District 9 director Neill Blomkamp has claimed Hollywood is ready to green light his highly-anticipated take on Alien, which would be led by original star Sigourney Weaver.
Last month Blomkamp released extensive concept art of Weaver as Ellen Ripley, the lead protagonist in four Alien movies between 1979 and 1997, with the predictable explosive online reaction from fans of the space saga. Now the South African film-maker, who recently worked with Weaver on his new film Chappie, has revealed in an interview with Uproxx that the main obstacle in the way of the new film is not studio intransigence, but his own uncertainty over whether to proceed.
“Basically, what happened was, when Chappie got heavily into post-production, I could take my foot off the gas a bit,” revealed Blomkamp. “I was thinking about what I wanted to do next and I’ve been wanting to make an Alien film for like years and years.
“Speaking to Sigourney Weaver, when we were doing Chappie, she set off a bunch of thoughts in my head — I had come up with an idea that didn’t have Sigourney, it was a different idea. But I spent all of the shooting time with her, it was like, holy s***, that could actually be really interesting. When I came back to Vancouver, I had an entire year to work on Chappie. And when I wasn’t needed in the edit, I could think about Alien. So, I basically developed an entire movie and I did all of this artwork as well.”
The artwork features Sigourney in a “space jockey” helmet similar to those seen in both 1979’s Alien and recent Ridley Scott spin-off Prometheus, as well as an image of Ripley with Aliens’ Michael Biehn as Hicks. Blomkamp did not reveal how his proposed movie connects to other films in the series, but said studio 20th Century Fox was ready to make it.
“There’s a high possibility, a high degree of chance that it happens that I go back and try to get Alien made,” he said. “I’m the problem. Fox, they would make it. Like, tomorrow. They would make it.”
Blomkamp’s comments are bound to leave fans of the space saga bamboozled for a number of reasons. Firstly, Weaver’s Ripley died at the end of 1992’s Alien 3 (though she was conveniently brought back as a human-xenomorph clone in 1997’s Alien: Resurrection). Secondly, Scott is supposed to be working on a sequel to 2012’s Prometheus, which is expected to continue the story of Noomi Rapace’s Elisabeth Shaw and android David (Michael Fassbender).
Scott said in September that the new film would follow the unlikely pair on their mission to find the home world of the Engineer aliens introduced in Prometheus, where they hope to discover why the human-like creatures want to destroy mankind. He said that several drafts of the screenplay had been written and confirmed the xenomorphs would not feature.
