After directing the first Alien film in 1979 and then returning for 2012’s Prometheus and 2017’s Alien: Covenant, Ridley Scott has now passed the baton to Fede Álvarez for Alien: Romulus — while still giving a few notes.
At the Romulus premiere in Los Angeles on Monday, Scott — who is a producer on the project — told The Hollywood Reporter that when Álvarez showed him the movie for the first time, “I was hugely relieved that it was potentially a huge film and I just said, ‘You don’t have to take a note but I’ll tell you what I think.’”
The filmmaker explained that he wrote down notes instead of saying them aloud to Álvarez, “then he reads them privately, kicks the wall, punches the door, and then comes back out and said, ‘They were good notes.’” Scott also made a suggestion to cut down the film, noting, “Directors tend to make it too long; it was long so you don’t want to lose your dynamic. The dynamics in this kind of movie are everything, and he had so much going on; he didn’t need so much.”
In choosing Álvarez to take over the franchise, Scott pointed to his previous work — which includes Evil Dead and Don’t Breathe — and emphasized, “You don’t give this to a starter because you’ll get eaten alive by the studio… people have no idea what it is to be a director starting on your first movie with everyone telling you what to do. Talk about too many cooks in the kitchen, are you kidding me, and you’ve got to actually say, ‘Stand back.’”
Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn and Aileen Wu star in the film, which follows a group of young space colonizers who come face to face with the most terrifying life form in the universe.
Of taking on the franchise, Álvarez said, “Alien has always been the scariest movie ever for me, so to be able to go into that world and bring it to a new generation, and bring it to life in a way it’s never been brought to life before and in such a realistic and almost documentary way, it really was the things that made all my nightmares.”
He also explained the decision to use practical effects over visual effects, saying, “Obviously it’s easier to just shoot an empty space and get some CG creature later on; we didn’t do that. We went all the way to create creatures — we did technology of today with the philosophy of the old movies, but with technology of today to create something that people don’t see onscreen everyday.”
Alien: Romulus hits theaters on Friday.
Tiffany Taylor contributed to this report.