WHAT WENT WRONG - Aliens

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

On camera it was Ripley vs. the Alien Queen… off camera it was James Cameron vs. everyone else. Mutinous crews, studio interference, and seemingly impossible creature builds were just the beginning of the chaos behind 1986’s action-packed classic 'Aliens'. This week, Chris and Lizzie uncover why no one called Ridley Scott, how Sigourney Weaver almost didn’t make the cut, and why you should never—ever—argue with James Cameron. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So, dear listeners, and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, full stop that just so happens to be about movies, and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone one of the greatest sequels ever made from one of the greatest sequel directors of all time, the man who's never wrong, who sees the future, and who is headlining this December for us. As always, I am Chris Winterbauer, joined by my fearless co-host. Lizzie Bassett, Lizzie, how you doing this morning? Game over, man. Game over. I don't know if you've been keeping up with current events. We just got our asses kicked back there. I'm doing great. I am so excited to kick off our James Cameron Christmas season with aliens. And what a treat this one was, man, it's a lot.

I don't know if there's ever going to be a James Cameron movie that's not just like an absolute disaster behind the scenes. And you know what? Every time I cover him, I love him a little bit. bit more. And I think we're going to learn a lot about the man, the myth, the grumpy legend today. Chris, obviously, I know you've seen aliens before. But what was your relationship to this movie and what was your experience upon rewatching it for the podcast? So I actually saw aliens before I saw Alien. Oh, wow. When I was about, I don't know, 11 is my guest, maybe 11 or 12. My dad started on

the rated R gauntlet of action movies that he loved from the 1980s in particular. And I think that he felt that because aliens is a war movie hidden inside of a science fiction alien movie, right? It's an action movie for sure. Because of that, I think he felt more comfortable showing it to me than the first one, which is so scary, terrifying because it's a slasher, effectively. So I saw aliens first. I loved it from a young age. And one scene in particular gave me so many nightmares.

And that is, of course, when Ripley, spoilers, Ripley and Newt wake up in the med bay. and the facehuggers have gotten loose because Paul Riser's fantasticly... I love him in this. Fantastically, corporate shill, Carter J. Burke has let them loose. That scene burned a hole in my mind. It's great. It's so good. I continued to watch this movie again and again.

I then later found the director's cut, you know, the special edition that adds a few other scenes. I studied the script a lot in film school. I wrote an adaptation of the Mole People for Universal Monsters. And I have 100% stole parts. It didn't steal, but it lovingly referenced the structure of aliens very much in that movie. Somebody, please make more people. Yeah, please. It's fun, I promise.

And now I happily own the Aliens 4K Blu-ray. Wow. And it looks so fantastic. Holy smokes, does this movie look good? It holds up, in my opinion, with like a couple of exceptions, so well. And I think James Cameron not only made two of the greatest sequels of all time with aliens. and Terminator 2. And I alternate between which one of those is my favorite James Cameron movie.

It is those two. And if I watch one, I think it's my favorite. And if I watch the other, it's my favorite. And what I love about them is that aliens is such a good movie about maternity and motherhood and a mother-daughter relationship, in my opinion. It's a found family, which you love. It's a found family movie. Exactly.

Cameron loves that too. And so is Terminator 2. And that's very much a movie about fatherhood as well. And so I love them as a pair. I love this movie. I'm very excited to talk about it. I can't wait. You're coming in with an awful lot of information, which is great.

This is my, for some reason, I have covered all of the James Cameron movies that we've done so far on this podcast. I know. You keep picking them and I'm just like, son of abyss! But it's actually really fun for me because then I get to like experience you experiencing. You know what I'm saying? It's really great. I think this is the one I was least familiar with, to be honest.

The other two we've covered are The Abyss and Titanic. Titanic obviously, like I saw in theaters. Every little girl, you know, at that time had a very strong connection to it. So that was really my entry point to James Cameron. And then I saw the Terminator and Terminator 2 and it blew my mind. I agree with you. I think Terminator 2 is my absolute hands-down favorite James Cameron movie. It's so good.

It is so good. And I really love aliens. I think Terminator 2 tops it. You're probably right. I just happened to watch aliens more recently. So it's like skewing me, you know. I think if you watch Terminator 2 again, I do think that takes the cake, but they're close. Okay, dibs.

I'm dibsing it now. Fine. I'm dibsing it now. Fine. We still have to cover the first Terminator, and I can take that one. But so I had the opposite experience from you, Chris. I saw Alien when I was probably around the same age, and I was obsessed with it. I love Alien.

I love the Alien universe. I will watch anything in this universe, no matter how garbage it is. And there's certainly been some garbage that has lived inside this universe, although this movie is absolutely not part of that trash can. And I loved how contained it was. I loved, obviously, that Ripley is the center of it. I love that there's a cat. But I think I had a resistance to aliens because I had always thought it was just sort of a shoot-em-up type sequel.

So I really didn't see this outside of, like, clips on TV until probably late 20s or maybe even later than that to actually sit down and watch the whole thing. And when I did, I really loved it. To your point, this movie truly is it's too mother. opposite each other. Felt a little bad for the queen this time. When all of her eggs get torched, it feels a bit unfair. Bit of a breach of contract there from Ripley. As Ripley says, I don't know which species is worse.

You don't see them fucking each other over for a percentage. That's right. And learning about this made me appreciate the movie and, of course, the man behind the movie even more. I love the performances in this. Man, Paul Reiser is great. He is so good. He's so evil. got that cold sweat.

You guys should hear yourselves. Like, it's mass delusion. This is ridiculous. You know, he's so good at maintaining that smarmy, holier than now, condescending, yet reasonable, corporate speak. He's really, really excellent at not tipping his hat at the fact that he is the villain to the very end because he doesn't believe he is. And that's, like, what is so good about that.

I also love that they dress him like every, you know, every tech bro walking around Seattle right now is just dressed as Paul Reiser in Ali. Yep. He's such a good contrast to, they do a good job of making Lieutenant Gorman feel like the antagonist through the first, I don't know, I would say, hour or so of the movie, right, because he's incompetent. He hasn't done as many drops. Right. He's just a dick, though. He's just a dick. And I love how they flip them and they give Gorman a redemption arc at the end and whatnot. It's very smart writing. And like you mentioned, Paul Reiser plays it so well. Yes. Performances across the board in this movie, I think, are really excellent. We're going to talk about all, everyone.

One person in particular I will call out who I think is fabulous in this for reasons I did not even understand is Michael Bean. Yes. Obviously, a Cameron regular. But, spoiler alert, not the original person cast in that role. I have a guess. I actually don't know. Okay. Well, we'll get to it. All right.

Let's get into it. So two main sources for this episode today among many, many, many, many other many oral histories, retrospectives, everything. But the making of aliens by J.W. Rinsler. and also the Movies That Made Us episode on Aliens. If you've never watched that series on Netflix, I really recommend it. They canceled it, which is such a bummer, but really great series.

I love the way that they cover these movies. They're basically oral histories with a very charming narrator, kind of tying it all together, and that episode on this movie was really wonderful. All right, the basic info, as always. Aliens is directed by James Cameron, produced by Gail Ann Heard, among many others. It is written by James Cameron,

with a story by James Cameron, David Giler, and Walter Hill. It stars Bill Paxton, Carrie Henn, Jeanette Goldstein, Michael Bean, Paul Reiser, Lance Henriksen, Sigourney Weaver, and many more. And it was released on July 18, 1986, and the IMDB logline, as always, is decades after surviving the Nostromo incident, Ellen Ripley, is sent out to reestablish contact with a terraforming colony but finds herself battling the alien queen and her offspring. Do you know what Nostromo comes from?

Nostradamus? No, it's the name of a Joseph Conrad book. Oh. And Nostromo is the eponymous main character in this book. It takes place in a fictionalized 19th century kind of version of Columbia, a different name. And the city that it's set in is Sulaco. And so that's where the Sulaco comes from. Interesting.

Joseph Conrad, who has popped up on this podcast before. That's right. All right. Chris, in 1979, a young truck driver. in Orange County, went to a movie theater and had a profound experience. He specifically remembered, quote, not my reaction to the movie, but my reaction to the audience. I thought to myself, if I can do that, if I can even come close to doing that. The movie was, of course, Ridley Scott's alien. And the truck driver was a 25-year-old James Cameron. So, since this is our first episode and our Christmas gift to you all, a James Cameron extravaganza, we have to talk about him. And I'm going to give a little bit more

background in this episode than we did on the abyss and Titanic, but both of those are worth going back and listening to to get the full Jimmy C. Concrete Boots picture. Also, our interview with Alec Gillis. He is going to come up in this episode. Amalgamated Dynamics. He talks about early James Cameron, their experience together. So if you want even more personal stories, you can listen to that. Yes, definitely. All right, here's the basics. He was born August 16, 1954, a Leo, naturally, just like me, in Ontario, in Canada. He's the oldest of four. He grew up in Chippewa, which is a very small town. His father was an electrical engineer for a paper company, and his mother was a housewife and artist. And when you think about his parents being an engineer

and an artist, he makes a whole lot of sense. As a young teen, he saw a film that lit a fire inside of him. And it's one that we haven't covered yet, but has inspired many filmmakers on this show. Chris, what is it? He's 11 or 12, 1960. Was it 2001 Space Odyssey? Yes, exactly. And he was obsessed with it. But he didn't just watch the movie like some lazy normal child. He wanted to know how all the VFX were done. So he started building all of his own models based on the 2001 model kit and the making of book. And something else to know about Cameron is that his outlook was very much shaped by the Cold War, which is understandable given when he grew up.

