Interview (Written): John Logan

The screenwriter talks about writing the script for Alien: Covenant.

A Creative Screenwriting interview with John Logan whose screenwriting credits include Any Given Sunday (1999), Gladiator (2000), The Last Samurai (2003), The Aviator (2004), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), Rango (2011), Hugo (2011), Skyfall (2012), and Spectre (2015). His latest movie: Alien: Covenant.

You’ve no stranger to franchise films, having written Star Trek and James Bond movies. What’s the biggest challenge with finding something new in a project that is part of a long-running franchise?

You have to be true to those parts of the story or those characters that excite or move you. Every writer will approach a story with a particular viewpoint. If you hand a James Bond novel to Eric Roth you’ll get one screenplay, to Bill Condon you’ll get another, and to me you’ll get a differendt one. There are different things that speak to an individual writer.

With Alien: Covenant, I just really wanted to write something that had the feel of the original Alien, because seeing that movie was one of the great events of my youth. It was so overpowering in terms of what it communicated to me and its implications, that when I started talking to Ridley about what became Alien: Covenant, I said, “You know, that was a hell of a scary movie.”

I wanted to write a horror movie because the Grand Guignol elements of Alien are so profound. We tried to recapture that with Alien: Covenant, while also trying to pay homage to the deeper implications of Prometheus. In terms of tone, pace, and how we chose to play this particular symphony, we wanted to create a really frightening movie.

Speaking of the original Alien, Ripley is one of the great movie heroes of all time, and Daniels fills a similar role in Alien: Covenant. What makes Daniels different from Ripley to you?

One of the great things to celebrate about this franchise is that it was promoting female heroes long before it was popular. The Alien franchise has always embraced the idea of strong feminist iconography and heroism. Obviously that was something Prometheus did with Shaw, and that we’re delighted to do with Daniels.

But Daniels is her own unique beast. One of the major differences between Alien: Covenant and all the other movies in the cycle is that the people on this ship are not soldiers or mercenaries — they’re colonists going to found a new world. One of the reasons why I named the ship Covenant is because when the Pilgrims came to America on the Mayflower they signed a covenant — a social pact.

This crew has a very unique bond because it’s made up of couples — romantic couples, married couples, gay couples, straight couples — so already they’re invested in this shared social mission.

Within the first fifteen seconds of her experience in this movie, Daniels loses her husband. So she’s dealing with catastrophic loss from her first moment of the movie. She’s set on a very shaky emotional foundation, and one of the joys for me in developing the character with Ridley and Katherine Waterston was finding the way in which she steps up to her heroism.

A trailer for Alien: Covenant:

For the rest of the interview, go here.