Alien director Sir Ridley Scott has never shied away from sharing his brutally honest thoughts about the sequels to his 1979 classic. It's no secret that he didn't love what James Cameron delivered seven years later with Aliens, but for most Xenomorph fans, the sequel remains the franchise's best instalment.
Scott later returned to the series with Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, both of which earned mixed reviews. Now, Fede Alvarez is developing the Alien: Romulus movie (which has been given Scott's seal of approval), while Noah Hawley is working on an Alien prequel TV series for FX.
Talking to Deadline about his new movie, Napoleon, the filmmaker reflected on not being asked to direct Aliens and shared his thoughts on how different Cameron's vision was from his.
"Well, Jim is about that, the way he designs, his whole process is The Ride. As I learned somebody else was doing this, I actually had been trying to develop something," Scott remembers. "When Jim called me up and said, listen...he was very nice but he said, 'This is tough, your beast is so unique. It’s hard to make him as frightening again, now familiar ground.'"
"So he said, 'I’m going in a more action, army kind of way. I said, okay. And that’s the first time I actually thought, welcome to Hollywood.'"
It's easy enough to see why he wasn't happy and Scott went on to talk about his initial reaction and how, around the same time, he found himself also fighting to bring his original vision for Blade Runner to our screens.
"I was pissed. I wouldn’t tell that to Jim, but I think I was hurt. I knew I’d done something very special, a one-off really. I was hurt, deeply hurt, actually because at that moment, I think I was damaged goods because I was trying to recover from Blade Runner. Which I thought I really got something pretty special, and then the previews were a disaster. And [my cut of] the film lay on a shelf for almost, I think 10 to 12 years after that until it was discovered by accident at a Santa Monica Film Festival. Somebody said, let’s dig out the old print and run it for fun. And they called Warners. And with the greatest respect to Warners, they’d lost the f*cking negative, which is like, what? And somebody panicked and went into a drawer, yanked up the first can that had Blade Runner on it, never checked it, sent it to Santa Monica."
"They ran it. It was a cutting copy with partly Jerry Goldsmith on it, and partly my great musician on it. And it was a copy where we were getting reached to the end of the short strokes and trying to cut and recut to, as it were, save the movie. And this version had no voice-over and had what I call the film noir ending, which is Deckard stares at the origami in his hand, which is a unicorn, nods his head as if to agree and he goes off with his gal. So that got rediscovered. It came right out like a cannon shot, and went everywhere. And of course I know it. I knew it then that it was a very special form of science fiction. It hadn’t really been done like that ever and became a kind of copycat benchmark for most of the TV shows and science fictions. I mean, I got the social order of dystopian society really well, and I think that had never been done before. Now it’s copied again and again."
Confirming there's no bad blood between them now, Scott did later add, "Jim and I talk often. We’re not exactly friends, but we do talk and he’s a great guy."
There had been rumblings that Scott might return for another Alien movie, but those plans appear to have fallen by the wayside due to Disney doing its own thing with the 20th Century Studios franchise.
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