Alexan­dre O Philippe on explor­ing the ori­gins of Rid­ley Scott’s Alien

After delv­ing into Psy­cho​’s famous show­er scene in his 2017 doc­u­men­tary ⁷⁸⁄₅₂, direc­tor Alexan­dre O Philippe has turned his atten­tions to anoth­er land­mark genre work with Mem­o­ry: The Ori­gins of Alien. Just as Alfred Hitchcock’s black-and-white slash­er shocked audi­ences in 1960, so Rid­ley Scott’s sem­i­nal sci-fi hor­ror thrilled and ter­ri­fied cin­ema­go­ers in 1979, and Philippe’s fas­ci­nat­ing lat­est explores the hows, whys and what-ifs of its genesis.

“My first mem­o­ry of the film was actu­al­ly the poster, which I remem­ber being real­ly obsessed with as a kid,” says Philippe. ​“It just gave me this great desire to watch the film because I loved hor­ror movies from a very young age, but there was also this absolute sense of dread that match­es the feel­ing when you watch the film.”

One aston­ish­ing rev­e­la­tion in the doc­u­men­tary is that 20^th Cen­tu­ry Fox want­ed to cut the space jock­ey scene because, in their view, it served no plot func­tion. It seems unthink­able now that such an icon­ic moment from the film might have nev­er been shot. From Philippe’s per­spec­tive, the space jock­ey ​“does much more than any plot point can do because it cre­ates an envi­ron­ment where your imag­i­na­tion can go places, and it’s very sim­i­lar to the open­ing sequence in Iraq in The Exor­cist. It doesn’t tech­ni­cal­ly serve a plot func­tion, but it sets the tone and mood for the entire film.”

He adds, ​“Those are very impor­tant cin­e­ma moments, and as far as Alien goes, to me it’s the moment they enter The Derelict and essen­tial­ly cross the thresh­old into that Gigeresque, ethe­re­al land­scape. That’s the most extra­or­di­nary part of the film for me where every­thing changes in that moment, and it includes of course the space jock­ey and also the egg cham­ber and the face-hugger.”

Philippe’s film explores the sub­ver­sive side of Alien too, com­mu­ni­cat­ing its own ideas influ­enced by mythol­o­gy that were not nec­es­sar­i­ly the intent of the sto­ry­tellers. ​“If you had asked Dan O’Bannon, HR Giger or Rid­ley Scott about the mytho­log­i­cal mean­ing and res­o­nance of the film back in the day, I don’t think they would have been able to express what they were doing,” Philippe explains. ​“There are so many influ­ences and forces at work in the mak­ing of a film like Alien. Scott went on record as say­ing that it’s basi­cal­ly a haunt­ed house movie in space. On a basic lev­el, of course, it is that – but it’s so much more than that.

He con­tin­ues, ​“There are cer­tain rare occa­sions where the movie itself finds a way to bring itself to life in a par­tic­u­lar way with­out the con­scious involve­ment of the film­mak­ers. It’s a pret­ty eso­teric idea, but I look at the paint­ing by Giger in his Necro­nom­i­con, which is essen­tial­ly the xenomorph, and it’s pret­ty much as it is in the film. It has eyes, but you remove the eyes and that’s what you have. That crea­ture exist­ed while Dan was work­ing on the script, it exist­ed before Rid­ley Scott was even a thought as a direc­tor, and so it almost feels like that crea­ture was wait­ing for the right sto­ry to bring itself to life. It’s pret­ty crazy stuff.”

The com­par­isons Philippe draws to films and com­ic books chal­lenges the notion that Alien is an ​‘orig­i­nal’ mas­ter­work. ​“Alien it is both orig­i­nal and uno­rig­i­nal,” he says. ​“It’s uno­rig­i­nal in the sense that sto­ry exist­ed in the B‑movie realm and in com­ic books, and it’s a retelling of an old sto­ry and Giger taps into imagery that is not com­plete­ly nov­el. It’s root­ed in cer­tain ideas of mytholo­gies of the past, but there is no ques­tion that he was a tru­ly vision­ary artist, and that’s true of every great work of art.

“A great work of art doesn’t come out of nowhere,” he adds. ​“It pays trib­ute, it taps into and ref­er­ences our past con­scious­ly or uncon­scious­ly, or both, and it also finds a way to be com­plete­ly orig­i­nal and tells a sto­ry that we’ve heard before in a new way. And that’s what the great artists do and that’s why we keep going to watch movies, and why we keep read­ing sto­ries in the hope that we are going to find some­thing that is going to feel new, and yet con­nect us to our past.”

Philippe pin­points a sin­gle moment which he believes deter­mined the film’s fate. ​“At the end of the day, it all comes down to the chest­burster scene; if they had messed that up, the whole movie would have fall­en flat on its face.” How­ev­er, he does acknowl­edge that it was a film blessed with unbe­liev­able good for­tune out­side of this one moment. ​“When you look at the mak­ing of Alien, nobody real­ly knew how it was going to man­i­fest itself. And the fact that so many things went wrong, but did so in a way that was serendip­i­tous and mag­i­cal, that’s what movies are all about. It’s real­ly remark­able that they pulled it off the way that they did.”

Mem­o­ry: The Ori­gins of Alien is in cin­e­mas 30 August. Read the LWLies review.