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That Alien thread yesterday has re-awoken something in me
so here we go, ALien Resurrection trivia thread
* Joss Whedon originally scripted the Newborn creature as a four-legged, eyeless, bone-white creature with red veins running along the sides of its head. It had an inner jaw, similar to the all the other aliens. It also had a pair of pincers on the sides of his head. These pincers were used to hold its prey still as it drained the prey of blood with its inner jaw. The creature was also larger, nearly the size of the queen alien. In later script revisions, the creature was changed into a "more believable" hybrid of human and alien.
* The first draft of the script contained an action sequence that took place in a garden contained within the spaceship "Auriga," with Ripley driving an electrically-powered jeep to avoid aliens attacking from all sides. This was to take place after the scene in the chapel but before the sequence where the Newborn is introduced. The sequence was cut due largely to budget constraints.
* The first draft of the script included a different climactic fight between Ripley, Call, and the Newborn. Originally, after the Betty crash-landed on Earth, Ripley and Call were to battle the Newborn on a snowy mountain, using a "Harvester", a reaper-like farm machine which they had found during the garden chase sequence (which was also cut from the film due to budget limits).
* Nigel Phelps based the design of the spaceship "Betty" on a jackhammer. The "Auriga" was originally to be a vertical structure, but he abandoned this idea once he realized the difficulty of capturing the scope of such a ship design on film.
* Winona Ryder nearly drowned during the filming of the underwater scene.
* Sigourney Weaver made the behind-the-back half-court basketball shot successfully after two weeks of basketball practice, tutored by a basketball coach. Her conversion rate during that two weeks was about one shot in from every six. When the day came to shoot the scene, director Jean-Pierre Jeunet wanted to have the ball dropped in from above, rather than wait for Weaver to sink the shot herself, which "would probably take about 200 takes". Weaver insisted that the she could get the shot in herself, which she was finally allowed to do. She sunk the shot on the very first take, even though she was six feet further past the three-point line. Ron Perlman was completely stunned (and thoroughly impressed), and turned directly at the camera and broke character, saying, "Oh my God!" The editors looked at the shot and decided that there was "enough room to get the scissors in". Weaver was excited about making the shot, but Jeunet was concerned that audiences would believe the shot to be faked due to the ball leaving the frame. Upon Weaver's insistence, he kept the shot as it was. Weaver described the miracle shot as "one of the best moments in her life", after her wedding day and the birth of her daughter, of course.
* Jean-Pierre Jeunet's first solo credit as a director.
* The alien eggs were made to appear more vivid and pulsating at the request of director Jean-Pierre Jeunet. After watching Alien (1979), he thought the eggs were too static.
* In the scene where Dominique Pinon appears out of an elevator, his line originally was "Who were you expecting? The Easter Bunny?" However, Pinon kept saying "Eastern Bunny", to which his fellow actors would break out in laughter. The crew even started to print T-shirts with this line.
* The opening shot of Ripley cloned, albeit as a young girl, was based on photographs that Sigourney Weaver had given the special effects crew of herself as a child.
* Sigourney Weaver was paid $11 million to come back as Ripley, more than the entire cost of Alien (1979).
* Jean-Pierre Jeunet originally wanted to cast a woman as the main villain but the studio refused, seeing as the film already had two female leads.
* Although it appears that the cast spend most of the time wandering up and down endless spaceship corridors, in reality there were only two built for the film.
* As the film progresses, the walls of the ship's corridors become darker and more ominous.
* Milk had to be added to the underwater set as the water was simply too transparent to be convincing.
* The underwater scenes took three weeks to film.
* The Newborn was specifically given eyes to answer some of the criticism that had been made earlier about how the alien could actually see, as it had no apparent eyes.
* The genitals of the Newborn had to be digitally removed.
* The underwater segment was shot on a specially constructed sound stage on the Fox lot, which was converted into a permanent water-tank. It took nearly a week to fill it with water.
* The actors were subjected to about 15 underwater training sessions in swimming pools around the Los Angeles area before arriving at the underwater set where they underwent a further 2 weeks of training before anything was shot. Sigourney Weaver missed most of this because she had been appearing in a play on Broadway just prior to filming.
* Actor Ron Perlman nearly drowned while filming the underwater sequence. At one point, when trying to surface, he hit his head on a sprinkler in the ceiling, knocking him out cold. He was rescued by nearby film crew members.
* Joss Whedon went through five different versions of the final battle with the "Newborn" creature, the first four versions of which all took place on Earth in such settings as a hospital maternity ward, a giant junkyard, a snowy forest and cliffside, and a desert.
