Aliens

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 https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Winterbauer?

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• 0:31Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:15Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Hello, 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?

• 2:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Game over, man. Game over.

• 2:31Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know if you've been keeping up with current events. We just got our asses kicked back there.

• 2:36Lizzie Bassett?

  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 gonna 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 more. And I think we're gonna 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 re-watching it for the podcast?

• 3:08Chris Winterbauer?

  So I actually saw Aliens before I saw Alien.

• 3:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, wow.

• 3:12Chris Winterbauer?

  When I was about, I don't know, 11 is my guess, 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?

• 3:30Lizzie Bassett?

  It's an action movie, for sure.

• 3:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Because of that, I think he felt more comfortable showing it to me than the first one, which is so

• 3:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Scary.

• 3:37Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 3:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 3:54Chris Winterbauer?

  And the facehuggers have gotten loose because Paul Reiser's fantastically

• 3:58Lizzie Bassett?

  I love him in this.

• 4:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Fantastically corporate shill Carter J.

• 4:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Burke has let them loose. That scene burned a hole in my mind.

• 4:07Lizzie Bassett?

  It's great.

• 4:08Chris Winterbauer?

  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'd wrote an adaptation of The Mole People for Universal Monsters and I 100% stole parts. Didn't steal, but like it lovingly referenced the structure of aliens very much in that movie.

• 4:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Somebody, please make mole people.

• 4:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, please. It's fun. I promise. And now I happily own the Aliens 4K Blu-ray.

• 4:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 4:39Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 5:10Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a found family, which you love.

• 5:12Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 5:24Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 5:33Chris Winterbauer?

  I know. You keep picking them and I'm just like, son of a bitch. But it's actually really fun for me because then I get to like experience you experiencing it. You know what I'm saying?

• 5:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 5:41Chris Winterbauer?

  It's really great.

• 5:42Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 6:03Chris Winterbauer?

  It's so good.

• 6:04Lizzie Bassett?

  It is so good. And I really love Aliens. I think Terminator 2 tops it.

• 6:09Chris Winterbauer?

  You're probably right. I just happened to watch Aliens more recently, so it's like skewing me, you know?

• 6:14Lizzie Bassett?

  I think if you watch Terminator two again, I do think that takes the cake, but they're close.

• 6:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay, dibs. I'm dibsing it now. I'm dibsing it.

• 6:21Lizzie Bassett?

  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, I loved how contained it was. I, you know, 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 them up type sequel.

• 7:04Lizzie Bassett?

  So I really didn't see this outside of like clips on TV until probably late twenties. 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 two mothers 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.

• 7:31Chris Winterbauer?

  As Ripley says, I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over for a percentage.

• 7:36Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 7:47Chris Winterbauer?

  He is so good.

• 7:50Lizzie Bassett?

  He's so evil.

• 7:51Chris Winterbauer?

  When he's got that cold sweat and you guys should hear yourselves, like it's mass delusion. This is ridiculous, you know? And he's so good at maintaining that smarmy, holier than thou, condescending.

• 8:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 8:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Yet reasonable corporate speak.

• 8:04Lizzie Bassett?

  He's really, really excellent at not tipping his hat at the fact that he is the villain.

• 8:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 8:08Lizzie Bassett?

  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 Aliens.

• 8:22Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 8:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. He's just a dick, though.

• 8:35Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 8:46Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 8:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 8:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Obviously a Cameron regular, but spoiler alert, not the original person cast in that role.

• 9:06Chris Winterbauer?

  I have a guess. I actually don't know.

• 9:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, well, don't, 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, many other many oral histories, retrospectives, everything, but The Making of Aliens by J.W. Rensler 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 Anne Hurd, among many others. It is written by James Cameron, with a story

• 9:50Lizzie Bassett?

  by James Cameron, David Geiler, and Walter Hill. It stars Bill Paxton, Carrie Hen, Jeanette Goldstein, Michael Bean, Paul Reiser, Lance Henriksen, Sigourney Weaver, and many more. And it was released on July 18, 1986. And the IMDb log line, 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.

• 10:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Do you know what Nostromo comes from?

• 10:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Nostradamus?

• 10:21Chris Winterbauer?

  No, it's the name of a Joseph Conrad book.

• 10:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 10:25Chris Winterbauer?

  And Nostromo is the eponymous main character in this book. It takes place in a fictionalized 19th century kind of version of Columbia, different name, and the city that it's set in is Sulaco. And so that's where the Sulaco comes from.

• 10:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Interesting. Joseph Conrad, who has popped up on this podcast before.

• 10:45Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right.

• 10:46Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 11:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Hmm.

• 11:07Lizzie Bassett?

  And the truck driver was a 25-year-old James Cameron.

• 11:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep.

• 11:11Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 11:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Also, our interview with Alec Gillis.

• 11:30Lizzie Bassett?

  He is going to come up in this episode.

• 11:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Amalgamated dynamics. He talks about early James Cameron, their experience together. So if you want even more personal stories, you can listen to that.

