Director Fede Alvarez talks exclusively to Film Stories about his path to making Alien: Romulus, its practical effects and fighting cynicism in the dream factory.
This article first appeared in Film Stories issue #51
When Uruguayan writer-director Fede Alvarez first landed in Hollywood over a decade ago, he noticed something disturbing in the air: apathy. Meeting the filmmakers he admired, he recalls that the topic of conversation was more commonly about business deals or money than a love of storytelling.
“In the early years – this would happen all the time – I would meet some director that I’d really admire,” Alvarez says. “I’d sit down to have a coffee with them, and they’d talk about deals. They sold this movie for this or they made it for that much. I was like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ ”
Some 15 years after he first ventured there, Alvarez says he still feels out of place in Hollywood. He has his regular collaborators, many of them from his home country in South America, but otherwise “I’m a total outsider – I don’t know a lot of people,” he says.
“I have my community, and I don’t do Hollywood that much,” Alvarez shrugs. “Over the years, I’ve developed relationships with other filmmakers I admire – friends and people of my generation. How do I see [Hollywood]? I don’t know…”
Studio attention
Alvarez was in his early 30s when he made Panic Attack, a five-minute alien invasion film with a budget of $300. A young hopeful with no contacts in Hollywood, Alvarez put his film on YouTube in October 2009 and thought little of it. Within days, he began receiving phone calls from some of North America’s biggest film studios.
Of the various offers thrown in his direction, Alvarez ultimately chose to make Evil Dead, a 2013 remake of Sam Raimi’s iconic 1980 horror that delighted author Stephen King and horrified British film censors. It says something about Alvarez’s confidence as a filmmaker that he agreed to remake such a well-known movie; a single wrong foot could have angered gore fans the world over. Instead, Alvarez made an impressively controlled debut which revelled in its own gleefully nasty, practical gore effects. If he was fazed by the leap from making short films on a shoestring budget to a $17m production in America, it certainly didn’t show in the finished movie.
A successful US debut meant that, four years after Panic Attack went viral, he’d established a career as a Hollywood filmmaker. And it was around this time that he began taking note of all that cynicism around him.
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“What I’ve seen – and still see, and it breaks my heart – is that people don’t care and they’re jaded,” Alvarez sighs. “Movies are just Monday to Friday. It’s just a job… There’s a lot of that [apathy] going on, particularly in older directors – people that have just checked out and keep working on movies that aren’t good. They don’t really care. I’m sure you’ve heard stories about some directors who aren’t even there, or they just show up late and then just leave as soon as they can.”
Alvarez, by contrast, is a tightly coiled spring of grinning enthusiasm. When he talks about his latest film, the soon-to-be-released Alien: Romulus, he talks passionately about working with some of the special effects artists who worked on 1986’s Aliens. In a Q&A hosted by author Ian Nathan, which took place shortly before our interview, Alvarez tells bizarrely funny anecdotes about directing a Chestburster puppet and the way it should behave just as it’s erupted from its host (“That’s why they’re so angry, the xenomorphs – they’re born and the mother’s dead right next to them every time”). He describes his passion for Ridley Scott’s Alien from 1979, and how he wants to give his film’s creature the same graceful, “Nosferatu presence” rather than the “jumpy-jumpy ninja shit that happened in the later movies.”
Alvarez got the Alien: Romulus gig almost by accident. In 2017, not long after the release of his second feature – the lean and grotesque horror-thriller, Don’t Breathe – Alvarez was invited to a meeting at Ridley Scott’s company, Scott Free. Alvarez wasn’t there to talk about the Alien series, but he was nevertheless asked what he’d do if he were to make one.
A devoted Alien fan, Alvarez blurted out some ideas. The key part of his non-pitch was based on a scene absent from the theatrical cut of James Cameron’s 1986 sequel, Aliens, but restored to the 1991 Special Edition: that of the mining colony on the planetoid LV-426, and a brief glimpse of kids running around and playing in the cold, industrial corridors.
