Noomi Rapace Alien: Covenant

Cast: Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Carmen Ejogo
Director: Ridley Scott
Genre: Action, Sci-Fi
Rated: MA
Running Time: 121 minutes

Synopsis: The crew of the colony ship Covenant discover what they think is an uncharted paradise, but it is actually a dark, dangerous world, whose sole inhabitant is the synthetic David, survivor of the doomed Prometheus expedition.

Alien: Covenant
Release Date: May 11th, 2017

 

About The Production

Welcome Aboard The Covenant

From the beginning, Ridley Scott was out for blood.

'I think Ridley Scott's first line was, -We're going to make a hard R-rated film, and we're going to need a lot of claret,' which is a term for film blood," recalls Alien: Covenant producer Mark Huffam. 'That was the very first conversation"we're out to scare the pants off everybody."
If anyone knows how to terrify audiences with smart, sophisticated storytelling, it's Ridley Scott. His original Alien remains a standard bearer for the horror genre, a psychologically taut, uncomfortably claustrophobic film, as lean and effective as the sleek, vicious beast that first stalked Ellen Ripley and the crew of the starship Nostromo back in 1979. 'In a funny kind of way, I always thought of Alien as a B-movie, really well done," Ridley Scott says. 'The subtext was pretty basic"it was seven people locked in the old dark house and who's going to die first and who's going to survive."

For Alien: Covenant, the Oscar®-nominated filmmaker sought to recapture the same foreboding atmosphere of constant danger and dread while also offering new insights that would add richness and depth to the larger Alien mythology. That approach was necessary, he says, to keep the storytelling fresh and surprising. 'You can't keep being chased down a corridor by a monster"it gets boring," Ridley Scott says. 'It came to me that no one had asked the question, who made this and why. You could say monsters from outer space, gods from outer space, engineers from outer space invented it. They didn't. Alien: Covenant's going to flip that around."

The film opens with a peaceful mission designed to take humanity beyond the confines of Earth into a settlement among the stars. On the manifest of the spaceship Covenant are couples who will populate the planet Origae-6, along with dozens of embryos to help establish the new colony. Charged with their protection is the ship's crew: Captain Jacob Last Name TK (James Franco) and his wife, Daniels, head of terraforming operations (Katherine Waterston); second-in-command Christopher Oram (Billy Crudup) and his biologist wife Karine (Carmen Ejogo); boisterous pilots Tennessee (Danny McBride) and Faris (Amy Seimetz); head of security Sergeant Lope (Demián Bichir) and his second-in-command and husband Sergeant Hallett (Nathaniel Dean). With them is one non-human, Walter (Michael Fassbender), the Covenant's loyal synthetic, keeping watch as the passengers remain locked away in cryosleep until they reach their destination.

When a stellar ignition rips through the ship, Walter is forced to prematurely wake the crew to save their lives. A mechanical malfunction traps the captain in his hypersleep chamber, however, and he suffers a horrible, brutal death. The incident leaves the deeply religious Oram in charge and Daniels' reeling from grief over the loss of her husband.

Daniels seeks solace in the company of the ship's only other solitary figure, Walter, who no doubt, look familiar to audiences. He's the next evolution of David, the Laurence of Arabiaobsessed synthetic Fassbender portrayed in Prometheus. Although he is technologically superior to his predecessor, his emotional range is somewhat restricted. He cannot fall in love, and he has been programmed to be unfailingly loyal to the Covenant crew"Fassbender describes him as a 'super butler."

'He is first and foremost there to protect and to serve, like a good police officer," the actor says. 'He's purely logical and devoid of emotion, even if those around him, particularly Daniels, search for some sort of emotional connectivity with him, it's not really there."

Despite his programming, Walter's relationship with Daniels is complex and colored with hints of affection. Waterston says Daniels 'comes to rely on him after Jacob dies. She feels more comfortable around him than the rest of the crew because, in a way, he is emotionally limited. It's easier for her to be around someone who doesn't really understand what she's going through, so that she can be left alone with her grief. She doesn't really have to engage back with him. She also feels a connection to him because they are the only two single beings on the ship."

