Summary

To celebrate their Best Visual Effects Oscar nomination, Collider’s Steve Weintraub speaks with Alien: Romulus’ Fede Álvarez, VFX Supervisor Eric Barba, and Wētā VFX Supervisor Daniel Macarin.

Following a special IMAX screening, the trio sat down to discuss capturing the perfect blend of practical and CG VFX, working with industry legends, and the most challenging scenes to tackle.

Álvarez also gives an exciting update on a Romulus sequel and confirms and explains that major Narcissus Easter egg in the movie.

Horror is a genre that doesn’t often get enough recognition during awards season, but this year, genre filmmaker Fede Álvarez and his stellar team of VFX artists are in the running for Best Visual Effects at the Academy Awards with Alien: Romulus. Unlike the genre itself, the Alien franchise isn’t new to the Oscar game. Both Ridley Scott’s Alien and James Cameron’s follow-up, Aliens, took home the gold in the category, and Romulus is eyeing that prize again.
To celebrate their nomination and get just a taste of the incredible work that goes into the special effects for a blockbuster like this one, Collider partnered with Walt Disney and 20th Century for a blood-pumping special IMAX screening. After the credits rolled, Collider’s Steve Weintraub moderated an extended Q&A with Álvarez, Visual Effects Supervisor Eric Barba, and Wētā FX Visual Effects Supervisor Daniel Macarin to discuss the craftsmanship that goes into a practical effects-heavy film blended with CG that bolsters the story and takes the visuals to the next level.
Check out the full Q&A session in the video above, or you can read the transcript for tons of behind-the-scenes info like enlisting the help of the special effects creators from the original Alien movies, Shane Mahan and Alec Gillis, which scenes were the most challenging to get just right, the workaround for the (shockingly) most outrageous CG expense, and tons more. They talk about filming the unforgettable Chestburster scene, Álvarez’s plans for an Alien: Romulus sequel that will explore “uncharted waters,” and confirmation and a full explanation on that Narcissus Easter egg. For fans of the franchise, you don’t want to miss this one.
Obviously, Fede Álvarez Has a Facehugger

The writer-director couldn’t store the Corbelan, but he’s got a few toys from set.

Image via 20th Century Studios

COLLIDER: I want to give a huge thank you, first of all, to IMAX for being an amazing partner and for letting us screen this movie again tonight in IMAX, which is the way to see the movie.
FEDE ÁLVAREZ: Absolutely. I haven’t seen it in IMAX for a while now since the movie came out, but it’s the way to do it. It’s for 4:3 and it’s bigger. It was a bit of a discussion at some point, but I’m happy we ended up going as big as we could.
DANIEL MACARIN: We put a lot of detail into those shots, and that’s the way to see it.
I can keep going on about IMAX. It’s my favorite format. I’m so happy that the last few years, it does feel like more of the audience is seeking out the big-screen experience because you just can’t recreate this at home. Fede, I mentioned this to you a while ago, before the film did really well; now that the film has made a lot of money, did Disney or Fox give you any of the models from the movie to keep?
ÁLVAREZ: Yes. The ships are somewhere. They don’t belong to me, but I know they’re somewhere in storage. The Corbelan and the big Echo Probe, as well, the one from the opening scene. Those two are somewhere. At some point, I could keep them—I don’t have a place to put them.
MACARIN: They’re room-size.
ERIC BARBA: During production, we thought we were going to buy a new house just to build around the Corbelan.
ÁLVAREZ: So Fox still has that. I have a few things. I have one of my favorites, a cryo frame with a Facehugger asleep inside. It’s a pretty cool one with the lights and everything. It’s one of those things that you see inside the cryo chamber. I have a pulse rifle, the best toy in the world, because when I workshopped those, we built those to work so they can fire and have a really good kickback and a flashlight in the front to make sure that illuminates the surroundings and smoke comes out. Also, the barrel would get red as it goes to show that it gets hotter. Best toy ever. I have some real Facehuggers.
Fede Álvarez Set Out to Prove “Why ‘Alien’ is One of the Best Sci-Fi Movies Ever”

“There was a bit of disenchantment.”

When you took on this project, you really don’t know how it’s all going to turn out or what the audience reaction is going to be but this is the biggest hit of your career. Audiences loved it and it’s just been very successful. What does it like to not crash the Ferrari? This is a franchise that audiences truly love.
ÁLVAREZ: Yeah, but the reality is when we took over, it felt like a Testarossa. It was a bit rusty. It was a Ferrari, but… For me, it was amazing—who doesn’t love that carpet? But because Covenant hadn’t worked so well and there was a bit of a disenchantment, I think, with the franchise. Not for me. It never ceased to be amazing, but I think in general, there are a lot of people that, when I told them we were doing Alien, they were like, “Oh, they keep doing those?” There was some of that, and that was exciting to me because that was a challenge. That was a challenge to be had. It was like, “Okay, let’s just bring it back. Let’s show the 20-year-olds who have never seen any of them, who I don’t care, ‘Why is it so cool for us?’” Why, for us older people, we think it’s so amazing.
It’s the same example. I find myself talking with teenagers, telling them, “You haven’t seen Alien? You should watch Alien, it’s great. And Aliens. It’s amazing!” And they go, “Nah. It’s too old.” They don’t care. I try to explain what’s cool, and then, in a way, I went, “Okay, stay there.” I go away for three years, come back with the movie, “Okay, watch this.” It’s a way to bring a new version that they will sit down and watch because it’s made now, and it will have all the great ideas of all the other movies. It’s the best way to prove to that new generation why Alien is one of the best sci-fi movies ever made.
I couldn’t agree more.
The ‘Alien’ Franchise Has Been Pushing Visual Effects Since the ‘70s

The ‘Romulus’ crew set out to continue that legacy.

