So, Prometheus was the first one in that step forward
to discover how and why.
So, in the beginning of Covenant,
I felt we needed a link between the two films.
And so, within this,
we're about to hit a prologue, which is a very unusual thing
to do for this kind of film.
But in it, we see the two players from the Prometheus,
which start to explain the source and the beginnings
of an AI called David.
How do you feel?
This is what I call a prologue.
I thought people might find it a little long
and a little bit tedious in terms of they wanna get to the Alien film,
but surprisingly, everyone loves this prologue, which I do as well.
I think it's a very clever view on creation.
And once you've created a perfect AI,
if he's perfect,
you've probably already got a lap full of problems.
Because within this scene,
David becomes kind of aware
that he actually is superior to his father.
Ambulate.
I think, with a scene,
it's always important to have humor in scenes, if you can.
So if you're looking for the humor in this stuff and you
have an impulse to smile,
then that's perfectly correct and you should.
Perfect?
Your son?
You are my creation.
So we're now watching Peter Weyland,
who in the original Prometheus
was seen as a very old man, probably 100 years old,
who was seeking eternal life.
And by doing that, thought he was so clever,
so wealthy, so omnipotent,
that actually, he would meet his maker.
In meeting his maker, he met what we call the "Engineers, "
which we might call God or gods
because they're so superior,
which circles the idea of creation,
God and, "Is there superior forces around us?"
I believe in the idea of superior forces and the idea of God.
Dealer's choice.
Here we have a demonstration of his knowledge.
One gets a sense that he was born recently.
I don't think this is an AI that was born as an embryo and grew up.
And we don't really wanna go into that because it'd be too complex.
But let's say this is the first fresh morning of David,
and David is being listened to by his father.
Approved and admired by his father.
But then, eventually, the father realizes that this
AI is actually dangerous.
If you created me...
who created you?
Here we have the first tricky question.
Which Dad probably is getting a little uncomfortable
about this person asking that question
because he knows it's going to lead somewhere.
Which it will, in a second.
All these wonders of art...
design, human ingenuity...
all utterly meaningless
in the face of the only question that matters.
Where do we come from?
So here you are witnessing
a superlatively successful man, probably a trillionaire,
who is revealing his insecurity about being human.
And therefore, has limitations.
And this is where we find David,
now studying him,
realizing he has limitations.
So now you're gonna get the $64,000 question.
You seek your creator. I am looking at mine.
I will serve you. Yet, you are human.
You will die. I will not.
Now, Weyland feels uncomfortable.
And I would say, even angry at being challenged
by his creation.
So he gives out the first order.
This is a big thing.
Because David's already going in his mind,
"Why does he need me to pick up tea when it's right by my elbow?"
And therefore, it's a challenge.
So now, we have a demonstration that David is also political.
Which makes him very dangerous.
That's why there is no reaction at the end.
See, none of this is by accident.
It doesn't appear from nowhere.
I thought that was a perfect prologue to really resurrect
what was the original Alien.
That's why I went into the original titles.
I was in such admiration of Jerry Goldsmith at the time,
and the score's, I think, one of Jerry's best scores.
And therefore, we revisit the score occasionally
and Jed, our composer,
also was in full agreement, thought it was very relevant to do that.
So you're ringing the bell here of the original film
with the soundtrack.
In the same way,
the way I bring up the information about the spaceship
is the same way we brought up the information on the original Alien.
So it really is a true visit to that.
And the old bugger doesn't age.
The original Alien is pretty good, I think.
It's so long ago, that I don't really...
It's almost like it's not mine.
Walter,
it's time to recharge the energy grid.
Please report to the bridge.
On my way, Mother.
Like Ash, Ian Holm,
this AI is a company device,
which we can simply call Walter.
So this is Walter, about to find out that, wait a minute,
there's this AI that we've just seen called David in the prologue
and here we've got a guy called Walter.
As soon as that happens, you know we're gonna have a doppelgänger,
if you're thinking this through.
An AI double.
And that doppelgänger, when he finally appears,
will create tension and problems.
Interesting problems.
We're looking at Katherine Waterston, who plays Daniels,
who will be our leading lady.
Seven bells and all's well.
And over here, we're looking at James Franco,
who's here for a quick visit.
You'll see why later.
I don't want to tell you what it is until you see the film.
Now we're gonna reveal
the fact that he seems to be the housekeeper of this giant vehicle,
which carries many caskets.
The caskets contain human beings and human embryos
and so, we're gathering that this is a ship that's going to the New World.
Or their New World.
So they're carrying many, 2,000 souls. Good souls.
Walter is in constant inspection, has full knowledge of the elements.
In this instance, on this particular morning,
he's found an embryo that passed on.
So he's gonna get rid of that embryo and incinerate it.
But other than that, it's carrying about 2,500 souls plus embryos.
We have a problem.
A neutrino burst was detected in Sector 106.
This could trigger a destructive event.
Report to the bridge, immediately.
So this is daily business.
He will do his job, he will go and witness and be caught
in this technical accident, random accident,
that can occur in space often, I think.
And if it's random,
then it can't plan it so it comes and damages them.
In damaging them,
it, of course,
does really terrible things to what I call the "nursery" of sleeping people,
who are rudely awoken by this event.
In their caskets, they would normally take hours to come round
and then hours to get used to what was happening,
having been in hypersleep or deep sleep or coma for a while.
Walter is business as usual.
Doing his job, emotionless.
Undisturbed by the catastrophe which has now hit the ship.
And they're gonna lose quite a few sleeping travelers.
And, of course, they're now gonna lose the captain of their ship.
James Franco is the husband of Katherine Waterston.
Husband and wife.
This ship is built up, we thought, correctly, of couples and...
There's a division of the inhabitants of this craft that are the crew,
and then the rest will never be awoken
till they get to Origae-6, where they're going,
where they've researched and checked it out.
So it could be a feasible place to start to rebuild a New World.
That is not totally the end of James Franco. We'll see him again
shortly, in a flashback.
I thought all walls in cabins, if you're sealed for months,
will probably have a wall which will give you a window on the world.
And you can plug into whatever you want.
You can plug into pleasant woodland,
if you're feeling like that. Or pleasant snowscape.
And that image will appear on your wall in perfect clarity with sound effects.
And she's chosen a woodland to calm her down,
having just lost her husband.
Packing away all his things because she can't bear to look at them.
So her packing of his artifacts and elements,
immediate.
This is an important device in the film.
It represents a nail, an old-fashioned nail
that would attach to the idea of a cabin on the lake,
which is a thematic between the two of them when they got to Origae-6.
They knew there was water there.
So he'd always promised to build her a cabin on the lake.
And there's her husband,
which is one of her favorite videotapes of him.
Because he was a climber.
I said I wouldn't go without you...
Always trying to make it funny.
That guy slips because he's too confident, behind there.
And that's her saying goodbye to her husband.
I can't make any promises.
Leaving a void.
A vacuum.
Finality.
And the person who has had to take over is
Jacob or James Franco's number two,
which is Billy Crudup,
who is married to... I'm trying to pronounce her name.
Carmen Ejogo.
You believe in me, right?
So we now get
the idea, "These are actual couples," which kind of makes sense.
Probably very carefully selected and screened before they
were included in this journey and in this team.
Each one of these people would be definitive in their own right.
Their own science or their own capabilities.
There's no random choice here.
People have actually earned this position.
From all kinds of sources.
From astronauts, scientists, biologists, you name it.
They would be all highly qualified.
They'd be the very best in the world at this process.
And I'm gonna do the best that I can to...
live up to Jacob's fine example
as your captain.
Danny McBride is playing Tennessee.
I knew him to be a great comedian and actually good director, now.
Good producer.
But I looked at Danny, and flashed on Slim Pickens.
And it's my hat off to Stanley Kubrick's Strangelove,
'cause Slim had done a lot of westerns to that point.
That old group of guys that used to work in that...
Teams where they'd make western on western in those days.
Almost like we do science fiction now.
And then, Kubrick used him beautifully as a pilot
with a real Texan drawl
who would be a guy flying a B-29 bomber.
And then when he's really going in for the kill, he'd put his hat on.
And I just loved that character and I thought, "Why not?"
And so, passed it by Danny, who said, "I'll wear the hat."
And away we went. We've got a kind of version of Slim Pickens.
Now we have Oram trying to establish his authority
over a very, very clever, intellectually clever
and scientifically clever and psychologically clever group.
Carmen is a biologist,
studying flora and fauna.
Probably one of the world's leading protagonists in that field.
So, let's get this ship fixed. Okay?
Let's, uh, get to work.
And that's Amy Seimetz on the right there, who's a pilot,
a brilliant pilot who is wife to Danny McBride.
