The Talented MR Ridley

Ridley Scott Is Bringing HR Giger’s Acid-Blooded Xenomorph Back To The Big Screen In Alien: Covenant. Jordan Farley Reports From The Fright-Filled Set.

- Jordan Farley

It's June 2016, and in a decommissioned reservoir just outside Sydney the crew of Alien: Covenant has constructed Paradise. But a paradise this ain’t. At one end of the drizzly basin, giant stone steps are littered with immolated Engineers, the porcelain smooth old gods perfectly preserved in their chargrilled final moments like the haunting spectres of Pompeii. At the other end of the vast, open-air space stands a blue screen so big it’s being held up by cranes and a wall of shipping containers stacked three high. The centre of gravity around which everything orbits: Ridley Scott – the eclectic Brit filmmaker and 79-year-old workhorse who’s presiding over sets as staggeringly huge as SFX has ever seen. And it all started with a flaky pastry. Sort of.

“It came out of me thinking about the croissant – what I call the beautiful croissant – that was on the ground in Alien, and what was inside it,” says Scott, who sidles up to SFX during a break from filming on the Prometheus sequel/Alien prequel. “Throughout the series no one ever asked the question: ‘Who would want to make such a thing?’ Prometheus started to ask that question. Covenant will tell you who made the Alien, and why.”

But before we get to the who and why (dear god, why?) there’s a Prometheus-shaped space elephant to address. Scott’s much-hyped return to the Alien-verse in 2012 was the victim of a publicity campaign so irresistibly enticing it was almost inevitable the finished product wouldn’t, or rather couldn’t, live up to stratospheric expectations. Part of the problem: Prometheus was an Alien prequel that wasn’t an