a) Fede's theory about the Alien creature
Fede went with the idea that the less we understand about the Alien creature, the scarier it is. He thought that we are afraid of things that we cannot understand, and above all, things that we cannot understand that have a human element.
He did what he could to bring the designs back to the original concept. The production embraced the biomechanical aspects of the creatures that were abandoned at one point. He found it to be something more fascinating and scarier than if it's just an organic creature
- Fede Alvarez: The less you understand about the creature, the scarier it is. We are afraid of things that we cannot understand, and above all, things that we cannot understand that have a human element (https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2024-08-07/director-fede-alvarez-alien-romulus-ridley-scott-horror-interview).
- Fede Alvarez: It's pretty faithful, we're trying to take the designs back to the original concept. We do embrace the biomechanical aspects of the creatures that were abandoned at one point. There was something about that that I find fascinating and scarier than if it's just an organic creature. (Total Film, August 2024)
b) Need for practical special effects
b.i) Fede appalled by bad CGI
Like many people, Fede was appalled by bad CGI in movies and so his experience of it had been ruined. But he was not against it, he was all for whaever was best for the shot and whatever technique had to be applied.
They went to extremes in the movie to do things practically. They had WETA workship doing a lot of the Face Huggers. They borough back the men who worked on Aliens, for instance Shane Mahan who sculpted the Alien Queen's head himself, and so was in charge of building all of the alien beasts in the movie.
b.ii) What the original Alien film makers had done
Based on Giger’s designs for Alien, the Xenomorph costume was originally intended to be transparent. (See: Alien: Sculpting the costume) However, effects artists in 1978 were dealing with extremely limited resources, especially compared with what’s available today, and a proper see-through silicone rubber material that wouldn’t tear with movement simply didn’t exist back then. Giger and director Scott settled for a darker, stiffer mask latex instead, and had suit performer Bolaji Badejo stick to the shadows to better hide his rigidity.
b.iii) What Jim Cameron did in Aliens
In Aliens, Cameron battled this problem by opting out of a full Xenomorph suit, and instead having his performers wear leotards with pieces of the suit attached to them, allowing for more mobility.
b.iii) The direction to go in Romulus
In Romulus,
not only did Mahan know how to capitalize upon Giger’s original idea,
but also knew ahead of time, based on working with Cameron on the
sequel, how to build the suit better and faster
They had them actually built with full animatronics for all of the creatures in the movie. He had a great time just to see these men that he admired so much back working together.
There were moments when he needed nine puppeteers to make a creature work, and these puppeteers under the table were now men in their 60s.
He would have to join in himself puppeteering these things, and he was so fascinated that they were he puppeteers for the Aliens movie itself.
There were moments though when Fede realised "Oh, if we do something here, we
could do something really cool that the puppets never could." and then they really succeeded.
b.iv) Alien beasts as offspring of the Queen
They really wanted to pay tribute to Giger’s paintings and his artwork. and for whatever reason they wanted the Xenomorph to feel like an offspring of the Queen, even though in the context of the chronological order of the films, this falls between Alien and Aliens.
You haven’t technically seen the Queen yet, but if you look at the two together, there’s a familiar trait of the Queen in our Xenomorph, in the very narrow torso.
The tails have always had a bony structure to them, but that’s also another artifact of the Queen.
The tail is very Queen-like.
b.v) Skin Surface
Fede had a lot of ideas about the skin surface, He wanted it to be very rough and sharp. His description was that ‘even if you ran your hand along it or if it bumped up against you, it would cut your skin,’ so there are a lot of ridges and sharp points to it, and the overall feeling is just very dangerous.
b.vi) Transparent
They also wanted to have
translucent panels in the legs and arms that light could come through
because there are moments in the film when light can shine through, so
that the audience can sense that there’s not a person in a suit. But in the resulting film that would be sensed.
b.vii) Newlin the suit performer
b.viii) New but familiar
They wanted this film to feel organically new, but to also feel familiar.
Shane Mahan thought that when people think of the original film, the classic thing is the traditional long head that was created, and certainly the silver teeth.
