Color & grading

Everything was built. I don't think there were any locations on that film. They didn't love you as much as Tim at that point. Yeah. So when you have to use locations, it gets very complicated to maintain the tone and maintain the feeling of being in this future. Yeah. I remember the first time I met David Snyder, he goes, every inch of the movie is future. So nothing is left to chance. And a lot of that is the color palette and the lighting. Yeah.

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That was, again, Alex Thompson working with Alex to create a color palette for San Angeles present day and then to create a color palette for this. And this was also shot in a kind of complex in San Diego. That was an amazing dress for San Diego.

57:07 · jump to transcript →

I think Don Burgess did a wonderful job here. If you notice the color palette he's dealing with and how you really can almost feel the harshness of the drug and what that's leading this character to experience. Yeah, I think if I recall, he changed the color palette to a much cooler sort of blue-green color palette and really desaturated it.

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So it made you sort of feel all the lack of warmth and anything of that nature in the scenes that make you feel like everything's been drained out of her life, just like he did with his color palette.

1:30:27 · jump to transcript →

So these in this extended cut, I do think you get a better sense of who these characters are. I think one of the problems with the film is that, by the time the third act is coming around, you see a lot of bald-headed guys getting killed. But they're fun characters. They each did have an identity. And particularly, I think, Golic. The little crazy guy got some of his stuff excised a little bit much. The little crazy guy got some of his stuff excised a little bit much. When he releases the creature, you see that he's nuts. And his experience in meeting the creature, he has sort of interpreted it a little differently than someone who's not quite as bent might, and so therefore he feels it's his duty to release the creature. Sort of like a Renfield and Dracula kind of relationship, which I thought was interesting. And it added a little bit of clarity to this whole scene here. This is, again... Look how beautifully this stuff is shot. Fincher was very much into these browns and sepias. Well, the alien in Alien³ was still more of the blackish... The black, black alien. But because of the lighting and the color timing and so on, he does pick up this sort of overall sepia tone of the color scheme of the film. Whereas in the second film, even though there were browns in the body of the alien, there was a lot of blue light that was being used, and that reflects off the glistening slime. So they feel more blue-black. And this one feels a little more sepia. And actually, in Giger's work, if you look through Necronomicon, you really do see two different tones. You can see the blue-black and the brown-black. And so we opted more towards the brown-black. And, again, every one of these films... What's great about the Alien series is that every one of the films has the stamp of each director on it. No matter how you interpret that, or whether you like that or not, each movie is stylistically its own film. All owing to the original, but still maintaining some of its own quality.

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