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Alien: Covenant – An interview with writer John Logan

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With Alien: Covenant, Ridley Scott sought to answer some of the disturbing, intriguing questions he raised in the 1979 film Alien. How was the alien species created? Where did it originate from?

Alien: Covenant, which is the second installment in Scott’s prequel series and the sixth Alien film overall, serves as a bridge between Alien and 2012’s Prometheus. Set roughly ten years after the end of Prometheus, Alien: Covenant follows the crew of the Covenant, a ship that roams the galaxy in search of an uncharted paradise. What they find is hell.

To realize his vision, Scott sought the help of screenwriter John Logan, Scott’s collaborator on Gladiator. Several weeks ago, I had the chance to talk to Logan about the construction of the Alien prequel.

DG: How would you describe your relationship, your history, with the Alien film series?

JL: I first saw Alien in New Jersey in 1979, when I was seventeen. I didn’t know much about the film when I saw it that first time, except that it was science fiction, and the poster didn’t reveal much to me. But it was a cause célèbre when it was released, and it turned out to be a great movie-going experience for me. What I responded to in Alien was seeing real people, the crew members in the film, put into a provocative situation, and it was the drama of this that I found extremely terrifying. You had real people who were dealing with this evolving, terrifying threat, this alien creature, and they had to find a way to survive. Ridley directed the film like a master surgeon.

DG: What was the strategy that you and Ridley Scott came up with in terms of linking this film to Alien?

JL: Alien was a film that was steeped in purity. There was such a wonderful, frightening purity in the way those characters were placed in that terrifying situation, and Ridley directed the film like a science fiction version of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. Now that Ridley has made his version of And Then There Were None, with Alien, how do we tell an equally terrifying story that falls before Alien? When Ridley and I looked at the 1979 film, we asked ourselves how the alien creature was created and where it came from. This formed the basis for Covenant.

DG: How would you describe the relationship between Alien: Covenant and Alien?

JL: We’re taking a firm step toward Alien with this film. There are little Easter eggs in this film that relate to the 1979 film. I picked the title Covenant, inspired by the name of the brig in the Robert Louis Stevenson novel Kidnapped. The word refers to a pact between two people, a solemn agreement between two parties or rulers.

DG: How would you describe the Covenant’s mission in the film?

JL: The Covenant isn’t on a military mission, or a mining mission, unlike Alien and Aliens. It’s a colonial ship, and they’ve left earth, and they’ve set out on a colonization mission. They’re trying to make a new home on this new planet, which has the feel and look of dark grandeur.

DG: How would you describe the dynamic that exists between Billy Crudup’s character, Captain Christopher Oram, and Katherine Waterston’s Daniels?

JL: Billy and Katherine are at odds in the film over how they’re going to build this new world on this strange planet. Billy’s character is a religious, spiritual man who feels very uneasy about trying to take over a new planet and then remake it in their image.

DG: What questions did you want to answer in the film, and what questions did you want to leave open-ended?

JL: What happened to David between the end of Prometheus and the beginning of Alien: Covenant? What about Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, played by Noomi Rapace, the last human survivor of the destroyed Prometheus? Where did Shaw go at the end of Prometheus? Where did the aliens come from? What happened to David? What role did the engineers play in the creation of the alien species? These are the questions that Ridley and I wanted to answer in this film.

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DG: Although this is a prequel, you and Ridley have to contend with all of the alien sequels that have appeared over the past twenty years. How do you generate fear and tension in the aftermath of all of these films, most of which were regarded poorly by audiences?

JL: Ridley had a much broader palette to play with on this film than he did on the first film. On the first film, Ridley had one creature to play with, and he did a brilliant job. In this film, Ridley obviously had much more to play with, and you’ll see different creatures, different colors and shapes. We didn’t pay much attention to the Alien sequels, seeing that we’re only looking ahead to the 1979 original. I think the sequels all had flaws and qualities, good and bad points. I think the key is the dynamic that exists between the human characters and the creatures in this film. That’s what I found so compelling in the first film, and that’s what we focused on in this film.

DG: How would you describe your collaboration with Ridley Scott on this film?

JL: It was similar to Gladiator. All of our conversations for both films revolved around character and drama. We wanted to go back to the purity of Alien and other classic horror films from the 1970s and 1980s, like Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Steven Spielberg’s Duel was another inspiration. We’re telling a story about the creation of a civilization, which led Ridley and me to talk about Shakespeare. When I worked on the James Bond series, the villains were the easiest part to write, because it was so much fun. The hardest part was writing the drama and the characters. The hardest part of writing Alien: Covenant was writing the scenes between Daniels and Oram.

DG: As a writer, how do you approach horror and science fiction compared to the other genres you’ve worked in?

JL: I know about photon torpedoes and xenomorphs. I know very little about the Harry Potter series and the Lord of the Rings universe. Like the James Bond series, I approached the Alien series as a fan. I knew the language.

DG: Do the crew members on board the Covenant have weapons in the film?

JL: They do have weapons. A terrifying development occurs early in the film, and the tension never breaks after this. There’s no break for them. They obviously encounter this mysterious menace, and there’s great tension and unease throughout the rest of the film. This film, like Prometheus, represents a vision of hell. It has the feel of gothic horror and the Hammer horror films. It’s like The Wizard of Oz for the characters in this film, except that their journey leads them to a discovery of unspeakable horror.

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‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments

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It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.

We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.

Evil Dead Rise

“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”

That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”

Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:

High Desert Hell
The Gemini Project

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‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening

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Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.

Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.

Happy Sad Confused

Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.

Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.

Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.

The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.

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Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date

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Jake gyllenhaal presumed innocent

Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s in ‘Presumed Innocent’

Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.

These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:

According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”

Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.

Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.

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