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Alien 3 (1992)
Alien 3 (stylized as ALIEN3) is a 1992 American science fiction horror film directed by David Fincher and written by David Giler, Walter Hill, and Larry Ferguson, from a story by Vincent Ward. Starring Sigourney Weaver reprising her role as Ellen Ripley, it is the third installment of the Alien franchise.
Directed by David Fincher · Shot by Alex Thomson · Cut by Terry Rawlings · Music by Elliot Goldenthal · 114 min
How it was made
- Filming began at Pinewood Studios on January 14, 1991 without a finished script, after $7 million had already been spent; cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth, suffering from Parkinson's disease, worked only two weeks before being replaced by Alex Thomson.
- Fincher wanted the alien to move "more like a puma" than the upright creatures of earlier films, so original designer H. R. Giger produced new sketches with longer legs and a sharp tongue in place of the secondary jaws, faxed from his Zurich studio and sculpted into plasticine models by Cornelius de Fries.
- The alien was portrayed through a combination of Tom Woodruff Jr. in a suit walking on all fours and a 40-inch, one-third-scale rod puppet built over a bicycle-chain armature, shot against bluescreen and composited in with its control rods removed by rotoscoping.
- Puppeteer Laine Liska led a team of four to six people operating the rod puppet in a technique called "Mo-Motion", moving it alongside a motion-control camera; effects producer Richard Edlund said pushing the puppet's movements to the edge of control created "serendipitous action" that gave the alien character.
- To sync the puppet's movements with live-action plates, the effects team built an instant compositing system using LaserDisc so the crew could immediately check on set whether spatial adjustments were needed.
- Fincher initially suggested dressing a Whippet dog in an alien costume for some coverage shots, but the visual effects team dropped the idea after finding the result unconvincing.
Behind the scenes
Elsewhere
More by David Fincher
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