There was the human skull that Shane Mahan thought had a subliminal effect. It had been gone for a while from the Alien beasts from some of the films. They wanted to bring some of those elements back but play with the surface texture so it wasn’t just shiny and smooth. They didn’t want it to just feel like electrical tubing housing and mechanical parts. The biomechanical part was sort of reduced to just purely a biological look at this point.
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| The 'Xenomorph' in 'Alien: Romulus' |
- LA Weekly: Based on Giger’s designs for Alien,
the Xenomorph costume was originally intended to be transparent.
However, effects artists in 1978 were dealing with extremely limited
resources, especially compared with what’s available today, and a proper
see-through silicone rubber material that wouldn’t tear with movement
simply didn’t exist back then. Giger and director Scott settled for a
darker, stiffer mask latex instead, and had suit performer Bolaji Badejo
stick to the shadows to better hide his rigidity. In Aliens,
Cameron battled this problem by opting out of a full Xenomorph suit,
and instead having his performers wear leotards with pieces of the suit
attached to them, allowing for more mobility. In Romulus,
not only did Mahan know how to capitalize upon Giger’s original idea,
but also knew ahead of time, based on working with Cameron on the
sequel, how to build the suit better and faster.. (https://www.laweekly.com/building-nightmares-shane-mahan-gives-a-behind-the-scenes-dive-into-the-special-effects-of-alien-romulus/)
- Shane Mahan: The fact that we sculpt in a computer, and rapidly prototype and print full-scale sections of bodies, as opposed to sculpting entirely by clay and making molds, we can engineer the mechanisms first and then skin them with the digital sculpts afterwards, I mean you don’t have to retrofit the mechanisms into the art. We can work around it and bypass a problem. There are so many things that we can do, on a shorter production timeline, using the technology that’s available to streamline the process. People don’t realize just how much we use digital work on our side of things to create physical effects. We don’t do CGI shots, but we’re using an awful lot of digital technology to create the creatures. There’s still a great deal of hand sculpting, absolutely, for prosthetic makeups and certain things that you need to have actual clay-to-surface construction, but the advancements are tremendous. Also, with telemetry-driven animatronics and very strong servos and computer systems that run those things, everything is really quite spectacular today. (https://www.laweekly.com/building-nightmares-shane-mahan-gives-a-behind-the-scenes-dive-into-the-special-effects-of-alien-romulus/)
- LA Weekly: For the most part, the new Xenomorph suits are large 3D-printed pieces that are all interconnected and assembled like a giant model kit. Once sculpted in the computer by key artists Scott Patton and Darnell Isom, the pieces are then grown to scale, put together and finished off in hard surface modeling. From there, the pieces are remolded, cast in lightweight urethane plastic, then assembled and painted by Ryan Pintar and Parker Hensley. Shots of the alien in the film are an amalgamation of an actor in a suit, a Bunraku puppet (a Japanese style of puppeteering using rods that move the ligaments of the puppet like a shadow), and an eight-foot-tall animatronic. (https://www.laweekly.com/building-nightmares-shane-mahan-gives-a-behind-the-scenes-dive-into-the-special-effects-of-alien-romulus/)
- Shane Mahan: On this one, we cast very lightweight, urethane castings to keep the weight of the animatronic down, It was very thin. It’s got kind of an exoskeleton feel to it, and it could shell over the mechanics very easily. It paints very easily. It just has a great sort of carapace, insect-like registration to the eye when you see it. The whole thing’s conducive to the feeling of a chrysalis insect, a beetle’s shell. That was the action suit for Trevor Newlin, the suit actor. The sub-base is foam rubber, so it has a lot of detail to it, but it’s got the ability to compress and move. And then it had sections over it that were made of the same material as the animatronic, so it had a matching consistency of the chest and the arms and the head. When you intercut the two together, they feel like the same creature.(https://www.laweekly.com/building-nightmares-shane-mahan-gives-a-behind-the-scenes-dive-into-the-special-effects-of-alien-romulus/)