• 11:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, definitely. All right, here's the basics. He was born August 16th, 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?

• 12:08Chris Winterbauer?

  He's an 11 or 12, 1960. Was it 2001, Space Odyssey?

• 12:13Lizzie Bassett?

  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,

• 12:57Lizzie Bassett?

  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'd 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.

• 13:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Nice.

• 13:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Nice.

• 13:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Upgrade. 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.

• 13:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Roger Corman?

• 13:48Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 13:48Chris Winterbauer?

  No, this is before?

• 13:49Lizzie Bassett?

  A group of Orange County dentists.

• 13:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, it's dentist money. It's another dentist money. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got it, got it, got it, got it.

• 13:56Lizzie Bassett?

  According to Frakes, 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.

• 14:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Nice.

• 14:05Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 14:15Chris Winterbauer?

  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 Coens had a dentist money with Blood Simple, kind of Sam Raimi. But I also, I knew someone, an undergrad, whose dad was a dentist. And he was like, "Oh, my God, like, I'm gonna be a dentist. My brother's gonna be a dentist." And we're like, "Why?" And he's like, "They make so much money." And like, "You only have to work, like, what?" 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?

• 14:48Lizzie Bassett?

  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, but had no idea how to drum up any further investments for a feature film. So instead Cameron and Frakes used Xenogenesis as a demo reel for themselves. Have you ever seen the short film, Chris?

• 15:11Chris Winterbauer?

  I have not.

• 15:12Lizzie Bassett?

  It's great. You should watch it on YouTube. It's really impressive.

• 15:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, I believe it.

• 15:17Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 15:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 15:26Lizzie Bassett?

  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?

• 15:39Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 16:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, 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.

• 16:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 16:25Lizzie Bassett?

  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?

• 16:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Is it Gail Anne Hurd?

• 16:39Lizzie Bassett?

  It is his second wife, Gail Anne Hurd. Yes.

• 16:43Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right.

• 16:44Lizzie Bassett?

  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 like, get something and she showed up and there's this very stern blond Canadian man who's like, "Let me show you around, I'll show you all these things." And she was like, "Wow, this guy must be in charge." And he was not at all.

• 17:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, no, of course not.

• 17:05Lizzie Bassett?

  It's like the lowest level model maker.

• 17:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep.

• 17:07Lizzie Bassett?

  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 paintbrush 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.

• 17:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, my understanding is he will grab anything on set that needs to be grabbed.

• 17:29Lizzie Bassett?

  100%.

• 17:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 17:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Which I know is annoying, but I kind of love him.

• 17:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, and you know, he can actually do it.

• 17:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 17:34Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 17:39Lizzie Bassett?

  It's the problem with James Cameron.

• 17:41Chris Winterbauer?

  James Cameron, he may be the exception.

• 17:42Lizzie Bassett?

  I think he is.

• 17:43Chris Winterbauer?

  But he also famously, according to Alec Gillis, was also pretty anti-film school and really...

• 17:48Lizzie Bassett?

  He is, has been vocally so.

• 17:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, like not anti-education in general, but more like you can learn more through doing than you will ever learn in a classroom.

• 17:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, and I think he's correct about that.

• 18:00Chris Winterbauer?

  I do too. I think it's the value, you know, that's the value of apprenticeship, for example. I wish we had more programs like that.

• 18:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. All right, in 1982, he left to direct his own feature, Piranha 2.

• 18:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Piranha 2!

• 18:10Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 18:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:18Lizzie Bassett?

  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 2.

• 18:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, but as I mentioned, the master of sequels. His first movie was a sequel.

• 18:30Lizzie Bassett?

  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 Anne Hurd. And Chris, what was that script?

• 18:37Chris Winterbauer?

  The Terminator.

• 18:39Lizzie Bassett?

  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?

• 19:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Slap a two after Alien?

• 19:02Lizzie Bassett?

  You would think.

• 19:02Chris Winterbauer?

  And make another one.

• 19:04Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 19:37Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 20:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 20:01Chris Winterbauer?

  And it's an orphan now at this studio.

• 20:04Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 20:11Chris Winterbauer?

  No, I've read the original script. It's drastically different.

• 20:15Lizzie Bassett?

  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 Geiler, Walter Hill, and Gordon Carroll. They are the founders of Brandywine Productions, because it turns out Fox have been practicing good old fashioned Hollywood creative accounting.

• 20:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Napkin math, where you throw out the napkin, dip it in some coffee, put it back on the table. You got a whole new set of numbers.

• 20:58Chris Winterbauer?

  You think you made money on this movie? Think again.

• 21:01Lizzie Bassett?

  So despite Alien bringing in $100 million worldwide, they claimed it had actually lost $2 million.

• 21:07Chris Winterbauer?

  No, they billed them.

• 21:10Chris Winterbauer?

  You owe us money.

• 21:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Can you imagine? I'd be so bad.

• 21:12Chris Winterbauer?

  I actually can't imagine.

