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Ridley calls the original an “old dark house film.” Does that sound right to you?
Yes, because when you say to me: Old Dark House film, I think of a bunch of characters whose car breaks down on the side of the road and they have to go into a place of which they have no understanding whatsoever and they discover that place’s secrets and bring those secrets out of the house with them. It’s classic Hammer Films filmmaking. And of course the marketing around the original Alien was geared to that: “In space, no one can hear you scream.” It was more horror than it was sci-fi. That being said, there were so many incredible science-fiction ideas presented in Alien — the whole movie being about the gestation process for what this being is and how original that was and how original that looked, but also the idea of Ash as sort of malevolent artificial intelligence was sort of a direct nod to Kubrick 10 years later. I’m hard-pressed to think of any movies that were released between ’69 and ’79 that had crazy robots in them. The idea of taking HAL and making him into a man and then playing it closed, not knowing that Ash is a synthetic being until he starts to freak out. That was an incredible idea. The biggest thing that makes it an old dark house movie is that one by one the characters are going to be killed and so the most revolutionary thing that happens in Alien is Sigourney Weaver is not really presented to the audience as the main character. So when Tom Skerritt dies about an hour in, you’re suddenly going, ‘Oh my God, I don’t know if anyone’s going to make it out alive! Dallas is supposed to be my guy!’ He’s the hero, right? It’s not going to be Harry Dean Stanton! So that Ten Little Indians idea of one by one people are getting killed, is why Ridley, I think, looks at it that way.


What do you think Ridley’s influence on the sci-fi genre has been?
When I saw Blade Runner, my understanding was that Blade Runner and Alien were sequels to each other — or they were related. They were set in the same world. I was not sophisticated enough to know that Ridley Scott directed both of them or even know what a director was. Ridley decided to say, I’m going to look at the future the way it might actually look. I’m going to think about what urban design is going to look like, the ships are going to be gritty and grungy, the people who inhabit this world are blue-collar people. He took the fantasy out of sci-fi and grounded it in a profound way, which laid the track to look at the future in a different way, which was dystopian instead of utopian.


Did you and Ridley ever discuss why he wanted to go back to a movie that he made 30 years ago? Did he feel like there was some unfinished business there?
The only sense of it that I ever got — because by the time I came into the process he was already very excited, he was already ramped — is that in his journey as a film director over the past 30 years, it seems like the movies that people are most interested in and the movies he probably gets asked about the most are Alien and Blade Runner. And so, for him, he doesn’t look at himself as a science fiction director. In fact, when he talks about the five other guys that he was up against to direct Alien, he’s sort of befuddled as to why they chose him. He was the unlikely guy. I don’t think he sees himself as a sci-fi director. So probably over the course of the last 30 years it’s probably confusing to him why people keep asking him about these movies. But I would assume that over time, it would start to get into his head: Wow, these movies that I made 30 years ago really resonated and people are still curious about them, maybe there’s more story there! And I can guarantee you that many times over the intervening years, he was aware of what was happening with the Alien franchise. And his silence on those movies, with the exception of Aliens, which I think he is a fan of and I know he’s also a huge Fincher fan, but post-Alien 3 — both Resurrection and the Alien vs. Predator mash-ups, I think Ridley’s feeling was, It’s time for me to now take the reins and put the ship back on course. I feel a sense of parenthood and I feel like my child needs a stern talking to. That’s my sense of it, it’s not anything that he has said to me.


It sure sounds right though. Let me ask you about the lead character that Noomi Rapace plays in Prometheus. How important is it for this film to have a strong female action lead like Ripley?
I think it was very clear — and this was in the script before I came to it — that she was clearly at the center of this thing. And the inevitable comparisons to Ripley are going to come down the pike and therefore it was really important that although she is the lead of the movie, she be different from Ripley in a lot of ways. And I think that from a jumping off point, Ripley is a blue-collar miner/terra former who is basically doing a gig for money and wanders into this horrific situation and she has to react. It’s just a survivor’s story. And in Aliens, Ripley’s story begins to get fleshed out in a more significant way where she becomes maternal with Newt. But if you just look at Alien, you can’t tell me much about Ripley. We don’t know much about her as a character. Whereas Noomi’s character, Shaw, has a very specific background that leads her to where this movie leads her. She is a seeker. The Mulder character for lack of a better pop culture metaphor. And classic sci-fi, to me, is based on the principle that science has the opportunity to cross a line — the line is defined by cultural and religious ideas. Should we do this? Are we breaking God’s will by doing this? That’s sci-fi. So the idea of just because we have the technology to create life, should we create life? This is the be careful what you wished for, I shouldn’t have crossed that line story, which is what all sci-fi is. In Alien that doesn’t happen. All they do is answer a distress call, which is what they’re supposed to do. They’re not paying for anything they did wrong. I think it was important for Shaw to be directly responsible for everything that happens in this movie. For the hero of the movie to say I want to go find this out and I understand that it may be dangerous, that became a critical driver for her. And something that existed in Jon’s work, but really we talked about a lot as we developed the screenplay.


As someone who’s worked in TV and movies, what is it that you like about film vs. TV?
They’ve each got their own benefits. I think the advantage of film is the canvas is much smaller, which would seem like a contradiction. If you take something like Lost where the story was told over 121 episodes, and you take something like Prometheus where the story is told over two hours, it’s a smaller canvas. But because of that, you have to be so much more detailed. There’s a lot less area for screw-ups. I think movies are more exciting– it’s a slower moving ship. So the idea that I started on the movie in July 2009, I wrote on it essentially through the beginning of production in March, 2010 — that’s seven or eight months of writing. And then Ridley called me into the editing room a bunch of times, so all told it was a year of my life. In a year of my life in TV, you make 30 hours of it.


Last question, tell me about what the title means in terms of the story you’ve told.
I don’t want to sound like the movie is a history lesson, but I do think that the primary take away from the myth of Prometheus is that the Gods were nervous about mankind. They were nervous about what they would be capable of if they had fire. Fire was a big piece of technology that they would build off of. And the story of any creation is eventually a child will try to destroy its parents. It’s a very paranoid world view, mythologically-speaking it pops up a lot. Especially for us Star Wars aficionados. So the essential story is: I don’t want to give my kid this toy because eventually he will develop it into a weapon that will kill me. So I will therefore withhold it from him. And what is the price I must exact on somebody who betrays me? So Prometheus steals the fire from the Gods, gives it to mankind, knowing exactly what mankind is going to do with it and even though he knows he’s going to be punished for it. So this myth felt perfect for this movie because the movie is all about creation, it’s all about punishment, and it’s all about our desire to understand why we’re here in the first place. It just felt like the natural way to go even though we knew people would have a hard time pronouncing it and that it was wildly pretentious.