Rounding out the release of the Alien short films on Alien Day, the sixth and final installment is Noah Miller’s Alien: Alone. A fan among fans, Noah brings his deep knowledge of the canon and obsessive attention to detail to his film, which follows Hope and her solo journey aboard the Otranto. This foreboding tale is a reverent nod to the gothic horror genre with an interesting twist that fans are going crazy for.
To celebrate the franchise’s 40th anniversary, 20th Century Fox teamed up with Tongal to give filmmakers the opportunity to create new and original short films based on the distinctive world of Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien. In a span of one week, we received over 550 pitches, more than any other production project on Tongal to date, and ultimately greenlit 6 filmmaking teams, providing them each with a budget of $35,000.
Keep reading to learn more about Noah’s creative process, how his team built a facehugger from scratch, and some advice from Vince Gilligan that has become his personal creative mantra.
Ingrid Vining: With over 550 Pitch Qualifications submitted, the Alien 40th Anniversary Shorts Project was the most competitive filmmaking project on Tongal to date. How did it feel when you learned you were one of the 6 filmmakers that got the greenlight from 20th Century Fox?
Noah Miller: Weirdly enough it was the pitch greenlight that excited me the most. I poured a lot into that pitch, the idea being that if I was rejected I’d be rejected for my full idea and not have to wonder “what if?”.
I immediately wrote the full script then worked for pretty close to four days straight, dragging my work computer home, animating and working on the 2.5D story animatics. I poured the full amount of pitch money into a storyboard artist. I turned the whole thing into a mini production, color correcting, trying out some 20 different music tracks, doing sfx, getting actresses in to do the dialogue.
That was all driven by pure excitement for this project.
I also have to give a huge thanks to Pat Ridge and Tim Carhart at Ridge Production. They were so behind this project, think about that -- would your boss let you drag $5k of company material to your house just to make some little pitch video? They’ve been incredibly supportive throughout the process and I can’t thank them enough.
IV: We heard you built the fully articulated animatronic facehugger -- so impressive! Why was it important for you to have this prop and what was the R&D process like?
NM: I knew from the start I was going to do purely practical effects, especially because the facehugger was such an important part of the film. For quick shots, low budget CG can work but we needed something concrete to work with. I wanted Taylor Lyons (Hope) to have something to act with for sure. I definitely didn’t want to pin the quality of the short on pure post work. And most of all, it’s just cool. We got to do a lot of old school film techniques and puppetry was a big part of that.
R&D was done all by Raptorhouse who created this amazing machine. We ended up with two facehuggers, one was animatronic and one was soft silicone for stunt work. I don’t remember exactly when, but they ended up with the names Kate and Rose from Titanic. Kate lives at my house now.
I do remember this great moment where Jesse Velez came over to me on the second day of shooting, “I’ve got a surprise for you.” The madman, after a day of shooting 12 hours, went back to their shop and added breathing bladders to the sacks. While we were shooting he was improving the puppet. It was absolutely insane how much work Jesse and Cameron put into this.
Jesse Velez: Creating the facehugger for Alien: Alone was a daunting treat for the team at Raptor. With just five months from idea to animatronic, we were able to create a fully articulated radio-operated hero puppet and an identical stunt body that were each freakishly lifelike. Silicone skin, 3D printed skeletons, servo motors, and a lot of slime added up to a creature that looked and felt totally alive. We were truly honored to re-create these world famous parasites, and present our work as a grateful tribute to the special effects wizards that gave us the greatest monsters of all time.
IV: Your short stood out for its unique tone, walking the line between horror, romance and dark comedy. What drove you to take your story in this direction?
NM: Years ago when I was at AFI, I ended up at this talk with Vince Gilligan. It was a surreal experience because about six or seven people showed up. So I got to ask a lot of questions. One of them was how he could possibly make us be sympathetic with Walter White when in the first few episodes he melted a person in a bathtub? His response was “Do what you like and the audience you want will come with you.”
That’s a pretty big mantra for me. I didn’t give a thought to the different tones I was hitting other than that they felt right for the story and that the story felt right for me.
That’s not saying there weren’t some adjustments. Once more people were brought on they all added to our final project. That was important to me; Alien was a very collaborative effort. There are so many voices present in that film. For example Dan O’Bannon hates the idea of Ash the synthetic and it was Walter Hill and Ronald Shusett who added that in. I think Alien would have suffered without Ash. I originally did not want to have a reveal about Hope’s character. It was Pat Ridge and Quaid Kocur who argued for putting that in. And they were both right. This happened all over this production, another example being our DP Colin Jacob. My thought was to go very dark visually but it was Colin who got us on track to representing the facehugger in light instead of darkness which I think created a very unique way of dealing with the creature, and still representing its psychological significance to Hope.
The last thing that was pretty influential on the tone was a deep dive into the gothic horror genre. I named the ship the Otranto, after the Castle Of Otranto by Horace Warpole, considered the first gothic horror novel. The original Alien was heavily influenced by gothic horror and I wanted to carry some of that over. Early gothic horror was just plain weird and had elements of horror, comedy and romance playing together. While I didn’t set off to bring all of that in, I was knee-deep in reading through the canon of gothic horror. So it’s interesting to see that make itself known in the final product.
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See more behind-the-scenes action on Instagram at @noahrobertmiller and @alienanthology, and all the Alien 40th Anniversary shorts on IGN.