“I was curious to see what happens when those people grow up and they realise they’re in a mining colony and there’s no future for them whatsoever,” Alvarez said, imagining a scenario in which a bunch of young, second-generation colonists, desperate to get off their lonely backwater facility, set off to scavenge a derelict vessel abandoned in space. While picking among the station’s remains, they meet a fearsome and distinctly familiar creature.
A couple of years after his Scott Free meeting, Alvarez got a phone call from 20th Century Studios president Steve Asbell, who asked: “Is it true you want to do an Alien movie?”
Naturally, Alvarez said yes, and went through a more detailed idea for his movie. It was a concept that later got the seal of approval from Ridley Scott himself.
The Romulus of the title, Alvarez explains, hints at the themes of siblings present in the finished film. The six characters at the heart of Alien: Romulus are all related or share a deep connection in some way; protagonist Rain (Cailee Spaeny) has a surrogate brother, Andy (David Jonsson) who happens to be a synthetic human created by Weyland-Yutani. Also along for the scavenger hunt are Tyler (Archie Renaux), Navarro (Aileen Wu), Kay (Isabela Merced) and Bjorn (Spike Fearn), all of whom share a bond of one sort or another.
“They really care for each other,” Alvarez tells us. “That’s one of the main themes of the story: what does it mean to be someone’s sibling? There are a lot of movies about what it means to be a mother or a parent, or a lover, but siblings, there’s not a lot of that. For me having two brothers, it’s something I’ve always thought about. What are our responsibilities for them?”
Personal experience
Part of a 45-year-old franchise though it is, Alien: Romulus feels of a piece with much of Alvarez’s other work to date. Evil Dead and Don’t Breathe are both about young, working class people looking for escape; even Lisbeth Salander in The Girl In The Spider’s Web, Alvarez’s only critical and financial disappointment to date, is something of an outsider. It’s an interest that comes from his own personal experience, Alvarez says.
“It’s just my reality – my background,” he tells us. “My mother was a stay-at-home, my dad was a teacher. All my friends and all my community back home are all working class. In Uruguay, in general nobody has too much money anyways. I grew up with this idea of trying to get out of there all the time… It’s something I understand and I can write about that. I know those characters. It’s me and my group of friends as we were growing up.”
Even though he’s writing Hollywood films – almost always with co-writer and fellow Uruguayan Rodo Sayagues – Alvarez still finds ways to weave his own perspectives into his stories and characters.
“Everyone always asks me why the characters in Evil Dead are from Detroit,” he says. “And I’ll say, because it’s the third world of America. I have no idea what it’s like growing up in Austin or California with all this shit that I saw in sitcoms. That’s not my life at all. I don’t understand those characters. I don’t understand what it’s like to grow up with the idea of a hopeful future. What I grew up with was, ‘Well, we’re all fucked and good luck!’
“There’s no jobs. Particularly in Uruguay, the best times are behind us. ‘The ’50s! Ah, you should have seen the ’50s!’ Uruguay was shit in the ’50s. Great. What does that leave for us looking to the future? Forget about it.”
It’s a tone that’s perfect for the dystopian cynicism of the Alien universe, where blue-collar workers, space marines and convicts are as much at the mercy of the heartless Weyland-Yutani corporation as they are the acid-blooded xenomorph.
Practical effects
On set, meanwhile, Alvarez is entirely uncynical about the process of filmmaking. He ensured there was room in the budget to secure the services of practical effects houses Studio Gillis and Legacy Effects, partly so he could have two of his old heroes, Alec Gillis and Shane Mahan, working side by side again. His commitment to realising the xenomorph in all its forms practically made shooting complex, but that tangible reality and craft, he argues, is key to making audiences believe that the creatures they’re seeing are real.
