Aliens (1986)

This is Jim Cameron. I wrote and directed this film back in '83, and directed it in '85 through '86. It was released in the summer of '86. July 17th, if I'm not mistaken. It started as a treatment. I was having a meeting with David Giler and Walter Hill, talking about another project, and that pitch was not going very well. I could tell by their sagging expressions that they didn't like any of my ideas. But they had read my 7erminator script and wanted to work with me on something. I was getting up and making my way toward the door and David Giler, one of the producers of the first film, said "We do have this other thing", and I said "What's that?" He said "Alien 2." And all the pinball machine lights and bells went off inside my head but I maintained a straight face and said "That could be interesting." And I suggested that I write a quick treatment, a quick outline, just to give them an idea of what I might do with it. So I raced home and stayed up for three days straight, drank about eight pots of coffee and wrote a 40- or 50-page treatment. Really what I did was I adapted a story I had already written, which was called Mother, which was an "alien on a space station" kind of story. It had the power loader machine in it. I had written this treatment a few months earlier. So I adapted it, dropped Sigourney's character and a bunch of marines into it, and in that one quick stroke created all the character names - Gorman and Hicks and Vasquez and all those folks - and dropped it on them a couple of days later. I think they felt like they'd hit the jackpot. That was the film they wanted to make. So they authorized me to go ahead and start writing the script. The problem was, that day I landed the job to write the script for the second Rambo film. So I called them up and asked David Giler what I should do. And he said "Don't be stupid. Take both jobs." So I took both jobs. I also had to do a rewrite of my 7erminator script to start production in February, so I had a three-month period where I had to write three scripts. So I decided that each script was gonna be two hours long, so it'd be 120 pages. So I figured out the total page count, whatever that is - I guess 360 pages. I divided the total number of waking hours I had during that three-month period by 360 and figured out how many pages per hour I had to write, and then I just wrote that many pages per hour.

I'm Gale Anne Hurd. I produced A/ens.

I'm Stan Winston. I created the creature effects and the alien effects for A/ens. I remember Jim trying to figure out how he could make the beginning of this movie impressive. He said he wanted to use a robotic laser. It was an afterthought and it wasn't in the budget and I remember having the gall to say to him "If you wanna use it, you have to pay for it." And he did. - Is that right? This robotic arm and the laser came out of his pocket. I wanted a seamless blend from the end of the first film into the beginning of the second film. I certainly wanted to honor all the things that were good about the first film. So I went to school on Ridley's style of photography, which was quite different from mine, cos he used a lot of long lenses, much more so than I was used to working with. But the smoke, the backlight, the textures, the way he forces the frame by putting a lot of equipment, machinery and foreground pieces, I really studied all that. I wanted there to be a stylistic continuity. I also wanted to have my own style grafted onto that so that I felt enough of a sense of authorship to make it worth doing.

This is Robert Skotak. I was the visual effects supervisor on the film.

My name is Dennis Skotak. I was supervising director of photography on this project.

This is Pat McClung. I was the model-shop supervisor on the film. They're wearing modified costumes from Outland, or the basic suit is from Outland and it's been redesigned and they put some stencils on it. This is microglitter and fuller's earth blown on there. I remember in this scene the batteries in the flashlights kept going out. You would think this would be an easy scene to do, but, as with everything in this movie, it was harder than it looked. There are no easy scenes with Jim. There's that nice dissolve, the contour of the earth matching her face. When we shot this, a matte painting combined with miniature and perspective, there are some perspective gags going on there. We used a clip of Sigourney's face in the viewfinder to line up the curvature of the earth, so we had a nice match. I wrote the piece obviously with Sigourney in mind for the character. I was told she was on board and I should just toddle off and write the film when in fact no deal had been made with her whatsoever. So here was a script that was written that everybody wanted to make, in which she was in every scene, and they hadn't made a deal with her yet. That's why she got her first big payday of her acting career. She got a million bucks, which was a big deal. She might have been the first actress to get a million dollars for a movie in movie history. It was all because it was mishandled by the producers. She was the main character and they hadn't made the deal. She was worth every penny of it and more. When people saw the film, they realized that. I Knew what a phenomenal actress she was. I'd never met her. I had her picture up while I was writing the script. I went off the character that had been created in the first film, took her much further. Of course, this is Paul Reiser. I certainly had no idea what a great comic actor he would prove to be, and certainly that's how people think of him, not as a dramatic actor. I just read him in a lineup of actors in the normal casting methodology, and I thought he was really interesting, that he could play this really sincere but slightly smarmy guy who could then turn evil. This is a dream sequence, but you don't know that yet. I remember from the premiere screening of the film that the incomplete chestburster scene here really got people cranked up and on edge, set the tone for the whole movie, that you were here to be messed with, which is a good way to start off, I think. The way you get a cat to hiss like that is you put another cat close to it. I had no idea. I didn't know what you did to make a cat do that. But that's standard procedure. Bring a cat it doesn't know close to it and it'll do that.

This scene was shot really quickly. It was pretty much all handheld, 48 or 60 frames a second. I think 48. Then Sigourney had to loop all her lines at slow speed, which is always odd. Our first effect in the movie. It's great, because it's what you expected to happen and then it's not what you expect. She was actually under the bed for that sequence. We built an artificial body from her neck down. Someone is under the bed with her. I can't remember who the lucky guy was that created the illusion of the chestburster. Pushing its way through her. It sets up the character. This is her nightmare. You know that she never wants to have to face it in real life again because she's haunted by it in her dreams and her nightmares. This effect is as if you're outdoors. When the camera dollies over, you see it's just a video projection. The idea was that in outer space there would be places you could go to get a feeling you were in a natural environment. So that plate behind her was shot out in the garden at Pinewood Studios. It was a VistaVision plate. Originally, there was supposed to be a birdhouse in the background in that garden, and she would have Jones on her lap and a bird would fly in and Jones would jump up and hit the screen and that's how the audience would find out that she wasn't actually on the earth. This scene was cut from the release version of the film, which became the source of some controversy with Sigourney. She later said in print that she had based her entire character on this scene, and she was devastated when it was removed. At the time she first screened the film, she told me she didn't like the scene, and then we wound up reading interviews where she had a big problem with that. We didn't have a chance to talk about it because of the postproduction schedule. We were working in England, kind of in isolation.

Even though I liked the symmetry of the fact that she had had a daughter and lost her - that's Sigourney's mother, so there's an interesting inversion here. She's looking at the face of her mother but playing it as her daughter. As an actor, it allowed her to work the connection. All my movies are love stories. This one is about parental love, protectiveness and a sense of duty, and the ultimate sacrifice that a person would make, given that sense of duty. That was a nice touch. That was Sigourney's idea. This was one of the seminal scenes in the movie and was one of the ones that had to be deleted and omitted from the theatrical version because of length. We didn't have multiplexes, and there were only so many showings a day that you could have of a film, and we had to get it no more than two hours ten minutes in order to get the maximum number of screenings per day. Peter Lamont came up with a simple and austere look for our future sets. I watched this film recently and I was amazed at how little we see of the conventional future world, as opposed to the spacecraft interiors. She's actually on Gateway Station here. She hasn't returned all the way to earth. She never sets foot on earth in the whole series of films, which is interesting. This is as close as she gets until the end of the fourth movie, where she's re-entering the atmosphere. But this is earth for all intents and purposes. This is everyday life circa a couple of hundred years from now. And Peter came up with a very spartan look. It's not overworked at all, which I think was quite clever. We wanted to do it minimalist. We didn't have her walking around corridors. We didn't create a world because we weren't interested. We were interested in the through-line of her story and her character's dilemma and problems, the fact that she's not believed, that she understands there's this great threat. The same applied to the costumes. We didn't wanna suggest a wildly separated future from our present one. This might be one of the first science fiction movies where men still wear coats and ties. The thinking was people will still wear coats and ties. They may not look exactly the same. We turned up the collar on the jackets. It's no big deal but it's a subtle change. We wanted to have a place to go. We wanted the space environment once they get to the colony planet to be exotic and so we didn't wanna overwork earth. We also wanted to understand who these people were, and a Suit Is a suit. These characters are suits and we wanted to reinforce that. If everybody's in Star Wars type costumes, it's harder to relate to them as characters. I was thinking more of a writer than a designer when I was making my picks of what things should look like from amongst the suggestions made by the costume designer. Denny, did they shoot at 25 frames per second for all the video playback stuff? Do you remember? They did. The 24-frame issue was messy. It can be done, but it's such a big procedure. Shooting 25 frames per second on the camera puts the video in sync with the film camera very easily. There's a slight speed differential but it's almost impossible to perceive. In Britain they have a different television system, a 25-frame-per-second system. 625 resolution instead of 525. Later in the film there's some video footage that was used, appearing on video monitors. But the PAL system is better than NTSC, which is our system here in the United States. It almost looked like a slightly too fuzzy version of film, sort of in between. It's not as good as it should be for film, but it wasn't obvious it was video. Jim realized and made the video images noisier or break up more often so it was more obvious. The tag of this scene is gonna be a throw to this big sequence that takes place on the colony which is before the aliens attack. That's cut out of the release version, so coming up Is the biggest single change from the release version of the film. It's an entire reel. I'll never forget Gale Hurd, who was my wife and producer at the time, trying to shorten the film by 20 minutes. I just could not see how it was possible to do a cut here, a cut there, a few seconds, a bit of a scene, the tag of a scene maybe. She said "I've been thinking about this for days." I said "Go ahead." She said "Reel three." Which starts here. "You can take out reel three." I immediately rejected that as completely absurd. Then I thought about it. Reel three ends with Newt's scream when her father has the facehugger on his face. It works flawlessly. It's a brilliant cut and I have to credit Gale with that. I had poured a lot of energy into the design of these scenes and the alien derelict ship. The problem for me was that I couldn't imagine this film without the cognitive tether to the first film of the alien derelict, but it turns out that it works perfectly. A little dialogue bridge and it works fine. I like this tractor a lot, this tractor with this articulated leg design. This is one of my favorite effects. You see the big tractor driving by and in the background you see these people struggling to put a tarp over that tractor. That was done in perspective. There were full-size people back there, and a miniature in the foreground with distance between. It put everything in camera all at one time without any opticals or anything beyond that. The trick was that the actors had to act at double their normal speed of acting, because the camera was running at 48 frames per second. We had a Ritter fan on them to really kick those tarps around in excess of what it would be in real time, but because we were overcranking, that motion would then look normal. The multi-wheeled vehicle at the beginning is a fifth-scale miniature, radio-controlled, that Jim designed. On the airplane coming over from Los Angeles to London he just doodled it. Ron Cobb, I believe, fleshed it out.

I always liked these guys. I always liked this "I'm just trying to do my job. I'm a working stiff in a situation." "The guys back home never know what we're going through." We wanted the idea that there were kids around, that the colonists had come with their families. This is a connection to the first film. The Weyland-Yutani Corporation was the big, bad, evil company that was responsible for everything that went wrong in the first movie. So we just carried that tradition on. Ultimately, I think that what this scene shows is that at that time I was not - maybe never - as good as Ridley Scott at what he does best. The suspense and the creation of the atmosphere of this planet is done so much better by him in his film, and so, in a way, the removal of this scene makes the picture stronger because it puts it more on its own turf. We tried to recreate the alien ship but I don't think we were quite as successful as he was. In his film it was a major set piece. In ours it was just a stop along the way.

