The Futurist

by Rebecca Keegan

  4.

  THIS TIME IT’S WAR

  Sigourney’s Alamo

  Aliens is Cameron’s combat picture—and not just because it’s about a band of Colonial Marines hunting down acid-bleeding, extraterrestrial predators with pulse rifles and flamethrowers. While filming the sequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien, Cameron would go to battle in more earthly ways, fighting both a mutinous British crew and an anxious Hollywood studio for creative control. But first he had to beat back all the movie-industry well-wishers who were advising him to steer clear of Scott’s iconic film.

  In December 1984, Cameron was basking in the afterglow of The Terminators surprise success. Seemingly overnight, he had metamorphosed from a B-movie outcast into the hottest young filmmaker in town. After The Terminator opened at number one at the box office, the guy who had lived off room service leftovers two years earlier didn’t have to buy his own lunch for two weeks. And just as suddenly, he didn’t need the gig he’d wanted so badly—writing and directing Alien 2. Julia Phillips, the feisty producer of Taxi Driver and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, warned Cameron that if he directed the sequel, anything good in the movie would inevitably be attributed to Scott’s vision and anything bad to Cameron’s. “Yeah, but it’ll be cool,” Cameron said. “I was such a geek fan,” he recalls. “It may have been hubris, but I never really considered how it could have been career suicide.”

  Cameron began calling Alien 2 “Aliens” while working on the screenplay. He talked the film’s producers, David Giler and Walter Hill, into that title by holding up the back of a torn-off script page where he had written “ALIEN” in Magic Marker. Cameron added the S and then drew two vertical lines through it, making a dollar sign. The producers agreed to the new title on the spot. In the 1980s, it was not yet a foregone conclusion that a sequel to a hit film would become a money tree. But Giler and Hill felt their concept of a war movie in space had real box-office potential. For Cameron, it was a chance to explore some fertile creative territory. As a kid he had liked war movies, and as an adult he admired the warriors themselves. For Aliens, Cameron envisioned something reminiscent of World War II combat pictures like Sahara or The Dirty Dozen, where a scruffy, ethnically diverse squad of soldiers find themselves trapped behind enemy lines and pull together to face an overwhelming foe. He also had in mind John Wayne’s 1960 film The Alamo, in which Wayne, as Davy Crockett, galvanizes his overmatched, ragtag troops against the advancing Mexican army. As Cameron saw it, Sigourney Weaver’s character, Ripley, was John Wayne, the unflappable leader in a hopeless battle.

  There were a few advantages to packaging Aliens as a war movie. Cameron knew he couldn’t do a better job at creating an atmosphere of claustrophobia and dread than Scott had with the original. The combat conceit was different enough from Alien that it would allow him to graft his own style onto Scott’s and claim a sense of authorship. A military plot also provided the director an opportunity to layer Vietnam War metaphors into the story. Like any child of the sixties, Cameron had grown up surrounded by Vietnam imagery and themes, and he had further immersed himself in the conflict while researching his Rambo script. He watched Apocalypse Now and read Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato and Michael Herr’s Dispatches. Cameron adopted the cocky attitude and lingo of U.S. troops in Vietnam for the Colonial Marines in Aliens. And he used the arc of the Vietnam story—the pride coming before the fall. “It was a definite parallel to Vietnam to tell the story of a technologically superior military force which is defeated by a determined, furtive, asymmetric enemy,” Cameron says. For all their futuristic firepower, his soldiers would be obliterated by a giant bug.

  “Get Away from Her, You Bitch!”