• 21:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, yeah, seriously. So this led Guyler Hill and Carroll and their production company, Brandywine Pictures, to sue Fox for unpaid profits. Eventually, the Fox accountants re-crunch 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.

• 21:31Chris Winterbauer?

  I know.

• 21:32Lizzie Bassett?

  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 Minxes 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 had 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.

• 22:15Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 22:37Lizzie Bassett?

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• 23:22Lizzie Bassett?

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• 23:44Speaker 02

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• 24:21Lizzie Bassett?

  All right, so despite some internal support, the general feeling on the Alien sequel was pretty meh behind the scenes. According to J.W. Rensler, 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 kinda true.

• 24:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, and yet, at this moment in time, you have a couple of the most successful sequels in recent memory. I'm thinking-

• 24:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Star Wars.

• 24:49Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 25:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Actually, I think those are all not quite out yet.

• 25:05Chris Winterbauer?

  They're not quite lining up right. Interesting.

• 25:08Lizzie Bassett?

  So, Chris, who do you think would be the first call when looking for a director for the Alien sequel?

• 25:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, you should call Ridley Scott.

• 25:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, you should call Ridley Scott.

• 25:18Chris Winterbauer?

  He did a great job.

• 25:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, he did. They don't even call him.

• 25:23Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 25:23Lizzie Bassett?

  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. Like, 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.

• 25:42Chris Winterbauer?

  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?

• 25:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Pretty bullshit.

• 25:53Chris Winterbauer?

  And also Ridley Scott was expensive.

• 25:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, that's true.

• 25:56Chris Winterbauer?

  So maybe it was that. Maybe they're just cheap. I agree, it's bullshit. They should call him. He crushed it with Alien.

• 26:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, they didn't.

• 26:02Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 26:02Lizzie Bassett?

  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 gonna happen.

• 26:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 26:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Not even Brandywine. They were kind of half-heartedly in it at this point. In fact, they 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.

• 26:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Nice.

• 26:31Lizzie Bassett?

  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 gonna keep this short because we're gonna 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 in primarily science fiction terms. We weren't seeing eye to eye." You know, he knows what he wants.

• 27:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm.

• 27:03Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 27:48Chris Winterbauer?

  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 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.

• 28:13Lizzie Bassett?

  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, has not even gone into production. So he's really only made Piranha 2. David Geiler, 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 the space station. And 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.

• 28:55Lizzie Bassett?

  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, you know, 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 Gail Anne Hurd in 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 them, and he likes to marry them."

• 29:41Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 30:04Lizzie Bassett?

  She's doing pull ups in her sanitarium.

• 30:05Chris Winterbauer?

  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 Skerritt. 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.

• 30:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 30:22Chris Winterbauer?

  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 one. No, like she's scared. You know what I mean? She's, she's struggling and then she overcomes these things. I just think they're really well fleshed out characters.

• 30:43Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 30:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. Yep.

• 31:00Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 31:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Femininity, maternal instincts.

• 31:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 31:14Chris Winterbauer?

  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 he just, they're complicated, you know, well-rounded characters.

• 31:28Lizzie Bassett?

  I think that may have more to do with Michael Bean than anything else.

• 31:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, that's good.

• 31:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 31:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay.

• 31:31Lizzie Bassett?

  But yes, I agree. He's a very good writer.

• 31:34Chris Winterbauer?

  He is.

• 31:35Lizzie Bassett?

  So by fall of 1983, he submitted his treatment to Brandywine, who in turn submitted it to Fox, who said, nah.

• 31:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, you know, probably. This is a lot of alien costumes. This seems expensive. A lot of aliens. Yeah.

• 31:50Lizzie Bassett?

  They felt that it was wall-to-wall horror and that 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 just to drive home how much money they were gonna make.

• 32:04Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 32:13Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm sure that's correct.

• 32:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 32:15Lizzie Bassett?

  He's got great timing.

• 32:16Chris Winterbauer?

  He does.

• 32:17Lizzie Bassett?

  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 Geiler at Brandywine loved Cameron's treatment, as did Lawrence Gordon, now the head of production at Fox.

• 32:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Hmm.

• 32:34Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 32:56Chris Winterbauer?

  One of my favorite titles, Rambo: First Blood Part 2.

• 32:59Lizzie Bassett?

  You need more numbers.

• 33:00Chris Winterbauer?

  So good.

• 33:01Lizzie Bassett?

  The way he did this, by the way, we see he set up two separate desks, one for each screenplay, so he would move back and forth. This man does not sleep.

• 33:07Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 33:08Lizzie Bassett?

  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 Geiler at Brandywine and said, "I'm so sorry, I have to start working on The Terminator like basically tomorrow, and I need to set Alien 2 aside for now." And according to the making of Aliens, Cameron said, quote, "Geiler 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."

• 33:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah!

• 33:41Lizzie Bassett?

  He was angry as hell, and then he hung up on me.

• 33:44Chris Winterbauer?

  He's like, "I have to stop 'cause I'm going to work."

