Movies
Ridley Scott Talks ‘Prometheus’ Space Jockeys, H.R. Giger and Xenomorphs
Filmophilia conducted a pretty lengthy interview with Ridley Scott, director of Twentieth Century Fox’s sci-fi horror Prometheus, the assumed prequel to his 1979 Alien.
While Scott has been absolutely deceitful in earlier interviews, he’s slowly become more and more candid about the connection to the 30-year-old franchise. In the most recent of chats Scott comes clean on the addition of the Space Jockey, reveals the involvement of artist H.R. Giger, and promises with a bold face that we won’t be seeing the xenomorph synonymous with the franchise. You’ll find all of the juicy bits after the break, click the link at the bottom for the interview in full. In speaking to the connection to the Alien films Scott reaffirms the “DNA” quote he gave a few months back: “I mean, you could actually say, and there’s a quote I did, a pretty good quote: By the end of the third act you start to realize there’s a DNA of the very first alien, but none of the subsequent aliens. To tell you what that is is a pity, and I’m not going to tell you, because it’s actually pretty good, pretty organic to the process and to the original. But we go back, we don’t go forward.”
The official synopsis from Fox says that this revolves around the “Alien Gods”, the “Space Jockey” from the first film. Scott confirms their involvement and goes into some depth as to what we’ll see in Prometheus.
“Yeah, so there you have that,” he states boldy confirming the involvement. “I was always amazed that, I mean, I’ve only done two science-fictions, but I was always amazed that no one asked who the hell the Space Jockey was. He wasn’t even called the Space Jockey. During the film they started to call it the Space Jockey. I don’t know who started that one off. I always thought it was amazing that no one ever asked who he was, and why was he there? What was all that about? I sat thinking about this for a while and thought, well, there’s a story! And the other four [films] missed it! So, here it is.”
H.R. Giger is synonymous with the Alien films as he created the look of the creatures and the film’s look. The site asked Scott about his potential involvement in the film.
“I brought him in, I showed him what we were doing, showed him the story and he liked it a lot” said Scott. “So he’s doing a little bit of work for me. He’s been doing some murals, big murals, which we’ll see in almost one of the first chambers we encounter when we land where we’re gonna go.”
Lastly, don;t expect to see the original xenomorph in Prometheus.
“No. Absolutely not,” states Scott before joking, “They squeezed it dry. He (the xenomorph) did very well. (He laughs) He survived, he’s now in Disneyland in Orlando, and no way am I going back there. How did he end up in Disneyland? I saw him in Disneyland, Jesus Christ!”
We’ll go bac to a darker time on June 8 when Prometheus launches from Earth to….?
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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