  In the 1979 film, we don’t learn much about Ripley, other than that she’s smart, a junior officer, and an independent thinker and that she’s got balls of steel. In fact, Ripley could be called a female version of a young James Cameron, which might help explain why he centered his script for the sequel on her character. In his Aliens screenplay, Cameron gives Ripley a backstory He reveals that her first name is Ellen and that she had a daughter back on Earth who aged and died during Ripley’s fifty-seven-year hypersleep. In the theatrical release of the film, the sequence that explains Ripley’s motherhood was cut to trim the running time. But the maternal subtext plays out throughout the movie. Ripley takes on the little girl Newt, the lone survivor of the alien attack on the planet LV-426, as a surrogate daughter. Cameron had no children at the time he wrote Aliens, but he managed to tell a resonant parental love story. Looking back as a father of five, he says, “I’m surprised that I got it as right as I did, since it was not an emotion I’d ever felt. I had never even had my own dog.” In Aliens climactic fight scenes, a sweaty, dirty Weaver, clad in a baggy T-shirt and cargo pants, faces off against the slimy alien queen, each badass matriarch grappling to protect her young. Ripley isn’t glamorous—she’s a samurai. In one arm she cradles a little girl, in the other, a flamethrower. In making Ripley a mother and a warrior, Cameron managed to treat her gender as both the heart of her character and a complete nonissue. Even twenty years later, audiences who see Aliens in theaters at revival screenings yell loudest when Weaver delivers her memorable battle cry, “Get away from her, you bitch!”

  Cameron had kept a picture of Weaver by his side while he wrote the script, which features her character in virtually every scene. So it came as some surprise to him when he learned his leading lady knew nothing of the sequel, wasn’t under contract to make it, and had no real interest in revisiting the world of Alien. Cameron decided to call Weaver himself. “Look, you don’t know me from Adam,” he told the actress when he reached her in France, where she was filming a comedy with Gérard Depardieu. “But I just wrote this script I’m calling Aliens. And now I’m in an embarrassing situation. I’ve been working on this film for some time, but now I’m being told you know nothing about it. So—can I send you the script?”1

  Weaver was dubious of what she thought was an attempt to cash in on the success of the original, but she agreed to read the script and was pleasantly surprised by Cameron’s thoughtful take on Ripley. “He made her this renegade,” she says. “It was a great beginning for this character to find this isolation and rage.”2 The actress agreed to meet with Cameron and showed up intensely prepared—she had marked her copy of the script with several different colors of ink and filled the margins with questions and notes. Weaver told Cameron some very specific things she wanted to see happen in the Alien mythos. “She wanted to die in the film, she wanted to not use guns, and she wanted to make love to the alien,” Cameron says. When she attained a position of power as a producer of the third and fourth films in the Alien franchise, Weaver got to do all three of those things. But at their first meeting, Cameron vetoed her requests. “I thought she would bolt,” he says. She didn’t. And some of Weaver’s ideas inspired Cameron to think more deeply about the character. He had seen Aliens as a straightforward revenge story. Weaver, more softhearted than her director, didn’t think Ripley hated the aliens. “I said, ‘No, no, no, she hates them,’” says Cameron. “‘She hates the aliens that killed all her crew members and put her through the most traumatic event of her life, and she wants to see them destroyed.’” Ultimately, Cameron sold Weaver on the notion that there are colonists on LV-426 and Ripley would want to prevent the kind of trauma she had lived through from happening to anybody else. “That creative tug-of-war between us forced me to think outside of my limited box at that time and to see that her motivation was on a higher plane,” Cameron says. “She was on a sense of duty”3

  While Weaver loved the script, she made one other thing clear at the meeting: she still hadn’t made her deal with Twentieth Century Fox. Weaver knew her own value as Hollywood’s first real action heroine. After Scott made her a star, she’d gone on to earn lead roles in notable movies like The Year of Living Dangerously and Ghostbusters. Now that Cameron had crafted an entire screenplay around her character, Weaver felt she was ripe
for her first fat paycheck. The studio didn’t agree, however, and a stalemate developed in Weaver’s contract negotiations. By now it was April 1985, and Aliens was set to go into production in September. Cameron had already tangled with Fox over one woman whom he considered central to the film—Hurd. Although she had delivered The Terminator on time and on budget, Hurd’s youth (she was now twenty-nine), gender, pixielike appearance, and romantic relationship with Cameron led the studio to assume she was not a “real” producer. But Cameron insisted on the duo as a package deal, and won. After reinforcing their professional partnership, Cameron and Hurd sealed the personal one. The couple headed to Maui to marry. Before they left, Cameron told Fox, “We’ll give you until we get back to lock in Sigourney’s deal. If it hasn’t happened by then, we’re out.”

