If you’re crafting an Alien project, all a filmmaker would want is a blessing from the legendary Ridley Scott.
Scott, the mastermind behind the entire Alien franchise, is very candid about his feelings on related projects. Thankfully, it seems like filmmaker Fede Álvarez is in the clear with his upcoming film, Alien: Romulus.
Álvarez is set to helm a new installment in the franchise, going for a vastly different tone and style from what we’ve seen before. We know very little about the project, but we do know now that Ridley Scott has seen the film and approves of what Álvarez is cooking up.
Speaking to Guillermo del Toro at the DGA Latino Summit 2023, Álvarez talked about writing and directing Alien: Romulus and how he wanted Ridley Scott to see it first. As always, Scott held nothing back. “I wanted him to see it before anybody,” Álvarez said. “And everyone gave me the head’s up that Ridley is really tough. He’s really tough, particularly if it has something to do with his movies. He was really tough on Blade Runner [2049], which I thought was a masterpiece, and he had issues with it because it’s really hard for him because it’s his work.
He continues, “I asked him about the new Top Gun, and he’s like, ‘meh.’ I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’ And he was like, ‘My brother’s was original, and this is like, eh.’ He really respected it, but you could see how tough he was. So I was like, ‘There’s no way I win this one.’”
Then came the moment of truth, and the filmmaker revealed the film to Scott. “…he walks into the room, and he did say, ‘Fede, what can I say? It’s fucking great,’” Álvarez recalls.
“For me, it was like…My family knows it was one of the best moments of my life to have a master like him, who I admired so much, to even watch a movie I made but, particularly something like this… and talk to me for an hour about what he liked about it.”
One of the key things that Scott enjoyed was reportedly the script, especially the dialogue. “One of the best compliments he said was, ‘The dialogue is great. Are you the writer?’ Yes!”
It seems like we have a faithful and well-written Alien movie on our hands in the coming year.
Alien: Romulus will star Cailee Spaeny (Mare of Easttown), Isabela Merced (Rosaline), David Jonsson (Industry), Archie Renaux (Shadow and Bone), Spike Fearn (Tell Me Everything) and Aileen Wu in her feature film debut. Alvarez wrote the film with his frequent co-writer Rodo Sayagues while Alien creator Ridley Scott will produce the film alongside Michael Pruss for Scott Free Productions.
The logline for the film reads, “On a distant colony, the group finds themselves in a fight for their lives with the titular alien, a creature known as a Xenomorph, whose race propagates by implanting eggs into people’s chest via little facehuggers eventually violently bursting out of the chest.”
Alien: Romulus is set for release on August 16th, 2024.
