WHAT WENT WRONG - Alien 3

Episode Date: February 23, 2021

David Fincher's nearly disowned directorial debut! This week Chris & Lizzie crash-land a production beset by Alien whippets, bowel-moving bass notes and bald caps constructed one follicle at a time.Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Yeah, I like the cheap thing I forgot that cubed was a thing And when I looked at it, I was like, oh, it's like, Alien Square, but with the three And David was like cubed, you idiot Oh, yes, that's why the movie failed. Americans were too stupid to read the title. I don't get it.

So, Lizzie, we watched Alien 3 this week. What did you think? Had you seen it before? Quick rundown. No, I had not seen it. before and after a long run of movies that were actually enjoyable to watch um i'm mad that we watched this one because i like nothing happens um other than the exact same plot as the first movie but

worse and then add like kenburn's civil war sepia tones to everything and then lots of goo and that's this movie that's all it is it's very gooy um it's very sepia it feels like a direct rip-off of many other alien movies, including its own predecessor. Anyway. Well, I'm sorry, first of all. I actually enjoy this film, although I'm a weird sucker for this franchise. I kind of like all the alien movies, no matter how good or bad they are. So I realize this is not the strongest entry in the franchise.

Well, I love Alien. Let me be clear. I'm a big fan of the first movie. it's one of my favorite movies ever. This is just not good. I'll say that. It's not good. Well, I think you're going to understand why as we go into some of the history here. And one of the reasons I wanted to talk about this film,

aside from the fact that it's a classic kind of what went wrong with this franchise, Alien 1 was incredible, aliens was incredible, and then Alien 3 is kind of known as a bit of a stinker. I think something that not a ton of people know right off the bat is that this was actually David Finchers. first movie. What's interesting about Alien 3, in my opinion, is that a very young David Fincher was hired to direct this movie, who would go on to become one of the United States' greatest directors of his class, and he basically had the exact opposite experience of how Orson Wells was able to

handle Citizen Kane, where Orson Wells was given complete control over the story, final cut, everything, David Fincher was in the opposite position. And we'll get into the problems that that created for this project. But before we begin, some background details. So, Alien 3, as Lizzie, you mentioned, visually styled as Alien Cubed or Alien to the Third Power. So dumb. Is the, you guessed it, third installment in the long-ring alien franchise. Now, I will argue the title had some logic, which is the first one was singular alien.

The second one was plural aliens. And so they raised it to the third power for the third one. It doesn't exactly make sense, but it almost makes sense. So the sales pitch. If there had been three aliens, like if there had been like, you know, triple the aliens, maybe, but that's not even the case. Well, actually, they did use it in the marketing. They said three times the suspense, three times the danger, three times the terror, which actually isn't what to the third power means anyway.

So let's keep going. Also, three times the VFX that look like clip art. It was rough. We'll get into that as well. As I mentioned, the film was David Fincher's directorial debut, though he would later disown the project. It stars Sigourney Weaver as hero Ellen Ripley, Charles S. Dutton, the, like, surprisingly sexy Charles Dance, just throwing it out there.

Pete Posslethwaite, Lance Henrickson as the Android Bishop, and then very, very briefly, in just-appearance cameos, Michael Bean as Hicks, and Carrie Hen as the dead child nude. Alien 3 received mixed to negative reviews from critics, and it somewhat underperformed at the box office in the United States, although this movie did not lose money, despite what a lot of people like to say. So, how did this truly Sterling franchise, started by Ridley Scott and then continued by James Cameron, lose its way. Let's burst through its chest and find out. All right. So, for those of you who have not seen Alien 3, the plot is very simple, because as Lizzie mentioned, not a lot happens in this movie. Almost nothing.

So the story picks up shortly after the events of James Cameron's aliens, in which Sigourney Weaver playing Ellen Ripley, Corporal Hicks, played by Michael Bean, the Android Bishop played by Lance Henrickson and the young survivor, Newt, wonderful child actress Carrie Hen, who actually left acting after aliens, are floating through space aboard the Sulaco, a ship, in cryosleep. Somehow, an alien egg is revealed to be on board. One of the little facehugger guys gets out. The ship gets damaged. The computer rejects the life support systems down to a prison planet, populated by two dozen or so violent male inmates that have all taken up a weird religion. and Ellen Ripley, the sole survivor of the crash, once again finds herself in a life or death battle with the titular alien as it begins picking off prisoners one by one.

Lizzie, at what point in the movie does the alien really show up? With like 15 minutes left to go. No, sorry, there might be like 30 minutes left to go before the full-blown alien shows up. But one quick thing about this prison planet, there's an awful lot of time spent on how they are, extremely nervous about a woman being anywhere nearby on the planet because all of the men in this prison are going to want a banger immediately, which problematic for many reasons. Anyway, there were a lot of problems with this and there was also a quasi-rape scene that I really didn't need. This is an alien movie. Indeed. And a lot of that sexual angst comes from an earlier version of the

script that we'll get into. So, why make a Alien 3. That's the first question. James Cameron's aliens released in 1986 was truly a surprise smash hit. It turned Ridley Scott's Slasher in Space horror concept into a full-blown action blockbuster. 20th Century Fox raked it in at the box office that year. The movie grossed $160 million against its $18.5 million budget, which was huge for the 80s. Star Wars had wrapped up in 1983 with Return of the Jedi and 20th Century Fox was looking for a new franchise to carry the company Ford into the 90s. And it looked like Alien fit the bill. Beyond its financial success, aliens had been a critical smash as well. Sigourney Weaver had gotten her first Oscar nomination

for her role as Alan Ripley, which was unheard of. This was a science fiction film. Wait, sorry, she got that for Alien or Aliens? Aliens, she got an Oscar nomination for Best Actors. Did not know that. And Alien was her first movie. So she had just at 30 years old, that was her first real role. I had no idea. Coming into film. Yeah, I mean, I think she'd done some very small stuff, but alien, she was an unheard of actress going into alien. So she's become an international star. They've got a franchise on their hands. So 20th Century Fox approaches brandy wine productions. They're the production company that controlled the rights to the alien property. They'd co-produce the

first two movies with Fox about a sequel immediately following the release of aliens. So this is like 1986, 87. The producers at Brandywine that we're going to be talking about are David Giler and Walter Hill. There was also Gordon Carroll, but he wasn't in the documentary I watched as much, so we're not going to talk about him as much. So they're open to another go at the story, but Lizzie, they had the same concern that you have as a criticism of the film. They didn't want to just reheat the exact story that they had done before. Whoops. So, their idea was, let's explore why this company, the Wayland-Dutani Corporation, is so intent on capturing these aliens and using them as biological weapons. So if you remember in the first film, it's revealed that the character played by Ian Holm, his android, Ash, is actually working for this corporation to try to bring a sample back, be it at the expense of the crew or not.

And then similarly, Paul Reiser's character in the second film has the same nefarious motive. So they're like, okay, this makes sense. Let's expand it by going to the corporate side and seeing, you know, what happens when they get their hands on an alien, for example. So they put together a treatment for the story, and it's going to be a two-movie project. So they're going to shoot an alien three and an alien four. And they're going to shoot them at the same time to save money. And basically, it's going to be a Cold War allegory. Okay.

