“I love the problem”: the movie Ridley Scott called a C-level film he turned into an A+
Filmmakers often test themselves by seeking out challenges, but Ridley Scott could have been wading into potentially dangerous waters by agreeing to direct a picture he knew heading in wasn’t even a B-movie but a C-level story.
That didn’t dissuade him but instead presented a sizeable hurdle that needed to be overcome. With the benefit of hindsight, many auteurs have confessed they knew they were making a terrible movie all along but either didn’t care enough or were being paid too handsomely to try and stop the bleeding, but that wasn’t the road Scott wanted to head down.
Instead, he’d viewed the narrative framework as having plenty of potential, even if a few tweaks and flourishes were required to transform it into something truly special. Fortunately, his collaborators were of the exact same mind, so they put their heads together and eventually fine-tuned the screenplay into a stone-cold classic.
Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett’s Star Beast was pitched as Jaws in space, but it needed something more. Scott wouldn’t have directed the story in its original form, but once the plot was refined and the production designers and effects team began working their magic, he was increasingly confident Alien was going to be a success.
“Alien is a C-film elevated to an A-film, honestly, by it being well done and a great monster,” he said to Wired. “If it hadn’t had that great monster, even with a wonderful cast, it wouldn’t have been as good, I don’t think. So, in this instance, my special effect behind it all would be the world.”
By working closely with the writing team, Syd Mean, HR Giger, and other minds, who he described as “serious futurists, great speculators, great imagination, looking to the future,” the brain trust hammered Alien into shape from a shlocky creature feature into a razor-sharp haunted house in space flick that boasts an iconic monster, an ensemble cast making their characters feel like fully-realised people and an uncomfortable amount of tension.
“That’s the stretch, that was the target,” he explained. “That I wanted the world to be futuristic and yet felt – not familiar because it won’t be – but feel authentic.” That posed a number of challenges for everyone involved, but Scott was thrilled by the prospect of clearing those roadblocks. “I love the problem,” he said of meeting those prospective pitfalls head-on, and it would be an understatement to say Alien delivered.
Sci-fi movies about fearsome beasts lurking in the shadows had been done to death, but nobody had ever seen anything like the Xenomorph before. Combine that with Sigourney Weaver’s imperious turn as the iconic Ellen Ripley, the increasing sense of claustrophobia, and a film where every frame is dripping in rich and pulse-pounding atmosphere, the C-film is a certified A+ in everybody’s book.