As the Covenant attempts to regroup from disaster, they're thrown for a loop yet again. Tennessee is outside the ship repairing the energy sails, when he hears a cryptic message that sounds like it could be a distress call. The crew tracks the source of the transmission to a nearby planet, and Oram, motivated by his strong Christian faith, opts to chart a new course that will take the ship on an unknown path toward the beacon. The mantle of leadership does not sit lightly on his shoulders"he always carries with him a set of metal worry beads, which he uses to calm himself when the pressure mounts.

'As soon as he's given the opportunity, I think the weight of these 2,000-plus souls becomes enormous and overwhelming," Crudup says. 'There's a tremendous amount of self-doubt at his capacity to manage his own fear, about leading this many people into the unknown. I think that's a big part of the story"how he relates to the other crew members and how he, ultimately, finds some sense of confidence and clarity and moral authority in trying to defend them.

'In moments of turmoil, of fear, that's the time to concentrate on your faith because it will give you strength and clarity and you won't be reactive about dangerous situations," Crudup continues.

His level-headed wife, played by British actress Ejogo, also serves as an anchor for Oram. 'Oram has a deep love for her," Crudup says. 'Her support is one of the driving foundations for his ability to get through the day. I don't know what he would do without her because of her ability to access the parts of him that he doesn't let other people access."

An ion storm encasing the atmosphere prevents the Covenant itself from reaching the surface of the planet, so a landing party of scientists and security personnel is dispatched instead, with Tennessee piloting the mother ship as it orbits above. When McBride, an actor and screenwriter best known for comedic roles in films such as Pineapple Express, initially met with Scott to discuss the part of Tennessee, the director had a very specific reference point in mind: Major T.J. -King' Kong as played by Slim Pickens in Stanley Kubrick's classic satire, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

'Ridley Scott said that Tennessee was an homage to him, so we worked on finding the perfect cowboy hat and the perfect flight suit," McBride says. 'But the character was so clear in the script, I could see what needed to be done. Ridley Scott finds the actors he wants, who he knows can bring it themselves, then gives guidance. If you go a little too far, he brings you back in, but he's really there to see what you're going to bring to it."

As Daniels, Oram, Karine, Walter, and Faris, among others, head to the planet's surface in the ship's Lander, along with the security team, Tennessee is left in command of the Covenant with communications and navigations experts Upworth (Callie Hernandez) and her husband Rick. But he soon grows restless, overcome by a sense of unease, as the storm prevents any real interaction with the team on the ground. 'One of the most interesting things about the script is the fact that the ship is filled with couples, so instantly it raises the stakes of the horror," McBride says. 'It's not only about your own survival, but the survival of the person you came there with."

After a long period of frustrating silence, they must decide whether to take the Covenant closer to the planet. Upworth clashes with Tennessee on maintaining the protocol of not endangering the Covenant and her human occupants. 'There's a maddening powerlessness," explains Hernandez (La La Land). 'They've lost connection. If you're trying to connect with a fellow human being in any context, if you're losing connection, you fight for that connection back. That's what Tennessee is trying to do."

Maneuvering through the storm, the Lander sustains damage, but the team safely arrives on the planet only to discover breathtaking, majestic scenery. But there's something unnerving about the magnificent terrain"the environment is simply too quiet. 'The planet is wondrous and spectacular and kind of threatening in scale," Ridley Scott explains. 'The planet is a dead planet, it's a haunted house. You've got no life forms except for plants and trees. No animals at all."