• 33:48Lizzie Bassett?

  You'll never work in this- Town again.

• 33:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 33:51Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 34:04Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm sure they were so patient and didn't bother him at all.

• 34:07Lizzie Bassett?

  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 Two? So they said, fine, we're gonna 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 gonna be a success at all. So he actually was looking at it as an opportunity to test ideas for Alien Two. 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 heroine crawls through all this machinery, I thought, this'll 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.

• 34:51Lizzie Bassett?

  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 Two. Much to Cameron's surprise, everyone was advising him not to take the job. Here's James Cameron speaking to Vanity Fair.

• 35:08Speaker 03

  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.

• 35:20Lizzie Bassett?

  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 gonna 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? I revisit.

• 36:00Chris Winterbauer?

  And I mean, Scott was like, he'd done The Duelist, right?

• 36:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 36:03Chris Winterbauer?

  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 he, you know, it makes sense to want to go back to, well, Alien was successful.

• 36:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 36:23Chris Winterbauer?

  I'll go do that again.

• 36:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Exactly. So I feel bad for Ridley Scott in this situation. It's pretty shitty.

• 36:28Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 36:33Lizzie Bassett?

  A Canadian?

• 36:34Chris Winterbauer?

  A canuck?

• 36:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 36:35Chris Winterbauer?

  We used to own them.

• 36:37Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 36:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep.

• 36:45Lizzie Bassett?

  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, Gail Anne Hurd. According to the making of Aliens, Cameron said, quote, "I finally made my deal as a writer-director and then I brought Gail into the mix, but Fox initially didn't want to take her on because they weren't familiar with Gail. 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.

• 37:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 37:30Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 38:14Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 38:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, she did that in 84.

• 38:36Lizzie Bassett?

  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, she's interested. She'll do it. Like, let's, 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 Heard are like, no, it is Sigourney Weaver or bust. We're not considering anybody else. So they did something pretty ballsy. Heard and Cameron were headed off to get married in Hawaii and they said, sign Sigourney Weaver before we get back or we're out.

• 39:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 39:20Lizzie Bassett?

  And off to Maui they went, I think assuming the movie was probably dead. And even their wedding was fraught, according to Heard in 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."

• 39:33Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 39:43Lizzie Bassett?

  I would love to have seen that.

• 39:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:46Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 39:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 39:54Lizzie Bassett?

  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 altogether and center the film around Newt. Now, obviously he had no plans to do this, so why is James Cameron making this call, Chris?

• 40:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Is it to get Sigourney Weaver active at this point?

• 40:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, it's because they shared the same agency and he knew that Arnold's agent would tell Sigourney Weaver's agent.

• 40:27Chris Winterbauer?

  There you go. Schwarzenegger's the connection. Okay, got it, got it, got it.

• 40:30Lizzie Bassett?

  And he was right. Also, at this point, I think we know that if James Cameron is calling you, you're probably getting played.

• 40:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 40:35Lizzie Bassett?

  When asked in La Fissier 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.

• 41:05Chris Winterbauer?

  And by the time you get to resurrection, they're literally cloning her to come up with a reason to bring her back.

• 41:09Lizzie Bassett?

  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 gonna fly. And also, making love to the alien. Now, I had a little bit of a hard time.

• 41:26Chris Winterbauer?

  She kinda does all of these in Alien Resurrection.

• 41:29Lizzie Bassett?

  She does.

• 41:30Chris Winterbauer?

  And Alien 3. That's really weird.

• 41:32Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 41:48Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, the alien itself is extremely sexualized.

• 41:51Lizzie Bassett?

  It's very phallic, yeah.

• 41:52Chris Winterbauer?

  It's both. It's phallic and yonic.

• 41:54Lizzie Bassett?

  That's true. The face huggers are straight up vagina.

• 41:57Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a vulva, exactly. So if you look at Giger's art, it's extremely sexual, and the alien design is too.

• 42:04Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 42:11Chris Winterbauer?

  No, I'm gonna write it off. That's a, I think that's a crazy, crazy idea.

• 42:14Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 42:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, do you know who disagrees with that? Strongly.

• 42:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Sigourney Weaver.

• 42:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Tim Allen, who frickin loves that.

• 42:31Lizzie Bassett?

  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 hypersleep. She's sweaty. Her clothes were covered in blood. Why wouldn't you take your clothes off?

• 42:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. And I know it's like really small underwear. I always read that.

• 42:44Lizzie Bassett?

  You could give her bigger underwear. That's my only complaint there.

• 42:47Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. Yeah. It's the Russell means like, I could use a little bit bigger of a flap to cover my junk here in Last of the Americans. But that being said, I never viewed it as super sexual at the time. And I always liked how like, 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, they're not, not everybody's like shaved up and stuff. I don't know.

• 43:04Lizzie Bassett?

  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 Heard 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 Geiler 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. On board because that's something that he really supported and wanted.

• 43:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Mid 80s now, we're in the, the 1980s action star is born. Right? Yeah, exactly.