This derelict ship had been in Bob Burns' driveway. He'd been given it by Fox and it was starting to fall apart. We had to put it back together and fix it up. Fortunately, though, it existed, so it saved us a lot of model work because it was there and mostly intact, rather than building from scratch. My name's Carrie Henn and I was Newt. My name's Chris Henn and I was Tim Jordan. It's cool to see what James Cameron had in mind, cos at the time we didn't really know what was going on. Little did we know at this time that our life would change when they came back from inside. That was the first time we saw the facehugger, when we opened the door and we saw it on Jay's - who played our dad - neck. I was really sad for my brother that this got cut out, and for everyone watching it, because it shows everyone why I can't stand the aliens, pretty obvious anyway, but you find out that my dad was the one who brought it back to the colony. It shows how Sigourney and Newt get the connection, too, as mother-daughter, and they have the same enemy. This was interesting, cos it wasn't something we saw filmed. When it happened, they just got out of the car and that was it. It ties it to the first one. It's the same place they went in the first movie. We have another one of our first creature effects that is like the introduction of the facehugger. All of these things were so daunting to me psychologically, because these had now become iconic characters, the facehugger and the chestburster and the warrior aliens. Of course, the queen was brand-new, but we also wanted each of these to have their own life in this movie and at the same time be legitimate to the original. So, to the very discerning eye, if you look at the facehugger from the original, from A/en, and you look at the facehugger in Aliens, there are subtle differences in the detail, more attention to detail as far as the creature itself.

That was genuine scare. - That freaked us both out. This is where James Cameron asked me to scream for the first time ever and I screamed and everyone stopped and stared. Could shatter glass with her scream. I always liked that sound cut. We spent a lot of time on the sound on this picture. The picture was mixed by Graham Hartstone at Pinewood Studios in England. I remember mixing it for a long time, I think seven weeks. There's some really nice sound work and I learned a lot. My only prior experience with a mix was on Ierminator and that was done really rapidly. I'm thinking it was done in four or five days. Not a sophisticated mix and I knew nothing about it, so I learned an awful lot from Graham and the Pinewood mixers. This is Bill Hope. He's a Canadian actor, working in England at the time. SO, again, here you see her whole world is created by a pretty simple little set of a corridor and her little efficiency apartment on the space station. It's not specifically stated, but she's never made it back to earth. She's stayed on Gateway Station and got a job as a dock worker, machine operator. Foreshadowing. "Running loaders and forklifts." What does that mean? I guess we'll see if we watch. - This is exciting. I think the intention was that... Iam a child of the '60s, and the prevailing myth at that time was that the Vietnam War was all about protecting American business interests in Asia. We wanted the evil corporation here. The idea is that the corporation has the contract to establish colonies much in the sense that the Dutch East India Company might have controlled that whole area of the world and that colonial marines don't work directly for them but are called in as a security force whenever the interests of the parent country, wherever Weyland-Yutani is, although it's probably a multinational. Your model for that is colonial America, or the Caribbean, where the military were sent as security for the corporations who were bringing back the wealth to the parent European countries. So it's probably a very entangled relationship. The marines don't report to the company. You can see there is a separate chain of command. They don't take orders from Burke, but Burke makes very strong recommendations to them. So they definitely have a lot of clout.

At the time I made the movie, I Knew diddly-dick about how big corporations work, so to me they were just this big, shadowy entity. I Know an awful lot more about it now. And I actually nailed it, I think, pretty close. I think that if you look at places of major corporate culpability, like, say, the Bhopal disaster in India, where 3,000 people were killed because a major international corporation cut corners on safety... There's many instances throughout history where, just by negligence, corporations have been responsible for many, many deaths, but always in distant, remote places. So if it's gonna happen, i's gonna happen on a colony.

Obviously, this is the heart and soul of the movie, which is Ripley's internal demon. I think Sigourney's just great in these scenes. Interestingly, Sigourney herself had an issue with my take on her character. She didn't think that Ripley hated the alien. We had a long creative dialogue and I said "No, she hates him." She hates the alien that killed her crew members and put her through the most traumatic event of her life, and wants to see them destroyed. But I think the way I finally sold it to her was - because Sigourney's very liberal - that Ripley would want to prevent the trauma she went through happening to anybody else, and she knows there are colonists on that planet. So I displaced it outside of her, when in reality I saw it as a very straightforward revenge story. But I think that was beneficial, because that creative tug of war between us actually caused me to think outside of my limited box as a writer at that time, and see that her motivation was on a higher plane as well, she was acting out of a sense of duty. That spoke to some of the themes I already had in the story with respect to her relationship with Newt. Once she finds out that the colony is lost and that battle is lost, she really only has one thing to fight for, and that's the little girl, the one survivor. Her mission has been to help these people avoid what happened to her and her crew.

The Sulaco. This was a Syd Mead design that was fiberglass body. Some of the detailing was based on that Syd Mead sketch and then Pat and Dennis and myself did a lot of the fine detailing for the front, the side, the top, all the microscopic detailing. This was not a particularly large model. It was about five or six feet long. The detailing we would do after hours because we had to be on the stage to shoot all this stuff, get everything organized, and once everybody went home, we'd go up to our little effects office and start another shift of microdetailing. It was so cold, we were wearing our winter coats. It was hard to move around and use these tiny little Exacto knives, and these pieces of plastic that were maybe half the size of acomma on a textbook, sticking them on meticulously, one after the other. So this was our biggest set, I guess. Or the biggest volume, I guess. The hanging chains, these little widgets and things, this was all inspired by the tone and feel of the opening scenes of Ridley's film. We were trying to create that same sense of the ship having its own life and being an eerie, interesting place.

We had a big budget cut, or we had to save money, and the budget for this set got cut. Peter Lamont came up with a great idea. There's a mirror at the end of the set and another mirror behind the camera. I think we only had three of those hypersleep capsules. I think we might have had four. We mirrored them out to make them into 12. If you're clever you can see where the mirror is but I can't see it right now.

You can see there's two Vasquezes. Another wonderful thing about Jim and a Jim Cameron film is this wonderful loyalty that he has with people who have worked with him, actors that have worked with him. Carpenters. Bill Paxton was a carpenter on Battle Beyond the Stars and then one of the punks who loses his clothes to Schwarzenegger in 7erminator. Lance was going to be the Terminator. - And then became the detective. And Michael Biehn, of course. Kyle Reese.

My name is Michael Biehn. I played Hicks, or if you've seen the DVD extended version, that's Dwayne Hicks.

I'm Lance Henriksen. I played Bishop.

I'm Jenette Goldstein. I played Private Vasquez.

And I'm Bill Paxton and I played Private Hudson. I just wanna say, it's great to See you guys. It's fun to get together every 20 years and look at movies we were in. I'm sure they'll put that on the... Seriously, great camaraderie making this film. Look at Ricco. He's putting you all to shame. I gave up early on trying to have a physique against you guys. That would have cut into my drinking time.

I was doing those. - Were you standing on a box? No. I'll say this once and for all. - Look at that.

Spunkmeyer. In the pipe. Five by five." I always liked the way she said that. Actually, those are the hard ones. What did Mark have on there? I don't remember him wearing all those... Scars and bones. I think Jim had put the chin-up bar up there to make the line "Anyone ever mistaken you for a man?" work, cos in the T-shirt no one would have mistaken me for a man. He said "How can we make this line work?" So he said "Can you do behind-the-neck chins?" I said "Yeah." Is this the scene where you guys do the thing with the knife? I remember saying at the time "Jim, what about...?" "Shut up, Michael." Why did he put your hand on top of his? What happened was that Jim had wanted me to do it like a demonstration. And we got right to the moment and I said "Jim, this is really gonna be boring." I said "What if I put my hand on Billy's hand?" And since I won't hurt anybody, I would never hurt him, it would make it more interesting. I never understood what Bill was so scared of, because his hand was underneath. After the movie was done, we all went out and partied and drank a lot of beer, and I remember a voice in the middle of the night saying "You gotta come back because when they sped up the film it looked phony." Remember? We had to come back. And that's when I caught your pinky by accident. Just barely touched it and he almost died. I had to have reconstructive cuticle surgery. But, anyway, it was more interesting on his hand. This effect was one of the first uses of this camera with a variable speed. Magic Cam? - Yeah. Which is used a lot now, but it was a first here. What's great about it is that you could start out at 24 frames per second and then the camera, without having to cut and set up a separate camera, would automatically adjust for a faster or slower frame rate and then go back. Change the aperture while it was changing its speed. Do you remember Lance brought over his knives? No. I met Lance Henriksen at the airport when he was coming over from the US. They have much stricter weapons laws in England. He'd packed the knives that he'd been practicing that effect with in his suitcase. He said "I'm always the one that they check to do the luggage search." Going through customs he said "Stick with me." It was the first time he hadn't had his luggage searched. I thought "That's great. An actor coming over here with concealed weapons."

Bishop, if you watch the film again knowing the outcome, he plays it completely innocent. He plays it as this very helpful, compassionate guy, but he looks so sinister, and you know enough about these synthetics from the first film that you never believe him. And the interesting thing is he is playing it on the square the entire way through the film. So this starts off with a miniature and pans off onto the full-size. There's a foreground set piece on the left that's a miniature. It's another Skotak shot. A forced-perspective shot.

I Knew nothing about the US Marine Corps at the time. Although, while I was making this film, my brother joined the marines and was in for six years. I now know a lot more about the marines and they are more disciplined than these people. I would like to apologize to any marines listening that we did not get that part right. These guys are definitely Vietnam-era regular army, toward the end of their tour kind of motif. The film is obviously informed by imagery from Vietnam, the idea that they put painted flowers on their helmets and things like that, and there was a real discipline problem. That was also amongst a lot of draftees at that time. So we're mixing our metaphors a little bit here.

Do you chew gum in every scene? I tried to. If you watch my performance, I'm always doing something. It's all I could do in those days.

Everybody's archetypical in this thing. I don't remember all the stuff hanging off of Mark. Chicken bones. I look like a boy. That's what we liked about you. Was this the day, Michael, you were passed out by the lockers and Sigourney walked by and said "There's my leading man"? Am I mistaken with another day? Somewhere around in here. I had to audition. They made you audition for Fox. No, it wasn't for Fox. They had a limit on how many Americans they could bring over. So they auditioned a lot of Englishmen for that role. The casting director, Mary Selway, and I had to meet every member of the North American registry from British Actors' Equity who was interested in being in this film before we could bring anyone from the US. I think we must have met and auditioned 3,000 people.

I encouraged the actors to customize their own costumes and armor, to give the impression they had been out a lot, that they were seasoned, that they had been away from command authority on their own a lot and were good enough at their jobs that they were allowed these kind of latitudes. This is a continuation of the motif from the first film, where they're wearing Hawaiian shirts and all kinds of strange stuff, all of which was a new idea in science fiction. People always wore uniforms on spaceships. That's how it worked from Star Trek on. Every science fiction film ever made, there was the general-issue uniform. Alen broke that mold and it just seemed so right to people. They recognized the archetype instantly. "Oh, these guys are truck drivers." "They dress however they want. There's nobody to tell them not to." And so the idea here was extrapolated to a military unit that's worked at the extreme fringes of human civilization. The power loader was not designed by anybody in drawings per se. I had done some preliminary drawings, but it evolved basically from trying to figure out how to make it work. We built full-size mock-ups of the arms and legs in foam core. There's a guy inside that thing, a big, strong English stunt man moving it. It's supported by cables. It's completely an on-set gag. The English visual effects guys thought we were crazy the way we wanted to do it. I said "It's the gag where the dad lets the daughter walk on his feet, his three-year-old." So standing behind Sigourney right now is this big 270-pound body-building English stunt man. He's raising the arms himself and he has in his hands a control that allows him to raise the forearm of the power loader. And then when they walk, they have to walk together. The weight of the machine is held by a crane which is off-camera, or some kind of overhead track rig - we had two versions of it. If we didn't need the machine to turn, we mounted it on a pylon, a boom-arm thing, and if we needed it to pivot we hung it on wires.

