American Cinematographer - July 1992 - 58

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"We supply equipment that
entertains the world"

ing him do those things. Fortu¬
nately, the two people who created
the alien on this picture also
worked on the alien creature in Le¬
viathan for Stan Winston, so I knew

and trusted them and that made it
easier."
Thomson had previously
worked with Ridley Scott, the man
who first breathed life into the Alien

mythos, and he often thought of the
filmmaker when it came time to
shoot the creature's various evolu¬

tionary stages. "It's nice to keep
light moving on the creature, which
is something that Ridley taught me
when we were shooting [the char¬
acter!

Darkness

in

Legend,"

Thomson recalls. "It leaves a lot to
the imagination. You get an over¬
all impression of what it looks like,
but we never dwell on it. If you see
it in its entirety, it looks like a guy
in

a

rubber suit.

Moving the light

gives the alien

a lot of animation
even when it's not moving and
lends to the excitement. The trick is
to light the actors

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something that had

never been
seen in the series before - shots
from the alien's point of view. Since
the alien in this film is able to crawl

the sides of the corridors like a
bug, its point of view not only had
to be able to move swiftly through
the prison complex, but also had to
appear to roll 360 degrees. "Every¬
body talks about that shot, but it
up

was

a

done

through the expertise of
operator named Peter

Steadicam

Valley, CA 91352

(818) 767-1122
56

and not the alien."

Another trick was to create

Fax (818) 768-9900

July 1992

Robinson,"

In

Thomson

suspense,

striving to create
Thomson
kept the sets as dark

ex¬

plains. "Peter

as

did a marvelous

job. He literally
ran
through the
corridors with

he could without

obscuring the
actors.

a

Steadicam and

then, at the right moment, flipped
it upside down.

I've never seen that
done before. I think we were down
to 12

fps or a little less than that; it's
the speed it's shot at that makes it
look so fluid. Since it was supposed
to be the alien's point of view, we
shot it with a 10mm prime lens, not

when you
image ap¬
pears extremely distorted."

an

see

anamorphic lens,
it

the

on

screen

so
the

Smoke has become an es¬
sential element of the Alien films,
not to mention the science-fiction

genre in general. Alien3 has its share
of ambience, but in this case, where
there's smoke, there's also an elabo¬
rate fire sequence. When Ripley
convinces the convicts that the alien
is afraid of fire, they attempt to bum
it alive in the subterranean pas¬
sages using old cans of gasoline.

Of
things never go quite right
for the protagonists in these films,
course,

as

Thomson relates: "Unfortu¬

nately,

one of the guys drops
flare and ignites his petrol gel

fore

his
be¬
everyone's cleared out of the

corridor,

so

there's

a

sequence

in¬

volving everyone rushing for safety
amid huge explosions and flame-
it's like a mmi-Backdraft\"
Dealing with fire
a

on

such

scale took infinite caution and

a
American Cinematographer - July 1992

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