Image via 20th Century Studios

Alien: Romulus has been nominated for Best Visual Effects at the Academy Awards. I absolutely think it’s deserving of the nomination. For all three of you, what does that nomination mean?
ÁLVAREZ: They know, personally, I’ve been directing things with heavy visual effects since I can remember. Since I did things in my teenage years, I was always trying to figure out ways to have special effects in it, and I learned to do it myself. Through their pain, I know enough to sound like I know but not enough to really know to be as involved as I am sometimes. But I love it. As you know, I made a short movie called Panic Attack! that gave me a career in Hollywood, and that was all of the effects that I did myself. It’s always been my passion and my love and something that means so much to me. So, to one day direct something that gets the nomination for visual effects, you have no idea how much it means to me. It’s the world. If you could pick one nomination, that’s the one I would dream to get one day. I’m so happy, and I owe it to this guy for doing such a great job.
BARBA: It’s huge. I think Fede actually woke me up that morning. I was sleeping, and here’s my phone going off, and it’s Fede, and I’m like, “Hi?” So, he told me. It’s a great compliment to the entire visual effects team that worked on it. Obviously, we’re just a small part of it, but everyone came to work every day with such a passion for the franchise, and I think it shows in what they put up on screen. When you have that passion, and you love what you do, it shows, and we all did. We wanted to give Fede the best visual effects we could possibly give him. So, to get the recognition is massive and makes those two years of living away from your family and working hard all worth it.
MACARIN: The Alien franchise, the first two, were also nominated and won the Visual Effects award, and they were pushing the films and ways of doing things that had never been done before. So, it was really, really obvious to us that everything we got from Fede was trying to do the same thing, and a lot of that old-school kind of work, doing it on set but in ways, allowed us to do new things. So that achievement was really, really fun and exciting for people because just the raw plates were extremely exciting, and then we just got to make the story better and keep adding to it. The fun of that is having a team that trusts all of us to keep working on the story and keep making it better and really just be creative in getting this right for both ourselves and the fans, which is what we all want.
Eric and Daniel, you’re both up here, but there are so many people who worked on this behind the scenes. For each of you, and this is going to be very tough, who’s one person that you each worked with that you really want to give a shoutout to right now who contributed behind the scenes to help make this movie what it is that you just want to shine a light on?
BARBA: Well, I’m totally enamored with what Shane [Mahan] and his team at Legacy [Effects] brought to the screen because this is a master craftsman, and they care so much about the work that they do. To see them working every day on set and with them, I was just kind of blown away. I had a smile on my face most of the time when we were shooting, because what we were getting was so great with the actors.
ÁLVAREZ: To clarify, he’s talking about Shane Mahan. At the very beginning of the process, he was the first person we went after. If you look at any behind-the-scenes of Aliens, you’re going to see Stan Winston, which is the legend that created the great queen and worked on that movie and created the Predator, you name it. He’s a legend of animatronic and practical effects. He passed away a few years ago, but at the time, there were two guys on set who were in their early 20s at the time. One is Alec Gillis, the other one is Shane Mahan. I knew I needed them. Today, they’re in the 60s, but the best at what they do, and they have their own shops.

Image via 20th Century Studios

They’ve never worked together since that movie, actually, and my goal was to get the band back together. Usually you hire just one vendor because it’s easier, but I went out of my way to make sure that both of them came on set. Alec did the Chestburster in the movie, which I think is one of the most incredible practical things in the film, and Shane did the Xenomorphs and the Offspring at the end, among other things. Both of them together was a dream come true for all of us to see them again on set sliming a Xenomorph together. Although they’re in two different companies, they’re like brothers. So they were working together on set and they were a massive part of everything on the practical side of the movie. And again, they hadn’t worked together since Aliens and they have massive careers separately. It was great to see them together.
BARBA: The thing gave us the foundation that the actors got to work with, and then the digital teams kind of stand on their shoulders and be horrified about how hard it’s going to be to match and at the same time, be inspired to do what they had to do.
MACARIN: It’s exactly that. What you see from those guys is so incredible, and you’re like, “Okay, that’s the bottom level I have to hit.” That’s what everything has to match to, and being able to work with that team is just awesome.
These Shots Were the Most Challenging for VFX to Tackle

From Pandora to deep space, these guys have done it all.