He told the New Yorker in 2009, I suppose you could say, I believe in peace through superior firepower. I don't believe that the human race is suddenly going to evolve to the point that we can all join hands and sing kumbaya. In 1972 at 17 years old, his father was transferred to Southern California. This is when the family moves to Brea, which is a city in Orange County. Now, he never finished high school in Canada, but he did start taking classes right away at Fullerton College, which is a community college, initially studying physics and then English, but he dropped out by 1974.

At this point, he becomes regular blue-collar man James Cameron, where he works as a janitor, a truck driver, but he never stopped painting, drawing, writing, thinking about filmmaking at all during this time. And in Brea, he met two very important collaborators, William Wisher and Randall Frakes. Wisher, he met through a mutual friend, who would later become Cameron's first of five wives. And Frakes met Cameron when Cameron tried to pick up his girlfriend. Frakes dumped that girlfriend and picked up James Cameron instead. Nice. So Cameron and Frakes teamed up to write a script called Xenogenesis, and they decided to try and

film a demo reel to help raise money for a feature-length film. But they needed extra money just to finish the demo. So they turned to, Chris, do you know this? I think you do. Roger Corman? No. No. This is before a group of Orange County dentists. Oh, it's dentists. It's the dentist. It's another dentist money. Yeah, yeah. It's more dentist money. Got it, got it, got it, got it, got it. According to Freak, his buddy ran a recording studio and had been hired out by a garage band whose lead singer was the child of an Orange County dentist. Nice. This kid saw the footage that they'd shot. He really loved it. He managed to convince his dad to bring it to the rest of the dentists who agreed to finance the demo for $17,000. You know, it's really a real thing. First of all, A, yes, I mean, obviously, Terrence Malick famously, I believe dentist money, Badlands back in the day.

I believe the Cohen had a dentist money with Blood Simple, kind of Sam Ramey. But I also, I knew someone in undergrad whose dad was a dentist. And he was like, oh, my God, like, I'm going to be a dentist. My brother's going to be a dentist. And we're like, why? like, they make so much money. And like, you only have to work, like, one day a week. And it was this idea that, like, as a dentist, you just get to play golf, you know, and finance films. And I just think to myself, why didn't I become a dentist? Yeah, I don't love teeth. So that's probably why I'd have to be in someone else's mouth. But yeah, well, whatever, I'm glad they exist. And it turns out the dentists had great taste, but had no idea how to drum up any further investments for a feature film. So instead, Cameron and Franks used xenogenesis.

as a demo reel for themselves. Have you ever seen this short film, Chris? I have not. It's great. You should watch it on YouTube. It's really impressive. Oh, I believe it. Obviously, it's like, sure, it's a little hokey.

But the fact that, like, it's crazy what they were able to make basically in their garage with models. It is pretty amazing. Yeah. So armed with his demo reel, Cameron turned up where so many aspiring filmmakers have, you already mentioned it, Chris, Roger Corman Studio. And Chris, can you give a little brief background on Roger Corman? Just his style.

Maybe the most prolific B-movie, to be generous, producer of all time, famously made movies for astronomically small sums of money. But his studio became a revolving door for innumerable, talented people in Hollywood who used it as a stepping stone to eventually move on to, you know, bigger and better things ostensibly. Right. Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demi, many more. and he had a habit of hiring people essentially off the street with zero experience because he could pay them nothing, have them work really long hours, you know, and weekends. And he knew that they would do it because he did offer them the chance to actually make a name for themselves and become filmmakers in a way that would basically be impossible without him.

So Cameron got a job sculpting models for Corman, and he was very hardworking and scrappy. He worked through the night. And before long, he was promoted to a set designer. He also met a young producer who started out as Corman's executive assistant. Chris, do you know who it is? Is it Gaylan Hurd? It is his second wife, Gayle Ann Hurd. Yes.

That's right. Now, she told Stanford Magazine we called it the Roger Corman School of Filmmaking. You essentially learned everything, literally everything. By the way, she told a very funny story where Roger sent her down to the model shop to get something, and she showed up and there's this very stern, blonde Canadian man who's like, let me show you around and show you all these things. And she was like, wow, this guy must be in charge. and he was not at all.

Yeah, no, of course not. It's like the lowest level model maker. Yeah. So this was basically the best case scenario for Cameron in terms of learning how to make movies. If he wanted to move a light, he moved it, he wanted to paint something, he painted it, some guy wasn't doing something right. He would slap the paint brush out of his hand and do it for him.

I'm kind of kidding, but he is literally still known for taking the makeup brush out of a makeup artist's hand and doing it himself. Oh, my understanding is he will grab anything on set that needs to be grabbed. A hundred percent. Yeah. Which I know is annoying, but I kind of love him. Yeah. know he can actually do it. Yes. I've mentioned before that I think the skill of most directors is to know

that they've hired people who are better at what they do than they are. With James Cameron, he may be the exception. I think he is. But he also famously, according to Alec Gillis, was also pretty anti-film school and really. He is. Has been vocally so. Yeah, like not anti-education in general, but more like you can learn more through doing than you will ever learn in a classroom. Yes. And I think he's correct about that. I do too. I think it's the value, you know, that's the value of a For example, I wish we had more programs like that. Yeah. All right.

In 1982, he left to direct his own feature, Piranha II. Parano, too. Yeah, which, you know, this opportunity, he actually started as the special effects supervisor. He became its director. That was a whole thing. The director was fired. It was a bit of a double-edged sword because on the one hand, he got a directing and screenwriting credit, I believe.

And on the other hand, it was Piranha II. Yeah. But as I mentioned, the master of sequels. His first movie was a sequel. That's true. It was a sequel. By 1983, he was sitting on a script that he'd pulled together with his now girlfriend, Gail Ann Hurd, and Chris, what was that script? Determinator!

That's right. Let's roll the clock back to June of 1979 when Ridley Scott's Alien was released in theaters and did absolutely gangbusters, plus scared the shit out of everyone. It made $23 million in just five weeks. On a budget of around $11 million, it brought in over $100 million worldwide. So, Chris, what seems like the logical next step after this movie makes bank? Slap a two after Alien. You would think. And make another one.

That's right. Now, since we will eventually cover the original film, I'm going to keep this pretty brief. But basically, Alan Ladd, Jr., who we've discussed quite a bit across the podcast, had been an enormous advocate for the first film. He resigned from his position as president of 20th Century Fox one month after Alien was released. So a sequel lost its number one supporter basically immediately. And I also wonder, you know, we've seen this a million. times. When the guard changes, there seems to be a tendency to not want to make the content that the old guard was producing. Yes. I also think Alien notoriously has a very complicated creative

ownership structure. Dan O'Bannon, one of the original writers, Brandywine Productions, original producers. And then H.R. Giger is like as responsible as anybody for the finished film because he ultimately came up with the look of the most iconic alien in the history of cinema. And so you have, there's a lot of cooks in the kitchen. Yes. And it's an orphan now at this studio. And I think it was a pretty troubled production. And my understanding is that the script was not what ended up on screen at all.

No. I've read the original script. It's drastically different. Yeah. So things got even murkier in 1980 and 81 when Fox was bought by industrialist Marvin Davis and financier slash fugitive Mark Rich. We'll discuss the fugitive element in just a minute. Norman Levy became head of worldwide distribution and marketing, and he was strongly opposed to an alien sequel because he thought it would cost way too much money.

And you mentioned this, but there was a lawsuit churning behind the scenes between Fox and Alien producers, David Giler, Walter Hill, and Gordon Carroll. They are the founders of Brandywine Productions because it turns out Fox had been practicing good old-fashioned Hollywood creative accounting. Yeah. Napkin math, well, you throw out the napkin, dip it in some coffee, put it back on the table, you got a whole new set of numbers. You think you made money on this movie? Think again. Yes. So despite Alien bringing in $100 million worldwide,

they claimed it had actually lost $2 million. No, they billed them. You owe us money. Can you imagine? I'd be so bad. I actually can't imagine. Yeah, yes, seriously. So this led Giler Hill and Carroll

and their production company, Brandy Wine Pictures, to sue Fox for unpaid profits. Eventually, the Fox accountants re-crunched the numbers and they're like, fine, fine, fine. We made a profit, but it was only $4 million. which like, no, you didn't. No, you didn't.

I know. By spring of 1983, Fox settled the lawsuit once and for all, and part of that agreement was that they agreed to put an alien sequel into development, which would allow the Brandywine team to generate more profit. Naturally, those trixie minkses knew what they were doing because they only had to put it into development. They didn't actually have to make the thing. So I don't really think they have any intention of doing this at this point.

I think they just want this off their plate because Fox is an absolute dumpster fire at this point in time. I mentioned Marvin Davis and Mark Rich. Well, it turns out that Mark Rich had misrepresented the provenance of crude oil that he sold in 1980 and 81, as well as a little bit of a tax evasion, fraud, just a dab of some illegal trade. So he gets indicted, and he actually flees the country, hence he is now a fugitive. Don't worry, he was pardoned by Bill Clinton in the 90s. But this becomes a whole big thing Marvin Davis buys out all of his shares. And then this is actually when Rupert Murdoch swoops in and buys the whole thing for both of them. So a lot of upheaval happening at Fox during this time.