My kids remember all the dialogue and one thing they did was "Bay 12, please." And Newt's line: "They're dead, all right? Can I go now?" How about "Get away from her, you bitch"? The most classic line in the movie. And obviously this was another interesting idea that Jim had, which was to use a Steadicam harness that's normally used for holding a camera to make a futuristic weapon out of. Everyone said it couldn't be done, which is at least at the beginning of Jim's career typical of the response to Jim's ideas, and then, of course, it worked beautifully.

These were aircraft vehicles. They were the tow vehicles that were used to bring jumbo jets, 747s, to tow them in to the Jetways at Heathrow Airport. And then the skin was fabricated by metalworkers locally in Slough, England, which is near Pinewood Studios. The basic framework was an airport tug, a vehicle that had four-wheel steering. It weighed I don't know how many tons, so they had to strip the body off and strip a number of tons. I think it was 72 tons. It wound up being 28 tons when it was done. The whole thing was full of mechanisms. When they open the door, there's nothing inside. Now we cut to an interior set piece. This interior is a cheat because it's larger on the inside. This amount of set wouldn't have fit inside there, but it's a movie cheat that works well. Do you remember when the ceiling of this collapsed? I'm not sure if it was this scene or one of the scenes later on, but there was so much set dressing hanging from the roof of the APC set that at one point it collapsed.

Look at Bill. - This was my big speech. My big speech. - God, I stayed up late trying to learn this thing. You used to work hard, Bill. - I worked so hard. I killed myself to make it work. I guess it has to do with Jim and my relationship with Jim. Your work ethic. - That too. But with Jim, it's peaked. You want it right for him because he's a perfectionist and you see how hard he's working.

These are all miniatures built by Bob and Denny Skotak. Fairly large miniatures. When we shot this scene, Bill said "

and the grips shook the set and the set collapsed on us and split open my scalp. So I'll always remember that line. It caught fire and the roof came in all on the same day. And it hit Jim in the head. I saw blood spurting out of his head. It was where Sigourney was supposed to be sitting, so it was good it hit Jim and not her. We'd have gotten a day off. Think they did that on purpose? No. - I'm just asking. At that point, maybe they would've. In the pipe. Five by five." My favorite line. These shots, it's just me shaking the back of the magazine of the camera. The poor camera operator had a bruise around his eye, cos sometimes I'd whack the magazine too, just to give it a sharp jolt. This is all my shake of the camera. The operator can't do it himself. It just gets into this bouncy rhythm if the operator tries to do it. It has to be imposed from the outside and then they fight it, which is the natural reflex. Such a wonderful sound design in this movie. Much of which was generated in our living room in England. At the time, people really weren't using synthesizers in England to create sound effects for films, and we had a Fairlight synthesizer in our living room. A lot of the sound effects were generated by Bob Garret, Randy Frakes and Jim in our living room near Pinewood, including the sound of the alien queen. It really was a home movie.

The dropship evolved in its design as it went along. I came in on a Sunday during preproduction and bashed a kit together out of a bunch of model parts and pieces of foam core, and spray-painted it gray and gave it to Ron Cobb to draw up. We had brought Ron Cobb to England to help with some of the designs. So Ron packaged it, as he called it. He made it look better. This is a good scene. One theme of the film is that these soldiers succumb to a technologically inferior enemy that they don't know how to fight, which is really a Vietnam metaphor, where US forces got their butts kicked by barefoot guys running through the jungle because they didn't understand how to fight that war, they didn't understand their enemy. So Hudson's bragging scene here plays into that. They're cocky. They think they can handle anything because they've got the fire power. Bill was so wonderful in this, such a memorable character. And when you think about all of this exposition that's being delivered in a really entertaining way. All of this military jargon. Because the characters are so distinctive. They don't just go right past you.

We were trying to go for a transformer effect here, where it deploys these weapons pods.

More handheld rear projection to put you there. What I had noticed from a lot of science fiction films, even the first A/ien, was that you've got all this handheld, claustrophobic stuff and then you cut to the window shots and they're just these static cutout mattes, and it violates the flow. So we wanted to have continuity across those cuts, so we decided to do all the views out the windows as rear-projection handheld.

This is just a regular Handycam, a regular 8 Handycam, whatever the standard was at that time. This landing of the dropship was complicated in terms of trying to hit a mark while shooting at high speed. The dropship was shot overcranked, so the model had to be really moving fast and those landing legs were fairly frail. We would do take after take and the landing legs would get crushed. This film is not a wide-screen film. If I did it again, I'd shoot it wide-screen to be consistent with the first picture. But I didn't like anamorphic for the visual effects problems it created. I'd had a bad experience on Escape From New York trying to do anamorphic visual effects, so we decided to shoot 1.85. I almost shot the film in Super 35, but I got talked out of it by somebody that didn't understand that format, and then I wound up shooting all my subsequent films in Super 35. I still don't care for anamorphic. You have problems with lenses shooting miniatures, with depth of field, there are problems in composite. On Escape From New York we didn't have much money and we were inexperienced in anamorphic, so I didn't really have an alternative that I considered viable at the time. But now when I see the two pictures back-to-back screened - it doesn't make too much difference on video - I actually like the look of A/en better because I just like the aspect ratio. And I've come to know and love the 2.35:1 aspect ratio. The interesting thing is that the first film was anamorphic so it used more of the negative area. This is a 1.85 picture. In this exact year Kodak was in transition. They were changing their emulsions. This was a higher-speed negative than had been used previously. They hadn't worked out their T-grain emulsion. So it turned out grainier than I wanted. But this was actually the standard, just what that stock was that year. Because we weren't using the full negative, like with an anamorphic film, we weren't getting quite as much image quality. If I had shot Super 35, it would have looked terrible because of the graininess. By the time I got ready to do 7he Abyss a couple of years later, they had improved the emulsions enough that Super 35 looked pretty great. I was surprised recently at how grainy it was. Nobody noticed the grain at the time cos most films frankly looked like that.

Bill, isn't there dialogue that you have on this that people have used in video games? Yeah, I think so. "Game over, man" and things like that. You get anything for that? - I don't think so. I'm not even getting anything to sit here and do this commentary. They expect us to do it for no money. You got a beer out of it, though. No, it's just fun. I got a beer out of it, so that's cool. This was an amazing set, this concourse A. And it was long. And later on when all hell's breaking loose, Jim had that little video camera. He had everybody on the crew having coffee while we would run at him and do different things. It was SO amazing to see this gigantic set, one of the biggest sets I'd ever seen, and there's Jim by himself with this little camera. When did the bust-out almost happen? He was gonna move the movie. When did that happen? I remember there were some problems. There were some union problems. The crew weren't used to working the same way. With Jim. They weren't used to working. That's unfair. They were craftsmen, but they had an indentured way of doing everything. Jim needs something, he just grabs it. If he needs a light moved, he'll grab it himself. We punched a hole through somewhere cos he needed to run a line. He didn't wanna wait around. He just said "Give me a hammer." But this was an ambitious schedule. Jim was running from stage to stage. I think we had about three big sound stages with giant sets. And then there were two sound stages with miniatures. And then there was a stage with all those tunnels. I remember them putting you in that damn tunnel. That pipe. We had gone to the power station to shoot the atmosphere-processor scenes and come back to the set after it had been wrecked. So we're into Adrian Biddle's photography here. He was the second DP. I encouraged Adrian, to save time, to use as much built-in lighting as possible. This is lit by the fluorescents in the set, with just a little additional lighting. Adrian liked to work on a raw and edgy look and work with the practical lights a lot more. This is another thing that is important. With a lot of science fiction movies that are all interior, you often lose track geographically of where you are and it becomes incredibly confusing and it's hard to build the tension and the suspense. Jim was aware of this from the script stage and made sure that we established through the helmet cams, through the motion trackers, where they are, and then ultimately, later on, where the aliens are. Even in this version, you're left to fill in what happened. We don't see the baittle. We'll see plenty of battles later and this is promising you that. We have a shot coming up here where there were acid holes - acid... holes... eaten into the floor by these so far unseen aliens. And, of course, these sets were not double-deck sets. Jim wanted a scene where a character looks down through one of these holes. I think Bill spits down into it to give some perspective. So this down-view we shot on our miniature stage. We layered the set and photographed that. This is where you spit and they did it in miniature. They even did a miniature spit. - Is that what that is? To get that spitting effect, it was actually not spit. It didn't work very well, so it was a combination of milk... Milk and water in an eyedropper right underneath the lens. The complaint from the studio was that the film went on too long without anything really happening. I was winding the suspense tighter before you actually saw anything. The studio said we were just jerking around. Too many movies that I see now, it's all upfront. You start seeing stuff right away and there's no sense of a build. So this is the miniature APC that was built by Bob and Denny Skotak. Pretty good size. I remember it being five or six feet long. Most people don't twig that as a miniature. That's the real APC pulling in. They matched the lighting pretty nicely. I think Jim did some of his live-action stuff undercranked. He ran the camera slightly slower on the APC so that it felt slightly more as if it were a miniature but you knew it was real because you could see people interacting with it. So if any of the miniature stuff didn't quite work for whatever reason, it took the curse off that cos it felt that the two were blended together. I think he wound up undercranking because the APC, the full-size one, didn't move as fast as he wanted it. I think it could only go eight or ten miles an hour. One difficult thing about making this movie was 7erminator wasn't out in England and the perception of Jim Cameron, who looked about 20 when he directed this movie, and myself as the directing-producing team was met with a great deal of resistance because back then the system in England was that you had to put in years and years to rise up to the level of being a producer or a director. And we were simply not treated with a great deal of respect and it was very hard every day of the shoot. We were being second-guessed and every decision we made was questioned and the tremendous thing, of course, having Stan on the film was that... I was old. - No. ...was that you were a cheerleader for both of us. By demonstrating the respect and enthusiasm that you did, I think other people gradually relented. I knew it was the best thing for me and for everybody on that set. There are people that you know, no matter how they do it, what they're doing is special. This particular directing-producing team had been a win for me in my career and stayed that way. I never thought our facehuggers looked as good as the one in A/en. We had to make lots of 'em and they had to run around and do things, but, texturally, the one in the first film looked great. It really held up. The bits of oysters and stuff inside it looked great. But I did wanna see the disgusting thing that had been down the inside of Kane's throat in the first film. You never see it in the movie, in A/en, so I figured we'd gross everybody out. All of Giger's designs have a real sexual undercurrent to them. And that's what horrified people about the alien as much as anything, is it worked on a kind of Freudian subconscious level. And Ridley and Giger knew that and they went for that. This film was never intended to be as much of a horror film as the first one. It was working on a different thematic level but I still wanted to be true to some of those ideas, some of those design concepts. It would be natural to assume I'd wanna work with Giger, but it just didn't occur to me at the time. Maybe it was because we really only needed to design one new creature and I had already designed her by the time I wrote the script. The alien queen. I guess maybe it was my own ego as an artist. I just felt like he'd made his stamp and I knew from what I'd read that he had to do everything his way and I had a very specific idea for the alien queen to extrapolate beyond what had been done before. I got the impression from what I read that I wasn't gonna get the dynamic character that I wanted. In a funny way, part of what attracted me to doing this film was the opportunity to do cool design stuff. So maybe I was just a little bit too in love with the idea of designing the creatures and the weapons and doing all that stuff.