* The Auriga interactive computer is named "Father." In the original Alien (1979), the computer's name was "Mother." There are even compatible scenes where people yell at Mother or Father for not responding to them.
* Writer Joss Whedon wrote Christie's character with Yun-Fat Chow in mind. Yun-Fat's manager and producer Terence Chang turned down the role for him.
* Leland Orser has "crazed convulsions" when the Alien is about to burst out of his chest, similar to what his character experiences in Se7en (1995).
* In the theatrical release, H.R. Giger is not credited for his part in the design of the Aliens. The video release has his name in the closing credits.
* Originally, the fourth alien movie was to be a rendition of the popular comic Aliens Vs. Predator.
* Jean-Pierre Jeunet wanted to have a scene where a mosquito stings Ripley, then vanishes into smoke because of her acid blood. Eventually, he dropped the idea after the SFX team told him how much it would cost.
* Elgyn's spoken landing code for the Auriga is, of course, "EA-TM-E".
* The character of Dr. Wren was originally written for Bill Murray, with the intent of reuniting him with Sigourney Weaver, his co-star from Ghost Busters (1984).
* Winona Ryder agreed to do this film even before reading the script. She stated that she "didn't care if she died in the first scene", she'd do it. Ryder claimed that then she could boast about being in an "Alien" movie to her younger brothers.
* When pre-production was underway, the original 'Alien Queen' could not be located and the molds that were used to build the original were damaged beyond usefulness. Fortunately, the original life-size puppet was located... in the personal collection of an avid _Alien(1979)_ fan.
* During the production of the Alien Quadrilogy DVD set, Frantic Films was brought in to re-shoot the title sequence where the bug's teeth gives way to a shot of the Auriga.
* The studio wanted to cut the scene preceding Ripley's encounter with the alien queen that can be interpreted as a love scene, but decided to keep it only after Sigourney Weaver told them she would not promote the film if the scene was cut.
* Ripley's outfit was going to be a different one than the dark red uniform she is wearing for the most of the film. After Sigourney Weaver saw Kim Flowers (Hillard) on the set, she wanted to wear the same costume. Hillard can be seen in the exact same outfit in the underwater scene.
* Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet spoke almost no English at the time of shooting and had translators on set at all times.
* Jean-Pierre Jeunet wanted to shoot additional action scenes using a fully digital Newborn creature. He wanted Ripley to be chased by the Newborn in the escape from the Betty scene, but could not realize it due to budget constraints. In the final film, a full-size Newborn creature can be seen in only one scene and almost all of the scenes involving the creature are animatronic.
* The $50-60 million budget was significantly lower than the director and writers originally imagined. Therefore, sets were toned down in scale and a more claustrophobic shooting approach with a lot of close-ups to characters' faces was taken.
* Danny Boyle was Fox's first choice to direct. He turned it down to work on A Life Less Ordinary (1997).
* David Cronenberg was also an early choice to direct but later passed.
* The part where the two aliens kill the third to get out of their cell, the intestines and guts and blood 'melting' through the floor was actually a platform descending with the intestines over top of it to give the impression of it melting through the floor.
* H.R. Giger was openly displeased that he wasn't given a credit for his alien designs and fired off a letter of protest to 20th Century Fox.
* The ricocheting bullet that takes out a soldier standing behind Gary Dourdan was an unused idea from Jean-Pierre Jeunet's La cité des enfants perdus (1995).
* Sigourney Weaver signed on to the film largely because of one scene in particular - when Ripley 8 encounters her previous 7 aborted genetic incarnations.
* To play Ripley 7, Sigourney Weaver stuck her head up through a hole in the floor so it could be seamlessly grafted onto the grotesque body that the make-up department had created for her.
* For the luckless human victims which the renegades find, already having had the aliens burst out of their stomachs, the crew devised costumes which had stomach entrails stitched onto the outside. This was directly inspired by a T-shirt that was popular around the time of the release of Alien (1979) in which an alien fetus (and a lot of blood) was attached to the front.
* Ron Perlman actually did his own stunt of hanging upside down off a ladder with his legs wrapped around the rung, firing two guns. The next day, when he came to take a shower, he discovered that he had severely lacerated the backs of his knees in doing so.
* To achieve the shot where the camera travels inside Leland Orser to see the alien fetus about to be birthed, Orser had a camera shoved down his throat and then pulled out. This was then reversed.
* In her initial scenes with the Newborn, Sigourney Weaver makes a point of not looking in its eyes. This was a lesson learned from when she made Gorillas in the Mist: The Story of Dian Fossey (1988) in not making initial eye contact with a potentially dangerous animal.