  When Cameron and Hurd returned from their honeymoon, Weaver and Fox still had no contract. And now Cameron had put himself in a spot. He felt he had to stand by the deadline he’d created, so he devised a ploy Cameron called Arnold Schwarzenegger’s agent at ICM, where Weaver was also represented. He told the agent he’d been thinking over his new place in the Hollywood pecking order and had decided to drop the character of Ripley altogether and build the story around Newt and the marines. That way Aliens would be 100 percent Cameron’s, with no baggage from Scott’s classic picture. He finished by telling the agent he was starting the rewrite immediately, and hung up. Cameron never had any intention of writing Ripley out of his script. But he knew what would happen next—Schwarzenegger’s agent called Weaver’s, who called Fox. And Weaver’s deal was closed that day. In the end, she was paid one million dollars for Aliens, about thirty times her salary for the original.

  The Garbage-Bag Test

  Perhaps the most indelible image from the first Alien film is the gruesome moment when the creature violently explodes out of John Hurt’s chest. Cameron knew he would include the “chest bursters” and “face huggers”—the gory, parasitic life stages of the alien that had so horrified audiences of Scott’s film. But he also wanted to take a design stand of his own. The first unique design concept Cameron cooked up for Aliens was the immense alien queen. He painted her himself as a super-bug, sort of a cross between a black widow spider and a dinosaur, with two pairs of arms and an egg-laying sac modeled on a termite queen’s ovipositor. Cameron references real animals and insects in his designs for fantastical creatures like the alien queen for two reasons. Most important, he feels an image rooted in reality helps an audience suspend disbelief. When you’re asking people to travel with you to another planet and time, it helps to give them vaguely recognizable forms to latch onto along the way. But the other explanation for Cameron’s plagiarizing the natural world is that doing so feeds his Mr. Wizard alter ego, the part of him that relishes any excuse to dive into scientific esoterica like insect reproduction. Cameron’s alien queen was only part science, however. The other parts echoed H. R. Giger’s designs for the original Alien film: elegant, beastly, and begging for Freudian interpretation. Some film theorists have called the alien queen Cameron’s version of Grendel’s mother from Beowulf—“the female that is the monstrous form beyond Grendel, and the real source of terror, as she, unlike Grendel, could give birth to more beasts.”4 Cameron’s mama was fourteen feet of terrible, and she was dragging thousands more hideous, chest-bursting babies in her distended sac full of eggs.

  In the queen, Cameron had dreamed up another monster that would require as much imagination to build as it had to conceive. For that job, he recruited his pal Stan Winston. “I’ve got this great idea,” Cameron told Winston. “We’ll get a couple of guys. We’ll put them in a suit. We’ll have puppeteers working the legs.” Winston, who rarely had trouble matching Cameron’s enthusiasm for seemingly impossible tasks, didn’t get it. “I’m looking at him going, ‘This guy’s completely out of his mind,’” Winston recalled years later on the DVD commentary for a special edition of Aliens. But within seconds, the special-effects artist thought back to their shared effort on The Terminator. “If Jim is imagining it, somehow he’s got an idea of how he can make it happen. So my second thought was, ‘Yeah, we can do that.’ “5 Cameron sketched how the two puppeteers would operate the four arms while lying back-to-back in a body tray inside the torso of the queen. To prove to Winston—and to himself—that his concept would work, Cameron proposed a test. He had Winston build a fiberglass tray mold to fit two workers from his shop. The crew then cut up foam core in the shape of a head, arms, and legs and covered it with black plastic garbage bags to approximate the black sheen of the alien. Then they dragged their hastily constructed queen out to the parking lot of Winston’s San Fernando Valley studio. Using a crane, they suspended the two puppeteers inside the foam body. Cameron ran the camera for the test and called the shots. “Crane, raise up,” he said. Up rose his Hefty-bag monster, gingerly at first. “All right, bob the crane up and down. Just a little bit, like it’s shifting its weight. Try to keep the palms down.” The goal was to see the total mobility and the silhouette of the creature. When they played back the video, to the surprise of everyone but Cameron, the potential of the design was clear.

