> The production was notoriously difficult, marred by issues with the cast, harsh weather, and a skyrocketing budget. Bruce Willis was originally hired to play Edward Prendick, but allegedly dropped out as he started divorce procedures from his wife at the time Demi Moore. Willis was replaced with Val Kilmer, who made his availability limited, and later had anger issues with most of the cast after also being served divorce papers onset. Then actor Rob Morrow quit cause of script rewrites. Also, Marlon Brando's role as Dr. Moreau was supposed to be expanded, but after his daughter, Cheyenne, committed suicide, he retreated to his private island, leaving the film production in limbo, not knowing when or even if he would show up. Brando also didn't want to learn his lines, so he requested them through an earpiece. Finally, original director Richard Stanley, was fired by New Line Cinema after problems arouse during production, with John Frankenheimer being brought to replace him. The film received mostly negative reviews and was considered a box office bomb.[3][4][5][6][7][8]
Production Clusterfucks
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> Stanley as director
> The chosen location for the film was the rain forest outside Cairns in North Queensland, Australia. Tensions between Stanley and New Line had been growing during pre-production, partly because of Stanley's quirky, insular nature, and his marked unwillingness to attend studio meetings, but they reached crisis point within the first few days of filming. Stanley's vulnerability to studio pressure was exacerbated by the continuing absence of his main ally, Brando, but the biggest problem proved to be the notorious on-set behaviour of Kilmer, who reportedly arrived two days late.
> Kilmer later attributed his obnoxious behaviour to the fact that, just as filming began, he learned from a television report that he was being sued for divorce by his wife of seven years, Joanne Whalley.[12] Whatever his reasons, many of the cast and crew have testified to Kilmer's bullying, and his consistently hostile and obstructive manner during the first days of shooting. He would not deliver the dialogue as scripted, and repeatedly criticised Stanley's ideas; what little footage was shot was deemed unusable.
> The studio mainly seems to have blamed the director for not getting Kilmer under control,[13] but another significant factor was the sudden departure of co-star Rob Morrow on the second day of shooting. With the location being pounded by bad weather that had temporarily stopped filming, Morrow found himself unable to bear the tension and hostility on set any longer, so he telephoned New Line chairman Rob Shaye in Hollywood and tearfully begged to be let go. Shaye agreed.
> After a third day of filming, following emergency consultations with its on-set executives, New Line abruptly fired Stanley by fax. The beleaguered director reacted angrily, shredding documents in revenge, and then vanishing after being delivered to the airport for the return flight to Hollywood. The reasons for Stanley's dismissal were not made clear, and false rumours were spread about his allegedly erratic behaviour, but the main reasons appear to have been his perceived unwillingness to deal with studio executives, and especially his problems in dealing with Kilmer, whose already well-established reputation for being 'difficult' was soon to be enshrined in movie lore thanks to this film.
> Stanley had been offered his full fee on condition that he left the production quietly and did not speak about his sacking, so his disappearance caused consternation at New Line, who feared he might try to sabotage the film. His removal also predictably sent shock waves through the cast and crew. Outraged female lead Fairuza Balk stormed off the set after a heated exchange with the New Line executives, and then had a production assistant drive her all the way from Cairns to Sydney - a distance of some 2,500 km - in a rented limousine. However, by her own account, Balk's agent then warned her in blunt terms that the studio would ruin her, and that she would never work in films again if she broke her contract, so she was soon forced to return to the set.[10]
> Frankenheimer as director
> With a budget now approaching US$70 million, and potential disaster looming, New Line brought in veteran director John Frankenheimer. He came on board in part because - like virtually every member of the cast and crew - he wanted the opportunity to work with the legendary Brando,[14] but he also used the studio's desperation to his advantage, successfully demanding a hefty fee and a three-picture deal in exchange for his services. Well known as one of the last of the "old style" Hollywood directors, Frankenheimer's gruff, dictatorial approach was radically different from Stanley's and he soon alienated many of the cast and crew. He and Brando decided to have the then-current script by Richard Stanley, Michael Herr and Walon Green rewritten by Frankenheimer's previous collaborator Ron Hutchinson. Frankenheimer also needed to find a new lead actor to replace Rob Morrow and brought in David Thewlis to play Douglas. The whole production was shut down for a week and a half while these changes were implemented.[15]
