the the model maquette uh the guy had designed for giga like his assistant and it had these like claws like that come up where it kind of come out with obvious hands yeah yeah so it can climb things really quickly and uh but we're having human lips though That was kind of like the weirdest part. It's bordering on, I suppose, the creature he would design for species in that regard. Somewhat sexualized it a little bit with the third one. But this one basically kind of looks a bit like the arms and legs are a bit longer. It still just kind of looks like a xenomorph. its normal form really most of the shot like that shot we just got of it then could have been yeah could have been anything i i really like the um the way or the extent to which we actually see it moving even though it is so often unconvincing and just looks like terrible cg even though it's not it the the one of the only flaws and the only criticism that you can make of the first two movies is that you don't see a lot of the beast in you know long shots especially moving about, if any. So I really like seeing it get up and about. And that first shot of the Bambi Burster, they call it, that's completely convincing. I think that looks brilliant. I love that. I really like the idea behind it and everything. And I really appreciate the fact that they've gone back to Giger's original smooth cranium concept as well, away from Cameron's variation. And that they hired Giger... to design it even though they completely ignored his design which to be honest wasn't one of his best I mean his work on the first one was was months and months spent in LA and wherever draw you know on this it's like it was a few sketches that he faxed through from his house in Switzerland we had a picture he had sketched the ox didn't he which was interesting um with his new alien that's kind of it's come from an ox basically but had the speed and agility And he's just done what he thought it would be. But I think those designs were even for the Vincent Ward version. Because he said Vincent Ward had a great idea where these guys were on the toilet and he would come up and just pull you. Which he said was also funny but also terrifying at the same time. I thought that would be great because you're always like... If you see any horror film where something comes out of the toilet then you go for a dump afterwards. You're like... You're a bit cautious. I think that's a terrible idea, personally. The producer who explained in the clip, I can't remember where I saw it, when, but the producer saying, it's brilliant because it's scary and funny. And I just said, no, no. This is how movies go wrong. A producer decides that something can be simultaneously scary and funny. It's possible, but what you're imagining is not both simultaneously scary and funny. Does anyone actually can do that, though? Roger Corman. Funny and scary? No, no, no, Rob. It's Sam Raimi. Oh, good point, yeah. He's telling you what he can do it. Get away with it. See, how is that not CG? It's extraordinary. Yes, yes. It's a rod puppet, isn't it? So it's the... That's a rod. That's a completely rod puppet there. It looks so much like bad CG, badly comped. It gets worse later on. The problem being is with the comping of the optical effects, the alien is not transparent or it's lost colour. It still retains the colour in the optical, so it hasn't got that generation loss. It's just got a matte line all the way around it. It's such... Such an art, comping. I mean, we've talked about this before, but what people might not realize, and I think it's still the same now, is that to create a CG monster in a scene like that, more time will be spent on the 2D, which is the comping, than on the 3D. So the CG monster needs to be created. It'll have a whole lighting guy come in, a surfaces guy, and all these people. But to then put it in the scene... is so much more work, and so much more goes into that than might be obvious. Because if you just let, because they obviously had this, so they shot the monster as a rod puppet against blue screens, and they shot clean plates on the set, and they used some sort of primitive version of motion control by the sounds of things to marry the two up and stick them together. And it sounds, or it looks to me like that's what they've done. They've just stuck them together. And there's so much more goes into it than just placing that thing on that thing. The rotoing, the finite little blurring of the edges, just all kinds of little touches that suddenly make it look convincing. They've just not been done here. No, no. There's a couple of bits where, you know, when you see the alien kind of run... chasing someone, the guy comes up into the foreground and shuts the door. There's really good comping on that. It sells it really well. I think it's just down to the angle you're shooting it from and the complexity of what the alien's doing. If it lingers on too long... that shot, it gives it away. I think that shot we saw, it hangs on it too long. And it's not lit right either. And that shot, that scene there is a prime example because there's all this fire around and looked in detail. I dare say they've done something clever to try and reflect that fire in the surface of the monster. But whatever it is they did wasn't working for me.

Love to be with Neil. Do you want some more? No, I'm space. Space is your rodents. Always kills me. If I spike you, you'll know you've been spoken to. I kept doing this all the way through watching this last night. Every time Paul McGann or Ralph Brown came up, I was like, speed is like a transatlantic voyage. Does this gaff have a dog? No. What are you talking about? I love this bit. Just let me go. Oh, sorry. Like that. It's just a great little line. And then he clumps in with the fire extinguisher. What he's doing with his accent here, I have no idea. Well, Paul didn't he? Paul told off his accent he had used earlier. Then he basically becomes someone from Liverpool, I think. You know, here's what he felt it sounded like.

Selling hippie wigs in Woolworths, man. Sorry. Can't watch someone fiddling with their hair and not say that. Do they have any scenes together? Just one-on-one? They don't, do they? That would have been cool. I'd have had to have shot something and slipped in a little reference with those two together. That would have been good.