With Faris staying near the Lander to make necessary repairs, Karine, accompanied by security escort Private Ledward (Australian actor Benjamin Rigby), ventures out to take biological samples. Their journey into the increasingly unusual landscape goes horribly awry"Ledward falls terribly, inexplicably ill, and Karine struggles to return him to the Lander's medical bay. Back at the ship, Faris begins receiving frantic distress calls from her colleagues. 'Ridley filmed this with me underneath the Lander in the middle of Milford Sound in New Zealand," recalls Seimetz (The Girlfriend Experience). 'I was alone, hearing these terrifying snippets in my earpiece and reacting to that. I can't do anything about it because I don't know where they are" they sound confused, the intercom is breaking up. It was eerie but amazing to create the scene that way because it was very effective performance-wise for Ridley Scott."
When Ledward and Karine reach the Med Bay, hell quickly breaks loose. What Karine witnesses under the bright fluorescent lights is the awful birth of the Neomorph, the latest alien incarnation to join the franchise's pantheon of monsters. Says Ejogo: 'Quite what this being is Karine has no idea, and it's the mystery of what it is, in that moment, that is most palpable and powerful. It's not like being confronted by a tiger where you have a sense of what's coming next. There's no way of negotiating with these creatures.

'It's the first true moment that audiences will be reminded of the dread that we've come to associate with the Alien films," she adds. 'You can sense that something is afoot that is going to be so out of our understanding that it will be horrifying."

Things rapidly spiral out of control as the beast rampages through the Lander, threatening everything in its path. The crew is in truly desperate straits by the time help does arrive in the form of a mysterious hooded figure, who seems to have an odd measure of control over the predatory species. The unexpected savior turns out to be David from the vessel Prometheus, who's been stranded in isolation for roughly a decade and certainly looks the worse for wear.

'When we meet David in Alien: Covenant, he's let himself go," says David Fassbender, who in addition to playing Walter, here reprises his Prometheus role. 'His hair is long, he's scraggly and he's been living alone on this planet and exploring a creative side of himself " playing music, painting, drawing."

David Fassbender leads the frightened explorers to the shelter of an abandoned city, but every passing minute introduces a new and more complex menace. 'At this point, we're just going to try to make it alive and in one piece, but we're starting to lose people and we've already lost our Lander, our only way out," says Bichir (A Better Life, The Hateful Eight). 'Lope has to recover control, to keep it together no matter what."

Even for a seasoned solider, seeing his team ravaged is devastating. 'Not in his wildest nightmares could he imagine that this could be happening to a human being"they don't know what it is, and added to that, the love of his life, Hallett, is at risk," Bichir says.

Of the authenticity of the relationship between Hallett and Lope, Dean says: 'They've been married for a quite a few years. They love each other. We're not punctuating the fact that they're gay. I think it's great that Ridley and the producers have put this thread into the context of space, into the Alien franchise, because you would hope that for humanity in the future, this is even less of an issue. They're good people who love each other, who happen to be badass soldiers and good with M-4s!"

Bichir and his fellow platoon actors received intensive weapons and fitness training, but in addition to the physical preparations, Bichir saw the immense value of one-on-one sessions with Ridley Scott in developing Lope's inner life. 'Sometimes you work on films where you don't rehearse or even talk about the character with your director," Bichir says. 'There are many ways of approaching the work, and you're supposed to be ready to solve any problem under any circumstances, but to have the chance to have those sessions one-on-one with this man, that was an incredible part of the process."

Indeed, on set, Bichir found the experience of working with Scott no less than thrilling. 'His is one of those names that you always put in your Christmas list," Bichir says. 'I wish I could have seen how Jules Verne wrote, or Michelangelo worked in the privacy of his studio. When I had the chance to work with a genius in my own time, I saw it as a gift."

'I think Ridley Scott confirms that great masters make everything really easy, simple and loving," Bichir continues. 'He is, of course, savvy and so smart and the way he solves everything is simple, very easy within its own complexity. He had more energy than all of us put together. He's always there and he's always ready."

While Bichir might have been new to working with Scott, Alien: Covenant marked the third collaboration for Michael Fassbender and the director after Prometheus and The Counselor. 'Michael is a great actor, and he's got a great sense of humor," Ridley Scott says. 'I always have fun working with him, which is really important. I'm nearly always looking for that side of Michael, which is his mischievous sense of humor."