> However, once shooting resumed, the problems continued, and escalated. Brando routinely spent hours in his air-conditioned trailer when he was supposed to be on camera, while actors and extras sweltered in the tropical heat in full make-up and heavy costumes. The antipathy between Brando and Kilmer rapidly escalated into open hostility, and on one occasion, as recounted in Lost Soul, this resulted in the cast and crew being kept waiting for hours, with each actor refusing to come out of his respective trailer before the other. New pages were turned in only a few days before they were shot. Frankenheimer and Kilmer had an argument on-set, which reportedly got so heated, Frankenheimer stated afterwards, "I don't like Val Kilmer, I don't like his work ethic, and I don't want to be associated with him ever again".[13]
> According to Thewlis, "we all had different ideas of where it should go. I even ended up improvising some of the main scenes with Marlon". Thewlis went on to rewrite his character personally.[16] The constant rewrites also got on Brando's nerves, and as on many previous productions, he refused to learn lines, so he was equipped with a small radio receiver, so that his assistant could feed his lines to him as he performed - a technique he had used on earlier films.[10] Thewlis recollects: "[Marlon would] be in the middle of a scene and suddenly he'd be picking up police messages and would repeat, 'There's a robbery at Woolworth's'".[16] Meanwhile, friction between him and Kilmer elicited the former's quip: "Your problem is you confuse the size of your paycheck with the size of your talent".[17] Upon completion of Kilmer's final scene, Frankenheimer is reported to have said to the crew, "Now get that bastard off my set".[10][16]
> Stanley had reportedly jokingly told the film's production designer to burn the set down, but when Stanley disappeared after his sacking, security was tightened in case he was actually trying to sabotage the project.[10][16] Stanley himself later revealed that he had in fact stayed in Australia - suffering a total emotional breakdown, he had retreated to a remote area in the Cairns region to recover.[10] There he had a chance meeting with some of the film's former production staff, who had been rehired as extras and were camping in the area. It was confirmed by these same production staff in the Lost Soul documentary[16] that with their help Stanley secretly came back to the set over several days, disguised in full costume as one of the dog-men, and performed as an extra on the film he had originally been hired to direct .[10][18] It has also been reported that he showed up at the film's wrap party, where he ran into Kilmer, who was said to have apologized profusely for Stanley's removal from the film.[16]
> Due to the many problems with the production, and the evident ongoing attempts by both Brando and Kilmer to sabotage it, the location shooting eventually stretched from a scheduled six weeks to almost six months, and the atmosphere on the production became almost a mirror of the plot of the movie, with the long-suffering cast and crew becoming more and more alienated by and hostile towards its wayward co-stars and their authoritarian director.
bump...
I remember reading somewhere that the earpiece Brando wore picked up a police signal so in the middle of a scene Brando said some police bullshit.
I'd love a documentary about this
i thought there was one, or are you being ironic?
There is a documentary on this.
>Kilmer later attributed his obnoxious behaviour to the fact that, just as filming began, he learned from a television report that he was being sued for divorce by his wife of seven years, Joanne Whalley.[12]
wow women are such cunts
Stanley is a decendant of Sir Henry Morton Stanley.
H.M. Stanley is the mercenary who was hired by Leopold II of Belgium to acquire a large section of the Congo for private ownership by Leopold.
It’s quite possible Stanley had no need for the fee he was offered.
Also,
Richard Stanley has been in some very interesting places, at some very interesting times.
>Also, in the late 1980s, Stanley traveled to Afghanistan to document the Soviet–Afghan War. Stanley and his crew witnessed the Soviet withdrawal and the country's slide into the civil war that would bring the Taliban to power. ....Stanley saw action in the siege of Jalalabad, and the events surrounding his escape from the country, along with his wounded camera man, Immo Horn,
And possibly more interesting.
>in 2001 and ‘The White Darkness’ – a look at the voodoo practices in Haiti – in 2002.