These shoulder-mounted lights were not practical. They'd go through batteries quickly and they're delicate, but they served the purpose. I assume at this point in the future they'd work more efficiently.

When we were crewing up, the department heads would meet with me before they met with Jim. It was a two-tier process. A number of them came in and said "Who's really producing this movie?" And I'd say "I am." And they'd say "No, you're the director's wife." "You get the credit but who's producing the movie?" It was really difficult for me to maintain a sense of calm. I never worked with a better producer. And a great directing-producing team. Cos you're one of the few people that actually stands up and talks to Jim. There's an intimidation factor there. I feel fortunate that I had that relationship with him and you for the films we've done together but I've never worked with a more diligent and intelligent and, unfortunately, tough producer as you. Thank you. - Beat me down financially, I tell you. "This is what we need." "This is what you got, dude."

Carrie Henn, who plays Newt, was an astonishing find. Mary Selway, our casting director, and her associate, Sarah Jackson, searched throughout England and, in fact, I think the entire British Isles, trying to find a young girl who could portray this character. And we had every young girl who wanted to be an actress, or whose parents wanted them to act, to come in and audition. Almost all of them had done commercials, and every time they delivered a line they would smile. Of course, this is a little girl suffering from traumatic stress. She's watched her family wiped out, every other person on the mining colony wiped out, and I think we probably had 500 little girls on tape. And Carrie was found at a US Air Force base in England. Her father was a US serviceman serving there. And she came in and auditioned, never having acted even in a school play, and was dead on from the very first reading. She's such a good little actress. Has she done anything since this? She has a normal life. She did not pursue acting as her career. One of the things that we were very concerned about was whether or not this film would traumatize her. It's very intense and unlike now, where we could composite creatures in seamlessly, or create one digitally, she really was terrorized by the alien warriors in the film, and she understood it was make-believe. Her parents were tremendously supportive and she really had her feet on the ground. This really is acting.

Carrie had never been on a movie before, but she started to enjoy it and liked working with everybody. It was a big adventure. She started to become an actor. She understood her character. There was one day when she was sick and they didn't want her to work. She was devastated that we were gonna do the scene with a double. She pitched such a fit that she came back. I wound up doing one little shot with her so she'd feel better, so she could go home. I worked with her a lot. I'd give her eye lines. I'd make a mark on the wall. In this scene, she was supposed to stare off into space. I had to unwire her from the normal response to somebody sitting there talking to you. So I gave her a mark on the wall to look at, told her to blank her mind, and that seemed to work pretty well.

This is one of my favorite parts of the movie. I guess cos Sigourney and I had bonded so much and this is where in the movie our bonding does start. She was determined to get that dirt off of me. They didn't really want her to wipe my face clean, and she was really determined to get it off of me. She didn't think it was very fair that I was that dirty and nobody else was. So it was nice that I didn't have to worry about so much dirt later on. She was really nice. She was always helping me. Sigourney and Carrie got to be pals and they'd hang out. I think Sigourney felt very protective of her. Sigourney didn't have any children at that time. There was a real bond that was very maternal, I think, there. And I think Carrie thought Sigourney was pretty cool. Carrie's pretty good in this scene. She really got it. Sigourney was so nice. I thought I must be screwing up cos she was so nice to me all the time, but I realized she was just really genuinely a nice person. She really is. Gentle. She was the leader of the cast, absolutely. She took a lot of punishment in this thing. Her back was hurting her, too. They had to make a dummy of Newt. For her to carry. Cos her back was killing her. A Iot of crawling around and crouching. It's interesting to note that she was nominated for an Academy Award in a genre that the Academy never recognizes - science fiction, fantasy and horror. It does now but it didn't then. It does now but it certainly didn't then.

I love the idea of this little girl who feels more secure by herself, away from the adults, with these aliens around, than when she's with them, and the foreboding potential of that. She looks at the marines and says "You guys are all gonna die and I'll be on my own again, but I'm more at risk when I'm with you than doing my thing that I Know works." I really thought that was a cool idea. This is where I was gonna use the two pupils in each eye. And I did it and when the guy interrupted me, I turned and looked at him and Jim said "It's so scary, I can't use it." Lance loves to create a character through some kind of physical totem. In characters he's done for me, it could be a pocket knife... I'm talking about a rabbit's-foot kind of thing. He looks for some way into the character. So he, on his own, made up these sclera lenses that had double pupils. They were really creepy. It was a really cool idea, but I felt it was too overt. I felt it was too on the nose. We wanted to go for an ominous thing, but I think Lance underestimated his own onscreen power, and I knew that he could do a great ominous moment.

Here's a panning shot of the armored personnel carrier. This was done with the twelfth-scale armored personnel carrier. We had the camera flat on the ground and at the beginning of the shot, behind the APC, is the fiftieth-scale colony complex. Because we're flat on the ground, the audience doesn't see the scale differential that's going on there. Literally, the bumper of a twelfth-scale was next to a fiftieth-scale. The shots of the APC driving into the atmosphere processor were also done as miniatures. There was no full-size entryway that was built for the film. That's why we built one as a miniature. The sequence inside the atmosphere processor is a location that was a decommissioned power station at Acton, inside London or just outside of London. Rather than building a set from scratch, they used what was there and then added the alienesque bits to it. Look at that. - This was my first day. At Acton? - First day ever on a film. You won't see me there. - Ever on any film. I'd no idea what "back to one" meant or anything. What does it mean? 30 years later I'm still trying to figure it out. That's a real gun. That's a German Sten gun. It was cool until we started firing the weapons and then this fine snow started raining down on everybody. I think they checked it out. - It was just asbestos. We had to practice shooting flame-throwers. We did the close-quarter battle stuff. Approaching a building or going down a hallway, you leapfrog along. We did that. Al Matthews who plays Sergeant Apone had some kind of military background. I think he had served in the Vietnam War, and after the war he had come to England, where he'd become a radio disc jockey, I think. He was either really good at bullshitting us, but he seemed to know what he was doing. His orders were so authoritarian that we followed him.

Another technique that's not used any more to create the size of that set. A hanging miniature that was the previous shot, where you saw the expanse of the inside of this alien virtual universe, which is what you're seeing here, setwise, the cocoon aspect of what these aliens do. A hanging miniature, which is a technique, is a small set piece that hangs in front of the camera and then the full-size set is behind it and the actors are behind it. The illusion is that the set is huge and expanding up and over everyone, when, in fact, the foreground of the set piece is a miniature, the background of the set piece and all the actors is normal size. It's basically a forced-perspective shot. This is my first on-camera line coming up. This was the first day. We started at Acton. We started here. I thought you guys had already been shooting. They had to reshoot. We went back and picked up here. I see. And Dick Bush, the cinematographer, was replaced by Adrian Biddle somewhere in this area at the same time. A few changes were made in the lineup about two weeks in.

I heard that some of the studio execs were screening footage back in the States, and they were a little perturbed and asking "Where's the effects shot?" Gale Hurd said "You just saw an effects shot." She was referring to that perspective shot. They were completely fooled by it. They thought nothing had been shot. They thought they were spending huge amounts of money on these sets. They said "You spent so much and there's no miniature." She said "No, that is the miniature." It was a smart move on Cameron's part, to do it that way very quickly in the film, so the studio wasn't worried quite as much about what was going on 5,000 miles away in London. It does make it a bit tricky to shoot, though. If anything goes wrong, you're stuck with it or you have to fix it later but with a reshoot. You can't really fix it later. So that worked out quite well, but with actors and everything there's a lot on the line. Something we've lost sight of over the years is that with this era of filmmaking, not only for live-action but for miniatures, there wasn't much ability to go back and fix something. Now, digitally, you can change an actor's face, you can get rid of wires, do all kinds of tricks, split-screen, take elements and change shots. But at that time you had to plan these things and make it work within a narrow tolerance, otherwise that was it, that's what wound up in the film. IIt reminds me of a stage play. You're doing it live, in a sense. What was on film was it. There was no going back. You could only do it so many times. There was a limited budget to work with and it had to work on film, no matter what.

My crew actually helped dress this whole set because it had to be cocooned bodies, and so we created all these bodies and all the dressing over it, to help out the art department. I remember being terrified that the set wouldn't be ready in time. Because it was very complicated. Everybody had to pitch in and make the movie work. It was a lot to do in a short period of time. No one else would have really been able to do it, even this stuff. I even doubled for Vasquez. Did you? Do you remember the shot? Of course I remember the shot. I'll show you later on. Our homage to what everyone needs to see in this movie is about to come up. This was a very tough scene to create, which was the chestburster scene. Again, a duplication of head and entire body and then we built an entire puppet of her for the chestburster and the burn sequence.

James Horner came up with this music sting here and I always thought it was totally over the top. When I saw the whole film put together with the score, I thought "No, that's what we need." I thought "How can you sting somebody opening their eyes?" But it works. Oh! Mm-hm. She shouldn't have had the bangers and mash. Kill it. Fry it. Come on. What are you doing, Hicks? Bad-ass nasty shot. That's a nasty shot of that thing. That's a good shot of it there getting fried. Gosh. Here they come. I think our chestburster looks a little cooler than the one in the first film. Stan Winston's guys really did a good job on it. John Rosengrant and Shane Mahan. Look who's back. Another one of our problems to solve for this movie was creating the whole army of warrior aliens and being legitimate to the original movie but having to improve on it for movement and for the look of being able to study them. In the original A/ien they were rubber suits and very difficult for the actor to move around in. And yet he was very tall and very skinny. And Jim wanted to do a lot of very interesting moves with the warrior aliens, so we came up with a technique to create the suit that really involved a lot of spandex and pieces on it. And then we designed the set pieces for the aliens to fit into the walls, like the one that is behind him there, so that the camouflage would work. An enormous amount of wirework for all of these stunt alien performers, which required that the alien costumes be extremely user-friendly. This was inspired by the scene in the first film where Dallas is in the air vents and they see the signal moving and get a little freaked, and Veronica Cartwright says "Get outta there" and he makes the wrong move and gets killed. That's one of the most suspenseful scenes in the first film. I took that idea that they're getting these readings that are getting them spooked and then they make some bad moves. Form follows function. This is a perfect example of it. You start with what it is you wanna achieve, and once you have that, you can design it, so the actions and the performance is consistent with what you want in the finished film. Believe it or not, very few people work that way. They just wanna come up with something that's cool, and then you spend hours and hours trying to get it to work for the ultimate film. I happen to agree with Gale. My background is as an actor. I really come from a place where the creatures and the characters are wonderful to look at, but it's always about their performance. We have to figure out how they're gonna be able to act, and create a good performance, or it's a waste. And so that's really always at the top of the priority list when we're creating any creature - what is it gonna do and how is it gonna do it? What he does is create a character, and that's why I think his work is So unique. When you look at a film, you can always tell who's done the creatures, if they actually have a character. Because he creates a character that can act and perform. The whole film builds to this moment, where the power transfers from the authoritarian structure to the individual who takes action. Ripley's not supposed to do anything. She's just there as an observer. We're coming up to a sequence where Sigourney takes control of the APC and this sequence is comprised of live-action shots, but as it comes down this hallway and is banging into pipes and walls and sparking, that's all done in miniature. In some cases, the cameraman - cos the set was mounted at an angle - was on a cart, a wheeled cart, and was rolling backwards as the radio-controlled APC was coming at camera. There was a point when he was just put into free fall, rolling backwards downhill, photographing what was in front of him as he went backwards. Here we go. - This is the shot. This is also miniatures. There was a shot with the full-size when the brakes didn't work, and took out the camera, and luckily it was a remote-operated camera. It was the shot where we were actually crushing an alien warrior, when it broke through. This is the shot, actually, when it took the camera out. Then there's another shot where it takes down an alien.

