“I was really influenced by three films,” Ridley Scott told Fantastic Films in 1979, on the subject of the Nostromo and its claustrophobic corridors. “Not so much in terms of Star Wars, but definitely from 2001 and Dark Star.” The latter film, directed by a young John Carpenter and written by, and starring, Alien writer Dan O’Bannon, was an inverse, comedic take on 2001 – where Kubrick’s film was cold, sterile, clinical, and philosophical in scope, Dark Star was cramped, crowded, shabby, dirty, irreverent and yet also elegiac. “There was a great sense of reality, oddly enough, in Dark Star,” continued Scott, “especially of seedy living. It showed you can get grotty even in the Hilton Hotel if you don’t clean it. Everything starts to get tacky, even in the most streamlined surfaces.”
“When we did Dark Star,” said O’Bannon, “which was in the wake of 2001, we thought we wanted -partly for the novelty, partly because it was realer, mostly just for laughs- we wanted to show this once-sterile spaceship in a rundown condition, like some old bachelor apartment.” For O’Bannon, Dark Star‘s ‘used universe’ was not as strong a visual element as he had hoped, and Star Wars’ “didn’t come across all that clearly either.” For Alien, O’Bannon instructed Ridley Scott that “if we want this spacecraft to look industrial [and] beat-up, you’re gonna have to make it about three times messier to the naked eye than you wanna to see it. And Alien probably was the first time where an audience clearly saw a futuristic machine in a run-down condition.”
The design of the Nostromo and the ‘used universe’ aesthetic would be drawn from O’Bannon’s earlier sci-fi effort, coupled with the realism of Kubrick’s Discovery One. “It’s futuristic,” Scott said of Kubrick’s approach to 2001, “but it’s still hung on today’s reality … In two hundred years things won’t change that much, you know. People will still be scruffy or clean. They’ll still clean their teeth three times a day.” Though Star Wars itself utilised a used universe (or, as Akira Kurosawa called it, a “maculate reality”), Scott wanted to create a tangible reality opposed to Star Wars‘ fantasy-hinged settings and ships. “I wanted to do the truck driver version, the hard-nosed version,” said Scott. “It was supposed to be the anti-thesis of Star Wars. The reality, the beauty of something absolutely about function.”
Before Scott came onto the project as director, writer Dan O’Bannon commissioned his friend and Dark Star spaceship designer Ron Cobb to draw what his script was then calling the ‘deep space commercial vessel Snark’ – a nod to Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. O’Bannon had promised Cobb a job on Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune, but when that film dissolved Cobb, who had terminated the lease on his home and prepared to move to Paris with his wife, was left standing empty-handed. To make up for the letdown, O’Bannon immediately hired Cobb for Alien, which allowed the artist to bounce back from a slump. “He was paid about $400 a week,” Cobb’s wife, Robin Love, told the LA Times in 1988. “We thought it was wonderful!”
When Dan met Ron: “I was working on my first sci-fi film, John Carpenter’s Electric Dutchman, which would ultimately metastastize into the feature-length Dark Star. I tried to reach Cobb to get him to design the whole film, but he was unreachable. For weeks his phone rang without an answer, and then it was disconnected, and then I got his new unlisted number but it was invariably answered by one of the girls who were living with him, who always told me he was out. It was impossible. It took another year and a half to track him down and get him to agree to design us a nice, simple little spaceship for our simple little movie. Finally, one night about ten pm, Carpenter and I drove over to Westwood and rousted him out of a sound sleep. He was hung over from an LSD trip and I felt kind of guilty, but I had to have those designs. We took him over to an all-night coffee shop and fed him and got him half-way awake, and then he brought out this pad of yellow graph paper on which he had sketched a 3-view plan of our spaceship. It was wonderful! A little surfboard-shaped starcruiser with a flat bottom for atmospheric landings. Very technological looking. Very high class stuff.”
“The first person I hired on Alien, the first person to draw money, was Cobb,” O’Bannon said. “He started turning out renderings, large full-colour paintings, while Shusett and I were still struggling with the script – the corrosive blood of the Alien was Cobb’s idea. It was an intensely creative period – the economic desperation, the all-night sessions, the rushing over to Cobb’s apartment to see the latest painting-in-progress and give him the latest pages.”
“I just sat down and started blocking out a ship – which I love to do. Anyway, Dan’s original script called for a small, modest little ship with a small crew. They land on a small planet. They go down a small pyramid and shake up a medium-sized creature. That’s about it. He meant it to be a low budget film, like Dark Star, and I loved the idea. So I did a few paintings and Dan scurried off with them and a script.”
~ Ron Cobb
“And he was doing some incredible stuff,” continued O’Bannon. “Wow! I was really happy during this period, seeing the movie appear under Cobb’s fingers. Of course, we usually had to go over and sit on his back to get him to do any work -otherwise he would just party on with his friends- but how beautiful were the results.”
Coupled with Cobb was English artist, Chris Foss, who O’Bannon had come to know during their tenure together on Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune. “Alejandro wanted Doug Trumble to do the special effects [for Dune],” Foss told MTV in 2011, “and of course, Trumble was a big important American, and certainly wouldn’t succumb to Alejandro’s manipulation. So he picked up this gauche American film student, Dan O’Bannon. He was quite hilarious, he said to me once, ‘Hey, these streets are so goddamn small.’ This is Paris, which had some of the widest streets in Europe. Of course, it was only when I got to Los Angeles that I saw what he meant.”
... continue reading