That's going to culminate in the fourth film with Ellen Ripley facing off with hordes of alien warriors bred by a group of expatriated disgruntled earthlings in a fight for Earth. So it's going to be like Lord of the Rings, aliens on Earth, you know, all out battle scenes. Trust me, triple the aliens of aliens to justify the third. That's it. That's all I wanted. So the rationale was they didn't know if they had. could get Sigourney Weaver immediately to do Alien 3 because she didn't seem that interested in the franchise, but they thought they could get her back to do Alien 4. So they had to come up with a storyline that kept her character out of the third movie, but then brought her back in for the

fourth one. So 20th Century Fox is a little skeptical about this idea. Both alien and aliens worked in no small part because of their small claustrophobic settings. It was more affordable, and the stories just worked at an intimate level as horror films. So, So, Geyler and Hill had pitched this larger version, and Fox agrees to, they're like, we'll finance the development of the story. But in the meantime, get Ridley Scott on because we're the only, we can really only trust him. And James Cameron didn't want to do another aliens movie at that point. He had gone on, he was going to do Terminator 2.

So Hill and Geyler go to author William Gibson. So do you know who William Gibson is by any chance? So you know his work because of everything he's inspired. So he's a prolific science fiction author at the time. and he invented the subgenre, now known as cyberpunk. Oh, okay. And he's the first person to coin the word cyberspace. He directly influenced kind of, like, the Matrix is basically just ripping off William,

and knowingly ripping off William Gibson. In fact, he created the idea of the Matrix, and including the name, a digital world that characters are interacting in to escape reality. So the producers go to Gibson, and they're like, okay, great, we're going to have this guy, the king of cyberpunk, bring that aesthetic to alien and this corporate world. And it's going to be this really cool, like, funky ideas. And he hasn't written a lot of screenplay. So maybe it's going to be a little rough.

But, you know, it'll be out there. And it'll have really cool new ideas for new directions to take the movie in. Is this an explanation for the ridiculous pants that some of these prisoners were wearing? No, we'll get to that. So William Gibson turns in his draft. And it's kind of the opposite of. what they expect. Instead of it being like this, you know, really weird, like cyberpunkky kind of thing, it's really kind of down the middle as an action movie. And you can actually read this script

online, which I did because I was a little bored. It's fun. I don't know if it's good, but it's an enjoyable read. It would have been an insanely expensive movie to make. And so basically, the movie opens with the ship going through space, same as this one. Somehow there's aliens on board, but then Bishop gets picked up by this pseudo-communist space society while Hicks, Ripley, and Newt get saved by their capitalist enemies. And both of these rival space stations attempt to clone the aliens at the same time. And of course, aliens take over both ships. Ripley spends the whole movie in Cybers Cryosleep.

And so the action is driven by Hicks and Bishop attempting to stop the aliens on these ships. And the drafts have some interesting ideas, including like weird alternate forms of alien gestation and transformation that Ridley Scott clearly took when he made Prometheus and Alien Covenant. So if you're nerds about that, go read these. The biggest issue, though, is that this movie would have been insanely expensive. It had like a new alien queen, the size of a dinosaur, like climbing on the outside of a ship. Sounds great. Yeah, it had like people just turning into aliens, like aliens bursting out of their faces. Like, I'm, Well, they kind of try to do that in this and it doesn't. Yeah, it was just out of control. The body count was insanely high. Like I said, it had two space stations. So then the WGA goes on strike. Giler and Hill are like, we don't know what to do with this script.

Let's get a director attached and see if they can figure out the right direction to take it in. And I'd just like to plug briefly, if you are interested in the script, in 2019, A Radio Play adaptation of it with Michael Bean and Lance Hendrickson, coming back for their original roles as Hicks and Bishop. That's awesome. And that actually is really fun to listen to because they're great. The guy that directed it, whose name is escaping me, did an excellent job. And it's really well done, very fun, about two hours and 20 minutes.

Anyway, everybody wants Ridley Scott to come back for this movie. Ridley will save it. But he's unavailable because she's shooting this really weird Girard-Dup Burdue, Christopher Columbus movie that I've never seen or heard of called 1492. Anyway, they then, the producers approach finished director, Rennie Harlan. And the reason most people know Rennie Harlan is the second best shark movie of all time, Deep Blue Sea. Yeah.

Love Deep Blue Sea. So good. He had just made a nightmare in Elm Street for the Dreammaster, so a sequel. And it had earned $50 million on its $6.5 million budget. Pretty good reviews. And so it was like, oh, hey, this is a guy that can do horror. and he can do a horror sequel. And so maybe he'd be the right fit for aliens.

So Harlan comes on and he says, I hate William Gibson's script. And if I'm going to do this movie, it can't just be the same movie of like characters running down corridors and space while an alien chases them. Like we've all seen this. So it's the same thing you're talking about, Lizzie, and Rennie Harlan recognized it.

Yeah, because to be clear, that is the entire movie is people running down corridors and like the Titanic slash abyss. doors closing behind them as they run down more corridors. Yes, the bulkheads, I believe they're called. So Hill and Geyler say, okay, Rennie, like, what do you want to do for this version? And Rennie says there are two options in my mind. One, the aliens get to Earth and humans have to fight them on earth. Or two, the humans get to the alien home world and have to destroy it to defeat the aliens and make sure that they don't ever, like, get off the home world and come, you know, try to kill people again.

Fine. That makes sense. That seems like a natural continuation. Yeah. And so the producers are like, sounds interesting. Let's give it a try. So Harlan brings on another screenwriter, Eric Red. So William Gibson is gone. They get Eric Red to come on. Eric Red wrote The Hitcher and Near Dark to, like, if you were near dark, um, that's the Catherine Bigelow, like vampire family Western. It's really good. And the Hitcher. is fun too. Eric Red comes on and he really hated the process. Apparently he had to turn the script in in less than eight weeks and when he included the amount of time that he and Renny Harlan spent breaking the story, he said he had basically 18 days to write the actual script. Oh no. So he later said of this script, that's the one script I completely disown because it was not my script. It was the rush product of too many conferences and interference with no time to write and it turned out

utter crap. This script is also available online and I did not read it because even the writer said it was terrible. Well, Chris, you're fired. Fuck it. I know. Honestly, I thought about firing myself. But the gist of it is special forces team discovers the ship floating through space. Everyone on board has been eaten by aliens, so no continuation of the characters from the last movie. And then the action moves to a space-based biodome that looks like a small American town and culminates with a battle between the townsfolk and the aliens, Brandywine productions rejected the script when it was turned in. Now is this pre-or-post-actual biodome?

This is pre-biodome. So Polly Shore actually got a copy of this and then decided to make... I'm just kidding. I have no idea. I don't know if you've seen biodome, but I might believe that. If I've seen biodome, it's... I could have used some more aliens. So... More aliens less Polish Shore.

Yeah. More aliens eating Pauly Shore. So then David Tui, and I don't know if you remember David Tewy from the Waterworld episode, but he is one of the many writers who wrote on Waterworld. So David, David Tui, who would later go on and create the Chronicles of Riddick with Vin Diesel, exactly, was then hired to rewrite William Gibson's original take. By this point, the script process has gone on so long that the Cold War has ended. And so, like, William Gibson's, like, the next. work is irrelevant.

So Tui is the one who apparently came up with the idea of a prison planet or like a prison spaceship. Not a bad idea. No, no. So that's kind of where that idea comes from. And he's like, it's a prison planet. And what they're doing is they're experimenting on prisoners with the aliens under this like biological warfare division of the Wayland Utani Corporation.

And so Rennie Harland was like, great. It's now it's just aliens and hallways and stuff. space, he really couldn't get excited about this idea. And to his credit, he basically said, listen, I'm not the right guy for this project. So he walks away, which is a big thing. Yeah. This is the chance to direct aliens. And there's a really great documentary called wreckage and rage on this project. And Rennie Harlan comes across like a very thoughtful guy. So basically, Tui's script gets sent to Fox president Joe Roth and he basically asks, why the fuck is Ripley not in this screenplay? Like, why is Sigourney Weaver not in this?

