Alien is the punk rock / "Rock 'n' Roll" father of the world of films. Blade Runner too. God bless Dan O'Bannon, H.R Giger, Ridley Scott and Miss Weaver. So many names i could mention, but the people knows all these names already and i'm glad for it!
I loved it at the end when Ridley said you should go back and watch it again and Bobbie said "No Sir!" Hilarious. Ridley proved in Alien he was a master film maker and Bobbie quite rightly applauds his abilities as a Director/Film maker. Great interview although after watching many of her interviews where she loved a film it was quite obvious to me from the beginning she disliked Alien.
later she will go see Very Bad Things and say she cracked up and nothing at all about being offended, so, she definitely faced her fears and overcame the things that come with that largely due to Alien, I'm sure !
@@halfabeetSeems ironic, as the sequel has about 10x the violence and gore. She didn’t realize, even though Ridley was trying to tell her just that, that what really upset her was the masterful pace and editing and atmosphere of Alien, not the violence itself.
My favorite all time movie. I saw it with my mom when I was just a little kid. Horror and Sci-Fi. Amazing. I was fine with it. It was cool. Mom maybe wasn't so good afterwards. Haha.
I first saw the original ALIEN in the theatre in 1979 when I was 12-years-old... In fact, it was the VERY FIRST R-Rated film that I EVER SAW in a movie theatre... I had to literally FIGHT with my mother and father to get ONE of them to take me to see it... I put up SUCH a temper tantrum that they eventually caved in... My father lost the coin toss, so HE took me... During the now-classic ultra-violent chestburster death scene of John Hurt, my father turned to me, worried about the well-being of his son, and asked me if I wanted to leave... "SHUT UP, DAD... LEAVE ME ALONE!", I angerly whispered back annoyingly under my breath, "I'M WATCHING THE MOVIE!"... Yes, it WAS scaring the hell out of me... But I was ALSO absolutely LOVING it... So we stayed... and that day I saw a cinematic CLASSIC. I was TOTALLY TRANSFORMED by what I was seeing up there on the screen as I sat there in the darkness. I had NEVER seen ANYTHING like that before. It blew me away... Ridley Scott's 1979 film ALIEN is simply one of the GREATEST movies EVER made. It is PERFECT...It is ICONIC... It is a MASTERPIECE.
I love how this channel always lets you see how the sausage is made, but this episode in particular is intense. Ridley did not take any nonsense here, and no quarter was given. How i wish we still lived in this age.
There is a video recently posted of a news broadcast with Bobbie interviewing people after they've watched Alien at a Texas movie theater. Look up the video "Alien [1979] movie opening interview with moviegoers" posted by Vampire Robot.
I just want to express my gratitude to you for posting these thought provoking interviews which otherwise would have been lost … like tears in the rain (drumroll please - bows out gracefully). 😅
I remember seeing it when I was 7 or 8 and being absolutely terrified. He is right though about nightmares. I didn't have one. It was incredibly believable and that is what made it freaky
@Luke Smale ah, here in the UK I had to sneakily record it off the TV aged about 12/13 in 1984 ish (51 now). I recall my Dad watched it on his own on TV and went to bed looking quite pale. When I asked him what the matter was, he said "that bloody film is horrible". It was at that moment I knew I had to see it 🤣. Happy new year.
We just had a puzzle of it sitting in our attic that scared me. I always heard it was a terrifying film and the alien popped out of the guy's stomach, so I avoided watching it. I saw the Spaceballs parody long before I saw Alien.
I think Ridley should have listened to this version of himself before making “Prometheus” and “Alien Covenant” witch I pretend doesn’t exist. But “Alien” is one of my favourite movies if all time, I don’t know how many times I’ve seen it. Masterpiece.
You sound like the star wars fans that wrote off the prequels until Disney showed fans what a bad star wars movie looked like... I get that Prometheus and covenant isnt as good as alien or aliens but by god do they get unfair treatments by fans... They truely arent that bad...
Fox tried to get Ridley to release it in the early 2000s for home video. Ridley refused, said it was poorly paced at that length, and instead recut the film into a SHORTER version. Although it added in 4 deleted minutes and took out 5 other minutes. He said it was called a director's cut purely for marketing reasons.