• 43:41Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 43:55Speaker 02

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• 44:32Lizzie Bassett?

  So Cameron and Heard again chucked up deuces 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 Cleopatra.

• 44:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Which is so interesting because didn't Bruce Willis, noted TV actor Bruce Willis, get five in 1987 for Die Hard?

• 44:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 44:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 44:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure did.

• 44:57Chris Winterbauer?

  All right.

• 44:57Lizzie Bassett?

  She's the star of the franchise. Whatever.

• 45:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, and like an actress of quite good pedigree at this point.

• 45:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, 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 gonna cost like $35 million. We don't know if we can do this. This is crazy. And Gail Anne Heard and James Cameron keep coming back and saying, no, no, no, it's not. We promise. This is gonna be like 15.5. We can do this for 15.5 million dollars. 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 cast, 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

• 45:47Lizzie Bassett?

  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, 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 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.

• 46:28Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, one of the things that this franchise, even in the entries, the latter day entries of Ridley Scott with Prometheus and Alien Covenant, or even Alien Romulus, the android casting remains impeccable.

• 46:39Lizzie Bassett?

  I know, it's so good.

• 46:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Ian Holm, Lance Henriksen.

• 46:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Michael Fassbender.

• 46:43Chris Winterbauer?

  And then David Johnson in Alien Romulus is great.

• 46:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. I enjoyed Timothy Olyphant in Alien Earth.

• 46:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he's, he's fine. I'm gonna not say anything about that show.

• 46:52Lizzie Bassett?

  I know you didn't like that show. I enjoyed it. I know it was a bit messy. I liked it.

• 46:56Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 47:01Lizzie Bassett?

  All right, Chris hates Alien Earth. So, moving on, of course, Corporal Dwayne Hicks would be played by?

• 47:06Chris Winterbauer?

  James Remar.

• 47:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, it is James Remar.

• 47:10Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 47:16Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 47:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Stern, gruff, gravelly, yeah.

• 47:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep. 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.

• 47:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:49Lizzie Bassett?

  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 Anne Hurd was like, "Why don't you hang out for just a minute?" Her arms are amazing.

• 47:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, she was into amateur bodybuilding. Like, she had, she had legit done amateur bodybuilding. She was big.

• 48:04Lizzie Bassett?

  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 and the violence and just seemed generally uncomfortable with the whole thing.

• 48:18Chris Winterbauer?

  And we should note, Jeanette Goldstein is doing straight-up brownface in this movie.

• 48:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, she's wearing a lot of spray tan. I will note, she is of Moroccan and Brazilian descent.

• 48:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay.

• 48:29Lizzie Bassett?

  But yeah, it's, you know, does she have that accent? No. Is she wearing a lot of spray tan? Yes.

• 48:34Chris Winterbauer?

  We're in West Side Story Natalie Wood territory with Vasquez, as much as I love her character.

• 48:40Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 48:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, really pitch perfect.

• 48:55Lizzie Bassett?

  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."

• 49:08Chris Winterbauer?

  "Your family's dead."

• 49:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, so the casting director is like, "Fine, I'm gonna go around 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 a 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,

• 49:53Lizzie Bassett?

  which James Remar 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. Sigourney 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?

• 50:29Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 50:42Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. It is everything that happens with the first exploration of the atmosphere processing station.

• 50:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 50:48Lizzie Bassett?

  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?

• 51:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 51:14Lizzie Bassett?

  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, while 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 Paxton 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.

• 51:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 51:37Lizzie Bassett?

  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 riesgo siempre 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 Remar 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.

• 52:20Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 52:43Chris Winterbauer?

  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 I, 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.

• 53:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 53:02Chris Winterbauer?

  And it also, in a way, he's highlighted a little bit in the first half of the film, but not that much.

• 53:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Not much, yeah.

• 53:08Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 53:17Lizzie Bassett?

  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 longstanding 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 rules. 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.

• 53:50Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 53:50Lizzie Bassett?

  And to top it all off, most of them had worked on Alien.

• 53:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 53:53Lizzie Bassett?

  And they were pissed that Ridley Scott was not directing the sequel, which again, I kind of get.

• 53:58Chris Winterbauer?

  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?

• 54:11Lizzie Bassett?

  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 A.D., Derek Cranknell, 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, you know, 20 minutes for everybody to enjoy their tea and have their scones.

• 54:55Lizzie Bassett?

  And then, James Cameron is just like ripping his hair out in the corner of the set. According to J.W. Rinzler, 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. 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.

• 55:39Chris Winterbauer?

  She's so pushing her little carton.

• 55:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Can you imagine?

• 55:41Chris Winterbauer?

  I would just love to see the camera pan right as like she like just passes through all the eggs between the alien queen and Ripley.

• 55:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Knocking shit over. Oh, sorry, love. Now, part of the problem was that the Terminator had come out in the US 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.

• 56:00Chris Winterbauer?

  He was the director of Piranha 2.

