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Unquestionably one of the most iconic and celebrated projects ever to creep its way into the horror genre, Ridley Scott's Alien has been frightening the life out of people for over four decades now. Across 116 nail-biting minutes, the director and his crew masterfully told the story of the Nostromo team's efforts to stay alive after discovering a menacing alien life form. However, the tales of what occurred behind the scenes are arguably just as fascinating as the one that kicked off an entire Xenomorph franchise.
Scott himself ended up having a more hands-on role in making the picture than you likely realised, the film's stars very much suffered for their art, and the crew had to resort to drastic measures to freak out a cast member - and no, we're not talking about the chestburster sequence. That's a BTS story that has been talked about enough over the last 40+ years, so don't expect to see it erupt out of one of these entries. So, from malfunctioning spacesuits, to clashes with producers, to the many interesting ways Scott got what he wanted in the can, here are 10 secrets from the set of Ridley Scott's Alien.
10. Ridley Scott Shot A Lot Of The Movie Himself A great director will have an understanding of just about every job on their set, and perhaps may even be skilled enough to perform some of those roles. This is something the great Ridley Scott demonstrated during the filming of his 1979 space-set horror, with the man steering the ship actually spending a ton of time operating the camera on set.
That's according to art director Roger Christian, who'd explain that Scott wound up shooting about 80% of Alien on his own shoulder, remarkably doing all the movie's handheld camera work himself. Not being able to do something similar on Blade Runner seriously frustrated Scott later down the road. He'd been a camera operator on 2,500 commercials and chose to do a bit of that during both The Duellist and Alien (via Den of Geek ).
Due to the way film sets were ran in Hollywood, though, Scott wasn't allowed to be quite as hands-on as he'd been during the Alien shoot, where his fantastic work behind the camera helped make Alien the intense and stunning ride it ultimately was..