Together, the actor and filmmaker explored all the complex circuitry hard-wired into David, even tapping into his sly, subversive side. 'Ridley Scott and I tried and find the humor in him, the funny beats with him," Michael Fassbender says. 'We all let our guards down when we laugh, so we're more likely to experience other things like shock and horror to a fuller effect when we haven't been numbed because there's been a lack of humor."

As the peril escalates at a breakneck pace, the Covenant crew must pull off a daring rescue mission if any of her souls are to escape. Tapping into her inner heroine, Daniels takes charge on the ground. 'The film unfolds at a crazy clip," Waterston says. 'There's no real time for the characters to process what's going on. Everybody is forced into action."

Following in the sure footsteps of Sigourney Weaver's Ridley Scott, Waterston focused on Daniels' place in the broader legacy of Scott's female heroes. 'Ridley Scott is a director who has always portrayed women in a really honest and believable way, he's always been attracted to those kinds of characters," Waterston says. 'Daniels is the kind of person who gets clearer in a crisis. At the beginning of the film, Daniels is capable and smart and she's good at her job, but I don't think she sees herself any kind of heroic figure. As the events of the film unfold, she's able to function and think clearly in those moments of crisis. It was easier for me to relate to her coming to realize that she was capable and brave, rather than that she was born ready for battle. I don't know anybody like that."

Scott first took note of Waterson in her breakout role in Paul Thomas Anderson's 2014 Thomas Pynchon adaptation, Inherent Vice, and says she perfectly inhabited the role of Daniels. 'I needed somebody who was physically imposing, tall, athletic and a great actress," the director says. 'And she's special. What's interesting, both she and Billy Crudup come from the theater, and they very much brought their technique, their knowledge, their sensitivity. When you're doing a film like this"with people dying constantly and under great duress"there must be a constant show of fear. There are many colors of fear, many colors of remorse. A person who has a theater background, they dig deep and can pull that out. It helped enormously."

Producer Huffam, too, was quick to praise Waterston's work in the film. 'Katherine had big boots to step into, and she absolutely did it," he says. 'She had terrific enthusiasm for the role, and she was up for everything we threw at her. She was being stuck on wires floating around in the sky, beaten off steel platforms, stuck in fights. She seemed to thrive on it. She's totally taken the female action hero onboard."

The physicality of the role required the actress to undergo arduous fitness training, extensive fight training, and detailed lessons in weapons handling. 'It was like being on the playground," Waterston says. 'It was great fun to learn fight choreography and to explore that aggressive side of myself that I am not often invited to explore in my personal life or on film."
Although Waterston's kick-ass female lead belongs to a lineage of powerful Scott heroines, the monstrous threats she faces feel entirely fresh and new"even down to the moment when the classic Xenomorph finally makes its grand, climactic return. 'Alien: Covenant, for me, is in a lot of ways like the first Alien," Michael Fassbender says. 'It's gritty and dark, and from the get-go, when the Covenant hits the space storm, it sets a series of events in motion that don't stop until the final frame. Ten minutes into the film, it becomes relentless. I think this is going to be the scariest one of all the films."

It's true. With Alien: Covenant, there's no question that visionary Scott has returned to his element, crafting a bold, uniquely terrifying, visceral experience flush with the attitude and swagger of a classic Alien movie. Expect nothing less than relentless, heart-stopping, R-rated terror.

'I hope the film gets people very uneasy, helps your arteries start pumping, sets hearts pounding," says the filmmaker. 'I hope you have a very dry throat but can't take your eyes off the screen. To really scare the shit out of people is quite difficult, but his might give them nightmares. And that's a good thing."

About The Production

Alien: Covenant was shot over 74 days at the stages of Fox Studios Australia and on location in Milford Sound, New Zealand in 2016. Ridley Scott tasked production designer Chris Seagers with executing his vision for the titular ship.