All right. So despite some internal support, the general feeling on the alien sequel was pretty meh behind the scenes. According to J.W. Rinsler, author of The Making of Aliens, even though they did make sequels back then, they didn't make as many sequels because the general rule of thumb was that a sequel cost twice as much and made half as much. Honestly, like, still kind of true. Yes, and yet, at this moment in time, you have a couple of the most successful sequels in recent memory. I'm thinking, for example, Star Wars, right?

Empire Strikes Back 80, because I want to say 83 was Return of the Jedi. But that was independently financed by George Lucas very famously. But I was also thinking, like, Temple of Doom, although I guess that's not until 84. Actually, I think those are all not quite out yet. They're not quite lining up, right. Interesting. So, Chris, who do you think would be the first call when looking for a director for the alien sequel? Well, you should call Ridley Scott.

Yes, you should call Ridley Scott. He did a great job. Yes, he did. They don't even call him. No. They don't even tell him that they are putting this into development. It's pretty unclear why that's the case. He must have pissed people off.

I don't understand why you would not call him. Blade Runner did just flop at the box office in 1982, but I do not think that's enough reason not to call Ridley Scott first for Alien. It flopped. It was extremely expensive. I don't know. Very contentious relationship with Harrison Ford. Who knows?

Like maybe there were grumblings or rumors. Like, you know, who knows? Pretty bullshit. And also, Ridley Scott was expensive. Yes, that's true. So maybe it was that. Maybe they're just cheap. I agree, it's bullshit.

They should call him. He'd crushed it with Alien. Well, they didn't. No. Now, part of this may be that nobody was really championing the sequel. all that hard at all. So I don't know if they really even thought it was going to happen. Right. Not even Brandywine. They were kind of half-heartedly in it at this point. In fact, they'd turned their focus to other projects, including a science fiction version of Spartacus.

Yeah, not their best idea. In the summer of 83, they were on the hunt for a screenwriter, when their development executive came across the script for a science fiction film that was currently in development elsewhere. And now our timelines have merged, Chris, because that script was the Terminator. Nice. So it turns out Cameron was looking for work because, due to Arnold Schwarzenegger's commitment to Conan the Barbarian, the Terminator had been pretty massively delayed. Now, again, I'm going to keep this short because we're going to cover the Terminator as well. So they brought Cameron in, pitched him the idea, but according to Cameron, he was not interested. This is what he said in the making of aliens. He said they wanted the same movie, but with the sword

and sandal elements intergalactically dressed up, which was a concept I found pretty idiotic. I wanted to do a fundamentally different story told him primarily science fiction terms. We weren't seeing eye to eye. You know, he knows what he wants. But as he's headed out the door, they're like, wait, we also have this loose, barely even kind of not really an idea for a sequel to Alien. And this, of course, stops James Cameron in his tracks because he thought Alien was the best sci-fi horror film ever made at that point in time. He later told Time Magazine it was, quote, a high watermark in the genre. There was a total philosophy in that film, the way the actors were cast, the costumes, the way the sets looked functional and used and a bit grungy, the sounds of clinking chains, dripping water. people really believed while they were watching it

that it was a true experience. I think this is one of the reasons that aliens works so well is that even though James Cameron does something very different, you can tell that he is not trying to destroy the world that Ridley Scott built at all. He's expanding it. The one problem with aliens is that James Cameron takes it to 11,

which is what makes it so hard to do another sequel after aliens. The problem is you go from one alien to an army of, of aliens, right, very quickly. And all of a sudden, in the sequels, you have no way to escalate or build upon what he's done. He actually just, he destroys the franchise. He nukes the franchise, basically, by making it too good. Yeah, I agree. All right, so he's all in, but this is a much bigger property than Spartacus. So Cameron knew he was going to have to really win them over with the script treatment. And remember, the Terminator has not come out yet. It has not even gone into production. So he's really only made Piranha too. David Geyler in the making of aliens said,

I suggested to him at the time not to tell anyone that he'd done it. So Cameron went home and stayed up for three days straight, drinking eight pots of coffee to write the treatment. He used many of his own existing stories, including one called Mother, about an alien on a space station. And a side note, but Cameron's mother was a very strong influence on his life and someone who really encouraged his creativity,

his dad, not so much, probably why Cameron loves a particular kind of woman so much. The power loader is also pulled from xenogenesis. If you watch it, the xenogenesis basically becomes a fight between two giant robots, one of which is controlled by a woman inside of it. It's kind of like a four-legged power loader. And he did all this while he was staring at a picture of Sigourney Weaver he'd taped to his desk, because in his mind, it was very obvious that she would return and that Ripley

would be the center of the film. Say what you will about James Cameron, but he's always believed in the female action hero in a way that I think was genuinely revolutionary for the time. According to Gaylan Hurd and the New Yorker, quote, he felt that they were underutilized in sci-fi action and fantasy, and that just about everything you could explore in a male action hero could be explored better with a woman. To put it more bluntly, when it comes to strong women,

his buddy Wisher said, quote, he likes to write about him and he likes to marry him. But you know what I really do appreciate about, that I noticed, especially in this watch, but about the way that Cameron writes these characters, is that he writes their evolution extremely well. So, for example, like Linda Hamilton, right, Sarah Connor. She's not a fighter, she's a fighter, but she's not a soldier in Terminator.

She becomes a soldier across Terminator, and then by Terminator 2. She's doing pull-ups in her sanitarium. Post-apocalyptic warrior, right. And similarly, Alien, Sigourney Weaver becomes the hero of alien by process of elimination. She is not the protagonist at the beginning of that movie. It's like maybe it's Tom Scarrett. You know, we don't really know who it is. And then in the second film, I love, you know, I'm not a soldier.

Right. And then midpoint, she's the soldier. and then by the end, she's going head to head with a grenade launcher, you know what I mean, against the mother. And I just really, I like that he trusts that the audience will follow the arc of these characters. And he doesn't need to say, like, she's a badass from day. No, like, she's scared, you know what I mean? She's struggling.

And then she overcomes these things. I just think they're really well-fleshed out characters. I think what I appreciated upon this watch similarly, a lot of times when we see this sort of like, quote-unquote, strong woman trope, particularly when they are written by men, I feel like there is a need to show zero weakness in them. Exactly. Yep. To a point where they become unrealistic and also, like, very abrasive and annoying. He doesn't do that.

He's not afraid to show, yes, weakness, but also, like, the femininity and... Femininity, maternal instinct. Yes. And by the way, these are all, I actually think Michael Bean similarly shows humility and softness, and that's what draws her to him. I think he writes it on the male side well, too. Like, they're complicated, you know, well-rounded characters. I think that may have more to do with Michael Bean and anything else.

Oh, that's good. Yeah. Okay. But yes, I agree. He's a very good writer. He is. So by fall of 1983, he submitted his treatment to Brandywine, who in turn submitted it to Fox, who said, ah!

Nah. Well, you know, probably... This is a lot of alien costumes. This seems expensive. There's a lot of aliens. Yeah. They felt that it was wall-to-wall horror and then it needed more character. development, and this is a fun fact. According to lore, when he pitched his concept to the producers,

he wrote Alien on the meeting room board and then added a dollar sign to the end of it, just to drive home, how much money they were going to make. The version I heard, which is probably not true, is that he wrote Alien, and then he wrote an S, and he waited for a minute, and then he added the two lines to make it into a dollar sign. I'm sure that's correct. Yeah. He's got great timing. He does. Honestly, it seems like they kind of wanted to jettison the property. They had actually tried to sell the rights off to the producers of Rambo, but they couldn't seal the deal. So, Chris, the sequel was close to being shot out of the airlock, but David Giler at Brandywine loved Cameron's treatment, as did Lawrence Gordon, now the head of production at Fox, and he managed

to push it through, giving Cameron the green light to go ahead and write the full screenplay at this point titled Alien 2. The Terminator was still in limbo, so Cameron jumped at the job and began writing the script. And a little fun fact, the same day that he got this job, he also got the call that he was hired to write the screenplay for Rambo First Blood Part 2. And he did them simultaneously. One of my favorite titles, Rambo First Blood Part 2. You need more numbers. So good.

The way he did this, by the way, because he set up two separate desks, one for each screenplay, so he would move back and forth. This man does not sleep. No. In February of 1984, with only about 60 pages completed,

though, a giant Austrian man got in the way because Arnold was finally available to film The Terminator. So James Cameron called up David Giler at Brandywine, said, I'm so sorry, I have to start working on the Terminator like basically tomorrow, and I need to set Alien to aside for now. And according to the making of aliens, Cameron said, quote, Giler just lost it. He actually said something I never thought I'd ever hear anyone say in Hollywood, you'll never work in this town again. He was angry as hell, and then he hung up on me. He's like, I have to stop because I'm going to work. You'll never work in this town again.