These shots of the aliens hanging from the ceiling are just shot upside down. It's just guys standing there in an alien suit. And we set up some alien puppets made out of foam and filled them with gak and guts and yellow goo, and blew the hell out of them, as I recall. Made a big mess. Miniscule things we had to do, like creating burn appliance make-up for when the acid would hit. Here's a case right here. Alien comes up, splats, and the blood is right here. Quick cut. Quick cut. But prosthetics used. John Richardson was the physical effects supervisor. I was at his shop on the lot, and they were testing one of these flame-throwers and it was a real flame-thrower that they had built. This thing would go about 20 or 30 feet. So every time you see flames coming out, it's the real thing. It was a little scary. When we did the fire in the APC, there was something used to age the set, some kind of wax-based substance that the art department had dabbed on to make the set look more like a used military vehicle. And the heat caused it to vaporize and the actors got this strong sense that they couldn't breathe. It caused their throats to close up. Bill tells the story Jenette is going "Ugh!" And Bill remembers thinking "She's coming up with some great stuff." And she really couldn't breathe. I don't remember what we did. Probably just kept shooting. I think we just kept the fire out of the inside, kept going. Because the full-size APC was incapable of spinning its wheels, all those shots of Ripley when she hits the gas and you see the wheels spin and smoke are all the miniature, because the full-size vehicle again weighed some 20 or 30 tons. We had put A-B smoke... A solution on the wheel and B on the ground. And as the tire turned, it would mix that A and B together and give the smoke. We had somebody holding back the front of the APC for a moment, so that the tire'd spin, then we'd let it go. That A-B smoke is really toxic. We don't like to breathe that stuff.

We had different kinds of smoke. We had some really nasty smoke that I think is illegal to use now, titanium tetroxide stuff that created that really nice coherent smoke, but that was only used for some of the alien acid stuff. And then you just used a regular mole fogger. We used A-B smoke for a couple of things. Some of the acid hits were done with A-B smoke, which is pretty caustic. In Jim's movies - I think of it the same way with 7he 7erminator - there's not one shot in it that you go "That's bad" or "That doesn't work." It just seems like every single shot... He knows how to put all the shots that really make the whole sequence snap, crackle and pop, that's for sure. There's not many directors who are fluent in the language of film. Jim comes to it intuitively. What are you crying about here? Something.

Somebody was always telling you to relax. It was a character where I felt the audience is gonna be so ready for him to die. You got a good death scene, though. This was weird at first cos I wasn't quite used to all the cussing around me. Hudson tended to say a lot. Every time when we'd cut, he'd look at me - "I'm so sorry." I didn't care, but I kind of felt bad for him. And at this time, you never really realize what a bad guy Paul Reiser was. Paul was so good in this. You so wanted him to get killed. I love that in a villain. Hudson, the character that Bill Paxton plays, is the voice of the audience in this. He's saying the things the audience would say and asking the questions the audience would ask.

You could tell when we started screening the film... We didn't screen it in the way they do now. We never did a test screening. But at the premiere, let's say, which is the first time I saw the film with an audience, which is unthinkable these days, we could tell the audience really liked Hudson, really connected. I like this scene cos, again, it's the transfer of power. Sigourney has made Burke as a guy she can't trust. Ripley has figured out Burke's agenda, and she's created enough of a bond with Hicks that she knows she can get him to do what needs to be done, take command even though he's a corporal. Having been in the army myself in the '70s, Jim really nailed army life for the military, and he was never in the military. Jim wasn't. - That's how guys acted.

Rear projection is an older technique that's been used in a lot of films. It's basically having a projector a distance away from a translucent screen that's behind the actor. The image of the scene they're supposed to be standing in front of is projected - previously shot footage - and that method tends to look like what you're doing, unless, as Jim shoots it, the camera's moving a lot and there's a lot of things to obscure the straight photography of it. Front projection uses a material that is made by 3M and some other companies that is related to the material used for traffic signs. When your headlights hit the signs, they kind of glow back. It's very similar to that, except it's an even more extreme version of it. An image is projected... From the camera rather than behind the set. It's projected from near the camera, hits the screen and it comes right back at the camera. The shadow that you would expect to see is hidden by the object or person in the foreground. It's self-hiding, in theory. Front projection produces a more photographable image. It retains the illumination level better than rear projection. We did a number of these dropship crashes, four or five of these things to finally get the plate right. Jim was specific about how the dropship would hit. This whole ballet of it rolling and so forth. We had to design that in so that the pods hit a certain way, the landing leg shears off by hitting a rock which sends it skewing slightly sideways which dovetails into this tumbling action. This has become a famous shot in the film. Every film is a snapshot of the technical capabilities of its time. Even though at the time you feel like you're moving things forward a little bit, you look back on it now, 18 years later, and it just seems quaint. This is one of the scenes I don't particularly like. There's a line in here and it seems to be the only line of mine that everybody I ever run into remembers. Anyone who ever wants to irritate me, any of my friends, they just say this. They say it with everything. The line was "They mostly come out at night. Mostly." My friends'll be like "We mostly go to the movies at night. Mostly." They come up with whatever they can possibly come up with. It's probably the one scene I don't really particularly like in the whole thing.

This shot with Ripley and Newt looking back at the burning, damaged atmosphere processor was done with doubles months after live action had wrapped. I never realized I had such a small part in this.

You come in big at the end, though. A typical group scene. My challenge was almost every scene was a group scene. Most scenes had seven, eight characters at one time, so there were a lot of camera axes. In 7erminator every scene had two or three people in it. It was no problem. But almost every scene in this had multiple characters, a Gatling gun of dialogue going around the room, and I found that challenging at first till I got it all straight in my head. I wasn't that experienced. This was my second film. I wanted to be cool like Michael. I was cool in that shot. I wanted to be the cool guy, not the guy bellyaching. This movie made you a star. I wanted to be Michael Biehn in this movie. So did I. - I wanted to be Sigourney.

"Why don't you put her in charge?" There it is. That's a classic, man. Actor dynamics are tricky, cos actors are all gonna peak at different moments, and it's impossible not to go through a power hierarchy. The group always knows who's getting the close-up. There's this sense that I should do a close-up on everybody so nobody feels left out. There's a whole political side to doing a group scene. They all see what's going on. Eventually I dispensed with that and went for Sigourney's close-up. Fortunately, Sigourney always liked to go last, which was good. She liked to build and have the time before the camera got in tight on her to really pick how she was gonna do her moments. Here goes. "I'll do it. I'll go." "Send the doll." That's what Bill's whole thing was. Send the doll? "Send the doll out there, man." I was so hurt. Yeah, man. Hudson should go. I mean Bishop should go. There's a pipe. Send him down the pipe. My favorite thing was Bill wanted to use me as a training toy. "Let's chase Bishop around and shoot at him." The processing station. You were so into your character, we'd ask you for a coffee, you'd run for it, go clean up our trailers. I was absolutely selfless. That was embarrassing, man.

I never liked that shot because she keeps pointing at the same spot. I think that was a second-unit shot that was done while I was in another room shooting something else. I was never happy with it. The whole idea was she's supposed to be showing the whole area. The floor diagram didn't resemble the set either. You gotta remember, this is a low-budget film. Got to cut it a little slack.

I like these really advanced laptops they have. We thought we were being so advanced here. This is an added scene with these sentry guns. This is a scene that got the ax as a result of the studio's idea that we were wasting too much time not really getting on with the story. I actually think this stuff really ups the ante and increases the fear a lot.

Because 7he Terminator hadn't come out yet, there was the perception that Jim was somehow not up to the creative responsibility of directing a sequel to Ridley Scott's masterpiece. There was a lot of resentment, and really no understanding, or very little, of what he was trying to accomplish. We had people who were, I think, completely on our side - John Richardson in practical special effects, Brian Johnson in visual effects. There were people who understood Jim's vision, but there were quite a few people who simply looked at him as the know-nothing, upstart Yank, which drove Jim crazy, considering he's a Canadian. It was his right hand, his AD. The leader of the rebellion, the first assistant director, not only behind Jim's back but to his face would call him "Guv'nor" and roll his eyes, as if Jim hadn't earned the title yet. We were shooting very long hours and people were pretty frazzled, and by our standards in America at the time a 12-hour day is not a long day, it's average, but 12 hours at the time in England was a very long day, and there were times when we'd go into a 14-hour day. At a certain point our assistant director, basically, said: "We're not doing this any more." So we fired him. And he felt that he really should be directing the movie. He was a frustrated director. He had directed second unit before. I think he even had directed a small film. But he really felt that he was better qualified than Jim was to direct the film. He went to all the departments and some cast members and everyone walked off the set. It was the most difficult moment of my entire career, even to this day, trying to rally everyone back. In fact, we were able to turn it around so that the outcome of that mutiny was that we were united, after we resolved the issues, for the first time on the film and going onto the rest of the production schedule. We actually were a unified group. So it was an example of something good coming out of a really difficult situation. I remember talking to people and going "This is a wonderful movie." "Everybody's working as hard as they possibly can." And hoping that no one would lose the energy. Fortunately, because of how you handled it, it all came together. Because it was scary. It was very scary. We were at that point - what are we gonna do, hire a new crew? Not that the thought didn't cross my mind, but England was very busy. We didn't have the option. There weren't other key crew members even available. When you have no options, you make it work, and we did. This is probably my favorite movie of my career, and the only movie where I've experienced anything like what we went through. I will also say, on the positive side, of the English crew... I brought a handful of guys from the States. We started all our designs and our builds in the States and then built a workshop in Pinewood and hired all but a half a dozen of the key coordinators from my studio from England. And everybody worked very hard and did a great job. They were wonderful artists and committed and everybody wanted to do a good job. They just had slightly different work habits than we did. I was shocked when suddenly, at a particular time mid-morning, everybody would be gone. I'd go "Where is everybody?" They'd go "They're at tea." I said "Hello?" Just gone. The other thing is that Pinewood Studios at the time had an entire crew on staff that were assigned to a movie. Right now it's four-wall, which means you hire the crew you want, it's freelance. But you ended up with the crew that was assigned to the stages you were working on and there was no selection process involved. It made it really difficult because some people really were punching a clock. They didn't want overtime, didn't wanna do anything other than work an eight-hour day. Shooting this film in England wasn't just a culture clash. For me, it was also a transition from a non-union guerilla-filmmaking mentality, which started at Roger Corman's New World Pictures and continued on 7he Terminator, which had a non-union crew, to a union picture. And also the particular way that they work in England was very, very different, and so there was an adaptation to that. And, frankly, I thought there were a lot of people on the crew that were, to use a charitable term, comfortable, and that was completely foreign to me. I'd been used to working with young, eager, hard-core, dedicated film folks. They all had something to prove. But a lot of the people especially at the Pinewood Studios at that time were lifers. They had permanent employment. It didn't matter what movie they were working on. And they got pushed on us. If you did Pinewood, you had to use their people. It was a whole different mentality. So I pushed against that as hard as I could. If I hadn't, we wouldn't have got the film done on budget and on schedule, which we did. I know probably a lot of people there at Pinewood at the time didn't care for us, with our guerilla-filmmaking ways and styles - we were not polite. By the end there were a number of them that came to respect the fact at least that we knew what we were doing, which I guess is OK.

