Sigourney Weaver says “Alien 3” studio 20th Century Fox and the film‘s director David Fincher were on different planets while making the 1992 feature film.
Weaver told Deadline that a young Fincher, making his directorial debut, had to “fight every day” for his vision of the third franchise installment. The original “Alien” was directed by Ridley Scott; “Aliens” was directed by James Cameron. A pretty good pedigree there.
While Fincher no doubt felt pressure following in those footsteps, Weaver says the studio was “idiotic” to battle the newcomer for creative control.
“I could feel that David had to get on the phone and fight every day for us to shoot what he wanted to the next day. And I’m sorry that he didn’t get a chance to make the script his own before we started,” Weaver said. “That makes filmmaking very difficult.”
She added that the original script, written by Vincent Ward, included a storyline about monks in a monastery. Her character Ripley was supposed to be in a coma for half of the feature.
“I keenly felt the lack of studio support,” Weaver said. “That was a transition moment when studios stopped being about ‘let’s make great films’ and started being about ‘let’s not lose money.’ They had the great idea to put David Fincher aboard for his first film, but then not to support the guy was very idiotic.”
Fincher has since distanced himself from “Alien 3.” Weaver gets it.
“I heard recently that David has disowned the project and I’m sorry about that because I loved working with him, and I think we made a good film,” she said. “I’m glad he got a chance to do his version. It was a great ensemble.”
Weaver added of her franchise arc, “It’s been a great ride all those different directors and different stories and different evolutions of Ripley. […] I feel like she’s never far away from me, but on the other hand I have yet to read a script that said ‘you have got to do this.’ So for me, she is in this other dimension, safe from the Alien for the time being. I don’t really think about it, but you know, it’s not completely impossible, and certainly a lot of good filmmakers are inspired by the material. How much does the public really need or want another Ripley movie? I don’t really sit around and think about it, but if it came up, I would consider it. It has come up a bunch of times, but I’m also busy doing other things. Ripley has earned her rest.”
Weaver said she was not approached for the “Alien: Romulus” reboot.
“There wasn’t a discussion about Ripley being in it,” Weaver said. “I haven’t seen the new film. I might end up seeing it. I wish them all the best for it.”
But don’t count on Fincher joining her for the screening.
In 2003, Fox released an “Assembly Cut” that was supposedly a reconstruction of Fincher’s vision. (The film had originally been re-cut after test screenings.) The “Alien 3” cast and crew helped assemble that new cut together, but Fincher was not involved.
Fincher told The Guardian in 2009 that “a lot of people hated ‘Alien 3,’ but no one hated it more than I did.” He recalled being “fired off it three times” during the two-year production.
“I had to fight for every single thing. No one hated it more than me; to this day, no one hates it more than me,” Fincher said. “It was a baptism by fire. I was very naive. For a number of years, I’d been around the kind of people who financed movies and the kind of people who are there to make the deals for movies. But I’d always had this naive idea that everybody wants to make movies as good as they can be, which is stupid. So I learned on this movie that nobody really knows, so therefore no one has to care, so it’s always going to be your fault.”
He added, “I’d always thought, ‘Well, surely you don’t want to have the 20th Century Fox logo over a shitty movie.’ And they were like, ‘Well, as long as it opens.’ So I learned then just to be a belligerent asshole, which was really, ‘You have to get what you need to get out of it.’ You have to fight for things you believe in, and you have to be smart about how you position it so that you don’t just become white noise. On that movie, I was the guy who was constantly the voice of ‘We need to do this better, we need to do this, this doesn’t make sense.’ And pretty soon, it was like in Peanuts: WOP WOP WOP WOP WOP! They’d go, ‘He’s doing that again, he’s frothing at the mouth, he seems so passionate.’ They didn’t care.”