You know, they were going to make a cartoon series of this. Kenner had signed a deal for a toy line and a corresponding... They did. Yeah, I had the toys, Rob. I had the toys. They didn't make the cartoon. They made the toy stuff. I didn't know they made the toys. Yeah, that's all. If you put in Kenner commercial, aliens. Jesus Christ. The advert just goes, aliens! And then you've got all these clips of people going, it's over there! And then it cuts to like... the action figures and then people pretending to be those action figures, you know what I mean? There's like recreated like this new alien thing and oh man, he had his gorilla alien and one with like flying wings but you had like Bishop who had like a chain gun. It was so weird. And like Ripley had a power loader toy. Oh, I loved all that shit, man. But yeah, Shane, I didn't actually make the cartoon because I would have liked to have seen that as a kid. You would have been like, you would have been well annoyed. You'd be too old for it, you know. Kids need a toy range based on a movie about a monster-killing rapist. That's what they need. Yeah, yeah. It's crazy, isn't it? Because even, like, kids' TV shows, like, there's one called Bad Influence and Violet Berlin and Andy P. Davis. I can't remember his name now. They talked about technology. And his kid would go to ILM, and they were showing him how the effects were done on Terminator 2, a movie that was rated, what, 15 or an 18 in the UK? And it's a kid's TV show. So it's kind of this weird thing where kids, they already knew kids would have seen Terminator 2, but even though it's not for them. And, you know, as we saw with video games, you know, that were based on five movies that kids loved. Those Robocop toys, you know what I mean? It's like, you know. I'm surprised it didn't have action figures of Peter Weller's hand getting blown off or something. I don't know. That would be awesome. Yeah, removable or a hand that you can kind of ping off and it explodes into a hundred pieces. But at least those are movies like Terminator 2. Fine. Some people would say it's not child appropriate. I don't think there's anything in Terminator 2 that's inappropriate for children to see personally. But maybe that's why my children are insane. The thing is, it's not that most of those movies, Robocop is inappropriate for children, but kids would fucking love it. This is inappropriate for children, but it's also not appropriate. I wouldn't show this to my kids for any number of reasons, but the main one would be that they're just not going to like it. They're not going to enjoy it. It's not the kind of movie kids like. Aliens is. Robocop is. Predator is you know the other things they've made toys for but at the time this had I think really what Kate spun out of this in terms of merchandise was like model kits really and that you can make of the alien and the yeah was that yeah I got my friend a model kit of that for his birthday I always like to get him because he's obsessed with his films I'll try and get him like original stuff from the time, but there wasn't much in terms of like, they didn't do any action figures, but I think later on they would do, companies would license just the Alien 3 kind of creature, right? You won't get an action figure of Charles S. Dutton, you know what I mean? Rapist number two, one of the lesser characters. I want a Paul McGann action figure. Come on. There probably is. There's a Doctor Who, isn't there? So they've made him a figure. I want a diorama of Hulk McElhaney bending Sigourney Weaver over a pole. Whilst Charles S. Dutton beats a prisoner to death with a metal pole in the background. It's like Blue Peter trying to make the Thunderbird base. This week we're going to be making a diorama set from Alien 3. He's about to get bum silly. This week's scene is Newt's autopsy. Don't forget to bring some sticky back plastic. He's got a pretty cushy prison cell, hasn't he? I quite like the idea of this place, to be honest. There's no technology. Let's happily live there. Look at that set. It's amazing. It's very Victorian, isn't it? I keep thinking it. Again, when I watched this last night, I hadn't reminded myself or I didn't know that all of this was set. And watching it again now, I keep on nearly saying, Jesus Christ, they built that. They actually built that. They didn't find some old gasworks or something. No. This is Norman Reynolds, you know, who designed, who built this set and stuff. Fucking great! I love it because Danny Webb comes in and he goes, yeah, it's gone. He sort of looks like it's not my fault. Do we get any kind of explanation for his arc? Because he does... He's the character who changes, isn't he? I think it's Danny Webb. I think I was calling him David Webb earlier, but someone Webb. He's the one who starts off as this and ends up as this. But is there any real reason for that evolution? Does Ripley's humanity, which he isn't really displaying a lot of, frankly, does that rub off on him? Is that the idea? Yeah, because only Charles Dutton really has sympathy for her. And Ralph Brown's character. Because when he does the X-ray and it's like, oh, you've got one of the things inside of you. You're a nice person, but... That's interesting. He shows more empathy in that scene than Charles Dance does in the beginning. I love that scene when he tells Ripley that Newt's dead. He's doing a hell of a lot of work in that scene, Charles Dance. It's a beautiful little performance, but it's obviously like... sort of betrays the extent to which he's hardened himself or had to harden himself to not care so he just sort of tells her she's dead whereas yeah she didn't survive she didn't survive sorry yeah and then yeah the again ralph brown in that scene again does a lot of work to really get the nuance right the way he handles that i think he's he he has a wife and kids to go home to yeah you know so he and he's not you know, a criminal. He's a normal guy who's not particularly bright. But I think that's what humanity sort of shines through more to support her. But yeah, with Danny Webb, you know, he's just a guy with a horrendous temper. But I think, again, he's there to sort of, well, he realises his own safety and he has to basically survive and he realises that Ripley knows what she's doing. So he's just going to follow orders, isn't he? You know. step in line you know I guess yeah I suppose that's kind of my takeaway from it in the sort of simplest terms you know that is actually a good reason to get rid of Brian Glover as well what you say about 85 here about Ralph Brown's character with Danny with Brian Glover in the in the movie, there's no room for him to sort of come to the fore, really, is that he's going to kind of have to remain trapped as the sidekick who repeats everything that Brian Glover says. It's not until he's out of the picture that 85 here has got the room to grow into a different person and to be given things to do, like this scene. Well, yeah, I suppose it's down to the fact that he, you know, his character hasn't been given the opportunity to... do anything, and now he has. He's not actually that stupid. He's just the caring person. Lacking confidence, probably. Yeah. That's what's derived from his low IQ, I suppose. Well, he smoked a lot of weed, so... Those Camberwell carrots, they'll knock your IQ down. They bring back the character for Wayne's World, too, don't they? Yes. Had to beat them to death with their own shoes. 3,000 brown M&Ms who would go on stage. I'd forgotten all about that. Oh, I need to watch that film again. Because apparently the face you see, the mould of the head, is actually Glenn Close. Oh, yeah, yeah. Was it Meryl Streep? Meryl Streep, maybe. So they had used her as a sort of... for the mold and put the face sucker on and stuff. Because that's another weird thing. They keep talking in the documentary about how they didn't have this, they didn't have this, they had to they found a mold of Carrie Ann's body or head or something that was left over from it sounds like although it had a budget bigger than all the previous Alien movies times two they seem to have been quite short on certain resources and

