Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

The moment in aliens when Ripley's running

through the station and everything's blowing up

and it's on fire and she runs through a kind of wall of steam

and she finds herself in a room, a big chamber surrounded

by alien eggs and looking at the egg laying creature itself,

seeing its giant egg sack, seeing the creature itself,

and everything goes very quiet.

And you're in this kind of a dream within the greater

dream of the movie, this kind of very dream-like out of body

kind of moment where everything's in slow motion,

and it gets very quiet.

Even though you know the explosions are going off

and all sorts of stuff, you're suddenly

in this subjective reality.

That came from a dream where I went into a dark room,

I walked to the center of the room, and I looked around.

And as my eyes adjusted to the darkness,

I realized that every square inch

of the walls and the ceiling were covered by wasps,

and I knew I couldn't make it to the door before they got to me.

So I just froze.

And I don't remember what happened next doesn't matter,

but the point is that idea of suddenly realizing

you're in an extremely threatening space

and the only thing you can do is freeze and think your way out

of it was the nucleus of an idea that then got turned into what

ultimately became the first encounter with the alien queen

in the egg chamber, which stylistically

is an interesting scene, because I

wanted to capture that feeling.

Know what it is that you're feeling,

that you want the audience to feel, and then

start talking to people and figuring it out

and experimenting around and figuring out

how to convey that feeling to your audience.

All right so we're jumping way forward in the film now.

There at the atmosphere processing station.

Everything's blowing up.

So it's very loud.

I

Mean, we're literally spinning the needle

in the sound design in the mix.

We're in the red.

Explosions are happening, and she's running.

We're mixing very subjective handheld moving shots

with fire, with explosions.

Were blowing cork chunks from air mortars,

and we're blasting her with shots

from CO2 fire extinguishers.

And we've got fire gel burning, and we're

shaking the camera to suggest that it's

a kinetic, very frenzied kind of sequence.

We're on a fairly long lens here.

It's hand-held, fairly long lens.

I can't tell you right now.

I don't remember.

It might be a 50 or 60 mil.

We're handholding it, and we're walking backwards with her.

So it's very shaky.

We feel that sense of the energy of the whole place coming

apart.

Sound design has been very loud and concussive

and lots of camera shake.

And it all fades away, and the only thing that's left

is this kind of droning sound and the breath.

Now the whole place is still shaking and blowing up,

but we've just gone into an altered state of awareness.

And the speed ramp--

we used to call it a speed trap.

Now you do it as a digital post effect to change the speed.

So we've gone from 24 to 48 frames a second.

So we're in slow motion.

We're in an extreme close-up on Sigourney

that she's walked into, and she's looking

around seeing something.

She's seeing it before.

We're seeing it.

So it's the same thing in the audience's interest.

They're leaning forward.

What is it that she's seeing.

What has stopped her?

She's been running as fast as you can.

If you're running with the little girl to get out,

we know that seconds count.

We know the whole place is going to blow up.

What she's doing doesn't seem to make any sense.

So there's a strange nightmarish quality to it.

It's that same nightmarish quality as

in the nightclub in terminator.

The slow motion is telling you something,

and it puts you into an altered state of awareness.

And the sound design is doing the same thing.

All the explosions have gone away.

All the steam blasts and fire effects and deep subwoofer

shape, it's all gone away, and it's

gone very clear and very thin.

And the only thing you hear is your breathing.

So something is going on.

What has she seen?

Shit balls.

100 alien eggs and she's standing right

in the middle of them.

So it's a nightmarish--

it's a nightmarish image.

It's, kind of, her worst nightmare.

So now so we have the wide shot, the wide reveal

shot with all the eggs.

And this is like all the eggs we could afford to build.

If we could do it now digitally same scene,

it would go on there.

There'd be more eggs.

We'd do a digital extension.

We'd build 10 eggs, and we'd digitally

extend it with another couple of hundred

to really hammer the point.

But it plays, and I think that's a good lesson.

If you can't afford to do a digital extension of 100 eggs,

make as many as you can, and it'll still work.

The concept will still work.

So now we just hear this very echoey kind

of drone and her breathing as her eyes slowly track around,

and again we're still in slow motion.

I want you to feel the anticipatory whatever it is.

It's a joyful experience to feel strange, anxious emotions

in a movie.

That's what you paid for.

That's what you came here for.

So if you're giving the audience what they came for,

you extend it.

You stay in that state.

So she doesn't see it yet.

She still hasn't seen it.

Now we're really milking it.

She's turning.

We're still in slow motion.

What are we hearing?

The little pilot light of her flamethrower,

and that strange machine like droning that tells you she's

deep in the heart of the station,

but it sort of reminds us that we're

deep in the heart of this insect hive.

She still hasn't seen it, but she knows it's behind her.

And it's that feeling in a dream in a nightmare where

you don't want to turn and you don't want to turn

and you don't want to turn, but you know you're going to turn.

And the audience plays the game, and they

know the language of this.

They know it's there.

They know it's there behind her.

So we're even milking the turn farther.

Now I've punched in, and the moment where I see her eye

see it is going to be the payoff,

but we've built to it with, I think, six shots already.

