The Book Of Alien Extracts

Below are some extracts from The Book of Alien by Paul Scanlon & Michael Gross, which I own and contains a lot of information about the film and what the directors and artist thought about it. I searched through it looking for bits that related to my presentation which will be on coherent world-building. All these extracts are what I thought may be useful, so I wrote them down for research.

Ron Cobb “I like the challenge of designing a spaceship right down to the fuel tolerances and the way the engines function” he says. “Films are ideal for at least demonstrating the premise. It’s an excitement I have to communicate.”

A crew go to explore a huge pyramid on the horizon, they scale it and find an opening on top, and a volunteer lowers himself down the hatch,

He finds a giant chamber that seems like a tomb, or maybe a place of worship. There are a weird statues and some sort of hieroglyphics (which later prove to be representative of the Alien reproductive cycles). This of course, is where the Alien spores lie waiting for someone to come along.

The sequence offers a thoughtful contrast among three cultures human, Alien, and the unfortunate space jockey.

It was up to H.R. Giger to design the planetoid surface, the derelict ship, and its pilot. As he would do with the Alien itself, the Swiss surrealist applied his very personal vision to the designs. He calls it “biomechanics,” and the simplest definition might be “half-machine, half-human.”

But the response that Giger’s style evokes is much stronger and more complex than that. The derelict’s interior – running more than forty feet from floor to ceiling and taking up almost an entire sound stage – has something uncomfortably familiar about it. The cross-ribbing running up the walls, separated by a median structure like a spinal cord. The entrances to the derelict look sort of sexual. Someone once wrote that Giger’s work could be called “machine age eroticism.” But here’s the punch line: none of it looks human.

Sure, it isn’t supposed to be human, but persistence of vision teaches us to recognise familiar humanoid structures and patterns. Giger takes these patterns and skilfully combines them with mechanical images. The end result can be profoundly unsettling. Giger modelled the planetoid surface with real bones, bits of motors, pipes and wires, using plasticine as the equalising agent. The end result was a curious, surreal and vaguely threatening environment.

 Giger’s concept of biomechanics is fully realised in his designs for the film, as these interior and exterior drawings of the derelict ship demonstrate. In biomechanics, machines appear to be organic; organisms have a mechanistic quality. And above all, says Giger, “I like to work with bones.”

 Why are there three forms of the Alien? Ridley Scott offers this explanation: “I would have loved to have a third dimension on the creature, including the fact that there was a civilisation and that maybe the derelict ship was a battlewagon, or a freighter that was carrying either its own kind of weapon from A to B, and something went wrong. But without that, you still have to put perspective on the danger of the thing, like showing that even its reproduction is frightening.

“I try to put that across in the end sequence. I want to show that the Alien has a limited life cycle, like a butterfly. And within that period of time, once it decides to expose itself – to coin a phrase – once it jumps out of the egg, it has to reproduce and spread as fast as possible, maybe in a cycle of only days. And so in the last sequence, you see slime emanating from the Big Alien’s body because we’re trying to convey that maybe he’s sealing himself in again, like a cocoon. Also by that point he has to be provoked to attack, because he has to get on with his life cycle.

Dan O’Bannon “the whole idea is that they have a very complicated life cycle. They have a spore that contains what amounts to an ambulatory penis, and they require a host to reproduce. And when a host approaches the spore, this thing springs out and attaches itself to the host and deposits eggs in the nearest available orifice and then dies and fall off. And then it grows to maturity with incredible speed, it’s tremendously hungry, and it has a need to reproduce.”

“But the creature that pops out onboard the spaceship has never been subject to anything at all except a few hours in the hold of a ship. And therefore, quite literally, it doesn’t have an education. The Alien is not only savage, it’s also ignorant.