Maybe these things weren't kept, you know, for them to reuse certain bits. But, I mean, I know there was a double for Newt, because there's behind the scenes footage of the girl waiting to get inside the hypersleep bit. But, obviously, because when you see Newt, like, just, like, looks like she's basically drowning, that obviously must be the head replica they had of her. Of course, yeah. But, I mean, why not cast Sigourney Weaver's head and use that? in a scene like this, rather than just finding another head they had lying about. I suppose they probably knew that they would do a cast of her later on to do the bald cap with all the hair in, which a guy spent a week doing. It cost a fortune. But it was cheaper than actually getting her to shave her head again. But that's when they did a mould of her head. But at the time, maybe they just thought, well, you're not going to see the face. I guess, yeah. It's just time, isn't it?

fucking air conditioning why does this all sit there with axes when it comes in just hack it a bit just wait just wait you know it is funny how pete postlethwaite just has nothing to do doesn't he's just i don't in fact does he do anything And he basically just shuts a few doors and just complains, this is her idea. I think something like, it's behind us or something like that, he said. But he doesn't have much to say. I think Clive Mantle gets more to say than Pete Bosselsway. Would this have been before Usual? He's an amazing actor. That's like 95. Because that's what broke him in the States, isn't it? And he's got the chef in there who's completely useless, isn't he? Who basically starts the pistons, whatever, starts the process too early, doesn't he? Of course, I'd forgotten about him, yeah. He's just like Matt Lucas, isn't he, a little bit? He's in Father Ted, isn't he, as well, that guy? Henry Sellers in Father Ted.

I can understand audiences struggling to tell people apart. It's getting easier as there are fewer and fewer of them, but there was a lot of complaints, especially outside of the UK, obviously. Everyone looks the same and everyone sounds the same because the nuances of the accents are going to be lost outside this country. Yeah, yeah. And the film... The film was seen as sort of a disappointment for the US domestic box office, but it did extremely well worldwide. It's just based on the IP of Aliens. It made as much... They all made... The first three all made about the same amount of money, I think, didn't they? Or the first four, maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Internationally. Yeah, it's just big worldwide. Even though, you know, somewhat domestically, it may not perform as well. And this is all just because of the argument, wasn't it? When there's always... When you hear these debates now with female characters in movies, protagonists being too strong, all people can make references to now when it comes to comparing female characters in new movies to old movies. They always bring up Linda Hamilton, Sigourney Weaver. And that's all they can think of. I thought you were going to add a third the way you were saying, but no, you're not allowed to add a third. There's only those two. Because they don't know anything else. I mean, you've got other great performances like Gina Davis. I was going to say, Long Kiss Goodnight came a few years later. Yeah, but that's 96, right? But then you've got, you know, in that period, also you've got Michelle Yeoh and things like that. Yeah, they're talking about American movies. Always these generalisations, they're talking about American movies. Weirdly, because David Gardner said, women weren't going to watch these movies. Even though you've got this female hero at the centre of it all, who all the men loved. But the women didn't give a shit. They didn't care. They weren't going there in droves to see it. It's another perfect example of how insulting producers can be in their thinking. It's like, well, how do we get women to an action movie? Well, we make a woman the action star. No, that's kind of missing the point. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's just weird, isn't it? But it's also, you know, there is other strong female characters in the 80s outside of Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hamilton. You've got Hedon Slater. Yeah. That would be an interesting... Yeah, I must admit, I'm struggling to think of anyone who you'd put... We're talking about strong female characters in male-centric movies as well at the end of the day. We're very much judging this from the perspective of male action fans as everyone who has that conversation does. I can think of a couple. Cherry 2000? Yeah. Cynthia Rothrock. Tina Turner. Yeah, I think you had actresses like Meryl Streep who were actually doing pretty well for female characters in the 80s that just weren't in action movies. Yeah, Glenn Close, she's terrifying. Fatal attraction. That's true. Uh-oh, he's getting an email from me. What are you going to do with that, Danny? I think that's Roller Spliff, I think. I recommend you smoke some more grass. You are high. It will settle. Change down. Find your neutral space. You've got a rush. It will pass. Be seated. I've seen that movie a lot of times. Oh, dear. Maybe we should start doing commentaries on the Withnail and I cinematic universe next. That would be interesting. Sure. For sure. I hope that doesn't involve Oz and Horg. This is quite clever here with this moment here because she goes in to find the alien because she knows it will be nearby her to protect her. But you see those pipes. And you think it's there. It tricks you with the eye that the alien's just sitting there, but it's actually right above her, you know. But I think she implied this might be where the alien's nest is. I'm sure there's some sort of line about it, but I'm not entirely sure. But you'd start seeing if it was done in a way like the hives we've seen in, especially aliens, where it's just this kind of like, you know, gross slimy stuff, you know, but you don't see any of that. They've got plenty of spiders there though, loads of cobwebs. Yeah. How do spiders get there? I was just thinking the same thing. I went through a whole thing when some big spaceships went there, there's going to be aliens, that's fine, let's have spiders get there. Hang on, there need to be flies then as well, don't there? And there are lice, so yeah, there must be a complete ecosystem of horrible bugs.

