Alien - photography

I really am one of those people who loves Black and White photographs. There's such a purity to B&Ws. Color is great, more popular than B&W, but B&W photos have a classic look. that just can't be beat I love the way different kind of tonalities come out in a B&W photo which you don't get from color.

 

Alien - Sigourney's breasts

Sigourney's breasts -- there's a shot of Sigourney in the sleep pods with her breasts exposed that caused quite a stir. Pat, Sigourney's father, was a very powerful NBC big-wig, and she and her family had a lot of money, so when Sigourney got upset and threatened to sue us if the shot was released, needless to say, it was nixed.

Alien age restrictions in England

The only time I worried about Alien's audience was when I was in England, after the Worldcon. I went to Birmingham to do a presentation. After my presentation, I talked to a group young boys -- I think they were 11 to 13. England has very strict rating system which separates movie goers by age group. They have a category called Nasties. It's a different rating system than the one we have in the us. I worried we'd be limited in our UK market because their system allows for the arrest of selling video Nasties or box office Nasty tickets to underage kids. This group of young boys assured me there was no way they would be kept from seeing the film. They said if it got a Nasty rating, they'd still be able to see it.

Alien Contact Sheets

Selecting which photos to use during production is a winnowing process. We pick shots off the contacts, they get blown up, then from those blow ups, we pick the ones which will actually get used. The stack of photos I have -- think its easily a couple thousand -- was digitized in one fell swoop. I didn't look at them when they were being digitized. I arbitrarily pick a very small thumbnails and upload. Sometimes I'm surprised at the image I see when the photo is uploaded.