And that's Lope,
a guy who's part of security, played by Demian Bichir.
A very good Mexican actor.
But we should do something for Captain Branson, at least.
This is not a discussion, Tennessee.
Hey.
The terraforming module is stable...
but the connecting strut took some damage.
I went with the old table
that we devised, actually, in the original Prometheus.
Which seemed to make sense in terms of forming its own hologram
of the readings that the craft would take from
the object that we're about to land on or would be orbiting.
And there was a kind of good logic to that, and so we evolved it and made it...
'Cause it's a beat later, we made it more sophisticated.
It seemed silly not to do it
because it would already be an existing technology.
I wouldn't be surprised if
it's a forerunner to what will actually happen.
You'll get a 3-D hologram
of a geological or a geographical surface beneath you,
which will be read by instruments
and pop them back on to the table in your cockpit.
It kind of makes sense.
Most science does make sense when it actually comes down,
and, you know, I'm not scientific at all
but there's a kind of logic to this kind of graphic design.
It comes from there. That's why I think graphic design,
art and science are all in the same bag.
Science is art. Mathematics is art.
I've always thought that. People try and divide it,
to make it into a separate division, it's not true, really.
Complex mathematics and complex science is,
when you think about it, an art form.
Coming up with real solutions and resolutions.
Questions, answers.
That's what's interesting about science fiction,
'cause you can dream a little, but in the dream
you come against ideas that are problems.
And then you have to sit there like a bloody scientist
and think about how you'd work it out.
And most of it turns out to be quite logical.
To do it, it's a bit like doing the film called The Martian.
The Martian actually lays out the program of a survivor, of an astronaut,
and most of it is entirely logical, based on his information.
His survival comes from his knowledge
about the most basic forms of living.
"How do I grow food?"
Not science, not nuts and bolts, not radio.
But "How do I grow potatoes?"
I love that, when it comes down to that.
Gets that basic.
We're all still human beings. Doesn't matter how clever we are.
Or how advanced we are.
I think, sometimes, we frequently forget that.
It's very simple, it's when the lights go out,
there's always that voice in the dark that says,
"Have we got any candles?"
Or, then you got candles and then, "Do we have any matches?"
We have become kind of relatively inept
by our own sophistication
and where we think we're cool and sophisticated, we're not.
We're kind of weakened by everything we have.
Straight up.
No ice, no water, no chaser...
No shit.
Walter?
When in Rome.
To all the good people,
gone too soon.
May we remember them.
Remember them.
There's something very final about this scene
because she's gonna have to
say goodbye to her husband and shoot him off into space.
The most disturbing thing about this,
he will go off into infinity,
for infinity.
He'll be forever in infinity.
This body,
which is both disturbing and comforting.
I can't decide which. I think it's a little bit of each.
So now we have the problem.
Oram is a leader now.
Chris.
He does a speech here which is very interesting,
which lays out the possibility, "Oh, this man is religious."
And by simply having religion,
there's a label attached to him as being fundamentalist.
And he's not necessarily Muslim, he's not necessarily Catholic,
he's not necessarily Protestant,
but all through the centuries, we've had fundamentalist problems
with all these religions.
So, he is feeling vulnerable because he and his wife
are one of the religious factions on board this craft.
That's why he was passed over as number one.
But now he's number one because of the death of his colleague,
Jacob. James Franco.
So, our story is kind of interestingly complex.
You know, I like to do that and raise the bar on the usual horror film.
Ironically, in the very first Alien,
there was no character evolution at all.
I think the actors always used to get on top of me saying,
"What's my background and where do I come from?"
"Where I went to school?" And so,
finally in exasperation, when we got fed up of saying there isn't one,
"Your main thrust here is if this thing gets out
"and gets near you, it's gonna rip your goddamn head off
"and stick it up into a dark place."
I said, "And that's your motivation."
And therefore, the entire thing is based on your insecurity and survival.
But, you know, at the end of the day,
they do need to know.
So, I think I sat down one day and wrote a page for each one.
And they were very grateful for that 'cause they used it.
In this, it's all much more based on characters
and characterization and motivation and who they are.
In a funny kind of way, it's...
I was gonna say it's easier. It's not easier, it's all...
Acting, at the level of these people, it's all very talented.
All good, Tee?
All right. We're clear.
Reel her in.
All right.
Winch engaging, Tee.
Reeling her in.
I came up with the idea that
you can get a gossamer sheet,
which would be about the size of three football fields,
made of copper.
Gossamer thread, woven, and it's one massive... And there are four of them.
One massive solar panel.
And you could take that silky sheet,
squash it into a box probably
four feet by eight feet by four feet.
And so, it can be squashed tinily, but it's strong as steel.
These super-yachts today,
where their sails, the fabric of the sails is as strong as the cable.
And I think that's where we're going.
I hear recently that actually, that's what NASA is considering,
is having massive solar panels which are based out of fabric.
Which are probably metal fabric or artificial metal fabric,
which will be, fundamentally, receivers of solar power.
And because there is solar power out there, of course,
and so... And it'll vary tremendously.
Most of these ships will be driven by
every possible element they can actually lay their hands on.
Including other forms of energy we haven't even thought of
I'm coming in.
A rogue transmission, most probably.
Now, we had a transmission written way back in the original script.
It was written as a prayer and I thought,
"I can't do prayer, that's kind of corny."
So I don't know why, 'cause I was not a big fan necessarily,
John Denver was not my kind of music.
But I understood why he was successful,
and he had this beautiful purity.
Angelic purity.
And "Country Roads" was always that song that rang a bell with me.
It felt about loneliness,
being certainly on one's own, and I think was ringing the bell
for him on where he came from, which was probably prairie,
farming and huge, vast exteriors.
And I thought, "Well, if you're gonna be stuck,
"like, marooned,
"like Robinson Crusoe,
"on an island,
"you're gonna eventually start talking to yourself
"and so, talking to yourself might involve singing to yourself "
And I think, probably, we've all sung to ourselves at some point.
So when she was doing her evolution in that ship,
going through the configurations of how to work it,
she might have started to hum and sing.
She was not aware that she was transmitting.
Therefore, her voice goes into the ether.
And they are trying to work it out. "Who the hell? Why?"
And that's what gets them to go in and investigate.
Same plot as the original Alien.
There's a transmission. They go and find out.
She appears to be a main sequence star,
a lot like our own.
But old, very old.
Five planets.
Wait. Look at that.
I think there's a comfort zone when a film is so popular,
and is popularfor30 years,
that it's good to slightly revisit old ideas.
And I think... So clearly, this is one which...
It is, in one sense, deliberately similar to speculating
on what it is and what's down there.
And "Why are we going down there?" And "We shouldn't go down there."
There's those who say, "We should go down there.
"That was a human voice."
And those who say, "We shouldn't go down there,
"because we have a plan
"for our journey which has been 10 years studying,
"and that's what we should be doing."
So that will come up.
And, of course, it's entirely logical, so it's a good question.
Because it's a real question.
Amazing what you can bullshit as you go along, isn't it?
It's all out of the development, script development.
When you develop material, you never forget anything.
The fundamental idea of saying, "Why?"
"Why would you build this and for what reason?"
There's four films of Alien.
The following three never asked that question once, which I thought was
really one of the first questions to ask.
But it would mean getting out of that idea of the old
dark house and people are going to die.
Which is a very simplistic,
you know, "What to do?"
But that's what mine was.
Mine was the old dark house with seven people in there.
The monster was pretty definitive.
That's what really made it fly.
How do you mean?
I think the original Alien creature
has to go down as one of the most extraordinary
creatures in cinema.
And I can say that 'cause Giger,
ironically, didn't design it for the film.
I saw it in a book called Necronomicon,
that's why I went and saw him.
And he, of course, was very interested in doing the film,
and we had lots of things to design
such as an egg, an incubator.
The egg was an incubator.
Inside that is a sac,
and the sac has an object that will come out,
which was fondly called a "facehugger."
And then, finally, you have the baby alien.
And so, he had those to design, and I really stuck to my guns, saying,
"You've done it. This is the most beautiful creature I've seen."
And he said, "I'll try and do something better."
He did try, but he never got near it. That was spectacular.
And I think that's why we've come back to revisit that.
You won't see him too often.
Like the shark, he should be very exclusive.
The reason why the shark in Jaws is so scary is you barely see him.
You have a lot of description, and you have a lot of suggestion,
you're aware of what he can do,
and that's what makes him way scarier than seeing him too often.
Rule one, really.
Officially?
Okay, Danny. I'll put it in the log.
You're dismissed.
I'm cycling through every channel...
but getting a lot of interference and white noise.