• 56:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, exactly. And he was an asshole who was taking Ridley Scott's job.

• 56:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 56:06Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 56:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 56:22Lizzie Bassett?

  He set up multiple screenings and they could not be bothered. They never came, which is so fucking rude. That's so rude.

• 56:31Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 56:43Lizzie Bassett?

  I guess that's true.

• 56:43Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 56:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Very true.

• 56:56Chris Winterbauer?

  I can see their perspective a little bit.

• 56:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, they also really didn't like Galen Heard 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 gonna 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 Gail Anne Hurd doing the shooting in that sequence. And that's because she had a lot of firearms training. And James Cameron was like, she's gonna know how to do it the fastest and the best.

• 57:42Lizzie Bassett?

  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 A D 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 A D. But according to Gail Anne Hurd, 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.

• 58:25Lizzie Bassett?

  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 gotta go. Yeah, so Cameron is like, you know what? You can hit the road to Derek Cracknell. And this is the breaking point with the crew. Because the crew sided with Derek Cracknell. 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.

• 59:09Lizzie Bassett?

  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. Where 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 Hurd 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 Heard and Cameron's position and she believed in Cameron's vision very much and she kind of managed to convince everybody to calm down.

• 59:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Basically doing what she does in Aliens.

• 59:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Exactly. Heard 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.

• 59:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 59:53Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 1:00:05Chris Winterbauer?

  No, this is, you can tell Cameron's just thinking, this is the bullet I have to bite to get this movie made.

• 1:00:11Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 1:00:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:25Lizzie Bassett?

  I do very much sympathize with James Cameron in this situation. I think this must have been really hard. This was the right thing to do. And as far as the DP went, Dick Bush was gone for good.

• 1:00:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:35Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 1:00:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Didn't Biddle shoot the 1984 Apple commercial for him?

• 1:00:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, he did.

• 1:00:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, Adrian Biddle, we talked about him a little bit in V for Vendetta. That was his last film.

• 1:00:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, he passed away during that.

• 1:00:56Chris Winterbauer?

  He passed away before it released.

• 1:00:58Lizzie Bassett?

  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."

• 1:01:28Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 1:01:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, and I love this. She said, "It was fun giving Paul Reiser his bouquet. I just gave him a bunch of dead flowers."

• 1:01:42Chris Winterbauer?

  That's good.

• 1:01:43Lizzie Bassett?

  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 Soloco and the power loader, among other things. He had done concept designs for Blade Runner, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Tron.

• 1:02:01Chris Winterbauer?

  The very incredible angular designs, like kind of a bit of a mid-century modern feel to it. It's really cool. Sid Mead's art is amazing.

• 1:02:09Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 1:02:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay.

• 1:02:18Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know why. I could not figure out why he was a judge on this.

• 1:02:21Chris Winterbauer?

  A man needs his hobbies, I guess.

• 1:02:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure. And the first thing that he drew was the Soloco, 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.

• 1:02:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 1:02:40Lizzie Bassett?

  So that's what established the sort of slab-like gun shape of the Soloco. And when it came to the power loader, Cameron wanted some adjustments to the design and also insisted that it all be practical with an actual stunt performer inside the full-size suit. And everybody was like, you're insane.

• 1:02:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:54Lizzie Bassett?

  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 Time Out 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 than 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 them off my back. That Friday afternoon, a runner came down with two bottles of champagne with a note that read, 'Building power loaders is thirsty work. Have one on me.' Jim."

• 1:03:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, well, good for Jim.

• 1:03:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Look, there might be a, there might be a heart of gold inside that crusty James Cameron suit. Maybe.

• 1:03:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Who knows?

• 1:03:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Who knows? All right. So obviously, the original Alien, it is Alien Singular. It had one xenomorph.

• 1:03:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:03:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Right? Played by seven-foot-tall Balaji Badejo, which was, you know, 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 bajillion aliens in this movie. So what he did was he actually cast a bunch of pretty regular sized, six foot tall people, but they were very, very thin. He found like the thinnest 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.

• 1:04:15Chris Winterbauer?

  They're also quite often descending from the ceiling.

• 1:04:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:04:18Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 1:04:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. And obviously we know in the first one, H R Giger won the Academy Award for Visual Design for Alien, but he did not reprise that role in Aliens because he was doing Poltergeist 2. According to James Cameron in a La Fissier 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."

• 1:04:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:44Lizzie Bassett?

  "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.

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• 1:06:08Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 1:06:30Chris Winterbauer?

  It's one of the greatest

• 1:06:31Lizzie Bassett?

  It's amazing.

• 1:06:32Chris Winterbauer?

  creature builds. It may be the greatest creature build in the history of film.

• 1:06:36Lizzie Bassett?

  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 Stan 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 stuntmen inside of it to see

• 1:07:19Lizzie Bassett?

  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 bajillion people working to operate these things. Sigourney Weaver is inside of one of them. And then, ding ding ding ding ding ding, tea time. I would have lost my mind.

