Ridley Scott, the director behind the horror classic Alien, has revealed in a new interview that following the release of Alien: Resurrection in 1997, the sci-fi franchise had reached its conclusion – until, many years later, he returned with Prometheus.
“I think, wrongly, on Alien I thought the old beast had worn out. Because when we did the first [set of films], it was me, Jim [Cameron], David [Fincher], and the French guy [Jean-Pierre Jeunet] – there were four. They wore out. The beast wore out,” Scott said, speaking to Total Film (via GamesRadar).
“And, in a funny kind of way, I found the beast partly by accident. Without that alien, you wouldn’t have ever had this film. With all the great casting in the world, when you have a film where it’s about being locked in with a creature – you better have the creature right.”
“It can’t be The Creature from the Black Lagoon. And so many of these things are terrible. And it hangs on what that monster is, and also how you play with it when mostly less is always better for tension. And it’s easier to have a film that’s blood and gore with no tension. I tried to avoid that. And so it died.”
“And I sat and thought, ‘What a pity, because this is a huge franchise – maybe biggest apart from Star Wars and Star Trek ever – with legs.’ Because there’s still a long way to go with it. So I sat down with Damon Lindelof, actually. We sat down at a table, and spun a wheel to see: where could we go? And it all began with Prometheus…”
Prometheus, a prequel to the Alien films, was released in 2012 and followed five years later by Alien: Covenant. The latest film in the franchise, Alien: Romulus, takes place between Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986) while incorporating storylines from the prequels.