What do you think people would be surprised to learn about doing VFX on big Hollywood movies?
MACARIN: The best work is it’s more about a story and visual effects is always in support of that story. It’s not about just the spectacle of things, it’s about us as storytellers trying to get the audience the emotional performance and the story that the director is after and that we want to tell. So a lot of times we can make things very, very pretty, but it will take the audience out of the moment. It will take people out of the series. It won’t match the look that we’re going for. A lot of Hollywood films, the ones that do it the best, have this continual look through the entire film. The cinemtographer, Galo [Olivares], we had done this was doing such an amazing job with what cameras he was picking and the lights that he was using and everything else. We need to be on board with that. So the better that the VFX team is with the rest of the film and not a separate entity will make that film better.
Eric and Daniel, you’ve both worked on a ton of movies. What do you consider the toughest shot or sequence of your career?
MACARIN: I don’t often get asked, “Can you destroy a space station with the rings of a planet?” That was new. I couldn’t find any reference or anything else to even help me so that one turned out significantly well. I worked on a bunch of sequences on Avatar that were extremely tough. The difficulty is not always defined by the work or the level that the director and the team are trying to hit, and Eric was always pushing us and always asking the right questions, asking for the right changes and adjustments, and those kind of things are always difficult to do but are also the most rewarding.
BARBA: I think for me it was probably The Curious Case of Benjamin Button because we had to support the first 55 minutes of that film, and as David [Fincher] constantly reminded me, you can’t fuck it up.
That does sound like Fincher.
BARBA: Yeah, so that was excruciating, but ultimately, incredibly satisfying once we got the team… They’re always motivated, but especially back then, when you’re trying to capture a photo likeness in CG that hadn’t really been done to the level that David really wanted us to do. He wasn’t taking any prisoners with shooting around any problems with CG. He wanted to shoot Benjamin like every other shot in the movie. He just outright said, “I’m not shooting any different. Figure it out.” I mean, in exactly those words.
For the three of you, which Alien: Romulus shot or sequence ended up being the toughest to pull off and why?
ÁLVAREZ: It’s probably the shootout of the hive, when the Xenomorph shows up and there’s a shootout. Mostly it was because until that point, for the most part, what you see when it comes to the Xenomorph is the practical Xenomorph. It’s either an animatronic or the real face, and if there was any CG before that, it was very brief. There were a lot of chances for you to spot something different.
But now, when it comes to that point, we don’t have the money or the chance to have, like, eight Xenomorph animatronics coming down that corridor. So, it needs to be handed over. It’s a mix, still. A lot of the blow-ups, every time a Xenomorph gets hit, that’s a practical Xenomorph. We had one day of just blowing up heads of Xenomorphs. From that shot, you cut to the wide where these guys were taking over with the CG versions of the Xenomorphs and having to match almost perfectly the frame of the previous shot of the practical Xenomorph that has just exploded.

Image via 20th Century Studios

So, the complication of that is the practical will always look incredibly photorealistic, but it may look a bit stiff compared with the CG one that’s going to be more agile, but it may not look as photorealistic sometimes, depending on the shots. But when you cut from practical to CG, practical to CG, one shot to another, you get the chance to really compare them, so it puts a lot of pressure on the of the CG and the animation. That was a very long journey for all of us to get to a place where we could go, “Okay, we got that. That’s what works.” It’s a mix of techniques. The fact that we ended up pumping the volume in a way of the strobing of the flash of the guns, and that really helped us. That was a big step forward when we started doing that because you get that strobing, so your eye can never really settle on the CG. So, for me, at least, it’s always a different thing from the work side of what was complicated. For me, from my side, to get to a place where I was like, “Okay, that’s awesome,” from where I was sitting, that was the that was the toughest one to pull off. But I thought it ended up looking amazing.
BARBA: Besides that, because it took so long to plan, for me, because we had so much live-action to blend so much of our work, we had guides. We didn’t have guides for the space shots and leaving the planet, and knowing Fede’s expectations of wanting to make it look beautiful like paintings and dark and scary, that was incredibly challenging to get the teams and look right. So it felt like miniatures. It didn’t feel too crazy. Thankfully, Fede lensed all the shots himself and did all the previs and compositions, and that hugely helped. But then we had to make them look pretty and beautiful and scary, and make the models move just right. So that was a challenge on its own. There were many challenges, but I’m proud the teams got there and we were happy with it.
MACARIN: We had Fede-vis.
ÁLVAREZ: I think we have to explain that. I don’t think they know what that is. A lot of people might not understand what the hell we’re talking about with the “previs” and stuff.
MACARIN: Essentially, it’s a very basic guide. It’s your blocking of the camera, it’s your blocking and positioning of where you want something to be in the frame. It gives us time and everything. It was a very, very quick storyboard-type idea that Fede did for us. It definitely allowed us to see the sequences and understand where we needed to take it.
BARBA: It’s not often that the director actually does his their own previs, so this film is unique, at least in my experience, where every shot is really lensed from the same storytelling eye throughout the film. It’s not second unit or a previs team doing it or someone else bringing the shots. It’s really Fede’s eye behind the lens.

Image via 20th Century Studios

ÁLVAREZ: For those who don’t understand the process, normally, every time there’s a shot you cut outside the station, you see in the movie there’s suddenly a Corbelan flying by or that sequence of the Chestburster, every few shots, you have a shot outside of the Corbelan flying, drifting away, going on this collision course. When you cut in the movie, usually the director pitches to someone, “I think it’s a pan-by from right to left. The ship goes there.” But even if you go into detail, and even if you do a bit of a sketch, then what’s the lens exactly, the speed that it’s moving, how quickly, how close to the camera, how fast it’s going to be, how violent a pan, and all those things. There’s so much room for interpretation. So sometimes even that part, the back and forth between the artist that does that, imagine it’s the low-res black and white version of the shot when the ship moves in a very rustic way, that version, sometimes it takes a lot of time to speak if you’re communicating verbally, but because of Panic Attack! and stuff like that, I can do visual effects myself to a certain degree. What I did during editorial is when I got to that shot, I would tell my editor, “Wait a second,” move my P.C, and animate the shot. That means I choose the lens, the language of the camera is exactly the same logic I apply to the rest of the movie. I think it helps. It feels that it belongs to the same movie.
So because a lot of times the director has nothing to do with those shots. They’re done entirely by the VFX company and they approve them. They go, “Great, that looks amazing,” but nonetheless, there’s sensitivity. So I felt that that had an impact. And also in the pipeline, hopefully it gets you there faster, because at least when I’m giving them the shot, that’s exactly what I want. That’s the pan, that’s the speed, that’s the animation, and then they make it better. It’s like they said, I think they did exactly what I asked, and usually they changed it a lot, but I didn’t notice that they made it way better.
How much does that save in the budget when you are not having to go back and forth 10 times, trying to figure out that shot? You’re providing that previs.
BARBA: It makes it much more efficient because then we don’t have to go back and forth, like, “Did the director like it? Let’s get his approval.” It’s like, “This is Fede’s vision of the shot. Let’s make the shot.” So, you can cut to the chase.
MACARIN: I wouldn’t really say it saves on budget, though. What it does is it puts the money where it should be. I don’t have to waste it getting to that time. I can spend it where it’s really going to count, and I can take it to make that shot the best it can be because I haven’t spent weeks trying to reinterpret what I think it should look like.
How Is AI Affecting the VFX Industry?