• 1:07:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Am I right in that for a couple of shots, they do use a couple of smaller scale puppets of the two of them?

• 1:07:53Lizzie Bassett?

  They use miniatures, yes, for both.

• 1:07:54Chris Winterbauer?

  They use miniatures, right, okay.

• 1:07:56Lizzie Bassett?

  They do. They had to.

• 1:07:57Chris Winterbauer?

  No, no, I knew they did. For a couple of like the bigger movements, I thought, yeah. But they cut in so well.

• 1:08:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:02Chris Winterbauer?

  You really don't notice it.

• 1:08:03Lizzie Bassett?

  No. All right, Chris, post-production was also incredibly not smooth.

• 1:08:07Chris Winterbauer?

  I think I heard one story about post.

• 1:08:09Lizzie Bassett?

  It's probably the one we're going to talk about.

• 1:08:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Great.

• 1:08:11Lizzie Bassett?

  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?

• 1:08:19Chris Winterbauer?

  2001.

• 1:08:19Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 1:08:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Very differently paced movies than Aliens. Like, those are wonderfully edited movies. They're remarkably slow compared to Aliens.

• 1:08:36Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 1:08:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, Kubrick famously has all the time in the world for, you know, these things.

• 1:08:49Lizzie Bassett?

  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 with 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

• 1:09:32Lizzie Bassett?

  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 acknowledgements 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 acknowledgements. 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 acknowledgements in the next version of the cut.

• 1:10:13Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 1:10:54Lizzie Bassett?

  I cannot find it. So if anybody knows where this interview is from, please let me know.

• 1:10:59Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:11:44Speaker 05

  It was a nightmare.

• 1:11:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:11:47Lizzie Bassett?

  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 Gail Anne 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.

• 1:12:30Lizzie Bassett?

  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 cue for the big final fight between the Queen and Ripley.

• 1:12:48Speaker 05

  I ended up writing the cue. And then two days before, the day before I was supposed to write, record the music, massive changes. They'd changed the whole sequence around. And I was up for, you know, thirty-six 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 gonna have an acknowledgement there." And I said, "Well, you did yesterday, but now the sequence is..." And that's how it just goes. And it was all a question of the pressure of time. I said, "Jim, we're down

• 1:13:30Speaker 05

  to five or six days. I have to start writing, and I can't change anything. Once it's written, it's gotta go straight to the copyists, because it's gonna never make it to the stands. My job right now is to make sure the musicians have something to play, at least that sounds eighty percent of what you're asking for. If I had more time, I could make it a hundred percent, but we don't." And Gail's response was icy cold. She said, "Well, we'll just get somebody who can." 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."

• 1:14:10Lizzie Bassett?

  This just sounds horrible.

• 1:14:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:14:12Lizzie Bassett?

  I love his answer there, too. He's like, "I don't care at this point."

• 1:14:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, an impossible position, as many composers are put in.

• 1:14:19Lizzie Bassett?

  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 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.

• 1:14:48Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:15:33Speaker 03

  And that was a great experience by contrast.

• 1:15:35Lizzie Bassett?

  I love that. I like that they were willing to come back over 10 years later, but yes.

• 1:15:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Recognize the mutual talent and make something great again.

• 1:15:43Lizzie Bassett?

  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 18th, 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 budget. So they did go a little bit over. But 18.5 million for this movie is crazy, especially when you remember 1 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.

• 1:16:27Lizzie Bassett?

  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 Heard were nominated for anything. All right, let's do a little Where Are They Now? Though Cameron and Heard's working relationship would continue through Terminator 2 and The Abyss, their marriage, of course, would not.

• 1:17:11Lizzie Bassett?

  They divorced in 1989, the same year Cameron married Kathryn Bigelow, and one year after being fired from Aliens, Chris James Remar 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?

• 1:17:28Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 1:17:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, she's the Irish mother in Titanic.

• 1:17:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, and she's killed by a Terminator, an alien, and an iceberg.

• 1:17:45Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 1:17:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, I know this.

• 1:17:56Lizzie Bassett?

  You know this? I didn't know this.

• 1:17:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I've been to her store.

• 1:17:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, so she opened a series of bra shops called Jeanette Bras, and I was blown away because these bra shops are amazing. They're so good.

• 1:18:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, they're for women, I believe, cup size.

• 1:18:10Lizzie Bassett?

  D and up. The slogan is the alphabet starts at D.

• 1:18:13Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 1:18:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:18:26Chris Winterbauer?

  And our friend, I have a friend from film school who has a podcast, Cinination. Check it out, Brandon Sparks. And he, like, 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.

• 1:18:41Lizzie Bassett?

  She seems like a very cool person, yes.

• 1:18:42Chris Winterbauer?

  She's a very successful, you know, businesswoman.

• 1:18:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, she is. They have multiple locations, including one in Pasadena that I have been to. So, great store, Jeanette. Thank you for your work.

• 1:18:50Chris Winterbauer?

  No, I mean, as a flat-chested man, I don't get to appreciate it. But, yeah, she's crushing it.

