Interview: Ridley Scott

In the depths of space, the crew of the mining ship Nostromo is awakened from sleep by a distress signal from a far-off planet.

What they discover there will eventually slaughter most of them, leaving Warrant Officer Ripley (Sigourney Weaver in her breakthrough performance) as the sole survivor.

Alone, terrified and with her crewmates dead or missing, Ripley must face an unimaginable horror as it runs amok in the labyrinthine tunnels of the giant ship.

Thus Alien exploded onto cinema screens in 1979 and became an instant classic. A masterpiece of sci-fi horror, it stands as a benchmark of the genre and has never been bettered.

Such was its success, it spawned three sequels and a spin-off movie. Naturally as the sequels diminished the aesthetic, so 20th-Century Fox looked backwards to the prospect of a prequel – a movie that would unravel the roots of Ripley, the Nostromo and the Weyland Company.

Yet Prometheus, the $130m sci-fi epic that is the result of all those hours spent going back to the drawing board, is not being marketed as a prequel.

Even Sir Ridley Scott, the man who started it all in 1979 with Alien, has distanced himself from such a prospect.

Instead Prometheus is said to occupy a place in space and time conversant with the Alien universe. But it’s a very different film.

Last month Scott and actors Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron and Noomi Rapace converged on London to unveil 13 minutes of footage to eager journalists.

It was a day marked by the trademark secrecy and security that has cloaked Prometheus since before it began shooting.

But the overall response was one of ‘WOW’. And as Scott and his cast of Hollywood A-listers settled down to answer questions, he presented his own take on the origins of the Alien mythology.

“I watched the three subsequent Aliens being made, which were all jolly good in some form or other, [but] I thought the franchise was fundamentally used up,” said Scott.

Taking a different route, Scott focused on the back story to Alien and the movie’s beginning: an ancient extraterrestrial craft, a gigantic fossilised alien and a cargo hold full of eggs, one of which hatches and eventually destroys the Nostromo’s crew. During production it became neither reboot nor prequel.

“In all of the films nobody had asked a very simple question: ‘who is the big guy in the chair?’,” adds Scott. “There was this big-boned creature who seemed to be nine feet tall sitting in this chair and I went in to Fox with four questions: who are they, why are they there, why that cargo and where were they going or had they in fact had a forced landing?

“So off I went with two writers and we came up with the draft. When you start off with an interesting idea like that, you don’t know whether it’s going to be a prequel or a sequel.

“It gradually adjusted itself into much larger questions and therefore now the actual connection to the original Alien is barely in its DNA.”

The story of Prometheus revolves around the titular faster-than-light spacecraft exploring an ancient star map and fetching up on a distant planet, home to an extraterrestrial race and a hidden threat that could destroy humanity.

The complex plot takes in religious faith, asceticism, the icy self-belief of company drones, the warrior class and, perhaps inevitably, the evolution of android intelligence.

Man of the moment, thanks to performances in Shame, Haywire and A Dangerous Method, Michael Fassbender plays David, an android servant with super-intelligence who may or may not be afflicted by ego and an emerging soul.

“[David is] the one android amongst humans,” reveals Fassbender, “and the humans don’t really like having a robot around that looks like them, who can figure everything out quicker than them and is physically stronger than them. There’s something a little bit off-putting about that.

“He’s asking his own questions. He’s curious like the gods in old Greek mythology being jealous of human beings for their mortality.

“Also, he’s been programmed like a human being, so will his programming start to form its own personality outside of the system that was programmed? I just tried to keep it ambiguous.”

Charlize Theron, playing company ‘suit’ Meredith Vickers, is another ambiguous character. Whilst her companions vomit when they wake from deep sleep, she performs push-ups. She’s distant, enigmatic, mysterious.

“In the beginning she comes across as quintessentially ‘suity’ – detached and cold,” says Theron. “She really is just there for the sole purpose of making everybody’s life hell. She’s not a believer, she’s not a scientist, she really is just there to make sure that you think that everything is going to plan. But then she’s actually there for a very personal reason, of which I cannot speak.

“Vickers is an enigma, and the mystery surrounding her was something I really liked.”

Scott was determined to keep the Prometheus plot under wraps and to prevent internet leakage. Thus Noomi Rapace, playing God-fearing scientist Elizabeth Shaw, participates in what insiders are describing as the equivalent of Alien’s notorious chest-burst sequence.

According to Scott it “was private, no one witnessed that. We can’t say what it is.”

Adds Rapace: “I dreamt nightmares for two weeks! I had these weird, screwed-up images in my head. So, yes, it did affect [me].”

Prometheus is on general release from today.

The birth of Prometheus

The film was originally called Paradise, but director Ridley Scott renamed it Prometheus to fit the movie’s overall theme of creation.

The plot was inspired by Erich von Däniken’s book Chariots of Gods which expounds the theory that Earth was created by ancient astronauts.

When researching his role as android David, Michael Fassbender based his character on the replicants in Scott’s sci-fi classic Blade Runner as well as David Bowie’s performance in The Man who Fell to Earth and Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence of Arabia.

According to Prometheus screenwriter Damon Lindelof, a sequel is already in the pipeline.