Yeah. So James Cameron did something a little sneaky. He managed to get it to Walter Hill at Brandywine and also at Fox. And they all loved it so much that they agreed to do the unthinkable. They would wait for Cameron to be available to finish the script. I'm sure they were so patient and didn't bother him at all. No, of course not. But this is James Cameron we're talking about. So on his way out the door, he's like, and also I'd like to direct it. Okay, bye. Fox is like you, director of Piranha too. So they said, fine, we're going to wait and we'll see how this stupid Terminator movie turns out before we agree to that. Now, oddly enough, Cameron had no real faith in whether the Terminator was going to be a success at all. So he actually was looking at it as an

opportunity to test ideas for Alien 2. He told the LA Times, quote, I was thinking of the Terminator as a movie no one would see. So I could work on some of the things that I would use on aliens. I remember when I was shooting a scene where the heroin crawls through all this machinery, I thought, this will make a good dry run. I'll get some of this stuff worked out, so I'll know how to do it. But of course, luckily for Jimmy C., an awful lot of people did see the Terminator. when it came out in October of 1984. It was a runaway hit, topping the box office for over two weeks,

and this was finally his golden ticket. Fox agreed to put him on as writer and director of Alien 2. Much to Cameron's surprise, everyone was advising him not to take the job. Here's James Cameron speaking to Vanity Fair. You know, literally the advice I got was anything good in the movie you make will be attributed to Ridley Scott,

and if it's bad and it fails, it's all on you. And I said, yeah, but it's cool. Speaking of Ridley Scott, he did not even know that this movie had gone into pre-production at this point, and he was pretty pissed when he found out. James Cameron gave him a call to tell him that Alien was so unique, it would be hard to make it, you know, really frightening again, and he was going to take a more action-oriented military approach. And Ridley Scott later told deadline, quote, I was pissed.

I wouldn't tell that to Jim, but I think I was hurt. I knew I'd done something very special, a one-off, really. I was hurt, deeply hurt, actually because at that moment, I think I was damaged goods because I was trying to recover from Blade Runner. He's even said in some other interviews that he was actually like noodling some ideas for a sequel to Alien, maybe because he's coming off of Blade Runner. And he's like, what can I revisit? And I mean, Scott was like he'd done the dualist, right?

Yeah. That was his first film. But he was older. I think he was like 37 or 39 when he made that movie. I believe he was 40 when he did Alien. You know, he was a successful commercial director. But you have one really successful film, Alien, and then one enormous flop, Blade Runner. and so he's probably feeling pretty unsteady, and it makes sense to want to go back to, well,

a little successful. I'll go do that again. Exactly. So I feel bad for Ridley Scott in this situation. It's pretty shitty. And Cameron's like at least 12 years younger than him, I think. So it's also like this kid, this punk kid is taking my movie. A Canadian?

A Canuck? Yeah. We used to own them. Exactly. Cameron did indeed go a military route. As you pointed out, he created what he felt was a metaphor for America's involvement in Vietnam. And by February of 1985, he had. turned in his script just hours before a writer's strike. So Aliens was officially in pre-production,

and now, Chris, it's time to fight about everything. Fight number one, Gayle Ann Hurd. According to the making of aliens, Cameron said, quote, I finally made my deal as a writer-director, and then I brought Gayle into the mix, but Fox initially didn't want to take her on, because they weren't familiar with Gayle. Now, by this time, Gail and I had become close, we decided to get married, but my insistence on Gail was strictly business. I told Fox, Gail is an excellent producer, and she must work with me on this film, we are a team. You either hire her and me together or I don't do aliens. And this is like one of the most amazing parts of this story to me. They really stick together on so many things. And he does not even have the clout to be throwing around like this, but he just doesn't care.

Yeah. Now, they were all very deeply concerned that she would not be able to stand up to James Cameron, except that what they failed to grasp is that she's the only person who actually can stand up to James Cameron, which is why he wanted her on the movie. And she really had to sell herself and then interview for the job, which is like a little bit of bullshit because she did have credits under her belt at this point. And apparently the first question she got asked in that interview was, how could a little girl like you produce a big movie like this? Whatever. I'm sure she gave them a steely stare and they said, okay, fine. They gave up and Gail came on board. But in April of 1985, Gail and James Cameron discovered that even though they'd been working on this project for years at this point, no one had bothered

to mention it to Sigourney Weaver. Brandywine said they'd planned on waiting until they got a script they liked, and then they would tell her. And James Cameron was pretty pissed about this, considering he'd written the entire script around Ripley. So he went rogue again and called up Sigourney himself. She was in France filming one woman or two, and he just sent her the script. She'd never heard of him at this point.

It had been six years since the first film came out. She's kind of moved on. She'd made Ghostbusters by this point. Yeah, she did that in 84. Yes. She had Half Moon Street lined up, which she was excited about. But she really loved the script. She's booked and busy, so if Fox and Brandywine wanted her, they would have to act fast.

James Cameron's like, she's interested. She'll do it. Like, let's go. But the problem is, they didn't really want her, which is shocking to me. They were concerned about how much she would inflate the cost of what they were hoping would be a relatively low budget film. And so Fox was like, eh, we want someone lined up for negotiating power. Cameron and Herd are like, no, it is Sigourney Weaver or Bust. We're not considering anybody else.

So they did something pretty balzy. Hurd and Cameron were headed off to get married in Hawaii, and they said, signed Sigourney Weaver before we get back or we're out. Wow. And off to Maui, they went. I think assuming the movie was probably dead. And even their wedding was fraught, according to Hurd and the making of aliens, quote, the day of the wedding I got cold feet,

Jim had to do a logical cost-benefit analysis of why getting married would be good. You know, there's nothing more romantic than James Cameron explaining the breakdown of why you should marry him. Yeah, as if it's a studio movie. I would love to have seen that. Yeah, yeah. Well, much to their chagrin after they were officially wed, Fox had called their bluff, and they had not made a move on Sigourney Weaver.

Wow. So, James Cameron pulls another sneaky Hail Mary, and he calls up Arnold Schwarzenegger's agent and told him, you know, everyone's telling me not to do aliens because I should probably do my own thing after The Terminator, but I got all these great original characters in aliens, and in fact, I'm going to drop Ripley all together and center the film around Newt.

Now, obviously, he had no plans to do this, so why is James Cameron making this call, Chris? Is it to get Sigourney Weaver active at this point? Yes, it's because they shared the same agency, and he knew that Arnold's agent would tell Sigourney Weaver's agent. There you go. Schwarzenegger's the connection. Okay, got it, got it, got it.

And he was right. Also, at this point, I think we know that if James Cameron is calling you, you're probably getting played. Yeah. When asked him in Lafisier, if he would ever consider another actress for the role, he said, no, never, never, never.

I was asked to write a story based on Ripley. Later on, it turned out that everybody but us thought that the film could be made without Sigourney Weaver, which completely blew my mind and was absolutely out of the question for us. So as far as we were concerned, we started with Ripley from the end of the last film, and it was her story. We were fortunately able to overcome these obstacles

in the minds of the other people involved. We had to fight very hard for Sigourney to be in the picture, which to me was crazy. Me too. James doesn't make any sense. And by the time you get to resurrection, they're literally cloning her to come up with a reason to bring her back. Yes.

So they weren't through all the hurdles yet, though, because Sigourney wanted some changes to the script, which, according to Cameron, included dying in the film, not using any guns. That one's not going to fly. And also, making love to the alien. Now, I had a little bit of a hard time. She kind of does all of these in Alien Resurrection.

She does. And Alien 3. That's really weird. I think she got what she wanted. Yeah. I know. I had a little bit of a hard time confirming, like, the context of the making love to the alien comment.

But I will say that she and Ridley Scott did discuss some potential sexual undertones for the final sequence in Alien. So I think that that was something that was of interest. I mean, the alien itself is extremely sexualized. It's very phallic, yeah. It's both. It's phallic and yonic. That's true. The face-huggers are a straight-up vagina.

It's a vulva, exactly. So if you look at Giger's art, it's extremely sexual. And the alien design is, too. Yeah, I think, I mean, I don't want to write it off as like, that's a crazy idea because I think there could. be something interesting there depending on how it's portrayed. No, I'm going to write it off. That's a, I think that's a crazy idea. All right, you and James Cameron both. By the way, that sequence of Ripley in her underwear at the end of Alien really pissed James Cameron off. It's the only part of that movie that he really didn't like because he felt like it crossed a line

and over-sexualized her. Well, do you know who disagrees with that strongly? Sigourney Weaver. Tim Allen, who freaking loves that scene. God. Okay. Well, also Sigourney Weaver, who I think had a good point. She was like, look, she thinks she's done. She's about to go into hyper sleep, she's sweaty, her clothes were covered in blood, why wouldn't you take your clothes off? Yeah, and I know it's like really small underwear. I always read that scene as... You could give her bigger underwear. That's my only complaint there. I agree. Yeah, it's the Russell means, like, I could use a little bit bigger of a flap to cover my junk here and blast of the Mexicans. But that being said, I never viewed it as super sexual at the time. And I always

like to, I don't know, people in this movie have body hair. You know what I mean? Like, they come out of hypersleep and you're like, yeah, not everybody's like shaved up and stuff. I don't know. No, I agree. It doesn't bother me. But boy, did it bother James Cameron. And obviously, she wanted a much bigger fee. Fox refused and told Cameron and Hurd to go ahead and just rewrite the movie without Ripley in it. This was interesting. I'm not sure I can 100% confirm this, but allegedly David Giler thought that they had kind of gotten what they needed out of a female hero, and it was time to hand the franchise over to a male action star. Apparently, the idea to have the hero be a woman in Alien was a bit of a ploy to get Alan Ladd Jr. because that's something that he really supported and wanted.