• 1:18:55Lizzie Bassett?

  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 had one of the best bra-buying experiences they've ever had. So, thank you, Jeanette.

• 1:19:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Good for Jeanette. And by the way, I do want to be clear, she's great in this movie, and I'm not trying to put it on her at all.

• 1:19:08Lizzie Bassett?

  No, of course.

• 1:19:09Chris Winterbauer?

  About Vasquez. That's a James Cameron decision at the end of the day.

• 1:19:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Not an uncommon thing in the 80s. But yes, a little tough.

• 1:19:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, and she's a wonderful actress.

• 1:19:17Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 1:19:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Who remained incredibly close with his Aliens cast and especially James Cameron for the rest of his life. On February 13th, 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 that the night before Bill went into surgery, I didn't tell him that I loved him."

• 1:20:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Hmm.

• 1:20:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Aw. R.I.P. Bill Paxton. He was so great.

• 1:20:11Chris Winterbauer?

  He was. One of the best kind of like straddled that character actor, leading man,

• 1:20:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:20:15Chris Winterbauer?

  you know, zone that I, I think Billy Bob does too. We just talked about him in Bad Santa. And yeah, Bill's wonderful. And a good director, too. I don't know if you ever saw Frailty.

• 1:20:23Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 1:20:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:31Lizzie Bassett?

  All right, Chris. That wraps up our coverage of Aliens. What went right?

• 1:20:35Chris Winterbauer?

  So much, clearly. I mean, let me just take it so then you have to pick something more interesting. James Cameron. I'm just gonna give it to him. Is this a production I would have liked to work on? Uh, I don't know.

• 1:20:48Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know.

• 1:20:48Chris Winterbauer?

  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 Prometheus 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.

• 1:21:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Very well.

• 1:21:22Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 1:21:51Lizzie Bassett?

  You done it again, Jim.

• 1:21:53Chris Winterbauer?

  You son of a bitch.

• 1:21:55Lizzie Bassett?

  You son of, yeah. 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.

• 1:22:37Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 1:22:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. And, you know, I gotta 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.

• 1:23:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:06Chris Winterbauer?

  She has trauma. She has steely reserve. She has to gird herself as she goes down with the weapons to try to take out the aliens.

• 1:23:13Lizzie Bassett?

  She's a little bit older than she is in the first one, so she's more experienced. Yeah.

• 1:23:17Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 1:23:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:26Chris Winterbauer?

  And there's not a false note in her performance.

• 1:23:29Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree. I think she's wonderful. I think she ties this movie together. And to Cameron and Heard's point, it does not work without her. So I'm very grateful that they fought super hard for that.

• 1:23:39Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 1:23:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:23:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, this movie's amazing, guys. The, 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 Collector's 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 podcatcher you're 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

• 1:24:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Apple Podcasts, sign up for the 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, a Knives Out mystery written and directed by Rian Johnson, and we will, of course, be covering Avatar: Fire and Ash as part of our James Cameron Christmas on December 26. If you want even more content, head to our Patreon. Patreon is a platform that connects podcasters like ourselves with listeners like you. www.patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast. You can join for free for some free updates. For $5, you get all of our bonus episodes and

• 1:25:17Chris Winterbauer?

  an ad-free RSS feed, and for $50, you get an Ellen Ripley shout-out just like one of these.

• 1:25:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Adrian Pang, Korea. Angeline Renee Cook. Get away from her, you bitch. Ben Schindelman. Blaze Ambrose. Brian Donahue. Brittany Morris. Brooke. Cameron Smith. C. Grace B. Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away? Chris Liel. Chris Zaka. David Friskelanti. DB Smith. Darren and Dale Conklin. Don Schiabel. Ellen Singleton. M. Zodiac.

• 1:25:58Lizzie Bassett?

  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 Grey Hound, James McAvoy, Jason Frankel, J.J. Rapido, Jory Hillpiper, Jose Salto, Karina Kanaba. You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage. Kate Ellington, Kathleen Olson, Amy Elgashlager McCoy, Lon Relad, Lena LJ, Lydia Howes, Mariposas Humans, Matthew Jacobson, Michael McGrath, Nate the Knife,

• 1:26:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Nathan Centeno, Rosemary Southward, Rural Jur, Sadie, Just Sadie, Scott Oshida, Solman Shinani, Steve Winterbauer, Suzanne Johnson, The Provost Family, The O's Sound Like O's. There is no spoon. This bullshit that you think is so important, you can just kiss all of that goodbye.

• 1:27:04Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, Lizzie, next week, we have Avatar. The original in celebration of the third one coming out. Who knows, it'll probably make $6 billion. We've too often have predicted the demise of James Cameron at the hands of the Avatar franchise. It's never gonna happen. Hasn't come yet. Nope, he's gonna keep making billions. And am I a little sad that James Cameron is gonna 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.

• 1:27:39Speaker 06

  Go to patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast to support What Went Wrong and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.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 Krupso.