Something about Alien makes it my favourite sci Fi and horror film. I watched it at a very young age (maybe too young?), and it's just stuck as one of the greatest films
What Scott says about nightmares is absolutely spot on. I was about 11 or 12 when I saw this movie on video or taped off the TV, a few years after its release. My family didn’t know I had watched it and my parents wouldn’t have let me if they did! I had heard a lot about the film and was terrified of the idea of it. I watched the chest-bursting film from between my fingers. Then I rewound it and watched it again! I really was petrified while watching the film and worried that I wouldn’t be able to sleep and would have to confess my sneaky viewing. But to my surprise I found the film didn’t bother me after I watched it and I realised then that it was because it was wholly ‘unrealistic’ and that it couldn’t really happen. And now, 40 years later, I’ve found that Ridley Scott felt the same way! 😂
@@m1lst3r89 You're pretty much ready for anything at 12. I think I saw Predator at that age. We usually mean younger children when talking about being terrified by a film.
@@jedijones i saw Predator when was 9 or 10. Blew my mind (and for some reason, my mind didn't register p***y jokes), but what terrified me at that age was the last minutes of Fire in the Sky. In hindshight, I am content that I managed to shy away from a more edgier, harder stuff.
Its funny how people remember how "gory" Alien was, based on the indelible memory of the chest-bursting scene. But thanks to RU-vid we can now see just how much gruesomeness was edited out of the film, and very artfully. Almost all of Brett's death has been edited out, and of course Lambert's death is left entirely to the imagination. I saw Alien at age 15 and seeing the Chestburster scene was a rite of passage back in the late 70s to early 80s. Amazing how well the movie has aged, it stands as a master class in how to transform a "B grade" script into an A Grade piece of cinema.
It's all very fast, quick cuts for the most part, and a lot of suggestion. When the xeno corners Dallas, there's no blood or gore or anything whatsoever, it cuts right away to Ripley reacting or to Parker and everyone discussing it in the mess room. The chest burster scene was strong for the time, and is a bit gory, but even that happens very fast. Ridley edited the film deliberately this way to cut down on seeing too much of the xeno and spoiling the suspense etc going forwards in the storyline. ALIEN like Blade Runner was intended as anti-Star Wars SF/Horror: dystopian, to a degee, and more on the Heavy Metal side of things than any space opera which it has nothing to do with at all.
@@thiscorrosion900 I've seen the "cutting room floor" excerpts of the Chestburster scene and death of Brett and they were exceptionally gruesome and protracted. (they are here on YT under "Alien Brett extended death scene and Alien extended Chestburster scene" for the curious) Scott did the right thing in cutting them down and leaving so much to the imagination. Alien was indeed "Anti Star Wars" and more directly a sharp contrast to Star Trek The Motion Picture which was showing around the same time and presented a squeaky-clean, noble and upbeat vision of the future. On the theme of Star Wars, HR Giger said that his derelict design was intended as a parody of the Millenium Falcon with it's asymmetrical design and dual-pronged front.
I think there's an argument that ash being ripped in half was pretty gory. Sure, he's a robot but he bleeds (milk) and gurgles like a biological thing. Also, much of the implied violence against the female characters is sexualized....a robot tries to murder Ripley by ramming a tube (magazine) in her mouth, how the alien slowly runs its tail up the leg of Lambert etc. I mean, I think Alien is great but if someone said they found it tasteless I wouldn't disagree. But no, they didn't throw buckets of brains at the walls.
@@pennsworth996 Interestingly, the scene of the alien's tail going between lambert's legs was originally Brett's legs! In the uncut Brett attack scene (extreme gore content) the tail continues up Brett's back and jabs him between the shoulders. The sexualized attacks aren't solely directed at females: Kane's impregnation by the Facehugger is oral rape, I would disagree about alien being tasteless: Shocking, confrontational, yes. But it is all done with careful restraint and equally carefully contrived moments of terror. It is cinematic art at a high level.