Stanley was in Haiti during one of the US “interventions” in the country.
Stanley’s footage alledgedly got the Colonel in charge relieved of command in Haiti.
>"[Marlon would] be in the middle of a scene and suddenly he'd be picking up police messages and would repeat, 'There's a robbery at Woolworth's'
BASED
...
en.wikipedia.org
jeez read this fucked up wiki, gives some back story why marlon just decided to say fuck it..
that was more of a development hell
It was development hell and production hell. Many of the production problems were caused by the development process, the story got changed again and again by different writers and directors who were attached to the film at various points.
Gonna be probably multiple posts and not many people will read but I have nothing else to do.
>Original Alien (1979) Director Ridley Scott turned down the chance to direct. Scott, and later Renny Harlin both thought the third film should explore the origin of the Xenomorph species. This concept was deemed too expensive by David Giler and Walter Hill, since most special effects work at the time still had to be done practically instead of by computer-generated images, so Scott declined to return and Harlin later quit the film. Scott ultimately got his wish with the movie Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017).
>$7 million had been spent on sets that were never used thanks to the ever-changing script before filming had even started.
>One possible idea for the film included a chestburster coming out of Michael Biehn's character, Hicks. This was later abandoned in favor of having his character die after being impaled by a metal beam. A replica of the actor with his chest torn open (due to the impalement) was created, but after Biehn discovered this (erroneously thinking it was from a chestburster wound), he threatened to sue the producers for using his likeness without his consent, so a non-identifiable replica was used. Later, the producers paid him to use his picture at the beginning of the film for the computer sequence. Apparently he received more money for use of this one image than for his role in Aliens (1986). Biehn later stated that, had he any idea the kind of career David Fincher would have, he might have been more accommodating, in the hopes of getting a chance to work with him on a subsequent project.
>David Twohy, Vincent Ward, John Fasano, Renny Harlin, David Fincher, Larry Ferguson, David Giler and Walter Hill all attempted to claim credit for the screenplay during the arbitration process. Four more writers could have claimed credit but chose not to; William Gibson and Eric Red saw no point in doing so, since the film had changed substantially from their early drafts; Greg Pruss was talked out of claiming credit in exchange for guaranteed work elsewhere; and Rex Pickett, despite having written a substantial amount of the shooting script, declined to seek credit due to how unpleasant his experience of working on the film had been.
>David Twohy contributed to the pile of abandoned scripts the movie's pre-production generated. In his version, the only returning character is Ripley, who only briefly appears on a file card. As in previous scripts the story involves experiments in genetically-engineering aliens as bioweapons. This script introduced a high-security prison facility in space and its morally ambiguous inmates (one of which is an escape artist), themes which made it into both the finished product, and Twohy's own Pitch Black (2000).
>The original budget was $45 million which included Sigourney Weaver's fee of $5.5 million. The budget soon spiraled however, with first Renny Harlin and then Vincent Ward both leaving the project before novice feature film director David Fincher came on board. Extensive last minute re-shoots - especially after the finale was deemed to be too similar to Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) - ultimately pushed the budget into the region of $65 million.
>When the powers-that-be decided on a new ending to be shot, Elliot Goldenthal had one night to come up with a new score.
>Cinematographer Alex Thomson replaced Jordan Cronenweth after only two weeks of filming, after he began to suffer the onset of Parkinson's Disease. Though Cronenweth insisted that he was well enough to make it until the end of production, and David Fincher supported him, line producer Ezra Swerdlow forced Cronenweth off the film, largely because he had lost his own father to the same illness several years previously and knew that if anything, the demanding schedule would likely take a fatal toll on Cronenweth's health. Cronenweth received a special "Thank you" in the end credits.
>Costume Designer Bob Ringwood walked off the film early in production after finding Director David Fincher difficult and unpleasant to work with.
>The production effectively shut down for three months while the script was undergoing rewrites.
