The Untold Story of How Ridley Scott Saw ‘Star Wars’—and Ended Up Making ‘Alien’

In 1977, still smarting from the box office failure of his first film, The Duellists, Ridley Scott, ever the steely Northumberland pragmatist, decided that he needed to pick himself up and do what he’d always done throughout his career: He would put his head down and barrel forward with work.

Scott already had a thick screenplay sitting on his desk back at his office at his advertising firm Ridley Scott Associates (RSA)—a big-screen version of the medieval tale Tristan and Isolde. The script was in solid shape and was just waiting to go before the camera. Scott had already figured out how it would look, how it would be paced, the actors he saw in the title roles. And yet, the doubts buzzing in the back of his brain kept growing louder and more insistent.

After all, Tristan and Isolde was another yellowing historical piece. Was he digging a hole for himself by making a second esoteric film set in the distant past? Did he want to be that guy? More importantly, could he afford to be that guy? One box office misfire, especially a modest one like The Duellists, was excusable. A second might land him in a ditch that there was no digging his way out of. Scott wasn’t a man prone to second-guessing himself, but those doubts wouldn’t relent.

Then, one day, while working in RSA’s Los Angeles satellite office, he got the sign he’d been waiting for. The sign that would once and for all turn him away from the past and point him toward the future. A sign that came from a galaxy far, far away.

“I remember someone coming into my office and saying, ‘Ridley, you’d better go see this new movie called Star Wars.’ It was playing not far away at Mann’s Chinese Theatre,” Scott says. “So I went over there, and people were lining up around the block. It was extraordinary. I’d never seen anything like it, that sense of mass excitement, before or since. It was palpable.”

Inside the exotic, shrine-like confines of the famous movie palace that dated back to the 1920s, Scott managed to hunt out one of the few remaining empty seats. Once there, he turned around and scanned the room. It was completely packed with giddy college students, hopped-up kids, and their equally hopped-up parents. Then the lights dimmed, and John Williams’ opening brass overture blasted like a call to adventure.

What followed—George Lucas’ moving scroll of text—described an enthralling new world, one where good battled evil, a menagerie of alien species came and went as if they’d always existed, and cutting-edge special effects lived seamlessly side by side with the most old-fashioned of swashbuckling heroics. Scott felt the skin on his arms pebble like gooseflesh and the hair on the back of his neck stand up and salute. He recalls barely blinking for the next two hours, in fear of missing something on the screen. He was transported.

“I was stunned,” he recalls. “Star Wars just turned my head about completely. So much so that when I walked out of the theater, I thought, Why the hell am I doing Tristan and Isolde?! Things are changing! It’s time to get down to business!” Scott pauses, grins, and takes a long draw on a Montecristo cigar. Then he continues, “Six weeks later, I was offered Alien. I was the studio’s fifth choice.”

Still fresh from his Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus lightning bolt of clarity after seeing Star Wars, Scott jumped at the offer. Back in London, he turned the Alien script, the brainchild of roommates Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, into a series of gorgeously detailed storyboards—a work habit that he would continue throughout his career thanks to his art-school training.

When Scott later showed his drawings to the executives at Fox, they were so blown away that they didn’t even balk at Scott’s request to double the film’s $4.2 million budget. After all, they were now flush with Star Wars money.

But to Scott’s mind, at least, Alien was no Star Wars. As much as Scott had adored Lucas’ film, and as much as they could both be classified as science fiction movies, their tones and themes couldn’t have been more different. If Star Wars represented childlike joy and rollicking adventure, Alien was a bleak and brutal meditation on white-knuckle suspense and gory body horror. Scott, of course, was in no rush to point any of this out to the suits at Fox. He wasn’t inclined to talk himself out of a job.

For the Nostromo’s seven doomed crew members, Scott chose to steer away from casting well-known actors. Loading the cast with stars would have tipped the story’s hand in terms of who falls prey to the alien—and in what order. In the end, the director would settle on the familiar-but-not-too-familiar faces of Tom Skerritt, John Hurt, Ian Holm, Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Kotto, Veronica Cartwright, and a then unknown named Sigourney Weaver as Ripley, the ship’s warrant officer. Weaver’s tough-as-nails, can-do performance would become the movie’s most indelible one. Thanks to the newcomer’s fearlessness and ferocity, Ripley would end up becoming not just one of the greatest female movie heroes of the decade but one of the greatest heroes in cinema, full stop.

Alien would complete principal photography on October 21, 1978. From there, there would be five arduous months of postproduction, special effects, and editing. Six thousand miles away, back on the 20th Century Fox lot, the studio’s brass weren’t quite sure what they had when they saw the initial three-hour cut of Scott’s film. But they sure as hell knew it wasn’t the shiny-happy escapism of Star Wars.