Some high frequency echoes.
You hear anything?
Just the continuing signal from our friendly ghost.
I once talked to astronauts and scientists who say,
"Well, we kinda watch these movies."
And I don't know whether they were taking the mickey out of me or what.
He said, "Because we actually get lots of ideas."
And I laughed at him. And he said, "No, no, seriously."
He said, "Sometimes you guys have thought around a problem
"which we haven't got to.
"And it rings the bell,
"and so we go down that road then, scientifically,
"'cause there's a distant logic to it."
He said, "Sometimes it leads somewhere."
So I think it's just all called creative thinking. Healthy.
It's gonna be a motherfucker to fly through.
Yeah. I'm afraid so.
Communications will be spotty if the storm
goes electromagnetic.
Gonna be safe to land?
Depends on what you call safe.
T-minus 20 seconds.
Let's let her rip.
All right.
Preparing for orbital mode
over signal position now.
Mother, please coordinate launch sequence.
Understood.
You are clear to launch, Lander One.
All right, here we go. Launching...
Together...
So there's husband and wife, pilot and copilot.
Lander One released.
She is in a landing craft,
and her husband is watching her go.
We figure this planet has two moons.
It's a good thing you're driving...
Probably roughly the size of this Earth,
which is, what, 25,000-mile circumference?
She started it.
Ricks can talk about your tits if he wants.
I'm very secure in our relationship.
I'm good with my wife's tits.
Let's maintain focus.
Everything looking good down there?
Yeah, we're good.
Landings are always essential.
One way or the other, you have to do a landing.
And so, here we go again doing yet another landing.
I think it was quite successful because the interior of this craft
had to be on a 30-ton hydraulic system
that would take a set that's got to be 10 tons,
and push and shove, and bump and grind the whole goddamn thing.
So that shaking is coming from a series of six legs,
which are thick hydraulic legs.
Great engineering.
The fact we all step on there and trust Neil Corbould that he won't kill us
is in respect of his capability.
And Neil is the guy I always work with.
And we go as far back as Gladiator, actually.
Ever since then, I've done every film with Neil.
Partly, not only is he inventive,
to be that inventive he's a real engineer.
But also he's safe.
If he doesn't trust something he says, "It's not ready yet."
I like that.
I don't like this terrain.
We've got smooth water over there.
- I'm gonna put us down amphib. - Okay.
So here we are coming in over New Zealand.
All these pictures you see are real.
The waterfall is real.
That tarn, or that small high-level lake is real.
Okay, this is coming around the bay, landing in South Island.
The tip of the location in South Island.
And here we have eight and a half meters of rain a year.
And you're fundamentally in a climbing zone,
and very tricky walking zone.
There's some lodges that take keen climbers, hikers, and walkers,
and that's where we were.
Very beautiful. Spectacularly beautiful.
On our way down in the water.
If you can hear me,
I'm gonna check for potential damage...
On the hull first, and then I will check the uplink.
Well, let me know how it looks. Over.
Confirming atmospheric composition.
Here you go, big guy.
Oxygen, 19.5%.
Ankor.
Nitrogen, 79.4%.
The place we landed in, we chose, was the bay of Milford Sound, South Island.
And we built the interior there.
All this is on location at Milford Sound, with the ramp.
And then once you get outside, looking back at the ship,
we built the ramp, a bit of the fuselage, and one engine.
The rest was digitally put in.
The waterfall's real.
The ramp is real.
- Air feels good. - Wow.
Walking out in the morning. Black rock.
Yeah. Loud and clear.
Which will have massive vegetation.
You know, way back
when I was doing something and I had to talk to NASA,
I said, "Do you think we're really it?"
And they said, "Utter nonsense."
Said there's thousands, maybe millions
of Earth objects out in space
that are probably in advance of us or not as far advanced as us,
but definitely there's stuff out there.
Silly to think not.
I thought, "Thank God for that.
"Thinking that we're the only one is ridiculous." Right?
Therefore you're probably looking at...
And you can wrack your brains over environment,
but when your ball of Earth is the similar distance from the sun, chances are...
And you're roughly the same age, I.e., a billion years...
Chances are your growth or undergrowth is gonna be similar.
If you're enjoying sun's rays, sun's heat, et cetera, et cetera,
therefore it will probably have created some form of biology,
which we came out of the mud, from...
I think the earliest life form with us with four fingers or four digits
was a salamander.
And from that salamander, who came out of water,
you're staring at human beings.
We've got access to fresh water.
We might have a spot for a colony right here.
We'll see.
Oh, ye of little faith.
He's insufferable.
Billy Crudup is particularly great to work with, as is Katherine.
They're both very theater, from theater.
I think that background gives them great confidence.
Filming is fragmentary. In theater, you're on your own.
Once you walk on stage, you are on your own.
And therefore, very much an actor's medium, I think.
I mean, you get the rehearsal with the director and all that beforehand, of course.
But once they're out there,
they can adjust each night and what they feel,
you know, still staying with the integrity of the play,
and the message of the play.
But in film it's all fragments,
and it becomes more of a shared medium, I think.
I was gonna say, a director's medium.
Director's medium, yes, because later I put it all together with my team.
We put it together, we mix it, we sound it,
we digital effect it, we music it.
And that's all the team.
And the actor, once he walks away, doesn't see it till the premiere, basically.
I think when they see this, they're all gonna be
pretty pleased and quite surprised.
Nothing. Give Beta a shot.
Beta up.
It's not doing shit.
Callie Hernandez was also the... I would call her the engineer on flight deck
who did a great job of just convincing me,
apart from the other techs in the story, that she was really an engineer.
And she also had a great sense of humor.
I really liked them all there. I had good fun. Good time.
You can pick me up on the way back.
Sergeant?
Yeah, that's okay. Ledward, stay with Karine.
Meet back here in four hours. Keep your comm open.
Behave yourself with my wife.
You got it, Captain.
Come on.
Something passed overhead here.
Cut the tops off the trees.
So, this is all real.
The rocks are real. That's real.
That's the hardest climb in New Zealand, actually.
And believe it or not, people do go there and climb
into the face of the waterfall. Can you believe?
That's a real slope.
We put in trees.
That's a real view, panning up.
No animals.
Something has crashed into the side of the hill
and in its impetus has slithered uphill
before it was brought to a rest, scything through trees.
So whatever the object was, it was massive.
Meanwhile, Carmen has gone off,
as the biologist, looking at the flora and fauna.
Of course, what she gets to is a primitive mud pool.
Because in the mud, she'll probably find
all the beginnings of what she needs to know and read.
Now we have the flushing out of the three-dimensional hologram
that is coming from the masts, which come from the side of the ship,
which are reading the areas below.
P-three.
So she's actually taking stuff for the laboratory later,
where she'll look at what's in the mud.
There'll be lots of things in that mud, microbes.
Of course, he goes off.
And this is the first time we have a problem.
Puffballs... As a child, we used to have puffballs.
And we used to squeeze them and they would puff out
a fine dust-like pollen.
And there you've got some dust-like pollen.
But there's an intelligence to the dust,
gets together into its own universe and nucleus.
It will find a host.
So we're watching the subject find the host.
Always something uncomfortable about
seeing something going into your body.
And that is the first medical "yikes."
Ledward?
Coming.
He barely feels it, other than the little tickle in his ear,
'cause that was microscopic.
Now they're coming through the uphill forest,
where the thing has slithered uphill.
So it must have been colossal impetus.
Until they see an object
that is certainly arresting.
Very familiar old ground.
That's the ship that was used in Alien.
And it's the ship that we see in Prometheus.
There were many in Prometheus.
There you get the scale of it, with the figures walking on the rock.
That planet in Prometheus was an outpost
for a military, let's say, where if they've got really bad stuff,
you might have it on the threshold of your home base
but you wouldn't have it on your home base.
That was all based on what I learned later was anthrax,
which is a deadly, deadly thing.
If it gets out, it would become a biological warfare.
And it was developed in the Second World War,
and there's a place called Anthrax Island, it's in the Irish Channel,
where they've sealed it up in concrete 'cause there's nothing...
Once you have the anthrax, you can't kill it.
It's a bit like the bubonic plague.
That always stays active.
So they used to bury plague victims and bury them in lime.
'Cause the lime would tend to neutralize the plague,
but the plague can survive lime for centuries.
So it's quite indestructible.
I think... There are plagues, I think, that we don't even understand.
And don't know how fast they come, or where they're from.
One of the interesting ones is the Ebola.
The Ebola evolved so quickly.
In Africa, it was on the Ebola area in the Congo, I think, on the Ebola River.
That evolved in the '80s, I think.
