Hi, it has come to my attention that the closed-captioning isn't working on the new Alien Suit video. While I work on getting that fixed, here is the script for you to read.
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Gordon Carroll: “First question you ask for what is the alien going to look like? Is it going to be a guy in a rubber suit with fins?”
Ivor Powell: “Ridley's fear and his horror of what the movie might be tarred with at the end was ‘I do not want to make a film about a man in a rubber suit.’”
O’Bannon: “Over in Paris, I’d met a Swiss artist named Hans Giger. He brings out a book, art books, paintings in it. I started looking at his paintings and it took a minute for it to register what I was seeing. What I was seeing seemed to be very disturbing. It was that point that it struck me. I said, you know something? If you could get this guy to design a monster movie, you would have something absolutely original and unique.”
Ridley Scott: “If you haven't got the old monster, you ain't got a movie. I met with Dan O'Bannon and he dug out Geiger's books. So what do you think of this? I said, My God, that's it. It was a kind of rather Egyptian panel of a creature who look part humanoid, but definitely an alien. I was just so knocked out by the whole elegance. That's it. We want to be shooting by so and so. So that's it. Just to get THIS right is going to be incredibly difficult.”
On February 23, 1978, at Shepperton Studios in England, work began on the full-sized Alien known then as “Phase III”–with Phase I being the Facehugger and Phase II being the Chestburster.
They had the painting from Giger’s Necronomicon that got Ridley Scott to sign on, but the bottom half of what the thing would look like was a mystery (Rinzler 75). Scott knew that he wanted to do something that was unlike anything that has been seen in a monster movie and despite loving Giger’s painting, he wanted to test some ideas to make a creature that wouldn’t look like a man in a rubber suit (Cinefex 40).
The first idea was to make the alien completely mechanical but they didn’t have the budget to pursue it (Cinefex 40). The budget also didn’t allow them to try stop-motion animation, which I have to say I’m pretty happy about considering how dated the stop-motion animation in The Terminator and Robocop look compared to their mechanical effects (Cinefex 40).
There was very little time to design the Alien, and they knew the real challenges would come during the execution of the designs. Creating a believable monster seemed nearly impossible to Giger, because he could always sense the human being in the monster costume (Giger 58).
Scott: “in all the films I'd seen, which are either horror or sci fi they nearly always been let down by in the final notes, when you see, you know, the man in the rubber suit.”
Giger completed his sketches quickly, and they were discussed in detail. He designed the Alien with a long head that served a functional purpose: it concealed a long tongue with sharp teeth that the Alien could flick out like an anteater (Giger 58).
Adding a kind of shell on top of the head created room under the dome for a visible brain mass, potentially consisting of living maggots (Giger 58).
Scott also wanted the entire Alien to be transparent, like Giger’s biomechanoids, with the outer skin covered with cables and pipes (Giger 58).
Giger: “Biomechanical art? Yes. That’s an expression I used for my first portfolio… in ’69. There are a mixture [of] biological figures in mechanical environments from the 19th century, a little bit.”
You’ll soon see how the Phase III alien was designed to be sort of a mishmash of machinery and organic tissue, which conceptually seems to have been forgotten as the franchise went on.
The maggots and transparent skin were cool ideas, but when they tried to implement them they ran into some bizarre and hilarious problems. We’ll get to that later.
But as we discussed in the previous episode, on April 5th Giger was sent back to Zurich for what would turn out to be six weeks. At the same time that Giger was dismissed there was a lot going on behind the scenes–or behind the behind-the-scenes.
This was Giger’s first involvement with a major movie production and while he was away, the producers delegated the tasks of bringing each of these elements to life. Giger was hired to design and oversee; others would build from his designs (Cinefex 39).
Peter Voysey would handle the Derelict and Space Jockey. They hired creature maker Roger Dicken to build all three phases of the alien, but they needed something much more technically advanced for the Phase III head. Scott and the producers felt this was beyond the Shepperton team, which made one person at the studio very unhappy. And a kind of rivalry would later form..
There were lots of effects shots concerning the spaceships and alien planet, but Scott and the producers knew that the Alien itself was far and above the most important part of the movie. Outside of designing and building the various stages of the alien, there were special effects involved–they had to have convincing lifelike movements.
For this, Scott and the producers decided to go outside the effects team they had working on the miniatures and reached out to Carlo Rambaldi–the creature-maker who won an Oscar for his work creating the giant mechanical head and hand of the 1976 King Kong adaptation (Cinefex 40).
His work on the King Kong head was kind of a disaster for its production because it kept breaking down, which he blamed on the Italian movie industry for its lower budgets and fast shooting speed (Rinzler 133).
He then made the aliens in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which solidified his reputation when he was able to match the fluid versatile movement of stop-motion with a mechanical alien (Cinefantastique V09 20, 23). When contacted by the Alien producers, Rambaldi was busy building thirty vampire bats in his garage in Hollywood for a movie called Nightwing (Cinefex 40). He was interested in Alien, but he couldn’t make it work with his schedule.
“Fly away.”
On April 14th, Fox nearly doubled the budget based on a storyboard presentation by Scott. So they would have more money to work with for the Alien suit and head, but the compromise was that the shooting time was scaled back from seventeen weeks to thirteen weeks, putting them in even more of a time crunch to get everything ready (Cinefex 40)
While approvals and budgets changed in April, Scott started testing bodies and movement. At this point, Scott had fully accepted that the full sized Alien would be played by a person in a costume,
but there were dozens of ideas for what kind of person that would be. Scott brought in a contortionist saying,”I had a guy come into my office who ran around on his hands with his head tucked in and his feet stuck out. He looked like some strange sort of crab. He ran all over the top of my desk, and then hopped off on his hands and scuttled across the floor. It was amazing, but he was limited in what he could do. I even brought in a whole family of contortionists with the idea of taking an adult contortionist and then somehow carefully strapping two very small children, who were also contortionists, onto him in various ways.
Scott: “The one underneath was always staggering all over the place.”
He said, “Now what do you call yourselves? And he says, ‘the aristocrats!’
You can imagine if you did that, and then covered them all with some sort of a suit, you’d get a very strange-looking object. It could really scare the shit out of you coming down a corridor” (Cinefex 40).
Giger: “it was always a little ridiculous, the whole thing. And it wasn't scary. And so we decided, I think it's the scariest thing is to be very close to a human being.”
In the meetings, they brought up every uniquely-sized person they could think of–football players, wrestlers, and “very tall men,” but the problem there was that if they need the alien to do anything–like descend from chains in a tall room–they would need to use a stunt-man and all the ones the production had at its disposal were average-sized guys (Cinefex 43). So, why not just have a stuntman play the alien?
Dicken, who at this point was on the full-sized alien had enough. He offered to play the role himself just to get on with it (Cinefex 43). Dicken said, “Nobody seemed to know what the hell they wanted. I went to about three meetings in London and watched these characters rolling around on the floor - and quite frankly, I thought it was a bit Mickey Mouse. I mean, it was obvious to me that none of this was going to work, but I had to just sit around wasting time while everybody else figured it out” (Cinefex 43).
Finally, Scott brought out this photograph of famous Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl next to a six-foot-seven-inch tall Nubian man, saying that they should cast someone like this to wear the Alien suit (Giger 60).
I’m sure this must be related, but in the first episode of this series, we talked about a sci-fi fantasy movie Scott was developing that fell apart leading to him getting involved with Alien. Well, part of that movie involved a race of very tall and thin African-looking men with long tongues. I have to imagine that this picture was part of the pre-production for that movie.
Giger kept tinkering with his Necronom IV design. The long head was perhaps its most striking feature, but it needed to be a bit less phallic. The tail also needed to feel more dangerous. It should be slightly less erotic and slightly more monstrous. Giger had a brilliant idea that sort of seemed counter-intuitive at first–remove the eyes. Eyes are often used as the focal point of a monster’s scariness–think glowing red eyes. But removing the eyes somehow makes the creature more alien and subconsciously gets rid of that vulnerability.
Sketches
This was something he borrowed from Necronom V that looks strikingly similar to the final Phase III head design.
Giger: “The Necronom V has no eyes. The Necronom IV that has this kind of pipes or tube behind it. So it was a combination from that.”
