Alien (film) - Origins

Origins

While studying cinema at the University of Southern California, Dan O'Bannon had made a science fiction comedy film with director John Carpenter and concept artist Ron Cobb entitled Dark Star. The film included an alien which had been created using a spray-painted beach ball, and the experience left O'Bannon "really wanting to do an alien that looked real." A few years later he began working on a similar story that would focus more on horror: "I knew I wanted to do a scary movie on a spaceship with a small number of astronauts", he later recalled, "Dark Star as a horror movie instead of a comedy." Ronald Shusett, meanwhile, was working on an early version of what would eventually become Total Recall. Impressed by Dark Star, he contacted O'Bannon and the two agreed to collaborate on their projects, choosing to work on O'Bannon's film first as they believed it would be less costly to produce. O'Bannon had written twenty-nine pages of a script titled Memory comprising what would become the film's opening scenes: a crew of astronauts awaken to find that their voyage has been interrupted because they are receiving a signal from a mysterious planetoid. They investigate and their ship breaks down on the surface. He did not yet, however, have a clear idea as to what the alien antagonist of the story would be.

O'Bannon soon accepted an offer to work on a film adaptation of Dune, a project which took him to Paris for six months. Though the project ultimately fell through, it introduced him to several artists whose works gave him ideas for his science fiction story including Chris Foss, H. R. Giger, and Jean "Moebius" Giraud. O'Bannon was impressed by Foss' covers for science fiction books, while he found Giger's work "disturbing": "His paintings had a profound effect on me. I had never seen anything that was quite as horrible and at the same time as beautiful as his work. And so I ended up writing a script about a Giger monster." After the Dune project collapsed O'Bannon returned to Los Angeles to live with Shusett and the two revived his Memory script. Shusett suggested that O'Bannon use one of his other film ideas, about gremlins infiltrating a B-17 bomber during World War II, and set it on the spaceship as the second half of the story. The working title of the project was now Star Beast, but O'Bannon disliked this and changed it to Alien after noting the number of times that the word appeared in the script. He and Shusett liked the new title's simplicity and its double meaning as both a noun and adjective. Shusett came up with the idea that one of the crew members could be implanted with an alien embryo that would later burst out of him, feeling that this was an interesting plot device by which the alien creature could get aboard the ship.

In writing the script, O'Bannon drew inspiration from many previous works of science fiction and horror. He later stated that "I didn't steal Alien from anybody. I stole it from everybody!" The Thing from Another World (1951) inspired the idea of professional men being pursued by a deadly alien creature through a claustrophobic environment. Forbidden Planet (1956) gave O'Bannon the idea of a ship being warned not to land, and then the crew being killed one by one by a mysterious creature when they defy the warning. Planet of the Vampires (1965) contains a scene in which the heroes discover a giant alien skeleton; this influenced the Nostromo crew's discovery of the alien creature in the derelict spacecraft. O'Bannon has also noted the influence of "Junkyard" (1953), a short story by Clifford D. Simak in which a crew lands on an asteroid and discovers a chamber full of eggs. He has also cited as influences Strange Relations by Philip José Farmer (1960), which covers alien reproduction, and various EC Comics horror titles carrying stories in which monsters eat their way out of people.

With roughly eighty-five percent of the plot completed, Shusett and O'Bannon presented their initial script to several studios, pitching it as "Jaws in space." They were on the verge of signing a deal with Roger Corman's studio when a friend offered to find them a better deal and passed the script on to Walter Hill, David Giler, and Gordon Carroll, who had formed a production company called Brandywine with ties to 20th Century Fox. O'Bannon and Shusett signed a deal with Brandywine, but Hill and Giler were not satisfied with the script and made numerous rewrites and revisions to it. This caused tension with O'Bannon and Shusett, since Hill and Giler had very little experience with science fiction and according to Shusett: "They weren't good at making it better, or in fact at not making it even worse." O'Bannon believed that they were attempting to justify taking his name off of the script and claiming it as their own. Hill and Giler did add some substantial elements to the story, however, including the android character Ash which O'Bannon felt was an unnecessary subplot, but which Shusett later described as "one of the best things in the movie...That whole idea and scenario was theirs." In total Hill and Giler went through eight different drafts of the script, mostly concentrating on the Ash subplot but also making the dialogue more natural and trimming some sequences set on the alien planetoid.

Despite the multiple rewrites, 20th Century Fox did not express confidence in financing a science fiction film. However, after the success of Star Wars in 1977 the studio's interest in the genre rose substantially. According to Carroll: "When Star Wars came out and was the extraordinary hit that it was, suddenly science fiction became the hot genre." O'Bannon recalled that "They wanted to follow through on Star Wars, and they wanted to follow through fast, and the only spaceship script they had sitting on their desk was Alien". Alien was greenlit by 20th Century Fox at an initial budget of $4.2 million.