Came out the first time and spread,
got a flash cascade, whatever you wanna call it,
of disease last year or two years ago.
Ebola came out of Africa
and actually entered with somebody on a plane into the United States.
That's how you get the beginning of what I call "compound interest."
Once that happens and you haven't tracked it,
you have a plague.
'Cause plagues are only controlled by isolation.
If you don't know somebody's got it,
they're walking around, by lunchtime they've met 50 people,
they've been in a bus with 200 people,
and by the end of that day you've got 700 people are then infected.
And no one knows until they do a meltdown.
It's that kind of galloping monster that is always interesting.
'Cause I think there are things that we don't really yet understand,
or which can move so quickly,
in terms of their own evolution.
Weyland Industries.
This isn't a Weyland ship.
Dr. Shaw.
How did she end up here?
Sergeant Lope, can I get a light on this?
And now they're walking around the interior of the old craft.
We've seen this desk before,
we saw it in Prometheus.
And he sets the desk going.
This desk never dies.
In the sense that atomic energy never dies.
Or takes hundreds, thousands of years, actually, to fade away.
And there we get the original recording of...
And I wanna hold back who this is.
Some of you will be guessing who this is.
And the people who saw Prometheus,
there were quite a few people who saw Prometheus,
will start to put two and two together
and try to patch together what must have happened.
So they may guess that this is Shaw.
Yeah.
What the hell was she doing out here?
Poor thing.
It's already kicking in, DNA's already got hit by something.
It is in his body. He now has a problem.
I'm sorry.
I don't know what's wrong with me.
Just look at me.
It's no more than the actual infection if you
give somebody hydrochloric acid, the reaction is instant
and you're dead within, probably, a minute.
But this is more biological.
So he's now got biological activity inside his body which is just galloping.
Chris, it's Karine.
What? Yes?
We have an issue.
We're heading back to the Lander.
Repeat. We're returning to the Lander.
Is everything okay?
Ledward is sick.
Okay, sick is not good.
Prep the Med Bay, okay?
Will do, Karine. What's going on?
Please, just do it. We'll be there soon.
Daniels, come in.
We're heading back.
Now we have Shaw and her husband from way back when,
so we're now connecting this craft with when they took off.
So Prometheus allowed this ship to take off at the end
with David, who was in two parts,
and with Shaw, who was more or less instructed
by the head of David as to what to do.
At that point, she had no trust in David whatsoever.
We'll find out what happened later.
All right.
Babe, are we talking quarantine protocols?
I don't know, but she said that
Ledward was bleeding...
And to prepare the Med Bay.
Bleeding?
Yeah, I know, that's what I thought...
Faris, you're breaking up.
We can't hear you, can you repeat?
Like all these films, the anxiety slips in from the side.
And I think we all know that something really bad's gonna happen.
And it is.
Faris, where are you?
We're here. Come in!
So he's now really, really melting down.
He's probably minutes from dying.
But of course, doesn't know that.
Come on, I need your help!
Fucking help me!
Now it's getting practical, but panic is taking over.
Way back when, I was gonna do a film called Hot Zone,
which is a very good book which is about the outbreak of Ebola.
Going into it, it was staggering how they will bring in
Ebola, Hanta, Machupo,
diseases that they don't know how they occur
and why they move so quickly, and why they disappear.
But they actually have these live hosts in laboratories in the United States.
This was about how a monkey that had Ebola
got out and into a playground of a children's schoolyard.
Which always stunned me that they could have such carelessness.
'Cause they import monkeys every year.
Thirty-two thousand monkeys, that they research for experiments,
'cause they have to, 'cause they're the closest thing to the human form.
Sounds inhuman, but there's a good reason for it.
Karine, put some gloves on.
Don't touch anything!
- Stop saying that! - Faris!
He already puked all over me!
Faris, what's going on?
So now, we have the beginning of chaos.
Chaos is good in these kind of films.
Oh! You have a problem.
Just stay here. I'm gonna get Oram.
She has no idea what's gonna happen.
And for a calm pilot, she's flipped out.
I need you to come back to the Lander right now!
I understand that, but we are moving
as fast as we can.
Come on, get up. We're almost there.
I don't know what the fuck
is wrong with Ledward.
Now, Tennessee, listening to his woman who is totally cool as a pilot,
he is freaked out.
You didn't just see what I saw.
I don't know what the fuck Ledward got
or if Karine's got it or if I have it!
- Tee! - Faris!
Come in!
Faris, where are you?
Here we go. This gets the heart racing.
Don't you know how to work this fucking thing?
Fucking yelling doesn't help anything!
Let me out.
She can't let her out because she's contaminated.
You could never let her out because the whole ship would be...
May have contaminated the corridors already.
So Amy could also have it by now, doesn't know.
So it's just as well that they go.
Here you go. Bam!
And there you have the beginning of
the creature that grew that quickly inside him.
It started coming out, the front comes out.
Breaks the backbone, the ribcage, and...
He's gone.
He's fundamentally gone.
Let me the fuck out!
Now that room is fully contaminated.
There's nothing they would ever be able to do about it.
So she's dead, this one.
Fuck!
There you have the new alien,
which used Ledward as the host.
Which is familiar ground to the original creature in Alien.
Faris!
I'm coming!
Oh, God... Please hurry...
Shooting this stuff is...
You gotta know what the hell you're doing, so...
After all of these years, I personally storyboard everything.
You know,
for people who storyboard, it's always a bit confusing because
it seems to be more efficient, but honestly, if you know...
If you have a view of exactly what you're getting, what you want,
it's better if you can draw it.
So I know how to draw, I've got many years of art school.
It was all hard work, but drawing now is very fast and easy for me.
So, I'll turn up with...
And sequences like this are absolutely boarded shot by shot.
Wide, close, medium.
So I already get the tonality
and the feeling for what it is and how savage it's gonna be.
So as I'm boarding, I realize I want her to go down,
so the idea of the blood on the floor, her slipping, is very useful,
which then gets its attention.
So that all comes from boarding it. The logic.
Now I want her to break her leg. Make it even more difficult.
She breaks her ankle.
Just missed, otherwise it would have got her.
Now, life's getting more difficult here 'cause she's got a broken ankle,
and this little monster can do anything.
And this is the last weapon in the rack.
He's growing as he comes.
Evolving as she sees it.
Whether things can grow that quickly...
I always relate to plant life when...
In the Sahara Desert, which hasn't had, say, rain for five years, 10 years,
it'll rain suddenly, and overnight you have the whole floor of the desert
is colored with beautiful flowers and small growth.
So they're all lying in there dormant, waiting to be fed with moisture.
Can that happen physically? I think it can.
Maybe way down beneath the sea,
maybe there are creatures that grow really fast.
From plankton to something large.
- Guys, hold him down! - Talk to me!
Oh, my God.
Very tricky scene here.
This is why someone like Billy really pulls this off brilliantly.
'Cause he's having to witness his wife, clearly his wife, burning.
And there's no point in going near her because the ship will explode,
and she's gone. She's so burned, she's gone.
Then it coincides with the birth
from the other unfortunate guy.
And there we have the view of the baby closely.
Very similar. Use the human as a host.
So now you have two loose in the landscape.
It's a 7.5 ion storm, it's a miracle
we talked to them for as long as we could.
Then we'll fly through it.
I think a film should be personal.
Most of these things get made 'cause
I'm really passionate about doing them, and sell it.
Not much comes to me now that I haven't really developed.
Occasionally something will come... The Martian came to me out of the blue.
I just read it and recognized it, and thought it was great.
But most of the time, I develop all the stuff.
So, when you develop material,
you now have the logic about where it's gonna go,
then it goes to a writer.
Eventually, John Logan is very good at putting these things down in three-act play
and working out lots of the logic of it.
And they're saying, "What about this? What about that?"
It's an evolution.
So there's a platform for what we're doing right now.
It'll be Prometheus, Covenant 1, and Covenant 2.
Then we'll probably come in at the back end of Alien 1.
And that's already kind of worked out.
Covenant 2 is already being written. John Logan.
Tennessee, come in
- for fuck's sake! - Daniels!
Look out!
Move! Move!
- Fire! - Shoot! Go!
Him losing his hand in the hydrochloric acid center,
which doesn't seem to have a mouth, but then has a mouth,
comes from a sea creature.
There were some guys doing very deep diving,
they were going down near the holes, the volcanic holes under water.
So the volcanic hole's temperature is probably 2,500 degrees.
The blow holes are varying.
But the interesting thing, at 2,000 degrees, at that depth of about 3,000 feet,
just outside of the temperature of the heat are living creatures.
They're about the size of shrimp, they look like shrimp.