Mid-80s now, we're in the 1980s action star is born. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and of course, there's a tendency to have a woman as a bit of a sidekick character, obviously Indiana Jones, romancing the stone, like all these things, but they don't appear the same way that Ripley does. So Cameron and Hurd again chucked up deuses and said, no Weaver, no movie. And finally Fox and Brandywine caved, and Sigourney Weaver came on board for $1 million,

which was the first time an actress had received that since Elizabeth Taylor in Leopatra. Which is so interesting because didn't Bruce Willis, noted TV actor Bruce Willis get five in 1987 for Die Hard? Yep. Yeah. Sure did. All right. She's the star of the franchise. Whatever. Yeah. And like an actress of quite good pedigree at this point. Yes, she was incredibly successful at this point. So Chris, they've got Sigourney Weaver on board. Fox is looking at the script and they're like, this thing's going to cost like $35 million. We don't know if we can do this. This is crazy.

And Gail Ann Hurd and James Cameron keep coming back and saying, no, no, no, it's not. We promise. This is going to be like 15.5. We can do this for $15.5 million. And Fox is like, okay. So they go ahead and they're moving forward. And actually, by the time Weaver had signed on the dotted line, most of the rest of the cast had not only been casted had started training in a boot camp.

That is how long all of this took. And production was taking place in London at Pinewood Studios, which made casting the Marines very difficult. They'd auditioned basically every American expat. in the UK plus a bunch of Brits who were doing American accents. And Cameron was like, I want incredible firepower in these actors. I want them to look like the military's best, the toughest Marines. And the casting director is like, that's not who's emigrated to England, my friend. They're a little doughy. Like, it's not what you want. So Cameron filled out the crew with some of

his old pals, Bill Paxton, of course, who had a small role in The Terminator. But he'd actually known Cameron and heard for quite a long time because he started out as a lot of the as a set dresser at Roger Corman Studios before getting in front of the camera. And so they were old friends. Lance Henriksen, who was originally in line to play The Terminator, came on board to play Bishop. I love him in this. You know, one of the things that this franchise, even in the entries, the latter day entries of Ridley Scott, with Prometheus, an alien covenant, or even Alien Romulus, the android casting remains impeccable. I know.

It's so good. Ian Holm. Lance Henriksen. Michael Fastbender. And then David Johnson and Alien Romulus is great. Yeah. I enjoyed Timothy Oliphant in Alien Earth. Yeah, he's fine. I'm going to not say anything about that show. I know you didn't like that show. I enjoyed it. I know it was a bit messy. I liked it.

No, I thought all the cast was very good in that show. The story didn't hook me, but I thought the whole cast did a wonderful job. All right. Chris hates Alien Earth. So moving on. Of course, Corporal Dwayne Hicks would be played by James Remar. Yes, it is James Remar. I did know that. Yeah, Warriors, I think he had done that. And I'm just trying to think of what else he was known for at the time. He had done quite a few things. If you don't know who he is, you'll probably recognize him best as Dexter's father from Dexter at this point. But he's a very intense actor.

He has a very severe face. And just his energy is completely different from Michael Bean. Stern, rough, gravelly. Yeah. All right. Jeanette Goldstein, who would, of course, end up playing Private Vasquez, had been touring the UK doing fringe theater and showed up to audition with high heels, tons of makeup, and waist-length hair because she thought it was a movie about immigrants in England and was

very confused about why they wanted Americans. And of course, that would end up being a joke in the final film. But when she realized her mistake, she flexed her bicep, and Gail Ann Hurd was like, why don't you hang out for just a minute? Her arms are amazing. Yeah, she was into amateur bodybuilding. She's legit done amateur bodybuilding. She was big. Well, and it's interesting. She was not the original actress cast for the part. They actually did cast a bodybuilder named Rachel McClish for the part. And she was let go very quickly because she was pushing back on all the swearing in the violence and just seemed generally uncomfortable with the whole thing. And we should note, Jeanette Goldstein is doing straight up brownface in this movie.

Yes, she's wearing a lot of spray tan. I will note she is of Moroccan and Brazilian descent. Okay. But yeah, it's, you know, does she have that accent? No. Is she wearing a lot of spray tan? Yes. We're in West Side Story, Natalie Wood Territory with Vasquez, as much as I love her character.

So Paul Reiser was probably the biggest name outside of Weaver based on his role in diner, but he was not a huge star. James Cameron wanted someone for the role who the audience wouldn't realize was the villain. And again, he is maybe my favorite part of this movie. Yeah, really pitch perfect. But casting Newt proved the most difficult. Most of the kids who auditioned came from commercial acting backgrounds. They're all really polished.

All of them are just like giving James Cameron a big smile. And he's like, no, wipe that smile off your face. Your family's dead. Yeah. So the casting director is like, fine. I'm going to go around to all the. US Air Force bases in the UK, because surely those kids aren't happy and see if I can find you a kid there. And they find eight-year-old Carrie Hen, who was eating in the school cafeteria.

They were going around taking Polaroids of all the kids. When James Cameron saw her face, he was like, bring her in, she's perfect. And sure enough, they had their newt. I think it was probably beneficial that she had no acting experience. That may have been easier for James Cameron, to be honest in this situation. So the cast was getting along great, thanks to lots of bonding opportunities, including the little arts and crafts day provided by James Cameron. He brought them all into a room with their armor and told them to personalize it, which is why you see things like the heart on Hicks's chest plate, which James Ramar painted because he's still in the movie. September of 1985, the 75-day shoot kicked off at Pinewood Studios in England, and right away,

they ran into a pretty big problem. Sigourney Weaver was filming Half Moon Street across town, and they were running behind schedule. Word was trickling back that there were problems, and then came the news. Weaver was unavailable for the first three weeks of principal photography on alien. That means that their already tight schedule became completely a mess. The whole production plan had to be reworked. And crucially, the only major sequence that did not involve Ripley is what, Chris? The big action set piece at the midpoint prior to her arriving in the APC, which is all of your aliens, all of your production design, all of your guns, all of your pyrotechnics, not an easy scene

to start your shoot with. That's right. It is everything that happens with the first exploration of the atmosphere processing station. Suddenly, everything related to that section, including a hanging miniature, automatic weapons, flamethrowers, the chestburster, colonists cocooned in the walls, warrior aliens, all had to be fast-tracked. So this is the first sequence they're shooting. And because this is a James Cameron film, of course, someone has to almost die and there's no disappointment here. Okay, so remember in the movie when Drake is dying and Vasquez is really upset and it cuts to her and it almost looks like she's gasping for air? Yes. Great.

So she actually couldn't breathe. That is because immediately after Drake gets hit, you see his flamethrower shoot a huge arc of flame. Well, it caught part of the set on fire and that whole set was made of plastic, which then released a whole bunch of toxic gases. So Bill Paxson heard her say she couldn't breathe and he's like, wow, she's really in it, man. And then he goes to take a breath and he's like, oh shit, I also can't breathe. He said it was like someone had sucked the air out of his lungs. So they had to be pulled out of there and given oxygen immediately. They were told that it was fixed, but then it happened again on the next take.

You also might notice that Jeanette chose to decorate her breastplate with a line of Spanish poetry that reads El Riesco Siemere Vive, translated, The Risk Always Lives. If you're in a James Cameron film, that is accurate. So once they completed this sequence, they struck the set, which is totally normal, but there was a little problem. James Ramar had decided to sample the local heroin. Police raided his hotel room, found the drugs, and arrested him. He was promptly fired from aliens, but he does actually remain in the final cut in that sequence because they had taken the entire set down.

If you watch it, you don't see Michael Bean anywhere in those shots, and James Cameron is cutting away before Hicks turns to the camera every time, because that's James Remar. So Cameron called up his friend Michael Bean, who of course he'd just worked with on Terminator and was like, you're playing Hicks. And Michael Bean's like, okay, he got on a plane. He was on the set filming within two days.

I think his performance is amazing given that. He's great in this movie. It's funny how you can kind of see, I can understand Cameron's hesitance in casting him to begin with because the character is very close to Kyle Reese, the father of John Connor in terms of the relationship that he ends up having with the female protagonist. But that's why I think that he falls into it very naturally

because he'd kind of done it. You know what I mean, a little bit before? Yeah. And it also, in a way, he's highly, a little bit in the first half of the film, but not that much. So it's a really nice surprise when all of a sudden she says, I believe Corporal Hicks has the authority here, and he becomes her ally, and then their relationship builds from there.

Yeah. Fortunately, that was the case, and they hadn't shot that stuff when they had to replace him. All right, Chris, to make an already tense situation tenser, James Cameron was really not getting along with his British crew. Now, the way that the British studios worked at this point was that the crew came with the studio. They were a long-standing team who had worked together for a really long time. They're protected by very strict union rules, used to a very set schedule, set roles. It's a very comfortable job.

These are all things that graduate of the Roger Corman Film School James Cameron doesn't believe in, basically. No. And to top it all off, most of them had worked on Alien. Yeah. And they were pissed that Ridley Scott was not directing the sequel, which again, I kind of get. I totally get. And I also wonder if they felt like this is anathema to Alien. This movie is the opposite of alien.

