“Alien was a posh horror film,” says Ridley Scott. “I never think about it as a horror film, it just scared the sh*t out of people. It had too much class, to be conceited about it, to be classified as horror. Nothing wrong with horror but I think of horror as… well I better not get into that too much.”
We’d momentarily caught Scott by a stroke of luck as he prepared to shoot a scene inside a cavernous ceremonial hall, framed by enormous concrete heads of ancient gods, their aquiline features evocative of Prometheus’ Engineers. ‘The Hall of Heads’ was an interesting spot to chat to Scott, as it was a very Prometheus-like set - with all the enormity and gravitas that evokes in your imagination - within a very Alien-like movie.
And Alien: Covenant, as we are reassured throughout our set visit in Sydney, Australia, is definitely the latter. Despite Scott’s reluctance to box it in (and his not uncommon distaste among veteran genre directors for modern horror) he admits he wants his film to scare people. “I think [when you create] real tension and real fear, it’s really heartening when you scare people,” Scott continues. “There’s a bloodlust out there - these bloody films that you see that are not even frightening, they’re just like yikes, urrgh, I don’t want to see that. So I thought I’d try and come back and do one.”
Prometheus was a convoluted addition to the Alien franchise that took the original’s haunted house premise and blew it up with what many argue was misguided ambition to insert cosmic musings in among all the running and screaming. Covenant’s premise promises to take things back to basics. “A lot of the stuff that’s in this film is legitimately freaky,” says actress Katherine Waterston. “It takes a lot of energy to try to conjure so much fear. That’s been an interesting process to dedicate myself to.”
Waterston plays Daniels, third-in-rank and the chief Terraformist above the Covenant on a Noah’s Ark-like trip - everyone aboard is a couple - to colonise a new planet. Along the way, the crew discover a distress signal of human origin, and decide to investigate. Things go quickly south, and Daniels soon sees the crew around her getting picked off one by one.
“[Daniels] discovers her strength and her courage as the circumstances present themselves,” says Waterston.
If this sounds familiar (there was a distress signal, Ripley was also third-in-rank, and things also went quickly south in the ‘79 original) it’s because it’s meant to be. “[Alien] is a formula that works,” says Special Visual Effects Supervisor Neil Corbould. “I think Star Wars has proved that. They put the old X-wings back and the old cast, and Ridley's doing the same.”
“I think that was probably the old haunted house, and this is the new haunted house. It's very much a modern day version of that. It's definitely going to be scary.”
Covenant’s crew is reminiscent of Alien and its immediate sequel; a much rougher one than the vodka-swirling elite of Prometheus, a grunty mix of soldiers and scientists who communicate in teasing putdowns. Among the crew there will be the usual push and pull of power over the aliens themselves (“there are people that are fascinated with wanting to see who these alien creatures are... it's an Alien film” cast member Nathaniel Dean reminds us), but there’s plenty of light and dark in their everyday dynamics.
“The problem with Daniels and her partner [played by James Franco] is that her partner is the captain,” says Billy Crudup, who plays Christopher Oram, Chief Science Officer aboard the Covenant. “And he’s also younger than Oram. And Oram’s been a part of this programme for some time. And been in the system for some time.”
Oram is described by Crudup as a “complicated” person who struggles with his ideas of faith as a man of science. “I think that complication alienates him from people. He’s a serious minded person - he doesn’t have a great sense of humor... for Oram this is not a lark. This [journey] is an act of providence. He feels as though he has a strong sense of why he is part of this mission.”
Pissy about his rank and with an undefeatable belief in something more among a group of booze-swigging atheists, Oram is as close to a traditional antagonist on board the ship as possible. But that’s - perhaps unwisely - discounting the film’s two androids.
“Human beings either engage by paralleling or contrasting and there’s somehow neither happening with him,” Waterston says of her co-star Michael Fassbender. “And it’s... it’s just so surreal and it makes my job really easy because I can’t forget he’s a robot.”
Fassbender will return as David, the unknowable robot who has been stuck on an alien planet with Shaw (Noomi Rapace) for 10 years following the events of Prometheus. We are told little about David’s activities other than his humanity has grown more advanced in his time away from human maintenance. “He’s more sort of engaged in all sorts of human characteristics,” says Fassbender. “Insecurity, ego, rage might come out of insecurity, things like pride, envy, I saw a bit of that. He likes to feel important, so pride.”