The other aspect that was a shock to those of us who came from really indie filmmaking - I started with Roger Corman, you can't get any more indie - is that everyone in their family had done the same job. This is not, obviously, across the board. There wasn't the enthusiasm - "Let's get together and do a movie" - we were used to. I think their craftsmanship was as fine if not even more spectacular than anything I've seen before or since. And they did take complete pride in that, but it really is a different approach to working. Once you're aware of the difference in work habit, you can adjust to it. You know you've gotta get the product done. Everybody wants the same thing. They just approach it in a different way. That's all part of our learning curve. Now it's different also because there are not people on staff that are assigned to your movie. And also the liquid alcohol-based lunch is not the same any more. When you take time out, you do a bit of everything. You trim shots, you take out a second here and there. At this time we weren't cutting on the Avid yet or any nonlinear digital editing system, so there was less of a tendency to nickel-and-dime tiny cuts of 10 frames. Cutting on a Moviola, every cut had to be a splice that was opened up, so you tended to make lifts which were full scenes or partial scenes. When I cut //fanic, I made all the lifts I could and I was still miles out, so I went through cutting 10 frames here and there and got out another five minutes. This is rear projection. For the visual effects on this film, we needed all these process plates, projection plates, so the model unit had to be scrambled well ahead of time, actually producing finished shots in a way that we could project on the set. We knew we wanted a specific look out of all of these windows. We wanted to be able to have moisture on the window and dust and wind and all these sorts of things that would degrade the image, so we wanted to have these projections done in advance.

I like the feeling of these guys just working the problem, just trying to figure it out. There's always a moment when there's the thing you know you need to do and Bishop just steps up and volunteers. If you're claustrophobic, this is something you don't wanna try at home, get yourself welded into a pipe that's no wider than your shoulders. When I was a kid, we had a contest in my neighborhood. They were always building new subdivisions. We used to see who could crawl the furthest though the water pipes that had been laid. I won because I have no claustrophobia, but I got stuck once about 100m into a water pipe. Had to back out. That's a little moment from my childhood. Lance does a curious thing at the end of that close-up. I said "What was that?" He said "Bishop just realized he made a joke." You can actually see that, if you know that's what's in his head and you watch that shot. Bishop realizes after the fact that he made a joke. Because he's not human, he doesn't know if it worked or not. This was too freaky, I gotta tell you. I wouldn't have been able to do this, Lance. How did you get in there in the first place? Look how you get in. You just crawl in. You lower yourself in and then twist around. It's the shot of you putting the lid on. "Don't hurt your finger." That's the thing you say here, right? That defines him. You found stuff like that. You found it from your character. He was always trying to be of service, like the gas company. Look at this shot. - This is it. They dragged a camera on wheels in front of me. Is that how they did it? - Yeah. With a rope? I remember watching you shoot that. I think you were on another stage. They had that pipe. I remember watching you do that. I never let them light me that way any more. It's pretty rough.

I think editorially it's a fun moment. I like the build. I didn't do any editing directly on this film. Because it's film-based editing, with rapid cutting, I thought it had really good energy. You see that cutting now with the Avid cos you don't have to make each splice manually. This is the Alamo told with six people. So the sentry guns are the equivalent of the first couple of attacks. I think it's great foreboding. It's just coming at them like a wave. If these guns don't stop them, they're screwed. I think it works pretty well, but the studio talked me into taking it out. So I'm happy to see it restored in this extended version. Ray Lovejoy was our editor and it was a tremendous responsibility. And this is before you had all of the Avid and Lightworks and any kind of digital editing. There was so much film and we had a pretty short postproduction schedule and he did just a tremendous job. I hired Ray for one simple reason - cos he had worked with Stanley Kubrick. It took him a while to really get what I was trying to do with this movie. A lot of his early cuts I didn't really care for. It's not that there was ever any tension between us. I just didn't feel I was getting what I wanted. Ray was getting really frustrated. I remember toward the end he cut the alien queen battle, the power loader queen battle at the end of the film. He was really nervous, cos he hadn't given me the action cutting that I wanted and I'd had to mess with it a lot and there was another editor who was cutting some stuff, and I was liking his action cutting better than Ray's. Ray is just a dear guy and a really good editor, but he was struggling with it. SO, finally, he just grabbed all the film, locked himself in his room, said "Don't bother me." Not mean or anything, but "I just gotta do this." And he went in and he cut the entire last eight minutes of the picture. He showed it to me very nervously. He cut in a day or two. He showed it to me very nervously and I watched the whole thing and I said "It's perfect. It's absolutely perfect. Don't change anything." And that was that. He felt like it was such a huge victory because he had actually got it. He had mastered the style for the film. Sigourney, she's very liberal politically and despised the idea of any kind of guns or anything, and tried to talk me out of them having weapons. I said "They're marines. They'd have weapons." She said "Do I have to carry a weapon?" I said "Yes." She said "Why?" I said "Because it's not Sigourney Weaver in the film. It's Ripley. And Ripley wants to survive." So I took her out shooting a Thompson machine gun, out behind the studio, and she fired off a 50-round magazine from the hip. And then she looked up at me with this sly grin and said "That's really fun." Another liberal bites the dust. There were a few things she asked if she could do when we had our first meeting. She wanted to die in the film, she wanted to not use guns and she wanted to make love to the alien. And between the third and fourth film she got to do all of those things. But fortunately for this film, I said no to all of them, even though I was petrified. I thought she'd bolt from the project, but she didn't. She had a lot of good ideas. But she did have certain specific things she thought should be done in the Aven mythos. When she got to a position of power on the later films, she made that happen. This scene coming up with Ripley and Newt, which is the attack of the facehuggers, was a really tough scene to orchestrate, prepare for, as far as we think we're now back 16 or 17 years. So we don't have any kind of digital animation and there's not gonna be any stop-motion animation, and these facehuggers have gotta come to life, so we created I think a half dozen different facehuggers that would do different things to create the performance coming up, including our hero, which had completely articulated hands, multiple cables that had to be controlled by six puppeteers for one facehugger. We had one that would run across the floor. We called him our pull toy. We had stunt facehuggers that we could throw to hit the wall. We had actually two different heroes. There's the one that crawls up over the counter coming at Newt. And then a completely articulated one with tongue and fingers that Ripley would fight off with all of the cables down her arms through the whole sequence. And there's so much that happens in that. You think of the facehugger that's coming after them, and multiple to create that one scene.

This is, to me, the creepiest part of the movie. This thing running around, that sound effect he did of the facehugger. The first scenes of this movie when he did the chestbuster. The sequel, A/en - he took care of it in five minutes. That first scene. That it was a dream. - That was great. I thought it was so smart. It was just great. His storytelling. - The sound effects. That scrabbling noise. The way this whole thing was laid out in the first Aven and the second one, the whole genesis of the way it would start out in the pod and then it turned into the facehugger and then it turned into the alien.

A Iot of the shots of it scuttling along the floor were done on our miniature stage. That shot where it just scuttled by was done right next to the twelfth-scale cargo lock. At the base of the twelfth-scale cargo lock there was a little set there. So Jim would have five or six or seven little setups poked in between our miniatures. We'd fog up the stage and get ready to shoot, but he needed to shoot with no fog, so we'd clear the stage, he'd shoot his thing and then we would continue on. So it was like one giant filmmaking unit but we were doing two or three miniature shots simultaneously and he was doing four or five live-action inserts. A concentrated dose of Aliens filming. It's very hard to see Paul Reiser as such an evil guy, after so many years of his TV series. He used to hate to ride to work with me. I used ride to work with him. And he didn't like it? - Hated it. I was like a real primitive. He's a sophisticated comic. - What were you doing? I was always grunting and groaning. Smoking, burping. - He hated everything about me. What a boring ride that was. You've been carrying this baggage a while. This is a good forum. - Let it rip, baby. It was because of the character he was playing. He's such a prissy, corporate guy in this. It's tough in these kind of movies. Especially when you're young, if you're playing a good guy, you're always hanging with the good guys. You don't trust yourself as an actor to be friendly with the bad guys. "One of the bad guys might wreck my big scene." We were too serious as actors to be able to hang with Paul. He was reading the paper the whole time. It was like I was interrupting if I talked to him. You didn't wanna ride to work with me? I was in a different area. You were right round the corner. You didn't want me with you. - Bullshit. We're yanking these facehuggers around. I called them rubber-chicken facehuggers cos they were these floppy ones. The crawling one had a mechanism inside it. That was shot backwards. We pulled the tail off and shot it backwards. There was a pretty good mechanism built into the ones that are really articulated, but a lot of the time we were just yanking them around on fishing line and doing it in cuts. People probably wonder why I had him shoot the window before he jumped through it. The idea was it's tempered glass. You have to get the crystal structure of the glass to shatter before you can go through it. So this is a bunch of grown people fighting a rubber chicken, basically. But, of course, it's the actors that make the effects real in our minds. Great sequence. I love the red light that he uses in this too. The warning light. That happens in the other sequence too when the aliens are coming through the roof. Look. This is another scene that James Cameron sets up as the family scene. There's just the three of us there as a family, ready for Aven 3. David Fincher did a really good job photographically and so on. I think it's really a well-made film, visually. It's just kind of a slap in the face of the fans who invested in Newt and Hicks and all of those character relationships. I understand the instinct, of course, which is you have to make it your own. I just don't think you should make it your own at the expense of what people like, personally. But everybody's gonna make their own decisions. But I had to change some things and make it my own on my film. And I know that Ridley probably watched it and wasn't pleased with a lot of things. He probably wasn't pleased with the fact that he hadn't made it. But I think it's tough. It's tough to see somebody continue on something that you've started. But then you learn to just get over it because that's the nature of this business. I think the trick to this type of film is you just take it utterly seriously. You don't step outside yourself and try to have fun with it and wink at the audience. You take it absolutely seriously and you don't give the audience a chance to question it. And if the actors can sell it, then it works. This is a distinction. I never got the sense in the first film that the alien had an intelligence that allowed it to manipulate their technology, but I didn't see that necessarily as a barrier here because certainly these creatures have been around longer. The alien in the first film had only been alive for 24 hours. It was still an infant, even though it had grown full size. These aliens have had weeks or months to figure things out. There's no reason why they couldn't figure out the electrical system. Not that they're technological, but the rudimentary stuff. The implication is that they're pretty clever. It's clear by the end of the film that the alien queen knows how to operate an elevator. It's amazing how such a low-tech little device that Jim sets up early on really builds the tension. You don't have to see them. You just see that locator and you realize they're getting closer with a little sound effect. This is one of the first films we worked on that we worked with a video to look at our effects. Prior to that you would shoot a shot and go by your perception at the moment as to whether it worked or not and looking at dailies the next day. You didn't see an instant replay. But on this film we used a video tap and offside video camera on some of the shots to analyze what worked and what didn't. It was fairly expensive to have a video tap camera. In most effects stuff, the cameras used were... These old Mitchell cameras were great but they didn't have video tap. It was an expense a lot of times you couldn't afford. More welding. - Just don't look at it. Look away or you'll be blinded. Weld it but don't look at it. Put your hand there. Don't look at it. Is this where you bite it? - Yeah. Well, pretty soon. I'm gonna keep talking, even if I'm dead.