  Once the garbage-bag test proved successful, Winston’s team set about building the real thing. Ultimately, it would take fourteen to sixteen operators to move the queen on set. The head, neck, and body were hydraulically controlled, the legs puppeted externally using rods, the face, lips, jaw, and tongue operated by cables. “The queen alien is probably the only actress that could take direction from Jim Cameron, get pissed, and back him off,” says Winston. She was also the most complicated creature Winston had ever constructed at that point in his career. Seven years later, Steven Spielberg would seek out Winston’s help for Jurassic Park. “He said, ‘Well, you built a fourteen-foot alien and it worked. Why can’t you do a dinosaur?’” Winston recalled. “Everything leads to something else.”6

  With the queen in the works, Cameron and Winston tackled the army of warrior aliens. The alien in the original film was played by a seven-foot-two Nigerian design student named Bolaji Badejo, who was discovered in a pub in England by a member of Scott’s casting team. Unlike Scott’s movie, Cameron’s called for dozens of aliens. Unless the entire NBA showed up for auditions, Cameron knew he couldn’t find enough seven-footers to cast his alien army. But in studying Alien, Cameron realized that the creature almost never appears in the same frame as a person for scale, so Badejo’s freakish height wasn’t all that important. Cameron decided to use normal six-foot-tall people instead. He also wanted his aliens to have more mobility than Badejo had had in his rubber suit. So Winston’s team created costumes out of spandex that stuntmen and dancers could wear as they jumped, crawled, and skittered. This was one of the many times when Winston’s background as an actor came in handy in his special-effects work—intuitively, he understood that creatures had to be not only wonderful to look at but capable of delivering a compelling performance.

  Ugly, Battered … Functional

  The art of H. R. Giger had been crucial to the first film, enormously influential in creature and movie design, and inspirational to Cameron personally. Over the course of his career, Cameron has sought out some of the best artists in the world to collaborate with, but he didn’t invite Giger to help on Aliens, a decision he later regretted. “He sounded like an eccentric who might be difficult to work with,” says Cameron. “Maybe, at the time, I was afraid of giving up too much visual control. That comes from lack of confidence.” Cameron did muster the courage to seek out some other artists he idolized, Syd Mead and Ron Cobb. Mead, a onetime designer for Ford Motor Company, had reinvented himself as Hollywood’s “visual futurist,” concocting wildly imaginative vehicles for sci-fi movies like Blade Runner and Tron. Cameron tracked Mead down in Miami, where the artist was engaged in another act of ocular fantasy—judging the 1985 Miss Universe contest. He FedExed Mead a copy of the Aliens script and asked the artist to tackle the Sulaco, the hulking spaceship that transports Ripley and the Coloni
al Marines to investigate what happened on LV-426. Mead stayed up all night reading the script and meditating on Cameron’s description of the ship’s first appearance on-screen: “Metal spires slice across frame, followed by a mountain of steel. A massive military transport ship, the Sulaco. Ugly, battered … functional.” Mead completed several sketches of the Sulaco, first designing it as a massive sphere. The spherical idea didn’t work for Cameron, however. Instead, he sent Mead a quick sketch of his own in which the Sulaco resembled a giant gun drifting through space. Mead expounded on the giant-gun design, which was ultimately what appeared in the film. Mead also worked on the drop ship the marines would use to descend into LV-426’s atmosphere. Here Cameron wanted a vehicle that could dive down onto hostile planets and deposit ground troops, like the helicopters that plopped American GIs into the jungles of Southeast Asia. But again, the final drop ship would be based upon a design Cameron constructed himself, using parts from a model kit of an Apache helicopter that he bashed together on a Sunday afternoon and spray painted gray. “Syd had some great ideas, but his stuff was too sleek for the gritty, used future look we were doing,” Cameron says.

  Cobb, an accomplished illustrator who had worked on Alien and Star Wars, often packaged Cameron’s rough designs, adding the finishing touches. Though he was working with artists whom he respected in Mead and Cobb, Cameron relied on his own design aesthetic for Aliens more than anyone else’s. Rare among directors, he has the artistic ability to sketch, paint, and build things himself—and he prefers to. This is largely because Cameron knows better than anyone else what he envisions in his own mind. But there’s also a part of him that seems to deal best with the stresses of life and moviemaking by using his hands. Some directors drink, some smoke, some screw—Cameron moseys off to the model shop and gets dirty.