>Walter Hill and David Giler (the latter of whom referred to David Fincher as a "shoe salesman" during a conference call with the studio) fought with Fincher for 2 months over the script, and he complained about their budgetary restrictions. They and screenwriter Rex Pickett (who was also hired to rewrite the second half of the duo's script) in turn abandoned Fincher, and left him to finish the script himself. Fincher would end up rewriting lines and entire scenes on-the-fly during production, while trying to keep Fox (who were requesting daily updates from the set) at bay.
>Multiple proposed scripts caused misleading advertising which implied that the movie would be set on Earth. William Gibson also drafted a script in which Ripley spent most of the film in a coma.
>One of the main causes of the movie's troubled production (including script re-writes, crew replacements, excessive re-shoots and a budget that increased from 45 million to 65 million dollar) was the fact that 20th Century Fox was in need of a commercial success. Alien3 was green-lit by the studio because it was considered to be a sure hit, but a release date had already been set before a screenplay or even a story outline was written. Director David Fincher later said that this lack of direction in the story was the source of much creative disagreements and productional difficulties, while he was trying to deliver the best possible film in time; however, the studio wasn't particularly concerned with quality, as long as the movie was released and made money. Fincher also commented that his inexperience made things worse, since this was his directorial debut and he did not have a successful film to back up his opinion, giving the studio ample reason to ignore his input.
>After the first draft was complete (in which the Alien attacks a monastery), construction work began on the sets. The construction shut down, leaving the crew in limbo, as the script was reworked. Although the location was changed to a prison, it was decided that they would use the already half-built monastery sets, and the characters wold be converted inmates.
>Vincent Ward wrote a script where Ripley crashlands on a "wooden planet" filled with monks. At this point in production, 1/5 of the planned budget had already been spent, and Fox told Ward to rein in his plans (even prompting then-CEO Joe Roth to state "What the fuck is going on?" after hearing about Ward's plan to have Ripley be placed in a cryotube by "seven dwarves" in the finale). After butting heads with executives, Ward left the project.
I've seen the documentary, it's kino. It's the best making-of movie I've seen
>Although credited for the screenplay, Larry Ferguson didn't even finish his script for Alien3 (1992), he was fired early on when David Fincher was brought on as director. Ferguson's script was considered so bad that Walter Hill and David Giler took it upon themselves to write the final script.
>In an interview with PREMIERE magazine in May 1992, Fincher spoke about Ferguson's draft, saying that it shared similarities to the fairy tale Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the story of Peter Pan. Ripley was going to be a woman who fell from the stars and lands on a planet full of monks. She would tell the monks stories like Wendy from Peter Pan. In the end, she dies, and there are seven of the monks left, symbolizing the seven dwarfs. They put her in a tube, and wait for Prince Charming to come wake her up.
>Because of continuing troubles with the film, Fox halted production in Pinewood Studios in England in late 1991. The crew returned to LA, and an initial screening identified the missing parts of the film. A major part yet to be shot included killing the alien in the lead pool. By the time of the new shots in LA, Sigourney Weaver's hair grew back, and she had an agreement with the producers that if she would have to cut her hair she would be paid a $40,000 bonus. The producers therefore hired Greg Cannom to create a bald cap with very short hair on it. The make-up process cost $16,000 and was very difficult and time-consuming because the hairline required the cap to be placed very precisely on Weaver's head.
>Although the Alien that hatched from the dog was a rod puppet, early filmed tests used an actual dog in an alien costume. However, the special effects team thought the dog's movements made the Alien look rather comical, so the idea was scrapped in favor of the puppet.
>The creature that the Alien impregnates was originally an ox, but this was eventually changed to a Rottweiler dog during a studio-mandated re-shoot, because an ox was cumbersome and was seen as somewhat incongruous when placed in the film's environment. This sequence was later restored for the extended "Assembly Cut", where all the scenes featuring the dog were removed. However, in the BluRay edition of this version, prisoner Murphy (Christopher Fairbank) can still be heard calling for the dog in one scene.
>At one point, David Fincher was denied permission by the film's producers to shoot a crucial scene in the prison understructure between Ripley and the alien. Against orders, Fincher grabbed Sigourney Weaver, a camera and shot the scene anyway. This scene appears in the final cut.
