Joss Whedon may be Hollywood’s golden boy now, but back in the late 90’s he was a promising writer and show runner who had a cult hit show on television. Many were excited to see him get the opportunity to try his hand at the fourth Alien movie, but when Alien: Resurrection was released it…..well it sucked. Joss Whedon knows this and he still has to live with that even though the studio made a lot of changes to his initial script that he had no control over.
In an interview with Total Film, Whedon discusses what it was like to see things changed and how it feels to have his name attached to the film.
“Casting is storytelling, I wrote two characters for Alien: Resurrection and their arc was that you would not know what way they were going to go. One of them turned out to be insane – and what do they do? They call Brad Dourif. So there is no plot twist. Brad is a very good actor but he has been pigeonholed into these roles. Then they cast J.E. Freeman as a thug – and his character was also supposed to be a mystery. So there you go again – the mystery is gone. Those are just a couple of examples because there are thousands of them when it comes to Alien: Resurrection.”
Whedon gets brutally honest when asked about being involved in the Alien legacy.
“Yeah – you don’t ever get over it. When you are making a movie you are making something that is going to last forever, especially now with the internet. So there is always going to be a shitty Alien movie out there. A shitty Alien movie with my name on it.”
He also had quite the interesting name for last year’s Prometheus.
“Yes, I did see Pro-meaningless,” he joked. “In all seriousness,Alien: Resurrection was, I thought, the lowest I could ever feel. And then they cancelled Firefly. ‘Yup, there you go. That’s me feeling even lower.’ Let me quote King Lear – ‘The worst is not, so long as we can say, ”This is the worst.”
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