“You still need a really great artist.”

Image via 20th Century Studios

How has AI impacted the VFX industry, and if it hasn’t, how long do you think before it does actually come in? And is it going to be a meteor, or is it going to be like a dinosaur asteroid thing?
BARBA: No, it’s already affecting, but it’s not affecting in the way I think people think. We use machine learning. We use machine learning for Rook. It’s just another tool. It’s no different. It’s just a faster tool. I’ve said it’s like the difference between some of our early rendering technologies and the faster rendering technologies. It just makes things faster. But if you do it faster, that means sometimes you can do more iterations to get it just right, and so it allows a faster iterative process for some things. I’m sure it’ll be more as time goes on, but it’s just another tool. You still need a really great artist who can drive it in behind the scenes to make it work.
MACARIN: It’s exactly that. We’ve always been doing efficiencies and writing scripts and code to try and build tools, and it’s like, “Hey, that button you used to spend 20 minutes pressing? Well, now it’s instant.” That doesn’t take their job away. It just means, “Hey, you don’t have to press that button 50 times now. You can actually get on to the artistry and you can make it look gorgeous because I’ve now taken that very, very tedious task of tracking something or marking this or cutting it out, and now you don’t have to do that. You can do the rest of the shot.” So, I don’t think it’s that idea that it’s going to suddenly replace artists. I think it’s just going to allow artists to do what they’re best at.
I’m sure all three of you have seen a new technology behind the scenes that’s maybe not ready for prime time. Is there a piece of technology or code or something that you have seen behind closed doors that you are really excited to have to be able to play with making a movie or VFX or whatever it may be?
BARBA: No, because sometimes you see those things, and you just know they’re not ready. For example, the Volume shooting; there’s a lot of prep that goes into those shots to make them work, and when we see them not work, it’s because of the time that it takes. So, if you have to make all those decisions before you shoot, that means you’re locked to it. You’ve spent the money and time. So I haven’t seen something that’s maybe ready that would be that next great leap. But every day is a new day.
MACARIN: We look at a lot of new tech always coming out, and I share Eric’s feeling on it. We’ve gotten bitten by, “The demo looks fantastic. It looks really great in this one scenario!” And they’re like, “Great, let’s put this into a movie and get everything set up.” And you’ve gotta rein back, and you’ve gotta kind of leave a distance on a lot of those new things because they’re just not stable enough to use them in a practical sense. You can’t let the budget idea of, like, “Oh, but that could save us so much money…” It’s like, it could or it could absolutely destroy you when it doesn’t work the way you think it’s going to work. So a lot of that stuff has to be kept at a bit of a distance. We’re always kind of like, “Yeah, it’s cool. I’m going to wait. I’m going to let this develop and have our guys develop it and see where it goes and see what we can do with it.” We’ll know when it’s ready to be in a film.”

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After decades of Planet of the Apes films, could this be the one that snags the Oscar?

ÁLVAREZ: But also, a lot of times for me, at least from my side, what I’ve seen and discovered new things that AI can do in the pipelines, it would be stuff that you wouldn’t give a shit about. It’s like, “Wow, there’s this thing that discovers Z depth. The movie’s going to be so much better now.” It makes no impact on the art that you see. It just saves a guy that used to take days to rotoscope a thing, and maybe now they AI rotoscope it automatically or discover the Z channel, which is black and white—further away from the lens is darker, and closer is white. It’s stuff like that. Now we can kind of start getting there. You should never be concerned about that, and it will never make the experience of your watching a movie.
It might be what Daniel was saying. The artist won’t spend the time doing that. They will spend the time on the artistry. It will get better. So the money will spend there, and that will make the movie better. You wouldn’t notice that. But most of the tools that are, for me, like, “I can’t believe this exists,” they’re those things. There’s stuff that it’s just really the backbone of the pipeline of post-production and VFX that don’t really have anything exciting to share, but, “Wow, computers can do that now!” Unless you work on editing and you’re the one that’s done that job, frame by frame, and now something could do it, it’s not particularly exciting a lot of times.
Fede Álvarez Breaks Down the Now-Iconic ‘Alien: Romulus’ Chestburster Scene

“The harder it is for us, the better it is for you.”

Image via 20th Century Studios

Do you have a favorite death scene in Alien: Romulus?
ÁLVAREZ: I think the Chestburster, probably. That scene is glorious because of the context of what happened around the set piece in general. It’s one of my favorite set pieces in the movie. The whole running away, it’s coming, the palpitations, and the crash and the light—a lot of great things are happening. So, if that counts as a death scene, I think that’s definitely one of my favorites.
BARBA: I agree. It’s masterfully done by a bunch of people shoved into that tiny set. The cockpit set was built up on a gimbal, so we could move it around, and it was incredibly tight, like crazy tight. Like, 10 clowns would come out of that car. I don’t know how they fit in there, but they were operating the puppet with the alien and how her body was. And again, it was one of those things that I just had a smile on my face all day long because they were so amazing.
ÁLVAREZ: No one can access it. It’s not just those damn clowns. It’s like a Disney ride. Once we’re about to start shooting, “Okay, everybody clear,” and the whole cockpit goes, and there’s a massive hydraulic and it started going up. Then once it’s up there and we shoot those scenes, there’s this little joystick that you can play with that I can move, and if I move it like this, the whole cockpit up there falls. So that’s why there are those shots when you see her when it crashes, and Isabela [Merced] goes right and then, boom, slams against the left—all those dynamics you cannot fake with ropes. You have to be moving the whole room around. You can see the backs of the walls. So that made it so that when you were inside shooting, usually, it was isolated from everybody else. It’s a total nightmare. I think the harder it is for us, the better is for you. I truly believe that. It gives you an experience that’s unique. The easier it is for us, the harder it is for you to watch it. It’s not as great. When it’s very easy to make, it means that it’s been done before a billion times. It’s never going to impact you the same way.

