Jean-Pierre Jeunet: Tales of an Alien Director

Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the French director 20th Century Fox hired to resurrect its_ Alien_ franchise, talks about sparring with Sigourney Weaver, rethinking a character for Winona Ryder, and shaping Alien Resurrection into a worthy successor to the movies whose real star is a monster that represents "an evil that we all have within ourselves."

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No series of films has more deeply or disturbingly penetrated the dark corridors of our collective moviegoing psyche than Alien, Aliens and Alien3. Consider the caliber of the directors alone. A 1979 peak form Ridley Scott brought razor precision to the psychological shock of the original Alien, and registered 10.0 on the primal Richter scale. A 1986 peak-form James Cameron reimagined the monster tale as an ultimate action thrill ride; Aliens was unsurpassed for lean, muscular drive. The young, gifted David Fincher, who would go on to make the visually arresting, style-setting hit Se7en, brought an art-house sensibility to Alien3, veering the series into despairing, brainy existentialism. And there begins our story about the fourth Alien, appropriately titled Alien Resurrection. The entire Alien franchise did indeed need to be resurrected after Fincher's fascinating film killed off Sigourney Weaver's heroine and alienated ticket buyers at the same time.

Faced with a platinum franchise on the interstellar skids, Fox made one great move that set this much-hoped-for Alien Resurrection in motion. The studio nurtured a crackerjack script by Joss Whedon that brought Ripley back from the dead (through the wonders of cloning), and lured a discouraged Sigourney Weaver back to play her. Then began the search for a director who could do for Ripley and audiences what Ridley Scott and James Cameron had done--while avoiding the pitfalls David Fincher had slipped into. No wonder the trade press and Internet fans followed the manhunt for the next Alien director with rabid interest. Early reports had Danny Boyle, after Shallow Grave and before Trainspotting, meeting with Sigourney Weaver, whom Fox executives were anxious to please. Part of these discussions between the uncompromisingly individualistic Boyle and his possible star centered on his being reassured that he would be able to make his own mark on the gargantuan production. Boyle didn't buy it. Neither, apparently, did David Cronenberg. While promoting Crash, Cronenberg told reporters he'd declined the job out of reservations about autonomy. Marco Brambilla, a Ridley Scott protege, was also said to have considered the assignment. When, after all the rumors, Fox execs announced that their choice would be French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, eyebrows shot upwards. Jean-Pierre who? If you still don't know, I'll tell you.

Visionaries are scarce in the movies. Four or so years ago, I waited for the end credits of Delicatessen, a wry, visually stunning, French-made romp about cannibalism, certain that whoever had directed it was a visionary. To my surprise, there turned out to be two visionaries, codirectors Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Later I read that these 17-year collaborators, who were known for award winning commercials, music I videos and short films, divided up the directorial duties as follows: Caro took care of the look of the film; Jeunet concentrated on the actors and the cinematographer. Both were said to be painstaking control freaks who micromanaged down to the very dust motes. Four years later, I rushed to see the team's The City of Lost Children, a wondrous-looking fantasy film in which a waif and a giant team up to vanquish an aging mad scientist. The film's extravagant retro-futurism was like some glorious head-on collision of Cirque du Soleil with Jules Verne with The Wizard of Oz. I knew that from then on, I'd see any bit of inspired, sardonic weirdness these two guys got themselves up to. Alien Resurrection was not what I expected the next project to be.

Jeunet turns out to be a quietly striking-looking guy with the diffident, tuned-in-to-his-own-frequency vibe of an animator or computer effects wiz. Bizarrely enough, he looks tanned and rested, though he's in the midst of putting the finishing touches on a high-profile sci-fi epic that could prove to be a major hit for a studio that could use one. I could have chosen to start our conversation by asking why Jeunet thought Fox had entrusted Alien Resurrection to one half of a French team known for arty, exotic, low-budget films, but I decide to go for a question that might have a concrete answer: "So why, after all the other American offers you'd gotten, did you say yes to doing a huge franchise movie?

"With the question hanging in the air, Jeunet regards me as if I were tres fou. "If I had said, 'No,'" he answers, "I would have never again been able to look at myself in the mirror in the morning.

"It was quite impossible for me to say, 'No,'" Jeunet continues. "Before Alien Resurrection was offered to me, I'd always say, 'I prefer freedom to do the kinds of weird movies I like to make.' But I knew I had to have this experience. I mean, to do an Alien movie? Now, that is unique.

"Unique and scary as hell," I point out.

Jeunet nods. "The people who made the first Alien were artists," he asserts, his gaze shifting involuntarily to a boxed video set of the trilogy that sits at the ready by a TV monitor on his office shelf. "Ridley Scott, [alien designer H.R.] Giger, the writers--they invented everything. The rest of us who follow are artisans. That first film is a work of art, an entity all its own. The second is an action movie, probably the most efficient and precise of them all. The third is the most artistic one, but the script really had a problem. And the fourth? That will be the best of all." Jeunet utters the last pronouncement with an ironic grin--he's more wishful than boastful.

"What is it that gives these movies such resonance?" I ask him.

"It's something deep that captures people," he observes. "For me, the idea of a monster that explodes from a person's chest is not just suggestive of a terrible disease, but an evil that we all have within ourselves, an evil that is only waiting for us to release it. You remember the moment in Lawrence of Arabia when Lawrence tells his colonel he wants to go away because he's killed a man? The colonel says, It's war, these things happen in war. But Lawrence is disturbed because killing gave him pleasure. The Alien films are informed by that awareness."

Did Jeunet chat up any of his predecessors or his competitors before he accepted the daunting challenge of shaping the fourth Alien? "I only talked with David Fincher. Oh mannnn, for him, it was a nightmare. Even though Sigoumey was very much [in support] of him, it was [still] his first film. He was 28. The script wasn't ready. I love his film, but I must say that having Ripley die at the end was absolutely insupportable. Each time I see the film, it makes me so depressed I immediately have to watch 'Mr Bean.'"

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