Noah Hawley Explains Why ‘Prometheus’ Isn’t “Useful” for His ‘Alien’ Prequel
Emmy winner Noah Hawley is teasing his highly anticipated FX Alien prequel series.
The Fargo showrunner was recently interviewed by KCRW’s The Business, hosted by Hollywood Reporter Editor-At-Large Kim Masters.
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Hawley was asked by interviewer Eric Deggans about Alien, which is set on Earth about 70 years into the future, predating the feature film franchise.
Right out of the gate, Hawley showed his understanding of the franchise by giving a rather perfect description of what Alien is really about: “The thing with Alien is that it’s not just a great monster movie. It’s the story of humanity trapped between its primordial parasitic past and its AI future, and they’re both trying to kill us. So, there’s nowhere to go. It’s really a story of does humanity deserve to survive? Does humanity’s arrogance in thinking that we’re no longer food and its arrogance in creating these AI beings who we think will do what we tell them — but ultimately might lose their mind — is there a way out?”
In director Ridley Scott’s masterful 1979 original Alien, there’s indeed both the titular primordial monster and two sinister AI elements (the murderous android Ash and the ship’s persistently unhelpful supercomputer Mother).
“There’s a moment in the second film [1986’s Aliens] where Sigourney Weaver says, ‘I don’t know which species is worse — you don’t see them screwing each other over for a percentage.’ I think there’s something really intriguing about exploring humanity in all its goods and evils and then trying to recreate for an audience those feelings you had in watching those first two films — which isn’t easy in a franchise that has had four subsequent films and another film coming out soon [Alien: Romulus], but I think I have some tricks up my sleeve.”
Deggans asked Hawley if he’s using the backstory provided in Scott’s more recent Alien prequel films — 2012’s Prometheus and 2017’s Alien: Covenant — which take place closer in the franchise’s timeline to Hawley’s own show than those first two movies. The films introduced a controversial backstory whereby the aliens were manufactured as a bioweapon by a mysterious race dubbed The Engineers.
“Ridley and I have talked about this — and many, many elements of the show,” Hawley says. “For me, and for a lot of people, this ‘perfect life form’ — as it was described in the first film — is the product of millions of years of evolution that created this creature that may have existed for a million years out there in space. The idea that, on some level, it was a bioweapon created half an hour ago, that’s just inherently less useful to me. And in terms of the mythology, what’s scary about this monster, is that when you look at those first two movies, you have this retro-futuristic technology. You have giant computer monitors, these weird keyboards … You have to make a choice. Am I doing that? Because in the prequels, Ridley made the technology thousands of years more advanced than the technology of Alien, which is supposed to take place in those movies’ future. There’s something about that that doesn’t really compute for me. I prefer the retro-futurism of the first two films. And so that’s the choice I’ve made — there’s no holograms. The convenience of that beautiful Apple store technology is not available to me.”
Hawley’s Alien series shut down production in August due to the SAG-AFTRA strike but is expected to resume filming soon in Thailand. The ensemble cast includes Essie Davis, Alex Lawther, Samuel Blenkin, Sydney Chandler, Adarsh Gourav, Timothy Olyphant and David Rysdahl. Meanwhile, Fargo season five is airing weekly on FX and Hulu.
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