Aliens: How James Cameron made the greatest sequel in sci-fi history

On the day Aliens opened – 18 July 1986 – director James Cameron and producer Gale Anne Hurd, then a married couple, went to as many screenings as possible around Los Angeles. One at midnight on Hollywood Boulevard was especially thrilling. “It was like people were on an amusement park ride,” Hurd tells me today. “They were screaming at the screen... we had hoped it would get a visceral response but we never expected to that extent.”

Cinemagoers, though, had been forewarned that Cameron’s sequel would be a very different beast to the Ridley Scott original. “This time it’s war,” said the trailer. Alien: Romulus is bursting its way into cinemas this week, but Aliens remains the gold standard for the franchise’s sequels. There hasn’t been a decent entry – or a universally appreciated Alien, at least – since 1986, with a patchy record of troubled productions (Alien 3), maligned weirdness (Alien: Resurrection), low-rent spin-offs (Alien vs Predator), and unfathomably disappointing prequels (Ridley Scott’s Prometheus and Alien: Covenant). Plus, a trail of unproduced films – notably Neill Blomkamp’s scrapped Alien 5 – whose gestations proved trickier than the facehugger-to-chestburster life cycle.

Indeed, Aliens casts a massive, Alien Queen-shaped shadow. In Eighties action terms, it’s a giant armoured space truck of a film – a genre-defining, decade-defining, series-defining juggernaut. But much more than just action and quotable lines – “Get away from her, you bitch!” – Aliens is a masterclass in world-building and story exploration, rocketing the series far beyond the isolated confines of the original.

The film came during a thunderously successful period for Cameron, who went from being fired from Piranha II: The Spawning to making both The Terminator and Aliens in just four years. In fact, Cameron was attached to the Alien sequel before he started shooting The Terminator, which was delayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s contractual obligation to a Conan the Barbarian follow-up. Cameron looked for scriptwriting work in the meantime and met with Alien producers David Giler and Walter Hill about a “Spartacus in space” film. But when they mentioned that they had an idea for Alien 2 – something about Ripley teaming up with soldiers and returning to LV-426, the alien egg-riddled planet from the first film – Cameron jumped at it.

Cameron was warned off making an Alien sequel by friends, though his response was (quite rightly), “Yeah, but I really want to do it. It’ll be cool.” Incredibly, he wrote Aliens, Rambo: First Blood Part II and rewrites for The Terminator all at once, over three months. Ever drawn to a strong female lead, Cameron kept a picture of Sigourney Weaver on his desk as he wrote.

Cameron’s most obvious masterstroke was switching genres – from the off-world horror of Scott’s Alien to the full-throttle action of Aliens. “Jim revered [the first film], as do I, and did not feel that you could improve upon the original,” explains Hurd. “He did not want to remake it. So, he thought, what would be a proper continuation of the character of Ripley? And how could it essentially be a different genre?”

“I knew I could do white-knuckle action,” Cameron later told Film4, “that I could turn the screw tighter and tighter in an action sequence. So, I figured, let’s do that – let’s jump off from the horror premise into what ultimately becomes an action film.” Cameron took elements from a previous treatment he’d written called Mother, including the power loader fight and the name “xenomorph”. Mother would prove an apt genesis: Aliens is powerfully maternal stuff.

Cameron’s story saw Ripley awake from stasis after 57 years, at which point she learns that her daughter back on Earth has grown old and died. She’s then persuaded to return to LV-426 with a unit of marines – on a mission to save a human colony from the xenomorphs. Ripley finds the colony’s sole survivor, 10-year-old Newt (Carrie Henn), whom she takes as a surrogate daughter before battling the Alien Queen, a 15ft creature of multi-limbed motherly rage.

As the story goes, Cameron pitched his concept to the producers by writing the word “alien” on a meeting room board, before adding an “s”, then drawing a line through it to make it “Alien$”. Hurd chuckles at the tale’s place in Aliens lore. “I was not there,” she tells me. “But I understand that’s true. And even if it’s not, it should be.”

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Unusually, the studio was so excited by Cameron’s still-unfinished script that they waited for him to shoot The Terminator before completing it. Though it wasn’t until that film’s box office success that Cameron sealed the deal to also direct Aliens – his first studio picture. The expectation at the time was that a sequel would make just 60 per cent of the original. Aliens was budgeted accordingly at $14m (£9m) – significantly more than The Terminator but not huge by the measure of Eighties blockbusters. And as a 29-year-old woman, Hurd had challenges beyond the budget: being accepted as a producer by the studio and by their crew.