Giger: “I didn't want to have eyes because it makes the monster more dangerous. It's more scary. And because you'd never know where the monster is looking.”
Giger added a “translucent shell” covering the top of its head where the eyes would be (Cinefex 43). When you see the skull beneath the shell, you can see that the Alien does have eye sockets.
Giger: “The only thing in the alien is that, the difference is that they are have kind of sunglasses. Now we have this kind of shell. And here the tail, it's different. And yeah, also...the other things like these tubes, and this is like alien.” (The Beast Within)
The final tweak came from screenwriter Dan O’Bannon who suggested that it have six fingers with two thumbs on each hand (Cinefex 43).
Weirdly, at one point, Scott wanted a stage between the Chestburster and the full sized Alien that would be captured on the Nostromo’s cameras positioned in corridors (Rinzler 115). It never got going because they had so little time, but the idea was that it would be like a [quote] “black egg wandering on feet” that we would see unfold (Rinzler 115).
Because they had so little time, they needed to cut this transition concept and focus solely on the main creatures, but it was exciting to see that in Alien Romulus, we finally got a glimpse at this transition.
Regardless, the Phase III alien was fully designed. Now they just needed to figure out how to build it…
Mechanical wizard Carlo Rambaldi was too busy in early April, but now it was May and maybe things have changed. Gordon Carroll reached out to Rambaldi who had left his garage and was in a large workshop in a suburb of Los Angeles (Cinefex 47). He was working on another production, but he did have some extra time to work on Alien and on May 2nd, he was given six-thousand-dollars to make a clay model of the full-sized alien (Rinzler 132).
According to O’Bannon, Rambaldi had been approached very early on to do a design of the full-sized alien, possibly in those several months before Scott was hired, and said that Rambaldi’s design [quote] “looked like a half-molten marshmallow with a bunch of big, pretty blue eyes” (Rinzler 132).
Apparently, the Fox executives had been confident that they would get Rambaldi eventually because they allocated a hundred-thousand dollars in the revised budget in April for Rambaldi to create the mechanical alien head (Rinzler 132). They sent a list of requirements including, “head moving horizontal and vertical… mouth opening and closing… lips pull back into snarl…. Pulsating throat… eyes moving… forked tongue moving in and out” and gave him a due-date of August 22nd (Rinzler 132).
The deal with Rambaldi would be drawn up and signed in Late June of 1978 (Rinzler 132).
Scott was annoyed that Carroll was going over his head to hand off important decisions to Rambaldi saying, “The problem was I was perceived as a learner coming into a system that knows more than I do” (Rinzler 132). He was offended that he was seen as inexperienced despite making thousands of commercials with his agency serving America, France, and England (Rinzler 133).
Scott said, “‘I’m a monster already. You don’t go from where I was to where I went without being a bit of a monster. You have to be: Things only get done when you get angry. Have you noticed that? I was a door kicker and a wall puncher” (Rinzler 133). Scott had an office door with a glass panel that he shattered twice by slamming the door–after the second one, they didn’t replace the glass (Rinzler 133).
The politics bothered him, but he still needed a working head on schedule.
Despite this, Scott soon recognized that Rambaldi, with all his expertise in the business, would be essential to bringing the alien to life.
Rambaldi said, “They asked for my help because it was impossible for them to get what they wanted over there” (Cinefantastique V09 23).
Before working on the 1976 King Kong, Rambaldi had already worked in the Italian film industry for twenty years on [quote] “more than 350 films and television shows” (Cinefantastique V09 29). Working in Italy was much more difficult than in America because the budgets are lower and the shoots are quicker, but this experience coupled with his background in art direction and mechanical engineering set him up for great success on Hollywood movies (Cinefantastique V09 29). Earning an Oscar for King Kong allowed him to set up his own effects company in Hollywood where he would stay (Cinefantastique V09 29).
Scott said, “Rambaldi looked at the head, loved the artwork and the whole intention of the film and, even though he was up to his eyes in other things, he was somehow able to say, ‘Okay.’ We virtually pleaded with him to do it, saying, ‘You’re the only man who can make this thing work.’ And he said, ‘Yes, I am the only man who can make this thing work!’” (Rinzler 133).
Of course, Rambaldi would go on to make an alien arguably just as iconic as the Alien, although this one would be much friendlier.
Giger’s paintings and a “rough sculpture” were given to Rambaldi along with a copy of this painting by Giger from his Necronomicon book, which I have to blur part of because of what its tongues are (Rinzler 133). Use your imagination. This painting would serve as Rambaldi’s blueprint for how the Alien’s face should look (Rinzler 133).
Giger also sent some drawings of how its [quote] “tooth-encrusted tongue” would come out (Cinefantastique V09 23).
Rambaldi started by sketching out how the mechanics of the head would work and what would be needed and proposed a solution that he could deliver in four weeks and then got to building at his own workshop in Los Angeles and was basically left alone by Alien production (Rinzler 133, Cinefantastique V09 23).
Rambaldi said, “I figured the head would require seven different movements, so I proposed a series of mechanical joints and muscles activated by flexible cables. The front portion needed to pivot up and down and side to side, independent of the rest of the head. I wanted the lips to curl back: and of course, the mouth had to open and close. Inside, the tongue needed to move out and back, and its teeth had to open and close. And I also thought there ought to be a pulsating jugular movement at the throat” (Cinefex 47).
One problem that became immediately apparent was that this mechanical contraption featuring all of these abilities, would have to wind up light enough for an actor to wear it safely (Rinzler 133).
And who was this person going to be? The production was hard at work looking for their Phase III actor.
They wanted the full-sized Alien to be thin, tall, and elegant, but in order to pull this off, they would need an actor to be very thin because the costume is only going to add bulk to the body.
Scott initially wanted to cast a tall woman because he wanted the Alien to be a [quote] “very feminine creature” and thought of bringing in someone like the German countess and model Veruschka von Lehndorff who was six-foot-three and able to do strange insect-like poses (Rinzler 135).
Just a small note here, Giger would later work on a more feminine alien-human hybrid for the two Species movies. He also did a crazy-ass “Giger train” for a dream sequence in the first one.
Ridley Scott found the eroticism of Giger’s nightmarish paintings to be fascinating and thought that having a female hero fight a female monster would have a [quote] “great sexual connotation” (Rinzler 135).
They actually brought von Lehndorff in who did several insect-like poses for them as well as some other women, but even 6’3” just wasn’t tall enough, so they decided to look for a man (Rinzler 135).
Scott tested basketball players and actually brought in Peter Mayhew (who played Chewbacca) at one point to test for the role, but nothing was working (Cinefantastique V09 29).
It was a very specific body-type they needed and everyone they brought in either weren’t thin enough or tall enough. This would be a very difficult person to find, right?
Well, the production had put out a casting call looking for a “very tall, very thin actor” and that week, talent agent named Peter Archer was at a West End pub in London when he noticed a very thin elegant-looking man who must have been close to seven feet tall (Cinefantastique V09 29).
It was an amazing coincidence, so Archer went over and with a North London accent, the man introduced himself–Bolaji Badejo (The Beast Within). Badejo was 26 years old, six feet ten inches tall. He was from Nigeria, but he had been all over the world with his parents, spending several years in San Francisco and studying fine art in Ethiopia (Cinefantastique V09 29).
He said he was currently a graphic design student and the casting director asked if he would like to be in a movie (The Beast Within). Badejo was amused and curious and accepted the strange offer (The Beast Within).
Badejo said, “As soon as I walked in,...Ridley Scott knew he'd found the right person” (Cinefantastique V09 29).
It was a combination of “height, slimness and an erect posture” that made him perfect for the role (Cinefantastique V09 29).
I guess it is sort of a funny little easter egg, but there is a pack of cigarettes called Balaji, but it is spelled slightly differently.
It was early May and time was of the essence, so as soon as they secured Badejo, they had him go to the plaster shop and sit for a mold of his entire body (Cinefex 46).
Once the mold was completed, they made a mannequin of Badejo and sent it to Roger Dicken who spent a few days building up the Alien body with clay,
but when he made a mock-up of the head like Giger’s paintings out of wire mesh and cardboard, he thought the whole thing looked ridiculous (Cinefex 46). To match the proportions of Giger’s concepts, the head would be nearly six-feet-long, which Dicken thought was just way too much (Cinefex 46).
