Prometheus - The Q&A
An audience with Michael Fassbender, Noomi Rapace, Charlize Theron and Ridley Scott, concerning a film about which most everyone thought could've been better.
Besides showing 13 minutes of footage from the Alien prequel, the Prometheus press launch featured a lengthy in-person Q&A with director Ridley Scott (he really doesn't like it when you bring up his knighthood) and stars Noomi Rapace, Charlize Theron and Michael Fassbender. Why run it on Substack? For posterity, my friends, posterity.
Ridley you had an idea for a prequel to Alien based around the Space Jockey for a long time. At what point did that coalesce into Prometheus?
Ridley Scott: Well, I watched the three subsequent Aliens being made, which were all jolly good in some form or other. Does that sound competitive? Because I’m really competitive! So I thought the franchise was fundamentally used up. But I thought about it for three or four years, because in all of the films, nobody had asked a very simple question which was - who is the big guy in the chair nicknamed the Space Jockey? I don’t know how the hell he got that name; there was this big boned creature who seemed to be nine feet tall sitting in this chair and I went in to Fox with four questions. Who are they? Why are they there? Why that cargo, and where were they going or had they in fact had a forced landing? Tom Rothman [co-chairman and CEO of Fox Filmed Entertainment] said, ‘That sounds good to me’. And so off I went with two writers, John Spaihts and Damon Lindelof, and we came up with the screenplay. It’s interesting when you start off with an idea like that and you don’t know whether it’s going to be a prequel or a sequel - it gradually adjusted itself into much larger questions and now the actual connection to the original Alien is barely in its DNA. You kind of get it in the last seven minutes or so - there's a little bit of it right at the end that gives you a connection. That’s about it.
Noomi, this film is about faith versus science. Your character, Elizabeth Shaw, represents the faith side of the equation.
Noomi Rapace: Yes; she is a scientist and she grew up in Africa and her father was a priest, so she has been raised close to God, seeing different cultures and different people living under different conditions from a very early age. Her father died when she was young so she has been on her own and she has been able to turn and to use God in a constructive way. So she became a scientist but she still has a great gift of believing. It’s an interesting conflict that Ridley and I were talking about a lot, being a scientist but still believing in God. What she’s looking for out there is very personal to her; it’s something she has been living with and waiting for and wanting to do her whole life.
And is it about retaining faith in the middle of horrible circumstances?
Noomi Rapace: Yes. She goes through a lot of things in the movie and she transforms. You know in the beginning she is not maybe naïve, but she is full of hope and a true believer and then things happen and she becomes a survivor and a fighter and a warrior in a way. I’m not sure that she is so convinced at the end of the movie. I think she realises that it wasn’t really what she expected.
Michael you play David, the ship’s android, a sort of ancestor of Ash and Bishop. Did you look at Lance Henriksen or Ian Holm’s performances?
Michael Fassbender: I didn’t; obviously I’d seen the films before, but for some reason I didn’t want to go there. I did, however, watch Blade Runner. And Ridley had suggested The Servant with Dirk Bogarde. And then there was Lawrence Of Arabia and The Man Who Fell To Earth. And then Greg Louganis the American diver popped into my head. I don’t know why - just the way he moved. As a child, watching the Seoul Olympics, I was like, ‘Wow, who’s that guy?’ It was such a weird walk it made me laugh, but it's also felt very efficient, like yoga with economy of movement. So I thought that would be interesting to take something on board.
And Charlize, what can you tell us about Company woman Meredith Vickers
Charlize Theron: She's an enigma because, at the beginning of the film, she comes across as quintessentially ‘suity’. She's detached and cold - she's really is just there for the sole purpose of making everybody’s life hell, as suits tend to want to do! She’s not a believer, she’s not a scientist, she’s just there to make sure that you think that everything is going to plan. But then she’s actually there for a very personal reason, of which I cannot speak about!
Ridley, you’ve work with genius designers like H.R. Giger in the past. How long did you work on designing this new world and who worked on it with you?
Ridley Scott: I tend to work with one guy all the time now called Arthur Max who’s my production designer. I must have done about five or six movies with him now. Because I was a designer, I really enjoy the process and so I really get into it. For this film, before we were even green lit, I persuaded Fox to spend some smart money, in that the film was completely planned with five designers who are digital designers who work like industrial designers. Arthur and these five guys sat in my office in LA while we were writing and re-writing for about four and a half months, and by the time I had finished I had a book which was this big and that thick of glossies that were like photographs; they’re not drawings they’re exactly what you get on the screen. And that became my benchmark. Designing to me is very important.
How conscious were you of fusing the world of Prometheus with the world of Alien?