Weaver, meanwhile, didn’t know anything about the film. She was initially opposed to a sequel but agreed to read Cameron’s script. Cameron later recalled that Weaver’s story requests were “to die in the film... to not use guns... [and] to make love to the alien”. (Weaver had to wait until Alien: Resurrection to fulfil that last one). But it almost didn’t matter: the studio didn’t want to pay Weaver’s fee. “Fox baulked and approached the executive producers,” says Hurd. “They said, ‘Just write a new script and it’ll be a new chapter. Ripley’s not coming back...’ I don’t know what that movie would be.”

Cameron and Hurd threatened to walk off the project, though the wily Cameron hatched a plan: he told Schwarzenegger’s agent, who worked at the same agency as Weaver’s agent, that he was about to proceed without Weaver. Cameron knew that Arnie’s agent would tell Weaver’s agent, who immediately called the studio and got the deal done. Weaver was paid $1m (£780,000) – 30 times her Alien fee. By the time Weaver joined production, her marine co-stars – including Cameron regulars Michael Biehn, Bill Paxton and Jenette Goldstein – had spent weeks together in bootcamp.

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Was there really as much testosterone among the marines as seen in the film? “Oh yeah,” says Goldstein, who plays the tough-as-old-boots Vasquez. The bootcamp bonding exercises certainly worked. “We’re all incredibly close still.” She also enjoyed Cameron’s low budget mindset. “When things went wrong it was like a B-movie,” she recalls. “‘We’ll fix it, gaffer tape it, shoot it from a different angle!’”

That ramshackle quality has helped Aliens hold up, suggests dancer turned chef Carl Toop, who slipped into one of the many alien suits for the film. “You still get that tension from all the stunts being done for real,” he says. “We were in some positions where we did feel in danger. That must have come through in the actors’ expressions – I think some of that wasn’t completely 100 per cent acting. It was real scary stuff.”

Cameron himself designed the Alien Queen, a giant puppet that required multiple operators and hydraulic systems to manoeuvre. The Queen could have easily been the product of sequel-itis – bigger, louder, less subtle. But she’s the manifestation of the film’s most powerful weapons – the maternal mourning and fury that both pulse beneath the action. You can’t help but feel sorry for the Queen when Ripley shows up and torches her nest. Unfortunately, Cameron and Hurd had to cut the storyline about Ripley’s dead daughter to keep the overall runtime down. (This was later restored for the film’s special edition director’s cut). “I mean, talk about killing your babies,” jokes Hurd.

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Clearly, Aliens was next-level action cinema. But parts of the British crew were unimpressed, with one dismissively referring to Cameron not by his name but as “the Yank”. “That one really rankled,” says Hurd, “because Jim’s a Canadian.” Cameron and Hurd tried to set up screenings of The Terminator to show the Brits what Cameron’s filmmaking was all about, but hardly anyone bothered to show up. “There was definitely a clash of personalities and culture,” says Goldstein, diplomatically.

There were also tensions over working hours. While American crews were used to long days, dictated at the director’s behest, the British crew – bolstered by strong unions – favoured shorter days and (as is every Englishman’s God-given right) mandatory tea breaks. Cameron would set up a shot, only for the tea lady to interrupt with her squeaky trolley – at which point the crew would stop for a cuppa and a cheese roll. The “famous tea lady”, Goldstein remembers, was the last straw. “Jim would be like, ‘Oh my f*****g God!’”

Ultimately, the cinematographer, Dick Bush, was fired because he lit scenes how he wanted them lit – and not how Cameron wanted scenes lit – while first assistant director Derek Cracknell was almost fired, which led to a near mutiny and crisis meeting. “We managed to come to an understanding,” says Hurd.

Cameron and Hurd were of course validated: Aliens was a triumph, making a reported $183m (£143m). It was also nominated for seven Oscars, winning two.

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Its genre-flipping brilliance is neatly encapsulated in one particular sequence – when Ripley and Newt are trapped with a pair of facehuggers. In Alien, the facehugger is more of a grotesque visual – an image of primal fear – that latches onto the face of John Hurt. Cameron takes that image and transforms it into an action sequence driven by squirming, scuttling, pulse-pounding horror. That’s the essence of Cameron’s reinvention in an alien eggshell.

“I don’t think Ridley liked the fact that I came along and kind of trampled around in his little world that he’d created,” Cameron later said. In 2012, Scott’s Prometheus would make the fatal flaw of going inward, trying to answer questions about the original that were best left as mysteries. Aliens, conversely, is a universal blueprint for continuing the story while building on the mythology, creating new corners to explore, with a fresh vision – all without sucking the life from the original. Just as the xenomorph is a perfect organism, Aliens is a perfect sequel.

‘Alien: Romulus’ is in cinemas