Cailee Spaeny, star of Fede Álvarez’s new Alien: Romulus, remembers watching Ridley Scott’s original Alien as a child.
“My dad and siblings decided they were going to watch and I thought I was going to join in,” she recalls. “And then I went, oh no, this is going to be really scary. I left the room but I peeked in. I couldn’t sit through horror films when I was younger. I’d have terrible nightmares. But I do remember the chestburster scene and being like, I can’t. This is too brutal — but then also being curious and wanting to know what happens at the end.”
That sense of terror— and inescapable awe — is exactly what Alien: Romulus seeks to recapture.
The original 1979 film had a simple concept, Scott tells MovieMaker: “Seven people locked in a tin can. Who’s going to die first?”
Alien would turn out to be a sci-fi horror masterpiece, but at the time, he says, “my idea for Alien was to make a really good version of a B movie.”
It could have gone a lot of ways. (At one point, Robert Altman was a contender to direct.) But ultimately, writers Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett saw Scott, whose legendary eye for visuals would fuel later films like Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, Gladiator and The Martian, as the best person to bring their vision of a space parasite to life.
Despite the success of Alien, Scott wasn’t asked back for the sequel, 1986’s Aliens. James Cameron took over, to much acclaim, but Scott didn’t love someone else working in the world he created. The English director only returned to the realm of Alien when, after the ironically titled Alien: Resurrection, the franchise felt doomed.
“They squeezed it dry and it just died. I thought we could resurrect it,” says Scott.
He made 2012’s Prometheus, and the reactions inspired him to direct 2017’s Alien: Covenant. But it was one of the least-liked entries in the series, so Scott decided he was finished with the franchise.
Except… he’d taken a meeting with Fede Álvarez. The Uruguayan filmmaker broke out with his popular remake of Evil Dead in 2013, then directed the 2016 movie Don’t Breathe.
“I figured I’d done enough and walked away,” says Scott. “Now, Fede came to me with his idea for a prequel to Aliens, and I went in not expecting too much, but in a funny kind of way, he breathed new life into it.”
Twins
Álvarez is known for his expertise with horror franchises: He and Romulus co-writer Rodo Sayagues wrote the story for 2022’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre update, as well as their own Don’t Breathe and its 2021 sequel. Alien had been one of Álvarez’s formative filmmaking memories, especially a scene when Harry Dean Stanton’s character, Brett, meets his demise.
“My first contact with Alien was when my dad watched a TV show about moviemaking. They showed Brett being killed by the fully grown alien,” says Álvarez. “I was probably ten years old and I had never seen something like that. It was truly terrifying and also it was so fascinating to be scared of it. You don’t really see the alien, you just get a couple of glimpses of it. You’re terrified of this presence because those two images they gave you are the thing of nightmares.”
Alien: Romulus takes place 20 years after Alien. Its young cast is led by Spaeny, who is coming off the success of Civil War and Priscilla, as Rain, and Industry star David Jonsson, who plays her brother, a synthetic humanoid named Andy. They take their place as the new generation who must fight the Xenomorph alien species that we all know and love.
The film’s action happens on The Renaissance Station, which is made up of two sections: Romulus (which uses technology inspired by Aliens) and Remus (which uses technology inspired by Alien).
Students of Roman mythology — and fans of Succession — know the story of the twins Romulus and Remus, who legendarily once suckled a she-wolf and grew up to be powerful leaders. When Remus insulted a city Romulus was building, Romulus killed his brother.
So does the title Alien: Romulus imply there’s a sequel in the works called Alien: Remus?
“Romulus is the murderous one,” says Álvarez. “So to make a sequel about the one who gets killed and call it Remus… that story doesn’t feel like it’s going to be aggressive enough for the Alien franchise.”
As Álvarez’s focus on the more aggressive brother suggests, he wants his Alien to be truly terrifying.
“The goal here for me was to take Alien back to its roots,” says Álvarez. “We did that in many ways, but mostly in trying to make it a horror movie again. We joked on set many times that we should make hats that say ‘Make Alien Scary Again.’
Most of the sequels to Alien contain horror elements, but they don’t tap into the primal fear of the unknown that the original film evokes.
