Aliens (film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Aliens, the 1986 science fiction-action film written and directed by James Cameron, opens with a woman who has been asleep for 57 years. Ellen Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver, drifts through deep space in a tiny escape shuttle until a salvage crew finds her. The world she returns to has moved on without her. The colony she warned about has been built right on top of the danger she survived. When contact with that colony goes dark, Ripley is handed a choice that drives everything that follows. What made this sequel so different from the original that critics debated whether it surpassed it? How did a relatively untested director, working on a troubled British shoot with a fractious crew, deliver one of the highest-grossing films of 1986 and earn his lead actress the first Best Actress Oscar nomination ever given for a science-fiction role?

• 2. Years in Development

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  Alien earned over $100 million against a budget of $9-11 million, yet 20th Century Fox declared it a financial loss using Hollywood accounting methods. Brandywine Productions co-founders David Giler, Walter Hill, and Gordon Carroll sued Fox for the unpaid profits, and the lawsuit was not settled until early 1983. That settlement produced a strange outcome: Fox agreed to finance development of a sequel but was not required to distribute it. Studio president Alan Ladd Jr. had been supportive of a follow-up but left Fox to found his own company. His replacement, Norman Levy, told Giler he believed a sequel would be a "disaster". Fox executives thought Alien's success was a fluke, and declining horror box-office returns fed their hesitation.

  In November 1983, Cameron submitted a 42-page treatment for the sequel in three days, after development executive Larry Wilson had read the script for the in-production Terminator. One studio executive dismissed Cameron's treatment as a constant stream of horror with no character development. A deal to sell the sequel rights to Rambo developers Mario Kassar and Andrew G. Vajna fell apart, and the project stalled again. It only revived in July 1984 when Lawrence Gordon replaced the studio's leadership and noticed the untouched AlienII treatment sitting in the development pile. Cameron had spent the nine-month production delay on The Terminator expanding his AlienII outline to ninety pages, drawing partly from an older story concept of his about an alien on a space station involving a power-loader suit. The surprise financial and critical success of The Terminator in late 1984 gave Cameron the credibility Fox needed to hand him the directing job.

• 3. The Pinewood War

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  Principal photography began in September 1985 on a 75-day schedule with an $18.5 million budget, filming almost entirely at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire. Cameron, a Canadian, had little familiarity with British film-industry traditions such as tea breaks, which interrupted production for up to an hour each weekday. Cinematographer Dick Bush insisted on lighting the alien hive brightly, directly counter to Cameron's request, and was eventually replaced by Adrian Biddle. First assistant director Derek Cracknell routinely ignored Cameron's setups, doing them wrong so the entire set had to be broken down. The situation reached a breaking point when Cameron and producer Gale Anne Hurd fired Cracknell and the Pinewood crew walked out mid-day.

  Cameron called Fox for advice and wanted to move production out of England entirely. Hurd persuaded him to stay. He and Hurd gathered the full crew to address their grievances, and Cameron told them any member who could not support the production should volunteer to be replaced. The crew agreed to support him if he respected their scheduled working hours. On the final day at Pinewood, Cameron told the assembled crew: "This has been a long and difficult shoot, fraught by many problems... but the one thing that kept me going, through it all, was the certain knowledge that one day I would drive out the gate of Pinewood and never come back." Despite all of it, Fox was satisfied with the daily footage, and principal photography wrapped in January 1986, on time and on budget.

• 4. Casting and Characters

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  Weaver initially rejected offers to return, and even after reading Cameron's script required convincing that the film was not being made purely for commercial reasons. She received a $1 million salary and a percentage of box-office profits, the highest salary of her career to that point. Negotiations ran so long that Cameron and Hurd told Schwarzenegger's agent they planned to write Ripley out of the film entirely, knowing Weaver's agent would hear it; a deal was reached shortly after.

  James Remar secured the role of Hicks on the recommendation of Hill, his close friend, but left early in filming after being arrested for drug possession. Hurd hired Michael Biehn the following Friday. Bill Paxton credited his casting as Hudson to a chance meeting with Cameron at Los Angeles International Airport, where he mentioned he would be interested in a role. Fox backed Paxton partly because of positive responses to his performance in Weird Science (1985). Carrie Henn, who played Newt, was scouted by agents while she was at school in Lakenheath, England. Cameron said she had a "great face and expressive eyes" despite having no acting experience. The Colonial Marines cast underwent three weeks of intensive training with the British Special Air Service. Vietnam War veteran Al Matthews, who played Sergeant Apone, helped the actors handle firearms, since the blanks they used were still hazardous. Jenette Goldstein, who had never acted in a feature film before taking the role of Vasquez, spent hours at the gym, studied Mexican-American gang interviews to develop her character's demeanor, and wore dark contact lenses along with an hour of makeup each day.

• 5. Building the Creatures

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  H.R. Giger, who designed the original alien, was reportedly disappointed to be excluded from the sequel. According to Hurd, Giger was contractually obligated to Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986) and Fox could not negotiate with him. Special-effects creator Stan Winston took over. Despite the impression of horde-scale alien attacks on screen, only 12 alien suits were built: simple black leotards covered in molded foam for fast-moving shots, and detailed articulated models for close-ups. The creatures were played by dancers and stuntmen, and Cameron often filmed them hung from wires or in atypical positions to make them appear less human.

  The alien queen was Cameron's most ambitious addition. Inspired by the idea that the vast field of eggs on the derelict ship required a single reproductive source, Cameron imagined a queen creature combining elements of a praying mantis and a Tyrannosaurus rex. The final puppet was made from lightweight polyurethane foam, with two people inside controlling the arms, rods at the ankles for the legs, and a separate operator using fishing line for the tail. Up to four people controlled the head through a combination of servomotors and hydraulics. The queen's head was sculpted by Shane Mahan over several weeks by sight, based on a small maquette, because computer technology to scale up such a model did not yet exist. James Horner recorded the score at Abbey Road Studios with the London Symphony Orchestra, but the tight schedule meant the music for the climactic battle between Ripley and the queen was written overnight.

• 6. Reception and Legacy

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  Aliens opened on the 18th of July 1986, earning $10.1 million from 1,437 theaters in its opening weekend. It held the number-one position for three consecutive weekends. By the end of its theatrical run it had grossed approximately $85.1 million in the United States and Canada, and between $131.1 million and $183.3 million worldwide. The Academy nominated Weaver for Best Actress, the first such nomination given for a science-fiction film. Aliens won two Academy Awards: Best Sound Effects Editing for Don Sharpe and Best Visual Effects for Robert Skotak, Stan Winston, John Richardson, and Suzanne Benson. Time magazine put the film on the cover of its the 28th of July 1986, edition and called it "The Summer's Scariest Movie".

  The film's influence on popular culture ran well past its box-office run. Horner's score was imitated in action-film trailers throughout the following decade, and the Colonial Marines' weapons and armor became a template for science-fiction video games. The sets built for the alien nest at the decommissioned Acton Lane Power Station in London were left standing after filming; Tim Burton later redressed them as the Axis Chemicals interiors for his 1989 film Batman. Carrie Henn, who played Newt, chose not to pursue acting after the film. Aliens has been followed by two sequels, a prequel, and a television series, but Cameron himself said he considered Aliens special in a way that set it apart from his other productions, citing its particular impact on his career.