According to Veronica Cartwright, they also sent Badejo to Tai Chi and mime classes to learn how to make slow graceful movements for his performance as the alien (The Beast Within).
While Giger was waiting in Zurich, Roger Dicken was becoming overwhelmed with the task of not only making the Facehugger and Chestburster, but the full-sized alien as well. He was frustrated with the amount of different people wanting to make changes and add their own ideas into the mix (Rinzler 132).
On May 14th, Gordon Carroll called Giger and asked him to come back to England to work on the alien sets and give feedback on the construction of his creature designs, but when he arrived on May 25th and saw Dicken’s progress on the full-sized alien, he thought it looked terrible, saying that it looked like “a dinosaur from Disneyland” (Cinefex 46). He went on to say, “I was very depressed because I don’t like to do a nice design and then have it turned into something awful” (Cinefex 46). Giger totally rejected what Dicken had done, but didn’t offer any feedback on how to make it better (Cinefex 46). This really spiked the tension in the workshop.
A lot of tension was building because of the major time crunch. There wasn’t much time left to get every aspect of the titular alien ready for the shoot. Scott wasn’t sure that Giger was going to be able to come through with his work on the sets, so they assigned a whole army of people to help Giger achieve his vision (Rinzler 133).
Everything had to be finished by the end of August or they were screwed.
Giger was annoyed by what he felt was wasted time sending him back to Zurich for a month (Giger 16). When he was finally brought back to London, he was restless, feeling like there was so much he needed to do in order to fix the work and make it more like what he had designed (Giger 18). Giger would spend the end of May working hard on the alien landscape.
But during that time, Rambaldi flew to Shepperton studios for a week to work with Giger, figuring out the “muscles for the mouth” of the Alien (Rinzler 133).
In early June, they received a videotape from Rambaldi in Los Angeles showing a clay sculpt of the head that he had modified from Giger’s head design to fit all of the mechanics (Rinzler 149).
Rambaldi also spent two weeks making a two-foot-tall model of the full-sized “alien out of clay and videotaped it from all angles” but Giger felt that it looked too much like a dinosaur (Rinzler 149).
In his diary, Giger described Dicken as an aggressive nut and seemed to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown (Giger’s Diary 189).
When Scott and the producers received the tape, they told Rambaldi to keep going only with the head–time was running out and they had Roger Dicken working on the full suit at the studio (Cinefex 47).
And just as the panic was setting in, the production had another major setback. Roger Dicken was finishing up the Facehugger and Chestburster and was a few days into constructing the Alien suit, when he basically rage-quit the suit construction.
Dicken said, “I’d soon found that Alien was a ‘boardroom’ picture…One man wants a foot this way, another man wants a leg this way or a tail that way, and I can’t work like that. I’d already had enough hassles with the Chestburster and the Facehugger to know that I just wasn’t going to be able to come up with something workable [for the mature monster] in the amount of time I had left” (Rinzler 132).
Dicken was losing his mind and told the production to find someone else to make the alien suit.
Dicken said, “Pandemonium set in, and they said I was letting the picture down. But I just told them I wasn’t going to give myself a nervous breakdown trying to create this damned thing in the time required and under those circumstances. If I’d been left to my own devices, perhaps - but not with all the continual changes and setbacks I’d come to expect after nearly three months of sweating blood over the smaller ones” (Cinefex 46).
With Dicken off the suit and the head in Los Angeles, the production had a gap on its most critical build.
At the same time, Giger sat at the nearby restaurant–King’s Head–thinking about how disappointed he was by the clay models he saw of the Facehugger at Dicken’s workshop and the small model of the Alien on the videotape that Rambaldi sent over and determined that he would have to make the alien phases himself if he wanted them done right (Giger 60).
June is where Giger’s diary really gets going. After reading this thing, it could probably be summed up by: why must I be surrounded by fricken idiots?
Giger told Caroll and Scott that he wanted to stay in London to personally sculpt all of the alien designs himself (Cinefex 47). This was kind of a relief to them because, even though the Facehugger was pretty much done, they needed the Alien suit to be done as soon as possible and Dicken had just walked away from it.
They gave Giger a “full team of craftsmen” and had him get to work on the suit (Cinefex 47).
Everyone on the crew dubbed the Phase III Alien the “Big Chap” and this nickname is still being used to differentiate this version from those in other movies from the Alien franchise.
Supervising modeler Peter Voysey was busy on the Space Jockey, so they assigned sculptor Eddie Butler to Giger as an assistant and the two got to work (Giger 60).
When Giger saw the plaster cast of Badejo’s lower half—he didn’t like how the knees bent inward and the body looked too heavy in profile. He even suggested bringing Veruschka von Lehndorff back (Giger’s Diary 189). But once he saw Badejo in person, he realized the bad proportions were just the result of a rushed cast, so he ordered a new one (Giger’s Diary 191).
On June 5th, Badejo put on a rehearsal mask for test shots in the corridors. The results convinced everyone he was the right choice, though Giger complained the ceilings were too low (Giger’s Diary 193).
By June 7th, Giger and Eddie Butler began carving the Alien head out of Styrofoam as more bones from animals arrived at the workshop (Giger’s Diary 193). Giger was frustrated by Butler’s slow and meticulous way of working considering the tight deadline, and the language barrier made explaining things exhausting (Giger’s Diary 205).
Giger was given real human skulls to use in his construction of the Alien head concept. O’Bannon described seeing Giger at work saying, “Giger took one of the human skulls and jammed it right on the front, riveted it in place, and then started modifying it…It was such a beautiful human skull; it had been a real person, and he takes out his hacksaw and saws the jawbone off—and extends the jawbone six inches! Then he starts attaching other fixtures to it and building a new extension on the back of it. He’s doing this to a real human skull!’” (Rinzler 182).
“It's a lot easier to put down a fantasy in a painting than to translate such a creation into a costume that can be worn by a man. We realized this while constructing the aliens head. Now and then, our creation. It's a conglomeration of plasticine technical parts and a skull is subjected to a very critical appraisal. We're constantly feeling the pressure of losing time. It has to be finished by such and such a deadline. And this often turns the problematic construction process into a nightmare.”
On June 10th, Ridley Scott visited Giger’s workshop and reassured him that he thought they’d make it (Giger’s Diary 207). Two days later, Scott returned to pick his favorite elements from the head models: the head of Version 3, the back of the head of Version 4, and Version 4’s spines (Giger’s Diary 209).
The pressure was crushing Giger. He was unhappy with a lot of the work people were doing on bringing his designs to life–especially Roger Dicken’s task of building the Facehugger and Chestburster. Giger took it upon himself to try and build his own versions alongside Dicken while being entirely on the hook for completing the Phase 3 Alien. His diary during this time shows an artist falling apart, unable to sleep and feeling as though he’s surrounded by morons. Listen to this:
“[Ridley] Scott came for a visit. It is always embarrassing when you have to take the responsibility for something someone else did. Eddie [Buttler] made a kind of cap in polyester to anchor his wires and the Asian skull. The idiotic wire frame leaves hardly any room to do anything. I have absolutely no energy to waste on this miscarriage. The minute the upper body in plaster is back from the plaster shop, I’m going to make my own version. I’m so worried about not finishing the monster in time that it’s making me sick.” (Giger’s Diary 213).
On June 20th, Carroll and Scott visited Giger’s studio and saw that the head wasn’t finished yet (Rinzler 150). They saw that he was still spending time on the Facehugger and Chestburster (Rinzler 150).
Scott and Carroll told Giger to stop working on the Facehugger and Chestburster and only to work on the Phase III suit (Rinzler 150). Giger agreed but still planned to work on the smaller creatures on the side (Rinzler 150).
Giger was also producing a documentary on his work on Alien to promote his art and was told by Fox executive Peter Beale to spend more time working because the head sculpt needed to be complete by June 26th (Rinzler 150).
Giger knew how big of an opportunity this was to get his name out there.
When Fox sent someone to photograph Giger working, Giger went to producer Gordon Carroll about getting copyright permission to use the photos in his own book. When Carroll gave him the brushoff, Giger wrote that he “won’t take another insult like that” (Giger’s Diary 225).