And he says, quote, Sigourty Weaver is the centerpiece of the series. Ripley is the only real female warrior we have in our movie mythology. Where is she? So, Hale and Geyer realized, like, oh, shit, if we're going to make this movie, we actually have to have Sigourney Weaver in it. And they basically call her with an offer she can't refuse, which is. is a $5 million salary, which is huge, solid back-end participation, and she gets final approval on story elements. So she gets final approval on all the scripts, basically. I was hoping none of

this was Sigourney's fault. I love her. So she accepts, and one of her caveats, though, is that the movie cannot be dependent on guns. So David Toey has to write her back into the movie and write all the guns out of the movie. And David Toey loves guns based on the movies I've seen of Miss. Like, Chronicles of Fridic is just a bunch of people with guns. So, meanwhile, Sigourney Weaver is actually exploding at this time. Just a quick aside. She'd done Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters, too. And then she had just done Gorillaz in the Mist and Working Girl, where she'd been nominated in 1989 for both best actress and supporting actress in the same year. So Sigourney Weaver has only continued to grow in her stardom. So for Fox, it's like, duh, we definitely need Sigourney Weaver.

So they're like, fuck, we have Sigourney, kind of. We need a director desperately. So at this time, Hill attends a screening for a director who I've honestly never seen any of his work. His name's Vincent Ward. He's, I believe, from New Zealand. And he had just created his first breakout film, which is called The Navigator, a medieval Odyssey. And it's apparently about some medieval characters who get somehow transported to modern times. unclear like how or why this is happening. Anyway, point being, a bit of a genre mashup. And for whatever

reason, Hill was like, this guy is the exact right person for this movie, which I still don't quite get because I looked at Ward's other filmography. And he seems like he makes very heartfelt stories about like humans and not the cold alien movies. But anyway, Hill was adamant. So, they call Vincent Ward and he reads David Toohey's script and he reads David Toohey's script and he he's like, this is garbage. I don't want to read. I don't want to do an alien sequel. He ignores their calls until finally they call him enough that he's like, okay, I'm kind of bored in Australia. If they'll pay for me to fly to L.A., I'll just go have a vacation and meet with them about the project. So he gets on a plane, and during this 14-hour journey to L.A., he comes up with a version

of the movie that he can get excited about. And Lizzie, do you think this is the version that ended up in the final film? Certainly not. No. It's certainly the strange. just take on any alien film I've ever heard in my entire life. Okay. Here we go. Vincent Ward's Alien 3 is set on a wooden planet run by monks. The gist. So this is where the weird religion came from.

Yes. So the gist is that there is a group of monastic scholars who have converted a floating planetoid made out of old technology into like a Luddite fortress, just hundreds of layers of hundreds of meters of water. wood in all direction. And one of the monks at the opening of the film sees a fiery star shooting through the heavens. Of course, this is the Sulaco, Ripley's ship. It crashes on their planet and they think it's the angel of death. Ripley is the only survivor. An alien is born from a sheep that has been impregnated by one of the facehuggers. They then see this beast come to life and they think it's the

devil. Alien is kept in isolation for much of the movie as the monks believe that She has brought temptation and evil to their community. Wait, Ripley is Captain Isolation? Yes, as they believe that, like, she is, she represents temptation, basically. Okay. So, Ward develops this idea on a 14-hour plane ride, comes into Fox and pitches it, and they apparently loved it. They bought it in the room, and they hired another screenwriter to come onto the project.

There's parts of it that I'm interested in. Yeah, I like the cheap thing, and I'll get into some other, stuff that they, you know, were going to do for the project. That's kind of interesting. More importantly, Sigourney Weaver actually really liked the, a lot of elements of the project. And the thing that apparently she liked most was that she was impregnated with the alien and that she died at the end of the project. She wants to get out of this franchise. And actually, so Fox asked Ward to write an alternate ending where Ripley lived, and he did. And so he made it so like her love interest sacrifices himself.

the Charles Dance character in the final film sacrifices himself. It's actually, this is what's interesting. The doctor monk figures out a way to like basically exercise or abort the demon from her body, which is the alien. He gets it out of her and then it burrows itself in him. And he walks into a fire to sacrifice, like cleanse himself and sacrifice himself to save her. There's some interesting stuff in there that I thought was kind of cool. Also, they killed Charles Dance way too fast.

in this movie. We'll get to that too. So they took both versions of the movie to Sigourney and she said, are you kidding me? The only one that I will do is when I die. I have to die. I can't make another alien movie. How quickly can I die? Can I die within 15 minutes of it starting? Yeah. No, no. She was like, kill me. Kill me now. Please fucking kill me. So the movie that Ward developed actually had a lot of fun elements, many of which found their way into the final film that you see. So there were going to be these enormous wheat fields and the sequence in which we would watch from an overhead view as monks separated in the wheat field were being stocked by the alien. So you could see like the wheat parting as the alien chase him, just like in Steven Spielberg's The Lost World, Jurassic Park too. He does the same

thing with the Velas raptors in the tall grass. So it's like very similar to that. The monks wouldn't have any guns, just like in the final prison version. And they, at this, center of the planet, they had a glass factory where they made all of their like stained glass. They'd converted like the old smelting that it was originally done to make glass and mirrors to get light around. And so at the end of the film, they lure the creature into the molten glass and then spray water on him, causing him to expand and explode just like in this film. So, the project is greenlit. And more importantly, as we learned through Last Action Hero, it's given a release date. And that release date is Memorial Day.

of 1992. So they basically have a very narrow window to get the script in shape and start working on building the sets. So they hire Norman Reynolds as the production designer. He begins building these enormous wooden environments for the movie at Pinewood Studios in London. So Pinewood's the other studio that, so Elstree is where like the Shining was shot or EMI originally. And then Pinewood is the other one. So they take over the largest stage at Pinewood, which is called the Bond stage. They shot a lot of double of seven movies there. And while the script is being rewritten, they're building and building and building. They're building like a planet out of wood, basically. Now, unfortunately, it seems as they were going through this process, two things are beginning to happen. First is that

Ward is much slower in developing the story than they would need or hope. And second, he's much slower at making decisions than he would need to make this aggressive schedule. So the studio started to have second thoughts about this quote, like bold new direction for the franchise. So, uh, let's hear a fun clip of Vincent Ward, who sounds very charming, talking about this process. Even though I'd had a commitment from everybody that they loved this idea, the idea that I'd had, by the time I, you know, was heading over to England and beginning, getting close to, you know, hiring crew and so on.

And then I got this kind of list of saying, we want the following changes. Meet tomorrow with one of the key senior executives at Fox. I was made to wait outside a door for an hour like a school kid. And I was in a terrible mood, I have to say, by the time I waited for an hour. And I'd seen this list, which was very aggressive. It was you do, you obey. So I tried to talk my way around it and was completely unsuccessful.

It was told, do it or be fine. First I said, you know what, I'd rather be fired. So, Vincent Ward was basically told by the producers, actually, we don't like this wooden planet. Actually, we wanted to be prisoners, not monks. Actually, and they kind of went back on all the stuff that he had been interested in developing. Yeah, and to be fair, he never really came up with a good explanation for, like, how was the planet actually made of wood? He was kind of more in the space of, like, if people are going to suspend their disbelief and accept that there's an alien,

here, like, just follow me with this, you know, weird wood and planted idea. So, weirdly, this all culminated when Ward found out through a friend on the production that the assistant that had been hired for him by the studio, who apparently was like a really beautiful, like, shockingly overqualified young woman to be his assistant, who like, like, when she'd been hired by Ward's own admission, he was like, I was thrilled when I saw her, uh, because she was like very attractive. and super smart. He was told that each night at the end of the day, she would actually call the studio and tell them everything that Ward had decided to do,

and they would give her, like, instructions on basically how to undercut him as he was going through the process. So he found out about this. He apparently tried to fire the assistant, and what kind of one about it saying, like, she's overqualified, I just need someone simpler. And that actually became the breaking point with the studio. and they released Vincent Ward. They kept their release date because they had already spent $7 million.