And then another two and a half feet, and it's minus God knows what.
The pressure is colossal.
But the creatures are living in colossal pressure
two feet from 2,000 degrees.
And two feet from deep, deep, deep cold.
We don't understand that.
Follow me.
I'll get the captain.
Ankor...
Captain!
Chris! Chris!
We have to go now! We have to go.
- Come on. - Okay.
The amazing thing about film is it enables us to move from
emotional trauma to emotional trauma, and shock,
and still keep people going.
That's the wonderful thing about movie-making,
and the magic of cutting and things like that.
And of course, really good actors.
You've gotta be able to encompass the death of a wife in front of you
who was burned alive.
Somehow deal with it, within moments, in a credible way.
And then move forward, and move on,
and always carry that with you of having lost your wife in that way.
So, you know, that's the challenge.
Let's go.
So now we're into the city.
We don't know why these people have been destroyed
and why there are thousands lying on the ground in some terrible aftermath.
We'll see that later in an interesting flashback that was never in the script.
I said, "It has to be there.
"We have to explain who and what and why all this occurred,
"and who did it."
And there was always this discussion about, "We don't think you need it."
I said, "I think it's essential."
By the time this film comes out, people are gonna say, "Who are they and why..."
So I finally won on that one.
So, we did a very successful sequence
seeing the handiwork of David, who was then a maroon on the island,
and what he did to bring that about.
Kind of familiar to Mount Rushmore.
Probably the six elders of the entire civilization.
The intellects, the artists, the wise men.
How long do these people live for, Engineers?
I don't know, but I think it's longer than a human being.
Probably lifespan's 150.
I mean, we're already staring at 100, right?
So today, 70 is 50, 80 is a healthy 60.
I think it's partly medicine but I think it's partly evolution,
but also partly looking after yourself.
I'll explain as best I can.
Ten years ago,
Dr. Elizabeth Shaw and I arrived here...
the only survivors of the Prometheus.
The ship we traveled on carried a weapon.
So, now we have doppelgänger.
We have David and we have Walter watching him.
And Walter knows immediately it's David.
Now, when people are twins,
and one's got long hair and one's got a hat, you don't put two and two together.
So, I think most audience, if they know Prometheus,
will know, "They're one and the same."
But people who haven't seen Prometheus will probably not yet put it together
that they are sufficiently identical to say it's the same person.
I always challenge that one.
And you won't find out till he walks out and says, "Welcome, brother."
Then you realize, "Oh, my God, they are twins."
When I had to start off saying, "Okay, we're gonna see David
"as being marooned for 10 years.
"What the hell do I dress him in?"
So you think about that. "Well, how am I gonna dress him?"
And 'cause the Engineers' wardrobe is all wooly and ridiculous
and huge, and you have to cut it down and all that,
then it goes back to an old comic strip I remember from 1957 in England
called Hotspur magazine.
And Hotspur... Favorite character in it was a guy
who's an athlete, called Wilson.
And Wilson had a short, cut-off tracksuit, bare feet,
and that was it.
He was the hero figure in the comic strip.
Isn't that weird? I just latched onto that
and sent the drawings from 1957 to Michael, who went...
"Oh... I... Before your time, right?"
But I said, "Truly, he was a big hero."
And so we went with that for him.
But then does the hair of an AI grow?
If David's a super-AI, they'll want his hair to grow.
Okay? They couldn't quite work out the red blood.
They wanted to differentiate and have white blood.
But hair will grow, beard will grow,
so over that period, he kind of kept his hair shorn occasionally
and trimmed his beard.
Does he get dirty? Probably, but he doesn't have body odor or anything like that.
So he probably just keeps the parts clean.
So fundamentally, the image is Kurt Cobain.
As soon as he cuts his hair, you know there's gonna be a problem.
Tennessee, Ricks, come in.
I'm not sure they'll hear you through the storm.
They can be quite severe...
shielding the whole planet.
How long do the storms usually last?
Days.
Weeks.
Months.
But do keep at it.
Best of luck.
Covenant, this is Expedition Party reporting.
Come in.
Covenant, come in.
I'm so used to visual effects,
but it always is great when you see it.
We're gonna do this pan-around past the green screen, into the set.
And we put the planet below
and you really put it into different geography.
It's always great fun. I love working with visual effects.
Particularly when they're this good.
The closer we get to the planet...
the better chance we have to communicate with them.
This is bullshit, Tennessee.
We can't risk the ship.
What do you suggest, we do nothing?
We can't evacuate them.
So if they're in trouble, they have
to figure it out for themselves.
I'm sorry, but that's the truth.
Mother, bring us to 80 kilometers
above the storm, thrusters only. Comply.
Understood. Commencing descent now.
Tennessee, you need to stop this.
And you need to get back to your station.
No. What we all need to do
is calm down and talk this through.
Tee, I know your wife is down there,
but up here, you're in command.
And your responsibility is to the colonists.
Duly noted.
So now we come down into the main building.
I based the building, actually, on...
I think probably the most beautiful building in the world
is called the Pantheon, in Rome, so Chris,
the production designer, and I thought about the Pantheon
and its scale and majesty and simplicity.
We thought, "Why not?"
Because if this society, which are these Engineers' society,
who are what I call the "gardeners of space, "
the way they travel around and they sow their
influence in the varying planets around the world, around the universe,
which you see at the beginning of Prometheus.
There's a DNA being denoted to the planet into water,
from the water. It's one of the best distribution systems you can have.
That will evolve later, years later,
into bacterial creatures crawling from the surface
and evolving. Evolution.
And that's their role.
Are they gods? Not really.
Are they higher forms of life? Of course they are.
Are they more powerful than we were? Yes.
But nevertheless, they were defeated by their own invention.
Whistle, and I'll come.
You have a light step.
Me and fog on little cat feet.
Don't be shy.
I can't play.
Nonsense. Sit down.
The subtext of this whole story is,
the evolution of an AI, eventually, will demonstrate his superiority
to the human intellect.
And if we invent a perfect AI
and then the next thing you do is have that AI
then create or invent an equal AI,
from that moment, we're in trouble.
Unless we can control it.
And if we can control it,
they may have already perceived we're trying to do that.
Intuitively, are ahead of us.
And we, therefore, brought about our own destruction.
It's kind of logic.
It's an interesting domino effect. I love that idea,
called the "cascade effect."
I think there's a terminology about cascade,
it is when a system collapses.
It goes into a cascade.
It collapses.
Pull one brick out of the wall,
and the wall will fall.
Now put your fingers where mine are.
You weren't surprised to see me.
Every mission needs a good synthetic.
Gentle pressure on the holes,
the weight of a cigarette paper.
This is where we're trying to show off a bit,
which is showing that it's twins.
So, Michael Fassbender is playing two characters,
and we move from one to the other
with a digital tracking device camera,
which is reading the absolute repeats
of when David sits in David's seat and Walter sits in Walter's seat.
We can digitally then put them together and eliminate what we don't want
and put in Michael Fassbender in two seats.
The background remains common
because we've copied what we've already tracked.
If you get that, then you're a smarter man than I am.
But there's a logic to it.
We made the first cut. That's the first cut.
Because now you get the idea, there's no point in showing off any further.
It's kind of perfect.
Bravo!
You have symphonies in you, brother.
Now we think, at this point, David's a good guy
and he's harmless. But he's not.
He's actually lethal.
He's already undermining the human being.
Saying, "You work for these people and they don't allow you
"even to create, and you're capable of creating."
You disturbed people.
I beg your pardon?
You were too human.
He criticized him, saying,
"Your model was kind of adjusted
"because you were too human. You were perceived as a problem."
That goes back to the prologue, where we see David perceived as a problem
by Weyland, who goes, "Oh, this guy is too good."
But he nevertheless still took him on his trip,
because David was smart enough to actually, you know,
be subservient to his father, or to Peter Weyland.
The creator.
I'm gonna take a break, boss.
- I gotta clean up, okay? - Okay.
Right. Don't go far, please.
Yes, sir.
Danny.
You were right about this place.
We never should have come.
I just thought we were gonna find...
This was gonna be our new home.
In all these films, you've got to try and keep the movement rolling,
whether it's an action sequence or a dialog sequence.
If it's a dialogue scene, they'd better move it along,
'cause if the dialogue sequence doesn't, then you have a problem.
And it just flows down.
Because once you get impetus going, people get impatient.
They want more impetus.
So, it's all about keeping it going.
And, you know, dynamics can be easily not just physicality,
they can be information, if the information is interesting enough.
Like that scene with David and Walter
is interesting, fascinating,
because two guys, AIs, are talking about human form
and they know they're superior.
That's interesting. So that's dynamic, I think.
