Director Fede Alvarez pays homage to the original Alien with one plot development in Alien: Romulus. With spoilers, he talks about the work that went into it.
NB: This is your final warning for a major Alien: Romulus spoiler. If you haven’t seen the film yet, do read one of the many other wonderful things we have on this website.
That’s a long, rambling headline up there, isn’t it? Sorry about that. All we can say in our defence is that some of Alien: Romulus's secrets are worth preserving for the big screen.
If you have seen Alien: Romulus, though, then you will probably have noted that an unexpected face shows up at the end of the first act: it’s Ian Holm – or at any rate an artificial likeness of him – playing a damaged synthetic named Rook. If you haven’t seen 1979’s Alien, you may have simply wondered why the effects looked a bit wonky on that broken android propped up against a workstation.
In an interview with The Los Angeles Times, director Fede Alvarez has talked about the effort that went into re-creating the late Ian Holm’s likeness for his Alien sidequel, which is currently scaring up unexpectedly good ticket sales in cinemas.
First of all, Alvarez addressed the potential controversy over using the likeness of a much-loved, sadly-departed actor, saying that he’d personally contacted Holm’s widow, Sophie de Stempel, who gave her approval for the late actor’s appearance in the film. Being a part of a new Alien movie, albeit only in a roundabout way, would have pleased Holm, Alvarez said.
“In the last 10 years after The Hobbit, Ian Holm felt like Hollywood had turned its back on him and his widow felt he would have loved to be a part of this,” Alvarez said. “He loved this character in particular.”
Read more: Alien Romulus review | A bloody, chaotic tribute to the series’ best films
Alvarez then explained how the whole effect was achieved: ’80 to 90 percent’ of the shots relied on a traditional animatronic puppet, in keeping with the rest of the film’s reliance on practical filmmaking. To create accurate lip-syncing and facial expressions, meanwhile, Alvarez’s team used CGI. Actor Daniel Betts’ performance was shot and used as reference for that digital VFX work, while ‘generative AI’ was used to make Betts’ voice sound more like Holm’s.
Interestingly, Alvarez implies that the decision to introduce an android that looked like Ash wasn’t made until some way into production, with other actors and their in-universe synthetics also considered – Lance Henriksen’s Bishop from Aliens and Alien 3, and Michael Fassbender’s David 8 from Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. (Winona Ryder’s Call from Alien: Resurrection was seemingly never a part of that conversation.)
“We knew we were going to create an animatronic,” Alvarez said, “and that later we were going to do CGI enhancements in the mouth and in the eyes depending on the shots. “Then the question arose, ‘What face does it have? Who is it?’ The only one who hadn’t reappeared and who we found fascinating was Ian Holm.”
We’ll let you decide whether the resulting effect worked or not. For his part, Alvarez argues that while Rook looks like Ian Holm’s Ash – him being from the same line of synthetics as the Nostromo’s devious science officer – he’s a distinct character. Including Holm’s likeness was, he argues, simply a way of honouring one of the actor’s signature roles.
Said Alvarez, “We did it all with a lot of respect and always with the authorisation of his family, his children and his widow, who said, ‘We would love to see his likeness again.’”
You can find our thoughts on Rook and his impact on the film’s plot in our spoiler-filled piece on Alien Romulus’s gory twists and turns. You can also read our interview with Fede Alvarez on this site, while the latest edition of Film Stories magazine profiles the director and his path from Uruguay to Hollywood and on to Ridley Scott’s space horror franchise.
