Screenwriter Jon Spaihts On The Prometheus That Never Was

[img]http://www.empireonline.com/images/image_index/original/64734.jpg[/img] The medpod scene The medpod sequence is one of the reasons I got the job in the first place. It's one of my favourite scenes and it's visually realised in an extraordinary way. One of the things I realised was that we hadn't seen anyone survive a classic Alien chest bursting. And I was really intrigued by the notion that a character might be infected by the parasite and know that it was coming, know they had a timeframe of a few hours, and that we would have set up previously a nearly omnipotent medical device, designed to extend life for explorers in foreign places. Our heroine would have a short time to get to the machine and extract the thing inside her. It was a very gory sequence and it plays out very much like the sequence in the film. The main difference is in choreography. At the end of the sequence as I first conceived it, the heroine manages to get the creature extracted from her and it is expelled from the pod and she's sealed inside, whereas in the final film it goes the other way. Then she lapses in and out of consciousness for a number of hours as the machine puts her back together. As she comes back to consciousness, she sees the thing growing in the cabin outside and even killing people. So by the time she emerges from the pod eight hours later, the thing is abroad in the ship and big enough to be a huge danger. That was the original conception of the medpod scene. In the final film, obviously, that monster has been de-Alien-ised and become something a little more new and hybridised. And it's trapped inside the medpod while she rolls out, and it grows into something dangerous that's pushed to the end of the film. As for how she recovers from her surgery so fast - well, it was more of a protracted process in my original notion. My script underwent a number of major evolutions as we were working on it, and then Damon came in and made further changes still. But that sequence and its place in the story was one of the anchors. The medpod scene The medpod sequence is one of the reasons I got the job in the first place. It's one of my favourite scenes and it's visually realised in an extraordinary way. One of the things I realised was that we hadn't seen anyone survive a classic Alien chest bursting. And I was really intrigued by the notion that a character might be infected by the parasite and know that it was coming, know they had a timeframe of a few hours, and that we would have set up previously a nearly omnipotent medical device, designed to extend life for explorers in foreign places. Our heroine would have a short time to get to the machine and extract the thing inside her. It was a very gory sequence and it plays out very much like the sequence in the film. The main difference is in choreography. At the end of the sequence as I first conceived it, the heroine manages to get the creature extracted from her and it is expelled from the pod and she's sealed inside, whereas in the final film it goes the other way. Then she lapses in and out of consciousness for a number of hours as the machine puts her back together. As she comes back to consciousness, she sees the thing growing in the cabin outside and even killing people. So by the time she emerges from the pod eight hours later, the thing is abroad in the ship and big enough to be a huge danger. That was the original conception of the medpod scene. In the final film, obviously, that monster has been de-Alien-ised and become something a little more new and hybridised. And it's trapped inside the medpod while she rolls out, and it grows into something dangerous that's pushed to the end of the film. As for how she recovers from her surgery so fast - well, it was more of a protracted process in my original notion. My script underwent a number of major evolutions as we were working on it, and then Damon came in and made further changes still. But that sequence and its place in the story was one of the anchors. [url=http://www.empireonline.com/interviews/interview.asp?IID=1563]here[/url]