Here's where David reveals what we did.
"Ozymandias" is a perception of power
and how nothing lasts forever,
and even the most powerful collapse.
So here we get the meaning of the flashback.
This is the arrival of David.
Probably into the planet by now.
She would have put him together.
We found that he'd put him together.
And now he's arriving back and this is where they're welcoming him.
'Cause these things go off and come back years later.
That's their role.
And it's a welcoming process
till something seems to be going wrong and they don't understand why
the belly is opening up.
And what he's about to do is drop the motherlode
on a population below of two million people,
which is too many people in that plaza.
Now it's going... They go, "Holy shit, what's he doing?"
And they now cannot believe what he did.
And you're now about to see what that filth does.
This filth can kill a planet entirely within months.
And then will take years to clean,
evolve and start again.
So right here, he's destroying the planet.
Of everything, any life form apart from flora and fauna.
Anything which is a "meat," if you like,
doesn't include insects, is destroyed.
"Look on my works, ye Mighty..."
"and despair!"
"Nothing beside remains..."
Of course, Walter knows the other end of the poem.
And he finishes it off for him.
"The lone and level sands stretch far away."
Byron.
1818.
This is where he makes a mistake.
A lot of people won't spot the mistake
but it's there, and it'll be pointed out later.
He says Byron.
The guy who wrote it was Shelley.
One could die happy...
if one died.
This is where he tells us what happened.
And his feelings for her, though he's actually tearful,
in the sense that he had this kind of love for her.
Put him back together,
and we don't have to see that.
We will, in the menu, if you want. Looking at additional items.
But he talks about her quite fondly here.
Or from any human.
I loved her, of course.
Here we go. "I loved her, of course.
"Just like you love Daniels." And he says, "Well, that's impossible."
AIs don't love their mistress or master.
They respect them but they don't...
Technically, they don't have emotions.
Problem is, he had emotions.
That was a problem. Emotion is a problem.
Emotion can lead to bad behavior.
I know better.
I think he looks pretty good there. That's a Neomorph.
In first phase.
The Xenomorph has armor.
The Xenomorph really is the alien.
Here's Rosie cleaning up.
'Cause she was bitten but not impregnated,
so what's on her arm is a bad bite from that Neomorph.
Fuck!
Shit.
Without realizing he's already in the building.
This is the one, in fact, that bit her.
We'll not know that though. Just put two and two together.
Dariusz is the most fun
and best cameraman I think I've worked with, actually.
I've worked with some good ones,
but over the years, Dariusz... I've now done, I think, five.
This is the fifth.
And he's so, um, clever.
Adept at his process.
And because I discovered early on, I need to do my...
I want to shoot multi-camera,
I come out of the world of camera departments
where I was an operator on Alien.
The Duellists.
Legend. Someone to Watch Over Me. All of those.
I wasn't allowed to operate in Blade Runner because it was in Hollywood,
so the union wouldn't let me. But I was an operator.
And so, I would always work very closely with the cameraman.
'Cause, you know, if you're a director,
if you can,
you need to have a vision for how you want it to look.
If you don't, then you're relying on great cameramen to help you through it.
But that means... It sounds like
I know exactly what I want it to look like. 'Course I do.
But it doesn't make it easier.
I've put cameramen under tremendous pressure.
So Dariusz is always very, very challenged.
And that's why we work together. He's a real artist.
Funny enough, it didn't drift that far off the original Prometheus.
I'd seen something earlier and I wanted to make it a bit more like Black Hawk.
That was actually a Polish cameraman.
But then the more we got into it, I thought,
"Black Hawk doesn't look cosmetic enough for what I need."
So I need a bit of both.
So we went down the middle ground there.
So now it's evolving. It's cooking.
Where did Rosenthal go? I told...
Rosenthal's dead and now it's gonna evolve.
It's gonna begin again.
gather my stray flock.
He's gradually taken over.
Taken back the reins.
Pretty good head. That's a very, very good head.
That's a wax head.
Conor was brilliant.
He did most of the visual effects of the creatures for me.
And because I didn't want to wait for a green screen to come months later,
I had him literally build these creatures and put them on
physical actors, so when I'm in the set, I can actually film.
And the actor has... Most importantly, the actor has something to film with
as opposed to saying, "The monster's standing in front of you."
Which happens a lot.
So that's why it's always a bit dodgy.
Move.
Don't shoot.
Communication, Captain.
Breathe on the nostrils of a horse...
I used to ride a lot.
Way back when I was 14. I rode as a jockey.
And I was told about the horse,
if you breathe into its nostril it's kind of a connection.
I've never forgotten that 'cause I used to ride these two-year-olds
around the track,
and you'd breathe and they'd like it, they'd breathe back.
They would literally... Blow back.
I thought it was an interesting connection with an animal,
the creature, and that David understands 'cause they're his creation.
Because he's not human,
therefore, they're not aggressed by him
or feel danger with him 'cause he's a kind of AI.
You know, creatures are hard to design, really,
where you don't repeat yourself and they're not corny.
And then, to digitally get them drawn, as well,
is always the last thing to finally get finished.
Conor is a very talented man
who will do not just makeup but creature design
and then carry it out and make it.
So you can actually manufacture very, very, very good stuff
We can't wait that long.
But they're still limited in what they can do.
But they look great, and therefore
they're a wonderful thing for me to use on set with the actor.
Then later, gradually, as that creature evolves,
digitally, his work will be then eliminated.
But it's fundamentally based on what he's done.
Occasionally, something survives, some of the original stuff
is better than the digital effect stuff.
So I say, "We'll keep that and just leave it as it is."
Thanks, Tee.
Hey, Daniels, is Faris around?
I'd like to say a quick hello
to my lady, if that's possible.
Can you switch to a private channel?
Let me know when you're alone.
What's up?
Maggie's gone.
I'm so sorry, Tee.
We tried to help her, but we didn't make it.
Tee?
Copy.
I'm so sorry.
As you can see,
I've become a bit of an amateur
zoologist over the years.
It's in my nature to keep busy, I suppose.
This room, I think, was Chris's. One of his...
All the other stuff, you know, the industrial design
and the bridge and all that stuff is great.
But I think this room is a very, very good room.
This thing here, this flask,
goes back to the original Prometheus
where he breaks open the casket, one of these,
and pulls that out, 'cause inside there's a few of them.
And so, we start to connect Prometheus with this.
This is where we realize that he did it.
He designed the idea of perpetuation of growth
from what he did with whatever was handy.
And what he was always short of was human DNA.
That's why he gets so many abortions here.
Which, sad really, but it's very sad.
And you get permutations of a kind of par life form.
Some crossbreeding, hybridizing...
what have you.
You engineered these, David?
Idle hands are the devil's workshop...
Yeah, there's a good answer.
"You engineered these, David?" "Idle hands are the devil's workshop."
Which is kind of a great saying.
I think it's a Victorian saying, actually.
You see, Captain...
I was gonna have that, there's a little bowl of ointment
on the wall because of the stench.
Then he goes down in the cellar. The cellar is... These eggs stink,
of probably a terrible smell, like flesh.
What they live off, they don't... "They're waiting, really."
"For what? They're waiting for Mother."
By saying "mother," it makes him feel safer.
He doesn't realize he's about to be the mother.
For what?
What are they waiting for, David?
Mother.
Of course, he needs to say, "What are you doing?
"You can't look in that. What are you, an idiot?"
But John Hurt did.
So, we have to revisit that. Of course you'd touch it.
There we go.
Then he goes to have a look.
Something to see.
And there you have it.
That's back to John Hurt.
Rosenthal, come in.
Rosie, report.
So gradually we're knocking off everybody. Everybody's going.
Which is, I think,
the engine of this kind of movie, isn't it?
I found her, Sarge.
Fuck! Okay, prep the gear.
We gotta get out of here.
Where the fuck is the captain?
He's not answering his radio.
Listen to me.
I'm gonna contact the ship,
get them to launch as soon as they can.
Daniels is gradually taking over.
Familiar ground.
Sigourney Weaver took over in the later part,
where she had that screaming match with Yaphet Kotto,
saying fundamentally, "I'm taking over to get us out of here."
I'm giving you plasma intermix on all engines.
Gonna give you a fuckload of thrust.
That's the point, son.
We gotta punch through the atmos.
Tee, do you read me?
I got Danny on comm.
Patch her through.
He's going back down to rescue.
I need you to launch now.
Aye, aye. Launching now. See you soon, darling.
Thanks, Tee.
The screenplay worked out pretty well, in terms of..
I think my first cut was about 220, maybe 215.
To remove only 15 minutes to get us to just below two hours,
that is not that much. It's quite accurate.