The following spring, Fox began testing the film in front of audiences that had no clue what they were in for. But despite some queasy stomachs and a smattering of walkouts, Alien tested surprisingly well. “It was done and delivered and came in on time and on budget for [Fox studio head Alan Ladd Jr.],” Scott says with pride. “But they couldn’t settle on when to release it. They didn’t know what they had. And they should have. I think Alien was so hard-core for those days that they were a little afraid of it.”

Finally, a release date was chosen: May 25, 1979—exactly two years to the day following the release of Star Wars. Ladd had come to believe that the date was a lucky one for the studio.

“I remember I was in a horrible office in Times Square, and I was staring down at this billboard that said, ‘Alien … In Space No One Can Hear You Scream,’” says Scott. “I could also see a queue going all the way around the block. I hadn’t seen that since Star Wars. So at that point, I kind of figured that we would be in good shape.”

In fact, Alien would end up becoming one of the top-grossing movies of 1979, setting house records on its opening weekend on its way to scaring up $106 million at the worldwide box office. However, the critical reaction was mixed at best.

By the tail end of the ’70s, science fiction as a genre rarely got a fair shake from middle-aged reviewers. But in this case, they seemed unable to look beyond Scott’s lush Madison Avenue style and see the substance underneath. While some hailed Scott as a new kind of horror-film visionary, and both Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert would tilt their thumbs upward, others regarded it as little more than an “empty bag of tricks.”

Despite the skeptics, as 1979 drew to a close, Alien would be nominated for a pair of Oscars, for Best Art Direction and Best Visual Effects. It would win a statuette for the latter, thanks to the mad Swiss, H. R. Giger. Meanwhile, due to the film’s runaway financial success—the only metric that truly matters in Hollywood, critics be damned—Scott was now a filmmaker in demand.

Just a couple of years earlier, he’d been wary of becoming pigeonholed as a director of lyrical historical art films. Now, after Alien, he was being inundated with offers to helm big-budget science fiction pictures. However, this time around, he wasn’t concerned about being typecast. Not yet, at least. Which is how Scott found himself sitting in the opulent office of Italian movie mogul Dino De Laurentiis to discuss the producer’s massive adaptation of author Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune.

Scott would, in fact, labor on Dune for more than seven months with screenwriter Rudolph Wurlitzer (Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid) in London, trying to shoehorn its vast, unwieldy story into a manageable two-hour script. But every step forward seemed to be followed by several steps backward.

“I worked on Dune for what seemed like ages,” says Scott. “But every corner we turned on the thing, it became clearer and clearer that this was going to take another year and a half or two years of intense work until we finally got going.”

In retrospect, Dune had seemed like a cursed property since day one. First optioned by Planet of the Apes producer Arthur P. Jacobs in 1972, his big-screen adaptation loitered in development purgatory until his death in 1973 and remained there for the next two years while the producer’s estate ironed out the intricacies of his contractual holdings. Then, in 1975, a French consortium led by a wealthy Parisian with Tinseltown dreams named Michel Seydoux purchased the rights from Jacobs’s estate. He subsequently lured Alejandro Jodorowsky to spin a film from Herbert’s source material.

With little regard for the money it would cost, Jodorowsky assembled a dream team of future-shock artists, including O’Bannon, Giger, comic book artist Moebius, and the legendary Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí, the latter of which only agreed to work on the project for the insane sum of $100,000 an hour.

Jodorowsky’s costly endeavor soon became too rich and too amorphous (some put the projected running time of his film at 11 hours) for Seydoux to ignore. The plug was eventually pulled. Dune was dead. But then, following the success of Star Wars and the subsequent revived popularity of sci-fi, De Laurentiis stepped up and purchased the rights to Herbert’s book and its sequels for $2 million. All he needed now was a director, which is how Scott found himself sipping espressos with the Italian in late 1979.

In a way, the choice of Scott made perfect sense. Not only had he just delivered the smash sci-fi hit Alien, he had already worked with O’Bannon and Giger, who were still tangentially connected to the project. Fine-tuning the first draft of his Dune script with Wurlitzer, Scott set up a preproduction office at England’s Pinewood Studios. But eventually, the project’s maddeningly glacial pace and constantly moving goalposts seemed too much for him to bear. Or at least that’s what he would end up telling De Laurentiis when he finally resigned from the picture. It wasn’t a lie exactly. But it was a half-truth.

The other half of Scott’s motivation for moving on from Dune was that his older brother, Frank, had recently died from skin cancer. He was just 45 years old. Scott was shattered. He knew that he needed to fully throw himself into directing a movie as a distraction from his grief. Waiting around another two years or more for Dune to begin shooting wasn’t what he needed. What he needed was a film that was ready to go—and ready to go now.

That was when Scott’s mind drifted back to a screenplay from a novice writer named Hampton Fancher that he’d read right before he’d signed on to Dune. The story had been based on sci-fi author Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and was an exceedingly clever and surprisingly romantic futuristic noir about a haunted, Marlowe-like detective who hunts synthetic humans 40 years in the future. Scott hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the story and its rich visual possibilities since. He wondered if the project was still looking for a director. And if it was anywhere closer to the starting gate.