“Hollywood can be very lazy,” Alvarez said in his Q&A. “When they do CG, it’s not because it’s cheaper – it’s just quicker. It saves you a headache on set. If you bring in a one-ton animatronic [Alien] then believe me, it’s going to suck up all your day to get him through the door, but man, when you see it, you’re there. The opposite is, there’s nothing there on the day and someone else on a computer somewhere in the world will create the shot and I’ll see it later. I don’t get any joy out of that. I get the joy out of seeing it happen.”
Alien: Romulus isn’t entirely devoid of CGI, though even in the outer space scenes featuring planets and ships, Alvarez had modelmakers scan real scale miniatures, which were then scanned into a computer. The result is digital, but still with the fingerprints of a real-world model builder.
“Ian Hunter, who built Mars for Total Recall, built the ships for us,” Alvarez said in his Q&A. “The ships are scanned from a real miniature made by real artists, the way they used to make them. You can see all the handmade work. Other shots are literally just us filming miniatures. We got [animator] Phil Tippett to do some stop-motion for some shots. His team came in and he did a shot for us.”
There and back again…
Alvarez has also been hands-on throughout production. He often operated smaller creatures himself, sometimes while also holding a camera. When the VFX budget began to grow tight, Alvarez rolled up his sleeves and produced a few shots by himself, falling back on the old skills he’d taught himself back in Uruguay.
“If I don’t know how to do something, I’ll learn how to do it,” Alvarez says. “I’m a classically trained pianist, so I always did the music for my short movies. I was joking with my friends: they say that a director should be able to do everyone’s work at least a little bit to understand a little bit of all departments. And production design was the only one where I felt, like, it blows my mind how they’re able to build all these things.”
At this point, Alvarez pulls out his phone and begins scrolling through some pictures. During the pandemic, he says, he headed back home to Uruguay. During lockdown, one of his children asked if Alvarez could build a treehouse. With time on his hands, he decided to kill two birds with one stone: learn the basics of production design and build something to keep his kids amused.
Alvarez holds his phone up and shows us images of what is – absolutely unmistakably – a film-accurate recreation of Bag End, the Hobbit house from Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy.
“When I say I built it, I built it. Every stone, every piece of wood, I put in there myself. I got a bulldozer to move the dirt around. I learned all the techniques of construction. And also how to make something look like concrete when it’s actually plywood, and all this sort of thing. I never thought I was gonna have four months to learn something like that, but then the pandemic hit and I learned it all! I really love anything that has to do with the craft of filmmaking.”
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It’s a dedication that has served Alvarez well on Alien: Romulus, where he’s sought to recreate the look and feel of Alien and Aliens – his film takes place between those two movies – but also push what’s possible with his budget.
“To really make it bigger than what the budget is, to really push it, it starts with the director and how much work the director is willing to put in it,” he says. “How present you are, how much you’re willing to do it yourself.”
Alvarez refers back to the cynicism that so surprised him when he started meeting Hollywood filmmakers, and suggests that things might be changing for the better in more recent years.
“I think the success of movies like Top Gun: Maverick, the selling point is, ‘We’re working really hard. We really care. Everybody involved truly cares about giving you the best we can give you.’ It’s completely uncynical, and I think people are learning from that.”
At the time of writing, we haven’t seen Alien: Romulus in its entirety – only about 20 minutes of footage. Visually and aurally, though, what we saw captures the grit and grime of the 1979 movie: creaking spacecraft that feel as though they’re on the verge of falling apart. Then there’s the xenomorph in the various stages of its lifecycle – all viscerally brought to life with puppets and animatronics. Even if Alvarez’s film fails to match the dizzyingly high bar set by Alien and Aliens, it won’t be because he and his collaborators didn’t put in the effort.
“I have this delusion that movies are really important,” Alvarez says. “And when you care, it’s hard to make a really bad movie. Really bad means someone didn’t care – that the director didn’t care. I want to believe that it’s really hard to make a bad movie if you care. I think Tarantino said it like that. If you love film, then you’re not going to make a bad movie. It’s a bit idealistic, but I think there’s some truth to that.”
Alien: Romulus is available on-demand now.