This is a giant American-style shoot-em-up action movie. Vietnam War movie. What are we doing? Yes, totally. They were very not on board with his vision. One of the British members dismissively referred to Cameron as the Yank, which really pissed him off because, again, he's Canadian. And First AD Derek Kraknell had a habit of condescendingly referring to him as Govna, which Cameron really didn't like. And then there was The Tea Lady.

We've met her before. and she's back. Basically, the British crew were legally required to have tea breaks. And on this set, that involved a little old lady with a tea cart who would arrive at sometime in the morning and then again at 4.30, and it would be like 20 minutes for everybody to walk up and get their tea and then another 20 minutes for everybody to enjoy their tea and have their scones. And then James Cameron is just like ripping his hair out in the corner of the set. According to J. W. Rinsler, quote, He was ready to strangle this poor old lady who was just doing her job. And George Lucas would interiorize his anger at some of this stuff on Star Wars

and was, I think, compared to Cameron, more passive. Cameron would just grab a camera and go film something somewhere else. As far as he was concerned, these guys just dilly-dally part of the day away. And one day, as they were filming, I am pretty sure the final sequence with the Queen versus Ripley, which is an insanely tough sequence, as we're going to talk about in just a minute, they're about to call action and suddenly all the fog starts to leak out. the stage door that suddenly opened. Why? Because the tea lady had arrived. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. She's like pushing her little card in. Can you imagine? I would just love to see the camera

pan right as like she just passes through all the eggs between the alien queen and Ripley. Knocking shit over. Oh, sorry, love. Now part of the problem was that the Terminator had come out in the U.S. and had made a huge impact, but it had not been released in the UK yet. So as far as they knew, he was a nobody. He was the director of Piranha too. Yes. Exactly. And he was an asshole who was taking Ridley Scott's job. And Cameron's like, fine. I understand that. You know what? I'm going to set up a special screening of the Terminator so that you all can see what I can do, get a better sense of my vision, and maybe get on board with me. And Chris, the crew came and they loved it and they respected him immediately. Just kidding. They never showed up. He set up multiple screenings and they could not be bothered. They never came, which is so fucking rude. That's so rude. Yes, but another way to look at it is these workers are working very long hours and James Cameron's saying, after you go home, I actually want you to come back and watch my movie for another two hours. Also, I'm pressuring you to like stay late on set and not have your tea breaks.

And they're probably thinking like, fuck this guy. I'm not taking time off on my off hours to come and watch his movie. Very true. I can see their perspective a little bit. Well, they also really didn't like Gayleyn Hurd and were dicks to her. and treated her like she was just the director's wife, which, look, she is a hard ass. I think that she can be difficult, but she's also an incredible producer. And it was, you know, just an oversight on their part to be reducing her to just James Cameron's wife. It probably didn't help that Cameron was doing what

he always does. If he wants something done right and wants it done quickly, he's going to do it however he wants. And he involved her in that quite a bit. For example, in the sequence where Jeanette Goldstein as Vasquez is trapped in the air duct and she like jams the alien's head against the wall, and then shoots it, that is Gailie and her doing the shooting in that sequence. And that's because she had a lot of firearms training. And James Cameron was like, she's going to know how to do it, the fastest and the best. So he's also putting his wife in the movie to shoot the guns. But things really came to a head with cinematographer Dick Bush. He was refusing to light things the way James Cameron wanted them. And Cameron finally just had it. And he fired Bush. Now it seems like this may have been

the final straw for the already fraught relationship between Cameron. and first AD Derek Cracknell. Prior to aliens, Cracknell had worked as the first assistant on Kubrick's 2001, a space odyssey and a clockwork orange. He had been with this crew for a really long time. He was a very well-respected first AD. But according to Gayleyn heard, quote, Derek felt he should really be directing the movie. He was a frustrated director. He had directed second unit before. He felt he was better qualified than Jim. So when Jim asked him to set up a shot one way, Derek would say, oh, no, no, no, I know what you want. And then he'd do it the wrong way. and the whole set would have to be broken down.

It's really frustrating. It's also causing delays in the schedule, thanks to all of the wrong setups. Yeah, you got to go. Yeah. So Cameron is like, you know what? You can hit the road to Derek Kraknell. And this is the breaking point with the crew, because the crew sided with Derek Kraknell.

And in the middle of a shooting day, they put down all of their tools, as it were, and they stopped working. It was a full-blown rebellion. Wow. Cameron's like, fine, we'll just move the entire production. out of England. And Gail is like, we cannot afford to do that. We told them this is a 15.5 million movie, not a $35 million movie. And the way we did that was by agreeing to film it in England,

where it was cheaper. And he's like, fine, I'll get a whole other crew. And she's like, you can't do that because the crew comes with the studio. We're at this studio. There's no other crews available. It was apparently Sigourney Weaver who stepped in and kind of saved the day here. She met with Herd and Cameron and said that she understood how the crew felt. She had actually worked with most of them on alien. But she also understood Hurd and Cameron's position, and she believed in Cameron's vision very much, and she kind of managed to convince everybody to calm down. Basically doing what she does in aliens. Exactly. Herd and Cameron called an emergency town hall meeting where everyone had a chance to air their grievances and work through it. And in this meeting, Chris, James Cameron did the

unthinkable. He apologized to everyone. Wow. Cracknell was rehired, and the crew agreed to meet Cameron on the schedule as long as they still got their tea breaks. And Cracknell agreed to adhere a little more to Cameron's vision. I don't think he didn't really fully support Cameron. No, this is, you can tell Cameron's just thinking, this is the bullet I have to bite to get this movie made. Yeah, exactly. And also, I don't have the direct quote in front of me, but I believe at the end of shooting, he was just, James Cameron said something like, I am thrilled that when I leave Pinewood Studios today, I will never be coming back unlike you bastards. Yeah. I do very much sympathize with James Cameron in this situation. I think this must have been really hard. was the right thing to do. And as far as the DP went, Dick Bush was gone for good.

Yeah. But in his place, Cameron hired another Brit, Adrian Biddle, for his first feature credit as cinematographer, and it was based on a strong personal recommendation from Biddle's longtime collaborator, Ridley Scott. Yeah. Didn't Biddle shoot the 1984 Apple commercial forum? Yes, he did. Yeah, Adrian Biddle, we talked about him a little bit in V for Vendetta. That was his last film. Yeah, he passed away during that. He passed away before it released. Now, despite all the tensions with the crew, it sounds like the cast had a really wonderful time. Carrie Hen loved Bill Paxton. As did everyone, Bill Paxton had a wonderful time on the set. His iconic line, Game Over, man, was improvised, based on a whole backstory he'd built for his character where he was an avid gamer. And Sigourney Weaver really leaned

into her mentor role on set, telling movie phone, quote, we had a lot of young actors who were really gung-ho, and I was a more seasoned performer since Alien. By that time, I'd had much more experience and confidence. There were a lot of deaths, and I gave a bouquet to every character the day that they were killed. Oh, yeah, like Mark Ralston, you know, he gets it. Like, there's a lot of good actors that you'll see over the years kind of following this, you know, movie. Yes, and I love this. She said, it was fun giving Paul Reiser his bouquet. I just gave him a bunch of dead flowers. That's good. Very good. All right. We cannot talk about aliens without talking about the design, the creature design, the set design, the ship design, because it's amazing. So Sid Mead handled the concept

art for the ship design of the Solaco and the power loader, among other things. He had done concept designs for Blade Runner, Star Trek, the motion picture, Tron. The very incredible angular designs, like kind of a bit of a mid-century modern feel to it. It's really cool. Sidme's art is amazing. He is amazing. Weirdly, he was in Florida working as one of the judges on the Miss USA contest when Cameron called him to work on aliens.

I don't know why I could not figure out why he was a judge on this. A man needs his hobbies, I guess. Sure. And the first thing that he drew was the Salaco, which had to be built full size for camera perspective. And his first concept was actually a very large spherical spacecraft that would have been covered in antennas, but Cameron said no, because the camera has to move past it. And we don't want to pull focus, so it needs to be flatter. Right. So that's what established the sort of slab-like gun shape of the Solaco. And when it came to the power loader, Cameron wanted some adjustments to

design and also insisted that it all be practical with an actual stunt performer inside the full-sized suit. And everybody was like, you're insane. And the task of actually building it fell to special effects supervisor John Richardson, who didn't love James Cameron's level of specificity. He told Timeout magazine, quote, artistically, James Cameron is the most talented director I've ever worked with. He knew exactly what he wanted, sometimes to a finer point that I'd wish to argue with. Jim would start quibbling about the screws in the bottom of the foot. I had to ask the producer to get him off my back. That Friday afternoon, a runner came down with two bottles of champagne with a note that read Building Powerloaders is thirsty work. Have one on me, Jim. Oh, well, good for Jim. Look, there might be a,

there might be a heart of gold inside that crusty James Cameron suit. Maybe. Who knows? All right. So obviously the original alien. It is alien singular. It had one xenomorph, right? Played by seven foot tall Balaji Badajo, which is a man in a suit.