And you've got to shave all your body parts. You've got to be smooth all over. Make you incredibly itchy. It's beautifully atmospheric at times. All this stuff is amazing here. Love all the background stuff. This feels like... what we've seen in the previous movies. The background where you've got that sort of retrofitted stuff. I think it's kind of exposed in terms of the cabling and wires. This could be on the Nostromo or yeah, it could be anywhere in this universe really. As long as the cockroaches burst out, isn't it? Yeah, so what's she... We just saw the alien though, didn't we? No, no, that was a trick of the eye. Oh, that was the trick of the eye. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. Well, actually, it probably was to trick the person, but then just to set up the illusion that it is. Yeah. But that's actually above her. This is a nice idea, though. Impregnating. I do think all that works really well, actually, as an idea. Having her impregnated, even though I've no idea how it happened. It doesn't... I mean, how has she got a thing inside her? It's loosely set up at the beginning, isn't it? That it is set on the ship and it lets loose and it cracks the glass to get to her face. But obviously there's a burning on the side of the hyperspeed that sets off the fire alarm. Thus they are ejected from the Sulaco. So is that... I thought that was Newt's sleep chamber. So that was Ripley's sleep chamber where you see the burn mark, right? And so then it's just part of the whole... It's all set up because when the camera pans out, you can see her awake slightly because there's a crack in her mouth. So it's already told you that. So we accept that somehow it just got on that escape. Yeah. I mean, like... It made no sense. Because the whole life cycle thing of the alien is brilliant. Clearly, they just make it up and do whatever they want and then say, oh, well, there's a difference. The Queen rips the sack, doesn't she, as she escapes to chase after Ripley and Newt. She clearly just pumped out an egg and hoofed it and it got stuck somewhere for the facehugger to escape. Because it's It doesn't make any sense, but it had to do that as a way to continue this. But it's the gestation period, isn't it? So then presumably... Well, for her, because what we see in the movies is that when they are impregnated, it happens relatively quickly, right? With this, hers has been delayed because Charles Dance had been given her medication, hadn't he? to combat her sickness. So that's kind of delayed the effect. Maybe because it's a queen as well, it takes longer to develop. Yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah. All these things... There's a monkey in there picking skin off another monkey's back. There is a fairly nebulous mythology, though, surrounding this creature. It seems to me that they just do whatever they want, and whatever serves the plot or whatever serves the ideas they want to have, they then retro-engineer. The reason that they look different in Aliens is because Cameron just thought, I think they look better like this. So then they have to invent an explanation as to why. Because there's no groundwork for the law, right? It's all kind of up in the air. And that was the riding factor in people's annoyance with Alien Covenant was David had become the creator of the alien. And there's no process in that of the queen. How does the queen fit into all this? So that kind of undoes what... what we thought how the biological way of the alien kind of operated and how it kind of created itself all things you know the sort of genesis of it all was kind of undone um and everyone really pissed off but but then these rules haven't been set in stone it's just like it must made logical sense that there was a queen yeah it was like a hive you know um but then ridley scott kind of changed all that um But then again, you know, a queen could still be derived from this kind of process of what David's done, but it just wasn't shown or mentioned. But there was things like insects on the wall he'd drawn and stuff, so maybe that was the kind of loose connection to that. Ripley's got to do her big speech now, hasn't she, to... encourage everyone to like basically because at 85 just like you know they're not they're not going to kill us they're not going to hurt us because we know she said of course they will you know i mean they don't care about you why would they care about a bunch of prisoners on a on a planet you know i mean that's another i suppose wayland utani again it's again it's one of those things it's never really explained and we're just trying to piece it together but It struck me that it's a hell of a coincidence that unless Weyland-Yutani is just the future of everything, in the future, Earth is essentially just run by Weyland-Yutani, because they've randomly left one Weyland-Yutani facility and then randomly crash-landed on another one to avoid introducing a third party. Did really Scott, they sort of said, or maybe someone else, maybe, who's connected to these films, like, on Earth, it's basically like Blade Runner. Yeah. You know? Yeah. So you've got, what was the company in Blade War? Tyrell, yeah. But that was just one of many corporations, though. Yes, true, yeah. Because they didn't have much full power to sort of keep the replicants going, because they were kind of stopped, weren't they? They were kind of by another authority, so... It's a minor point. Interestingly, though... The promotional stuff for Alien 3, there was a Pepsi tie-in. These kids would walk down the street, it's a Pepsi machine, and they're chased by an alien. But you just saw, in 1985, Ralph Brown holding a Coca-Cola bottle. Why would they get a last-minute endorsement for Pepsi, but Coca-Cola's in the movie? Maybe Coca-Cola, like Kenner, saw the finished product and just went, I don't really want anything to do with that, thanks. I would love the McDonald's tie-in with Aliens 3. That would be so good. Get the rapist burger now, you know. Double quarter pounder, serial killer meal, you know. Action figure with Charles Dutton with an axe. I really want a Charles Dutton action figure now. Definitely, man. Him and Brian Glover. Oh, man, yeah. And you can press a button and they talk. Charles Dutton's like, motherfucker! And Brian Glover's like, you know, get back to infirmary! I mean, all credit to Sigourney Weaver and for David Finch for having the balls to do it, to carry this through, this whole miserable Ripley persona. We thought it was David Fincher's idea to make her bald, wasn't it? I know, I love that. That's when Ripwell, according