They had the great idea to put David Fincher aboard for his first film, but then not to support the guy was very idiotic.”
The Alien series has lasted longer than anyone may have anticipated. The original directed by Ridley Scott and starring Sigourney Weaver works well as a one-off and is timeless. Still, there was room left for a sequel that James Cameron delivered perfectly in the following decade.
Since then, keeping the franchise on a straight and narrow path has been a tricky affair – as much as it is with any long-running IP in the horror realm. When the Xenomorphs weren’t bogged down in fights to the death with Predators, they were embroiled in lackluster attempts to explain their origin and expand the lore.
That’s a heavy-handed endeavor to begin with, but not a suicide mission in and of itself. The ambition of Prometheus alone didn’t kill the Alien movies’ credibility. To identify where things really started to go wrong, we have to go back decades to the production of Alien 3.
Filming on David Fincher’s debut feature was a notorious clown show that went through continuous rewrites well into principal photography and had a few directors attached, including Renny Harlin before Fincher got the thankless gig.
He brought his ideas that clashed with the desires of producers and 20th Century Fox who had the film rights then, and saw the IP as one of their golden geese. However, because of their interference, the bird laid more of a turd than an egg in the eyes of its director and its star Sigourney Weaver.
The Ripley actress expressed her sympathies for Fincher in a recent Deadline interview. “I could feel that David had to get on the phone and fight every day for us to shoot what he wanted the next day. And I’m sorry that he didn’t get a chance to make the script his own before we started,” she said. “That makes filmmaking very difficult.”
“I keenly felt the lack of studio support,” Weaver continued. “That was a transition moment when studios stopped being about ‘let’s make great films’ and started being about ‘let’s not lose money.’ They had the great idea to put David Fincher aboard for his first film, but then not to support the guy was very idiotic.”
Fincher would disown Alien 3 and say in interviews “no one hated it more” than him. Recalling his experience making it to The Guardian, he shared an account of the production parallel to Weaver’s. “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,” he said. “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. 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,” he added.
Weaver caught wind of Fincher’s feelings toward the threequel and is sorry to hear of them. “I heard recently that David has disowned the project and I’m sorry about that because I loved working with him, and I think we made a good film. I’m glad he got a chance to do his version. It was a great ensemble,” she said to Deadline.
Alien 3 has fans, including Christopher Nolan, but the aggregate footage put together to create the theatrical cut that reached screens in 1992 is undeniably imperfect. Attempts such as the “Assembly Cut” have been made to improve it over the years but even that isn’t the last word on what the film – Fincher or no Fincher – was meant to be.
Originally, the story was going to include a sect of space monks that forsook modernity and lived in a wooden citadel. This idea was tossed in favor of the prisoners in the final film. In other rejected plans, Michael Biehn was to return and his character Hicks would’ve been elevated to a lead. Lance Henriksen would have joined him while Weaver would’ve been mostly sidelined on account of a comatose Ripley.
Warring factions and Cold War allegories were also in earlier drafts to give the script a sense of contemporary geopolitics. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, those subplots too were dropped. It was a long and messy history just to get it into theaters and you can see how Alien 3 developed into the version we know in the video below.