'Ships are always difficult," Ridley Scott adds. 'The Covenant is a like pioneer ship as in the old schooners on the prairie. This is not a grungy ship, this is a pioneer ship on a scientific mission, transporting people and equipment to colonize another planet. Logically, it's like a cargo train" it's in three sections with hexagonal junctions, which are massive garages. Each section would separate, a one-time only thing, land on pylons, and you've then got a vast warehouse with all this equipment."

'I mentioned to Ridley Scott the fact that oil rigs are almost like spaceships," says Seagers (Deepwater Horizon, Fantastic Four). 'They look from the outside like big tin cans but inside are full of technology, and they don't necessarily need people. They're automated. It's the same as space technology. It's all about guidance and navigation, and he liked that. So, we started pulling a lot of references from that kind of an industrial world."

As with other elements of the production, the original Alien proved to be an important touchstone. To amplify the claustrophobic feel of the interior of the Covenant, Seagers and his team kept the vessel's ceilings low and cloaked its corridors in darkness. Making the bridge of the ship functional was important to Scott, who sought to create a tactile experience for the actors. To that end, the production design team installed 1,500 circuits, so that every switch and dial worked.

'I felt like I was on a functional spaceship," Michael Fassbender says. 'The corridors, the bridge and the sleep chamber"all these production design elements were so detailed and sophisticated. It's a rare thing with fantasy films or high-concept action films. There's a lot of green screen, usually. We used some green screen, but a lot of it was there for us to explore, to touch and to interact with and that's a real rarity these days."

'When we stepped into that ship, you felt like a kid," Crudup adds. 'You couldn't actually believe your own senses"you felt like you were part of a space mission."

Scott's desire for realism and scale was something that excited special effects supervisor Neil Corbould. 'Ridley Scott's a very visual director, and he loves his atmosphere," Corbould explains. 'Even with water drips, he's very precise on where drips should be or how big they should be. He's very meticulous about the look of every small detail and he loves physical things, which is music to our ears because we get to build really big rigs and big set pieces."

Two of those rigs were enormous gimbals"one weighing 10 tons, the other 40"constructed to support portions of the Lander and the Covenant sets for action sequences in which the ships are sustaining damage, either from descending through the ion storm or from the impact of the stellar ignition. 'The 10-ton gimbal had the Lander cockpit on it," Corbould says. 'The Covenant ship on the 40-ton gimbal was about 20 meters long by about six meters wide. It all had to shake and shudder, which was quite a big task."

The scenes filmed on the exterior of the planet were shot in Milford Sound and on stage at Fox Studios, with the sets lit to mimic the eerie beauty of the natural location. 'We took inspiration from the actual weather in Milford Sound," says cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, a frequent Scott collaborator. 'It's very cloudy, soft light. Sometimes the sun comes through, but basically, it's dramatic clouds, mountains that appear and disappear in the clouds. Everything is drizzling. We repeated that on the back lot. We insisted on having everything gray and fogged, like a constant dawn or dusk."

For the interior scenes in the abandoned city, Ridley Scott sought to capture an 18th century painterly look for some rooms, in which the soft light should feel like it emanates from candles. Wolski and the camera department devised a clever and effective system to light the actors.

'We invented lights which were motion-controlled," Wolski explains. 'When an actor walked in, the light came on, and when they moved away it went off. Originally, we were going to have the visual effects team do it, but once we decided to motivate the lights ourselves, the system got better and better and better. There's only a few scenes like that, but they're very powerful."

State-of-the-art visual effects were utilized to embellish what was captured practically on set. For Alien: Covenant, visual effects supervisor Charley Henley recruited some of world's leading VFX facilities including Sydney-based Animal Logic, MPC (Moving Picture Company) in the UK, and Framestore in Montreal, Canada. One of the challenges for the visual effects department was the sheer number of locations they needed to build or enhance, which ranged from space and exterior planet environments to the abandoned city where David resides and its interiors.

'For example, the -Hall of Heads,' where there are a number of key scenes, was a fantastic set built with a number of huge heads, but because of the stage space and the complexity in building those physical elements, it was up to us to extend the top of the heads into the ceiling," Henley says. However, we tried not go over the top. If we were doing an all CG shot, for example, we made sure that the CG camera was capturing something that could be done in the real world with real cameras."