to Sigourney Weaver anyway, she's probably rounding off the edges a bit, but it was allegedly David Fincher's suggestion that she shave her head that got her really pumped for this and pumped for him. Why is this like... She goes, how do you see Ripley in this film? He goes, I don't know, bald? Again, this is a movie. Everything has just been pulled out of someone's arse in this movie. Nothing's been thought through, I don't think. Because, I mean, the whole religion aspect is left over from the Vincent Ward... isn't it? It's that idea transposed to the prism setting of the previous script. Because the original ending was far better than Vincent Ward's where you've got the giant field they've created and she walks into the fire. Okay. Yeah, I prefer this to be honest. There's supposed to be a scene where it's very what you'd see in The Lost World where the raptors are going through wheat field or something like the high sort of grass and you can see him coming in and that would do that with the alien we can see it from above shooting down with these guys getting chased i mean that was a great kind of setup where what we're about to see now is um the chase through the corridors um and alex thompson the dp said you know it all it's all great when they you know the steadicam operator flips the camera which you've never seen before but You know, the sort of geography of the whole thing makes no sense. Yeah, we're rapidly coming up to my last major complaint of the movie, actually, with regards to everything you just said, yeah. And it's also another alien movie that ends with the alien chasing people through corridors. So, yeah, the idea of what you just described about the wheat field, a scene like that, brilliant. Love the idea of that, because it's taking... the alien out of the environment, out of the only environments we've ever seen it in at that point and creating, doing something different because it is, you know, these sort of dark, dank complexes chasing people around in the, you know, that's both the previous alien movies. But the idea of Ripley walking into the flames didn't grab me hugely. And I do really like the idea. I love the idea of the ending of this. of Ripley sacrificing herself in that way, throwing herself into that. It's incredibly cinematic, or it would be if they hadn't fucked up the effect so badly. And especially, you know, I love the idea of the, it's a bit cheesy, but I love the original idea of the, or the previous cut idea of the alien bursting out as she's jumping and so on. But it is ultimately a lot of people running about in corridors coming up. What they could have done, actually what no one's thought about, It's like, well, they were outside earlier. Why don't they all go to the front door, let themselves out, lock it, and then the alien's stuck in there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I was saying earlier, that there's endless options for them to separate themselves from the alien and be perfectly safe. The only reason they have to engage it is because Ripley has decided that it can't be sent back to Earth, and they've decided to somehow, for some reason, believe her. So it feels really... over-engineered creating a situation whereby they have to actually tackle the alien and can't just hide from it because there's clearly clearly places they can hide here you know they don't even have to go outside but if you're gonna have a this is another one of those shots that has to be CG it's not CG How cool would it have been to go back out? Because that environment we see at the beginning is freaking awesome out on the beach. It looks so cool. It's weird columns and stuff. It's kind of like a shipping bay, isn't it? There's a shot coming up here where you see it run, chase the guy, and he closes the door behind it. I think that's the most effective shot of the rod puppet design. I remember this being a big deal. I can't remember if it was the trailers or TV spots or something, but I remember there being a lot of shots of this, the Steadicam charging down the corridors, which was really striking at the time. You'd never seen a Steadicam do that before. It's like now when you see an incredible CG monster and it just doesn't touch the sides, you don't notice it. But there was a time when that would have been really impressive. and this is exactly the same deal. But they managed to... They managed to overdo it in the space of one movie. There's a few shots like that, brilliant. By my reckoning, there's far too many of them. And I can't abide this upside-down and on-the-walls thing, because it doesn't make any sense. Oh, yeah. That's the shot I love. Yeah, that's one of those, yeah. How does the alien run on the ceiling? They can't defy gravity. They... Every time it leaves the ground to bound, it's going to fall down. It's going to need constant bits to grip onto, which you frequently see there aren't. And then when the camera switches back to the right way up, it's clearly exactly how you would rotate a camera and nothing like what an alien would do as it leapt from the ceiling down to the ground and flipped around. It would be much faster. It would zoom down and then... thump as it hits the ground there'll be a sudden start it's clearly just a camera rotating and it it really takes me out of it i suppose it's just it was just done because it looked cool you know that's that's the thing you know uh looks interesting that's why they've done it i think it's just like a done at the literally on the fly wasn't it oh let's do that you know look at that matte painting the matte paintings feel how fucking stunning things Because now we're coming up now, isn't it, with some of the really bad comping of... It's generally the one where the alien's on the ceiling. How does an alien run on that ceiling there? I don't get it. Yeah. It's the comping here. It's just like... It looked blurred then. It looked out of focus. There is this kind of like... You can tell it's RobPub because of how it kind of like weird... stiffness to the animation it's a bit more like it's not smooth so all like as alex thompson said very confusing yeah you don't know the layout you never get any kind of sense of the geography of this location of this building this series of buildings