Ridley Scott obviously was very careful about how he hid that. But James Cameron was like, I don't even think casting a seven foot tall person is really necessary, which is good because he wants to have a bazillion aliens in this movie. So what he did was he actually cast a bunch of pretty regular size six foot tall people, but they were very, very thin. He found like the thinest people you could possibly get who were strong enough to do the movement so that they look quite a bit higher. They did also have some, I think, like, eight foot tall, very thin puppets that were used for when they're like really crammed into small positions. They're also quite often descending from the ceiling, right? So like in the first attack, they're coming out of the secreted resin. And then the second attack, they're coming down through the ceiling. Yeah. Right. And obviously, we know in the first one, H.R. Geiger won the Academy Award for Visual Design

for Alien, but he did not reprise that role in aliens because he was doing poltergeist too. According to James Cameron in a lofizier interview, he said, quote, I think that if we'd really wanted to fight for him, we could have worked around it. The other thing is that I wanted to personally take charge of that aspect of the design. Yeah. I knew Sid Mead was going to handle some of the fantastic high-tech hardware of the future. Ron was going to deal with the colony.

I just wanted an area for myself. And that area in question was the alien queen. So Cameron brought in what went wrong alum Stan Winston's studio to handle the creature effects and especially the queen mother herself. He did the concept art himself for the queen. And Stan Winston's team, including, of course, friend of the pod, Alec Gillis, you can listen to his interview, had the daunting task of actually building it. According to Winston, this was the largest most complex puppet ever made for film at this point. It's one of the greatest creature builds. it may be the greatest creature build in the history of film.

I agree because it's completely practical, and that's why it looks so good. It is two stuntmen. Basically, the way that it worked, the way James Cameron designed it, was that it's dangling from a crane, so it's supported vertically, and there are two stuntmen inside of it, actually able to move the arms and puppet it. So Sam Winston said, when Jim first came to me with the idea of putting two guys inside a giant alien queen suit, I thought this man is out of his mind. Nothing like it had been done before, but in the next moment, I realized that if he had imagined it, we could probably do it.

So to find out if this would work at all, Winston's team, including Alec Gillis, did what they called a garbage bag test. They built the queen out of styrofoam and metal. They covered the skeleton with black trash bags and stuck the stuntman inside of it to see if it would even remotely work. You can see this test on the Stan Winston School's YouTube channel. It's really fun. I highly recommend going to look at it because it looks great. And of course, they did it and they pulled it off. And then again, remember, that sequence at the end is essentially two gigantic puppets fighting each other with like a bazillion people working to operate these things. The Gorney Weaver is inside of one of them. And then ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

Day time. I would have lost my mind. Am I right in that for a couple of shots? They do use a couple of smaller scale puppets of the two of them? They use miniatures, yes, for both. They use miniatures. Right. Okay.

They do. They had to. No, no, no. I knew they did for a couple of them. of like the bigger movements, I thought, yeah. But they cut in so well. Yeah. You really don't notice it.

No. All right, Chris, post production was also incredibly not smooth. I think I heard one story about post. It's probably the one we're going to talk about. Great. So he hired editor Ray Lovejoy for one reason. Chris, what was the movie that inspired a young James Cameron to want to be a filmmaker? 2001.

That's right, which Ray had edited. He also did The Shining. So I'm sure Cameron's expectations were extremely high of poor Ray. Very differently paced movie. movies than aliens. Like, those are wonderfully edited movies. They're remarkably slow compared to aliens. Yes. They were not getting along. They were on a very tight schedule. Cameron felt like Lovejoy was not doing what he wanted at all. Well, Kubrick famously has all the time in the world for, you know, these things. Yeah, this guy's not used to working under a schedule like this.

I mean, no one is. The schedule's insane. According to composer James Horner, quote, it was a nightmare. Ray was inundated but just barely keeping up with the film still coming in. Now, speaking of James Horner, the score was also a hot mess because the edit was a hot mess. And David, I'm actually wondering if you could pop in here and explain why you need a locked cut to work on the score and what happens if you keep changing the edit. Sure. Broadly speaking, the reason you want a locked cut is so that you can assess each individual's scene for the tone and the pacing and the general. emotion behind it. But, you know, a lot like with a sound designer's job, a composer's job,

is to match very specific actions on screen, whether it's a smile or a wave goodbye or a punch or a character's death. There are a million reasons that you want to have a specific musical moment at a very, very specific moment on screen. And these moments that I'm referring to are usually referred to as acknowledgments because they're acknowledging what's happening in the movie. So if the picture isn't locked, if the edit isn't locked, then you have no way to write music that corresponds with the picture in a way that uses these acknowledgments. And you're basically just creating ambient music, which makes no sense to do because you know that it's going to change and there's going to be expectations that you're going to hit acknowledgments in the next version of

the cut. So basically, without a locked cut and assurance that the edit won't change, at least from a timing perspective, you're wasting your time because unless your goal is to just write wallpaper music that's going on in the background, it's often way harder to try to string together disparate sections of music that are locked into old versions of the edit than it is to just start from scratch and re-approach the scene. Well, this is even worse than that, because when James Horner arrived in London, he discovered he couldn't even see a full cut because they were still filming. So Chris, here is the late great James Horner explaining. And I just want to say, I tried so hard to figure out what the source of this video is. I cannot find it. So if anybody knows where this interview is

from, please let me know. I got to England to write the score because I was going to write it where Jim was. He was in England doing post. And I found that instead of the film being totally locked and finished, they were still shooting. And it was coming out of my time to write the score allotment. I had six weeks to write the score when I got there, thinking that was sufficient. But there was no picture to score when I got there. They were still shooting, much less editing. I sat around for three weeks, visited the sets, visited the editing room.

They had 16 rooms at Pinewood with bins of film and trims up. it was a nightmare. Oh boy. Not great. Not great. Also, in case you're wondering about James Horner's accent, he is American, but he grew up quite a bit in England. So that's why he has that kind of quasi-British accent.

Now, Horner said that Cameron was extremely preoccupied by every facet of the production. Like, he would spend days just on the sound of the automatic weapons. He also created many of the film's sound effects in his living room with Gayle and Hurd using a synthesizer, which was very uncommon at the time. including the sound of the alien queen, the drop ship going down, that living room must have been wild. To top it all off, Horner was recording at Abbey Road Studios, which may have been famous, but was not modernized. It was not set up to patch in synthesizers and some of the more modern elements that he wanted to bring to the score.

So Horner begged Hurd at this point to move the release date back four weeks, and she said, no. According to Horner, Hurd and Cameron really didn't understand what they were asking him to do when they kept changing sequences. And here's Horner explaining what happened when he tried to write the queue for the big final fight between the Queen and Ripley. I ended up writing the queue as best I could. And then two days before, a day before, I was supposed to record the music, massive changes. They'd changed the whole sequence around. And I was up for, you know, 36 hours making sense, re-timing, rewriting like crazy, like crazy, like crazy. and then recording it.

And then Jim says, well, can't we do this there? And can't we do this there? And Gail said, I thought we were going to have an acknowledgement there. And I said, well, you did yesterday, but now the sequence is changed. And that's how it just goes. And it was all a question of the pressure of time. I said, Jim, we're down to five or six days. I have to start writing, and I can't change anything.

Once it's written, it's got to go straight to the copyists. because it's going to never make it to this dance. My job right now is to make sure the musicians have something to play, at least, that sounds 80% of what you're asking for. If I had more Tom, I could make it 100%, but we don't. And Gail's response was icy cold. She said, well, we'll just get somebody who can't. And I said, please do.

If you can get somebody more experienced and better able to produce this than me, I'd like to meet him because I'm sure I'll learn something. This just sounds horrible. Mm-hmm. I love his answer there, too. He's like, I don't care at this point. Yeah, an impossible position, as many composers are put in. Yes, as I'm sure David could attest to.

Now, of course, the cue that they're talking about is called Bishop's Countdown, and it would actually end up becoming one of the most famous cues in the whole movie and one of the most reused cues across action movie trailers ever. If you listen to it, you will notice it popping up in many, many, many trailers. Horner and Cameron would part ways for over a decade after the, this only to come back together for Titanic. And here's James Cameron himself on the Aliens DVD commentary explaining how they were able to work together again after this. I went to the scoring session expecting to hear the movie and an orchestra started to play stuff that didn't work. The music was

beautiful, but it didn't work necessarily on a scene-by-scene basis. And I didn't know what to do about that because there was no second round. It was like, okay, here's your score. James went off to another film. We wound up doing an awful lot of music editing and moving stuff around and tracking it from scene to scene. So, you know, he was never really happy with the outcome, even though he got an Academy Award nomination because it didn't necessarily reflect what he had created. And I didn't like the process very much. So when we got together on Titanic and I talked to him, I said, what can we do so that that doesn't happen again? Because I really like your music, and I really want you to do this film. And so we worked out a methodology by which we'd communicate

better. And that was a great experience by contrast. I love that. I like that they were willing to come back over 10 years later, but yes. Yeah. Recognize the mutual talent and make something great again. All right. Sigourney Weaver was very unhappy when she learned that the studio was going to be marketing the film as a straightforward action movie with an emphasis on guns and war. And she actually pushed back pretty hard on this. But on July 18, 1986, aliens was released. And it pulled in over $25 million in its first 10 days and then over $130 million worldwide on around an $18.5 million total production budgets.