Image Via 20th Century Studios 

Everyone knows that’s one of the iconic scenes of this movie. That’s a scene that people are going to rewatch and it means a lot to a lot of people. Can you break down how early on you were developing that scene? What is it really like behind the scenes in terms of putting it together with VFX and direction and builds? Because it’s a key scene.
ÁLVAREZ: To Eric’s suffering, I’m terrible at prepping too much. I mean I prep some, but I don’t prep probably enough. I don’t do a detailed storyboard or an animatic of the whole scene so everybody knows exactly what’s going down. Probably a few days before we shoot it, Eric will come to the office, and go, “So what are you thinking for the scene?” My philosophy’s always been since I started, the first time I grabbed a camera, that I want something to be in a room ready—creatures, things that are real; that’s why we do so much animatronics—and I walk in with the camera, and I’ll look at it, and I’ll be amazed by something and go, “Oh, wow, what if we go here?” Because as much as you prep, there’s always going to be a light or something that you didn’t see coming that was not in the plan, that was not on the board. So you see the light there, and you go, “Oh, well, I definitely have to go on this side now because that light is there.” There are people who are really good at planning every detail of where every light is going to be.
Actually, having a conversation, I heard this story about Fincher. With Panic Room, they had a whole animatic of the film, frame by frame, light by light, temperature by temperature, and he’s even acknowledging it doesn’t work. He’d end up not doing it that way. So, I’m on the extreme side. I like every day to be an adventure. I like it, but my team usually suffers it. They’re like, “Yeah, sure, great adventure.” I have no idea, so they have to be ready for everything. That’s what makes the team suffer sometimes, I guess. You’ve got to be on your toes. “What’s going to happen?” There’s the mystery of what’s going to be, but that’s how I like it. And unfortunately, when the movie succeeds, it just cements my method even more, so I don’t learn the lessons.
BARBA: I mean, every director has the way they work and what works for them. My job is to get their vision up on the screen, and in Fede’s case, he cops to it. He kind of likes to make it up as you go, but he also tells me what he wants, and we’ve got sets, so I kind of have to plan in my head and work with the other HODs to make sure we give him what he wants. But sometimes you get a lot of happy accidents, too, doing that.
Ridley Scott and James Cameron Give Very Different Advice

“They definitely look at it from different sides.”

At the Saturn Awards, you were on stage after winning, and you talked about how you showed the movie to James Cameron and Ridley Scott. They both gave you feedback, and Ridley would tell you something, and James would tell you the exact opposite. I know you’re not going to say what notes they gave you, but what was that like as a director, when you have these two iconic filmmakers who both are geniuses, and they’re giving you polar opposite notes?
ÁLVAREZ: You kind of expect it somehow. They’re so different, and I think if you watch their movies, they’re quite different movies. Obviously, they’re masters at science fiction and the genre in general, so part of me expected they were going to be different. None of them were opposite; half of them were just completely different. They were just looking at the movie from completely different angles. When I watch a movie, if a friend of mine asks me, “Watch my movie and help me out to make it better,” when it’s the first cut, I tend to pay attention to certain things that I think are the things that make a difference when it comes to making a movie better. Some people go, “It’s all about the characters. You have to look at the characters and the story. That’s the only thing that matters. That’s what makes a movie better.” Some people go, “It’s all about the editing, the pace of the story,” and they just lean on that.
They definitely look at it from different sides. Ridley tends to be a lot about plot and the pace of the cut, like, “Whatever you think was slowing it down, get rid of that. Get rid of this. You don’t need any of that. We just want to make it as lean and mean as it can be.” Then, for Cameron, what was equally important was more things that had to do with the technology. A lot of it had to do with that. Like, “I don’t understand the size of that ship. I need to understand better where they are and the station at that point.” All his energy was put into that, which, if you think about his movies, is probably what’s great about them. If you think about Terminator 2 [Judgment Day], it’s all about the technology created, how well explained it is, and how real it feels. So, clearly, for him, that’s a big part of making a movie better—make sure that the science fiction behind it feels legit and believable. Ridley’s more about, like, “Hey, look fucking cool.” That’s it. When you talk about Alien, he always talks about the water falling and how that didn’t faze him. People would complain to him, “Why is there water on the ship?” And he’s like, “Because it looks fucking cool.” That’s Ridley’s explanation. So, both of them are very different, so their notes were very different. There are a lot of things that they will see differently. They want to keep that, get rid of that.
But the truth is, a lot of times, I didn’t listen to any of it. I would just decide, “I disagree with both of you, and I’m gonna do my own version.” I took the gamble of doing it that way, because—and I love those guys, and I have so much admiration for them—but if you’re a real director, you have to have your own single vision. You have to be stubborn and you have to believe your way. There’s just one way and it’s yours and that’s the right way, and you have to see it that way. But there were other things where I was open, and I was looking for an answer, and those things were super helpful, and they led the movie in the right direction.
MACARIN: That being said, Fede knew how many feet it was from where a ship landed to how many floors down is a science lab and where everything was on that station, and we followed it pretty well.
I heard a great story about Ridley. In Gladiator II, there are sharks in the Colosseum, and people asked, “How are there sharks in the Colosseum? Is this historically accurate?” And he basically said, “It’s just fucking cool.”