When you see it there, when he closes the door, he starts running this. It looks very thin and just... Weird angle, but when you see Tom Woodruff in it, it's big and imposing. You know what I mean? The scale's completely wrong. And yeah, also limbs do seem to vary in how sturdy they are. There are a few shots now where the tail's been kind of... That just doesn't look like the thing we just watched getting trapped outside that door. It just goes... Like this. When it whips its tail, there are shots where the tail sort of appears to almost disappear in places. And whenever there's really fast movement, I suspect someone either hasn't rotoed it or they've over-rotoed it or something and it's not consistent rotoing. Near the end when they're trapped in the furnace bit and it's like a very tight space and he's got the tail whipping out. It's all practical, isn't it? It's all in camera. This looks bigger and more threatening. The stuff behind him now, when it's behind Pete Postle's throat, that's a good take. It's all nicely shot, but it's just not scary. That's the frustrating element of this movie. I mean, I think it's only really in 18 because of the foul language, I think, really. And it's kind of its tone. It's not for 15-year-olds or whatever, 13-year-olds. To be honest, I haven't shown either of my kids the first Alien yet, but I'd probably show them that before this, even though it's infinitely scarier, just because I think they'll enjoy it more. I don't know what there is for... Unless you're an alien fanatic, I don't know what there is to enjoy in this movie, really. Well, my joy comes from it, but it's down to the characters and the music and its visual style. You can say those elements are good for one to enjoy, but I think in terms of the satisfaction of seeing someone triumph over adversity, it's kind of a bit all skewed in this, and you're Again, you've got a hero at the centre of it, surrounded by nasty people who you come to appreciate and like because they're funny or they've just got good dialogue. And they're also trying to, I suppose, redeem themselves in some way to protect... Well, because they use themselves as bait. But again, they're doing it for their own survival, not just hers. So, I don't know, the tone and... The morals of this movie are a bit messy. Yeah, yeah. There's such a great opportunity for redemptive story arcs here, and I don't feel like any of them are done well, frankly. Dylan's gets some redemption, doesn't he, you think? Which one's done well? Charles Dutton. Charles Dutton. Yeah. I don't know. I guess. I mean, he softens a bit, but... I don't see what it is that happens that makes him do that. Well, because he knows he's in his mind that he is safe because he believes he's going to be, you know, in the afterlife, he'll be fine, right? But, yeah, because he will sacrifice himself to protect her. In which case, is it a sacrifice? I don't know. I mean, you see it, I suppose I see it that way because it's like, I don't know, maybe that's what the movie wants you to think. That guy seems like he belongs in a carry-on. Hey, fuckface. I like this. Like I say, I think there's far too much of this Steadicam in the corridors bit, but there's an energy to all this stuff. This is a good editing here. And the music's kicking in. He's like, run as fast as you fucking can. And you just see him get hit, the body just goes... It's all a bit confusing. I know, I've never understood that. He just randomly explodes. You see some legs flying around. That was one of those... We know the effect we want to achieve at the end of this little sequence, but I've got no idea how we're going to do it. We'll just do it. We've got the Japanese turn up now, don't we? Because I suppose they're the Yutani. Yeah, they'll be the Yutani. Very subtly done. Yeah. Where is Ripley? He's got these wicked glasses on. I mean, that is how Japanese people will dress in the future as well. I can believe that. Oh, mate. Oh, yes. You know, exactly. It's like, oh, this is clearly not Lance Hendrickson in the background.

Oh, I love this. It's great, isn't it? And he wasn't even carrying scissors this time. This film needed Richie and Eddie in it. Rick Mayer and Ade Edmondson. I just did a podcast a few days ago. It's funny, all the connections that keep coming up on Mr Jolly Lives Next Door. I've never seen that. Oh, man. It's bottom for grown-ups, basically. Oh, amazing. I'll have to watch that, then. It is such a great plot device. I started to say this earlier, but I think we moved on. Making... Ripley untouchable is such a great plot device. She's got to try and drag it. She's grabbed its tail, I think, hasn't she? Get off, Mum. Didn't she, like, I think it's going to be with a set, like, Tom Woodruff had, like, an earpiece in and David Fincher was behind the set just shouting abuse, like, you fucking hate her, kill her, you know, just like, you know. Trying to make Tom hater. It's a shame that HR Giga had fell out with the guys at Studio ADI. Because they were invited to go see him and his designs and stuff. And they just couldn't down to the time. Because he then left the project Giga had and he wasn't happy with what they'd done with his design. That offer to see him had now closed. And they're sort of a bit like, oh, a bit upset by that. It's interesting because it's Giga's design but you saw with the sequels where Studio ADI, Tom Woodruff and Alec Giddes would essentially be the guys who would create the alien from then on. And then they would do... for the AVP films and things like that. That's the way it should be done really because an artist like Giger isn't going to be constrained by practical realities or think about how you're going to film this thing or how you're going to build it or how you're going to put something in sight. The way it was done in the original film is kind of perfect. He has the idea and then it's kind of made, he's involved enough with practical people to be part of making it practical after that. But even then, it's still a bit limited in what they can do with it because of the design. So to have him design it and then have practical people adapt and build it is probably the best of both worlds. Well, yeah, yeah, I'll say, there wasn't a complaint or I was disappointed in a way, because we saw Giga do other designs, he was brought into Prometheus to do some stuff, but it was too late, and what he designed was just a bit weird, because you go through his book, there's stuff in there that you couldn't put in Alien, it wouldn't make sense, it's just kind of like, there's only a few pieces that they've chosen to then incorporate into the film. Well, the other thing was because we mentioned, well, I had mentioned it during the Terminator 2 commentary that the endings are very similar because at the time, when this was 91, they were doing this sequence and they'd heard, because T2 hadn't come out yet, but they had the ending in a furnace