Alien III - The Untold Story

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If you are a fan of the film (and of the series, like me), this will make for some very interesting reading -

http://www.empireonline.com/features...wooden-planet/

Excerpts:

...The history of sci-fi cinema is littered with intriguing, shadowy almost-movies; dark, fantastic visions that never quite coalesced into celluloid reality. So it's hardly surprising that, determining immediately after Aliens stormed the box office in 1986 that there should be a third instalment, saga producers Walter Hill and David Giler midwifed a whole brood of alternative futures for Ripley and her phallic-headed nemeses during the next six years...

...His "first principle", he states on the Alien Quadrilogy's excellent documentary, was that he wouldn't copy either Scott or Cameron. "My original approach was that we place the story on the planet where the Aliens originate from, and really explain what they are, and maybe that they're not born to be bad after all."

This concept was swiftly nixed by the studio, 20th Century Fox. Alien homeworld? Far too pricey. Even so, Giler, Hill and Harlin needed more development funds out of Fox; they hired Near Dark and The Hitcher scribe Eric Red for a quick write to keep the suits satisfied. His script played further on the idea of genetic experiments on the Alien. And, at the producers' behest, it ejected Ripley entirely - they liked the idea of allowing her time out, then bringing her back for a fourth instalment. (It would also, conveniently, free the project from the constraints of Sigourney Weaver's availability; and besides, she was in the process of suing Fox for unpaid profits from Aliens.) But Harlin remained unconvinced. Red's script was shelved...

...Around this time, Hill was in New York, where he serendipitously saw a film called The Navigator: An Odyssey Across Time. Low-budget and ostensibly 'arthouse', it opens with stark, monochromatic, grainy footage of a Celtic medieval island-village whose snow-whipped, shivering inhabitants shelter from the encroaching Black Death, and goes on to tell, in vivid, hallucinatory colour, the story of a group of villagers led by a boy-visionary, who somehow tunnel through the Earth to 20th century New Zealand. Never preoccupied by the mechanics of 'time-travel', never burdened by expository 'What year is this?!' dialogue, it's a feast of sensory dislocation, about as near as you'll get to seeing the modern world through the eyes of someone born in the 14th century. Hill was blown away. He'd found the director of Alien III...

...Ward's supposed eccentricity is perhaps borne out by his initial response to Fox executive Michael London's suggestion that he direct Alien III: "No." It wasn't that he disliked the material - Ward loved Scott's "visually strong horror" and "respected" Cameron's entirely different take - just that he preferred to generate his own, something he felt sequel-making would deny him. Undeterred, London sent over the scripts that had been written so far, including Twohy's prison-colony work-in-progress. "I hated them," says Ward. "I thought, 'This is just more of the same.'"...

...At the meeting with London, Giler and Hill, Ward's pitch, as he recalls, went something like this: "What if this Alien had been encountered somewhere in the distant past on Earth? People would have thought of it as some kind of devil. Then, what if you had like a sort of powerful sect on Earth (in the future of the Alien movies) who reject all technology beyond a certain date. So the ruling forces say to the sect, 'Okay, you wanna live this way? We have an old satellite - huge thing. We'll tow it into outer space and you can just live there on your own.' They just give them a place to live where they know inevitably they're gonna die.

"The sect agree, but they believe in having an environment that looks archaic. Within that environment - a huge, round satellite about a mile in diameter - you have maybe 16 floors, each one about 100 metres high. It's layered like an ant's nest, or bee's nest, and each layer has been largely clad with huge areas of sculpted wood. They can grow wheat there, and even have windmills and orchards. In a way it's like a monastery. The satellite [named 'Arceon'] has a range of technologies that allow it to survive in outer space: it has a means of dealing with gravity, and a means of dealing with air, and it has a low surface atmosphere. It looks like a meteorite on the outer surface." This was what has since been called the 'Wooden Planet' vision.

The producers, it seemed, loved it. "It was a little far out," remembers Giler, "but that's what we wanted: to push this thing a little bit."...