>Much more of the autopsy scene was filmed than ended up in the final film. A rough cut of the scene originally contained so much gore, that it even made crew members who had worked on it sick to their stomach.
>David Fincher (depending on which source you believe) either spent a year attempting to edit the film, or was locked out of the editing suite altogether by the studio. The reshoots reportedly pushed the budget to $65 million, and were done in Los Angeles with almost an entirely-new crew. This was reportedly the last straw for Fincher, who walked away for good at the end of the reshoots.
MS: But there's this fantastic quote that I found, where you said of Alien 3 that "a lot of people hated Alien 3, but no one hated it more than I did."
>DF: I had to work on it for two years, got fired off it three times and I had to fight for every single thing. No one hated it more than me; to this day, no one hates it more than me.
MS: At the risk of opening old wounds, what did you take from that experience that has subsequently helped you in your Hollywood career?
>DF: It was a baptism by fire. I was very naive. For a number of years, I'd been around the kind of people who financed movies and the kind of people who are there to make the deals for movies. But I'd always had this naive idea that everybody wants to make movies as good as they can be, which is stupid. [audience laughs] So I learned on this movie that nobody really knows, so therefore no one has to care, so it's always going to be your fault. I'd always thought, "Well, surely you don't want to have the Twentieth Century Fox logo over a shitty movie." And they were like, "Well, as long as it opens." So I learned then just to be a belligerent asshole, which was really: "You have to get what you need to get out of it." You have to fight for things you believe in, and you have to be smart about how you position it so that you don't just become white noise. On that movie, I was the guy who was constantly the voice of "We need to do this better, we need to do this, this doesn't make sense". And pretty soon, it was like in Peanuts: WOP WOP WOP WOP WOP! They'd go, "He's doing that again, he's frothing at the mouth, he seems so passionate." They didn't care.
>In 1993, after the film had opened to generally hostile reaction, Fincher gave a candid phone interview with journalist Mark Burman, originally meant for the BBC, which was then published in the premier issue of Imagi-Movies Magazine in the Fall of that year. During the hour-long conversation, Fincher expressed his thoughts and feelings on his then only feature as director.
>“I think audiences find it pretentious and ponderous and resent the fact it’s not a scary-scare movie. It’s a queasy-scare movie.”
>“The first thing that we decided was that the alien wasn’t going to be the main focus. It’s like the bridge on the river Kwai. the bridge is one of the things you have to deal with, that’s not what the movie is about. The idea was not to make a whiz bang, shoot ‘em up. But to deal with this character. Let’s put a 40-year-old woman in outer space, not an underwear-clad victim like in the first Alien.”
>Like many filmmakers of his generation, the original Alien had a major impact on Fincher upon its release in 1979.
>“Oh God, Alien changed my life! It just seemed so real to me. I was aware of being told things about people and story through the art direction rather than exposition. I always thought Ridley was brilliant but I never appreciated just how brilliant he was, until I tried to make this movie.”
“>Actually he came down to the set once when we were setting fire to something. In he walked with his silk suit and one of his big Cuban cigars, looking fabulous. There was a documentary crew from the publicity machine at Fox filming the whole conversation.” “Ridley asked how it was going and I said ‘Really bad’ and he said, ‘It never goes well, this is not the way to make movies, make sure you make a little film where you have some control while they’re beating you up.’ And all he did was tell me he still hasn’t seen a dime from the first Alien. I don’t think they ever used it in the documentary!”
>Fincher’s biggest issue to contend with when accepting the assignment was the fact that despite his obvious talent and passion for the project, he didn’t have the clout of a more established filmmaker and thus the respect of the studio suits overseeing the production.
>“Oh it was just awful. This is the worst thing that ever happened to me. Look, it would be stupid for me to say that I didn’t know what I was getting into. It took me five years to decide what I wanted to do and I always held out for something on this scale because I like this kind of canvas, I like the scope of this kind of thing.”
