Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [101]
Dan O’Bannon’s vision for Alien was, in a way, to re-create the process of Dune on a bigger scale with a room full of great artists trading ideas. The plan was for Ron Cobb to design the spaceships as high-tech contraptions, using the latest in cutting-edge science. This would be like the space travel in Dark Star, except with a budget that didn’t have to use egg cartons for set design. Cobb imagined the surfaces of the cramped ship as dirty, industrial, and rusted. This spaceship would look as glamorous as a high-school locker room.
Giger’s alien’s head had the hard shell of the hood of a truck, and its spidery legs and fleshy skin made an odd match. The phallic protrusions and vaginal crevices brought to mind a collection of sexual parts massproduced in a factory from the late nineteenth century. It breathed and drooled and squirmed. It was a vulnerable thing. Cut it and it bled—only the liquid that spilled out was acid that could destroy just about anything.
Most horror movies concentrate on the dead eyes of the killer. Think of the close-ups through Leatherface’s mask or the glassy stare of the sniper from Targets. The monster in Alien, however, has no eyes, and yet it has no trouble seeing, just the kind of discrepancy that a designer interested in science would grapple with and Giger didn’t bother worrying much about.
O’Bannon encouraged this clash of styles between Giger and Cobb, but since working on Dark Star, he was more comfortable with the notion that the surreal could benefit from realistic science. His spaceships in Dark Star and Star Wars were full of buttons and gadgets and hard geometric shapes. He loved Giger’s otherworldly designs, but even he occasionally worried about the science of them.
Giger was not interested in elegant triangles, ovals, or squares, preferring squishy monsters with curved tails and watery eyes and tender skin. As he became more comfortable on set—he helped build the creatures himself—he also started expanding his influence. Giger drew a sketch of the derelict ship that was emptied out by the monster. This was not his responsibility—Cobb had already made a sleek design. But in a flurry of early-morning activity, Giger had an idea, and he drew a curved horseshoe of a shuttle with phallic horns jutting out that blended in with the eerie mountainous landscape. This new ship integrated into the landscape, making the design appear fully formed rather than cobbled together. O’Bannon complained that it wasn’t technical enough. It looked too much like the world around it as opposed to a piece of scientific innovation.
Ridley Scott made the case for the design, but later a producer told Giger to make a new one. It blended too much into the landscape. It was a short-lived victory for O’Bannon, whose influence waned as he became embroiled in a variety of petty disputes with Scott and the producers. Trouble started in the weeks before the shoot, which took place in London. Walter Hill thought that O’Bannon’s script needed trimming. He didn’t like the smarty-pants grad-student dialogue—his taste ran more toward Hemingway—and he cut it out. He also changed the names of the characters and turned the protagonist into a woman. Scott was fine with these changes, but he asked O’Bannon to take another look. “So I went through and repaired some of the damage,” O’Bannon says, “but because I had been ordered not to go back to the original, some of the best moments were lost. It was a sad degrading of my screenplay. I was convinced the picture was ruined.”
O’Bannon made his unhappiness known, which rubbed Hill the wrong way. “I always thought Dan and Shusett were unsophisticated guys,” Hill said, chuckling with more than a note of condescension. “They didn’t understand how the movies worked. I remember Ron telling me about coffee enemas once, that it would clean out your system. You know: science-fiction writers!”
O’Bannon hung around