aliens – How To Write Your Favorite Movie

aliensposter

How to Write Aliens

by L.A. Zvirbulis

1 – The Inspiration. Watch a movie called Alien while you’re stoned. Decide to write a sequel on your own because you’ve just stopped smoking marijuana and are super focused now.

2 – The Genre. Horror but with more Action. Action-Horror. Do what the first movie did but with more characters and more aliens. Same but more, as no one in Hollywood advises. Write it at the same time you write another Action-Horror movie called “The Terminator”. People love female-led action movies in the mid-1980s. No one will notice that you kind of write the same movie over and over again. And no one will ever notice that all of the movies you write and direct start with either the letters A or T and feature the color blue.

3 – The Complications. What’s the worst that could happen? You are forced by an evil corporation to join a bunch of military grunts on a mission to find this alien you saw once so they don’t sue you for blowing up their expensive ship Nostromo from the last movie. Also you lost your biological daughter in the deleted scenes.

4 – The Fun Stuff. You know how the first movie was about men scared of having children? Let’s make Ripley adopt this awesomely tough eight year old girl named Newt, who happens to be the only survivor on the territory set up by the evil corporation. This will cause people to take their own young daughters to the movies and then inspire them to write about movies later in life. Thank you, Mom.

5 – The Device. The alien has to be scary but also be the same alien from the first film. So let’s just put more aliens in the sequel. But this time, we also get to meet the Mother alien – the one that lays all the eggs of the face huggers. A mother versus a mother? Awesome. Let’s also add flame throwers and a cool alien-tracking watch.

6 – The Ripley. Ripley is even more badass than she was in the first movie. This time, she’s a mother. This time, she knows what her villain is – it’s not the actual aliens, it’s the profit-driven evil corporation represented by that guy from 90s sitcoms. This time, Ripley’s not the only one that survives.

7 – The Jokes. Make Bill Paxton say funny things like “Game over, Man,” “We’re on the express elevator to Hell, going down,” and “Yeah, but it’s a dry heat.” He’s a grunt. Grunts make jokes. Put Bill Paxton in a lot of your movies.

8 – The Title. This is the sequel to Alien, with Sigourney Weaver reprising her original role as Ripley. So what is more than one Alien? It’s plural. Aliens. When you pitch this, use a dollar $ign as the $ in Alien$. This will also give $igourney Weaver’$ agent bargaining control to get her a big paycheck, and po$$iblly in$pire pop $star$ decade$ later.

9 – The Ending. Blow the alien out of the damned airlock, just like the first movie. Same but more, am I right? “Save the Cat” by having it not join the mission in the first place. Smart cat. Let’s make the synthetic more human in this one, and he/it helps save the kid but only after getting ripped ruthlessly in half, also paying tribute to the talking head synthetic in the original. This is also where you put the line “Get away from her, you bitch!” You can put this scene without that line in your movie Avatar.

10 – The Heart. Alien is a movie about men being scared of getting pregnant. Aliens is a movie about a mother protecting a child. Both the hero and the villain are mothers protecting what is most valuable to them. Argue what you will about James Cameron, but that strange “human” knows how to make a beautiful feminist sequel to a movie he didn’t originally write.

*L.A. Zvirbulis did not write Aliens. James Cameron did from a story by a story by James Cameron, David Giler, and Walter Hill based on characters created by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett.

alien poster

How to Write Alien

by L.A. Zvirbulis

1 – The Inspiration. Make a movie with your film school buddy John Carpenter called Dark Star that uses a spray-painted beach ball as an alien. Inspire yourself to write a movie with a realistic looking alien.

2 – The Genre. Horror. The last movie you made was a spoof comedy, so just to change it up to make this one scary. Use artwork from H.R. Giger as inspiration for the alien and the sets.

3 – The Complications. What’s the worst that could happen? You are stuck on a spaceship with a hungry alien. But how does the alien get on board the ship? Once you figure that out, the rest of this realistic alien movie will fill itself in. How about non-consensual-face-impregnation? Sorry for using that word, but that’s what happens. Now we can put a lot of sexual imagery in because a man gets impregnated after an unfortunate encounter with an alien face rapist. I mean face hugger. I mean non-consensual-face-impregnator.

4 – The Fun Stuff. “I didn’t steal Alien from anybody. I stole it from everybody.” – Dan O’Bannon. Go ahead and take ideas from old films, like The Thing From Another World (1951), Forbidden Planet (1956), Planet of the Vampires (1965), Junkyard (1953), and Strange Relations (1960), among others. You can even pitch this as “Jaws in space”. You can tell your actors some of what’s going to happen in the chest bursting scene, but you’ll get a real reaction if they don’t know how much blood will be thrown on them during filming. Super fun.

5 – The Device. The alien has to be scary. Let’s give it acid for blood, so if you spill its acid-blood, it may burn through the walls of your spaceship and also kill you. Good defense mechanism. Let’s also give it double jaws, a mouth within a mouth. Like we said, this is Jaws in space, so it needs more jaws than that shark. Two Jaws. And of course the only way it can reproduce is by face hugging a trespassing human, growing inside that human, and then bursting out of the chest killing that human. Let’s make alien childbirth disgusting and scary to men.

6 – The Ripley. Write a badass survivor named Ripley. Make him smart. Make him always correct, so if you listened at all to Ripley’s advice there would be no movie. Make him a her. Wait what? Ripley is a lady now? Ew. Who made that decision? Oh, the director. You may write Ripley as a man in the original script but some guy named Ridley Scott will change the gender as a way to give this perfect character a flaw. Being a woman is the only thing wrong with Ripley. Being Sigourney Weaver is everything right with Ripley.

7 – The Jokes. Kill the funniest characters off first, please. The crew is made up of working class types, so of course they have senses of humor. It gets less funny the more people are killed off, though. It’s only respectful. Also, put a cat in to ease some of the tension. People like cats.

8 – The Title. While Star Beast sounds pretty scary, you use the word alien in the script a lot, and alien is both a noun and an adjective. Alien. Yeah. It will make for great opening credits. Also, even though the tagline “in space no one can hear you scream” looks great on a poster, this movie is made way after the silent era so we actually do need to hear all of the screaming.

9 – The Ending. Blow the alien out of the damned airlock, but only after Ripley blows up the huge spaceship Nostromo and takes off on the small escape ship. Make sure the cat survives. Save the Cat, as Blake Snyder recommends in his screenwriting book.

10 – The Heart. Alien is a movie about men being scared of getting pregnant by a realistic looking alien. It’s terrifying. And of course, the only human that survives is a woman. That’s big for 1979.

*L.A. Zvirbulis did not write Alien. Dan O’Bannon did from a story by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shussett. Producers David Giler and Walter Hill add the character of Ash as an android.