leading from:
Prometheus - The Return of the Space Jockey
a.) During the time when the project that became Prometheus was still in
the stages of being at least one Prequel movie, it was revealed in the
Alien Legacy Forums on October 29th, 2010,
by a user named Necronom (which shows the person to be a Giger fan):
“I’m
not sure if any of this is known, but my Brother works in TV and one
of the crews he works with came back from Morocco about 10 days ago (I
waited until I knew it would be okay to mention). He was told that
the area of desert they were shooting (where Scott shot Kingdom of
Heaven) on had just been recced by Scott and he’s given the go ahead
for them to start work on a pyramid!
The person who told my Brother thought it was going to be a part of
Earth, but the pyramid sounds suspiciously like the original pyramid
idea for Alien, so might actually be Acheron, or another planet.”
b) Financial Times on
December 10th, 2010, it is supported though by an interview with
Nourreddine Sail, head of the Moroccan Cinema Centre, confirmed that
there would be filming in Morocco’s southern Ouarzazate film studios in
February and March of 2011.
c) It was once a trailer for the film Prometheus finally came out in
2012 we firmly discover at least strange dome shaped building with an
elongated head on top similar to Giger's design for the Harkonnen Castle
in Jodorowsky's Dune project. Some might have guessed it earlier and
some may have tried to deny the possibility because they had seen that
design for some years already in the form of Giger's Harkonnen Castle
painting and also Ridley's silo drawing. Ridley started drawing a
similar image in his storyboard for an earlier version of his egg silo
inspired by images fro Giger's Necronomicon for the early Alien
storyboards, the images were revealed as supplementary material in the
Alien DVD sets, we can see how it was loosely inspired to some extent by
Giger's Harkonnen Castle that could be found in the book Giger's
Necronomicon. He actually drew more than one of these "pyramid mounds"
in his storyboards, there appear to be a line of them in the images
shown in one of the Prometheus trailers and upon the mound he put a
simple head like structure that served as an entrance and gave up the
concept when Giger worked on his own, a breast shaped egg silo.
|
|
bottom of pyramid mound entrance from inside from International Trailer UK released
|
d) It can be easy to see where Ridley was coming from with this design in Prometheus. However at the time of the
trailers release, we find ourselves asking still about whether this
reused old concept of Giger's was supposed to be the pyramid that has
been talked about before hand in the rumour, in the way that a pyramid
was supposed to be found on the planetoid in Dan O'Bannon's original
script and had been replaced by different ideas relating to Giger's work
and labeled as an egg silo before the chamber had been integrated with
the derelict ship in the way it's finally found in the Alien movie
 |
| Ridley's Egg Silo sketch |
e).
On April 18, 2012 , we can now firmly tie the news of the pyramid that was going to be built in
Morocco and the presence of the ancient alien structure on the alien
planet together. Going back to find out whether this strange building is
exactly the
pyramid structure talked about in the early rumours, Spotlightreport
revealed that Morocco was the initial location where their alien planet
would be filmed and this planet landscape would feature the alien
building:
 |
| Giger's Dune II Castle Harkonnen |
f) "
When the
crew of the Prometheus land on the alien planet at the core of their
expedition, they find an inhospitable, barren environment and a strange,
vast alien structure. It will, assures director Ridley Scott, look like
nothing we’ve seen before in science fiction, and the production went
to great lengths to shoot on location in Iceland, at a location so
remote that the cast, crew and equipment had to be airlifted in.
Interesting article; Moebius said ones that Star Wars and the other movies like Alien copied the idea of Dune's Jodorowsky, this is the level of the important of that project of Jodorowsky that lamentably never looked the light.
ReplyDeleteMany thanks for this extraordinary post.
One thing about Moebius' work, it certainly seems that there were keen fans of his in the Star Wars team, and they'll have been borrowing from his work in Metal Hurlant and Heavy Metal for sure, while George Lucas can be accused of borrowing ideas from Frank Herbert's Dune. Thanks!
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