Under directors as varied as David Fincher and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the nine Alien films — including two Alien vs. Predator movies — have given directors varying degrees of freedom to explore their own ideas. (Fincher, who fought for creative control of Alien 3, told The Guardian in 2009: “to this day, no one hates it more than me.”)
Álvarez once turned down a Marvel movie, citing the “strong guidelines” involved. But with Romulus, he felt he could make his own fresh contribution to the Alien universe.
“What makes each movie unique is who directed them. They’ve all made such an imprint on the franchise,” he says. “It felt to me that of all the franchises, this is the one where you can really do your own thing.”
Alien Meets Aliens
Romulus fills in some gaps between Scott’s Alien and Cameron’s Aliens, which takes place 57 years after the first film, as Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, the sole survivor of an alien’s attack on the commercial space vessel the Nostromo in Alien, awakens from stasis.
When communications are cut off with a human colony on the moon where Ripley and her crew first encountered aliens, she joins Colonial Marines to investigate.
“In Aliens, the Colonial Marines ask, ‘Is this gonna be another bug hunt?’” says Álvarez. “There’s this whole endless discussion online wondering if the Marines encountered this creature before, and why did they say ‘bug hunt’ if they haven’t? And obviously, they haven’t when you see the way they react to the Xenomorphs.”
Álvarez and Sayagues went to one of Aliens’ writers for the answer — and he graciously took a short break from the Avatar franchise to help.
“We ended up having this amazing two-hour conversation with James Cameron. The first hour was about Aliens and his experience making it and the second hour was talking about our idea for Alien: Romulus,” Álvarez recalls.
Álvarez and Sayagues didn’t have a script at that point, so they bounced some ideas off Cameron.
“The three of us were brainstorming for the film,” says Álvarez. “One of the best parts of making this movie was going through that process with him.”
Cameron loved leaving Pandora for a look back on a more horror-oriented part of his career, Álvarez says.
“I remember him thanking us for having that moment with him,” he adds. “He said, ‘I haven’t done this in ages.’”
Álvarez noted that as masterful as Scott and Cameron are, their feedback focused on entirely different aspects of the story.
“They just look at completely different elements. If one would talk about the characters or story, the other would talk about the spaceships and the technology,” says Álvarez. “If the other was focusing on the length of the movie, the other one—”
He pauses. “You’re probably trying to put together who said what.”
He laughs and continues: “The other one would never consider the length and just talk about what the story needs. The most fascinating part was the difference in what they would see in the movie and what they feel needs to be discussed. They would just see completely different things.
“They both truly love the movie they made in the franchise. As a director, there’s no more valuable film lesson than to work with guys like this on something they deeply care about.”
‘Could Be a True Story’
There’s a now-viral 1979 local TV news clip, out of Fort Worth, Texas, in which a reporter interviews parents who took their kids to see Alien. One father explains that he has no regrets about letting his son see Alien because “things like that could happen in life. That could be a true story.”
Watching the clip recently, Scott let out an exasperated: “How old were the children that he took to see Alien? He’s got to be out of his fucking mind.”
But the dad is partly right: Elements of Alien have come true. The film raises questions about both environmental and artificial terrors: Are we killing our planet? Or might artificial intelligence kill us first?
Ash, the synthetic android played by Ian Holm in Alien, and Bishop, the synthetic played by Lance Henriksen in Aliens,eachadmire the aliens, in a way. There’s a glint in Ash’s inhuman eye as he admires the creature’s precise extermination of the Nostromo’s crew. And when Bishop autopsies one of the creatures, he’s struck by the economy of their design.
Ash ultimately betrays the humans. But Aliens doesn’t let you in on Bishop’s true nature until the movie’s finale.
Romulus similarly raises questions about Andy’s allegiances.
Spaeny says the relationship between her character and Jonsson’s synthetic Andy is “the heart of the film.”
“Rain’s brother Andy being a synthetic flips things on its head from what we’ve seen in the other movies. It’s someone she’s fighting for and what that means is being challenged in the movie,” says Spaeny. “They’re stuck on a planet that is falling apart, they don’t have parents, and life on this planet has no future.”
Adds Jonsson: “What the Alien franchise does really well is set up these worlds in which human beings and synthetic beings coexist. Andy serves an important purpose to Rain because he does more for her than what a synthetic, in its basic sense, would usually do. It’s why they’re brother and sister.”