...Further story elements were fleshed out: the Alien, it was decided, would meet its end in a glass factory, where mirrors, which light the satellite's interior via reflected sunlight, are made. It would be plunged into a huge vat of molten glass, only to leap out and be doused in cold water, which would shatter the creature. Meanwhile, the wheatfields would burn spectacularly.

But what would happen to Ripley? Ward had her impregnated by the Alien, but planned to save her via a kind of 'exorcism' delivered by the monk John, whereby he 'pushes' the would-be chestburster out of her body. "The thing blows out of her mouth and is sucked into him," says Ward. "He then sacrifices himself, walking slowly into the wheatfields, which are on fire." However, Weaver had other ideas. "'I wanna die! End the series - I don't wanna make any more of them!'" Ward remembers her exclaiming....

...The script wasn't finished, but Ward and Reynolds at least were working on the film in earnest. Sets were being built. "We were doing it in a serious way," says Reynolds. "It was happening." Then, about three months into pre-production, Rupert Murdoch announced the release date: Easter 1990. It was like dropping the whole project into a pressure cooker. Everything suddenly changed. As production executive Jon Landau has since astutely put it: "As a studio we set out to make a release date, and not make a movie."...

...The entire Wooden Planet concept itself also came under fire. "We could never quite get him to explain why this planet should be wood," says Giler on the Quadrilogy. "The interior was clad with wood before it went into outer space," responds Ward. "You can clad the interior of a spaceship now with wood!"

Perhaps the key criticism levelled at Ward was that he was less interested in the Alien or Ripley than he was in his world. This is certainly Pruss' claim: "The movie's called Alien because it's about the Alien," he said in '92. "I couldn't get that across to Vincent." Weaver has also since voiced that she had a similar concern. "Frankly, I think he never wanted to make an Alien picture in the first place," she said. "The elements were there but there was no story involving Ripley. He really did not know what to do with my character."...

...Ward was clear from the outset that, through his world, he was re-imagining the Alien through God-fearing (or rather, devil-fearing) medieval eyes: less H. R. Giger, more Hieronymus Bosch (indeed, the bizarre, hellish paintings of the 15th-century Dutch artist were a key reference point for the director). It's central to his plot, and he insists he was "more than happy to scare the bejesus out of people!" As for Ripley, he concedes that he focused on the harder job of "making the surrounding characters come alive" while only sketching Ripley's throughline, assuming he'd have more time to detail it. An approach he now recognises was unwise: "When you're working with a star and showing treatment drafts at such an early stage, that's not such a good strategy!"

Even so, he had clear intentions for the character. He was particularly taken by Cameron's idea, seen in the Aliens Special Edition, that Ripley had a daughter who had died of old age. Though he was keen to be rid of the surrogate-daughter figure of Newt ("One of the first things I wanted to do was kill her off. She kind of annoyed me," he laughs), he wanted to place at the thematic heart of Alien III the idea of Ripley searching for family. "You can't keep living your life fighting creatures without much of a family," he says. "How would you survive? Families give us something. We're communal, social creatures. So Ripley's big regret is that she missed out on a personal life. She seeks some sort of strange atonement for not having had a relationship with her daughter."...

...Eventually, Ward was sent notes that were, he says, "very adamant about what could and what could not happen in the script. Now it was felt it should be more like Alien and Aliens, so they suggested, 'Let's make it a mining community!' How boring! 'Let's have that guy who turned out to be a robot (Lance Henriksen)!'" Ward protested: "Guys," he said, "you can't do the same thing in this film, another character that has milk come out of them - it's gonna be predictable! Try something else!"

Soon after, Ward received a message that he should meet with "one of our key senior executives at Fox" the next day. He was made to wait outside for an hour, "like a school kid". His mood darkened. The meeting did not go well. The Wooden Planet, he was told, had to go. Shortly afterward, Ward left Alien III. "Basically, the only reason I signed on was because I had a strong idea for the story," he sighs, "and the very fabric of that story had been chipped away. It just became a remake...