>“The lesson to be learned is that you really can’t take on an enterprise of this size and scope if you don’t really have a movie like The Terminator or Jaws behind you. When Steven Spielberg comes in and says, ‘I made Jaws, the biggest grossing film of all time and I want $18 million to do Close Encounters,’ which is probably the equivalent to what we spent, it’s very nice to be able to say ‘This is the guy who directed the biggest grossing film of all time. Sit down and shut up, and feel lucky that you’ve got him.”
>“It’s another thing when everybody’s wringing their handkerchiefs and sweating and puking blood because of the money that’s being spent and you’re going ‘Trust me, this is what I really believe in’ and they turn around and say ‘Well, who the fuck are you, who cares what you believe in?’”
>Although Fincher did indeed have the full support of his cast and crew, the studio were still uneasy about the idea of killing off Ripley.
>“In a way we had to rationalize it. Here is this woman waking up again and finding the same fucking monster. Please! We decided the reason it keeps happening is because that’s what she’s cursed to do. She is cursed to fight this thing until it’s over.”
>“I had a master plan for the whole thing. I saw the first film as the beginning of the yuppie ideal. It was getting ahead in the office, sticking to the protocol and being vocal and eventually triumphing because of one’s own beliefs. Obviously it’s more than that, it’s a monster movie and it’s Ten Little Indians, but I saw that film as being a real kind of personal empowerment. They gave it a feminist message as well.”
>“In 1978 you have the beginning of the whole ‘Me’ decade and then by the time of the second film in 1986, you had a lot of women coming to grips with wanting a career and also having these incredible maternal instincts and I think Aliens really taps into that.”
>“And when we started this one I thought what could I do with the story that would ride the next yuppie wave? And I thought what are the yuppies coming to grips with? Sacrifice, the idea that sacrifice was a noble, capitalist alternative. We’ve come full circle and realized that selflessness is as important as selfishness in order to survive. So I thought that’s the obvious place to go with this character because we’re not really going to have too much more to do with her.”
>“Once we decided we were going to kill Ripley off we had a lot of fights and discussions about building to that moment and I always said you can’t work backwards from the idea of Ripley sacrificing her life. Certainly in terms of the American audience you can’t because that’s still seen in American culture as a sign of weakness, as the easy way out. It isn’t looked on as taking responsibility, it’s looked on as shirking responsibility. I said ‘We’ve got to force her to this last decision.”
waterworld
all bakshi films
ishtar
the exorcist and poltergeist productions were both seemingly demonically cursed
>According to the Alien 3 making-of documentary in the Quadrilogy box-set (and subsequent Anthology), Ripley’s death plunge (sans chest burster) was reshot when it was discovered James Cameron’s Terminator 2 (which was being produced around the same time) had a similar ending with Arnie sacrificing himself in a vat of molten metal. The chest-burster exploding out and Ripley holding it to her as she fell was added in order to create a point of difference, so that Alien 3 couldn’t be unfairly accused of ripping off Cameron’s movie.
>This decision never sat well with Fincher.
>“I didn’t want to have the alien come out. I still don’t like the idea of the alien emerging. Originally she falls backwards, standing on the gantry, with an explosion of blood on her chest and this thing pushes out. It’s more a stigmata and she falls backwards into it.”
>“No matter what cathartic experience we could expect from finally seeing the two strongest images from the first movie, the chest-burster and the character of Ripley, if we left the movie with her choking on her tongue they would feel worse going out of the film than they do now.”
>“I said ‘whatever happens she has to be in peace at the end.’ It has to be a sigh rather than gritting teeth and sweat. So we talked about it and went over and shot this blue-screen element. We were shooting that shot four days before the film opened, a completely ridiculous mess. I don’t know if it works.”“I never felt it was necessary to show the creature. I was very much against this and dragged my feet and said ‘I don’t believe in it, I don’t think it’s important to see the monster but if we’re going to do this we’re going to have to do something that has a little bit of top spin to it, something else going for it.”
tl;dr
>“No matter what cathartic experience we could expect from finally seeing the two strongest images from the first movie, the chest-burster and the character of Ripley, if we left the movie with her choking on her tongue they would feel worse going out of the film than they do now.”
