Alien

Ridley Scott, the director of “Blade Runner” and “Alien,” has signed a deal with the gaming and streaming media website Machinima to produce a dozen short sci-fi films that will use filmmakers from Scott’s commercial production company. The most successful of the short films could be developed into features, Machinima and Scott announced Monday. Scott will serve as executive producer, and the 12 shorts will be made by directors working for Scott’s advertising concern, Ridley Scott Associates. Machinima, which says it reaches 262 million viewers monthly, recently started work on a feature-length version of its “Mortal Kombat: Legacy” series. Scott’s advertising roster includes such heavyweight filmmakers as Kathryn Bigelow, Martin Scorsese, Sam Mendes and Neill Blomkamp. Scott most recently returned to science fiction himself with last year’s “Prometheus,” which took place in the same universe as his landmark “Alien” and […]

The topic has been making the rounds in cinéaste circles, and on Thursday it reached the cafeteria at Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, Calif. Three of the studio’s directors — Oscar winners Andrew Stanton (“Finding Nemo,” “Wall-E”) and Lee Unkrich (“Toy Story 3″) and Oscar nominee Bob Peterson (“Up”) — sat down for lunch and began chewing on a Hollywood mystery: the Ridley Scott Exception. “We started talking about it because Lee mentioned how he had just shown both ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘Alien’ to his teenage daughter and that she loved both of them,” Stanton recalled later that day. “Certainly story and character must be king for a movie to stand the test of time, but typically every [science fiction] movie, no matter how good it looks, is ultimately betrayed in the end by the limitations of whatever current technology […]

SPOILER ALERT: This post reveals details about a key scene in “Prometheus” and also touches on other major plot points.  SPOILER ALERT: Haven’t seen “Prometheus” but you plan to? You might want to read this post later. From the moment Swedish actress Noomi Rapace signed on to play Elizabeth Shaw in Ridley Scott’s sci-fi action film “Prometheus,” she was concerned that acting in front of a green screen would be a big challenge. But Scott had no intention of putting Rapace on an empty stage. Rather, the director and his crew built enormous sets at Pinewood Studios in London to create the far-off planet where Shaw and her crew land after two years of space travel. Even the monsters in Scott’s world were real — including the baby alien that Rapace’s Shaw rips out of her belly with help of […]

Ridley Scott talks about creativity, photographic memory, “Prometheus,” painting and the possibilities of another “Blade Runner” film in this premiere episode of “Hero Complex: The Show” on the Nerdist Channel. After 30 years, the esteemed filmmaker is returning to science fiction on June 8 with “Prometheus,” a movie set in the ”same universe” as his classic “Alien” (1979). The movie stars Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron and Idris Elba as crew members aboard the Prometheus, a ship sent across the stars to find the secrets of humanity’s origins. Scott, at age 74, is on a search of his own as he returns to questions left unanswered in “Alien” (as he explained when he first spoke publicly about this project at the 2010 Hero Complex Film Festival). We spoke with him at the Los Angeles offices of his production company. I get the fun job of hosting “Hero Complex: […]

Ridley Scott studied painting at the Royal Academy of Art in the 1950s, but unlike classmate David Hockney, he decided that career would be a life of cruel dawns. “Staring at a big canvas every morning with a pack of cigarettes saying, ‘I hate what I just did yesterday.’ So it was a fight with yourself.” The filmmaker still paints for pleasure, but ruefully he points out that he “never truly finishes a canvas,” and perhaps that’s one reason that, with his new film “Prometheus,” Scott, 74, returns to the deep-space mythology of his 1979 film, “Alien,” to find empty corners and layers that can be thickened. Just two years after “Star Wars,” “Alien” may have been just as revolutionary with the universe it presented — a future where corporations calculated the profit between planets, toyed with the lives of […]

Ridley Scott, one of the true titans of contemporary cinema, will be the inaugural guest on Wednesday when “Hero Complex: The Show” with host Geoff Boucher premieres on the Nerdist Channel on You Tube. Scott, the director of “Blade Runner,” “Alien,” “Gladiator” and “Black Hawk Down,” returns to science fiction this summer with “Prometheus,” the Fox film set in the “Alien” universe and starring  Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, Idris Elba and Logan Marshall-Green. It was at  the Hero Complex Film Festival in 2010 that Scott first spoke at length publicly about the project, and now that comes full circle as he again sits down with Hero Complex creator and lead writer Geoff Boucher in this new forum. Leonard Nimoy and Daniel Clowes will be guests in the second and third episodes, respectively, which will be posted on the Nerdist Channel every other Wednesday. The Hero Complex launched […]

When the enigmatic television series “Lost” came to a close two years ago, show co-creator Damon Lindelof thought he was done working on scripts with shadowy plot lines. Then he got an offer to write “Prometheus,” a Ridley Scott-directed science-fiction film whose story has been kept tightly under wraps since its inception. “Coming out of ‘Lost,’ I was like, ‘What a relief it’ll be to leave mystery and secretiveness behind,’” recalled the 38-year-old, who also was one of the writers who penned last year’s “Cowboys & Aliens.” “Then I found myself in the same situation, and I thought, ‘Here we go again.’” Months before the film’s June release, little is still known in Hollywood about the 3-D “Prometheus,” whose ensemble cast includes Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron and Idris Elba. The movie was initially billed as a prequel to […]

GUEST ESSAY Ridley Scott just presented “Prometheus” to Hall H fans at Comic-Con, and that has Finland’s Juhani Nurmi, a journalist and devoted fan of “Alien,” looking back in horror – and appreciation.  “In space, no one can hear you scream.” That’s the best movie slogan I know, and in my book, nothing else comes even close. Ditto for the poster (designed by legendary graphic artist Bill Gold), which is sinister yet elegant in its minimalism. It depicts a luminescent egg floating in a dark void, above a grate. Obviously, we’re talking about Ridley Scott’s “Alien.” This year marks the movie’s 32nd anniversary and more than that, the movie is back in the pop culture conversation with new urgency as Ridley Scott toils in Iceland on “Prometheus,” the 2012 release that began life as a straight prequel but  has now reportedly morphed into something […]

Ridley Scott knows how to make an entrance even when he doesn’t show up. To tell Comic-Con International fans about his upcoming movie “Prometheus,” the filmmaker appeared via satellite Tuesday from Iceland, standing in front of a waterfall with his leading lady, “Girl With a Dragon Tattoo’s” Noomi Rapace, who was wrapped in a puffy coat and confessed to a little disorientation at addressing the expo’s Hall H audience of 6,500-plus in the midst of shooting. “I just came back from space,” Rapace said. “It feels really weird to come back to Earth again.” “Lost” co-creator Damon Lindelof, who wrote the screenplay for “Prometheus,” moderated the conversation, with another of the film’s stars, Charlize Theron, on stage. “I realized that there was something in the original ‘Alien’ that no one has asked a question about,” Scott said, explaining what sparked […]

Four years before Mickey Mouse made his debut in “Steamboat Willie” in 1928, Walt Disney wrote a letter to his old friend Ub Iwerks, urging him to come to California and join his studio. Iwerks agreed, and the pair soon set about developing Mickey’s personality and bringing him to life on paper. Now, that 1924 letter is on the block, with a pre-sale estimate of $60,000 to $80,000, at a memorabilia auction next weekend. The auction is being held by Profiles in History, run by appraiser Joe Maddalena of “Hollywood Treasure” fame, on May 14-15 at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills, as well as online. Among the items up for bid are signed, original animation cels from Disney movies, including the classics “Cinderella” and “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (around $20,000 each). Also on the block: the fully-operational […]