Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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with John Fasano, and when the production company requested a different ending,
Ward began work on a new version with Greg Pruss. 843
Ward’s story idea was to link the space age back to the Middle Ages, via
a wooden orbiting vessel about a mile in diameter that was built as a multi-tiered
monastery and that, with its inhabitants, had been towed into, and left to rot, in
space. Of course it had the barest necessities for maintaining gravity and air, but
these were hidden within its husk. So you had a medieval environment akin to
Bosch and a group of ascetic monks. They see a star in the East and believe it is
a sign from the cosmos that will bring them redemption, when in fact it is
Ripley’s partly destroyed ship carrying the Alien. The idea was to link the Alien
with ancient tales of the Devil and to play off the realities of a biological
predator versus a mystical demonic creature out of myth. This becomes more
complicated when Ripley finds she has been impregnated by the beast. Again
the story played off demonic possession versus being taken over by a purely
biological host.
Ward felt the film could
create a medieval apocalyptic landscape both around Ripley and the monks and
in her own mind, as she became progressively more ‘possessed’ by the Alien. I
imagined that she would have visions of the Alien along the lines of the
Temptation of St Anthony, so it had both a sexual thread and a strand to do with
her lost opportunities to give birth. I figured she would feel this would be her
last opportunity to have a child. This would have an extra weight to it as she
was plagued with guilt over the only child she had ever had who she had not
been able to bring up. Subsequently her daughter had died leaving a sense of
loss and regret. In taking one calling, she had lost a more human course. So in a
sense she was fighting her own demons as well as the beast. I had intended that
there would always be a clash between different belief systems – hers and the
monks’. 844
843 Neither of these writers was credited as contributing to the screenplay when the film was released, but
Greg Pruss was described as a “conceptual artist” on the end credits.
844 Ward, e-mail to Stan Jones, 27 May 2002.