They'd spent $7 million on rewrites and set construction at this point in time. And so Fox was in a bind. They desperately needed a director. They had a limited window with Sigourney Weaver. They needed someone to come on, but no one wanted to touch this project because it was in development helm. And so the studio reaches out to the studio. to the very, very young David Fincher, who is 28 years old. Oh, no.

He is a whiz kid of the commercial and music video worlds, and they're like, hey, kid, how do you want to make an alien movie? Hadn't he also worked in, like, like, art department or something early on? Yes, yes. Well, I'll talk about that briefly. So they invite him to the Fox lot. he comes in, he's obviously incredibly smart, and he just blows away these executives. And they're like, great, we got our guy.

So a little bit on Fincher before we continue with the movie, he was born in Denver, Colorado in 1962. He moved to San Anselmo, California when he was two years old. He was actually George Lucas's neighbor for a brief period of time. His mother was a mental health nurse, and his father was an author, which makes sense because he's obsessed with sick people and he's a very creative man. Indeed. So he moved to Ashland, Oregon in his teens. He attended high school there and he directed plays and ran the projector at a second run movie theater. So what's interesting is that I think a lot of people on this project assumed,

oh, David Fincher shoots commercials and music videos. He just cares about how good the movie's going to look. They didn't realize that David Fincher is actually hyper obsessive over performance. He'd been directing actors since he was 13 years old. So in 1983, at the age of 21, David Fincher found work with industrial light and magic, or ILM, as we all know it. He was an assistant cameraman at first, and then a mat photographer. That's right. So he was, right, so you do these matte paintings, and his job was to make sure the cameras lined up correctly and exposed properly to do the mat photography and make sure these compositions look right. So his background was in art department, but more important, his background was in special effects.

And being very meticulous with them. Oh, hyper meticulous with them. He worked on both Return of the Jedi and Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom. And then he jumped ship when presented with the opportunity to direct a commercial for the American Cancer Society, which I've actually seen this commercial. I don't know if you have, Lizzie, and our viewers can all go watch it. Google David Fincher smoking commercial. The commercial is a fetus in the womb smoking a cigarette. Ew.

30 seconds. And it was highly controversial, and it launched his directing career. He co-founded the production company propaganda films. He started directing bigger and bigger music videos, working with Levi's, Converse, and Coca-Cola. But he hated working on commercials because he was answerable to the client, and there was no story. So he switched into music videos, which were at least more creative. I mean, he did Aerosmith, and then most famously, he won two MTV Music Video Awards for his work with Madonna in the late 80s. Wait, on what?

So he did Sting, Englishman in New York, Steve Winwood's holding on, he did straight up with Paula Abdul. Oh, that's a crazy one. Mm-hmm. He did Janie's Got a Gun, Aerosmith, Madonna, he did Vogue. Oh, wow. He did Freedom. I didn't know that at all. Those are huge.

He was the music video director of the late ladies. I had no idea. Not only that, but his production company Propaganda Films was. a production company that the next generation of music video directors, including like Spike Jones, Michelle Gundry, Mark Romanack all went through as they kind of earn their stripes. So here comes Fox. You know, they're telling him you're going to follow in Ridley Scott and James Cameron's footsteps. Finchers, this wonder kid, like what could go wrong? And well, obviously, budget is the first issue. So here's David Giler on the issue of the price tag for the film.

This was just before we were going to start shooting. And there was a figure that the movie was going to cost, you know, flat. And we told them, and they said, it can't be that. It has to be this. He said, they give us another figure. He said, look, it cannot be that. Sorry, there's this, you know, not with this director, not with these sets, not with this, it's just never going to be that.

And if you say that it's going to be that, it's going to end up costing more because when you're aiming low and you go over, you go way over. Which of course is exactly what happened. It went way, way over. So the budget was a really contentious issue from the get-go. The studio clearly wanted to make the movie for well under $40 million. The producers thought it would be a $43 million budget. In the end, they spent well over $50 to make this movie. So no one was on the same page from the...

beginning. Fincher comes on and his first job is he needs to figure out what the hell they're going to do with the script. So he's got this like half completed version of Vincent Ward's vision. They'd already even started making sets of this, you know, wood planet. And this is not Fincher's style. So he goes back to the idea of the prison planet. He wants everything to feel abandoned, rusted, decayed. So the production design team gets started on repurposing the sets that they've built and building new enormous sets to fulfill his vision. But they're not working off of a script. So they're actually, the sets are so complicated and so huge.

Everything you see in the film is a set built on a soundstage. Every single room environment that you watch in that movie is inside Pinewood Studios. It is incredible, the scale to which they built. You can watch the behind the scenes of the film. It's remarkable. Multiple stories. just everything. They've built it from scratch. So basically, Fincher's writing the script and at the same time, Norman Reynolds is building environments that hopefully are malleable enough that Fincher can

shoot what he needs to in each of them. So they're building tunnels, they build the mess hall, they build the infirmary, knowing that these are going to be key locations, but not knowing how they're going to be used. So, for example, chase sequences in the film are really confusing because they basically just built circular reusable sections. Yeah. That Fincher then had to just shoot over and over again in different directions and hope that that would sustain the suspense. And the geography is really hard to understand. That's because the script was not finished when they built these sets. In fact, Fincher would go visit the stages, see what the sets looked like, and then rewrite the script based on what the sets looked like to figure out what he could do. So after like an indeterminate

amount of time a couple months, Fincher turns in the first rewrite, and apparently it's a disaster. The studio, desperate to stop the bleeding, shuts down all work. And I guess the reason it was really a disaster was that he and the writer that he was working with had not captured Ripley's character in a way that Sigourney Weaver liked. And to her credit, she was like, basically all the men that have ever tried to write this character default to making her a bitch. Like, they just think her character is like, oh, she says crap and ass and shit and she's a bitch. And she's like, what Hill and Geyler and James Cameron all understood is that she's actually aloof, which is a very like male quality in film.

And they think that they can't write that into a woman. But these three actually did. So that summer for three months, everything gets shut down. And then the effects company, desperate to work on something, spent the whole summer working on the dummies for Bishop Hicks and Newt, which is why the dummies in the movie for the dead bodies all look really good because they have like three months to work. They looked great. Yeah. So meanwhile, Michael Bean, who is very salty about not getting invited back for this sequel,

has caught wind that they've made a dummy of him to use in the film as like a dead body. He finds out about this, and then he threatens to sue the production for use of his likeness. They then turned him and they're like, hey, can we just pay you to use your body? And he basically said, no, go fuck yourselves. And so a month later, they changed the script and they made it so his face got smashed in the ship so you couldn't see his likeness. And then they were like, listen, we want to do like a computer readout of your face that says like Hicks, you know, deceased. And he said, all right, now you can pay me. And so he later say that he was actually paid as much for Alien 3 just to use

his likeness as he had been paid for aliens. Oh my God. To be in that film, which Bean says is both a reflection of, you know, kind of how much of an asshole I was to get them to pay that, but also how little I was paid on aliens. Bean would later say that it was a big regret because if he'd known that David Fincher would become David Fincher, he would have just been like, go ahead, use whatever you want and use me in one of your later movies. But instead he's like, I don't think I'll be invited to one of his projects. An important lesson to learn. You never know where somebody's going to end up. Yeah. So, so Sigourney Weaver is really frustrated with the script. And I think understandably so. she's coming off two more Oscar nominations at this point.