and Arnold sacrificing himself. So like, oh God, what are we going to do? And it still got criticised for being very similar, but because... That's why they incorporated the chestburster. It was different. Dave Fincher didn't want to do that. He didn't want to do the chestburster. That's what we see in this cut. You see a very crappy effect they did for this edit. Her arms spread out. This cardboard cutout going into the fire. It's not very good. But the theatrical cut... When you see the chestburster and you still see her falling, it's an awful flickering effect. It's like it's being comped on video. I don't remember the... I didn't realise that they'd only done the one without the chestburster later in the day, but it's the first time I'd seen that version. How can both versions of a fairly simple effects shot look so terrible? Yeah, it was bad, really bad. This is all... This is all pick-ups. This is all stuff in LA. Yeah. And of course, it makes sense then that Fincher's preferred version would be the one without the chest person coming out. But I think that adds a lot. It's a great touch having it come out. Having it come out of her as she falls. She's still going to die anyways. Just to show that she's cradled it and it's her baby, basically. I think maybe part of you wants confirmation that it's in her as well. Hmm. It's funny, isn't it? The Alien movies are such a great example of a series where all the ideas came from different places. That... When it jumps out there, the molten stuff looked like it was CG. But we're only told it's only this bit coming up when they drop the sprinklers, isn't it? Yeah, that's what they claim. That's it. But I never believe them when they say there's no VFX, there's no CG. It's in Cinefix they talk about that. There's a great book, actually, on Cinefix put all the Alien... issues into one big book when Alien 3 came out you can get it on eBay for like 20 quid worth seeking out for those listeners who want to know more about the effects yeah I think I said this in the commentary for the first Alien it's really intriguing with this series how the idea and it carries on with this movie with the third one how all the ideas come from different places There's no one author, there's no one creator. People, I think, like to think of Dan O'Bannon as the creator of Alien because he's a bit weird and he's obviously a creative and he's kind of a victim and we just like the idea, I think, of one person coming up with an idea. But all the ideas came from all over the place and Alien did such a great job of picking all the best ones and putting them together, whereas this seems to... It doesn't exactly do the opposite. It doesn't pick all the worst ideas, but it's got producers written all over it. That shot, I didn't know this, that shot of the definitive shot from this movie of the face-to-face between Sigourney Weaver and the alien, I didn't realise that the studio told him not to shoot that. Really? They said, you can't shoot that. It's not in the budget. It's not in the time or something like that. So after everyone else had gone home, he just got Sigourney Weaver and the cameraman, basically a skeleton crew, and just did it anyway. And it's like, Jesus Christ. So it didn't... Because they'd said, during the reshoots, like, Terry Rowland said, OK, we need... And he and Dave Fincher decided, OK, what we need to fill the gaps, we need A, B, C, E and F, right? And then they go, oh, you can only have, like, B, E and F, right? And then they shoot it... put it in the film, and then they watch it and go, oh, yeah, you're missing bits. Yeah, because we needed those bits. So there's constant back and forth, constant meetings, arguing. It's just like, Jesus, guys, let them finish it, you know. And someone with a bit more experience than David Fincher would probably have handled that situation a bit better, because it's like, I think they even say in the documentary, yeah, we need these five scenes, and the producers would say, well, you can have these two. And an experienced filmmaker, they're just going to go and film those two scenes knowing full well that when they go back, the views are going to... Or they're going to film them in such a way that it requires the corresponding scenes to be shot. These clever filmmakers do it. There are certain filmmakers who only shoot... Who do that. Yeah. Things like, oh, I need a crowd of 1,000 people, but you really want 500. Right, so you lie to them and they'll give you 500, what you want. Exactly, yeah, you've got to work the system, which David Fincher didn't appear to be doing at all, as far as I can gather, which is understandable, he's naive, he's younger. I think it just needed a really strong line producer that was going to assist him and had the experience. I don't know, it just seems to me, and my impression you get from the documentary, it's just like you've got guys there who very much enjoy the power they have. and aren't fully experienced in this type of production. And I just basically just like, oh, you can't do that. You can't spend any more money. And I'm more sympathetic towards Ezra, the producer, and John Landau, who was just like, if you see in the interviews, he's very cagey about what he did. And he's like trying to be sympathetic, but you just think, I bet he was a bright monster. Yeah, there was clearly engineering going on behind the scenes. There was a lot of politics. I think there's a lot of... this person's been imposed by the studio and is reporting back to them behind the director's back. I think there was a lot of that kind of thing. That was the awful thing. Fincher would come in and say, talk to the effects guys and then say, give some advice. And he'd walk off. And this woman who's an assistant for the studio saying, you can't do that. once David's left the room. It's like, fucking hell. Exactly, yeah. And you've got to play that. You've got to be smart to get around that. And David Fincher, obviously, just didn't have the experience. Werner Herzog says this. If he doesn't have Final Cut, in the days when he might not have Final Cut, and he wasn't quite sure about the producer, he wouldn't shoot five frames more than he had in his screenplay because he knew if he did, it was just giving the producer an opportunity to do something different. to use that take instead or to extend that take a bit longer or whatever. So he'd end up with 5% of what he shot not being in the actual movie just to make sure that no one could fuck with his vision. And this is obviously the exact opposite of that. You've got Fincher doing 15, 30 takes apparently