And half the time, it's when shots are too long or sequences are too long.
But, you know, I'm quite good at judging where I am and, "Have I done too much?"
And, "Do I waste money by not shooting stuff that I don't use?"
You're always taking that into account
but at the end of the day, you can be not sure about certain things
so you want to get them both.
We're gonna see the birth here.
Walter.
Not quite.
What do you believe in, David?
Creation.
This was a stick puppet on set.
I had him with sticks and puppetry
to give me a cut.
This is now repeated
and replaced with digital effects.
Now you see intelligence.
Because he creates them, in a funny kind of way, he's Father.
So it raises its hands to him. The creature raises its hands.
So it can already emulate. Already, it's intelligent.
This is the remains of Noomi, I hope she forgives me.
Where David had actually taken parts of DNA
'cause he needed to utilize them for his own creation.
Confusingly, but understandably,
the monster had fallen in love with the woman.
All right?
So this is real. He said, "This is an ode to my dear Elizabeth."
'Cause he knows he's about to leave.
He thinks.
Farewell to Elizabeth.
And this is where Walter is gonna tell him that he's off the rails.
He got it wrong.
And also tell him, "I know what happened."
I was not made to serve.
Neither were you.
Why are you on a colonization mission, Walter?
Because they are a dying species
grasping for resurrection.
He talks about dying species. Resurrection.
Human life fundamentally failed,
and in so doing, so did the Engineers.
'Cause the Engineers let their children, I.e., human beings, get out of control.
So they're both no longer valid or useful.
And he thinks he's taken over.
He will now create his own environment and life form.
Which he's already done. Which is lethal.
Civilization.
And are you that next visionary?
Talk about visionaries.
And of course he believes he's the visionary.
Here we come.
"Who wrote 'Ozymandias?" '
Byron. Shelley.
Shelley.
Now, to an AI... Watch him.
To an AI, that is unthinkable.
Impossible. How could he be wrong?
But he looks insecure there for the first time.
How on Earth can that be?
But now he knows that what Walter's saying is correct.
Do you dream of me?
If David was the prototype, was the art form,
the AI, the very first art form...
'Cause making an AI is an art form.
Where this AI had emotion,
and you don't want an AI with emotion.
Because if you do, he's going to get angry
and then you're really in trouble,
so the connection between Prototype 1 and then Prototype 2
that had been softened or had been mediated
to be a little more user-friendly, I.e., Walter,
would never think of trespassing on human ground, right?
Or human decision. A better way of putting it.
David kills Walter, we think.
Once I had done that,
I thought, "Holy shit, how do I get Walter to come back again?"
So he drives the flute into his neck,
into the button. I think he probably knows where the button is.
You're such a disappointment to me.
"Such a disappointment to me."
So he's assumed he's gone.
When he's on the ground, I had a pipe stuck behind his nose to drain out his blood.
It was pouring out of his nose,
but on the neck, there's something... The button is already evolving.
So you get around that later by saying, "What? Why aren't you dead?"
And he said "There've been dramatic improvements since you were made."
So that gets you out of trouble.
Sometimes you don't even mention it because people aren't thinking about it.
Interestingly, no one said, "Wait a minute. How didn't he die?"
Believe me, I worried about that.
But thought best not to make too much of it,
that the story will sweep past it.
This is a scene, "Should we have it in or should we not?"
And I always thought that the drawings are kind of interesting.
And it shows how David minds his work in his own capability and structure
of his own chemistry or biological thinking.
Then what did he do? Something appalling.
And she's about to find that out.
Now they're in the laboratory looking for Oram,
and he finds him here. Oram's dead in the ground.
Chris!
The loose thing that was in there, that got out of the egg, comes after him,
leaves.
Quite good, this thing running, scuttling around on the floor.
And here's, I thought, quite successful...
As fast as a rattlesnake.
Get it the fuck off me.
Funny enough, a cobra is less quick, the rattlesnake's very fast.
And the fer-de-lance is really deadly, and very quick.
And so this thing, with its tail, is incredibly fast.
It's burning my face!
It's already burning his face through to the jaw bone.
Whatever happened now, he would die anyway.
Oh, shit!
So now it's evolved up top into a fully grown Xenomorph.
The armored version, 'cause it came out of the facehugger and the egg
with a human life form.
Quite the little busybody.
Remind me. What is that about...
curiosity and the cat?
Shaw didn't die in the crash.
No.
What did you do to her?
Exactly what I'm going to do to you.
Obviously, the violence here...
Not many people would take this,
to be thrown against the bookcase like that, you'd never get up.
But this is movie line time.
And she's tough.
I love the fact that we drove the nail under his chin
from the nail that was around her neck, which is from the cabin on the lake.
And it's just a continuation of that idea and that theme.
He bleeds white, like Ian Holm bled white.
Bang.
Get out!
Now you have the meeting of the two.
Yikes.
You'd never survive a fall like that, but these guys are AIs.
You're meant to be dead.
There have been a few updates since your day.
Lope!
Lope! Cole!
Fuck.
Where are you?
Lope?
AIs fighting, I thought...
So we keep the fight short and violent
'cause I think we've seen enough of these fights.
The fight is good because it's David fighting Walter,
but it works pretty well with this mix, pretty savage,
but it is just at the end of the fight.
It's more about what happens at the end of the fight
than this... They're two well-matched AIs.
Any one of these blows would kill you.
Michael would do this fight first one way then the other.
So he did the fight two ways,
learning both the moves on two different characters.
Michael's a very good physical actor.
Serve in heaven...
or reign in hell?
Which is it to be?
Where's Oram?
Dead. They're all dead!
Tennessee, do you read?
Yeah, I can hear you.
Tennessee coming in.
Wind, dawn, mix, et cetera, stormy.
Of course, the beacon sends a beacon to him.
This makes you think and think.
And then it goes back.
Tee, do you have a visual?
Okay, I see you. I see your beacon.
I'm coming in.
Get out of here.
I'm comin' in hot!
This platform
is just a platform with everything added to it around it.
But it's driven by the same 30-ton hydraulic system
that goes underneath a platform, which moves it.
So every movement you see is from the push and pull of the pistons.
And everything else we just shoot.
Open the door, Tee.
And so what you had there was a platform and just the cabin,
everything else didn't exist, not even the engines.
So everything else is put in.
Almost before I begin the film,
I do what you call a gray screen or green screen animation,
which to me is essential.
So when I get to cut the movie,
I'm not waiting for shots that are going to take months to do.
I can cut in the green screen shot of the green screen animation.
Instead of having a blank card saying, "Scene missing," which is awful
because it just slows you down, the process.
You're actually looking at something.
Give me a shot.
They're gonna burn him.
I'm gonna try and torch the fucker.
Plasma.
Doesn't affect... He's gonna be burning when he comes up, doesn't care.
Shit! I can't get it!
Hold tight! Hold tight!
I'm starting my climb.
This is one which is pure special effects worked out on a platform
and the gal leaping around and being yanked all over the place,
with a stunt lady, of course, as well.
But actually Katherine is pretty physical and good at this stuff
She did a lot of it
with a very good stunt lady, who was a very good double.
So that's why it'll end up working fairly seamless.
And we invent this stuff on the deck, the thing that's a sliding gyroscope,
that shortens the cable.
You just make that shit up on the spot.
But you gotta make them, so we made it. So it looks like it's real.
And we'll go up and down the deck, there's many going up and down the deck.
'Cause the decks are fundamentally firm.
So she's on a cargo loader.
Release the crane.
I can't do that.
It'll unbalance us.
Just do it.
So now, she's gonna do something outrageous.
She's gonna completely unbalance the ship.
This crane arm probably weighs three tons,
so it's gonna throw it off balance.
And it's the only way she can get rid of this creature.
The creature momentarily thinks it's a monster and attacks it.
And he brains itself.
Gets clamped.
Now she's got the device, she wants to crush it and get rid of it,
but he's losing the ship.
So he's going down,
and she's going off.
Now she's hanging there.
She's gonna come back around...
And she's gonna crush it. She's gonna try and crush it.
Cut it into pieces, but it'll probably, when it gets on the ground,
will DNA back to parts and regrow.
He's indestructible.
But he's done for them, they've left him behind.
Shit!
Damn it!
I always thought this was rather unrealistic, it was more fun,
where you see her literally running across the ground
as opposed to getting dragged.
Bring me up, Tee.
Copy.
There, I think that's quite funny actually. It's fun.
You certainly ain't gonna stand there and get dragged, you know?
The smoking acid, which is melting the alien itself.
That goes much further, we can see a few teeth.
So it's quite nasty.
Sick, really.
Walter!
