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  • 2 days ago
Interview with Writer / Director / Producer Fede Álvarez
Transcript
00:00I'd love to discuss the use of Ash, and obviously the great Ian Holm.
00:03I'd love to know what was that process like, and I guess if there are rules,
00:08what are the rules for something like that now?
00:10Do you guys reach out to his estate and see how they feel about it?
00:12Yeah, yeah, I mean, it started with, because I knew I was going to build an animatronic for it, right?
00:19I knew I was going to build an animatronic that was going to be,
00:21I wasn't going to put an actor through the table.
00:24I wasn't going to get someone to put the torso through a table and pretend they're animatronic.
00:30So I was like, if it's supposed to be a robot, let's build a robot.
00:33That's what it should be.
00:35And I knew the limitations of the technology would be justified because it's a malfunctioning robot,
00:39so it wasn't supposed to work perfectly.
00:42So I was like, good, we can do that.
00:44So once we decide that, we knew it could look however we wanted,
00:49because it wasn't going to be an actor.
00:50We have to mold a face and create a face.
00:52And so talking with Ridley, we both came up with this idea that we both agreed that it was unfair
00:59that Lance Henriksen came back so many times and Michael Fassbender did it a couple of times.
01:04And there was all these actors that got to play different synthetics,
01:08but the best one of them all, Ian Holm, didn't get to do it twice.
01:12So he was really good friends with Ian, and he thought he would have loved to do it.
01:16But still, the first thing I did was personally, I called his widow
01:20and pitched the idea to her and make sure that she talked with his kids
01:25and make sure the whole family was on board with this idea, you know,
01:29because he had passed away not too long ago.
01:31And actually, my dad passed away the same year that Ian Holm did,
01:34so I know how delicate that can be.
01:36So I just want to make sure that they were okay with it.
01:39And, you know, his widow agreed that, you know, Ian, in the last years of his life,
01:45he kind of felt the cold shoulder of Hollywood,
01:47that he wasn't called for many projects and nothing interesting.
01:53And he would have loved to get the call to be part of Alien again
01:56because he loved that character and he loved the character of Ash,
02:00and he was one of the best members of his life.
02:02So they told us that it was okay to do it.
02:06And then also, what I never really tried to do is I never tried to recreate it in a home.
02:11That's impossible.
02:12There's no technology that can bring the talent of an actor,
02:14the nuances of their performance.
02:16There's no way we can know what it would do.
02:18All we approach it from the point of view of, like, recreating a likeness, a face.
02:24But the character is different.
02:25It's a different character.
02:26It's called Rook and has a different personality.
02:28So the style could be different, and we hired an actor to play the voice
02:35and the performance that translated into the animatronic.
02:40So it was this whole incredible, you know, amazing adventure that implied,
02:46also, in a way, to hire a lot of people to do it.
02:50It was this whole adventure.
02:51But we're really proud of it.
02:52Actually, I wish you could see this,
02:54but I was just showing someone the incredible head that, look at this.
03:01You'll get to see it.
03:02I don't know.
03:02I don't know if you get to see it.
03:03Do you get to see it?
03:04Oh, yeah.
03:05That's cool.
03:06Look at that.
03:07Yes.
03:08That's so sick.
03:11Oh, my God.
03:13That's incredible.
03:15That is amazing.
03:16That's the head, the whole body, the guys from Legacy, you know,
03:22Shane Mayhem, who did The Queen on Aliens and all the team,
03:25like, they took on the challenge.
03:28We find a head cast of Ian Holm from Lord of the Rings that he did for,
03:32it's the only one that existed from 1999 that he did when he was starting
03:37to play Bilbo.
03:39So we went out, workshop, had it,
03:41and that was the beginning of the molding of this face.
03:46And then, you know, if you see the movie,
03:47you need some CG for the lips in some moments,
03:50and there's some shots that needed that.
03:52But a lot of the shots, it's just you just look at the animatronic,
03:54which I think is amazing.

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