Damon Lindelof on How ‘Prometheus’ is a(n Original) Prequel to ‘Alien’
The mystery surrounding Ridley Scott’s Prometheus appears to finally be over — and it didn’t take six seasons and a despicable series finale to find out.
Screenwriter Damon Lindelof, the demon behind “Lost”, openly spoke to Kevin Pollak’s Chat Show about how he approached Scott’s presumed prequel to Alien. As much as my skin crawls when I hear his name, he makes some really strong points; the boys over at /Film were kind enough to transcribe the good stuff.
The 3-D sci-fi horror venture, starring Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, Sean Harris, Guy Pearce, Kate Dickie, Rafe Spall, Logan Marshall-Green, Benedict Wong and Emun Elliott, takes launch on June 8, 2012 from 20th Century Fox.
And truth be told, it wasn’t script doctoring in the strictest sense because the draft that existed before I came on was written by this guy named Jon Spaihts and it was very good. And there were a lot of things in the movie, Prometheus, which were Jon Spaihts and I feel like somewhere in the media reconstruction of this story, the tale is that I come in, I pitch an entirely new story, and its so original that everything else gets thrown out and that’s what we’re doing. In my brain, that’s not exactly what happened. But I also do feel that this movie is the movie I would want to see as a fanboy, take place in that Alien universe, which precedes the events of the original Alien, but is not necessarily burdened by all the tropes of that franchise with Facehuggers and Chestbursters, and all that stuff that I love… but its sorta like, we’ve seen it before, can we do something different this time? And thats the movie that Ridley wanted to make. And when you’re working with an auteur, you basically just shut your mouth and listen and try to transcribe and channel the vision of that person, and get out of the way.
So I read it, and it was good. This was not a disaster. There were really good ideas in that script. So I sent off an email…. Ridley works with these guys, Michael Ellenberg and Michael Costigan. I basically sent them an e-mail and said, here is what I think, and here is what I would do, if you were interested, and the next morning … I get the call and they are like “We like your take, can you come in to Scott Free?” I walk into a room and there is Ridley Scott and an executive at Fox and I verbally present, here is everything in the script that I like now, here’s some of my thinking on it — what’s the lay of the land? What are the issues that you guys are having? And we have a great 90 minute meeting in which I do a lot of listening. Again, I don’t want to say I went in and WOWed them, when what really happened was I gave a really short presentation and then Ridley talked about the movie he wanted to make. And then, they decided to hire me. I had to go down to Fox and talk to Tom Rothman about what I wanted to do as well.
And then Sir Ridley Scott and I, and Michael Ellenberg, sat in a conference room for four hours a day, three days a week, and sort of went over it, again and again and again until I understood exactly what he wanted to do and I wrote it. It took me two weeks to write it, not a lot of time — the time consuming part was the collaboration because he thinks, and I know this sounds like I’m brown-noising but, Ridley Scott is a true genius and he thinks in visual terms far beyond the comprehension of mortals like us but also understands story and mood and tone.”
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