So they did go a little bit over. But 18.5 million for this movie is crazy, especially when you remember one million of that went to Sigourney Weaver. Roger Ebert said, quote, I have never seen a movie that maintains such a pitch of intensity for so long. It's like being on some kind of hair-raising carnival ride that never stops. I don't know how else to describe this. The movie made me feel bad.

It filled me with feelings of unease and disquiet and anxiety. I walked outside and I didn't want to talk to anyone. I was drained. I'm not sure aliens is what we mean by entertainment, yet I have to be accurate about this movie. it is a superb example of filmmaking craft. It blew audiences and critics away. It earned seven Oscar nominations,

including Best Actress for Sigourney Weaver. It was her first nomination, and the first time in history that the Academy had nominated an actress in a sci-fi horror genre film. It won two Academy Awards for Best Sound Editing and Visual Effects, and neither Cameron nor Hurd were nominated for anything. All right, let's do a little, where are they now?

Though Cameron and Hurd's working relationship would continue through Terminator 2 and The Abyss. Their marriage, of course, would not. They divorced in 1989, the same year Cameron married Catherine Bigelow. And one year after being fired from aliens, Chris, James Ramar got sober and has stayed that way to this day. Jeanette Goldstein would go on to be killed by a Terminator and the Titanic, continuing to work with Cameron. Do you know who she is in those? She is John Connor's foster mother, along with Xander Berkeley, who we discussed in heat,

and she is the mother who stays in the... cabin with her two children. I can't remember the character's name. Yes, she's the Irish mother in Titanic. Yeah, and she's killed by a Terminator, an alien, and an iceberg. That's right. But Chris, this is maybe my favorite fact that I learned over this whole episode, and I know it won't have the same impact on you, but she actually really found her calling, not in acting. Oh, I know this. You know this? I didn't know this. Yeah, I've been to her store. Okay, so she opened a series of braw shops called Jeanette Brawes, and I was blown away because these braw shops are amazing. They're so good. Yeah, they're for women, I believe, cup size.

D and up. The slogan is the alphabet starts at D. Yep. So her bra shop in Santa Monica is right next to the new art theater. And I had seen the art on the bra shop, and I thought, oh, I put the name together and I looked it up. This was 10 years ago. Wow.

And I have a friend from film school who has a podcast, Sin a Nation, check it out. Brandon Sparks. And he just went in there one day and said, hey, I'm a huge fan. Do you want to come record a podcast with me at the new art? And he had talked to her about aliens and all this stuff. And she seems like such a cool person. She seems like a very cool person. She's a very successful, you know, businesswoman. Yeah, she has. They have multiple locations, including one in Pasadena that I have been to. So great store, Jeanette. Thank you for your work.

No, I mean, as a flat-chested man, I don't get to appreciate it. But yeah, she's crushing it. She is crushing it. She's made a space that I, one of my friends said she and her mom went to the store and they have one of the best bra buying experiences they've ever had. So thank you, Jeanette. Good for Jeanette. And by the way, I do want to be clear. She's great in this movie. And I, I, I'm not trying to put it on her at all about Vasquez. That's a James Cameron decision at the end of the day. Not an uncommon thing in the 80s, but yes, a little tough. Yeah, and she's a wonderful actress. She is.

She's very fun. And congratulations on your bra shops. What a good job you've done. All right, Chris, last but certainly not least, we have to talk about Bill Paxton, who remained incredibly close with his aliens cast and especially James Cameron for the rest of his life. On February 13, 2017, he called Cameron and the two chatted about the surgery. Paxton was about to undergo the following day. It was an open heart surgery to fix a damaged aortic valve, which he had had since childhood.

So this was not, I wouldn't call it routine, but it was pretty normal. According to Cameron before they got off the phone, Paxton joked about being nervous for the surgery and delivered his iconic aliens line, Game over, man. Paxton died of a stroke 11 days later from complications involved in the surgery. And at his memorial, James Cameron said the following. I am not a warm and fuzzy guy, but the biggest regret of my life is at the night before Bill went into surgery, I didn't tell him that I love. him. Aw. R.P. Bill Paxton. He was so great. He was. One of the best kind of like straddled that character actor leading man, you know, zone that I think Billy Bob does too. We just talked about him

and Bad Santa. And yeah, Bill's wonderful. And a good director too. I don't know if you ever saw frailty. Yeah. He was very talented and it's always nice to learn that somebody was also a good person and that sounds like very much the case with Bill Paxton as well. Yeah. All right, Chris. That wraps up our coverage of aliens. What went right? So much, clearly. I mean, let me just take it, so then you have to pick something more interesting. James Cameron, I'm just going to give it to him. Is this a production I would have liked to work on? I don't know.

I don't know. But just a singular vision, really remarkable. Like you said, honors the source material, feels like a continuation and an expansion of the original. It's so smartly written the way that Ripley wakes up 57 years later, the way that they do a complete recap of the first movie through her having to explain. what happened to the corporate board, the way that they trigger the discovery on Hadley's Hope of the alien Promethean or whatever spacecraft that is triggered by Burke's Paul Reiser's character being greedy. It's all the internal logic holds up, I think, really well. It's very smartly written.

And then the design of the alien queen, I actually think kind of like solves not a problem from the first film, but there is a deleted scene, I believe, in the first film where the captain is found inside, like trapped in the resin. And that was removed. And the queen then, kind of explains the full life cycle, I think in a way that's really smart and opens up, again, the world in a big way and creates just an even more formidable foe for Weaver to go against. So James Cameron, you do you. You done it again, Jim. You son of a bitch.

I will give it to Sigourney Weaver. She did not need to do this at all in terms of her career, in terms of her contractual obligations. You know, this is something that she did because I think, she believed in the script. And also to her credit, she believed in and supported James Cameron, even though he was not James Cameron at this point. And I think her ability to see both sides in terms of understanding the frustration of the crew and also understanding where Cameron and Heard was coming from and being really the only person who could kind of bridge that gap. I just think she handled it beautifully. She turns in a really amazing performance in this movie.

And I appreciate that she did it and that she came back when she did not have to at all. watching interviews with her is really, it really makes me love her. She's so smart. She's very sure of herself. She's very sure of her craft and, you know, but at the same time, she's incredibly collaborative. And I love Sigourney Weaver. I love her in the first one. I love her in this. More Sigourney Weaver all day, every day, which I assume we'll get with Avatar. Yeah. And, you know, I got to say, this is hands down my favorite Sigourney Weaver performance. I cannot think of another movie where she gets to cover such a fun range. Yeah. She has trauma. She has. She has steely reserve.

She has to gird herself as she goes down with the weapons to try to take out the aliens. She's a little bit older than she is in the first one, so she's more experienced, yeah. She's maternal with Newt. She's flirty and sexy with Michael Bean. Like, she gets to do so much in this movie, and she does it, she does all of it so well. Yeah. And there's not a false note in her performance. I agree.

I think she's wonderful. I think she ties this movie together. And to Cameron and Hurd's point, it does not work without her. So I'm very grateful that they fought super hard for that. I agree. Well, Lizzie, thank you so much for taking us deep into the annals of the resin secreted hive that is James Cameron's mind. Yes. Yeah, this movie's amazing, guys.

Again, if you have the opportunity, if you have a Blu-ray player, I highly recommend the special edition 4K, or I guess it's called the Ultimate Collectors Edition. Who knows? They'll probably make an ultimate, ultimate edition. But it looks amazing. It's fantastic. There's a fun behind the scenes. We didn't talk about this. the way they did the nuke at the end, that's all kind of like cotton and they're like shining a flashlight

underneath it as they pull the cloud up. There's some cool videos online. Anyway, if you guys are enjoying this podcast, there's a few easy ways to support us. Number one, leave us a rating and review on whatever podcasts are you listening on. Number two, tell a family member or friend, hey, what went wrong? Pretty good. Give it a listen. Number three, you can get bonus episodes on Apple Podcasts now. If you would like to listen to us one, at least one extra time a month, go to Apple Podcasts, sign up for special features for $4.99 a month, you get one bonus episode. These are not exactly normal episodes. We typically review newly released films, and then we give a little bit of a background on how that movie was made, how it came into existence. For example, we just covered Wake Up Dead Man,

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Angeline Renee Cook. Get away from her, you bitch. Ben Shindleman, Blaise Ambrose. Brian Donahue, Brittany Morris, Brooke, Cameron Smith, C, Grace B, did I cues just drop sharply while I was away? Chris Leal, Chris Zaka, David Friskillante, D.B. Smith, Darren and Dale Conklin, Don Schiebel, Ellen Singleton, M. Zodia, Evan Downey. You know, Evan Downey, I don't know which species is worse. Felicia G. Film it yourself. Frankenstein, Galen and Miguel the broken glass kids, Grace Potter, Half Greyhound, James McAvoy, Jason Frankel, J.J. Rapido, Jory Hill Piper,

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of the third one coming out. Who knows, it'll probably make $6 billion. We too often have predicted the demise of James Cameron at the hands of the Avatar franchise. It's never going to happen. Hasn't come yet. Nope, he's going to keep making billions. And am I a little sad that James Cameron

is going to spend the rest of his life making avatars? Yes, but I'll go see it. Me too. All right, guys. Thank you so much for listening. We will see you next week on Pandora. Bye. Go to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast to support What Went Wrong.

And check out our website at what went wrongpod.com. What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Jesse Winterbauer and edited by Karen Krubsaw.