(Montevideo) Back to the roots for a cult saga: seven years after the last film, Alien: Romulus is released in theaters this week. Its director Fede Alvarez told AFP in an interview how he was forever marked by the beginnings of the series during his adolescence in Uruguay.
After Ridley Scott, at the helm of the first opus The 8the passenger (1979), then James Cameron (Aliens1986), David Fincher (Alien 31992) or Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Alien, the resurrection), it is to a director much less known than Disney, who took over the universe, who entrusted the controls of this seventh film.
Ridley Scott, who returned to the helm in the 2010s to relaunch the franchise with Prometheus And Covenanteven if it means moving away from the original spirit, is the producer of the new film.
Fede Alvarez (evil Dead, Don’t Breathe), who considers the first two films to be “fundamental” in his work and for cinema in general, assures that he found inspiration in the beginnings of the series.
The plot of this quasi-huis-clos in a drifting spaceship is set at the time of the first films, when teams of space travelers discover, to their mortal cost, the existence of xenomorphs, fearsome extraterrestrials.
“There’s a scene in the 1986 film where you see a bunch of kids and young people running around a space station. I thought, ‘What’s it going to be like for these kids when they grow up?'” says the now-Hollywood-based director.
The 1 hour 59 minute film also aims to be a return to the gory and horrific spirit of the first opus. It faithfully reproduces the codes and cult scenes, including the emblematic hatching of the parasitic alien in the body of its human host.
PHOTO JORDAN STRAUSS, INVISION, PROVIDED BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Director Fede Alvarez
The 46-year-old filmmaker also revisits the visual style of the work of Ridley Scott, “one of the great masters of the genre,” according to him.
“It’s not so much a desire to go back, but simply the fact that as a filmmaker, I want to do it the way I’ve learned to do it,” he explains, particularly regarding his decision to film without “too many green screens,” a technique usually used to place visual effects during the post-production phase.
The filmmaker thus immersed himself in the “futurism of the 1980s”, with mythical specimens ofAlien controlled by teams of puppeteers. “Technically, it’s a very ambitious film,” he promises.
“Generating real emotion in people is the hardest thing there is,” he says. “When you decide to see this film, you more or less know what you want to expose yourself to. It’s like going on a roller coaster,” he illustrates, before adding: “I like to produce that effect on people.”
In the tradition ofAlienthe main role ofAlien Romulus is held by an actress, the young Cailee Spaeny. The original character of the saga, Ellen Ripley, had at the time revealed Sigourney Weaver.
PHOTO GUGLIELMO MANGIAPANE, REUTERS ARCHIVES
Actress Cailee Spaeny
Cailee Spaeny, a 26-year-old actress, was discovered in January as Elvis’ wife in Priscilla by Sofia Coppola, then in April in Civil War as a young death-defying reporter alongside Kirsten Dunst.
Here she plays an orphan, reduced to the status of a quasi-slave on a corner of the planet without a sun, managed in an atmosphere of Blade Runner by the private conglomerate Weyland-Yutani, which mines a toxic mineral there.
She won’t hesitate for long when a group of young rebels offer to let her try to escape to more hospitable skies. The plan? To seize a spaceship that they think is abandoned, but in reality inhabited by xenomorphs who have savagely murdered the crew.