>“I said ‘whatever happens she has to be in peace at the end.’ It has to be a sigh rather than gritting teeth and sweat. So we talked about it and went over and shot this blue-screen element. We were shooting that shot four days before the film opened, a completely ridiculous mess. I don’t know if it works.”
>Ripley considering her decision to sacrifice herself was another moment of subtlety which got lost in the final cut of the picture.
>“The end sequence when Bishop comes and presents his case. I always wanted it to play like she listens to him and she’s really tempted by it. Originally that scene played out much longer and there was a 40-second pause from the time he said ‘Please trust us’ and then she finally looked up at him and said ‘No’.”
>“It wasn’t as quick as it is now, I always liked that. I liked the idea of her making a choice as opposed to having the choice made for her.”
>“They look at these movies like a franchise. There are people, who shall remain nameless, that I was bumping into as I was trying to put this thing together. who were putting the experience into a really interesting kind of perspective. They were saying ‘Look, you could have somebody piss against the wall for two hours and call it Alien 3 and it’s going to do $30 million worth of business, you can’t keep people away. They’re going to go the first night to see what it is.’”
>“That’s not to say that 20th Century Fox didn’t want to make a really fine film and they spent a lot of money trying to make it as good as it could possibly be but you can’t buy pre-production time when you start shooting. Because things just get exponentially more complicated.”
>“I don’t know, the current wisdom is, of course, that I make things exponentially more complicated but they just are. I probably should have walked away from the first week of shooting when there wasn’t a script but there are extenuating circumstances.”
>“They were 15 million dollars into just the production, not including all the money they spent on earlier versions of the script, other directors, sets and designs. To walk away from something like that, in this town at least, at that point is more detrimental to your career than to plow on with something you think needs a lot more work.”
>“We really only had four or five weeks prep with the script that resembled what you saw. A lot of times we were fitting scenes into sets that we had aleady constructed. It was not the optimum way to make a movie.”
>“Looking at it in the role of communicator obviously in a lot of cases I didn’t get my ideas across. I’m taking that rap but I’m so happy with the monsters and the sfx and the look of the film and the performances and what people were able to do with whatever minimal prep they had. I’m very happy with that so I don’t want to seem ungrateful. I’m not embarrassed by the film.”
>“If we failed to do one thing it was to take people out of their everyday life. Actually, my dentist, as he was drilling my teeth, was giving me his thesis on the things wrong with this film and he said, “You know, when you go out of this movie you haven’t gotten away from AIDS, you haven’t gotten away from the race riots, you haven’t gotten away from your fear of other cultures.’”
>“We failed to give people the broad, safe entertainment that, in the United States at least, they seem to want. They want to go to the cinema and get away from it all. We tried to bring it down to right here and now, to make a movie about 1990. If we had just gone out and done a shoot ‘em up we would have cheapened the thing in the long run. Instead we did something weird and fucked up out there. I just think in terms of the world boxoffice we may have chosen wrong.”
>Brando was extremely competitive, and in 1968 he appeared at a private party celebrating Oscar nominations in which Paul Newman was in attendance with his wife Joanne Woodward. Brando approached Newman and began a conversation that eventually became very heated, resulting in Brando shouting and Newman walking away. Later that evening Brando stood on a table and challenged Newman to an egg eating contest, like the one Newman was depicted doing in Cool Hand Luke, however Newman ignored the challenge.
>Brando, undeterred, had somebody from his entourage bring him dozens of hard boiled eggs, and started the competition without Newman. While eating, he would loudly keep count as he consumed the eggs saying things like "21 Newman! 21 eggs already! I'm better than you Newman!", while mocking and insulting Newman the whole time, and calling him a "phony".
>Eventually, Brando consumed 51 eggs before being removed from the party, 1 more than Newman's character did in Cool Hand Luke. As he was being escorted out, he reportedly said "51 eggs Newman! I beat you! You couldn't eat 51 eggs because you're a phony, Newman. I'm better than you, and always will be Newman! Don't ever forget that!"
And yet Alien = Alien3 > Aliens, and Scott's origin bullshit was eventually so bad nobody even cared
Who'd have thought it