Stanley Kubrick was a legendary director, having made some of the most appreciated movies including 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut. His experience is one that many came to learn from and he is by far one of the most influential directors as well. His projects have been regarded as a work of art and that is no mistake either, seeing just how much he focuses when it comes to the making of his movies.
Despite so much of his stuff being so highly regarded, there was one thing that he could not teach himself. Surprisingly enough, it was none other than Ridley Scott who managed to teach the filmmaker what he had been so eager to learn and for that, he had to keep his ego aside.
Ridley Scott Taught Stanley Kubrick an Interesting Trick
Ridley Scott and Stanley Kubrick are two of the most remarkable filmmakers in Hollywood. So what astonished the former incredibly was when Kubrick called him up because he needed help in understanding one trick that Scott had pulled off. As per Total Film (via /Film), Scott managed to do something he never thought he would.
“The first time I talked to Kubrick was a week after ‘Alien’ came out. Somebody said, ‘Stanley Kubrick is on the line.’ I said, ‘Hello?’ ‘Hello. Stanley Kubrick here. How are you? I just saw ‘Alien.” Straight in. ‘How on earth did you get that thing coming out of his chest? Because I’ve got a print, and I’ve run it on the machine, and I can’t see the cut.’ So I said, ‘Well, I had John Hurt cut a hole in the table, lie in a horrible, awkward position, and I made a fiberglass shell …’ He said, ‘I got it, I got it, I got it. Brilliant.'”
The scene in question that got Kubrick thinking involved the alien getting out of John Hurt’s character’s chest in Sigourney Weiver’s Alien. It had mesmerized the director so much that he did not think twice before calling Scott. Someone so widely regarded for his own uniqueness in filmmaking found himself pulling his hair out for one sequence.
John Hurt’s Scene is the Reason Ridley Scott did the Movie
John Hurt’s chest-bursting, ironically, was also the scene that got Ridley Scott on board to direct Alien. The director was fifth in line after four other directors had rejected the script and as per The Hollywood Reporter, he was almost ready to do the same.
“I thought the script had an inordinately good engine. I thought it was virtually no characterization whatsoever. It was, ‘And then and then and then.’ And then I got to a page where it says, ‘And then this thing comes out of the guy’s chest,'” said Scott. “And I’m thinking, ‘This has put off four of the directors’ — because I was number five on the list. Obviously, clearly, the previous four went, ‘What?!? This is ridiculous,’ and just put it down. Because I’m a bit of a designer, I could see the film and I knew exactly what to do.”
He found the script to be too repetitive and boring. That was until he came across the iconic scene. That immediately made him sign up for the film because of how quickly his brain began to formulate ideas.
