T h e H i s t o r y o f t h e A l i e n
The whole thing started about 1975. Dan O'Bannon - then an unknown screenwriter had an idea for a sci-fi flick about WWII pilots and a phenomenon called 'Gremlins'. O'Bannon abandoned the idea, but brought on certain elements to his script "Memory". Memory was a sci-fi story in deep space about 7 people and one nasty 8th passenger... O'Bannon reallly belived in the project, but had no director for it. In 76 or 77 he met Ridley Scott and they started working on 'Dune'. Some of the furniture and the sandworms was made by an almost unknown swiss artist named Giger. The Scott version of Dune was abandoned, but he and O'Bannon soon got together again over 'Memory'. They had no monster until O'Bannon checked out a book of H. R. Giger named Giger's Necronomicon. There he saw half-human figures with deformed heads and thought that THIS was the alien. He brought the book to Ridley Scott and he agreed that this was the monster they had been looking for. As Ridley Scott later said: "That's it! I'd never been so certain about anything in my life." They contacted Giger and told about their plans. Giger said: Ok, I'm gonna make an alien to you. He originally wanted to make a completely new monster, but since the film crew, especially Ridley Scott was so facinated by his paintings "Necronom IV" and "Necronom V", he said ok. The picture on this page is the "Necronom IV". If you want to see "Necronom V", click here.
Giger was excited. The fact that he made 30 alien paintings during a time of 3 months shows this clearly. He shrinked the images to fax-size and faxed the drawings, notes and paintings over to a studio in England, where several sculpturists were set on the mission of creating an alien sculpture. But to the sculpturists' great frustration, their efforts were pointless. They didn't manage to turn Giger's two dimentional images into 3-D versions.
So Giger flew over to England and to the studio. There he went to work. Giger was nervous about not getting the sculpture ready in time... but the film crew gave him free hands, on one condition: the alien was to be a costume, and it had to fit a person. Some of the materials were quite unusual. For the face of the alien, Giger put a real human skull on it and sculptured the face over the skull. (Giger asked an assistent for "bones". The result was a box full of bones, including a rhino's scull!) He extended the jaw to make it look less human. The alien was first planned to be to some degree translucent. But due to problems with the material, the plans of an translucent alien had to be abandoned. The spikes on the back was not there originally, but was put there by Giger when it became clear that the extended head of the alien made the man inside the alien suit loose his balance, and the spikes worked as counter-balance.
This was the first 3-D creation of Giger, and he was unsure of himself and was not pleased with the result. Originally, the plan was for Giger to stay in England for three weeks, but he ended up spending 5 months there. The reason was that
Giger didn't just make the frightening xenomorph to the movie Alien but also the alien spacecraft which Dallas' team finds, the entire inside of the spacecraft, the alien pilot or 'space jockey' growing out of his chair and the landscape on the barren planet Archeron where they discovered the spacecraft.
Giger also made all the different stages in the alien lifecycle, except for the queen. His original idea was that each alien could lay one egg, containing one hugger.
The first 'Alien' picture was an inspiration for the sci-fi movies at the time and also moves made after 1979, and not only sci-fi. But for sci-fi movies, the time since the release in '79 has changed the aliens and other creatures. Before the release, most aliens were dumb, man-in-silly-paper-plastic-and-wire-suits, not exactly something to be frightened of, but after the release, aliens and other creatures have taken the place of Satan and Demons in the human mind.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the director of 'Alien Resurrection' also gives credit to the original film team, which didn't only contain Giger, but also other experienced artists like the cartoonist Moebius, who made the Nostromo and the spacesuits, and many more. Jean-Pierre said in an interview: The people who made the first 'Alien' were artists, Ridley Scott, Giger, the Writers - they invented everything. The rest of us who follow are artisians. That first film is a work of art, an entity all it's own
Life cycle Grey (Alien) Hive (Aliens) Queen Panther Newborn Rez Alien
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