And she's like, this isn't a well-written character. Basically, I want Hill and Giler, the producers, to write. You have to write this project. And if you write it, I'll do the movie. And so Fincher kind of has to say, okay, because otherwise he's going to lose his lead. And then the problem becomes that this divide starts to form between Fincher and the producers. where basically he's treated like he's, quote, this great shooter. And the idea starts to spread that Fincher's only responsibility is to execute the visuals on the day.

All of the story elements, the script, the dialogue, that's the responsibility of the producers and the studio. They'll get Fincher the script and then he can go do great things with the visuals like a music video director, but they get to do all the story. And what they didn't understand is that David Fincher doesn't do anything he doesn't want to. And he's actually more manic and detail-oriented about the actual process of storytelling than maybe any of the technical stuff that he does. So fractures are beginning to form between Finchers and the producers. And Fincher's strategy is basically, I'm going to take whatever script they give me. And then when I get into production, once I start shooting, I can actually start controlling things.

Because on set, I can control what happens on set. in the pre-production meetings, the producers have the control. On set, I have the control. So, as production draws near, just a couple of funny casting things, they start filling out the other roles. Some of them were, like, roles cast from the monk version of the movie. I'm sure, like, Pete Posselthwaite was, like, they had done pay or play deals, and they were like, if we don't cast these people, we have to pay them anyway. So, like, let's keep them in the movie. Pete Posselthwaite, who has maybe four lines in this? Yes. Yeah.

Sorry. The cat just knocked over the garbage can. Well, you know... He's a garbage cat. I was going to say. Game recognized game. So a couple of funny little things. Fincher wanted Richard E. Grant for the role of Clemens that Charles Dance plays. Okay. And the studio wanted dance.

They screen tested both and the studio won. Fincher also wanted to cast Gary Oldman. Unclear which role. Maybe the Charles S. Dutton role. And of course, he would most recently work with Oldman on Mank. And oddly enough, Fincher was married to Donia Fiorentino. They share an ex-wife. They share an ex-wife, which is just very odd as well.

There is a bit of a sidebar on that. I recently learned, courtesy of IMDB trivia, I think, that that particular ex-wife is rumored to have been Fincher's inspiration for choosing to do Gone Girl. Yes. I did read that in an interview as well. One of David Fincher's famous quotes, they asked him what his philosophy was, and he just said that all humans are perverts, which just tells you kind of what you need to know. Yeah, because I don't know that either he or Gary Oldman are easy to be married to.

Yeah, exactly. So production is kind of spiraling at this point. You know, Fincher doesn't feel like he has control. The studio's terrified that they've got this, you know, first-time director. on this project. The script is not locked. The shoot date has pushed. It was originally fall of 1990. It pushes to January of 91. They're like really getting close to the latest they could possibly shoot this movie because there's a lot of BFX. And so the producers bring on a new line producer. Ezra Swardlow. He's credited as executive producer in the final film to try to get the costs

under control. And here's a clip of Ezra arriving at Pinewood Studios three weeks out from production. What I was so shocked then, so really taken by was that we were three weeks out on what at that point, I think was a $42 or $43 million, which was very big at that point, with a guy who's never made a feature film before. And, you know, a very precious franchise. And that, you know, they didn't pull the plug. You know what I mean? It was like, you know, that I thought was the interesting decision, bringing this all together. kind of scripted evolving three weeks ago. Huge investment in construction based on pages that might change.

You know, storyboards that were clearly hundreds of days of shooting if you looked at it. And once I looked at these storyboards, I just said, you know, this is impossible. It's endless. It will just, you know, I'll have an English accent when I leave here. Oh, no. Yeah, so they're heading into production and the script is not. Locked, which is just the biggest second no-no. You know, we've talked about don't set the release date before you shoot the movie.

You can't start shooting the movie without a script. And bless you. And so January of 91, they start filming and filming is slow. So David Fincher. Because if we know anything about David Fincher, it's that he does a million takes of every shot. Not only that, David Fincher has to get everything exactly. right. So not only does he have his hands in, you know, everything from the exact position of the camera angle to the specific camera moves that they're doing and the lighting, but it's also the

shade of the fake blood that they're using. And there's just great footage of him behind the scenes being like, nope, too brown. That looks like Ronald McDonald. Like he's just going through every version. And then also to the design of the alien itself. And so what seems clear is that maybe as a result of the lack of control he had with the script, Fincher's doubling down on every aspect over the shoot that he does have control. So he brings back H.R. Geiger to redesign a new version of the alien, because you wanted to do something different, like the alien that moves on all fours. And that led to the quote, Bambi Buster version, which is like it pops out of the dog and it's already on four legs and looks like a baby horse as it kind of like gets up. Not good. For the first time. Well, this is what

required all the use of the effects that you talked about not looking great. So what they struggled with with this alien redesign is how do we get the alien to move at the speed that Fincher wants? In the first two films, the alien was just a man in the suit. I was going to say, it's completely practical. So in this version, it had been birthed from a dog, so it should move like a dog. And at one point, Fincher actually recommended that they build an alien suit around a dog. Yeah, I'm fully on board for that. So you can see this if you look online, and it's very simple.

very cute and very sad. They found a little, they found a whip it, like a little whip it. And they built this little alien suit around it and it's super cute. And it just looks like you're watching a chihuahua. It's such a bad idea. Like skittering down the hallway and it looks so awesomely stupid. It's so funny. And like I love the VFX guys in this movie. They're so fun. And they tried so many things. and they were such good sports. And they were just like, yeah, sometimes you make things. And it's just not what you hope it's going to be. So that doesn't work.

And eventually they settle on a combination of men in suits for the scenes where like the aliens kind of not moving. And that's when the alien looks good. Yes. And then also a rod operated puppet that was one third the scale of the alien that they would shoot against a blue screen and then use motion control camera setups to composite it into the final frame, which was very revolutionary technology at the time. It looks like it has like a halo around it? That's right. That's the fringing from how they're rotoscoping it out of the blue

screen and then putting it into the finished film. Boy, that didn't go well. The problem, yeah, it doesn't look quite right. The issue was that they tried to shoot the puppet shots on set, but they didn't work the way they wanted them to because they couldn't remove the puppeteers from the shot. So instead, they had to equip the cameras with digital recorders that would capture every movement of the camera. Tilt, pan, you know, dolly, every direction that they would go, feed them into a motion control computer. And then they would take that to a actual blue screen stage, and they would reduce that by two thirds, all those effects. And then they would shoot it at a one-third scale. And then they had to blow it up three times to put it in the final film. It was a...

nightmare. And I also think it's worth mentioning that what one year later is Jurassic Park, which was a mix of practical and computer generated images and it looks incredible still. Yes. For a whole host of other reasons,

you know, this one, I don't know exactly what was different, but clearly the technology they were trying to pioneer was not working in the way that Jurassic Park would. So not only that, there was some other pretty gnarly stuff. The effects team used real guts from the butcher each day to dress the effects on set.

So it smelled horrible. And this was like they would do 40 takes of the alien bursting out of the thing's chest to get it exactly at the right angle. There was actually an original version where the aliens birthed from an ox. So there was a whole deleted sequence with an ox in the movie and it bursts out of an ox. And that version was scrapped after they'd done like dozens and dozens of takes of it and gotten guts all over everybody. buddy. Fincher's so specific that Ezra Swardlow keeps having to fire and bring on new second unit directors. And so for those of you that don't know when a movie's filming, in order to make their schedule, the production team will oftentimes bring on what's called a second unit director.