- LA Weekly: Both Mahan and Álvarez were consistent in their efforts to strike a balance between paying homage to the very first Alien film while also using what came before as a launching pad to break ground on new territory. (https://www.laweekly.com/building-nightmares-shane-mahan-gives-a-behind-the-scenes-dive-into-the-special-effects-of-alien-romulus/)
- Shane Mahan: b.i (https://www.laweekly.com/building-nightmares-shane-mahan-gives-a-behind-the-scenes-dive-into-the-special-effects-of-alien-romulus/)
- LA Weekly: The result is the “Scorcher Xenomorph,” a revamped design made special for Romulus. (https://www.laweekly.com/building-nightmares-shane-mahan-gives-a-behind-the-scenes-dive-into-the-special-effects-of-alien-romulus/)
- Shane Mahan: Fede had a lot of ideas about the skin surface, He wanted it to be very rough and sharp. His description was that ‘even if you ran your hand along it or if it bumped up against you, it would cut your skin,’ so there’s a lot of ridges and sharp points to it, and the overall feeling is just very dangerous. We also wanted to have translucent panels in the legs and arms that light could come through because there are moments in the film when light can shine through, so that the audience can sense that there’s not a person in a suit. You can’t sense that. (https://www.laweekly.com/building-nightmares-shane-mahan-gives-a-behind-the-scenes-dive-into-the-special-effects-of-alien-romulus/)
- LA Weekly: Of course, there are many moments in Romulus when creature actor Newlin is in a suit. The animatronic is very heavy, roughly 200 pounds, and it can’t leap around on wires or crawl up walls. That’s where matching the suit to the animatronic comes in handy. Spliced together, the audience is none the wiser.(https://www.laweekly.com/building-nightmares-shane-mahan-gives-a-behind-the-scenes-dive-into-the-special-effects-of-alien-romulus/)
- Shane Mahan: We wanted this film to feel organically new, but to also feel familiar, I think when people think of the original film, the classic thing is the traditional long head that was created, and certainly the silver teeth.
- LA Weekly: Álvarez, along with Mahan and the entire crew at Legacy Effects, felt that it was very important to be part of that again. (https://www.laweekly.com/building-nightmares-shane-mahan-gives-a-behind-the-scenes-dive-into-the-special-effects-of-alien-romulus/)
- Shane Mahan: And the subliminal skull, which had been gone for a while from the Xenos from some of the films. We wanted to bring some of those elements back but play with the surface texture so it wasn’t just shiny and smooth. We didn’t want it to just feel like electrical tubing housing and mechanical parts. The biomechanical part was sort of reduced to just purely bio at this point.(https://www.laweekly.com/building-nightmares-shane-mahan-gives-a-behind-the-scenes-dive-into-the-special-effects-of-alien-romulus/)
- Gamesradar: One of the first shots we see after establishing the
Renaissance is a swarm of Facehuggers bursting through a door. How much
are you utilizing CGI versus practical creature effects?
Fede Alvarez: Just like anybody else, I’ve been appalled by bad CG in movies that have ruined my experience of it. But I’m not against it. I think you have to do whatever’s best for the shot, and whatever technique does it better, you should do it.
We went to crazy extents in this movie to do things practically. We had Weta Workshop doing a lot of the Facehuggers. And not only that, we brought back the guys that worked on Aliens. Shane Mahan, who [sculpted] the Queen’s head himself, was the one in charge of building all the Xenomorphs for our movie.
And when I say "build", we built them. We did full animatronics for all the creatures in the movie. It was one of the best experiences in my career, just to see these guys that I admire so much, back [working together].
There were moments when we’d need nine puppeteers to make a creature work, and you had all those guys, now in their 60s, under the table. And I’m there with them because there’s not enough hands. I got to be under the table, puppeteering these things, with the guys that worked on the original Aliens. So that’s been the best part.
And then CG just comes when you really go, "Oh, if we do something here, we could do something really cool that the puppets never could." And you go there. But we really tried… and we really succeeded. (https://www.gamesradar.com/alien-romulus-trailer-breakdown-fede-alvarez-interview/)
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