Sir Ridley Scott hasn’t been coy about his trepidations regarding the future of his and H.R Giger’s fear-inducing creation, the Xenomorph. The three-time Best Director nominee returned to the Alien franchise, that he started way back in 1979, with the prequels Prometheus (2012) and Covenant (2017), both of which yielded divisive verdicts.
As a result, Scott disclosed last November during a producer roundtable that he believed his and Giger’s nightmarish spawn had been enervated, saying:
“I think the beast has almost run out, personally. You’ve got to come in with something else. You’ve got to replace that.”
The director’s opinion on the Xenomorph appeared intransigent at the time, especially when he began to entertain the idea of replacing the titular creature with AI, which he did, to an extent in Covenant, with Michael Fassbender’s deliciously-devilish robot duo, David and Walter. However, in a recent sit-down with Yahoo!, Sir Ridley backtracked on his plan to supersede the Xenomorph, where he admitted that usurping Giger’s design is a more onerous task than expected.
“In my career, which has been pretty long, there’s only been, with the greatest respect for the people I’ve worked with, two real, real originals. Funnily enough, I came across a guy called HR Giger and if I hadn’t got that monster you would not have had that movie. I saw the drawing – the drawing was drawn for the book, not the film – and I was so kind of taken, I flew to Switzerland where he lived because he didn’t want to get the plane as he was scared of flying.”
The filmmaker isn’t just spitballing, either. Scott comprehends the genius behind him and Giger’s concept, expressing that the original movie would’ve never worked had it not been for the Xenomorph.
“It wouldn’t have been the same movie. Whilst the cast was wonderful, with Sigourney [Weaver] and Harry [Dean Stanton] and those people, but without that eighth passenger it wouldn’t have been the same film. What I’m trying to say is that there are rarities, there are those [ideas] that occur once in the while, not that often, but when they do grab them and hang on to them.”
Whether or not the Xenomorph, or Scott for that matter, will return for a third Alien prequel remains up in the air, but Sir Ridley does appear to have warmed up to the idea – at the very least. It’s also highly unlikely that 20th Century Fox would be willing to discard the iconic monster solely in favor of Michael Fassbender’s AI with a God complex, so Scott’s turnaround certainly bodes well for future installments in the franchise.