of everything, shooting all kinds of different versions and interpretations of everything. And that just gave the studio all the material they needed to do what they wanted. Well, yeah, because they said he was a slow shooter, wasn't he? And he still is, I think, isn't he? He does a lot of takes. This is weird. So this is the human bishop, isn't it? Well, yeah, he claims he created... Yeah, but look at his whole... His ears come off. So that's just what humans do, is it? music here is just beautiful absolutely beautiful score the um but then avp it makes bishop is then based on what wayland looked like in his image um which is prometheus changes all that you know wayland is guy pierce yeah so it's pretty much each movie certainly beyond the second one has its own mythology yeah it really does he's like what are you doing It looks like you don't have... I don't understand how his ear looks like that unless he's an android. It's just a crappy effect. It's so bad, isn't it? But it's bad in the theatrical cut. And then, yeah, just... The worst bit is the actual impact, which doesn't... Which isn't an impact. She just kind of gets faded out. They just turn the opacity down on the top level. I've seen better effects in Superman 4. Steady on. Steady on. There wasn't a blue glow all around her. Or Chris being frozen still as he moves. On camera. There's a religious symbol there in the kitchen. You can see that sort of crucifix thing. I love this bit here where he just heads on Danny Webb. He just gets pushed forward. He's like, ah, fuck you. The final word in the film is fuck you. Or something like that. Yeah, the final word is fuck you. Oh, man. Well, we get the original audio log from Ripley, which is kind of a goodbye bit to just taking from Alien. The last survivor of Nostromo signing off.

Yeah, I mean, how would you make this film in any way uplifting? You just couldn't. I think they were kind of stuck in this kind of like, ah, this film is not a feel-good movie. Man, it's... I mean, the problems with this movie are just built in at ground level. But for me, there's two separate issues. There's the fact that everyone is a hateful rapist and the fact that Newt is killed off right at the beginning and therefore Ripley. So there are ways around killing Newt. They could have been separated somehow. Newt could have carried on safety and Ripley could have ended up there. You could even have Newt still in suspension, still asleep. And you've got to protect Newt from the... But, you know, I appreciate that. Maybe that's a bit too much like Aliens. But if you have... If you separate them so that Ripley doesn't have to carry that weight the whole movie of complete misery, then that solves that problem. And there are ways to make those characters more fun and likeable than they are. Maybe they take the high road and they're like, well, we're not going to have too much fun with a bunch of horrible rapists. But You can do it. You can have prisoners there who maybe they're victims of circumstance or maybe they're deranged or maybe they're there for crimes that are in the future, for corporate crimes. Maybe they're there because they were fighting the government. There's ways to make them, or they could be freedom fighters. There's ways to make the characters more sympathetic and to make Ripley more upbeat. So why not do that? because then you've solved all the movie's problems, the movie's two main problems, to my mind. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. I mean, as I said throughout this, I never hated the film. I always kind of enjoyed it for its obvious elements of some good writing of dialogue. There's really good performances. It's a really interesting film, and I'm really glad. I don't hate it at all. I wouldn't, you know, I just don't enjoy it. It's just an interesting failure. Exactly. That doesn't make it unwatchable, but it's always that sense of, like, because I've seen it so many times, that the effect it has on you of being, like, depressed afterwards or just, like, downbeat is kind of all just worn off. But I think at the time, I can completely understand why people were just, like, dead against it and just pissed off because of... what they expected it's all down to expectations wasn't it of how would you continue on from Aliens and what that sort of gave you at the end oh my god what's going to be the next chapter of these characters and everything's just basically just flushed down the toilet and just gone fuck you we're just going to go in hard and put Ripley in a horrible situation throughout the entire film and then she dies like oh right okay because if you came out and told people exactly what the film was in a very sort of short synopsis you'd be like I'm not going to watch that You know, you end up being annoyed. But, you know, I saw it at a kind of, I suppose, at the right age and not having seen one and two to appreciate it for what it was, you know. And I said, I just love the story behind it all. I think that's the most fascinating thing. I just love crazy productions. I remember, you know, when the box set came out. And it had this massive documentary on Alien 3. That was the first thing I watched on it. I didn't watch the other two or number four or watch the extended cut. I just went straight towards this documentary because I just wanted to know more about it. It's like three hours long. You're like, fucking great, you know. I remember when I was, I think very early on, I was sort of talking to, while I was interviewed for RoboDoc, but my interview got cut out because they changed the direction of it, which completely made sense. But I said to the guys, look, you know, if they were going to do MGM were going to do a big box set on all the Robocop films with, like, three-hour documentaries for each one. You know, which one would you probably go to watch first? I think most of them were like, Robocop 3. You know what I mean? Because of its shambles of a film, right? That's where the interesting shit happens. Yeah, very true. Because at the end of the day, you kind of, like, you know, generally the first one's always covered a lot, especially with aliens. But yeah, I mean, I still like it for what it is. I like the extended cut more than theatrical. I think there's still a compromise between the two we can make more of a refined cut maybe but it's you know I'm sure some fans have done that but yeah even that with all the scores as well number three is just so unique with its music and really elevates a lot of the film's problems but yeah well everyone take care of yourselves and goodbye for now