http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/digital/fact-vs-fiction/prometheus-unbound-write-damon-lindelof-on-the-non-prequel-alien-prequel-9514210


>Prometheus Unbound: Writer Damon Lindelof on the Non-Prequel Alien Prequel

Damon Lindelof was driving when he got the call—Ridley Scott wanted to talk to him about a script. That script turned out to be the prequel to Scott's much beloved sci-fi flick Alien, written by John Spates (sic). Lindelof read the script, sent an email to Scott with some ideas for changes, and snagged a co-writing credit on Prometheus, out June 8, which has morphed into a sort-of-but-not-really prequel. Popular Mechanics spoke to Lindelof about working in the Alien universe, and why it's important to have scientific advisors. (Spoilers below, so see Prometheus before you read this interview!)

BY ERIN MCCARTHY

How did you get involved in Prometheus?

It was about two years ago. I'd been back (from my break after we finished writing Lost) for just a couple days and my phone rang and my agent said, "Ridley Scott is calling you in five minutes." I slammed on the brakes... and pulled over (to take the call). I stammered my way through that conversation—I was convinced that (Scott) thought I was someone that he already knew, because I have been worshipping the ground that he walked on for as long as I can remember, and (I was) secretly hoping that whatever he was sending me was the Alien prequel I'd been reading about. A couple hours later, a guy showed up at my house, handed me a script and said, "Enjoy. I'll be waiting in my car. When you're done, you can give this back to me."

I read the script—it was written by John Spates (sic)—and I thought it was great, but it was definitely a dyed-in-the-wool Alien prequel in the sense that there was a direct and clear connectivity between the movies. It relied pretty heavily on the face hugging and chest bursting and acid-for-blood xenomorphs that we'd seen in the other movies. All that was wrapped around this incredibly original and cool sci-fi idea about scientists thinking that they had a bead on what mankind's origins on the planet might be.

So I wrote an email that night saying, "I think that that idea is strong enough to carry the movie. We can get to some of that Alien stuff that the audience is definitely going to want to see, but you did that 30 years ago and it's been done many times since. And it would be great to not rely upon it so heavily and here's how you might do that..." And for some crazy reason they hired me, and that was the next year of my life.


Prometheus has creatures that are new, but also familiar. Did you have any say in how those things should act or what they might do?

On the day that I started, Ridley brought me into a secret room at RSA where he had a design team working. Every single wall was covered in conceptual art, from the design of the ships to what the engineers were going to look like. (Ed. note: The engineers are what the scientists call the beings who they believe created humans.) The idea for the engineers was very present in John's script before I even came in—(there was) the idea that what we identified as the space jockey from the first movie in the derelict ship was going to be human. And there were all these photos of Michelangelo's David and ancient Greco-Roman sculpture, and Ridley was like, "That's what color their skin is gonna be. They're gonna look in many ways like animated statues but I don't want to do it with CG, I want them to feel as real and as human and as grounded as possible."

So he was thinking about that stuff many, many months before he even began photography. And the way that he wanted to play the hits in terms of xenomorphs and face huggers, he wanted to make sure that they looked different than they had in previous movies because of some of the things that we were trying to say in this movie... I've always looked at Prometheus as this huge orgy between three generations of creation. So you have our creators, the engineers; us; and then our creation, the synthetic beings, the androids. And so basically everybody is kind of screwing each other. They all have a role in the end result of this movie. None of it would have happened had David not taken that little drop of goo that was generated from the engineers and spiked Holloway's drink with it and then Holloway has sex with Shaw and then their baby essentially ends up infecting the person who started it all, the engineers. So it goes full circle.


Each Alien parasite affects its host differently. What was the idea behind that? Are the parasites altering DNA?

I don't want to talk too specifically about what the black goop does. Obviously the characters in the movie are trying to theorize based on what is happening to them. "This thing is a weapon, it's really bad for us." When it interacts with living species, bad things result. So you see little worms and when the black goop gets on the little worms we see what happens to them. And when Fifield gets it all over his face mask, we see what happens to him. When Holloway just has a drop of it in a glass of champagne, we see what happens to him.

We wanted to be purposefully vague, (but steer) the audience towards some conclusions as to what that stuff was supposed to do: Is it supposed to kill you? Is it supposed to transform you—which seems like the most obvious choice—and to what end? Like, why in God's name would the engineers want to create abominations out of mankind? Some of these questions we wanted to answer directly and some of these questions we didn't want to answer directly, which sets you up for a certain level of frustration and disappointment that I am well familiar with, but I'll take it any day of the week because I also feel like it forces you to fire your own imagination.

We clearly have answers for those questions ourselves that we did not present in the movie purposefully, not just because we're saving them for potential sequels, but because the power of the original Alien—or even Blade Runner—is that to a certain degree, we're giving you all the numbers in the equation but we're not adding them up for you. And that's intentional.


In Prometheus, there's an Alien evolution of sorts, but how it works isn't explained in the movie. Was there an internal logic to how it worked?

It's not arbitrary. (But) the movie has to speak for itself. I will say that the theory that is formed by Shaw by the end of the movie—that the black goo is some sort of weapon and it is headed towards earth and if it gets there the result is going to be terrible—(is) based on the information that she has in the movie, but that's not necessarily the correct deduction for her to make. The audience is privy to pieces of the story that Shaw is not. I hope that the movie is one of those films that (is rewarding on) subsequent viewings as opposed to more confusing and more frustrating.


Did you do any research, beyond rewatching the movies after your first draft was written? Did you consult any science advisors?

John Spates (sic) did a tremendous amount of research in terms of interspace travel, cryonics, artificial intelligence. You're also married to the original Alien in a lot of ways—this is 30 years before that, so can we present our gadgetry so that it doesn't look like it's backwards, considering that movie was made 30 years ago? The Nostromo was a mining ship. It's going to be completely and totally dressed down. The computers are going to do the bare minimum of computing because its only job is to get from A to B and then mine, whereas the Prometheus is designed as a science vessel to basically answer the meaning of life. So that's the way you get around that issue. And Arthur Max, who was the production designer, designed all the ships and the Alien landscapes, and he had a whole slew of advisors that he (checked with).

There was a NASA guy that came in a couple of times and spoke to Ridley and us about the theoretical realities of extraterrestrial life. If you're trying for it to feel real and there's any degree of veracity, it's absolutely critical to have that stuff. But as a storyteller you kind of have to say: It's really good to know it, but we are writing a movie.

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