Ridley Scott: One of the problems with science fiction, which is probably one of the reasons why I haven’t made a science fiction film for many years, is the fact that everything is used up. Every type of spacesuit is used up, every type of spacecraft is vaguely familiar. So what you try to do is lean more heavily on the story and on the characters to give you lift-off - bad pun! But then during the design process, I think we come up with a lot of cool looking things which evolve from the drawing board with the designers saying, ‘I’ve seen that, you can’t do that, you can’t do that’. Then you suddenly start to come up with evolutions of different looks so that as a total package, the film feels quite different.
Noomi, how does it feel for you to take on this part?
Noomi Rapace: The first time I met Ridley it was in August, almost two years, in LA. He’d seen The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo a couple of times and he said to me that he loved my performance and that he wanted to work with me and I thought I was gonna just pass out! I don’t really get nervous; it’s not that I have many people in the world that I really admire and don’t really know how to behave around, but I thought I was gonna die. And my English was really bad, so I kinda felt like I was dreaming. And that he actually meant it! So he came back to me a couple of months later and said he wanted me to play this character in Prometheus. And the magic is that,
as soon as you step in and start to work, I don’t feel nervous, I don’t look at it from
the outside. It's only when you’re done that you realise there was a lot of pressure and you probably wouldn’t be able to do it if you started to think about the fact that many people are going to see it and judge it.
Ridley, with films like The Hunger Games and The Woman In Black getting 12A ratings, do you think the original Alien, which was an 18, should receive a lower certification? And what certification would you want for this film?
Ridley Scott: I want certification for this film that allows me to make as large a box office as possible! The studios wrestle constantly with these ridiculous adjustments and it does, to a certain extent, affect the box office which is where they get their money back. If studios don’t get their money back we don’t have any movies. And so it is important that films are successful and I am fully supportive of that because I’m not just a director - to a certain extent, I’m a businessman, I know the importance of that; so when a big film fails, it’s disastrous for all of us. When a big film wins, it’s terrific for all of us, whether you like the film or not.
Noomi, did the shadow of Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley create any pressure?
Noomi Rapace: No, we talked a lot and Elizabeth isn't Ripley. The amazing thing with working with Ridley is, it feels like you are so much inside the characters and every character in the story that I never felt alone in there. We were doing quite disturbing things some days and it was quite tough and you came home and your mind and your soul and your body were a mess, but I always felt really happy. It never felt like I was carrying something really heavy on my shoulders; it always felt like we were doing something together. But no, Shaw's definitely not Ripley. She feels like she’s in the same family, though - she’s a survivor and a fighter in the same kind of way.
Michael, was there an attraction for you in playing a soulless robot who's almost looking to become human?
Michael Fassbender: I don’t really know exactly what’s going on with David to be honest! There are a lot of things there. Because he’s the one android amongst humans, and the humans don’t really like having a robot around that looks like them, who can figure everything out quicker than them and is physically stronger than them. There’s something a little bit off-putting about that. Is that the future? He’s asking his own questions. He’s curious like the gods in Greek mythology being jealous of human beings for their mortality and for what that must be like to experience. Also, he has been programmed like a human being, so will his programming start to form its own personality outside of the system that was programmed? Or the idea of human beings – are we all programmed anyway as well? Is someone creating us? Is everything pre-programmed for us in life? That’s kind of interesting as well. Or do we have free choice? We played around with all those things. I just tried to keep it ambiguous. It was something that Ridley said to me at the beginning, when we’re watching him it’s like, ‘Is he taking the piss?’
Ridley, there must be a learning curve for you with 3D here.
Ridley Scott: Well, I’ll footnote this by saying it’s not science, it’s not brain surgery. It’s actually pretty straightforward. And yet it is science, because it’s science to actually make 3D occur and to be shootable and capturable on a daily basis, but I’m sitting in a studio with four huge screens which are all 3D in a little black tent and I’m looking at them. If there’s four monitors there are four cameras, if there are six monitors then there’s six cameras, and because I’m a visual person anyway, it was dead simple and very straight forward. You could easily allow things to turn into major conferences where you ask anyone what they think but I don’t do that. I had a wonderful camera man called Dariusz Wolski who had shot 3D for the last Pirates Of The Caribbean picture. I talked to him and said, ‘We’re going to do 3D’ and he said, ‘Yeah, that’s fine’. So we went with using the RED camera, as opposed to the other one, and the RED was superb. The quality was fantastic, whether it’s 2D or 3D - it’s amazing and it wasn’t a problem. So anyone who says, ‘Oh, you’ve got to add 16 weeks’ means they don’t know what the bloody hell they’re doing! ‘There’s a lot to it’. No, it’s dead simple! If you know what you want, you know what you want.