‘Alien’ stories burst forth in film
PARK CITY, Utah – In space, no one can hear you scream.
But they’ll probably hear you laugh watching “Memory: The Origins of Alien,” an entertaining new documentary about Ridley Scott’s “Alien,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival late Thursday night.
A follow-up to his 2017 doc “78/52” – which dissected Alfred Hitchcock’s infamous “Psycho” shower scene – director Alexandre O. Philippe takes a loving look at the making of Scott’s 1979 classic, which set itself apart from other scifi movies of its era with realism, a female protagonist (Sigourney Weaver) and most unforgettable, icky body horror.
Anyone who’s seen “Alien” knows precisely what we’re talking about: that grisly moment when Kane (John Hurt), splayed across a table on the spaceship Nostromo, convulses in pain as a small alien creature bursts from his chest. Splattered with their now-deceased colleague’s blood, Ripley (Weaver) and the crew look on in terror, before the monster wriggles out of the room.
It’s an indelible scene in movie history that was also quite humorous for the people behind it. Some of the more amusing tidbits we learned:
The original alien looked a lot like a penis.
“Memory” (which is still seeking distribution) explores the “chestburster” scene at length, starting with the look of the alien itself, which was heavily drawn from Francis Bacon’s 1944 painting “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.” Scott, screenwriter Dan O’Bannon and production designer H.R. Giger also were inspired by parasitic wasps, who are known to eat caterpillars from the inside out.
But early prototypes of the alien puppet weren’t scary at all, resembling a plump, featherless chicken, a small dinosaur and – as one woman who worked on the movie points out – a penis with razor-sharp teeth.
The set reeked, thanks to cow innards.
Scott and Giger eventually settled on a cobra-like alien puppet, which took the film crew nearly four hours to rig up inside Hurt’s shirt (during which time, he laid on the table drinking red wine and smoking cigarettes). They then stuffed his shirt with cow organs pur- chased from a local butcher shop, to give the appearance of Kane’s guts spilling out. Cast member Veronica Cartwright (who played Lambert) laughingly remembers it smelling awful, making it difficult to stand near Hurt.
All that stage blood was super-slippery.
Once they were finally ready to shoot, it took a few tries for the alien to rip out of Hurt’s shirt. (Hilarious outtakes of it getting stuck inside are included in “Memory,” which drew the biggest chuckles from audience members at an early screening.) But the crew kept on pumping fake blood inside, so by the time the anticipated “chestburst” happened, the entire cast and room were covered in it.
Cartwright remembers slipping and falling on the floor during filming but quickly recovered by the end of the scene.