The ‘Aliens’ decision Ridley Scott was “pissed” with
There are few films quite as important to the history of cinema as Ridley Scott‘s eternally memorable 1979 movie Alien. Having made significant strides in both the science fiction and horror genres, Alien is rightfully considered a true masterpiece and has retained all its quality several decades after its original release.
The film tells of the crew of the commercial spaceship Nostromo, who investigate a distress signal from a strange derelict spacecraft only to enter into a terrifying showdown with a deadly and seemingly invincible extra-terrestrial. Starring Sigourney Weaver, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt and Ian Holm, Alien is a masterclass in art and set design, acting, narrative and sound.
Scott’s movie made such an impact that 20th Century Fox commissioned a sequel that arrived in 1986. However, Scott was not hired to direct the film, rather being replaced by James Cameron, who’d recently handled the widely acclaimed The Terminator, and it was Cameron who steered the Alien narrative in more of an action-heavy manner.
Discussing the moment that Cameron called him and revealed the direction in which he was taking the Alien sequel, Scott once told Deadline, “I actually had been trying to develop something. When Jim called me up, 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. I’m going in a more action, army kind of way.'”
Still, Scott couldn’t help but feel a bit miffed that Cameron had suddenly swooped in to take away his cinematic darling, especially when Scott seemed to have something in the pipeline. The directing icons still talk to this day, so the studio’s decision to bring in Cameron was not the end of their relationship, even if Scott admits they’re “not exactly friends”.
“I was pissed,” Scott explained of the Alien sequel heartbreak. “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.” Around the time that Aliens came about into pre-production, Scott had just got off the rather torturous production of Blade Runner, so the news that he would not be involved in Aliens came as a double battering.
However, the best directors rise up from their lowest moments, and Scott looked ahead, “did a lot of pushups, play tennis, thrash the shit out of a tennis ball and look at the next movie”. Though a series of middling films followed Blade Runner in the shape of Legend, Someone to Watch Over Me and Black Rain, Scott eventually returned to form with Thelma & Louise and then Gladiator in 2000.
Aliens is often discussed alongside the original Scott movie, with cinephiles preferring either the tense claustrophobia of the 1979 science fiction horror masterpiece or the all-action Hollywood sequel of Cameron. It’s understandable for Scott to have been hurt by 20th Century Fox’s decision to bring in Cameron. However, having handled The Terminator, it’s equally easy to see why the studio might have wanted the audience appeal of a fresh face in the director’s seat.
Both films have earned critical acclaim for very different reasons, and they are considered the two best movies in the Alien anthology by some distance, even though Scott might still have his reservations about Cameron’s sequel.
