Daily Dialogue — October 29, 2019
“Please! Kill me!”
— Aliens (1986), screenplay by James Cameron, story by James Cameron and David Giler & Walter Hill, based on characters created by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett
The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Nightmare.
Trivia: Producers David Giler and Walter Hill were keen to meet with James Cameron after liking his script for The Terminator (1984), which was temporarily stalled in pre-production. Cameron pitched several ideas, none of which they were that receptive to (one was a sci-fi update of a “sword-and-sandals movie”, but they only wanted to do a proper historical action movie on an alien planet). As Cameron was leaving, however, they did mention plans of doing a sequel to Alien (1979); immediately, Cameron’s interest was piqued, since Alien was one of his favorite recent movies. The only premise that Giler and Hill had for ‘Alien II’ at the time was that a group of marines would encounter the alien creatures on a remote planet, so they tasked him to come up with the rest. Cameron used many elements from a story he had written called “Mother”, in which a human protagonist uses a power suit to battle a genetically-engineered creature that is trying to protect its offspring. Terraforming, an all-powerful company and the term ‘xenomorph’ were all part of the 40–50 page story treatment that he handed in less than a week later. Giler and Hill loved it, and commissioned him to write a full screenplay. Cameron was a bit hesitant at first, because he had already landed screenwriting duties for Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) that day, but Giler and Hill told him: “Don’t be stupid. Take both jobs.” Cameron worked on three scripts simultaneously, as he was also writing additional drafts of his Terminator screenplay. Although Rambo II would later be heavily re-written, his research into Vietnam veterans proved useful when writing Ripley’s post-traumatic stress disorder. After submitting the first act of his ‘Alien II’ script and coining the title change to ‘Aliens’, he was also considered to direct.
Dialogue On Dialogue: The hissing cat really helps sell the nightmarish conceit of the scene — that the alien is inside Ripley’s body.
