He’s certainly had a lot of this brewing in his head for a long time. I just wanted to make sure I was able to help bring it all to life.
Even back when he made Alien, he fought to keep the Space Jockey itself in the film when the studio executives wanted to get rid of it, thinking it was pointless. It seems like he had this idea in his head that there’s a bigger story connected to the Space Jockey.
Yeah, Ridley Scott was doing Easter eggs back in 1979—it’s a really cool idea.
When you first saw Alien back in the day, did that Space Jockey sequence send your mind racing?
Well, what was really interesting to me about it… Truth be told, I never felt that it was an unresolved issue in Alien. I felt that, OK, this is pretty clear—this is a crashed alien spacecraft that is sending out a distress signal, and the Nostromo is responding to it, and then there are these eggs on-board. So then, obviously, the question becomes, Where did this alien spacecraft pick up these eggs? But then, also, I feel really bad for that guy in the chair, this Space Jockey, because he’s a victim in this thing.
So I felt like I had all the story that I needed: They picked this stuff up, came across it, and it killed them. But the idea that Ridley was advancing for Prometheus was, A, what if those things weren’t as alien as we thought they were? And, B, what if there is a fundamental relationship between those beings and us? And, C, what if they weren’t victims of these eggs but were directly responsible for making them? As in, it’s more of a thing where they made Pandora’s Box and something got out, rather than them being innocent, hapless victims. Those were the ideas that really got me pumped up for Prometheus.
And the visual scope of Prometheus allows you to fully explore those ideas without any restrictions. When you’re writing a script like this, how much of a comfort is it to know that you have someone like Ridley Scott in your corner? No matter how crazy or imaginative your ideas are, he’ll be able to effectively bring them to life, which he’s proven through movies like Alien and Blade Runner.
Yeah, that’s exactly right, but I think even beyond that you just know that there’s a huge safety net below you. He’s an iconic visionary director, and he’s also operating in a genre that he helped define, so there’s a tremendous amount of trust there. In other situations, I might be collaborating and someone might say, “Do this,” and, “Do that,” and I say to myself, “Geez, I’m not entirely sure that this person knows what they’re doing. This doesn’t feel right to me.”
And that never happens to you when you’re working with Ridley; you’re just automatically like, “That sounds like it’s the coolest thing ever,” because you know that he’s going to be able to execute. And I think that he was really excited to returning to sci-fi. He was really excited about shooting in 3D; he was like, “I want to shoot this thing in 3D, not do a conversion. This is going to be a new use of it, in a way where you’re just not ever going to be aware of the 3D, and it’s going to make the entire film feel more immersive.” I feel he accomplished just that.
There’s certainly a tremendous amount of pinching one’s self when you’re working with Ridley, but as a writer the upside is you can go with God, because he is the God of this universe.
In addition to Ridley Scott, you also had a first-rate cast to work with and build characters around. I was reading an interview where you mentioned how once Charlize Theron signed on to play Vickers, the character changed dramatically from how she existed in your script. Was that the case for each of the actors and their respective characters? Or, for the most part, were these characters set in stone?
Nobody was set in stone, actually. In the case of Vickers, the character was rewritten in order to get Charlize to commit to the movie. We had a number of conversations with Charlize and asked, “How can we put a little more meat on the bone here for you to interest you?” Then, she throws an idea out, we work on that idea, and present it back to her, and she responds to that and decides whether or not she wants to play the part.
In the case of the other actors, from Noomi [Rapace] to Logan [Marshall-Green] to Idris [Elba] and Michael [Fassbender], once those actors got cast I went and rewrote the script every time. These characters aren’t off-the-rack—you have to give them specifications so they fit just right.
Janek [Idris Elba’s character], for example, was originally written as an older sea dog type; that’s the way that Ridley always described him, so I always thought of him as sort of, you know, a Sean Connery, 60-year-old pirate. And then Ridley says, “What do you think about Idris Elba?” And I say, “A, I think he’s a genius, and, B, I need to rewrite the character from top to bottom.” And then you rewrite it, but then Ridley calls and says, “He wants to play him southern—Idris doesn’t want to be English.” So I go, “OK, let me take a stab at that.”
You’re constantly working on the movie to accommodate the actors to the best of your ability, and you hope for the best. But you never just say, “Hey, this is the way I wrote it and you’re going to have to conform to that.”
On a purely tonal level, Prometheus harkens back to a tougher, edgier, and more hardcore kind of science fiction that we haven’t seen come out of Hollywood in a really long time. There are several really visceral and gruesome scenes, namely a rather insane C-section involving Noomi Rapace and a med-pod. Was that also a major hook for you, to be able to take the gloves off, so to speak, and let the carnage ratchet up in the final act?
Yeah, definitely. It’s tricky, though, because there was a lot of talk going into the movie as to whether or not the movie was going to be PG-13 or rated R, and obviously, in terms of potential box office, there’s a big difference between those two. I’ll give [20th Century] Fox all the credit here. Tom Rothman [Fox’s Co-Chairman and Chief Executive Officer] said to Ridley, “Hey, shoot the movie the way that you want to shoot it, and give us the movie that you want to give us, and we’ll work everything out from there.”
Not that Ridley hasn’t earned that kind of trust, but putting that kind of trust into a filmmaker actually helped curtail us, in terms of, “Well, because they do trust us, we’re not going to have gratuitous nudity or constant cursing—we’ll only use that stuff as it pertains to the script.” But when it came to the visceral gore of the movie, particularly the med-pod sequence, there’s only one way to do that and that’s all the way.
As soon as I saw that stuff, before the CG and just during the dailies, I was like, “This movie is going to be rated R.” And it always wanted to be.
When I saw the film, there were quite a few people covering their eyes and sinking into their seats during that scene.
Oh, cool! Mission accomplished.
Interview by Matt Barone (@MBarone)
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