Later, Giger contacted Fox about having his name on the poster as the creator of the planet, derelict spaceship, and alien creatures, and in the same size as the actors. He also wanted a copy of each of the alien phases and copyright permission to use Fox’s photos for his book, in exchange for the copyrights to the six designs that would be silk screened and signed (Giger’s Diary 227). Considering how much Fox is still earning off these designs nearly 50 years later, it doesn’t seem very demanding to me.
Giger was filled with anxiety when Scott came in and tried experimenting with the fragile plasticine model they made, but the rough head sculpt was ready (Giger’s Diary 223).
Supervising modeller Peter Voysey was back working on the alien suit with Giger and Butler and Giger’s girlfriend Mia Bonzanigo was helping with details like the alien’s ankles (Giger’s Diary 223). By June 29th, the suit was getting full attention–Butler on the hands, Voysey on the chest, and George Gunning on the back spine things that Giger called the ‘wings’ (Giger’s Diary 227).
There’s a running bit in Giger’s diary about being annoyed that Butler is still working on the hands after four days.
On July 3rd, the Alien head constructed from the skull and built up with plasticine and piping by Giger was packed and sent to Rambaldi in Southern California along with a cast of Badejo’s head, Giger’s new painting, and a “full-size sectional plan” (Rinzler 182, Giger 60). This locked the Los Angeles build on the head while the suit work stayed at Shepperton.
To ensure that a mechanical head will definitely be ready in time, Giger gave a second model to an engineer named David Watling at Shepperton to work on (Giger 60). Watling had made all seven R2-D2 units used on Star Wars and would make a mechanical head similar to Rambaldi’s but his would be controlled by radio as opposed to the cable system that Rambaldi was making (Cinefex 48).
When Rambaldi received the model head, he started sketching out a diagram of how the mechanics would fit (Cinefantastique V09 23). Rambaldi’s assistant said, “We couldn’t make a plaster mold off it because it was rigid and had a lot of undercuts, so we went to a rubber mold which we had to do in segments. From that, we made a polyurethane cast which gave us a flexible model to work with. Then we were able to use that to make our plaster mold. We had to go to a plaster mold rather than the rubber one because the special polyurethane that Carlo developed for his models needs a very porous mold. So all that took quite a while. After I made the mold, Carlo put a layer of clay in it to represent the final thickness of the skin, and then studied it to figure out where his mechanical parts were going to fit in” (Cinefex 47).
Things were delayed in part because Rambaldi’s assistants were forced to make a rubber mold of Giger’s fiberglass cast in segments (Rinzler 201). They couldn’t make the plaster mold they originally wanted because the fiberglass cast was too rigid and “had a lot of undercuts” and they could never get it cleanly off (Rinzler 201). They made a polyurethane cast from the rubber mold and then made a plaster mold from that cast (Rinzler 201).
Rambaldi sculpted a “final version of the alien’s head out of clay” and sent a videotape of it to London with “copies of his design” for approval (Cinefantastique V09 23).
Principal photography started at the beginning of July while the Alien head was being constructed (Cinefex 48). Because Watling’s version of the head was radio controlled, Badejo would need to wear a battery pack and air supply on his back when Watling’s head was in use (Rinzler 184).
The alien head was such a tricky task because it was essentially a large robot that Badejo would have to wear on his head. Rambaldi said, “[It] was very important to make it as lightweight as possible…I used fiberglass for the skull and moving parts, and aluminum inside for support. The tongue, for example, was fiberglass mounted on geared metal tracks and could extend about twenty centimeters - either very slowly or very fast. Each moving part was connected to a special sheathed cable - like hand brakes on a bicycle, only more flexible - which ran out through a hole in the base of the head. Normally, each moving part would require only a single cable, but the sideways movement of the head and the mechanism for the tongue required two opposing cables - kind of like reins on a horse. So there were nine all together. The cables were seven meters long and connected to hand-operated levers mounted on a wooden panel. By operating the levers in various combinations, a great many moves were possible” (Cinefex 47).
Rambaldi’s final construction of the head employed three main movements for the mouth–a cable to open the mouth, a cable for the second set of jaws to come out, and a third cable for those jaws to open (The Darkest Reaches).
What they keep calling the tongue, which I always just thought of as a second set of jaws, was made so that it could come out very slowly or spring out super fast like a snake attack (Cinefantastique V09 23).
Rambaldi: “The tongue, when opening the mouth, the tongue slides. Because it’s impossible to clear the actor, we used this mechanical system just to control this movement. But after this mechanism is vastly reduced, when the actor is inside because this is the exact position of the head of the actor.”
When Rambaldi had to leave, he left behind his chief assistant Carlo de Marchis who refined the mechanism during the production (Starlog #026 24)
For the teeth, Shirley Denny used polished steel so that they would be very shiny and reflect everything around them–this made the Alien look cold and indestructible (Cinefantastique V09 23). Rambaldi added controls for the upper and lower lips so that they could curl and reveal the teeth (Cinefantastique V09 23). To create the three tendons on each side of its jaw, they simply used shredded condoms that would stretch and be translucent to reveal the teeth from the side (Cinefantastique V09 23).
The fiberglass head was covered in a foam latex skin that was cast from a plaster mold made by Rambaldi’s assistant (Cinefex 48). It took two years for Rambaldi to perfect his own secret recipe for a polyurethane that replicated human skin (Cinefex 48). Usually polyurethane is spongy and uses two components, but Rambaldi’s had seven and tweaking any of the components would allow them to make it stronger or more elastic, which gave Rambaldi’s creations their unique and realistic skin texture (Cinefex 48).
Rambaldi had to modify the design just a bit to get all the mechanics to work, but made sure to stress that Giger was the true creator of the Alien (The Beast Within).
The mechanical parts were attached to the head by interlocking joints (Cinefantastique V09 23). The final piece to complete the head was a half-inch-thick “shiny plastic dome” covering the top of the head, which, based on the lighting setup, could be transparent or opaque (Cinefantastique V09 23).
Giger kept running back and forth between the studios working on bringing his various designs to life, but the production reminded him that getting the Alien suit done was the top priority (Giger 60). After intense discussion, Giger and Eddie Butler decided on the techniques and materials they would use (Giger 60). They got to work modeling on top of the body-cast of Badejo. Giger began adding real animal “ribs and spines” from several different animals and even “tubes from an old Rolls-Royce” onto a “thin sheet of plasticine” covering the body-cast (Giger 60, The Beast Within). Butler made metallic claws while Giger worked on one side of the alien and then Butler would copy his work on the other side (Rinzler 200, Giger 60). They were joined by someone Giger refers to in his diary as Andrew, who I think must be Andrew Kelly–likely brought over from The Empire Strikes Back to assist the two in completing the Alien suit (Giger 60).
Giger’s girlfriend, Mia, was also integral in picking up the slack.
On July 4th, Giger notes that Butler is still working on the hands, but on the 5th, he finally moved on to making the transparent dome hood for the top of the head while Voysey worked on the shoulder and arm opposite Giger’s work on the other half (Giger’s Diary 241).
Giger/narrator: “I modeled the alien costume on a plaster statue of the seven-foot-tall Nigerian, Bolaji. It’s laborious, intricate work to fit on layer after layer of plasticine, to add in tubes, cables, vertebrae of snakes, and so on, in order to finally see the biomechanical alien from my imagination standing in front of me.” (Giger’s Alien)
Once they were finished, the sculpture was then brushed with many layers of latex rubber.
Meanwhile, Badejo was hard at work training to become the movie’s monster. His girlfriend said that he “immersed himself into the choreography lessons” (Rinzler 184). On July 27th, Badejo stopped by Giger’s workshop to pick up a model head to train with (Giger’s Diary 275).
By July 28th, two more assistants had joined the Alien suit team (Giger 62).
Remember the transparent skin idea? Well, Giger wanted all the alien phases to have transparent skin that would show its skeleton and muscles underneath (Giger 62).
Giger had just cast the Facehugger skeleton when Andrew Kelly and Dick Hewitt brought him a transparent skin test for the facehugger model which he noted had a ‘good structure’ (Giger’s Diary 275).
The production heads got wind of this and ordered Giger to stop working on the Facehugger immediately and devote himself “exclusively” to finishing the alien suit (Giger 54).
But the transparency idea isn’t dead…yet.