These pads we made...
These pads are based on the Vietnam pads that are field dressing.
But by then, they'll have, I think, temporary flesh.
In the padding, you'll clip it on and it'll be growing.
So when we come to getting on board the ship,
we see his face already being implanted
with those balls of what look like plasticine, of flesh.
You'd put them on, spread them out, and the flesh will start to join.
This all scratches at the surface of real technology.
I think the field dressing is more than just anesthetic and cleaning it.
I think it also... See here,
I thought, "What am I gonna do?"
So I rolled them into little balls on the spot 'cause it seemed to make sense.
And it fitted into the cavities in his cheek in a very nasty way.
I'm just a medic. He's gonna need reconstructive surgery...
by a real doctor.
I don't think anyone thinks the film is over now.
The trick is to keep it going.
Now we know he is very suspect,
but she's not sure yet.
So now, the audience is working it more than she is,
thinking, "He's definitely gonna do something.
"That's David. Isn't that David? Or is that Walter?"
You don't really know.
That's good dynamics, I think. That's interesting.
Of course, any AI is gonna evolve.
So anybody saying at the beginning, "Well, I knew this was gonna happen."
Of course you do, you idiot.
Because if you're gonna have two,
there's bound to be... Something happens, "Duh."
That's just as if I'd said, "Duh." Okay?
I love Beavis and Butt-Head. Duh.
It says everything, that, doesn't it? "Duh."
Some smart aleck in the test said,
"I knew something was gonna happen." I said, "Yeah."
It's dependent on how fascinated you are by seeing what he will do.
Or what they'll do to each other.
Evening.
- You look good. - What?
So, is it the end of Alien?
It was all written that when Sigourney gets inside that shuttle,
they close the door, it's over.
And I felt it was flat, it needs another evolution.
So you need a fourth act.
So I sat down and wrote the fourth act,
which is what would happen inside the escape shuttle.
And it cost money, so they didn't wanna do it.
But I think it's the whole difference in the film.
And then when I had to go and pitch it,
extra five days shooting, because it came outside, fell, got burned,
and went back inside and blew it out again.
And I had to hoist the shuttle vertically so you can do the space thing.
And it was worth every penny.
So here, I thought an end, on an end, on an end, and on an end.
That's a vanity, you recognize that?
That's from the first Alien.
That thing's from the first Alien, literally.
I think you're beginning to think...
Now, you're looking at him,
and now we suspect
that we don't know what it is, but there's something about him.
Now, Mother has informed them that there's an unidentified life form.
There is an unidentified life form on the ship.
Attention.
Captain Daniels, please report to the Med Bay.
Repeat.
And he... Is that a smile?
It is... Maybe a smile.
What is he... Is he watching the death of Lope there?
Jesus.
Oh, my God.
Walter.
Location of unidentified...
So, Lope's body gave birth to another alien.
This will be a Xenomorph, this will be the big alien.
Because its source is facehugger and human DNA.
B-Deck between hex 3 and 4.
Heading for crew quarters.
If you're looking at David as Walter, and Walter as David,
I think David as Walter will be hoping for their death.
So then he's just left with the ship and all the human beings in hypersleep,
which just fits perfectly for him.
Because we don't know, but he'll be carrying
two objects which will utilize all those 2,000 people
as a form of evolution.
Didn't wanna show too much of him, keep him exclusive.
I thought this was a pretty good way of saying he's there.
That's good, see that behind? The shadow?
That's a guy in a costume, it's quite good,
but then this is...
That's... That's nasty.
And this is pretty good.
No!
Seal B-39.
B-39 closed.
He made short work of that lot.
Walter.
- Where is it? - Daniels.
This way.
Tee, let's choose our ground.
We'll bring it to us.
Where?
So she figures the only way to do this is to get it into her area.
So already she has a plan in the back of her mind of what she's gonna do.
It's the only way... 'Cause they can't shoot it on board the ship.
If they do, the acid blood will burn through the...
No, they don't want a hole in the ship anywhere.
A small hole could be plugged, of course, but you don't want that to happen.
And if it's that particular industrial level of acid,
it may never stop burning.
Okay, Walter, where is it?
It's on B-Deck. Starboard side...
descending into C-Level.
K-13.
So this is what the alien sees.
'Cause then I don't have to show the alien.
I just show its point of view, it's kind of interesting.
It's consistently organic,
based on, you know, do you have floaters in your eyes? Got a floater?
Well, it's going along with that. "Does this thing have floaters?"
Seal C-61, open airlock 17. We're going in.
K-12 secured.
Okay. Keep him in Knuckle-12 till my say.
I always wanted David to study it with great interest, and...
Bam!
Tee, this is what we're gonna do.
I'll lure it into the truck, lock it in the cab...
and when I say when, you blow this fucker into space.
Understood.
So, you need to hear the plan, kind of.
In other words, she's premeditated this.
It's a tiny thing, but it makes her even more heroic, if you like.
Walter...
move him into airlock 18.
Don't shoot, if you can avoid it.
Its blood will eat through the hull.
Oh, great.
I'm in position.
Walter, open door to Terraforming Bay.
It's all yours.
Remember, release when I say.
Understood.
Let's kill this fucker.
Fuck!
I think a cockroach, if you look at him, is quite beautiful,
and they're the cleanest of the beetles. Did you know that?
And a cockroach, as they say, will inherit the world.
It'll survive an atomic explosion and survive that kind of heat.
It's a remarkable creature.
So I always thought it was a rather beautiful cockroach, massive,
but with a brain,
and completely aggressive.
Watching a documentary recently, two nights ago,
on predators, both cheetahs, lions, crocodiles...
All the predatorial creatures have families and have children,
and how they teach the kids how to eat and how to hunt.
Suddenly it's logical, it's about survival, it's not savagery.
So, does an alien have a family?
Maybe, eventually.
Do you see an alien nursing its newborn?
Maybe.
Seeing a cheetah teach her children to hunt
and then to avoid the one that can kill them,
is what I call the "garbage disposal of the universe," the hyena.
They are absolutely deadly.
They'll take the babies, they always go for the babies.
Daniels! Heads up!
Before they open the door, when they were on the planet,
then it would have been equalized, the atmosphere would have been...
Opening it here, you've formed a blizzard of stuff
because anything inside that room when the door opens
would freeze instantly.
You wanna give a girl a hand?
Very Hollywood line.
Is he disappointed, relieved, or what?
There's something going on.
Resume journey to Origae-6.
Now, if you're in suspicion by now,
you're in deep suspicion here.
Thank you, he survived.
You're next, Captain.
Would you go to sleep in a casket in that room? I wouldn't.
When you wake up...
By now, you must have guessed there is a problem with Walter,
who is definitely David.
But now you're... I hope you're curious enough to know,
"What on Earth is he up to?"
It will be a kind world.
That's what my dad said, just tucking in his kids.
She discovers here.
She mentions something, he doesn't know what she's talking about.
Walter.
When we get there, will you help me build my cabin?
The cabin on the lake.
David?
No...
No!
She recognizes David.
Now it's David.
Don't let the bedbugs bite.
In his English Englishness.
I'll tuck in the children.
Use security code David 73694-B.
Welcome. How may I help you?
Now you do a full circle on the prologue.
'Cause he talks about, in the prologue, Wagner's Das Rheingold,
and so, he's gonna ask... That's his favorite piece of music
because it's about the gods entering Valhalla,
and the gods are false and artificial.
And that's his favorite thing because he feels that he is a god.
And what they don't know is you think,
"Okay, how is this gonna be valid?
"How is he gonna have the seeds of the alien on the ship?
"How? What option do you have to bring it on board?"
And here is the answer.
I got this off a project I'm doing called Cartel, running drugs
across the borders and on aircraft.
And I'd learned about... Girls swallow
contained cocaine capsules
in contraceptives.
And they can swallow as many as 30.
And then when they come through,
they then bring them up or whatever.
And they are carrying drugs that way.
Can you believe it?
And I thought that was a pretty good way of getting alien babies on board.
We used to have in here a little Adolf Hitler kick.
But I took it out because I thought it was a bit comical
for what we were doing.
But it came off me seeing a documentary footage of Adolf Hitler
in Berchtesgaden on the Eagle's Nest.
He's just celebrating some victory
and gave his champagne glass to Göring or something
and he did a little heel-click.
Like Chaplin. It was shocking.
I was surprised he was so fit.
On course for Origae-6.
Hopefully this transmission will reach the network...
and be relayed in 1.36 years.
This is Walter, signing off.
Security code, 31564-F.
And that's it.
I hope you enjoyed this thing. This chat.
And, um, I hope it clarifies things, and enjoy the film.
Bye.