ALIEN VAULT Unlocks Ridley Scott’s Masterpiece

Alien Vault: The Definitive Story of the Making of the Film
written by Ian Nathan
Published by Voyageur Press in 2011
176 pages
ISBN #978-0760341124
Buy at Amazon.com

Unquestionably, the original Alien was probably just as ground-breaking and influential as the original Star Wars.

Now, Ian Nathan takes you behind the scenes into the world of the xenomorph in Alien Vault: The Definitive Story of the Making of the Film. Nathan is the executive editor of Empire magazine, so you’d expect him to have all sorts of access to behind-the-scenes material. Which is why the book disappoints on that front. I was hoping for more in-depth material about the development of the story itself. Where the whole thing started.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s a fascinating look at the beginnings of the sci-fi/horror flick, and it does a great job presenting a lot of the elements that Ridley Scott used to make Alien such a spectacular, literary film.

The book is filled with notes about how Scott made the cast feel edgy and uneasy, making them wait for long spreads of time before he was ready to shoot. And yes, there is the full story of how the chest-burster scene was shot, and how the cast pretty much was caught off-guard. And much of the goo that shot out of Kane’s chest was actually organic in nature.

Alien began life as a script called Memory, then Starbeast, re-worked a few times after Dan O’Bannon came back to the United States following the collapse of an early adaptation of Dune – which wouldn’t have been anything like Dune – and rewrote it with Ron Shusett. In the course of development, Roger Corman was even interested at one point. But eventually, 20th Century Fox decided on a young newbie commercial director named Ridley Scott, and the rest is history.

Included in the book: storyboards (Ridleygrams, as he calls them) and a complete diagram for the Nostromo, giving you a sense of the geography of the ship’s innards.

And H. R. Giger’s artwork features in the book as well. Necronom IV was the inspiration for the final design of the xenomorph, and it’s easy to see why. It’s a grand mal get-under-your-skin alien. Something that people hadn’t seen before. And it almost got Giger left out of the production, as executives at Fox were put off by the stark depictions in his artwork.

Giger’s work is also the basis for the many psychosexual overtones that permeate the film – at least, according to Nathan. It seems to be the main idea behind much of the book – pointing out how the imagery and subtext all go back to some deep psychological meaning worthy of Freud. After a while, it got a little tedious for me, to be honest. But I can overlook it to a certain extent, mainly because of the many details about the production that made it into the book.

Other interesting tidbits include how Sigourney Weaver – then an unknown Broadway actress who’d only had bit parts in movies – showed up for her audition in hooker boots; how Yaphet Kotto kept trying to come up with ways his character could beat the alien; how originally Ripley and Dallas would have had a romantic relationship of some sort… the list goes on. And it even gives you an idea of how the creature could look and act a little differently in the sequels. It’s an explanation that actually makes a certain amount of sense, even when applied to Alien3 and Alien Resurrection.

It’s a fun ride into the world of dark noir science fiction. And you catch a glimpse of Ridley Scott’s style as a director and imagination craftsman, something he would go on to perfect in Blade Runner. But it’s still only a glimpse. For my taste, it’s not anywhere near as in-depth when it comes to the technical aspects of actually fleshing out the script and making the movie.

For those who are especially jazzed about anything related to Alien, this is a must-have for the shelf. You’ll get a lot of information, a lot of “oh, cool” moments. For more information, visit the official website.