On August 1st, Butler finished the feet and Patti Rodgers fixed up six sets of the soon-to-be chrome plated teeth while Giger worked with Shirley Denny on the “connecting part between the shoulders and head” (Giger’s Diary 471).
Giger worried that the transparent shell wouldn’t be ready in time for him to paint it (Giger’s Diary 471). He was livid when the polyester casts of the feet came back “full of air bubbles and inaccurately glued together” (Giger’s Diary 473).
On the 2nd, Giger was bouncing around between working on the derelict ship model and the facial muscles of the Big Chap. Shirley was driving him crazy by spending all day on the shoulder and when he went to check in on the Facehugger at Andrew’s studio, he saw that they had put two skins on top of each other and it looked [quote] “absolutely shitty” and wrote that everything the “studio tackles is a disaster” (Giger’s Diary 475).
He wanted to quit, but he’d already put his money into filming his documentary (Giger’s Diary 475).
On August 3rd, screenwriter Dan O’Bannon flew back to America and Giger noted in his diary, “At last we’ve got to the point where all the molds needed for the Alien’s costume are lying in the plasterers’ workshop. Since several casts will have to be made from each mold, the molds have been made of a hard-wearing silicon-rubber with a plastic sheath” (Giger 24, 62).
They experimented a lot with molds of the transparent material, but it kept tearing (Giger 62). They tried various methods to make the rubber spread evenly, but nothing worked and they were running out of time (Giger 62).
As if things weren’t already incredibly hectic for Giger, he got some upsetting news.
The producers called Giger in for a meeting and told him that they are very worried that the costume will not be done in time and “will cost an enormous amount of money” if it isn’t ready in time for the scheduled shooting day (Giger 62). They had scheduled the first day of filming the Big Chap for the end of August, right after Rambaldi’s mechanical head was expected to arrive (Rinzler 200).
There’s a fair amount of stuff that has been redacted from Giger’s diary (which I think is swearing and insults to the other crewmembers). Anyway, Giger wrote, “Clinton Cavers, that [redacted], has actually managed to convince the people in the Dept. Office that it’s my fault that Alien III isn’t finished yet and that it would be best to keep me away from the people in the studio. That’s what I get for being committed. I could [redacted] the entire pack” (Giger’s Diary 475).
Giger began to walk off the production, but they tried to calm him down by saying he is a great painter, but “not enough of a realist to finish Alien III” because he keeps making changes and Butler and the others can’t work under his supervision (Giger’s Diary 475). All that was really left to mold was the tail. Giger was moved to a room in the art department which his girlfriend Mia set up beautifully, cheering him up a bit. Butler and the others told Giger that he could stop by any time and Giger wrote that they could “shove it” (Giger’s Diary 477). He vented to Ron Cobb while having lunch at the King’s Head–a restaurant near the studio where the crew would often hang out after work (Giger’s Diary 477).
Shortly after this, they filmed the Chestburster scene and its creator, Roger Dicken, was very happy with how it turned out (Giger’s Diary 477).
Andrew Kelly used the casts to make a mold of the transparent material for the Big Chap’s skin, but he mixed it with a powder that repels water and it made the skin turn opaque and white (Giger’s Diary 479). Giger was frustrated because he was supposed to paint the underside and have it shine through the skin, but you couldn’t see through what Kelly had made. 500 kilograms of rubber were wasted (Giger’s Diary 481). j
Giger was told Kelly was tired of experimenting after trying a bunch of different versions that didn’t work (Giger’s Diary 481).
Around this time, Giger was angry that they were using elements from the Big Chap’s chest to design a corridor in the derelict spaceship.
Scott showed Giger some rushes of the Nostromo crew boarding the derelict and the Chestburster scene, which gave Giger the “courage to continue” with his work (Giger’s Diary 483).
Giger went to lunch with Badejo at the King’s Head, posed for an article spread, and worked on designing some lettering for the tile (Giger’s Diary 493).
By August 12th, the transparent skin still wasn’t working and the molds had been “badly damaged” from all the experimenting (Giger 66). It looked like they might have to make the molds all over again (Giger 66).
They determined that the only way to make it work would be to use metal molds instead of plaster, but they didn’t have the time or resources for that and the producers were about to have heart attacks (Giger 66). There was less than two weeks left until shooting the Alien scenes and they didn’t yet have a single usable costume (Giger 66).
Devastated, Giger and his team gave up on the transparent skin idea and decided to just cast the suit in latex rubber (Giger 66). Giger was “deeply disappointed” and attributed the failure to working with people who lacked the required experience to pull off his ideas (Giger 66).
That’s Eddie Butler working on the tail mold. Giger’s assistants painted layer after layer of latex on new molds of the suit and prepared complete rubber molds in plaster using a different method (Giger 66).
Here, you can see them delicately pulling the molds apart to find that their new method worked. And what is left is a fresh pair of Alien pants.
Here’s a pic of Giger trying on the suit himself. You can see he has to stand on something because it was molded on Badejo’s very long legs.
On August 18th, Badejo came in to try on the alien suit (Giger 66).
To make it skin tight, they had the inseam open so that Badejo could get into the pants and then they could close it up with him inside.
Scott wanted it to be flexible enough for Badejo to “roll into a ball” but it was “too rigid” and would need to be modified (Cinefex 59).
Scott: “In those days, I couldn't even get latex thin enough that wouldn't break, you know, quickly and would also take sculptural elements of sinew. And because you got to lay the sinews into the rubber suit. So certainly the rubber suit isn't like it should have been as thin as a contraceptive and as strong as nylon. Right, because then I can crush this person, the suit and have all kinds of things built and stitched into it.”
During the fitting, another problem came up. For a scene in which Brett is killed, Scott wanted the alien to descend upside down from chains hanging from the ceiling (Giger 66). This meant that the alien suit that they made would need to be replicated for a stuntman of average size (Giger 66). Giger was not happy about this.
Giger painted the whole thing a metallic gray using the same airbrush he used for his paintings, this time using a mixture of ink and acrylic paint (Cinefex 59).
The solution to the flexibility problem would be to make the suit into several separate pieces. It began with a one-piece black bodysuit that would hide parts that you could see through, like the ribcage (Cinefantastique V09 30). The rib cage was put on like a sweater and the legs and hips were put on like pants that would be zipped up from the side (Cinefantastique V09 30). Each arm was a sleeve that would be put on separately–the hands were gloves with six fingers and the feet were shoes (Cinefantastique V09 30).
After all that, the head would be put on which Badejo said “was like having your head stuck in the middle of a huge banana” (Cinefantastique V09 30). He said, “I had to keep my head up straight. That was the secret of wearing the suit” (Cinefantastique V09 30).
The chest piece looked too compressed, but the transparent dome for the head was nearly finished. However, Fox only gave Andrew Kelly £1,000 for all his failed experiments, which didn’t even cover his expenses. He was pissed off and considered not finishing the dome as blackmail (Giger’s Diary 505).
All in all, Badejo’s suit and the stuntman’s suit ended up costing more than $250,000 (Cinefantastique V09 30).
When Giger finally got the pieces of the suit together, he thought the feet were “too clumsy” and the hands were “too long” (Giger’s Diary 507). He and Patti worked on the lower jaw and he wanted to redo some of the molds in the plaster shop, but many of the plasterers have moved on to work on “The Martian Chronicles” in the sunny island of Malta and the rest didn’t have any time left (Giger’s Diary 507).
Giger was becoming increasingly frustrated with the production. The hotel room he stayed in by the Thames was very damp, causing him to suffer from rheumatism, and he was constantly catching colds (Giger 66). Giger’s stay was extended beyond the original six weeks, and reporters frequently visited him. He had to pose for pictures and answer repetitive questions as part of his contract, which he was getting tired of (Giger 66).
His girlfriend Mia was his only comfort during this time (Giger 66). Even when they would go to the King’s Head for a pint after work, all the discussions revolved around the [quote/unquote] “wretched Alien” (Giger 68). He often had trouble sleeping due to constant worries about meeting deadlines and the fear of not completing his work on time, which he felt could jeopardize the film (Rinzler 150). He was dreaming of the alien and became scared to go to sleep (Starlog 21). He was stressed out and having visions of the monster, so naturally he and his girlfriend took LSD to relax (Rinzler 150). At the time, he said, “I’m on the Alien trip!” (Rinzler 150).