The question of whether Andy is good or bad parallels our own fears around technology.
“A big question in the story is when shit starts to hit the fan and things get tense, is he going to be like Ash, or is he going to be like Bishop? Is he going to betray them or is he going to be benevolent?” says Álvarez. “There are a lot of challenges for Andy and the movie asks if AI is intrinsically bad and is it inhuman and evil by design — or can it actually be good?”
And about that dying planet: Álvarez says it “might” be Thedus, a terrestrial planet that the Weyland-Yutani Corporation is stripping of its resources in Alien. The Nostromo is taking part in that plunder.
But Thedus represents something more.
“The planet we’re leaving is a very interesting one because it feels like an exacerbated version of Earth if we carry on draining so much of its resources and not thinking about other people,” says Jonsson. “We’re not just leaving and going to space for no reason. There’s a reason, and it’s the same reason people leave their countries: because they want to be somewhere better.”
Alien: Romulus Influences
Ridley Scott looked to Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, and Richard Donner’s The Omen for inspiration when preparing to scare audiences in Alien. He considers the films “perfect engines of fear and terror.”
But before Scott considered becoming a filmmaker, he avoided horror and sci-fi movies, because he thought they were terrible. It wasn’t until movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still and On the Beach that he paid the genres any mind.
Then he saw Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the 1968 film that became his primary inspiration for Alien.
“2001 showed me that whatever your fantasy, you better find a reality to make it work,” he says.
Scott says Alien writers O’Bannon and Shusett “clearly borrowed” Ash from the idea of HAL 9000 in 2001.
“HAL was a box who was placed in the ship by this corporation to make sure that the journey was more important than the crew,” Scott says. “Ash made all the sense in the world because if you’re going to have a robot on board, don’t make him a box, make him like a human being. That way even he’s hidden from his own agenda.”
When Scott returned to the franchise with Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, he introduced the synthetic David (played by Michael Fassbender) who’s “more human than human,” he says.
“When you pack this massive amount of information into a synthetic, at what point do you pass the line that might give him that magic word of emotion?,” asks Scott. “When you realize you’ve passed that point… then you’re in real trouble.”
Terror
There’s a story that Alien’s cast didn’t know the chestburster scene was coming until the moment the newborn alien exploded from the ribcage of Kane (John Hurt). It’s how Scott captured real terror in the moment — and Álvarez carried that spirit to Alien: Romulus.
“He would do sneak attacks without telling us or keep a scene rolling for 10 minutes and keep me in a place of absolute fear,” says Spaeny. “It really does a number on you after shooting for six months. … He made sure that we saw sets and the aliens for the first time when we were filming.”
“Honestly, some of the animatronics were so scary that no acting was required,” Jonsson adds. “Fede knows how to make a set that feels terrifying because all of it is practical and real. The movie is all the better for it.”
Stan Winston Studios worked on Aliens, and many of Winston’s colleagues returned to work on Romulus.
“I really had to stop myself from getting giddy over these creatures because they’re so artful and beautiful in a weird way,” says Spaeny. “It was amazing to meet the team behind these creatures. A lot of people were going up to take selfies with the Xenomorph, and I had to go, ‘No, that’s my scene partner.’”
“It was terrifying sometimes but then you get used to it,” says Jonsson. “You’re walking past the Xenomorph and giving it high fives.”
The man who could have been the scariest force on set kept his distance: Though he produces Romulus, Scott let the team work without him.
“I think we would be scared out of our minds if we had Ridley Scott right there, the legend who’s the reason all of this happened,” says Spaeny. “Ridley must know in himself that his presence is quite intimidating.”
Scott says he preferred to save his suggestions to Alvarez for after filming.
“I come in when he’s finally putting it together because I’m the most useful in editing,” Scott explains. “That becomes quite tricky because once people get in the editing room, they tend to get blinded by everything they shot. They don’t want to lose anything, and sometimes, you have to be prepared to lose things you love.”
Alien: Romulus arrives in theaters August 16, from 20th Century Studios.
Main image: Director Fede Álvarez, left, and Cailee Spaeny on the set of 20th Century Studios’ Alien: Romulus. Photo by Murray Close. © 2024 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.