Hurt took over the job the very next day.ĩ. (Ironic? Yes.) He had already prepped for the role by having a chest and neck built for his big chestburster scene. Jon Finch, who had played Macbeth in Roman Polanski’s 1971 film version, had to drop out of the role on one of the first days of shooting, on account of a bronchial attack. John Hurt was not the first actor cast as Kane. Discovered in a London pub, he got the job after several lithe female models (and Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca in Star Wars) tested for the part.Ĩ.

Despite Ridley Scott’s initial hesitance at having the Alien be a man in a suit, the production eventually cast a six-foot-ten Nigerian-born graphic arts student named Bolaji Badejo. Moebius’s main contribution to the film was the bubble-helmeted surface suits, which were later given a medieval/Japanese samurai warrior flair.ħ. But when O’Bannon’s Alien script (initially titled Star Beast) started to move forward, Giger came back on to work on designs for the creature, the derelict spaceship, the planet surface, the Space Jockey (more on that later), the chestburster, and the Alien eggs.Ħ. After that project fell apart, the group all scattered to the wind. When Giger and O’Bannon met for the first time, in a Paris hotel, Giger was smoking opium. The filmmaker gathered an odd contingent of creatives around him - Dan O’Bannon (who at that time was known for doing the special effects on John Carpenter’s Dark Star), Salvador Dalí (as an adviser), Jean Giraud (better known as the comics artist Moebius), and Swiss surrealist painter H.R. In the mid-seventies, Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo) was assigned to direct a film version of Frank Herbert’s Dune. Such a large blast of fake blood blew into actress Veronica Cartwright’s face that she fell backwards over a small table and fell on her back, cowboy boots in the air.Ĥ.

When it came time to shoot the film, the actors were obviously aware of what the scene involved - having read the script - but they had no idea it would be so gory.

I always imagine the director jerking off, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to see that woman get chopped to pieces.’ No, I want to see a man get it because I knew it would make the men uneasy.”ģ. O’Bannon also enjoyed the idea of having a man give birth: “Having the victim in a horror film always be a woman was a cheap shot. In the midst of writing a version of the story, he awoke one night with the idea for the chestburster, which mirrored his own suffering.Ģ. According to Jason Zinoman’s history of seventies horror films, Shock Value, writer Dan O’Bannon suffered from Crohn’s disease, a disorder that resulted in extreme gastrointestinal pain. The first film’s gory central set piece, in which a creature explodes out of the torso of one of the Nostromo’s crewmembers, was part of the story from the very beginning.

Alien films