Noah Hawley has two scripts down on his upcoming Alien TV series for FX and already knows it will not be about Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley.
Speaking to Vanity Fair, the Legion showrunner offered a status update on the series and divulged some details about what fans can expect from the anticipated show. The series, which was announced last December, will be set on Earth and will raise the stakes around the concept of “what happens if you can’t contain it?”
“The alien stories are always trapped…. Trapped in a prison, trapped in a spaceship. I thought it would be interesting to open it up a little bit so that the stakes of ‘What happens if you can’t contain it?’ are more immediate.”
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Hawley went on to confirm that the question that undergirds the entire franchise won’t be answered by Ellen Ripley, the franchise’s beloved alien-destroying heroine.
“It’s not a Ripley story. She’s one of the great characters of all time, and I think the story has been told pretty perfectly, and I don’t want to mess with it,” Hawley said of his decision not to feature the character.
Ripley has, however, influenced Hawley’s vision for the series, which he says “on some level” is a story about inequality. “There’s that great Sigourney Weaver line to Paul Reiser where she says, ‘I don’t know which species is worse. At least they don’t fuck each other over for a percentage,'” he said.
The FX series, for which Hawley says he’s finished the first two scripts, will tackle class warfare and “what happens when the inequality we’re struggling with now isn’t resolved.”
“If we as a society can’t figure out how to prop each other up and spread the wealth, then what’s going to happen to us?” he teased.
Hawley said that focusing on the human element of the franchise is based on a desire to explore the films’ larger conversations, not just their “monster movie” element.
“Those are great monster movies, but they’re not just monster movies,” Hawley explained. “They’re about humanity trapped between our primordial, parasitic past and our artificial intelligence future — and they’re both trying to kill us. Here you have human beings, and they can’t go forward, and they can’t go back. So I find that really interesting.”
Gearing up to make the first TV series based on the popular movie franchise next spring, the Fargo showrunner says he’s not rushing to get the series done. The pandemic and “level of visual effects” the show will demand requires “a lot of preparation” and a little more patience to “do it right.”
“What’s been really illuminating is to see that the entire film industry had to take a year off, and they are now trying to jam two years of production into one year,” Hawley said. “So it’s very hard to look on the planet Earth and see where you might make something in the next six months. Everyone is racing to make up for lost time. So, I figure let that bubble burst a little bit, and we’ll do it right.”