Giger had given up the goal of making the perfect monster and hoped that Scott could figure out a way to present only its best parts and hide the bad (Giger’s Diary 507).
Meanwhile, the deadline for Rambaldi’s alien head had arrived but Rambaldi and the head had not (Rinzler 201). Associate producer Ivor Powell was freaking out (Rinzler 201).
Brett’s death scene would be the debut of the Big Chap both in the movie and in the production (Rinzler 231-232). After a day of shooting, Scott went to Stage B to observe the rehearsals for the scene, which would require a stuntman in the costume, to hang from wires next to chains (Rinzler 231-232).
Nearby, in the parking lot, Butler showed Giger how the alien hands and tail were coming along (Rinzler 231-232).
All Giger needed to do was paint them, but he wasn’t too happy about the hands and feet, calling the feet clumsy and saying that the fingers were too long and monster-like (Rinzler 231-232).
On August 21st, a week past the deadline, Rambaldi finally arrived in London with his crew from Rome, his manager, and three Alien heads (Giger 68).
Scott had just finished filming reshoots for Ash’s death scene (Rinzler 232-234).
Of the three heads Rambaldi made for the movie–two were mechanical and were the ones used for close-ups (Cinefantastique V09 23).
One of those had the full mechanics and was used for most of the shots and the second just had a mechanism to make the lips curl and was easier to work with (Cinefantastique V09 23). He also made a third head that had no mechanics at all and was lightweight for use in long shots (Cinefantastique V09 23).
Giger wrote, “The great cases are carefully unpacked and we monster-makers wait on tiptoe to see what has happened to our polyester. We are not disappointed. Rambaldi had done a marvelous job. This is confirmed by the English engineer who is working on the spare head. It looks like a fossil that has fallen victim to a brilliant amateur carpenter“ (Giger 68).
What he means by this is that while Rambaldi did a great job, there were a couple of issues immediately apparent.
Brian Johnson: “The mechanism, the jaw mechanism actually had visible springs and things which were sticking out, and the head was wider than Ridley wanted it.”
Giger thought that Rambaldi’s versions looked a bit too much like an ape and hoped that it could be modified to fit their designs (Giger’s Diary 509).
A production manager, who Giger described as an “ardent nationalist,” wasn’t a fan of Rambaldi and his Italian crew and saw a competition between Rambaldi’s heads and the radio-controlled backups they were making internally (Giger 70). He told Giger that he would give him anything he needed to make it so their heads, which only half-worked, end up getting chosen for use in the movie, but Giger said he is only interested in quality (Giger 70).
The funny thing is that Watling, who had made the backup heads, worked directly with Rambaldi’s assistant on the modifications (Rinzler 235).
Even though Watling’s heads were nearly identical and finished a month earlier than Rambaldi’s, according to associate producer Ivor Powell, none of Watling’s heads appear in the movie because Rambaldi’s was more practical for close-ups and there didn’t end up being a need for long shots of the Big Chap without the cables (Cinefex 56).
What’s really cool though, is that a few years ago, Watling’s Alien head was found and put up for auction.
On August 23rd, they rehearsed Brett’s death scene with the stuntman, Eddie Powell, in costume. They did a test in the egg chamber room where wires were already set up for Kane’s descent. Giger didn’t like how Powell’s costume turned out, but when Powell was lowered upside down from the wires, Giger and Scott were impressed (Giger’s Diary 511).
Giger/narrator: “Beside its toothed, flickering tongue, this creature also ought to have a tail it could use as a weapon. For this, I am using an animal vertebrae, which appears to be flexible enough.” (Giger’s Alien)
The tail wound up being six feet long (Giger 70). Every week, the engineers did demonstrations in the workshop, but there was always a problem with the tail (Giger 70). Rambaldi said that it will never work because it is too heavy (Giger 70). Scott said that it looked like an octopus tentacle (Rinzler 234).
Watling said that the tail was even more difficult to do than the backup head he made (Cinefex 59). The tail couldn’t have any wires coming out of the end, so the solution was to simplify the movements and make it work like a real tail with artificial vertebrae and wires instead of muscles (Cinefex 59). The tale was made of over 600 different parts and anchored inside the costume with a molded fiberglass attachment (Cinefex 59).
By August 30th, Rambaldi had been at Shepperton for a week (Giger 68). He had originally planned to be there for three days, but the modifications were taking some time (Giger 68).
Rambaldi spoke Italian and Giger spoke German and both spoke very little English, so it must have been difficult for these two guys to work together when they knew so little of their only common language.
His stay in London would be extended to two weeks while he met with Scott and fixed up the painting and details on the heads (Cinefantastique V09 26). Rambaldi had another job and couldn’t be there during the shoot, so he taught the production team how to operate the heads (Cinefantastique V09 26). Rambaldi’s assistant Carlo De Marchis would stay in London to supervise the operation during filming (Cinefantastique V09 26).
All in all, the production had six Alien heads to work with including one made of plastic foam for the stuntman to wear while he is hanging upside down during Brett’s death scene (Giger 68).
When Rambaldi finished his adjustments, he flew back to Hollywood.
Scott loved the result saying, “Normally you can’t stand to have the camera take a close look at things like this, but it was so good and I was so pleased with it that I just did a huge closeup on it” (ASC Scott).
Giger’s workshop contained the alien head and suit and was locked up and kept secret from the actors (Giger 66). None of the actors were allowed to see the alien until they were in the scene to ensure a genuine surprise for their performances (Giger 66).
Wygant: “Did the actors always know exactly what––Or was there an element of surprise for them too?”
Scott: “No, we actually protected them in that sense from ever really seeing the alien at all. Or in its various forms, you know. It develops, obviously. And I always kept them very much away from that. I think it gives them an edge not to see it until it appears.” (Eyes on Cinema)
At the end of August, the crew was making their final push to get everything ready for the Big Chap’s debut. The day before filming, Giger and Patti ended up disassembling the face to try and fix it. Giger was also working on the eggs during this time with lots of back and forth about how close it should look to a vulva–they decided less so because of the Catholics. Scott inspected Giger’s alien head and Rambaldi’s mechanical alien head. Scott didn’t like the facial muscles on Rambaldi’s and had them use condoms instead.
Giger was convinced that Rambaldi’s head wouldn’t be ready in time for filming on Monday, but on Thursday August 31st, Rambaldi’s mechanical head was finally finished and Giger got to work touching it up (Giger’s Diary 519).
They hung out with Rambaldi’s crew at the Kings Head one last time before they were to leave (Giger’s Diary 523).
Stuntman Eddie Powell did another rehearsal fully dressed in costume (Giger’s Diary 519).
Monday, September 4th, was supposed to be the Big Chap’s debut, but the cat refused to cooperate, delaying the shoot to the next day (Giger’s Diary 535). On Tuesday morning, Giger noted that the heads all look “pretty shitty” and it wasn’t until 5pm that they started filming (Giger’s Diary 537). Scott had oily water raining down from above to create a texture to the scene, but the water was turning the “lacquer coating whitish” on the alien costume and causing the ink underneath to dissolve, meaning that Giger would have to repaint the whole suit the next day (Giger’s Diary 537).
Apparently they decided to see if Badejo could do the wirework himself on the day of filming. Badejo was rigged up with wires and suspended about fifteen feet high (Cinefantastique V09 29, 30). Scott wanted him to curl up and slowly stretch out, but with a harness around his stomach, he couldn’t do it (Cinefantastique V09 29, 30). They tried several things like attaching Badejo to a jib arm that would move him up and down like a see-saw (Cinefantastique V09 29, 30). Nothing was working, and when he tried hanging upside down, he became very dizzy and told Scott that he couldn’t do it anymore (Cinefantastique V09 29, 30). They brought in stuntman Eddie Powell and he fainted and then they tried just putting the suit with no one in it on the jib, but it looked terrible (Cinefantastique V09 29, 30).
Scott eventually had Powell descend head-first on wires. He grabs Brett by the head and pulls him up to the ceiling seemingly inexplicably. They filmed it several times and after each take, Powell, still hanging upside down, would be “criticized, corrected, discussed and hauled up for another dive” (Giger 70).
While filming Brett’s death scene, Scott thought that the alien sort of looked like a dolphin, but in a good way, and loved the moment when the alien finally drops down because the audience really knows that the crew is in trouble (Cinefantastique V09 14).