* Producer David Giler was initially opposed to the making of a fourth film.
* In order to heighten contrasts, cinematographer Darius Khondji added silver to the printing process. This had the result of making the dark colors richer and giving everything else a metallic tinge. He also used an electric blue tint for the underwater sequence.
* Winona Ryder was a big fan of the first movie and jumped at the chance of appearing alongside her icon, Sigourney Weaver, for that reason.
* Jean-Pierre Jeunet's long time partner, Marc Caro, with whom he had made Delicatessen (1991) and La cité des enfants perdus (1995), had no interest in taking part in the film. Caro did fly out to Los Angeles for several weeks to provide some costume and art direction designs.
* This is the only Alien movie not to be shot in England. One of the reasons for this was that co-producer Sigourney Weaver didn't want to travel.
* The production had trouble finding enough studio space as major productions like Titanic (1997), Starship Troopers (1997) and The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) were all taking up most of the available studio space in Hollywood.
* The underwater sequence marked the first time that Winona Ryder had gone underwater since a near-drowning incident that happened to her when she was 12 years old. The actress suffered a complete anxiety attack on the first day of filming in the underwater set.
* One of the concept designs of the Newborn involved the creature sporting a likeness of Sigourney Weaver's face. This was abandoned as it bore too much of a similarity to Sil, the alien creature in Species (1995).
* The film's model miniatures were shot at a former Howard Hughes aircraft plant in Los Angeles. Visual effects supervisor Erik Henry and visual effects director of photography Rick Fichter used an advanced motion control camera system that required constant vigilance and re-alignment as the area was prone to small earthquakes and tremors.
* WILHELM SCREAM: A soldier in the last escape pod when the alien enters it, right before Perez asks for the grenade.
* Leland Orser's character is called Larry Purvis in the credits. In the original script, he was supposed to have his last name on his jumpsuit, and Christie calls him by that name. This scene was changed in the final cut, and the only person who ever refers to him as Purvis is Call, when they get ready to put him in the Betty's freezing chamber towards the end of the film.
* The gaps between the four Alien films steadily decreased. There was seven years between the release of Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986), six between Aliens and Alien³ (1992), and five between Alien³ and Alien: Resurrection (1997). This pattern was broken in 2001.
* Joss Whedon has commented on his dissatisfaction with the movie. Fans had speculated that the finished article deviated from his original script in some fatal manner, however he put such rumors to rest. His dialogue, action and plot were essentially intact. However he had written with a playful, tongue-in-cheek tone, which didn't work when the director decided to "play it straight". Eventually the Betty and her crew became the prototypes for Whedon's _"Firefly" (2001)_, which captured the tone he had aimed for in this movie.
* The final of four Alien movies starring Sigourney Weaver.
* The script originally called for Newt, the child from Aliens (1986) to be cloned. But the studio changed it to Ripley instead because she is the anchor of the series.
* Joss Whedon was unhappy with everything about the film. He later commented in 2005: "It wasn't a question of doing everything differently, although they changed the ending; it was mostly a matter of doing everything wrong. They said the lines but they said them all wrong. And they cast it wrong. And they designed it wrong. And they scored it wrong. They did everything wrong they could possibly do. That's actually a fascinating lesson in filmmaking. Because everything they did reflects back to the script or looks like something from it. And people assume that if I hated it then they'd changed the script...but it wasn't so much they changed it, they executed it in such a ghastly fashion they rendered it unwatchable.
>>> WARNING: Here Be Spoilers <<<
Trivia items below here contain information that may give away important plot points. You may not want to read any further if you've not already seen this title.
* SPOILER: The character of Dan Hedaya (General Perez) was initially going to die in a decompression scene, with him being sucked through a small hole in a window. However, Jean-Pierre Jeunet thought this was a much too spectacular death for such a minor character, so this idea was used for the death of the Newborn. Hedaya's eventual death scene (with him being bitten in the back of his head, and observing a piece of his own brain) was not approved by the studio, but was kept in the movie after the response of a test audience proved quite favorable.
* SPOILER: The film ends with the Newborn being sucked out of a tiny hole in the spaceship's hull, an idea that was considered for the first film but abandoned because of budgetary constraints. It was also proposed for dispatching a minor character in one of the drafts of Alien³ (1992).
* SPOILER: The androids' names in the Alien films follow a pattern: in Alien (1979), its Ash (A); in Aliens (1986) and Alien³ (1992) its Bishop (B); and in Alien: Resurrection (1997) its Call (C).