Alien: Romulus is a lean, mean, and slimy horror-thriller. Director Fede Álvarez, co-writer Rodo Sayagues, and all involved sharpened the edges of the franchise for long-time and new fans. In going back to the basics of the original film and then some, Álvarez and Sayagues delivered a jolt to the Alien series.
Sayagues previously accomplished a similar feat with Álvarez’s Evil Dead remake. The duo have been working together for over 20 years, starting with the short films El Cojonudo and Panic Attack! Their punk rock yet commercial sensibilities shine in Alien: Romulus, which Sayagues recently discussed with Immersive Media.
[Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and length]
You all go back to the simplicity of the original film, while at the same time, acknowledging the larger mythology, including Ridley Scott’s prequels. How was that balancing act?
The basic premise when we started working on this was to bring back the spirit of the first two Aliens. When I say spirit, mostly the feeling that we had when we watched those movies when we were kids. That’s an exercise that Fede and I did when we did Evil Dead in 2013. And now with this one, trying to go back to how we felt as kids watching those movies and try to imprint that feeling into this new version, so the audience today would feel what we felt when we watched those movies back then.
And then of course, the franchise has so many entries. There are so many ideas and elements that you don’t want to leave anything out if it’s great and if it helps your story. I wouldn’t say it was a challenge. Actually, it was a blessing that there were so many cool ideas in this franchise that we could use. If they made sense and they fit into our story, why wouldn’t we use that? We’re super grateful that all of those elements were there for us to play with.
Going back to how you felt as kids with the first two Alien movies, as a lot of fans grow older, they realize there’s more going on in those movies than we first realized. How’d you both want to capture how you felt about those first two films as you got older?
Yeah, that’s funny. It’s quite a different experience as you grow older. You are discovering a new film within the film. It’s funny, Fede’s son is 10 and Fede showed him The Matrix for the first time. He said, “Oh wow, a Kung-Fu movie.” And that’s true. It is as true as it is a movie about breaking out of a certain system. It could either be a metaphor for breaking out of your own mind or out of society, a system within a society that you live in, whatever, but it’s also a Kung-Fu movie.
It’s the same thing with Alien. When I saw it growing up, it was a monster movie. It was a creature killing people. But then you grow older and you watch it again, the first one, it’s about a company exploiting its employees. You go, “Oh, it’s about capitalism in a way.”
When you were a kid, Aliens is about a bunch of guys running from monsters. It’s a monster movie, but then you realize, it’s like a Vietnam War movie with all the themes that it brings. It’s super interesting, and I hope this is going to happen with our Alien movie as well, that people are going to watch it 10 years, 20 years from now, and they’re going to find a different movie within the movie.
We made sure that there’s plenty of thematic concepts buried into the movie that eventually after watching it two, three, or four times, they’re going to start to pop out. You’re going to start realizing that there’s more layers to the story that you see at first glimpse. I think that should be something that happens with every sci-fi movie. Sci-fi lends itself to explore themes, a lot of themes other than what’s actually happening on the surface when a monster becomes a metaphor for something else, the world. Your story becomes a metaphor for something else that relates to our day-to-day life.
So yeah, when we started working on this movie, we had that in mind. We were very aware of sci-fi, in a way, demands to have roots that extend way beyond the surface.
What were some of the ideas you and Fede wanted to bury in the story?
This is something that Fede and I discussed very much. We’ve been talking about it for the last couple of days, and it’s funny, because there’s even themes that you discover after you make a movie. There’s stuff that you’re aware of, but there’s stuff that even as a filmmaker you’re not aware of, like even halfway through the shooting. Maybe we don’t want to discuss it now, but maybe 10 years from now, I’m going to go, “You know what? The movie is actually about this and that at a deeper level.”
But you can say that it’s about the themes of capitalism and how authorities exploit people very clearly, because there’s Weyland-Yutani representing this authoritarian regime exploiting workers. The whole storyline regarding Weyland-Yutani, whatever their agenda is in this movie, it makes that very clear.
But there’s also the theme of youth understanding that they maybe were born in the wrong place and want to break free for whatever reality they’re living. They think there’s something else out there, but there’s an authority blocking their path, controlling their destiny and their lives. That’s also there. There’s the themes of siblings, which is very much explored in the relation of Rain and Andy.
I encourage people to go and watch the movie again and see what they think. Maybe start a thread online and discuss all these themes. But what I can tell you is there’s a larger, bigger concept that’s buried beneath the whole story that no one has tapped into yet. Maybe this is something that we can talk about some years from now.
The choice of having it be a younger cast, a cast that looks like college kids, was a thematically rich choice. Was that always an early idea of, let’s have young people fighting the system?
Yeah, if you pay close attention to it and you know that we are the filmmakers behind Don’t Breathe, you realize that it’s actually the same story. It’s a bunch of kids that were born in the wrong place where there’s no hope, no future, and they don’t have the means to escape that reality. But its youth always pushing and pulsating towards freedom. It is just an organic process of life and independence.
These kids in Don’t Breathe get to a point where they realize that the only way out is breaking into this guy’s house and robbing some money in order to leave town. And this is very similar. These kids live in a colony that is very reminiscent of the Detroit that we portrayed in Don’t Breathe. There is an authoritarian regime that is not going to let them escape that actually enslaves them. And then there’s this big, it’s not a house in this movie, but there’s a big place where there’s some element currency — in this case, the pods — that is going to allow them to escape and journey into freedom. So, basically it’s the same story. It’s kind of the same story in space.