I don't Know if you remember, Bill. I had to ask Jim to go after you. He was just gonna have you being pulled down. I'm like "Let me go after him." It was a nice thing. - I remember. I think about how much shooting we did in this sequence with those pulse rifles and the full loads. I was standing to the right of you, so I got to eat a few of those. I was catching the shells. This was a hard-core sequence. It was the first time... - You had the earplugs in. But it was one of the few times we really got to shoot those guns off, which was great cos we were carrying them all the time. This is it right here. - This is a great shot. That one right there. Looking up and seeing these dudes. This is great. POV. Ooh! There's a whole nest of them things coming out of there. They're coming out of the woodwork. Let 'em have it, Vasquez. Come on, Hicks. Get your gun off. The alien head in the first film was very smooth. The top was smooth. Underneath it had a skull shape and a ribbed design. Originally it was designed to see that through a transparent surface in the Giger design. I thought what was under the surface was more interesting than the final look, so we just modified it slightly. We used a lot of strobe lights to simulate the back blast of their weapons. Every time they're firing weapons, we're aiming strobes at the actors, which created a nice sense of a lot of energy flying around as they fire these weapons. Did you say "motherfucker"? - I think I did. I think I've used up my quota there. That could have been my quota.

"You want some?" That's a good one. "You want some? Come on, I got it." And then I get pulled below. - Oh, man. That was good. And that thing comes up... There it goes. From here on out... - The movie dies right there. The movie's just not quite the same. He had the script for Near Dark. This movie just doesn't stop. You had the script for Near Dark and were thinking about that. The movie just goes into overdrive from here on out, right to the bitter end. It just doesn't stop. There's an editing technique that Jim likes to use which is blank frames in between the discharge from the weapons, sort of whites out the frame. It really helps the staccato cutting. I was having them splice together individual frames of white flash leader. The negative cutter said - we did a lot of flash frames and one-frame cuts in that sequence - we had more edits in this reel 12 of Avens than in any complete film the negative cutter had done before.

So the whole high-tech war has degenerated to the point where they have to follow the little kid or they're gonna die. Movie air ducts are always big enough to get through. It bears no resemblance to the real world. The theory is that the audience has never been inside an air duct. Air ducts are not big enough to walk through. But it's a conceit. It's also a conceit taken from the first film. Supposedly, the way I survived in the colony was going around everywhere in the air ducts. We supposedly played a game and part of the reason I was called Newt is because I was so quick in the air ducts and no one really liked me on the colony because I beat them at the game. Fortunately it ended up saving us from the aliens at this time. For this air-duct set, we had vertical air ducts so that we could actually drop the aliens down with the monofilament, so that you would feel - and you'll see it in here - feel them crawling on the ceilings and the walls, that bug aspect of them. My cameo's coming up. - Who were you? Vasquez had never fired a handgun. Jenette Goldstein hadn't. She was living in England. Not a lot of handguns. For the wide shot she was great, but for the close-up of her killing the alien, her recoil wasn't accurate. Unlike today, when I'm on a set, I dressed up in suits on this film and the crew couldn't believe it... That's me. That's me. - All right, girl! All of the close-ups of the handgun firing at the alien was me. People couldn't believe it, since I always dressed up in suits. I needed something to give myself the appearance of authority. When I came in in the fatigues and fired a gun... They saw the real Gale. - They were pretty surprised. Jim told me that I was in my office and the crew were saying "What are we gonna do?" "Who here has ever fired a handgun before?" And he said "My wife has." He said "I'm gonna go get her and she's gonna do the shot." And I did. Jenette has very fair skin, freckles and had hair down to her waist and blue eyes. So somehow we managed to see that if we cut all her hair off and gave her dark make-up and brown contact lenses, she was actor enough to actually pull off this Hispanic character. That was a tough actual physical effect. There was nothing optical. That fireball came flying through that corridor. We didn't have digital anything back then. We didn't have digital fire. This is cool. It was a chute. It was about three stories high and it had a big old curve at the end. I Kept sometimes messing up so that I could redo it. Important survival tips in this film. Never grab the jacket. Grab the hand. Unless you have a Newt-finder device in your pocket, then you're OK.

Gene Siskel had a big problem with this scene because of the jeopardy of a little child with an alien monster. That never occurred to me, but I wasn't a parent when I made this film. It probably would bother me more now because I could empathize too much with the child. The thing that never bothered me about the idea of putting a child in jeopardy is that somehow you just know inherently that Ripley's not gonna let her die, no matter what it takes.

I know they spent a lot of time on the first film finding a big guy, building a suit that the tall guy could wear, but in watching that movie and studying it, I realized that the alien almost never appears in the same frame with a person for scale, and so we just decided to use normal six-foot-tall people, cos we needed a lot. We knew we couldn't find ten seven-and-half-foot-tall guys. Probably the only exception is when the alien rises up behind her, but I figured that wasn't a problem cos she was small anyway. We create the scale in our minds anyway. Michael was so good at this. This shot is in my show reel still. If you examine it now, you can see the monofilament on the tail, pulling it up. I hate to low-tech it, but it's what it was. Goodbye. You just see the little doll head as it sinks. That's where Jim over and over again has those images like that. There it is right there. The eyes kind of close.

This is where they use that A-B smoke on me. That stuff's nasty. They used that on Near Dark. They've outlawed it. Hard-core stuff. You breathe that in and you get lung damage. It's tough when you're doing these shots. It becomes all about if the smoke reacted right. I've always thought the worst job on any set is the guy who makes the smoke. Less smoke, more smoke. Waft it up, waft it down. Fire that guy. Get a new smoke guy. Elevator doors never close fast enough for me. It's just a pet peeve with the way the world is wired. The shot of the vest getting hit by acid was an insert that was shot on M stage as we were shooting the dropship flying out of the atmosphere processor. As it's blowing up, Jim was shooting with his back to us. He was stepping on our track that the camera ran on, while it was being photographed. He would step off the track and we'd run the camera down the track. And there was A-B smoke drifting over into our area which made it hard to breathe. Miniature on wires here. Again, recalling that these miniatures are moving very fast in reality. We're seeing them here slowed down. We run the camera at high speed for miniature work to give a lot more scale. It gives it the size that's needed to make it feel believable. If you were to see it as it actually happens, it would look like the small scale that it is, so this is why it's done. We'd gone back in after we built the atmosphere-processor miniature and before we did this shot we had a whole crew - well, four or five guys, including us - running in and adding extra detail because we were pushing into the interior of it. So we had a day and a half of heavy-duty microdetailing going on there.

This movie laid the foundation for me for a lot of stuff. Again, it was working for Jim that was really fantastic. I remember running into Jim when he'd been hired to write this. I was at the airport. He was handing off a parcel to some courier. I don't know why. I guess because they were setting up shop in England. He said "I'm writing the sequel to Aven." I said "Write me a good part in there." I kidded him. Six months later I tried out for it in England and I didn't think I'd gotten it. Your friends are usually the last people to hire you. Cos you have no mystique with them. And then I got a call. I almost took Police Academy 3 or something, and then I got this. More money than I'd ever seen in my life. They hired Bob Wildcat Goldthwait instead. I don't know who got the better deal, but I think I did. Everybody was looking at the film as well-made in the sound and visual effects, but we were pleasantly surprised when Sigourney got nominated. Not that we didn't think her performance was worthy, but there was no precedent for a horror film being honored by the Academy for acting. The fact they took it seriously I think still is a real milestone. Interesting thing coming up. Another shot that Jim stuck me with but it's really kind of fun is when we meet the queen alien. This is gonna come much later. She ends up back in the elevator shaft. In fact, the elevator shaft is not nearly big enough to hold the queen alien, so only her front half is in the shaft. The rest of her is sticking out the back of the elevator on the set, but you never really think about it in the movie when that elevator opens and the queen comes out, that she would never be able to fit in it. And since 90 per cent of the queen alien stuff in this movie is all full size, we had to deal with the sets based on the reality of her size and the reality of the sets. I never forget Jim coming to me when he first had written the screenplay. He said "I've got this idea for the queen alien." "We'll get a couple of guys in a suit. It'll have four arms. We'll carry it on a crane arm." "We'll have puppeteers working the legs." I'm going "He's completely out of his mind." Then a split second later "No, it's Jim, so it probably'll work." Remember when we did it with the... The garbage-bag test. Exactly. Do it first and make sure it works before you do the design. So we rented a little crane behind my studio and built a little body form for two stunt men, ski poles for arms, foam-core legs, rod puppets, foam-core head, and looked at it and "You know what? It works." Same with the power loader. We did all that in foam core first to make sure the concept worked. Unfortunately, it was too heavy and had to be supported by the crane. By the wires. But you'd never know that in the movie. No. The queen, when she drops out of the dropship, she's virtually a huge marionette, and there are wires in the shot and we never see 'em. Wires on each of her legs, her entire body, when she comes down out of it. It's a 14-foot hydraulically operated marionette. I learned to have a great deal of respect for second unit directors doing this movie cos I had to shoot second unit, small shots and big shots. And to have to make sure that every light and everything was exactly the way Jim wanted it so that it fit in seamlessly makes you realize that that job, which fortunately I haven't done since working with Jim, is a rough job, because it's not being creative, it's making sure you're doing what the director wants. It originally started that Sigourney was supposed to have run into Paul Reiser and he did a cocoon scene as well, and she gave him a grenade. And later on in the movie, there's a part where it's a big old boom, and it was supposed to have been him setting off the grenade. But obviously no one really knows any of that because it was cut out of the movie. I run into Sigourney once in a blue moon at an airport lounge or something. She's always great. She remembers Louise's name, my wife's name. A very thoughtful woman. - Gracious. She made this series what it is. Without her, it just wouldn't be the same. Also Ridley Scott and Jim, they both really showed up loaded for bear on these films. I've never followed the other movies. I couldn't tell you much about... I thought Ridley was doing the third and Jim the fourth. That was David Fincher. I've seen a lot of his movies and liked 'em. Yeah, he's great. I personally installed Carrie in this cos I wanted to make sure it was done in a way that wouldn't hurt her or create any discomfort. So I'm smearing this gak all over her and she looks up at me and says very quietly "It should be illegal for you to do this to little kids."

She was just winding me up. She wasn't serious. The cocoon was probably one of the most horrendous scenes that I had to film. There was a little hole and they made it just big enough for me to crawl through. It was all made out of fiberglass and I couldn't actually even put my feet down. I would sit in there for what seemed like hours on end but I doubt it was. I couldn't rest my feet on it in case it broke. I couldn't do anything in case it broke. We just had to keep replaying it over and over again, and it took days. When Sigourney actually tears apart the cocoon, When Sigourney actually tears apart the cocoon, because it was made out of fiberglass, she tore her hands all up. They were all bleeding and everything. This was just not a fun scene to film. It took forever.

