Before Ridley Scott got the job, Alien was almost directed by cinema legend Robert Altman. What would the MASH filmmaker's version have been like?
Director Ridley Scott said that Robert Altman was offered the job of directing Alien before him, but what would the movie have looked like if the famous helmer ended up making it instead? The Alien franchise has been worked on by numerous directors across its many sequels, prequels, and spinoff movies. However, veteran director Ridley Scott is the director most closely associated with the Alien movies, having helmed the 1979 original Alien, 2012’s prequel Prometheus, and 2017’s second prequel Alien: Covenant.
Although director James Cameron’s sequel Aliens was almost as critically acclaimed as Alien, the movies that fleshed out the lore of the Alien universe are Scott’s contributions to the franchise. Alongside writer Dan O’Bannon and producer Walter Hill, Scott was responsible for much of the detail that made the Alien movies such a memorable series. As such, it may be a major surprise for some readers to learn that Scott was not the first choice to direct Alien. In fact, he was not even the fourth choice.
According to a 2021 interview with Scott, he was the fifth choice to direct Alien, although the director did not know the names of all of the helmers who were approached before him. Franchise megafans may know that Whatever Happened to Baby Jane director/cult movie legend Robert Aldrich was one of the first four since he infamously suggested the Xenomorph be a shaved orangutan during a sit-down with producers. However, Scott did divulge the unexpected revelation that legendary Nashville auteur Robert Altman was the name picked directly before his. Scott was unsure why anyone would ask Altman to make Alien despite the director's undeniably impressive pedigree, saying "the guy before me, bizarrely, was a great filmmaker called Robert Altman. But what on earth would you offer Robert Altman Alien for?” Indeed, anyone familiar with Altman’s output might reasonably be surprised to hear he was ever in the running to make the sci-fi horror hit since he was famous for more character-centric work. So, what would the director’s take on the material have looked like?
Robert Altman had a long, varied career as a major Hollywood talent, although his instantly recognizable signature style would not necessarily have merged well with the Alien franchise. Each Alien movie looks different from the last sequel and the series does have a variety of visual aesthetics, but it does not have much in the way of Altman’s naturalistic dialogue or slyly satirical sprawling ensemble storytelling. Altman’s most famous early efforts such as M*A*S*H* and Nashville weren't particularly accessible to mainstream audiences, with large casts that precluded the presence of a singular protagonist and overlapping conversations that were much closer to real life than the mannered, clear dialogue of typical Hollywood movies.
Even Altman’s genre movies, like the Western McCabe and Mrs. Miller and the film noir The Long Goodbye, were quick to subvert and abandon the rules and conventions of their respective genres. The Long Goodbye was a sunny, colorful film noir (a contradiction in terms), while McCabe and Mrs. Miller was a bleak western where the heroes weren’t heroic and none of the good guys won in the end. While the bleak Alien 3 certainly subverted audience expectations with its brutality and grim tone, the first two entries into the franchise were mainstream sci-fi horror movies with simple stories, scary chase scenes, and exciting action. None of these were ever strong suits of Altman’s work, which reveled in thoughtful dialogue, knotty plotting, and a focus on character.
Between the explicitly anti-war movie MASH and the more subtly satirical westerns McCabe and Mrs Miller and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Altman had made it clear by 1979 that he favored stories with a political bent. The finished version of 1979’s Alien does have themes of class warfare (the working-class stiffs are sent to retrieve a lethal bioweapon by a faceless company who doesn’t care if they die in the process), but this would likely have been brought to the forefront by Altman. With more of a focus on the human characters and their plight and less of a focus on the titular monster, Altman’s Alien might have been a deconstruction of the “haunted house in space” story that Scott played comparatively straight. Interestingly, director John Carpenter attempted something a lot like this with the fun but inessential Dark Star in 1974, an effort that proved Alien was better off focusing on intense scares rather than goofy satirical humor.
While he was no Wes Craven, Altman’s earlier outings That Cold Day In The Park and Images prove that the director was a more than competent horror filmmaker despite what some readers may assume. However, his most critically-acclaimed movies before 1979 were dramedies and the psychological horror of his earlier scary movies was nothing like the monster-centric chills of Alien. With the then-recent 3 Women seeing Altman move into more experimental territory, his Alien would likely have been something more strange and trippy than the straight (and terrifying) horror that Scott made in his stead.
It’s hard to say how well or poorly Altman’s Alien would have come together, but Scott certainly seems like the better choice of director in hindsight. Ridley Scott is still involved with Alien and passionate about the franchise decades later and, according to many, his contributions to the series remain its best movies. As such, it is clear that the job was clearly more than a paycheque to the director. In contrast, Altman’s uniquely slow burn, low-key style would not have fused well with straight-up horror set pieces, and his talky, ramshackle narratives couldn’t have been less suited to the claustrophobic, intense atmosphere of Alien. Altman remains one of the most influential figures in American independent cinema, and without his work, entire movements like mumblecore would likely never have existed. However, the helmer also knew his strengths (outside of a few inexplicable misfires like OC & Stiggs and Popeye), and he was likely right to steer clear of Alien’s sci-fi horror story.