4:45

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I want to go back to the beginning if you don’t mind. For the three of you, what is it like when you first sit down to work together and those initial discussions on figuring out, “Are we going to work together or are we going to be able to gel? What are you thinking about for practical? What are you thinking of?” What is it like in those initial days or those initial conversations, director to VFX team?
ÁLVAREZ: It starts with me going out and finding a VFX supervisor for the movie that is right for the film. I knew he was the right guy based on his work, but mostly, he has good taste. That’s what you want: a VFX supervisor who has good taste and will know when to say, “This is enough,” and when to say, “We have to go further.” Movies like Oblivion, the Tom Cruise movie that he worked on, I remember being blown away with that film at the time and how tasteful the visual effects were on it—you didn’t ever fail one green screen and everything was done to perfect measure. And Zodiac, as well, which I remember at the time was one of those films that you’d never notice a green screen. They push a lot of boundaries when it comes to the VFX on Zodiac, in a movie that you would never think is a VFX-heavy film by no means. Zodiac is like a drama, but everything is shot on camera and there is so much VFX on it. Being from a VFX background, I never could spot a green screen on that film, and, again, that’s a testament to the VFX supervisor that’s behind it and the eye behind it, and it’s usually things that we cannot see that he can see. So, it starts there.
It’s just like when you cast an actor. If you cast the wrong actor, you’re fucked. There’s nothing you can do. Even if he’s a great actor, if he’s not the right actor for the role, it’s not going to work. So for this, the stars are there. The VFX supervisor is someone you cast and you better cast it well because his style will be all over the film. So, as long as he’s still the same person that he is in these other movies, I know we’re in good hands. A VFX supervisor, correct me if I’m wrong, but they can be screwed by a director if they push them too hard and they’re against a wall that they don’t want to be in. Then it’s hard to keep the consistency of the work. I thought we did a great collaboration and we were on the same page where we discussed how to approach it.
In the first discussions, we talked about all this, like trying to get it as practical as we could, and some things we would agree on, and some things were like it’s fun to see, “Well, let’s find out who’s right” when I’d think of one way, and he’s like, “I think it’s the other way,” and vice versa. Lucky enough, I was wrong enough times, hopefully, as he was wrong, as well, on some things and we would find a good middle ground. Maybe I give myself too much credit, but that’s how the collaboration works. Then he’s the one who obviously goes and gets who will be the vendors that can bring this vision, and that is the level that he expects from the vendors. And obviously, Wētā, there’s no one like them, right? This guy is the best, and so we are going to be in good hands with them.
But also, you have to find the team inside the company that actually believes in the movie that loves it. That, for me at least, is a big part. You can see that on the calls, who is really excited to be working on Alien and loved the footage and is excited, and who is just like, “Yeah, well, we’ll see if this movie…” Because they do this for a living, so there’s movie after movie. For me, it’s important to feel that they love it.

Image via 20th Century Studios

MACARIN: When we heard Wētā was up for this film, our executive producer came into my office, and my office has a Xenomorph bust and tons of Alien toys and Facehuggers, and he’s like, “Hey, you want to work on an Alien film?” I was like, “Yes, I do. Yes.” Like, “No one else is doing this.” So, what really made this work is trust. And Wētā, we’re storytellers. It’s not just about visual effects. A lot of times, a visual effects team will kind of gatekeep the director or separate things, and right from the start, Eric was very, very open, allowed us access to Fede, and there was trust between them. Eric’s notes were very, very clear, and the way he pushed us was always right, so it made it very easy to trust Eric. So between the two of them and them allowing us to be storytellers and creative and pitch ideas and try things out, even if they failed, they allowed us to do what we do best. Anytime you work with a team like that, it’s the best thing that we can hope for because it makes us part of the film, and we can give you the best work that we do.
“When it’s impossible to do, how do we do the impossible?”

Image via 20th Century Studios

One of the things about this movie that I love is the way you use practical models and practical sets and then amplify with VFX. At the beginning of the film, it looks like you’re on another planet, and when you’re watching the ships in space, it looks real. Was it a challenge to do that, and why don’t more movies do what you did? Because it looks so much better.
ÁLVAREZ: It’s definitely a challenge. There’s nothing easy about this movie, and everything took a long time to get there, to get to what’s on screen. But I cannot talk about the other movies. I really don’t know a lot of how Hollywood works the way it does, but. But in experience making the film, the studio is a great partner, and everybody on the VFX side were totally on board with the vision. They were very supportive, and they really believed in it. Using my approach, even if it’s silly at the beginning, I am as radical as I can be on if it can be done real, let’s do it real. VFX should be a tool for, “When it’s impossible to do, how do we do the impossible?” You go to effects. But if it’s possible, then we should do it. Ideally, that’s always the idea of visual effects—do the impossible or do the unpayable when it’s just too expensive and you cannot buy it. So, yes, it is possible, but you don’t have the money to do it. Usually, those are the reasons. So for me, if we could afford them and we could do it for real, we should do it for real.
So, that’s the test that we tried to push as much as we could of, like, “If it can’t be done on set…” So that comes to the building of the sets. I know we can build them. We don’t need to have blue screens everywhere if it can be built. It just transcends the discussions of what looks better or if people are going to tell if I didn’t do CG. It’s not even that. It’s just for me to show up on set and be on a spaceship. That’s why you make movies. As a filmmaker, that’s what I grew up dreaming about doing. “I want to go to a set and see animatronics and shoot things.” The actors also want to show up on a set and see a real monster in their faces. They want that. That’s the experience, right? So, as much as you can do that, you have to do it.
Usually, what happens, and what I’ve noticed in discussion with the studios, is they hear me pitching that at the beginning, and they’re like, “Ay yai yai.” And it’s not because they don’t believe in it; it’s because, too many times, most directors feel the same way. Not everybody, but most directors do want to do it that way, and sometimes it doesn’t work, so then you end up paying for it double. You pay for the animatronics, and then you replace it with CG. And how many people have told us doing the shots, “Oh, you’ve got to replace it all. You’ve got to replace all this.” Friends and press and people who knew they were doing practical, people online, “Ah, it’s all bullshit. They’re gonna replace the whole thing.” So the studio thinks of that because that has happened many times. We were lucky enough that the ones that we said we needed to do practical, for the most part, 80% were there.

