From Dreamwatch Issue 118 (July 2004).

Alien Vs Predator sees two of the scariest movie monsters of all time going head to head. Director Paul W.S. Anderson offers Bryan Cairns a ringside seat…

Paul W.S. Anderson is preparing to unleash the biggest inter-species brawl in the galaxy. The director of Event Horizon and Resident Evil is currently in post-production on Alien Vs Predator, the big-screen sci-fi showdown that spent over a decade in ‘development hell’. And Anderson is well aware that a lot is riding on this film, including the fate of two franchises and the fury of die-hard Alien and Predator fans if the movie fails to meet expectations.

“There’s a huge amount of pressure to deliver and it’s the kind of pressure that keeps you awake at night,” says Anderson. “It’s very intimidating to be working in a franchise that has featured some of the best filmmakers in the world, including Ridley Scott, James Cameron, and John McTiernan, back when he was a top action director. That’s tough competition to live up to.

“I’m also aware that these movies are classics,” he continues. “You want to make a scary movie? It doesn’t get better than Alien. You want an action movie? It doesn’t get much better than Aliens. The benchmark is so very high and the cast and crew worked hard to live up to that standard. I also have a lot of people who wouldn’t talk to me if it wasn’t fantastic!”

During Alien Vs Predator’s long stretch in development hell, various filmmakers like David Twohy (The Chronicles of Riddick) were linked to the project. In 2002, the project took a major step forward when producer John Davis approached Anderson, who had been developing his own idea for the epic battle. After a pitch to the studio, a screenplay was commissioned, and three weeks later, the movie was in pre-production.

“It was a complicated movie to get going because there are franchises involved,” notes Anderson. “Then there was the decision to make Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection. You don’t want to make an Alien Vs Predator when you have an Alien movie out the same year.

“Another problem was with those other existing Alien Vs Predator screenplays. They never had a take on the movie they liked enough to spend a fortune on and put two of their biggest franchises in. That’s probably the true reason Fox never proceeded with it. Fortunately, the concept we have now is much stronger and more exciting.”

Prey Mates

Set in the Antarctic, Alien Vs Predator revolves around an expedition hired by Weyland Industries to explore some barren ice caverns beneath the frozen continent. The elite team includes environmental activist Alexa ‘Lex’ Kline (Sanaa Lathan), archaeologist Sebastian De Rosa (Raoul Bova), chemical engineer Graham Miller (Ewen Bremner), ex-soldier Max Stafford (Colin Salmon) and billionaire Charles Bishop Weyland (Lance Henriksen). Once the group is 2,000 feet below the ice, they discover pyramid ruins, human skeletal remains with ruptured rib cages, fossilised remains of Face Huggers, and two deadly races that could arguably wipe out mankind.

“The Predators have a captive Alien Queen who they force to lay eggs, and they use those eggs to hatch Face Huggers,” reveals Anderson. “To fully breed grown Aliens, they need hosts and that’s where our human cast comes in. The movie is then about a hunting party of Predators who are tracking down the bred Aliens. The Predators are probably a little too confident for their own good because things get out of hand. Eventually, our humans end up getting trapped in a war between the Aliens and Predators.

“The movie is very much designed as a prequel to Alien and feeds into that story,” he continues. “When the Nostromo diverts itself to check out the derelict, it is clear Weyland knows about the existence of those aliens. They are not discovering them for the first time. This movie explains how that first piece of information falls into their hands.

While Alien Vs Predator’s human characters don’t have any futuristic hardware to tackle the Aliens and Predators, our heroes aren’t entirely helpless. “They have weaponry and plenty of it,” notes Anderson. “Although it was a cool line in Alien3 where Ripley says ‘You mean you have no weapons of any kind?’, for me that was certainly a mistake and it spelled the doom of that movie. I really missed the guns and shoot-outs in Aliens, so it was important to have heavy artillery to give our people a fighting chance.”

The human characters’ fight for survival may drive Alien Vs Predator, but the thing that cinemagoers are most excited about is the clash between the two monster icons. “I don’t want to give it away because it’s one of the treats of the movie, but, yes, they go head to head,” reveals Anderson. “Obviously, the Predators have an advantage in clear grounds if they have a plasma gun on their shoulder. It’s tough for the Aliens because they get blown away. But if the Aliens can get the Predators in a tight space, then they clearly have the edge.

“We have two species going at each other so it’s a war with lots of death. As the movie progresses, one particular Alien and Predator become the focal point.”

Face Off

Despite all the adrenaline-pumping action, Anderson’s primary goals for Alien Vs Predator were to create a tense environment and establish the film’s main characters. The director confirms that he carefully studied Alien, Aliens and Predator in preparation for his movie.

“One of the interesting things about the first two Alien movies is that you don’t see the Face Huggers for a long time,” he notes. “They have a slow build-up, so you care about the characters when they die. It also preserves the mystique of the creatures. The same goes for Predator – you don’t even see the Predator cloaked until 50 minutes in. “In our movie, we establish the characters and once the action starts, it doesn’t stop. It’s like a rollercoaster ride. People should be walking out of the theatre feeling like they’ve been beaten with a baseball bat – but in a good way!”

Anderson reports that the look of the Aliens in the new movie comes straight from their earlier big-screen adventures. “It’s a return to the original look they had in Alien – the very black, oily, bio-mechanoid creatures,” he explains. “We’ve taken them back to the dark terrifying look.”

Alien Vs Predator also features a lot of computer-generated imagery, although Anderson is quick to point out that he opted for a more traditional approach to special effects whenever possible.

“We are using CG but for me, a lot of the combat in Aliens is far superior than that in the third and fourth film,” he says. “If you can do it for real, it looks real. We have lots of Aliens and Predators in this movie and that volume of CG would never have looked real. When they go at it, it wouldn’t have looked convincing with CG, so what we’ve tried to do is mesh animatronics with CG enhancements. The images are 80 per cent real, 20 per cent CG. But the action is so fast and furious you’ll never even notice it’s a CG tail.”

Round Two?

If the success of last year’s horror franchise team-up movie Freddy Vs Jason is anything to go by, Alien Vs Predator looks set to be a massive hit at the box office – and further Alien and Predator movies seems likely. But Paul W.S. Anderson insists that he isn’t giving much thought to further movies just yet.

“I feel a lot of movies get screwed up when studios are more concerned about making a franchise and making numbers two and three instead of a good number one,” he states. “To me, Alien was not a movie conceived with thoughts of a franchise. So this is not a movie designed to spawn 10,000 sequels. Our goal was to make a really good movie. But if it makes a ton of money, of course there will be sequels, because there always are...”