Art and images from the H.R. Giger film, SWISS MADE (1968). The design for the alien visitor was based on his own 1967 work, “Woman with Child” (last image).
1978 Rare on-set Polaroid photo of the Alien in the escape pod.
In the film’s finale, Ripley escapes the destruction of the Nostromo
aboard the Narcissus. What she does not know at first is that the Alien
has actually hidden among the machinery. “Originally, we thought the
Alien would be hiding in the closet in the lifeboat,” Shusett told
Cinefantastique Online. “But then Ridley said, ‘can’t we beat
that? Can’t it be somewhere [Ripley] and the audience can’t see it and
it just emerges?’ So at the end of shooting every day, we changed the
set around the Monster. He’d lay in there and we’d rebuild the set over
and over. Every time, it looked like Mad magazine – you could see [the
creature] was two feet away from her! The guy who played the Monster
would lay there for hours and hours and we’d shoot it and look at it the
next day and say, ‘this is stupid; we’ll never disguise it.’ The trick
that really made it work was the [shape of the Alien’s] head. Finally,
somebody got the idea: we’ll put an air vent that looks like its head
above and below it, so when the hand comes out, it’s not coming from
behind anywhere — he’s in the wall. We had just built that. We didn’t
know if it worked. So Ridley said, ‘Let’s get the guy back in here.’ We
yelled for him — and he was in the wall! We were shot with our own arrow
— we jumped a mile! So we filmed it, and it worked perfectly.”
Alien (1979). Art by Chris Foss, Ron Cobb, and H.R. Giger.
The monster design actually preceded production and was based on the “horrible but beautiful” art of H.R. Giger, which had caught the eye of screenwriter Dan O’Bannon. Chris Foss (image 1, temple interior) had done work for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s failed adaptation of Dune, with which O’ Bannon had been involved; Ron Cobb lastly did several designs of the “birth temple” and derelict spaceship.
Carlo Rambaldi designs for ALIEN (1979). Effects artist Rambaldi was hired to make the head do its thing basically, the original design of course was Giger’s.
All thinsgs having to do with the first Alien film. For my other blogs about Aliens and Predators Universe see the index page at:
sconesavpindex.tumblr.com