We also had to replicate Carrie for this because of all the shots that Sigourney was gonna have to carry her. And she was too heavy. And it was also Sigourney's back. Exactly. So we built a little replication of Carrie's body. It was actually a really beautiful dummy that she carries through much of the scene after she saves her. It's not enough to build a 14-foot queen alien. It's gotta have a head that comes out of its helmet-like head. This was a great shot. This was a combination of miniature and then we built the last part of the egg sac and attached it to the full-sized queen. This is all full size. This is full-size 14-foot queen when we see her for the first time. That's a big puppet. And the extruding head. We had to come up with a new way of doing the teeth, making them translucent rather than metal, as with the alien warriors. When Jim first came to me, he had a painting of the queen alien. Just like with 7he 7erminator, he had already had her designed. I had some ideas and started doing some drawings myself, one of the rear legs. It ultimately ended up being virtually Jim's original design. I'll never forget the two of us sitting on drawing boards at his house where he would draw one part of her and I'd draw the other part, and it would be all coming together. He's one of the most talented artists I ever had working for me. I think he remembers it a little differently. You don't think he'd look at it like that, as an employee of Stan Winston's? I also love this sequence when Ripley is communicating with the queen. "See, I can wipe out your children." I shot that shot. She wants the queen to call off her warriors, and when the queen doesn't, she goes to town. Kill the eggs. Wasn't there a puppeteer whose hand was dropping the egg? That was Nigel. He would push it out. It was on a plex rod underneath the egg. Somebody was under the set to place it, otherwise it would roll over and fall down. My job was to take that egg and shove it back in. I know Sigourney still has liberal guilt over this whole scene. But this is the classic cathartic purging with fire. You purge the nightmare by burning it out. And the idea that this is the only way she's ever gonna have psychological closure. Not, by the way, a new idea in films. And probably one that doesn't have a whole lot of basis in real human psychology. It feels right to the audience, but if you're that traumatized, it wouldn't help you that much. But she sure unleashes holy hell on these guys. We had a sharpshooter fire a real bullet into the miniature egg sac. This is a miniature. That's a front projection shot. A lot of smoke in the air tends to take the edge off of it. It was a bit heavy. Obscuring the plate.

There's a shot here where the platform the queen is on, there's a big explosion when she tosses the weapons belt here, and the queen, when it falls, is actually quarter-scale miniature in which we use a double-mirror setup. We had a beam splitter in the foreground reflecting large-scale fire that was off to the right of the camera and behind the puppet was another mirror that was angled off to the left where we had another very large-scale fire. We had a full-size alien queen and then we had this miniature one. The miniature one flails a little bit. The alien queen design could be created so beautifully today with CG animation. That didn't exist then, so we had to figure out how to do it with more conventional means, so it's a bunraku puppet more than anything.

This electrical-charge effect was footage we acquired from Gene Warren from Fantasy II. He had several hundred feet he had shot for the first 7erminator film. We needed that type of generic lightning effects and we had that film shipped over to us. It was actually tesla coil footage. Give credit where credit's due. Once again, just the subtle things, like the countdown, reminding the characters and the audience that there's a ticking clock. The huge queen alien comes round the corner here. It's one of our tougher shots, for her to come out around the corner and see her right here, and looking at her. Neat performance.

I'll never forget my first conversation with Steven Spielberg about Jurassic Park when he said to me "You built a 14-foot alien, full-size." "Why can't you do a dinosaur?" Everything leads to something else. The water weenie in Abyss to the T-1000 in 72. Everything's R and D for something you do later on.

This is the shot. The queen just thinking, looking. A little cock of the head, knows what she's gonna do. "I got a plan. I'm not stupid." That woman can act. The female computer voice that's counting down is an intentional tie-in to the first film, to create the same sense of panic as the clock runs down. And then this is what you expect to happen, that Bishop completely betrays them. But I think what you don't expect is that he didn't, that he turns out to be a good guy. People always expect the worst of others, never the best. And so when a character actually lives up to their promises, and Bishop said he was gonna stay and he did, you don't expect it, you don't see it coming.

This is a front-screen projection shot. There's a dropship comes up behind Ripley on this landing platform. The element that we shot for that was shot at high speed. Because the camera's running at such high speed, the actual movement was so fast, it's almost not possible to move an object that quickly.

Look at this. Big old queen inside that little elevator. We'll just keep it dark inside. It's a black curtain at the back of it that she's coming through. You think it's all lost and there it is. It's hard to imagine how fast that actually moved in real time. Any time the miniature is supposed to be traveling fast, it had to be traveling three, four, five times as fast. This down-view was extended with mirrors on the stage floor. It was not apparent in the shot with the fireball coming up, the earlier cut, as you see this set continuing very far down, but those are mirrors on the studio floor. IIn addition to the pyro, we used flashbulbs, buried in the set, to give extra flashes. This is another instance where the score is so terrific as well. When we were in the scoring stage, this was the last cue that Jamie had finished. And then there was no... It was like "OK. And then what?" "I didn't get around to the last cue of the film." And in a miraculous burst of creativity, he generated the final cue overnight. I didn't know how to work with an orchestral composer when I made this. I don't think James knew how to work with directors that well. I think he was a brilliant composer, but he had a lot to learn and so did I. By the way, that nuclear explosion is a big light bulb. Literally, a light bulb covered with cotton. We didn't have any budget for a big effect there, so we just made something up. But it didn't create problems between us personalitywise but I went to the scoring session expecting to hear the movie, and an orchestra started to play stuff that didn't work. The music was beautiful, but it didn't work on a scene-by-scene basis. I didn't know what to do. There was no second round. It was like "Here's your score." And James went off to another film. We wound up doing an awful lot of music editing and moving stuff around. He was never happy with the outcome even though he got an Academy Award nomination cos it didn't reflect what he had created, and I didn't like the process. So when we got together on //fanic, I said: "What can we do so that doesn't happen again?" "Cos I like your music and I want you to do this film." So we worked out a methodology by which we'd communicate better. And that was a great experience, by contrast.

This is a great effect, of the queen tail coming out through his body. It's basically a soft tail that we pulled with a monofilament. And it works great. You would never know it. Alec Gillis was throwing... After Bishop was torn in half here, you see his torso go one way, the top part go the other way. Alec would throw it and it would land in these goofy, ridiculous positions. Setting up for this one shot right here was two days of work, to get that shot there. This shot of it landing was shot over and over again. I remember seeing the dailies. The arms would land behind its head. It was one of those funny moments. This sequence used a combination of the full-size and the quarter-scale queen. Where there was a lot of movement across the floor, we'd use the miniature. If it were in place or close-up, we'd use the full-size. And this is the biggest marionette in the history of motion pictures. She is every technology we had. She's rod puppet, she's hydraulic, which was new to us, she's a breakthrough, radio-controlled, wired and rod, all in that one beast. And seamlessly intercut. With this miniature puppet of Doug's. With a miniature puppet of Ripley. This sequence in the fight between Ripley and the power loader and the alien queen, we used the movie cam which was able to change the frame rate within one shot, and were able to start at 24 frames per second and then go down to 18 or 20 frames per second, so that when the internal jaws came out, they whipped out. When you analyze this scene, it's all just quick cuts. The alien's hand is in one shot and you see a bit of the head and the hand, but it's just all done with puppeting.

I think it's actually good. The intention today would be to do it with computer graphics and see it more full-figure, and I think seeing it in bits and pieces is actually more powerful. This was a hard shot. This is the pylon rig. You can see it behind her. It's like a long crane arm.

I remember seeing the film, midnight screening on Hollywood Boulevard, and that line brought the house down. People stood up and cheered. Probably the most gratifying moment of my producing career was their reaction to that shot. When we screened this film, we knew we had a hit. The audience went crazy. And it was an industry audience, so they can go either way. They'll either be very negative or they'll be celebratory of a film they think is working. Once again, you have a mixture of full-size power loader and queen and miniature. This is all pretty much full-size here, which shows you how well-articulated what Stan Winston's guys did. These shots of the power loader taking big swings were quarter-scale shots. That's the kind of action that would have been very hard to stage successfully with any kind of dynamics in full scale. Thinking about it, this looks like a heavyweight machine, and it was actually just flimsy plastic. You'd probably lift a lot of that if it were in pieces. That whole arm, that claw mechanism, only weighed a pound or so. It had some sort of a counterweight, cos so much weight is pushed out forward. You forget again that there was a bodybuilder inside of there helping to manipulate it. Basically, Sigourney was standing on the fronts of his feet, as I recall.

And a quarter-scale version of the airlock was also made, as well as the full-size, so, depending on the shots, the requirements, you'd use one or the other.

Interesting that we chose not to score this. I just felt it had a greater sense of reality and it might seem a little over the top if it was being driven by music, whereas it plays very real, somehow, without music.

I think the score cuts in when the queen grabs her. That lever's always right there that allows you to depressure your entire spacecraft. It's a bit like the button in the Krell lab that blows up the planet that you put in the children's learning room. And this is so terrific. We had a little trolley underneath the set that he would ride on. The shot as the queen falls away was done in miniature. We had taken pieces of the set up to the top of the stage and dropped them away. We had people physically holding a large sheet of black cloth, sort of fireman-style, standing on the stage floor, and we dropped these pieces from the top of the stage. There's an interesting thing here. When Newt slides, Bishop, you see his body, you see how the gag is done. Lance is down through the set. It shows you how people watch a movie. They watch the hands, whether he's gonna miss her, and they don't see a bad visual effect that's happening on the other side of the screen. But I was watching it with an audience for about the fifth time before I saw that myself, cos I always looked where I was supposed to look. The queen was stop-motion, right, coming out of the Su/aco? The exterior shot of the queen was, I think, puppeted bluescreen. It's got a bit of a stop-motion quality, but it's just... The original thought was to use stop motion in this film, but the problems of time as well as the kind of action that stop motion creates is different than puppeted. There was also questions about these slime elements. The thing was always dripping and there was a lot of real-time elements that were mixed in that would have made it hard to do a stop motion. But, again, time was a factor and we had to do a shot a day or every couple of days and cover things with multiple cameras. It would have been very impractical to do it that way. She recovers from her traumatic event pretty quickly. But she's been through a lot so she's got used to this stuff by now, I guess. I didn't think it was appropriate to show Sigourney in quite the same sexy underwear she was in at the end of A/en, I'm sure much to the fans' disappointment. It's a movie I'll always be proud to have been a part of. It's great to get together and revisit it after so many years. It holds up. It was a great experience. - This was my first film. Was that your first film too? Yeah. He gave me my first job. It was amazing to step into that. You do movies and always have high hopes, and it's only a few that turn out as great as this one. That's why it's so special. I think at the time we knew we had a great script, a great director, who really knew how to put this thing on film, and there was a great camaraderie amongst all of us. It was great to have this common purpose and know we were making a great science fiction classic. There was no question in any of our minds that we were involved with a great film. We showed up on the set in London and to see the stagecraft that they had done. That's why when people talk to me about working for Jim Cameron, that's why it's so great to work with him, cos you know you're in great hands. There's a possibility that it's gonna be a great, great movie, a really good possibility. We've all had hits and misses since, but it is a filmmaker's medium. When you go into a movie like this, you just give that extra, added whatever it is, cos you know that there's a shot. It surprised me how it went across lines of people who love science fiction but beyond that - you don't have to be a science fiction genre buff to enjoy it at all, or it wouldn't have lasted as long as it has. And what a challenge, to be the director of the sequel to A/en, which, like you were saying earlier, really revolutionized science fiction films. This was the first monster to come down the pike that was so intricate and interesting in the whole way it evolved, and the Giger design of the original monster. To be bold enough to go "Yeah, I'll write and direct the sequel." Tough duty. I don't think anybody else could've pulled it off. I had so much fun on the A/fens experience. A once-in-a-lifetime experience. Definitely. Who can say that their name comes up second in the credits? Not very many people. Wow. Did we actually make that movie? For 18 million dollars. - It wore me out watching it. It was what? A 60-odd day shoot? It was like a 65-day shoot. Very proud. We did good. Let's do it again. - Hats off to you, Jim. The man kicks butt, doesn't he? He's the maestro. I think in terms of actual technique, it's crude compared to films made now. But I think in terms of storytelling, it's as good as I'll probably ever be, which is really what filmmaking is all about. It's about the people, it's about the relationships. Of course, then they made the third film and killed everybody.