We can see here that they attached the tail to the front–most likely to ensure that the tail would hang down before the alien came into frame. Of course, here, it looks bizarrely sexual.
The alien was cut back in this scene in the final film (Cinefantastique V09 14).
Despite how elaborate and painstakingly detailed the suit and head were, it was obvious that lingering on it in full view would give away that it was a man in a suit, so Scott would have to be very selective in how and when to show it (Cinefex 59).
Scott said that his reasoning for only showing quick shots of the alien was not “out of embarrassment,” but because he wanted to give a specific impression saying that you don’t need to see more of it to get across what he wanted to get across (Cinefantastique V09 14). In this way, we get the best of both worlds. We know what the creature looks like, but we still get to use our imagination to make it even more frightening.
Scott originally had an idea during the filming where the alien would caress Brett’s head inquisitively before killing him (Cinefex 59). They got some blood tubes and hid them in Harry Dean Stanton’s hat that would pour down his face (Cinefex 59).
It didn’t really make sense how the Big Chap was floating up to the ceiling, so Scott tried shooting it more in close-ups, with quick impressions of what’s going on, so you don’t get a full sense and can imagine that it was maybe using its tail to bring itself up and down.
We can also see another moment that didn’t make the cut where Brett’s blood rains down on Parker.
This was removed because of a note by studio head Alan Ladd Jr. requesting to cut down the amount of blood–especially after the chestburster scene (The Alien Saga). In a way, this Hitchcockian approach makes it scarier because the horror is created by the story as opposed to using gore as a crutch.
If you’ve seen my video on Blade Runner, you’ll know that Scott also used close-ups a lot on that movie to make the setting look less like a set. Filmmaking is also about what you don’t show.
Scott only allowed Badejo and Giger to watch the rushes with the footage of the alien suit, so that they could confer with each other about how to show it and what movements it should make (Cinefantastique V09 29). Most of the footage of the alien suit would be cut from the movie.
The Big Chap is only visible on screen for about three minutes and two of those minutes is just the end part on the Narcissus– the small ship that Ripley escapes on. Nearly all of it is shot very close.
Around this time, Giger had become fatigued with the process, writing in his diary, “My idealism has slowly ebbed away and I’ve begun to count the days before the final take. On the other hand, I do now understand the film pros, who don’t take things so seriously and have been quietly laughing at my involvement. But one thing I know for certain: Alien will be an extraordinary film, possibly a classic among horror science fiction films” (Giger 70).
Rambaldi’s cable system for the head worked by levers that would constrict or release the cable moving a feature of the head (Cinefantastique V09 26). The cables would be hidden inside the neck and run 45 feet to the control panel (Cinefantastique V09 26). When filming, they had six people controlling the different parts of just the head. For perspective, the alien Rambaldi made for Close Encounters had seven operators for its entire body (Cinefantastique V09 26).
That said, when Rambaldi saw the final film, he said that only “20% of alien’s capabilities” are actually seen because Scott used only quick cuts and extreme close-ups (Cinefantastique V09 26, 27). Rambaldi had even added a detail that the Alien’s jugular would bulge when it opened its mouth (Cinefantastique V09 26, 27). Rambaldi said that, if he was on the set, he would have pushed for more shots of the alien, but he ultimately understood that Scott had his reasons for only showing glimpses of the alien (Cinefantastique V09 26, 27).
To enhance the realism, they had KY Jelly pumped through the mouth, which added a unique detail for audiences to pick up on (Cinefantastique V09 26). They also rubbed oil all over its head to “give it a sweaty, reflective sheen” (Cinefantastique V09 26). The only problem was that the KY jelly would dull the color, so Giger would have to repaint it every day (Giger 70).
Because the dome covering the top of the Alien head would become transparent based on the lighting, Scott had another idea to make it even more horrifying. The idea was that, during this shot, the audience would be able to see into the head with squirming brains inside. To do this, they would fill the head with maggots (Rinzler 234). Rambaldi modified the head to make room for them and Giger found it very unsettling (Rinzler 234).
Giger wrote, “[Shirley’s] making a polyester bowl with compartments, that the critters have to be stuffed into somehow. They have to be either lured with food or forced with compressed air. I don’t know who’s going to do it. Somebody has to. I certainly won’t” (Giger’s Diary 517).
They did a test during a rehearsal with the stuntman and a stand-in and Scott liked how it turned out (Rinzler 234). Co-writer Ron Shusett left his hat on a bench nearby and when he put it on he felt something strange and checked his hat to find five maggots inside (Rinzler 234). He freaked out and ran into a room with the Fox executives begging them to check his hair and they were all very confused (Rinzler 234).
The maggots soon caused a problem because the whole point is that they would wiggle on camera, but a few minutes under the warm lights made them all fall asleep (Rinzler 234). So, they tried Spanish fish, which look like wireworms, but they fell asleep too (Rinzler 234). At one point Scott thought about giving the maggots LSD and sugar (Rinzler 234).
On top of that, Badejo saw what was going on and said there was no way he would put the head on if there were maggots inside, so they abandoned the whole idea (Rinzler 234).
When the Big Chap finds Parker and Lambert, we get our most direct view of its strange movements so far.
Badejo finally got a chance to display what he learned in his mime and tai chi lessons and there were a fair amount of difficult movements that were shot, but again, these were cut back to prevent blowing the effect. They had him do a crab walk, but this ended up looking pretty silly.
But what does look kind of cool is this outtake of the alien crouching and letting its tail unfurl.
One piece of mime work that did make it into the movie was when the Big Chap gracefully glides toward Lambert, which is one of my personal favorite moments. I love how strange the movement is–it somehow heightens the terror for it not to run or claw like an animal, but instead act strange and, well, alien.
With Parker’s death, we get an even better view of how the Alien uses its second set of jaws to kill.
Special effects supervisor Nick Allder said, “What happens to Parker is simply a suggestion in the final film…I doubt if it’s more than three or four frames long. But I actually took a casting off Yaphet Kotto’s head, and then constructed a dummy skull out of fiberglass - except for a section of the forehead which was done in wax. Since it was going to be a very large closeup, I made a special rig so we could mount just the alien’s tongue and make it dart in and out and hit a specific spot on the forehead piece. Inside the skull, I put real pig’s brains; and then we put special little barbed hooks on the end of the tongue. So during the shot, you actually saw it punch through the forehead and pull out the brain” (Cinefex 60).
Badejo said, “The idea…was that the creature was supposed to be graceful as well as vicious, requiring slow, deliberate movements. But there was some action I had to do pretty quick. I remember having to kick Yaphet Kotto, throw him against the wall, and rush up to him. Veronica Carcwright was really terrified. After I fling Yaphet Kotto back with my tail, I turn to go after her, there's blood in my mouth, and she was incredible. It wasn't acting. She was scared" (Cinefantastique V09 29).
Interestingly, there is a shot of the tail going between Lambert’s legs and curling up behind her. There is a sexual connotation here, but Veronica Cartwright revealed that this shot was actually repurposed from Brett’s death scene.
Badejo worked three to four days a week–sometimes weekends–for about four months (Cinefantastique V09 29). They would film a shot with him and then watch the dailies and something might be off or it wasn’t scary or looked silly and then they’d get some new ideas and bring him back in to reshoot those moments and restart the process over again (Cinefantastique V09 29).
They had a guy nicknamed Mother who would apply the jelly to the alien before each take (The Beast Within). Poor Veronica Cartwright would have to do a take of her intense death scene and then they’d cut and Mother would run out and start rubbing KY Jelly all over the alien like it’s getting ready for a swimsuit competition and everyone would crack up (The Beast Within).
Ivor Powell: “K-Y jelly was very much in fashion at the time, and I think that was put on everything that moved in front of the camera. On the alien, it was dripping from everywhere.”
Badejo speculated that they must have used around 2000 tubes of KY Jelly to make the drool coming out of the alien’s mouth (Cinefantastique V09 30).
