On Location, Everyone Can See You Sweat

New York Times

5 days ago

April is the hottest month in Thailand. In the sprawling film production area known as the Studio Park, just outside Bangkok, walking between the air-conditioned sound stages is like staggering from boiling sauna to frigid pond. The hundreds of Thai workers gabbing in the outdoor canteen appeared to be taking the heat in stride; among them, small groups of Westerners sat quietly, some just picking at their food.
'It's hot,' said Sydney Chandler, star of the FX series 'Alien: Earth,' which was filming its first season here in April 2024. 'I'm used to Texas, but this heat comes from below and above. It's amazing.'
For 'Alien: Earth,' the extreme conditions were both a challenge and a feature. The show was drawn to Thailand by the up-do-date facilities and skilled work force, and by proximity to dramatic coastal and mountain locations. But its vision of Earth in 2120, when corporations have replaced governments and climate change has made the planet hospitable for all sorts of alien parasites, was also a good fit for the local natural environment.
'Look, it's a story that's set on Earth in the future,' Noah Hawley, the show's creator and principal writer, said. 'Part of the reason we're in Bangkok filming is, it's going to be a hotter, wetter planet.' ('Alien: Earth' premieres on Tuesday, on FX and Hulu.)
Hawley has a track record for taking a familiar movie with an avid fan base and turning it into a successful television series: 'Fargo,' his reimagining of the Coen Brothers' Midwestern gothic crime thriller, has been nominated for 70 Emmys across its five seasons, and it won best mini-series in 2014.
'Fargo' was also an FX project, and Hawley said that John Landgraf, the chairman of FX Networks, came to him with the idea of an 'Alien' adaptation as a follow-up long ago, before the acquisition of 21st Century Fox by Disney in 2019. ('When Fox was still Fox,' he says.) The Fox movie division was not willing to share the rights, but Landgraf kept the idea alive, and a deal was struck after the merger. Hawley was once again in the business of transformation.
'I think if I have a talent in interpreting these films, it's in figuring out what the original movie made me feel and why,' Hawley said. 'And then trying to figure out how to make you feel the same things by telling you a totally different story.'
The 'Alien' film franchise, beginning with Ridley Scott's terrifying space-creature feature of that name in 1979, has ranged widely in tone and style, from the portentousness of the prequel 'Prometheus' to the video game thrills of the 'Alien vs. Predator' movies. Hawley took inspiration for the series from the first two films, Scott's 'Alien' and James Cameron's outer-space war movie 'Aliens,' melding the elements of horror and action.
'I am trying to make something grounded and, quote, realistic in the way that the first film is, that also has some of the playfulness of the second film, which is one of the great action movies of all time,' he said. 'And so somewhere in there lies a form of pure entertainment.'
On television, pure entertainment has to last longer — in the case of 'Alien: Earth,' across eight episodes in the first season. 'It's not a two-hour survival story,' Hawley said. 'Even if we have 60 percent of the best horror action around, you still have 40 percent of 'What are we talking about,' right?'
The elements of that new 40 percent include fleshing out ideas about corporate hegemony — five companies have carved up the planet, politically and geographically — and artificial intelligence. Hawley's most noticeable new wrinkle, though, is more fanciful.
Inspired in part by Newt, the waifish child who brought out the maternal instinct in Sigourney Weaver's Ripley in 'Aliens,' he has made an allegory of Peter Pan and his Lost Boys part of the structure of 'Alien: Earth.' A childlike, Neverland-obsessed tech mogul (played by Samuel Blenkin) loads the consciousness of terminally ill children into ostensibly immortal, adult robot bodies, turning them into commodities with vast potential for profitable applications. (The actual children die in the process.)
Named after J.M. Barrie's Lost Boys (Nibs, Tootles, Slightly, et al.) the new beings receive an early test when a rival corporation's spaceship crashes on earth carrying a cargo of alien creepy-crawlies: the classic predatory xenomorphs and parasitic face-huggers, along with new nightmares like a sentient, skittering eyeball. Sent to obtain the monsters for their own company, the children are soon dealing with levels of terror and emotional distress they are wholly unprepared for.
'I still want all the body horror, the revulsion, all those elements are there,' Hawley said. 'But I also think there's a moral horror that's present in the movies. And so the show revolves around a few different moral quandaries, horrifying moral quandaries that some of the characters are in, and what makes it worse is that they're children. You're asking a child to do something that would be awful to ask an adult to do.'
