a) Having ideas about a show
Rumours
came about the creation of an Alien televisions series around the end
of 2018 before news soon came about in 2019 that Noah Hawley pitched the
series for FX TV
His idea was that on some level, Alien was the complete opposite of Star Trek, near enough about humanity at its worst
He thought about the time that Sigourney Weaver as Ripley says, ‘I don’t know which species is worse. At least they don’t screw each other over for a percentage.’
b) Expanding the Life cycle routine
With that the Alien has this life cycle, where it goes from egg, to chestburster, to xenomorph, and there becomes a certain routine to it.
If there was two hours of action, then there was still going to be eight hours left.
At the pitching, he tried to tell them what the show was about.
His idea was to take the alien out of the show, and then find out what was the show about?
What are the themes, who are the characters, and what is the human drama?
Then the aliens would be dropped back in so that they could say "This is great. Not only is there great human drama, but there’s aliens!’"
What appeared to have happened was that Fox executive Emma Watts was said to have shot down the pitch and it has also been said that Fox head Stacey Snider also was responsible for turning down the idea
- Noah Hawley is one of the most interesting and respected filmmakers
working today. Sure, he didn’t have the best of luck with his debut
feature, “Lucy in the Sky,” but his work on TV is pretty much
second-to-none, as “Fargo” continues to impress. But that doesn’t mean
he just is able to get every project he wants greenlit by studios. In
fact, as discussed in a new Observer interview, he had a pitch for
“Alien” that isn’t likely going to get made, as it will join the ranks
of his unproduced “Star Trek” feature. And as you might expect, Ridley
Scott’s sci-fi/horror franchise is very different than “Star Trek.”
“‘Alien’ is on some level the complete opposite of ‘Stark Trek,’” Hawley explained. “It’s sort of about humanity at its worst. There’s this moment in the second film when Sigourney says, ‘I don’t know which species is worse. At least they don’t screw each other over for a percentage.’ If you look at what Aliens tends to be, it’s usually a trapped story – trapped in a ship, trapped in a prison, etc. And because the Alien has this life cycle to it, where it goes from egg, to chestburster, to xenomorph, there becomes a certain routine to it.”
So, with the “Alien” franchise being so different than “Star Trek,” how did Hawley approach this unique style of sci-fi franchise?
“I thought it would be interesting if you could expand,” he said. “If you’re going to make something for television, you’ve got 10 hours let’s say. Even if you have a lot of action, like two hours, then you’re still going to have eight hours left. So what is the show about? That’s what I tried to talk to them about.”
Hawley continued, “As I did with ‘Legion,’ the exercise is: Let’s take the superhero stuff out of the show and see if it’s still a great show. What’s the show about? Let’s take the Alien out of the show. What’s the show about? What are the themes, who are the characters and what is the human drama? Then we drop the aliens back in and we go, ‘This is great. Not only is there great human drama, but there’s aliens!’”
While an “Alien” series without a xenomorph sounds a bit like “Prometheus” (and we all know how badly most fans responded to that), it’s hard to argue with the guy that not only did an ‘X-Men’ show (“Legion”) without superheroes and was able to make the “Fargo” TV series not only work as a concept but actually become one of the best shows around. So, yes, we should give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to a proposed “Alien” series.
The only problem is that it doesn’t seem like it’s ever going to happen. Much like “Star Trek” on the big screen, no one really knows what to do with “Alien” right now. Maybe that’s for the best. (https://theplaylist.net/noah-hawley-alien-tv-series-20200925/) - “Watts has long been known as a very strong executive, and several have said she is about the only one there who has been clued in on the Disney plans. Does she have the clout to prevent Fox film properties from being repurposed as TV projects or as streaming projects on Hulu and Disney+ with low budgets and no back-ends? Sources said that in the recent past she fended off an attempt by [Noah] Hawley and FX to take the Aliens franchise and turn it into a miniseries… She did that before the Disney deal, when it was a whole different ballgame.”(https://bloody-disgusting.com/tv/3552491/legion-creator-noah-hawley-fx-wanted-make-alien-miniseries-fox-shot/)
- Collider: Jumping
into another thing, I heard and I could be wrong about this thing, you
had pitched or had an idea for an Alien series. Um, is that true?