Image via 20th Century Studios

There are other things that we didn’t even attempt the CG, like the hive. We knew we would have to do it that way, and they were all fine with that, and then some shots maybe the practical fell behind a tiny bit, and they cleaned it up, but still 80% of what you see is what we had on set. So I think it is way harder. To say that it’s practical is easy. People go, “You should do it practically.” Sounds great, but it’s really hard and time-consuming on set when you bring this two-ton animatronic on set that fails. It’s a pain, and it takes your day when you could be using that time on something else. So, it’s tricky.
But we had a great team, and all of us together with the DP that knew how to put the light, and also Shane and Alec who worked on the originals that guide Galo at some point, like, “Can I give it you now? I worked on some of these movies,” and they will tell him, “I think if you put a light here and there and some from behind, you’ll see how subtle the Xenomorph pops,” and we’ll do it, and wow, it does. And, of course, they worked on Aliens and Alien 3 and Resurrection. They worked on all of them so they know exactly how to do it. So, it was a challenge to do a practical. If you do it right, it’s totally worth it, but you need to have the right team.
BARBA: We also almost kept everything. I think it’s much higher. Probably 95%, we kept.
MACARIN: That was the directive. From day one, it was, “Keep as many pixels as you possibly can of what we shot,” and we respect that directive, and it works out. A lot of times, that was the thing about doing something practical is, yes, people change their minds, and it’s about what you said, picking the right team. When we got the plates of the Offspring, that thing is terrifying, and we looked at it like, “What do you even want us to do to this thing? It looks amazing.” That is the best thing because sometimes you get things in where they’re like, “Yeah, we spent a huge amount on this suit,” and you’re like, “And you want us to throw it away?” They’re like, “Yeah, throw it away. It didn’t come out right.” It’s like, “Well, okay.” That’s not necessarily the right team that went into it. They didn’t share the ideas, they didn’t share the concepts, they didn’t share the history of the look that you were going for. We were looking at a lot of stuff from [H.R.] Giger and the original work on that kind of stuff, and it shows. It comes out in the film, and that’s practical done right rather than practical done quickly or not at all because you want the flexibility to change later and so you just greenscreen everything. This was done with all the right intentions.
“CG Hair Is Not a Joke, Man”: How to Perfect Zero-G Practically

Álvarez set out to show us something we’d never seen before in an Alien film.

Image via 20th Century Studios

I definitely want to touch on filming in Zero-G. Let’s talk a little bit about filming that and how you pulled it off.
ÁLVAREZ: I think it was the first day of sitting with Rodo [Sayagues], my co-writer, to think about a new Alien movie. The first question was, “We know what we’ve seen. We know what we want to see again. We know what we don’t want to see again. What are the things that have never been seen before in an Alien movie?” We thought, “Zero-G, which is normal in space. We haven’t seen that.” So I was like, “Here we go.” Thank god I still have this dysfunction in my brain where I can put my writer hat on and write things, going, “Ha! Some idiot’s going to have to shoot this one day,” and that person is me, the person that has to deal with that. But I do it, really, for the sake of I get to write the best story I can and the best setpieces without thinking about the complexities of executing eventually. Then, cut to a few months later, you’re in production reading the script over, like, “Oh, the motherfucker who wrote this…,” and you see the problems that you have created for yourself, and that was one of them.
We knew, also, that we didn’t want to do CG doubles unless it was completely necessary because you guys have seen the version of that where there’s a bunch of CG characters floating around, and it’s like, “Ay yai yai.” Sometimes, it might look great that year, and the next year, it doesn’t look that great. We wanted to avoid that, so we knew we were going to need a great stunt team. We had a good stunt team locally that figured out, eventually, how to work with wires and give us the sense of Zero-G. That was a big part of it. The second big part of it was to discover with Galo, the DP, this rule of thumb: if there’s no gravity, there’s no up and down; if there’s no up and down, there’s no concept of horizon. So, if there’s no horizon, the camera should never be just looking at someone like that floating in the air because that will give away that the cameraman has his feet on the ground.

