The Untold Story of How Ridley Scott Saw 'Star Wars'—and Ended Up Making 'Alien'

Finally, a merchandise day was chosen: May 25, 1979—exactly 2 years to the time pursuing the merchandise of Star Wars. Ladd had travel to judge that the day was a fortunate 1 for the studio.

“I retrieve I was successful a horrible bureau successful Times Square, and I was staring down astatine this billboard that said, ‘Alien … In Space No One Can Hear You Scream,’” says Scott. “I could besides spot a queue going each the mode astir the block. I hadn’t seen that since Star Wars. So astatine that point, I benignant of figured that we would beryllium successful bully shape.”

In fact, Alien would extremity up becoming 1 of the top-grossing movies of 1979, mounting location records connected its opening play connected its mode to scaring up $106 cardinal astatine the worldwide container office. However, the captious absorption was mixed astatine best.

By the process extremity of the ’70s, subject fabrication arsenic a genre seldom got a just shingle from middle-aged reviewers. But successful this case, they seemed incapable to look beyond Scott’s lush Madison Avenue benignant and spot the substance underneath. While immoderate hailed Scott arsenic a caller benignant of horror-film visionary, and some Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert would tilt their thumbs upward, others regarded it arsenic small much than an “empty container of tricks.”

Despite the skeptics, arsenic 1979 drew to a close, Alien would beryllium nominated for a brace of Oscars, for Best Art Direction and Best Visual Effects. It would triumph a statuette for the latter, acknowledgment to the huffy Swiss, H. R. Giger. Meanwhile, owed to the film’s runaway fiscal success—the lone metric that genuinely matters successful Hollywood, critics beryllium damned—Scott was present a filmmaker successful demand.

Just a mates of years earlier, he’d been wary of becoming pigeonholed arsenic a manager of lyrical humanities creation films. Now, aft Alien, helium was being inundated with offers to helm big-budget subject fabrication pictures. However, this clip around, helium wasn’t acrophobic astir being typecast. Not yet, astatine least. Which is however Scott recovered himself sitting successful the opulent bureau of Italian movie mogul Dino De Laurentiis to sermon the producer’s monolithic adaptation of writer Frank Herbert’s 1965 caller Dune.

Scott would, successful fact, labour connected Dune for much than 7 months with screenwriter Rudolph Wurlitzer (Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid) successful London, trying to shoehorn its vast, unwieldy communicative into a manageable two-hour script. But each measurement guardant seemed to beryllium followed by respective steps backward.

“I worked connected Dune for what seemed similar ages,” says Scott. “But each country we turned connected the thing, it became clearer and clearer that this was going to instrumentality different twelvemonth and a fractional oregon 2 years of aggravated enactment until we yet got going.”

In retrospect, Dune had seemed similar a cursed spot since time one. First optioned by Planet of the Apes shaper Arthur P. Jacobs successful 1972, his big-screen adaptation loitered successful improvement purgatory until his decease successful 1973 and remained determination for the adjacent 2 years portion the producer’s property ironed retired the intricacies of his contractual holdings. Then, successful 1975, a French consortium led by a affluent Parisian with Tinseltown dreams named Michel Seydoux purchased the rights from Jacobs’s estate. He subsequently lured Alejandro Jodorowsky to rotation a movie from Herbert’s root material.