Jedi2016
Sr Member
I'm basing most of my ideas off of the BTS features and commentary on the DVD, straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak. O'Bannon himself was the one that talked about the facehugger design, how he adapted Giger's "hand" alien into a more "spider" shape, got the nod from Ridley, and had Roger touch up the details and build it.
Published screenplays tend to be a bit off a lot of times.. often reverse engineered from the final film. I've yet to see a film that matches the shooting script 100%, so that's usually an indicator that the "script" was written from the film and not the other way around. Take ESB, for example. Word for word, no changes of any kind. Including "I am your father", despite all of the evidence from the actors and producers that the shooting script never had that line in it. It also doesn't account for known deleted scenes from those films, either.. cuts like that aren't made during writing.
The shooting script for Alien contains quite a few subtle differences. Stage direction is pretty much intact, but little bits of dialogue are changed here and there, and of course it contains all of the deleted material that never made it on screen, including things they never shot. And some of that doesn't quite match 100% to the deleted scenes as they appear on the DVD, or the ones reintegrated into the film for the "director's cut". The cocoon sequence, for example, actually contains more dialogue between Dallas and Ripley, rather than the two words that Dallas spoke in the scene as they filmed it.
I may be wrong about the octopus thing, but I thought I remembered O'Bannon saying he'd drawn up a sketch (maybe he's talking about a different sketch). Anyway, his script is very clear about the octopus shape and suckers anyway, so despite the sketch, the idea behind that design is clearly his in any event.
The subterranean bit is a leftover from the script, I think. It was in O'Bannon's original script, and it's also in Giler's rewrite (the shooting script), where Kane says "I'm below ground level" while still in the tunnel on his way down, before he even hits the cave. I'm not sure if they ever recorded that line or shot the extended drop-down sequence (in the film, he appears pretty much instantly inside the cave, as if the cockpit was directly above it with nothing in between). That may have been an intentional change on Ridley's part to incorporate the cave directly into the ship. He even talks about it on the commentary, speculating that it may be a military cargo ship, carrying these things to some other world.
Published screenplays tend to be a bit off a lot of times.. often reverse engineered from the final film. I've yet to see a film that matches the shooting script 100%, so that's usually an indicator that the "script" was written from the film and not the other way around. Take ESB, for example. Word for word, no changes of any kind. Including "I am your father", despite all of the evidence from the actors and producers that the shooting script never had that line in it. It also doesn't account for known deleted scenes from those films, either.. cuts like that aren't made during writing.
The shooting script for Alien contains quite a few subtle differences. Stage direction is pretty much intact, but little bits of dialogue are changed here and there, and of course it contains all of the deleted material that never made it on screen, including things they never shot. And some of that doesn't quite match 100% to the deleted scenes as they appear on the DVD, or the ones reintegrated into the film for the "director's cut". The cocoon sequence, for example, actually contains more dialogue between Dallas and Ripley, rather than the two words that Dallas spoke in the scene as they filmed it.
I may be wrong about the octopus thing, but I thought I remembered O'Bannon saying he'd drawn up a sketch (maybe he's talking about a different sketch). Anyway, his script is very clear about the octopus shape and suckers anyway, so despite the sketch, the idea behind that design is clearly his in any event.
The subterranean bit is a leftover from the script, I think. It was in O'Bannon's original script, and it's also in Giler's rewrite (the shooting script), where Kane says "I'm below ground level" while still in the tunnel on his way down, before he even hits the cave. I'm not sure if they ever recorded that line or shot the extended drop-down sequence (in the film, he appears pretty much instantly inside the cave, as if the cockpit was directly above it with nothing in between). That may have been an intentional change on Ridley's part to incorporate the cave directly into the ship. He even talks about it on the commentary, speculating that it may be a military cargo ship, carrying these things to some other world.