And this is a director who comes in and leads a smaller skeleton crew of cinematographer, you know, camera assistant, sound person, et cetera, to go film things that might be, insert shots like close-ups of various items. It might be establishing shots, like exterior shots of locations. It's things that don't require like the lead actors or something and don't require performance. And so the director can continue shooting the meat of the movie while these guys get the flourishes. The issue is Fincher, being the control freak that he is, and I think rightfully so, had a monitor on set with him at all times that showed him a feed of what the second unit was directing. And so anytime that he saw something like garbage that the second unit was, you know, shooting, he would radio in and be like, what the fuck are you shooting that for? I'm never putting that in the movie. And sometimes he would even just like kick the monitor over because he was like so pissed off about how bad the second unit shots looked. He was deeply frustrated because he knew that at some point they would shoot something he didn't like and then he would have to put it into the film. And then of course there were some unexpected developments beyond anyone's control that slowed filming. So, and I'm going to

to skip this clip because it goes on for too long, but I'll speak to it. So the cinematographer for the film is now credited as Alex Thompson, who's a British cinematographer, and he was a experienced cameraman, but the original cinematographer was a gentleman by the name of Jordan Croninworth. And Jordan Croninwith had most importantly shot Blade Runner for Ridley Scott. He was a remarkable cinematographer whose control over light alone was unparalleled. One of the reasons that Blade Runner looks so good and it does such a good job with its atmospherics and color is because he was able to light it in that way. Ezra Swardlow even says in this documentary that Jordan Croninworth was the one person on set

that David Fincher would treat with like reverential respect. He was the one guy who commanded Fincher. respect. And Jordan Croninwith, about two weeks into production, Ezra Swardlow recognizes that he has Parkinson's. And Ezra Swardlow's father had Parkinson's, so he knew what to look for. And so he's recognizing that Croninwith had it? That Cronin with has it. And Cronin with knows he has it. And he had disclosed it, I think, to Fincher. But Swardlow, who watched his father dive from it over 25 years, knows that this is an incredibly dangerous condition to be dealing with on a film that will require him to go up scaffolding 45 feet to get light readings to climb into a ship that's hanging off

of the ceiling. These sets are enormous and dangerous and they have to film from odd angles. And also, Swirlow knows there's a very real chance that like if this guy locks up due to his condition one day, which is what can happen, they won't be able to film anything. And ultimately, Kronin Weth stepped away from the project after about two weeks on it. And you can see some of his work, some of the more elegant shots,

especially in the infirmary early in the story, were shot by him. And they brought on Alex Thompson, who seems like a lovely man and I think did a really good job. But it was just, I think, a really big blow to Finchers control and what he wanted to do on the story.

And obviously just a very tragic development for such an established, you know, cinematographer. So he leaves the project and in watching this documentary, it becomes very clear that there's this distinct divide on set in terms of how people are viewing their work with Fincher. The actors, every single one of them, are obsessed with him. They praise his communication, his sensitivity, knowing what he wants. They can't believe how young he is. Sigourney Weaver tells this really funny story where she's like, the day I fell in love with, David, we were in a development meeting. He's like 28 years old wearing an animal rights t-shirt and

saw these Fox executives and he hasn't said a word. And she finally turns to him and she says, do you have any thoughts on Ripley? You know, in this movie and he kind of goes, huh, thoughts on Ripley. And he turns to her and he just goes, she should be bald. And apparently the whole room goes quiet and Sigourney Weaver laughs and just was like, and I loved that idea so much. She turned to him and was like, figure out a way to shave her head. And that's how that got written into the movie. Which is written in that they have a lice problem and they like show their like giant space crab lice. Yeah. No, they're big lice on this on this planet.

So the crew, however, it seems like a lot of them found him very difficult and unpleasant to work with. The costume designer doesn't have much pleasant to say about him. Alex Thompson is very polite, the cinematographer, that does take over, but it's clear. there were some issues and there's moments on set where David Fincher just clearly doesn't respect he clearly respects

the work that actors do because he can't do what they do I think and he everyone else on set he's like I could do your job so don't fuck it up this basically seems to be his attitude there's a moment on set in this documentary where you know he goes what are we doing here and the guy says he needs more cable and he goes so he's going up in the rafters

to do it and the assistant's like yeah and Fincher goes why didn't he poke a hole in the fucking wall and run it through here. And the guy's like, well, he's almost done. And then Fincher goes, great, we're being held at gunpoint by a fucking moron and just walks away. And this was right in front of Sigourney Weaver. Obviously, he was very stressed.

So Fincher is getting stressed as this project is going on. He did have a very good relationship with the special effects team, I should say. It seems like all those guys and him got along because they're all detail-oriented. And then apparently, he and the producers just hit this blow. blowing up point where there's the character that Ralph Murphy plays. He's, they call, they nickname him 85 because his IQ's 85, the second in command kind of character in the story. Yeah. So Fincher didn't want him to play as comic relief, but the producers wanted him to play as comic relief. And Fincher, basically they got in this, it seems so stupid. They wanted to kill that character at the midpoint.

Fincher goes, no, I need him to live until the end, so I can have this moment where he gets shot at the And so the producers call the studio and they say, hey, we want to kill this guy at the midpoint. Will you back us up? And the studio says yes. And they go, okay, we're going to call Fincher. And then he's going to call you. So what are you going to say? And they're going to like, the fox is like, we'll back you up.

So they call Fincher and they say, you got to kill him at the midpoint. And Fincher says, fuck you. He calls the studio. And then he's like so pissed off that the studio actually backs up Fincher. And so the producer said, fuck all of you guys. And Hill and Giler walked off the movie. Oh, wow. So they said, they said call us and post.

production when you guys are fucked and you need our help. On top of all of this, as you mentioned, coming into play is Fincher's notorious appetite for multiple takes. According to cinematographer Alex Thompson, he would often go for at least 15 takes, and then Sigourney Weaver would ask to do it a different way, and Fincher would use that as an opportunity to do 15 more takes. So the studio started applying pressure. They're basically like incredulous. They're like, he's not shooting Shakespeare. this is a commercial director whose job is to make it visually interesting. Why is he so obsessed with performance? And Fincher's like, you know, performance is all that matters.

So it deteriorates to the point where Fox tasks John Landau, who's the head of their physical production and executive vice president's company. And he's not much older than Fincher. And they basically say you have to break Fincher. Like you need to just shut shit down anytime he asks for anything. And Landau gets sent in as the fixer. He clamps down on the budget, denies Fincher's, request for everything. They send in this studio executive to trail Fincher everywhere he goes. Whenever he goes

and watches dailies, the executive goes with him. When he then tells the people in editing what to work on, like he'll give them a list. He then would leave the room and the executive would then walk up to the list and circle the things that the studio approved the editors to actually work on without ever asking Fincher, like what his prioritization was. Also, I could be wrong. I think John Landau is James Cameron's long time producing partner. Yeah, yeah, no, he did Avatar. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, he did aliens and Avatar.

Yeah, yeah. So they're bringing in somebody from a previous one, too. Like, that's insulting. That's great. And John Landau speaks very highly of Fincher and realizes he was in a impossible position. Yeah, he seems like a very good producer. So at a certain point, Fincher's just continuing to shoot.

And so the studio just says, fuck it. And they shut down production. So rather than wrap the film, they just pull the plug. They realize that there are still holes in the movie, but rather than stay in England to, quote, fill those holes, they decide to shut the production down, bring everyone back to L.A., edit the movie for a couple of months, look at what they have, and then to decide what they're missing for reshoots.

So editor Terry Rawlings, who is the editor on the first alien film, gets brought in. He assembles what's been shot. The first assembly cut is three hours long. No. Even though it doesn't even have all the final scenes, you know, that they need to finish the film. And so now they need to do reshoots in L.A. while they're trying to splice together a shorter version of the movie. So they're trying to shoot more material to make the movie shorter. Right. Connect the dots in a way that you can trick it.

