How Ridley Scott almost ruined ‘Alien’ with his on-set demands
Ridley Scott is a director who knows what he wants. When he has been allowed to realise his uncompromising vision, the world has been gifted with some of the best movies of all time. However, the process of getting that vision to the screen has often been fraught, and the director has been accused of being so demanding with his actors and crew that it can lead to discord. And by discord, I mean terrified actors who get hit in the face with blood jets and others who refuse to speak to him.
When Scott made Alien, it was only his second feature film, but he was already determined to get things his way. He insisted that sets be built smaller than usual to properly replicate the claustrophobia of the interior of the Nostromo spacecraft. In fact, John Hurt complained that the spacesuit helmets were particularly oppressive, but he still had to wear them.
Scott’s treatment of his cast could never be described as warm, and he had a habit of keeping them in the dark about what was about to happen when cameras rolled. The most infamous example of this was during the chestburster scene. Scott wanted the actors to be genuinely terrified by the baby xenomorph punching its way out of Hurt’s chest, so he simply didn’t show them exactly what it looked like nor give them any warning about how much blood there would be.
Veronica Cartwright, who played Lambert, told Empire, “When they finally take us down, the whole set is in a big plastic bag, and everybody is wearing raingear, and there are huge buckets around. The formaldehyde smell automatically made you queasy.”
Yaphet Kotto, who played Parker, added, “We were all wondering what the hell was going on. Why is the crew looking at us the way they’re looking at us right now? Why are they wearing plastic shields?”
When the chestburster made its entrance, a compressed blood machine fired grue with such force that it hit Cartwright square in the face, and she passed out from fear and shock. Kotto was so horrified and angry that, according to executive producer Ron Shusett, “he went to his room and wouldn’t talk to anybody.”
Kotto confirmed, “We didn’t see that coming. We were freaked. The actors were all frightened.”
Indeed, Scott’s tactics were potentially so extreme that there’s a parallel universe in which Alien was a dud, and he never worked in Hollywood again. Instead, the measures he took resulted in a classic film – and a cast who admitted that he got pretty incredible performances out of them.
In 2024, Scott confirmed that the Alien shoot wasn’t just bad for the actors – it was far from a picnic for him, too. When asked which times in his career were the most challenging, he told The Telegraph, “The early days, when I hadn’t made a name for myself. Doing Alien was a bit of a nightmare because every move I had to explain.”
Scott didn’t take kindly to being told what to do because, even though he wasn’t a name in Hollywood at that time, he was doing perfectly well for himself in UK advertising. He revealed, “I was 42 years old and independently well off, so I don’t want a Hollywood producer telling me what to do. Doing The Duellists, I’m asked stupid questions. Doing Alien, I’m asked even bigger stupid questions. So I get ferocious.”