Originally, the script had Lambert die while they attempted to blast the alien out of the airlock (Cinefex 63). Scott said, “Because of budget reasons and time, we just couldn’t shoot it, but I wanted Lambert to get sucked out of the ship through an opening about the size of a keyhole. Not a very heroic ending - but dramatic” (Cinefex 63). They floated the idea of using an inflatable dummy, but Brian Johnson was against the whole idea saying that you could never get sucked through a hole that small–your body would just plug it up and give yourself a nasty blister, but that’s it (Cinefex 63).Like a lot of things we talked about in this series, this idea would be repurposed in a later Alien movie.
Badejo wore the the non-mechanical head for the action shots, but there were a few shots where he had to wear the fully articulated mechanical head and couldn’t see anything through the small eye-holes they gave him unless he was standing still (Cinefantastique V09 30). He said, “It was all manual, remote controlled…There's still a space in it for my head. I had it on just to make sure nothing goes wrong with the posture of the head or how tall it is in comparison to the other sequences” (Cinefantastique V09 30).
If you’ve seen my videos on the set design, you might remember that the Scott had the ceilings lowered to six and a half feet to make the ship feel more claustrophobic. When Badejo had the suit and head on, he was seven feet tall, so aside from crouching he had to be careful how he moved around the set and not to lean forward and make the back of the head bump the ceiling (Cinefantastique V09 30). Badejo continued, saying, “It was terribly hot, especially the head. I could only have it on for about fifteen or twenty minutes at a time. When I took it off, my head would be soaked” (Cinefantastique V09 30).
What’s interesting is that as much as the set was set up to give the actors a feeling of claustrophobia, Badejo was in the same set but trapped in a skin-tight suit with his head in a heavy helmet made of gears and a fleshy material–he was living the true horror of Alien and Giger’s biomechanical nightmare.
Of course this wouldn’t even be the worst version of this nightmare–that would be Alien Resurrection.
Badejo only played the alien in full-body shots, because he was meant to show how tall the alien was (Cinefantastique V09 30). For example, he didn’t actually play the alien in the shot of Dallas being killed in the air duct because the alien was crouched (Cinefantastique V09 30).
The best view we get of the Big Chap–and has been criticized for being too good a view– is at the very end when it is being sucked out of the Narcissus. This was a very difficult sequence to shoot because many of the times Badejo was pulled out of the door, the suit would rip and need to be fixed and sometimes the whole tail would rip off (Cinefantastique V09 30). It took about fifteen takes before Badejo couldn’t take it anymore (Cinefantastique V09 30).
Ivor Powell: “Coming back to that thing in the Narcissus, where he was embedded in the wall and had to crawl out. I mean, there was a lot of takes we did with that. And there's a lot of, you know, sort of, CO2 stuff being, you know, blown in his face and in every orifice, so to speak, as he comes, as he detaches himself and comes out and I, I think if he got a few knocks and bruises in that.“
Lots of smoke was used in that shot and Badejo was extremely hot and found it very difficult to breathe (Cinefantastique V09 30).
The death of the Alien was, appropriately, the last scene filmed for the movie, which involved shooting it out of the Narcissus’s airlock and then blasting it with the ship's thrusters (Cinefex 67).
What’s interesting is that you can see it is basically water and light coming out of the engines. Early on, they had talked about using fire and CO2, but it was actually Brett’s death scene that changed this (Cinefex 68). When Scott got the idea to basically use rain in the landing gear room for atmosphere, it led them to what we see with the engine’s thrusters (Cinefex 68). Special Effects Supervisor Nick Allder said, “We started out putting steam and smoke and various other things into that leg area, and it wasn’t quite right. So for no other reason than just to see what it would look like, I decided to try drops of water. And Ridley said, ‘Yes. that’s exactly what I want.’ So we had this gentle dripping coming down, and during one of the shots Ridley kind of panned the camera up into the roof, and what you saw were all these water droplets falling - very heavily back-lit - and it was a really beautiful effect” (Cinefex 68).
Scott described the moment he came up with the idea saying, “I got some shots looking straight up at these four, very symmetrical round openings. They looked like jets or exhausts. And because the water was pouring down on us when we saw the rushes, it gave us a clue about how to do the ending. The water looked like plasma, because it was dropping in long, slow needles of light” (Cinefantastique V09 13).
To get the shot of the alien swinging from the wire attached to the ship, they built the back portion of the Narcissus upside down and had the camera pointed straight up at it (Cinefex 68). Stuntman Eddy Powell was then dropped through the hatch to make it look like it was flying out towards space (Cinefex 68). Using the water for the engine thrusters worked great for this as well because they could spray him with the backlit water without worrying about hurting him or the set (Cinefex 68). Yet another reason for the water was that they could light it to be bright white whereas fire would add yellow tones that Scott didn’t want and he didn’t want to show fire in space (Cinefantastique V09 14).
Badejo was bummed that, because he was under so much prosthetics, he never got recognized in public as the guy who played one of the most famous characters in movie history, but he was happy to have been part of the movie (Cinefantastique V09 30). Part of his contract stated that he would be offered the role again if a sequel is made (Cinefantastique V09 30). He was happy to go back to training for his graphic design career, but said he would jump at the chance to play the role again (Cinefantastique V09 30). However, he moved back to Nigeria in 1980 to work for his Uncle’s graphic design company and then started his own gallery in 1983 (Alien Series). Around that time, he had two children (Alien Series). Sadly, in 1992, just after turning thirty-nine, he passed away from the sickle cell anemia he had been diagnosed with as a child (Alien Series). Everyone who knew him said that he was really easy-going, fun, and humble (Alien Series).
Sigourney Weaver thought that the design of the Alien looked “very beautiful and very erotic” (Fantastic Films #12).
She said she thought that the crew should have tried to communicate with the alien but Scott intentionally avoided that because it was a trope (Cinefantastique V09 12). He wanted the crew to focus solely on their survival, seeing the alien as something that was designed to kill without reason (Cinefantastique V09 12).
On November 22nd 1978, Giger, his girlfriend, and the director of his documentary flew back to London to get the last of the footage they would need, including an interview with Scott and one with Voysey (Giger 26). During this time, they were filming the last close-ups and model shots at the secondary Bray Studios where the special effects were filmed (Giger 26). Giger saw the finished Derelict ship and loved it, saying that it exceeded his wildest dreams (Giger 26).
During the editing stage, Scott cut down the shots of the alien as much as possible and each new cut of the movie contained less of the creature (Cinefex 68). One of these came after a test screening in which Scott cut eleven minutes out of the movie (Cinefex 68).
Giger: “For instance, the cat is replacing the monster, and that makes it so real because the cat is real and then not appearing or not seeing the monster as much more real or much more believable.”
Alien was released “two years to the day after Star Wars” and, while like Star Wars transcended a long tradition of low-quality space adventures with a high quality masterpiece for the ages, Alien did the same with its B-movie monster roots (Cinefex 71). Star Wars helped usher in a new era of sci-fi and Alien not only benefited, but contributed to the idea of elevating genre movies to their highest form…an effect that we are still feeling today.
After all the headaches and Giger’s desire to walk out of the production, Giger’s reward was an Oscar…
Giger: “I'm very happy to have this. Thank you very much.”
along with Carlo Rambaldi
Rambaldi: “Three years ago, when I was here for King Kong. I don't know English. And I say ‘thank you.’ Now, I learned very well English and I say, ‘thank you very much.’”
…and the fame he was looking for.
Although this massive success was bitter sweet. Giger became known as the father of the alien–a piece modified to fit a studio movie, completed under massive time constraints and pressure, and executed in part by a crew who didn’t understand or weren’t able to construct his vision. And despite being shown on screen for only 3 minutes in pieces and shrouded in shadow and steam, the Big Chap has become so iconic that it has sustained a franchise for 50 years and you could probably go out and buy Alien bedsheets if you wanted to.
Giger: “I wouldn’t be so successful probably as with the alien film… people always know me as the father of this alien… it’s okay.”
On top of designing the planet, derelict, space jockey, and alien phases, Giger was responsible for another design element that we didn’t see. In a deleted scene, Ripley discovers Dallas in a grotesque cocoon made by the alien. I made a bonus video on that scene that is available on Patreon right now for 1 dollar. And it will go into the five-dollar archive when my next video goes up.
If you haven’t seen the other episodes of this series, I put the playlist right here which goes into the other amazing designs of the movie as well as the bizarre origins of the movie including the connection to John Carpenter and a cool sci-fi fantasy movie that Ridley Scott never made.