And beyond that, Fincher's penchant for all things grisly and disturbing is proving a bit much for the first Americans to see the film. The studio executives and the American crew, many of whom are VFX, are. artists who work in horror, a lot of them walked out during the new autopsy scene that was originally in David Fincher's first cut of the film. Okay, honestly, it's even, it's still quite gross. Like when they... And in the first version, apparently it was so bad that they were like, I couldn't watch it. And I'm a horror fan.

And it's a little bit... It was a little appalling to me that I know it was a dummy, but like they're showing a little girl. No, that was not. That was a, for some of those shots, that was a body, another, like, 10-year-old girl body double. Okay, because they're showing her completely topless, and there's a lot of shots that, like, highlight her nipples in a way that I was like, this is really weird. I think that the shots that highlight any parts of her skin that you would normally see were a double, but it's unclear because that was, I know they had another actress as a body double. It looked, there were some shots that didn't look like a dummy that looked like a little girl on the tin.

And it just wasn't, I just, it immediately put me off in a way where I was like, this is not necessary. And it's gross. Like, that's a 10-year-old girl. I don't care if it's a dummy. And that was a sanitized version of it. No. And the same was true of the dog chest burst scene. Which, by the way, it was a direct rip off of the thing.

Yes. Yeah, yeah. Well, it was supposed to be, it was an ox originally. But then they cut the whole whole first third of the movie out, basically, that established the ox. So basically, they edit the. movie down, Fincher and the editor, Terry Rawlings, go back to the studio and they're like, hey, we need A, B, C, D, E, F, G, you know, things. They do 50 meetings and the studio says, you can do A, D, F, and Z. And they're like, well, if we only do those, it won't work. We have to do all of them. And the

studio's like, well, I'll be grateful with what you get to do. So then they go shoot those things, knowing that they won't work without the components that weren't approved. They show the new version. The studio's like, why doesn't this work? And they're like, well, we actually needed this full version. And apparently this just happens over and over. Terry Rawlings is the editor who clearly really has an affection for Fincher and he's just like the guy was there was just no way he was getting out of this thing. So furthermore, what's an issue potentially with dragging on the filming over this period of time when it comes to your lead actress in this film, Lizzie, specifically with part of her look? Well, they shaved her head and your hair grows fast.

And your hair grows at all. So, uh, Ripley, shaved head, which great name for a band, is a challenge. And so Weaver didn't, when she was signing up for the project, she didn't want to have to draw out the hairstyle. Right. Because it could prevent her from other work without the use of a wig. I mean, with a guy, it's not as big a deal. With the actress, that's a really big deal. Unless you're Nicole Kidman and then you only use wigs. That's true. She actually has no hair. So, and I'm just kidding, she's wonderful. So, so Sigourney Weaver had actually had it written to her contract, that she would get a $40,000 bonus if after a certain date they had to keep shaving her head. So sure enough, they have to bring her back for another

sequence of shots after that date. But rather than pay the $40,000 to shave her head, they decided that it would be cheaper to make a custom bolt cap with four millimeter long stubble that had to be punched in every hair individually. It took somebody 70,000. hours to punch in all the hairs. It costs $16,000 to make and was nearly impossible to put on. And here is this makeup and VFX artists talking about this process. I told him at the time, I'll never do this again. I'm glad you got the shot, you know, I'm glad it worked.

I'll never do it again. So another month goes by. I get a phone call. Oh, we're shooting a whole new ending to the film. We had a big fight about the ending, too, of Alien 3. Sigournigfoil goes into the fire, struggling with the beast, the chest person, was a real last minute thing, and Fincher resisted at heavily. You'd heard that the Terminator ended with the guy falling into the lead, the same sort of deal. And he thought, oh, God, I don't know.

So sure enough, the new ending that they wrote to the film, that was going to be this beautiful culmination, ends up being inadvertently a direct rip-off of James Cameron's. Of James Cameron's Terminator, too. So the director of the last alien movie. And honestly, they were in production at the same time. They had no way of knowing until they had already shot this whole new sequence. So post-production lasted an entire year after the assembly cut was put together. The studio mandated, I mean, they shot like six more weeks on the Fox lot in Los Angeles. So the whole third act was reshot.

All the stuff about her falling into the lead was reshot. was reshot. The studio mandated that the film be under two hours, so huge swaths of Fincher's cut were eliminated altogether. So obviously Finchers is detail-oriented in post as he'd been in production. He brings in composer Elliot Goldenthal onto the project very early. He worked for over a year on the score. I actually really liked the score. Goldenthal did some really unique sampling work to bring the environments of the film to life. He did a lot of kind of score, a sound design sort of stuff. Dahl, though, kept kind of getting fucked with the restructuring and re-editing of the film. So basically, for an entire year, he's rescoring the movie constantly.

And then, like he says, in the final project, the whole movie becomes a chase sequence. So all the atmospheric stuff that he had written kind of goes out the window, and he writes a lot of drums of people running around hallways. And then basically, when they reshot the ending of the film, he was given one night to create a new theme for, like, the heroic conclusion of the film. of the film as she falls into the lava. So we wrote that in a night. And then another funny story before going into the release, the sound design team were these two incredibly funny fellows. And during one of the early previews,

they had installed two custom subwifers in the theater to reproduce the low frequency. They had layered into the opening sequence of the film, which were actually so low that people started getting up from the audience and leaving during the first 15 minutes. And studio executives were like, oh my god it's the movie bad but no what it was actually happening is that the subwarfers were so powerful

that they were loosening the bowels of the elderly audience members who were getting up to use the bathroom in the first 20 minutes of the movie so in the end it seems like fincher at a certain point just burned out of the project and he never formally quit but he basically walked away and he was largely unavailable for the final mix and you know kind of sound design and stuff and it's according to the composer, Elliot Goldenthal, Terry Rollins, the editor, oversaw and handled a lot of the mix, and in the end, he doesn't think that the movie sounds very good, and it seems like Fincher had eventually just been like, I'm done, I can't, you know, do this anymore. It's your guys' problem.

So Alien 3 gets released on Memorial Day weekend, 1992. It debuts at number two at the box office behind another third entry in a franchise, Lethal Weapon 3, so Alien 3 and Lethal Weapon 3, same weekend. Cameron famously called the decision to kill Hicks, Newt, and Bishop, a quote slap to the face. Although he was careful not to blame David Fincher saying he was handed a big mess on a hot plate. U.S. audiences struggled with the film. It's relentlessly downbeat nature, which contrasted with the upbeat action trailer that had been cut for the movie. The tagline of which was, the bitch is back.

Unclear if that was supposed to be the alien or Superman Weaver. Oh, wow. Don't need that. miscognizantist. The movie made $55 million in North America, which was considered a flop, but it did really well internationally. And so despite mixed reviews, it made $175 million worldwide. At the end of 1992, Fox was able to say, truly, that it was the highest grossing film of the franchise so far. It made more money than aliens. That is upsetting because it's bad.

Actually got an Oscar nomination for Best VFX also. Impossible. You're kidding me. No, lost to death becomes her. Oh, God, okay. I mean, it looks like they drew them on like an etchice sketch and then, like, it's bad. For anybody that hasn't seen this, they're really bad. Thatcher sketches did sponsor the Oscars that year, but you know, who knows what happened.

So everyone assumed that was it for the alien franchise, but as we all know, Ripley was raised from the dead five years later with the Joss Whedon penned alien resurrection, which will get its own episode at some point. And of course, the franchise lives on with Ridley Scott, more or less back at the home today. Fincher himself disowned the film. He refused to participate in the release of the anniversary box set. He is the only director to do so. All other directors associated with the franchise participated. And in 2009, he told The Guardian, quote, no one hated it more than me. To this day, no one hates it more than me.