Noah Hawley: That I pitched or had an idea for one. Er, you know, a few years ago, FX asked me if that, if that was a thing, would that be a thing for me, erm and we had a conversation about it but it didn't go very far and obviously it doesn't seem to be a thing, Alien for TV , but you know, it's, I mean it's such a great, it's such a great story, those, those, certainly those original two movies, you know, uh, um, are so iconic, but yeah, I don't know, it's not, it's not on my brain right now(https://youtu.be/oqAqmoLAJTA?t=150 Collider, 11th October 2020) - Deadline: We’ve known for some time that film chief Stacey Snider won’t be part of the Disney future, even though she has been in her office this week. Watts has long been known as a very strong executive, and several have said she is about the only one there who has been clued in on the Disney plans. Does she have the clout to prevent Fox film properties from being repurposed as TV projects or as streaming projects on Hulu and Disney+ with low budgets and no back-ends? Sources said that in the recent past she fended off an attempt by Hawley and FX to take the Aliens franchise and turn it into a miniseries, and when Searchlight once wanted to do something with The Omen, she held fast because who wants to give up your franchises? She did that before the Disney deal, when it was a whole different ballgame. (https://deadline.com/2019/03/fox-film-disney-paul-feig-universal-fox-layoffs-1202579443/)
- Noah Hawley: Obviously, they trust me after all these years, and the writing was on the page for the first year. So, in success, you tell the story and tell the story until the story is done. They're very good at that at FX, of not wanting you to milk something that feels like it's over. Legion, for me, I thought ended quite elegantly in that last season with a sort of perfect circle, literally back to the opening image. If they'd said we want one more season, now you've got a detour and you’ve gotta sort of add a thing that's not organic to the full story. It's just better if the story itself can drive how long it is. We want quality, not quantity. (collider https://collider.com/alien-series-multiple-seasons/, January 2024)
- Noah Hawley: I think that endings are what gives a story meaning, and so you should never start a story without some sense of where it's going because then you can really build that meaning into it. (collider https://collider.com/alien-series-multiple-seasons/, January 2024)
- Noah Hawley: With Legion, I had what felt like a three-act structure to it that I didn't know if that would be three seasons or five seasons, or whatever it was, but I sort of knew what a beginning, middle, and end was. And here, similarly, I knew that their desire was for a recurring series, not a limited series, and I had an idea that I was excited about, that I could see the escalation of it from one year to another. That's where we ended up not pitching them having a bible or pitching them blow-by-blow, but saying, “Big picture: this is the first movement, this is the second movement, and we're ultimately going here." (collider https://collider.com/alien-series-multiple-seasons/, January 2024)
His next TV adaptation: ‘Alien’
After putting his stamp on “Fargo,” Hawley is in the process of adapting another established cult movie, “Alien,” into a TV series for FX. He is directing the first hour of the sci-fi spin-off, which was first announced in December 2020, and said about 70% of it was shot before filming was suspended over the summer. With the industry beginning to power back up now that the writers’ and actors’ strikes have ended, Hawley confirmed plans to resume production in 2024.
“The plan now is to go back in January, prep the rest of the season — it’s an eight episode season — and start shooting again in early February through July. We’re filming in Bangkok, which is another world away and has been such a great experience for me. It’s aliens and spaceships and science fiction; it’s a whole new palette and genre.
It’s weird to start, then stop and wait. I was able to cut together what I shot and to really think deeply about what have I learned and do some script revisions, so there’s also invaluable-ness to the opportunity of time, which is something in TV you never get because you’re always racing.”
The series is set in a time period before the events in the 1979 sci-fi horror classic, and it is the first story in the franchise that takes place on Earth. As Hawley explained, building out the mythology is what made adapting the “Alien” universe for TV compelling to him.