On one of the chilly soundstages, Hawley, who directed two episodes, was filming a quiet moment in the season premiere. The scorching heat and dusty but verdant Thai landscape outside were just a rumor amid the drab greens and browns and dull blues of the laboratory set. (Looking back on the shoot a year later, Timothy Olyphant, who plays a robot scientist and corporate apparatchik named Kirsh, would say, 'The fact that we were there to mostly shoot interiors was really strange.')
Chandler, who plays the lead, a child-robot 'hybrid' named Wendy, was figuring out where exactly to lie while an 11-year-old intelligence is loaded into her character's high-performance synthetic body. Essie Davis, the Australian actress known for 'Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries' and 'The Babadook,' stood beside her, playing Dame Sylvia, the human den mother to the lost girls and boys.
'This is a scene that kind of gets revisited from many different perspectives through the series,' Davis said. 'It's a breakthrough in the potential immortality of humanity. What if we could make human minds infinite? And that's a brilliant and exciting project, but at the same time, it's the death of a child.'
Chandler, who played Chrissie Hynde in the punk mini-series 'Pistol,' was happy to be finally letting Wendy 'out of the box' of preparation. The key, Hawley had told her, was 'don't think about playing a kid.'
'She's much more brave and much smarter than I was at that age,' Chandler said during a break from shooting. 'Her mind is like a trap. She's extremely intelligent, extremely loyal, but doesn't understand the concept of consequence. She's yet to be truly battered by the world.'
No matter how well Hawley and his actors handle the intimate character drama and the play of ideas, however, a show with 'Alien' in the title is inevitably going to be judged in large part by its creatures and its spaceships. This is why a room was devoted in another part of the Studio Park complex to the production's monster shop, a bright, spacious, meticulously neat costume gallery for every variety of horrifying, viscous creature. Technicians from the New Zealand company Weta Workshop and the Thai effects shop Second Skin Studio ferried aliens and alien parts to the various sets.
Pride of place went to the models of the franchise's most iconic being, the killing machine known as the xenomorph. Full, partial and cross-sectioned examples were carefully laid out on tables and hung in rows like fresh suits at a dry cleaners. The TV version is less shiny and slick than the alien of the films — more natural, if that is a quality that can be ascribed to it. 'It's browner, cockroach-y,' said Darin McLeod, an 'Alien: Earth' producer. 'There were lots of conversations around the paint job.'
The 6-foot-2 actor and stuntman Cameron Brown, who plays the creature, grows to over 7 feet tall when he puts on its stilt-like appendages. 'It's not like a human in a suit,' McLeod said. 'We build around him,' making Brown's broad shoulders, thin waist and long arms the basis of the xenomorph's look.
'It's really genuinely terrifying when you're acting alongside him,' Chandler said, 'so I'm hoping that will spread over to the audience.' (She was quick to add that Brown is 'the loveliest human being.')
Elsewhere around the room, assorted smaller monsters, some winged, some slimy, some cryptically hard-shelled and featureless, sat on tables near the machinery used to give them life: levers, cables, remotely controlled motors. Some of the smaller items were simple puppets, manipulated by hand or puffed up with bulb syringes. A bin held 'Extension Hands,' 'Ball Hands" and 'Stubby Hands.'
The large collection of life-size models, and the time and effort spent on developing and caring for them, testified to the production's emphasis on practical effects over computer graphics, a preference it has in common with the original film. Along with that went an effort to recapture the analog look and feel of the technology.
'I decided that the retrofuturism of the first two films was what people think about when they think about 'Alien,'' Hawley said. 'Where it all started — and this might not be true of 18-year-olds, but it's certainly true of people from 30 to whatever age we are — it's the screen with the green ASCII text. It's the sound of the keyboards.'
Which was why another large soundstage contained life-size crew quarters, laboratories and flight decks of the Maginot, the spaceship that will crash into Earth but will also be seen, undamaged, in flashbacks to its 65-year journey. If it recalls the ill-fated Nostromo from the original film, that is no accident. The production had access to extensive archives of the original design, and some actual physical components of the sets, like grates and moving pallets (now hard to find), were still on hand. Walking down the long, claustrophobic corridors was both fascinating and unnerving; you could understand why the 'Alien' ride at Disney World had been closed down more than 20 years earlier.
Scott, still punishingly busy making movies in his late 80s, has an executive producer credit on 'Alien: Earth' but is not involved in the making of the show. 'He's been watching dailies from time to time,' Hawley said. 'But, you know, like the Coens, I think he feels like this is my genre, you know? I think he feels like it's in good hands, is my hope. And so I haven't heard a lot from him. We'll see what happens.'