When it was announced last summer that Fox was working on a prequel to Alien, there were an awful lot of groans. Those began to die down once it was revealed that the director of the original film, Ridley Scott, had decided he wants to helm the new film. However since those initial announcements, we haven’t heard much more about the film. Thankfully though, Scott has now broken his silence and revealed to MTV a few more details about the movie.
Apparently they’re now onto the fourth draft of the script, with Scott saying, “It’s a work in progress, but we’re not dreaming it up anymore. We know what the story is. We’re now actually trying to improve the three acts and make the characters better, build it up to something… but there’s no question about it, we’re going to make the film.”
However the real question is what’s it going to be about. Although we’ve always known it was set before the first film, everything else was speculation. Now Scott has revealed that, “It’s set in 2085, about 30 years before Sigourney [Weaver’s character Ellen Ripley is born]. It’s fundamentally about going out to find out ‘Who the hell was that Space Jockey?’ The guy who was sitting in the chair in the alien vehicle – there was a giant fellow sitting in a seat on what looked to be either a piece of technology or an astronomer’s chair. Remember that?… I’m basically explaining who that Space Jockey – we call him the Space Jockey – I’m explaining who the space jockeys were. “
He adds that Weyland of the the Weyland-Yutani coprporation will be in the film, and that it’ll be set in the early days of terraforming. Scott also says’that while Ripley won’t be around, “The main character will be a woman, yeah. We’re thinking it could go down that route, yeah. When I started the original Alien, Ripley wasn’t a woman, it was a guy. During casting, we thought, “Why don’t we make it a woman?'”
Perhaps most intriguing is what he has to say about the alien itself. While he tries to avoid being too direct when asked if we’ll see a reinvented creature in the prequel (particularly considering the alterations made to the creature design after his first film), he skirts around it by saying, “I think, therefore, I have to design – or redesign – earlier versions of what these elements are that led to the thing you finally see in Alien, which is the thing that catapults out of the egg, the face-hugger… I don’t want to repeat it. The alien in a sense, as a shape, is worn out.” He adds that they’re likely to go back to H.R. Giger for inspiration, but what exactly he means by saying the alien is ‘worn out’ is intriguing, and suggest perhaps the Space Jockey’s have more to do with the aliens looking the way they do than we perhaps expected.
And if you’re wondering when we might be able to see all this, Scott says, “We’re hoping to have it in theaters in late 2011, or maybe the best date in 2012.”