Ridley Scott launched the Alien franchise with his classic sci-fi horror film in 1979. Several years later James Cameron stepped in to play with the franchise and directed the 1986 sci-fi action film, Aliens. I love both films, but they are so different from each other!
It’s no secret that Ridley Scott wasn’t happy with Cameron’s Aliens movie, and he recently talked about how he was pissed when he first learned about Cameron’s plans for the movie. In an interview with Deadline, he said:
“Well, Jim is about that, the way he designs, his whole process is The Ride. As I learned somebody else was doing this, I actually had been trying to develop something. When Jim called me up and said, listen…he was very nice but he said, ‘This is tough, your beast is so unique. It’s hard to make him as frightening again, now familiar ground.’
“So he said, ‘I’m going in a more action, army kind of way. I said, okay. And that’s the first time I actually thought, welcome to Hollywood.'”
Scott was not happy, and he went on to talk about his initial reaction and how he was hurt. Around the same time, he was also fighting to bring his original vision for Blade Runner to life:
“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. Which I thought I really got something pretty special, and then the previews were a disaster. And [my cut of] the film lay on a shelf for almost, I think 10 to 12 years after that until it was discovered by accident at a Santa Monica Film Festival. Somebody said, let’s dig out the old print and run it for fun. And they called Warners. And with the greatest respect to Warners, they’d lost the f*cking negative, which is like, what? And somebody panicked and went into a drawer, yanked up the first can that had Blade Runner on it, never checked it, sent it to Santa Monica.”
“They ran it. It was a cutting copy with partly Jerry Goldsmith on it, and partly my great musician on it. And it was a copy where we were getting reached to the end of the short strokes and trying to cut and recut to, as it were, save the movie. And this version had no voice-over and had what I call the film noir ending, which is Deckard stares at the origami in his hand, which is a unicorn, nods his head as if to agree and he goes off with his gal. So that got rediscovered. It came right out like a cannon shot, and went everywhere. And of course I know it. I knew it then that it was a very special form of science fiction. It hadn’t really been done like that ever and became a kind of copycat benchmark for most of the TV shows and science fictions. I mean, I got the social order of dystopian society really well, and I think that had never been done before. Now it’s copied again and again.”
Don’t worry, there’s no bad blood between Scott and Cameron now, and the director added: “Jim and I talk often. We’re not exactly friends, but we do talk and he’s a great guy.”
The Alien franchise is currently going through another evolution with a TV series being developed by Noah Hawley and a new standalone Alien: Romulus movie from director Fede Alvarez. In regard to the film, Scott has said in the past that “it’s f –king great.”
There had been rumblings that Scott might return for another Alien movie, but those plans appear to have fallen by the wayside due to Disney doing its own thing with the 20th Century Studios franchise.
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