The actor will also play Walter, a more advanced model than David, but a simpler, less eccentric one, who serves the crew on the Covenant. “There was a resistance from people to [the David 8] model,” says Fassbender, “because he was demonstrating a lot of human qualities and his programming was veering towards human characteristics. And they found that to be not so much useful as opposed to making people feel uncomfortable. So they designed the following models with fewer of those human traits - well none of them really. So Walter is just a very straightforward, logical synthetic.”
Elsewhere on the ship is Alien Covenant’s own spin on the original’s idiosyncratic ragtag team of military men and women (many of whom, it's safe to say, are redshirts). “I think one of the great things about Ridley is that he... they're very individual, developed characters,” says Dean, who plays soldier Hallet. “You don't feel like you're soldier number one or soldier number two or any of that sort of stuff. They're very... detailed.”
“[My character] is an old school type of military, and pretty much every military I know throughout generations, they're always trained like that,” says Demian Bichir, who plays Sergeant Lope, Hallet’s husband. “I guess the peculiarity about this is that we're all couples in this ship. All kinds of couples, even man and man. And to me, that's a beautiful side of the story when you can have these two almost iconic type of macho types being together, and loving each other, and being a part of keeping everyone alive.
“I think one of the main things that sergeant Lope knows is that we can all die. There's a big chance that we won't make it.”
Covenant’s humans may go down in ribbons of blood and guts, then, but as per usual the film’s real stars are much hardier. Covenant will continue Prometheus’ tradition of keeping as much of its monsters in-camera as possible, and the creatures workshop we enter into is a humming hive of silicone, latex, and KY jelly (“you can’t beat it”, we’re told of the latter). “[Ridley’s] very hands on, lkes to get into it, dressing KY and goo and blood and yoghurt and food,” says Adam Johansen, 2nd Creatures Supervisor. “We had the spaghetti out yesterday.”
The team’s MO for Covenant is to eschew the mechanical tubing of the original’s Xenomorphs to create aliens - both Xenos and new alien type Neomorphs - that are more naturalistic. They’ll still look Geiger-esque, but a little more earthy and a little less fantastical; for reasons that are still unclear considering their eventual evolution into the'79 Alien. “Ridley really wanted to keep to the natural world,” says Creatures Supervisor Conor O'Sullivan. “They’re possible in a natural kind of way. They could be a real beast, where the mechanical version was something a little bit more in the fantasy world.”
Like Xenomorphs, the white, humanistic Neomorphs don’t arrive on the scene fully formed. They infiltrate their host bodies through airborne spores before ripping their way out, bloodily and violently through mouths and spines, as translucent infants. “We have a little guy who’s a little baby - a little puppet - and he grows incredibly quickly so we have a few versions, stages, five I think,” says O'Sullivan.
Considering the demands of movement, these puppets can’t all be physically in the film. Covenant will be a blend of practical and digital, and many of the practical creations we see in the workshop are proof-of-concept models rather than active participants; which still makes for a more realistic end product. “We find it all the time when we’re designing things on a computer screen, it’s very dangerous,” says O’Sullivan. “It’s too easy to look at it and go ‘yeah that’s great’ and send it off - and then when you see it on the big screen it doesn't look quite as good. We attempt to make things in a practical way and we’re honing in on the design through that process of making the film. That’s what Ridley needs and that’s what the film needs.”
Our visit ends with a cluster of press photographs on Covenant’s largest set, an enormous shell that serves as the interior of a crashed dreadnaught. At the centre of it sits the Space Jockey’s chair, also the centre of Alien’s entire mythology, and a reminder that Scott is still pushing the ball he got rolling with Prometheus; the reason behind it all. “I thought with that special kind of creature, it shouldn’t really have run its course, it shouldn’t have ended,” says Scott. “So you come back with a really simple idea, which is who made it and why? Nobody asked that question.”
But we are told time and time again that Covenant is leading toward the events of Alien, and shares more of its DNA with that film than it does with Scott’s dizzying (for better and worse) epic. “[Scott] did listen to the criticism, if you like, of Prometheus” says Corbould. “People wanted more ‘Aliens’.”
“If you're making it for a PG 13 or 15 your hands are tied to give proper horrors, but when the gloves are off and it’s 18, R-rated, then you can make the movie exactly what you want, with more aliens. He listened to the audience that wanted more aliens. They're going to get a lot more aliens, more than they probably anticipated.”
For fans of of Scott’s original, these might be the words they need to hear to get excited for this universe once more.
Lucy O'Brien is an editor at IGN’s Sydney office. Follow her ramblings on Twitter.
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