Since fans know quite a bit about this world, how much setup did you and Fede, especially in the colony, feel you needed for these characters and this universe?
The whole idea of setting our story in that colony came out of a deleted scene of Aliens. There’s a scene in the colony before the Marines come to the colony before all hell is let loose in the colony. It is just a scene where you see these guys working in the colony and these guys have kids and there’s kids on the little bikes riding around.
We just thought that it was super interesting. What it would be like for those kids to grow up in a colony like that where there’s a company that’s teasing you with a bright future that never arrives? Then your parents die. You’re still in the same illusion of an amazing future that you’ll never reach.
We thought that was a very rich environment to explore characters and kickstart a story. Also, it came out of Fede and I having grown up in a third world country where you kind of feel like that. The common feeling is that you were born in the wrong place and you have to get out of there in order to build a life for yourself. Naturally, we found that idea appealing and worth exploring. You realize that there’s a lot of people out there that resonate with that as well, so it worked.
One of the best shots in the movie tells that story, just Navarro seeing the light in the basement, the darkness of the ship.
For sure. Film is such a powerful medium. There was a beat that I love in the movie when they take off on the ship and our main character gets to see the sun for the first time. It’s a beautiful, very poetic shot and beat. And then the station that they are about to break into gets in between the sun and them and blocks the light. I think that’s super powerful. It tells a story in just a couple of frames.
Did Navarro always die first? That was unexpected.
Yeah. Of course, someone has to die first in this movie. It’s tricky. Who’s that going to be? We know it was going to be Navarro, but then the trick is to play it so that it’s totally unexpected. If you pay attention, everything that’s happening in that lab with the face huggers, she’s outside. You’re going to be thinking it’s never going to be that person.
She’s further away than anyone else. Impossible that she’s going to get a face hug first. But she does. And there’s a logic to that as well. Poor Navarro, she freaks out and too scared and paralyzed and she cannot do anything. She is the only person that’s not helping, and she pays a price for that.
You and Fede take some big swings, especially bringing back Ash. Was that synthetic always on the page from the start?
Well, yeah, Ash, no, it was not always on the page. It’s not Ash, not him, a different robot. But it got to a point where we got into production, thinking, who’s going to play this character? And it just made sense. If you think about it, throughout the franchise, the synthetics show up over and over again. Bishop did come back as a different, I mean, it’s his likeness. It’s the same actor, but it’s a different android and it makes sense. And same with Michael Fassbender.
You would think that Weyland is building several androids. They’re not going to build a new face for each one of them. That would be crazy, like a car making company making every single car different. What the fuck is that? It’s just impossible. So you would say, “Oh, there’s probably many Ash-like robots throughout the galaxy.”
Fede made sure Ridley was on board with that. He loved the idea. We had this blessing for that. And then Fede reached out to Ian Holm‘s family, and they loved the idea. They actually said that that was something that Ian Holm talked about very much. That was one of the favorite characters that he ever played. He wanted to do it once more. I don’t know, it just felt like it made sense and that we can pull it off. So there it is.
Where’d the zero gravity sequence originate from?
We have to credit Alfonso Cuarón for having made Gravity, which inspired that, of course. It showed that it’s possible to shoot that, possible to make it look super real. I think that sparked the idea of using zero gravity in space, which makes sense, and then it’s a domino effect.
We quickly realized that that would take care of the problem of the acid blood, oh, there’s no gravity, it’s not going to appear through the ship. We’re good. But then it creates another problem. You’re going to have to deal with the acid blood floating in the air. That was one of the early ideas that we had when we started thinking about this movie. It worked out really, really well.
The evolution at the end, the human-alien hybrid, how’d you and Fede land at that idea?
The movie was always going to land on that sequence. It just made sense because it’s the payoff to the whole Weyland-Yutani agenda and storyline, right? I mean, they were developing this compound based on the black goo, and their idea was to improve… We had a line that didn’t make it into the movie, which was their slogan, “Making Better Worlds.” The idea was, in order to make better worlds, you need to make humans better first. But how are you going to go about doing that?
We started playing with this idea of them using the DNA of the Xenomorph in order to gather its strengths and transfer that into the human DNA, which sounds okay, but then if you think about it, you’re messing with something very tricky. It might not go well. On top of that, the motivation for Weyland-Yutani to do that is really fucked up because they’re not trying to make human life better. They’re trying to make better slaves. They say, “They can work harder. They don’t have to sleep, they won’t die.”
It’s setting up a bomb. The bomb needs to go off at some point. We needed to see what the result of that experiment was going to be, and we’re super happy. We found a guy, his name is Robert Bobroczkyi, who plays the offspring. No one believes that. It’s shocking and unbelievable that you would tend to think that there’s CGI involved, but that’s Robert Bobroczkyi. He’s seven-foot-eight or something. One of the tallest people on Earth, and that’s him with latex and some makeup. It’s crazy.
We were lucky that we found him. He trained with an acting coach for six months, and he did an amazing performance. He was superb. And he brought this offspring to life that we are super proud of, and I think works really well, really, really well. I think we’re proud to believe that it’s a great addition into the canon of the franchise. We think the franchise has the best monsters ever created, and we are very humbled and honored having been able to bring something into it.
Alien: Romulus is now playing in theaters.