@@martinharris5017 Yeah, I think your assessment is fair. But I also think that the male-r*pe aspect has been noted many times in the sci-fi community over the years (that's how O'Bannon 'defended' the film from some early criticisms), with relatively little mention of those other scenes. Original intentions get pretty blurry when there are so many cooks in the kitchen - 2 original writers, 3 re-writers, then the director and the editor and the studio etc. If I recall correctly the original story didn't have any women in it at all. There's not much that I'd want to change about the movie (not that Fox was looking for me, lol) but I think I would've done the magazine attack differently...and the tail...and ditch the Star-Wars spaceship shot at the beginning. I love the way the camera moves through the Nostromo (very Kubrick-like), the blue-collar worker vs. corporate interest aspect (with AI assistance nonetheless) feels even more timely today, the sets and practical effects are great (minus that Here's Johnny / Happy Hands jump scare) and the acting is better than you'd typically get in this type of film.
The 1970s into the early 1980s was a fertile period - Don't Look Now, The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Jaws, Dawn of the Dead, Carrie, The Omen, Eraserhead, The Brood, Halloween, Alien, The Last House on the Left, and The Shining in 1980 and the Howling and American Werewolf in London in 1981.
Wygant went all American and Puritanical for a moment, but Scott handled it like the master artist that he is, with mindfulness and authority, and he did receive the compliment from her that was due, because Alien is in the top three of single SF film masterpieces, and has influenced all that came after. Scott is one of my top three favourite film makers full stop.
Basically he's saying I am not bothered for it to be that popular as star wars, that isn't the intention, but it will continue to exist in poplur culture for a long long time.
No nightmares my ass...I'm 35 and I still have nightmares about those things sometimes. The new films go out of their way to make the xenomorph nothing more than a dumb beast with sharp claws. The old movies do the opposite and that's what fuels the nightmares. Fast agile, relentless intelligent creatures with a primordial malevolence to them. The more you hide, the harder they try to find you. Doors don't keep them out. Nowhere is safe. If they catch you, you don't know if you're a threat to be eliminated, a nutritious meal, or prime candidate for incubation.
This film gave me a few actual nightmares due to the design of HR Giger and the general weirdness. Unlike any other “alien” man in a suit. Of course I saw it when I was about 10 on TV. Masterpiece and Ridley proved with Bladerunner he wasn’t a one hit wonder.
I usually like Bobbie’s interviews but here she is putting Ridley Scott on the defensive about the content of the film, which is really mild even compared to other 70s horror films.
It's because people back then had no mental defenses against something like Alien. Alien shocked everybody and quickly developed this reputation of being this ultra-disturbing x-rated (it wasn't) exploitation nightmare gorefest -- when in fact it was all happening in the audiences mind. They built a scarier creature in their mind than even Giger could came up with, he was just the spark. That's the power of filmmaking.
The question "is this film for everyone" makes me laugh. There are few films where I could not make all the way through (Talented Mr Ripley, Requiem for a Dream) and Alien is still number one. Scott created so many things its no wonder this franchise is so siccessful.
So you're telling me a master filmmaker who aimed to create a thriller was unable to scare a 5 year old child with his most atmospheric piece of work? I fail to believe that for a second.
@@Gunn27 By that time I'd already seen From Dusk Till Dawn and Coppola's Dracula and they did scare me real bad. That's one. The scariest thing in Alien isn't the atmosphere or the monster creature itself. Something else is at work there. Only you don't understand things like that when you're small, and so they may as well fail to scare you.
I saw alien and i can see the inspiración of this movie. Like matrix and or in the fith element..funny to use the same actor... Similiars and he say 'the perfect organism'
Parker, in a rage attacked the thing and was quickly overpowered and splattered. Lambert was next - but not before the Alien had some 'fun' with her. Their wet, dripping bodies were soon found by Ripley. Both slaughtered like pigs. 🧠🧠
Amazing.... "parts of your film offended my sensibilities". Ok....that is YOUR problem!! For God's sake.... amazing how so many Interviewers simply do not understand how Art works.
Would rather sit down and have a cup of tea with them than a blue haired, almond milk drinking, middle class, capitalist inheritance benefitting, emasculated, cowardly, non assertive cuck.
Ridley Scott & Stanley Kubrick are the only two Hollywood film makers in my opinion who could visually communicate with us through amazing cinematography and symbolism. They give audience something to think rather than spoon feeding everything to audience. Great director Ridley Scott. Iam your big fan from India.🇮🇳🙏