So I'm focused on her far eye.

When you're on a lens this long, you

have to pick which eye's in focus.

And sometimes it's a question of some debate with the camera

operator.

You got to pick an eye.

Well, we picked that eye, because we could see it better.

This one's hidden in darkness.

We're not interested in Newt here.

We're following Sigourney.

So Newt even though she's right there in the shot,

she's out of focus.

We're following Ripley.

Ripley is about to meet her nightmare.

So the shot ends when she has seen something.

We're going to cut to it.

Now we may expect to cut to something that we recognize,

an alien, but that's not what we're giving you.

What we're giving you is something mysterious.

It's the thing that's laying the eggs, so now that's progress.

Now we're seeing where the eggs come from.

Her eyes go up, follow it around.

We see the eggs inside it.

We see it glistening.

We see it moving.

It's a biological thing.

It's not like anything we've seen before.

We're curious.

We're afraid.

It's still got a nightmarish quality,

but we're getting there.

We're coming toward the answer, and we're

several shots into the sequence of this reveal now.

We're about to reveal the thing itself.

She keeps looking.

It's mysterious.

It's alien.

It's enigmatic, and it's big.

What this shot tells you, because we jump back over

her is it's big.

Whatever it is it's big, and it's mysterious.

I can't even tell what I'm looking at.

Maybe it's bones.

Maybe it's an insect.

Probably alive, and yes it's moving.

So now it's going to reveal itself not only to her

but obviously to us.

And the teeth extend, and yes it's definitely an alien,

but it's not like anything we've seen before.

And we immediately go from that reveal to the reveal

that there's not just one, but there's a whole army of them.

Ripley immediately knows that for Newt to survive,

she has to survive.

She has to get out of here somehow.

And she's surrounded by alien warriors,

and they're faster than she is.

And they're far more powerful than she is.

So she's not going to fight the warriors.

She's going to negotiate with the alien queen,

and that's exactly what she does.

So she sees the threat.

She's surrounded by the type of alien we've seen before.

The setting down of Newt is the gunslinger pushing their cloak

open to reveal their sixth gun.

She's going to fight.

Or is she?

Now we're in the queen's perspective.

Now we're seeing the little human in the egg chamber

from the Queen's perspective, and she

does something we don't expect.

She opens fire on the eggs, and the queen's response

is instantaneous.

And the audience understands what it means.

Ripley's going to burn the eggs.

She hasn't done it yet, but she can.

She's found the queen's weakness,

and she points the gun at the eggs.

There's not a line of dialogue in the whole scene,

and you see by the gesture that the puppeteers were

able to create-- now remember, this is all practical effects.

This is not CG.

You could do it with CG, and there's

no reason not to or you can do it with practical effects

like we did here.

And there's a place for--

place for both.

The way the alien queen lowers its head tells you

that it's intelligent enough to understand, and she's resolute.

The way Sigourney played it was that's right.

That's right.

I mean business.

Do we have a deal?

An the alien queen looks one way,

and Ripley follows and that warrior backs off.

She looks the other way and hisses.

She tells the other warrior to back off.

It's all in gesture.

And Ripley says, OK, I'm going to take this equipoise,

and I'm going to use it.

And I'm going to get the hell out of here.

And again, we milk it.

We fetishize the moment.

We make it palpable by doing an insert of the feet walking

through the slimy roots of the egg, so that we feel it.

We feel what she's feeling.

We're with her.

We hear what she hears.

We see what she sees.

We feel what she feels, so we're there with her.

Our hearts are pounding, and she knows that this truth

isn't going to last.

And then an egg opens.

Now does the queen control the eggs and when they hatch.

Is to queen is about to unleash 100 face huggers?

She doesn't trust that the truce is going to last,

so she says fuck it.

And then it's on.

So from this moment, because in the queen's mind

Ripley broke the truce it becomes a revenge story.

It's revenge for her burning--

for Ripley burning her babies.

And what's the principle at work here?

It's not to two men going at it to see who is most macho.

It's two women protecting their children

with the fury of the protective mother,

and so the conceit here was it's a different motivation.

It's a different motivation for a heroic action character

and in this case Sigourney's character.

It's a different motivation for a monster

than you've seen before, because I don't believe in villains.

I believe everybody's got a reason for doing what they do.

So what was the alien queen's reason for relentlessly

hunting her down?

This was-- this became a personal story at this point,

and I think a lot of the power of it came from that.

So you have to understand it's not

like I knew going in exactly every beat of how

this came out.

It was an exploration.

I did a lot of coverage on this.

I tried some things.

I didn't know it was going to work, trying to speed ramp,

trying this slow motion thing.

I wanted to do something.

I had a goal, which was to create

that subjective kind of out of body dreamlike nightmarish

experience.

I didn't exactly know how to go about it.

I experimented, talked to the DP.

We figured some stuff out, and it evolved.

And where it really kicked up to the next level

was in the sound design in the mix,

and I remember right now it was one

of the most satisfying experiences I've ever

had on a mixing stage was mixing this scene.

And when we finished it, we all looked at each other,

and we knew it we'd done something,

because we had fulfilled the promise of that nightmare.

[CREEPY MUSIC]