I don't know, David. 2003, an alternative version titled The Assembly Cut was released as part of the box set. You guys can go watch that. It has all the deleted scenes. And Fincher was actually just so furious this whole time. This is actually a quote from Fincher while on set of the production of Alien 3 talking about his overlords at Fox. It's amazing to me that Fox is number one studio in the country because they're all such a bunch of morons. So Fincher actually, it's not that he's being caught surreptitiously.

the reason he gets louder is he has grabbed the microphone and pulled it closer to his mouth as he says the words, they're all such a bunch of morons. Okay, I do just want to flag this. I love David Fincher. He is amazing. I think he's an incredible director. It stands out to me like a sore thumb that if this, if any of the behavior he exhibited on this set or that example had been a woman, that woman would never have worked again. I'm sorry. Like it's, this stuff, it is infuriating to a certain degree. I understand that he's frustrated. I completely understand that this was an absolute shit show. That being said, like, the level of sort of bad boy behavior that is allowed and to a certain

degree encouraged is infuriating. Oh, yeah. And ultimately, it's not Fincher's fault. That's a horrifying, you know, aspect of this industry that's hopefully changing. But you're absolutely right. I would argue, even if a female director had directed this movie that had made $175 million, but not been received that well and had been a dream on set. Yes.

They wouldn't have worked. They wouldn't have worked with her again. Yes. They would have said that she killed the alien franchise and that it was her. And they would have said things like, you know, she neutered it or, you know what I'm saying? Like she like defanged it or all this stuff. Yeah, absolutely. You don't get away with that stuff in 1992 if you're not a 28-year-old white dude, you know.

No. Who's also like, who people think. is brilliant and he's also very he's handsome like there's a lot of to be fair you still don't but but yes i mean it's yes yeah i just i just i think it can't go without saying that like i don't care how hard this project has been you don't do that like that's that is you know well well i guess i would i would flip it a little bit i would say you can do that it's it and i actually find it entertaining and i sure I guess and Sigourney Weaver put it well because she actually recognized she said Fox seemed surprised that David Fincher never seemed grateful to them for having given him

this opportunity and basically her point was and she's more elegant in the way that she says this is Fincher never viewed it as they were handing him out something he said you have a movie that you want made and you've hired me to direct it and by the way I also think I'm the best person to direct this movie. And so I'm going to direct this movie the best way that I know how. And if you get in my way, that means you're preventing me from doing the very job that you hired me to do so you can go fuck yourselves. And I don't personally like working like that.

That being said, I do think that when you hire someone to do a job, if you can't entrust them to do that job, you've hired the wrong person. you know or or you need to figure out a way to do yourself and any director that stepped into this would have failed that is that is clear and also david fincher from everything you said about the music videos he had directed was not a nobody like that no no he was not a nobody at all i mean he he was he was a nobody in the sense that he hadn't directed a feature film yet but i think the only two of people who could have truly been successful with this project were james cameron and ridley scott And also, by the way, James Cameron on aliens, and we can do a whole episode on aliens,

they didn't like his treatment for that project. And he basically said, you don't know what you like. You're an idiot. I need to make this movie. Anyway, as we know, David Fincher then went on to make seven. He then went on from there to make the game and Fight Club, which were not that well received at the time, but became cult classics. And then into Panic Room, his career takes off.

And obviously today with Mind Hunter, with Mank, with as you mentioned, Gone Girl, the social network. He's one of the greatest directors working today. And a lot of that is because of his ability to pioneer new technologies and exert a level of control over his projects that is freakish and challenging, although yields a meticulous result. And the tension is, if you're going to hire David. Fincher to do something, you better leave the room, like basically when he's doing it. And I don't think people understood that when they brought him in to make his first movie. No, because they were basically trying to just bring on a hired gun. Like, that's very clear that that's what this was.

And that's not what he does. He takes complete control of every aspect of it. I have a lot of sympathy for David Venture on this. I think he's amazing. Also, did you notice from Mind Hunter? Yes. The gentleman who plays Tensch. Yeah, who's great.

Name, I can't remember. But yes, he plays one of the gentleman that tries to rape Sigourney Weaver. What a horrible part. But I love him. Yes. So to all of you out there who want to be directors and scoff at taking a hired gun type of job, just remember James Cameron started with Piranha 2. Yes, he did.

And David Fincher started with Alien 3. So Lizzie, I know you hated this. movie. I saw the worst thing we've watched. It was just boring. Yeah. We got to end on a high note. Okay. So in your opinion, what went right when it came to Alien 3? I got to go with love interest Charles Dance. I don't feel that we get enough of that. First of all, we don't get enough Charles Dance, which I think we've said before in the last action hero episode. But second of all, I liked that he was like a very sort of subdued, quiet. It was like, it was hot Charles dance. And I want to just like wholeheartedly second.

Yes, he's great. He should have been, he should have been a love interest in more movies. I kind of wanted the movie to be just like a rom-com. Yeah. Where like, like honestly, I found all of their emotional connection compelling. And I was genuinely like, oh, there's sparks here.

Like these two. I know. And then they kill him like a third of the way through the movie. It made no sense because it actually was like, I was kind of enjoying it when it was the two of them and they there. I thought it was. because he had this really interesting like puritanical like kind of repressed sexuality you know like he was it was cool because she was the aggressor right in the relationship which was really interesting and it's

well written for her character you know when she says do you find me attractive um in what way in that way like i just i really loved it was such a fresh dynamic yeah between them and then they just kill him so fast. He is, and he is attractive in an slightly offbeat way. Yes. Just physically, he's a little odd looking, but he was great. I really liked him. I think he's an excellent performer. He's great in Mank. Yeah. He plays William Randolph first. Um, so check it out. And I would just like to say, well, that was also going to be my what weren't right with sexy Charles dance. So I would just like to say, uh, Sigourney Weaver. So good. I think underrated also. and I hope this doesn't come across wrong,

Corny Weaver looks amazing in this movie. She's 40, she's 42 years old when they're making this movie. And she's just like, she's so unique looking. She's clearly super tall and like athletic. And she's just such a good, like, action hero. I feel that like if she'd come across,

come along 20 or 30 years later, she would absolutely be right up there with like Charlie Staron right now and taking on these, you know, totally kick-ass roles. And she was pioneering this type of role earlier on. And I just think it's it's so cool that they, in this movie, they do do a couple of things where they reverse the typical action trope and they just give it to a female character. Like, Charles Dance is her love interest. Like, she sexualizes him.

Like, she has the power, you know, in that relationship. One of the things that bothered me about the rape scene was that like that one scene took her power away. You know what I mean in the movie? In a way that. Also completely unnecessary. Yeah. Exactly. And all it did was build up this Charles S. Dutton character that we didn't like that could have just been the Charles dance character for the whole rest of the movie. Right. You know what I mean? Kind of filling in. And so I just I love that I love her character of Ripley and I thought it was a continued interesting turn on the character because she doesn't really have any sexual interest. Like there's a little of like a dalliance, you know, maybe her and Hicks in the second movie a teeny bit. But I just thought that was. really neat and I thought they actually wrote it really well in the third movie.

I agree. And I love Sigourney Weaver. All my tall ladies representing. I think she's like six feet tall, isn't she? Yeah. Five eleven and a half is what I read. Nice. Six feet tall. Which means if you were a dude, you'd be saying six two. Yeah. So that does it on Alien Cubed. Thanks again for listening. Remember, send us your recommendations at what went wrong Pod on Instagram or What Went Wrong Pod at gmail.com. All right. Until next week. What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer.

Editing and music by David Bowman with cover art from Uthana Uos.