“The prequels aside, because those are historical documents, what do we really know about the ‘Alien’ universe? We know there’s a company called Weyland-Yutani. We don’t know a lot more about it. We don’t know what the government structure is, the politics of it, what’s Earth — none of that. That’s liberating on some level to not have to thread various needles. But the challenge is also that we’re only ever in these artificial environments, the spaceship or a prison or whatever. What does an apartment look like on ‘Alien’? That basic stuff of the palette of ‘Alien,’ the design of that ship, that dripping is so specific. I think that the sweaty aesthetic of ‘Alien’ plays very well into climate change and the hot, wet future that we’re all moving toward. Technology in the first two movies was rooted in the retro futurism of the ’70s and ’80s. Is that our aesthetic? Those challenges really excite me because I would much rather deal with computers that look like that than holograms and feel like I’m in an Apple store.
“What’s rooted in the horror of ‘Alien’ is discovery. The life cycle of this creature, besides being insane, is truly terrifying. It’s an egg, and inside that egg is a creature that attaches to your face. I’m already out. But then that creature that attaches to your face lays another creature inside of you — hold on a second. Then that creature bursts out of your chest and grows to 9 feet tall? What is this creature? The experience of watching “Alien” for the first time is so visceral; it just gets worse and worse and worse and worse. [Director] James Cameron was able to take that and turn it into an action movie in which you knew what the life cycle was, so there was the horror of anticipation. But who’s laying those eggs? So he added that other element to it. But after that, there’s no discovery or surprise, we’re just doing that again and again.
The challenge for me is: Is there a way that we can take the audience back to “wait, what’s happening? What does this thing do?” That was the first challenge. The second challenge, which is why I think it justifies a show with multiple hours of storytelling, is that it’s not just a monster movie. It’s about humanity trapped between this primordial “they want to eat us” past and the AI future, and they’re both trying to kill us. We’ve created these tools that are turning on us, or if we program them correctly, we’ll go insane. Those elements of humanity, artificial intelligence, trans-humanism — ‘what’s the future of humanity?’ is a really interesting thing to talk about right now. Combined with the revenge of nature — we’re experiencing that now as weather or viruses or whatever. If we’re in a place where our self-driving cars are gonna kill us, or we’re going to drown in them, there’s a story to be placed in the middle of that.” (https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2023-11-22/noah-hawley-fargo-season-5)There isn’t just one live-action Alien series in the works, but two of them.
According to a source, one of them is said to have Ridley Scott as an executive producer and is going to be for Hulu. I would imagine that his production company Scott Free Productions would be involved as they’ve had previous interests in television projects including Ridley’s current project, an android series titled Raised By Wolves for TNT (which is not Alien related and it’s another thing entirely) that is filming in Cape Town, South Africa.
Details are scarce at the moment but there might be multiple seasons that could tackle different corners/eras of the franchise, not unlike Noah Hawley’s series Fargo.
In theory, I could see them possibly filling gaps in the franchise or crafting brand new stories to tell within the Alien universe. It still seems to be the very early days with these projects and I can’t exactly speak to what they’ll be about at the moment.
The Disney-Fox merger is a couple of months away but that wouldn’t stop from Fox developing their own in-house projects. Disney CEO Bob Iger has also suggested in an earnings call recently that they’re open to Fox continuing mature programming/franchises and we’ve already seen Marvel Television launch four mature animated shows on Hulu with M.O.D.O.K., Hit-Monkey, Tigra & Dazzler, and Howard The Duck. There is a very good chance that we could see more mature projects from the Fox side of things take root at Hulu, like this Alien series from Ridley Scott.
After the less than successful box office run of Alien: Covenant it could be enough reason to pivot to television/streaming for the next little while.
When we have more information to share we will certainly update. (https://hnentertainment.co/exclusive-two-live-action-alien-series-are-in-the-works-and-ridley-scott-is-producing-one-at-hulu/ February 13, 2019)
No comments:
Post a Comment