Henley, whose professional relationship with Ridley Scott dates to 2000's Gladiator, says he is consistently impressed by the director's hands-on approach. 'One of the amazing things about working with him is that he does his own storyboards," Henley says. 'They're fantastic, incredibly accurate"you can see it play out as if he's looking through the camera. Even in the boards, you get a sense of lighting as well."

It was Ridley Scott, too, who conceived the need for the Neomorph, which makes its awe-inspiring debut in Alien: Covenant as the newest deadly lifeform alongside the alien eggs, the Chestburster, the Facehugger and, of course, the full-grown Xenomorph. In conjuring the alien, the director referenced both the wildly innovative work of late Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger, whose genius was behind Alien's frighteningly original Xenomorph, and such wonders of the natural world as the eerie Goblin Shark, a rare species of deep-sea predator with translucent skin and a hinged jaw.

'Designing the Neomorph was tough," Ridley Scott says. 'It was a big challenge that came about because I had to have something in addition to the usual suspect. I didn't want that to wear out" I wanted to save him. The Neomorph, in a way, is the first generation of an alien, but it needs a human life form to cop on to and, if you like, mix with, copulate with."

Working from Ridley Scott's illustrations of how the Neomorph should appear and move, creature design supervisor Conor O'Sullivan and his team set about collaborating with Henley and the visual effects department on the design. Henley explains: 'Conor O'Sullivan and his team's material looked fantastic"practical creatures with real blood and real functionality. We'd generally just do enhancements. When there was a lot of creature movement, we could create muscle movement and the freedom to move them in a way that couldn't be done practically. It was a partnership to bring as much realism overall."

The cast, too, was impressed by the precise craftsmanship of Conor O'Sullivan and his crew. 'There are details on the aliens that I didn't even realize until it was up close," Ejogo says. 'The willingness to go that extra mile was incredible. There was a devotion to the legacy and to the possibility of this art form. It was artistry at the highest level."

Offers Crudup: 'Their intelligence is one thing that makes them unique. Ridley's really interested in biology and so all the components that go into the alien are things that he drew upon from nature. While there is something other-worldly about it, there's something very familiar about it as well."

The same attention was paid to the costumes. Janty Yates, whose long working relationship with Scott includes such films as Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, Robin Hood, Prometheus and The Martian, quickly realised that, for a film where bullets fly and copious amounts of human and alien blood spills out across the screen, many copies were needed of each costume.

'We had to have repeats of every single garment, for stunt doubles, …even the slightest bullet wound, we need to create new costumes for," Janty Yates says. 'Ridley Scott also said that apart from the sleep suits, he didn't want anyone to wear the same costume. So, the security team had tactical vests, more aggressive boots and a lot more armory. We needed to nail that, and then we could get on with the repeats. Time was always of the essence."

Still, Janty Yates devised clever, intimate touches, such as Daniels, in mourning, wearing her husband's clothes on the ship, wrapping herself in his memory. Moments like those, she says, echoed Scott's distinctive first film in the franchise. 'Alien really broke the mold because that spaceship was grubby," Janty Yates says. 'It was lived in. Their clothes were worn. There were Hawaiian shirts. There was a uniform, but it was so casual as a uniform it almost didn't register. It went completely away from the space visuals of earlier films."

Alien: Covenant did require Yates to tap into her more technical side as well. For Danny McBride's pilot, she and associate spacesuit designer Michael Mooney drafted a spacesuit referred to 'Big Yella," shaped like an enormous underwater suit. Mooney and London-based FBFX crafted the yellow spacesuits made of carbon fiber featured in the film. 'It's a thing of utter beauty and technological incredibility," Janty Yates says. 'Tennessee wears it when he's fixing things on the outside of the ship. It would stand out against these enormous rust sails. It looked beautiful."

Alien: Covenant
Release Date: May 11th, 2017