Image via 20th Century Studios

As soon as the gravity leaves in the movie, the cameras are always rotating. There’s no up and down anymore, and that really helped. That third axis of the crane that we always use every time there’s no gravity really helps you to not see the gravity. The way we referred to it all the time is to “hide the gravity” because you can see it on the hair, you can see on the clothes, you can see it in the physicality of the bodies. We did it through good wire work, avoiding CG doubles. There might be a couple of shots there of CG. I’m sure there were a few, but hopefully you didn’t notice. But most of the time it’s people on wires, and then the third axis and never having a horizon.
The third part was, in a few of those scenes, there are two sets, usually. One is horizontal, and one is vertical. So when you have characters floating, in one shot, the gravity is pulling them down, and in the next shot, they do exactly the same action, but they’re being pulled up. So the gravity is invisible because it’s just making them swing around, so you feel that they’re floating because they’re just hanging from a wire going up. So on that sequence, when she’s grabbing the rail and exiting through the floating acid, that’s what’s happening is in one shot, she’s on a normal set, and in another shot, she’s going up in another shot, so your eye keeps looking for it.
The last thing that was actually at some point the most expensive thing in our budget was a couple of million dollars in CG hair because otherwise, the hair will hang, and you will see the gravity. We had a moment with Eric that was like, “That’s it. Forget about it. Get rid of that in the budget. We’ll do wind.” So there’s constantly a wind tunnel that gets the hair to flap around, and that’s how we figured out a way to for you to, for most of the shots, never see that the gravity is pulling the hair in our direction. There’s always wind. I was like, “In Aliens, Ripley’s always inside some side tunnel with her curls flying around,” so I was like, “That’s the solution.” That was the last part of the massive puzzle that it was to do this zero gravity thing. So then, of course, the floating elements on the CG sides were CG extensions. Some of these sets were not complete, so we needed CGI extensions. These guys did amazingly, so seemingly, we managed to hide all the all the tricks.
I just want to point out that a wind machine saved millions of dollars.
ÁLVAREZ: $2 million.
This is probably the most important thing you guys learned today at the screening is a wind machine can save you a lot of money.
MACARIN: CG hair is not a joke, man.
ÁLVAREZ: It’s a lot of work.
BARBA: It would have been a lot of grief.
The ‘Alien: Romulus’ Sequel Will “Go Into Truly Uncharted Waters for the Franchise”

“There’s a vast horizon in front of us.”

Image via 20th Century Studios

This is a hugely successful film. I’m sure you have your choice of what you want to do next. What are you working on now?
ÁLVAREZ: For the last couple of months, I’ve been trying not to think about anything, just enjoying the fact that the movie did well, and now we’ve got some love in this award season, so I’ve been trying to think about that. But obviously, with the studio, we love the idea of making a sequel for this. So, most likely. We have a path, an idea that I’m really excited about for the continuation to really push the saga.
I think with this movie, we kind of check the boxes of all the things that I want to see, and that’s my bet that if I want to see it as a fan, some of you will agree with me and want to see the same things that I want to see. So this was done because there were many things I wanted to bring back and I wanted to see again. For a sequel now, I think there’s a vast horizon in front of us for where we can go because Alien is so many things. Alien is Alien, it’s Prometheus, and everything in between. It’s such a big universe. I think now I would love to go, and the plan is to go into truly uncharted waters for the franchise.
Do you think a sequel is your next movie, or do you think it could be something else?
ÁLVAREZ: Yeah, I think the sequel is my next movie.
Do you realistically think you could be filming it this year, or do you think it’s the next year?
ÁLVAREZ: It’s a good question. I hope I can shoot it this year. If you guys are available. [Laughs]
I like that. Are you currently writing or it’s just ideas in your head?
ÁLVAREZ: I’m writing it.
There’s a Whole ‘Alien’ Movie Happening Parallel to ‘Alien: Romulus’

And Ripley’s in it.

Image via 20th Century Studios

Are there any Easter eggs in the film that you want to point out to people now that it’s been out for a while that you can talk about?
ÁLVAREZ: There’s one, and since Dan is here, they were such sports with this one. This is going to get me in trouble, but okay. My logic was at some point, if Weyland-Yutani could find the Xenomorph floating around the debris of the Nostromo, to find the Narcissus, the shuttle that Ripley escaped in, is the easiest part. It’s a lifeboat; it has a beacon. Yeah, you’ll find her, right? It will be a place to figure out the research of what’s going on. You should go get her. So I’m sure they did, right? So I was like, “At some point, the Narcissus has to be inside the Renaissance station somewhere.” Not only that, I wanted to give an explanation of why Ripley got lost 40 years between [Alien and Aliens]. She was supposed to go to Earth and be in stasis for decades until she gets picked up in Aliens, so I was like, “Why did that happen?” So I thought, “Because they picked her up.”
So, in my mind, there’s a whole movie that happens in parallel to this one where the Narcissus is on board, and Ripley gets out of the station, does her whole fucking movie inside the thing, calls him Xenomorph. I think a lot of the shit that happens, some of the mayhem that happens in the movie, might have been Ripley getting ahead before the kids. It’s a massive station, right? Massive station. You get to see, like, probably 3% of the corridors that that station has. When you see them, think about the scale. So there’s plenty of room for Ripley to be around doing her thing, and then when she realized the whole thing was going to blow up, she had to get back to the Narcissus and get the fuck out of there.
So, if you watch, if you look closely, you’ll see the Narcissus twice in the movie in the background in a couple of sections where they walk by it, and you can see it right there on the wall. Then, of course, she cannot die, so the big explosion at the end when the station is crashing on the rings, you have to show the Narcissus leaving. I asked these guys, “Can you give me a Narcissus there?” And they were like, “We’re on it!” And they were all excited about it. So you can tell me that story from your side, but the shot is in the movie. As the Corbelan is escaping, you can see the Narcissus with Ripley inside just flying out of there.

Image via 20th Century Fox

MACARIN: You had started the Easter egg with the poster and everything, so we were always waiting for something like that. Of course, we’re in a call and we’re talking about ideas, and you threw it out there, and the comp supe next to me, Ben Morgan, was like, “I’ll do it! I don’t care. I’ll do it. Don’t don’t worry about it. I got this.” And it’s that kind of thing of a love for the series of, like, “Absolutely. It’s important and we want to put it in there.”
BARBA: I think he’d already done it, modeled it. Secretly, he had it ready to go.
MACARIN: We had our collection.
Alien: Romulus is available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu.

Alien: Romulus

Release Date

August 16, 2024

Runtime

119 Minutes

Director

Fede Alvarez

Writers

Fede Alvarez, Rodo Sayagues, Dan O’Bannon, Ronald Shusett

Franchise(s)

Alien