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