FX is set to release an Alien series, and they’ve joined with Noah Hawley to bring this xenomorph to life.
As part of the Austin Film Festival, Hawley appeared on a panel and spoke about his work on Alien. The Fargo & Legion filmmaker spoke about bringing the franchise to television after decades of films.
Hawley gave some insight into franchise filmmaking and what it means to adapt something for television compared to the big screen. He says at the festival, “I had some conversations early on with Peter Rice, who used to run all of television at Fox and then the first couple of years at Disney, where it was like – ‘The thing with Alien is, it’s always trapped in a spaceship, trapped in a prison. What if it wasn’t that?'”
“Look, a two-hour movie, you can set it up, and then it’s just about, ‘Are they going to survive?’ But if you’re making a series, ‘Are they going to survive?’, you can’t sustain it,” he adds. “Even if you have 60% of the best action-horror on television, you still have 40% of ‘What are we talking about?'”
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By bringing the story to Earth, Hawley already found the outlet to make this stand out. He notes, “What is this moment on Earth, technology-wise? And where are we? And the question science-fiction always tends to ask is, does humanity deserve to survive? So that seems like a really interesting question to continue to explore.”
“Then it always mimics the life cycle of the creature, right? Which is egg, slow, Facehugger, starts to get faster — you know what I mean?,” he adds. “And, of course, that’s great for a horror movie to build that way. So I found a way to kind of innovate around that structure and play with it.”
Filming on Hawley’s Alien series began in July but was halted in August due to the strikes.
The cast for the show includes Sydney Chandler, Alex Lawther, Samuel Blenkin, Essie Davis, and Adarsh Gourav. FX’s Alien adaptation with Hawley will serve as a prequel and be set 70 years before the events of the 1979 film Alien.
