John Fasano was a highly prolific and experienced screenwriter and producer, working in the sci-fi, fantasy and action genres, with over forty credits to his name. His credits include ANOTHER 48 HRS. (1990), UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: THE RETURN (1999), DARKNESS FALLS (2003) and SNIPER: RELOADED (2011). John also worked on a fair number of high-profile blockbusters without credit. One of these was the troubled ALIEN 3 (1992). I spoke to John about his work on the film (and also ALIEN VS. PREDATOR, 2004) in 2012, and sadly, almost two years later to the day, John passed away from heart failure. He was 52. This is John's side of what happened in the writing of one of the most controversial movie sequels.
At what point in
your career were you when you were hired to work on ALIEN 3?
I had been in the
business for two years. I had sold a spec script to Morgan Creek for
half a million dollars ('Tailgunner'), and I had written the first draft of THE LAST
OF THE MOHICANS (1992) for Michael Mann. My first movie, which was
ANOTHER 48 HRS. for Walter Hill, hadn't come out yet. Walter
had produced all the ALIEN films, and I was working on a script that
would become LAST MAN STANDING (1996).
How did you get
involved with ALIEN 3?
When
I started talking to Walter at Fox about the film, Renny Harlin was
the director. I was still working on ANOTHER 48 HRS. I had meetings
with Renny, but I never wrote anything for him because he had quit
within the month. I thought the project was dead. But then I got a
call from Walter that Joe Roth at Fox was on the line and wanted to
talk to me. Joe said ''You wanna write ALIEN 3? We need a script in
like two weeks.'' Walter asked me about two directors, Phillip Noyce
and Vincent Ward. I had seen Ward's THE NAVIGATOR (1988) but I hadn't
seen Noyce's DEAD CALM (1989). I thought THE NAVIGATOR was a really
cool idea. Little did I know but they then hired Vincent Ward.
Vincent came to California (from New Zealand), and he stayed at the
Four Seasons. I drove there every day from the Valley for two weeks
and I wrote the first of many drafts for ALIEN 3. This was early
1990.
Well,
they had had about ten writers before me, and each of them was
working on a different version of the movie! (I was the twelfth
writer on JUDGE DREDD!) In fact, when they hired Vincent and me,
David Twohy had been writing an ALIEN 3 script for Renny Harlin. When
Renny left I think at first David thought he was going to get to
direct his script. When he found out that they had hired me, he was
told it was for ALIEN 4 and that they just wanted to have a script
ready for the next movie. When you get a job in the business, the
requirement is that if you are rewriting someone's script then you
are supposed to call them and tell them. So I met David at his house
and when I told him that I wasn't writing ALIEN 4 but that I was
writing ALIEN 3, he threw a hissy fit. They were lying to him, and
they then told him ''OK, we'll make yours ALIEN 4.''
Did you read any of
the previous ALIEN 3 scripts?
No,
because they had nothing to do with the story we were doing.
What was the nature
of your writing collaboration with Vincent Ward?
I
was the first writer on the movie that eventually got made. I wrote
on the movie until Fincher was hired. They had one writer (Larry
Ferguson) come in for one draft. That was one of the bones of
contention because they were trying to say that that the draft that I
wrote to give Vincent a story credit on the film separated him from
me as a writer. That's like an arcane thing about the Writer's Guild.
Getting credit is all about what position you're in when you wrote
and so on. Walter, David Giler and Gordon Carroll were all really
involved in the story. Vincent pitched the story but I wrote the
first draft. There was no Vincent draft. After I had handed in the
first draft, and we were working on the second draft, I asked Fox to
move Vincent to a motel in backwoods California, near where I was
living. I had been driving eighty miles a day.
The
first thing he said was that the characters would live on this planet
made of wood. These monks had tossed out new technology in favour of
pre-technology information. They went into space with the physical
books. In the Middle Ages, the Church was the repository of all
information. They controlled who got the books. If you look at THE
NAVIGATOR, it's very religious. It's about these monks who go into a
cave and end up in 1984 New Zealand. Christianity is just coming in,
and they're looking for the person who has stolen the cross off their
tombstone. It was a low-budget movie, but the ideas were good.
What were some of
the intriguing visual elements in your scripts?
Vincent
was in love with Hieronymous Bosch, kind of like Gilliam with TIME
BANDITS (1981). In America, people didn't know what you were talking
about when you talked about Bosch. But when Vincent went to England,
the art department knew exactly what he was talking about. That was
funny. They thought Bosch was groundbreaking over here, but it was
old hat in England!
The
way I see the series is that the first film is about corporate
interests and blue-collar workers. The second movie is about the
military. The other part of society left is religion. I think the
ALIEN movies were a way to comment on the different aspects of our
society. This would be the religious story. Since religion is so
sensitive to people, the way to do it is to not take it entirely
seriously. In our story we didn't have Christians or Muslims or Jews.
We had these pre-Industrial Revolution Luddites, with the irony being
that this wooden 'planet' they lived on was really hi-tech, an old
spaceship sheathed in wood. The characters just didn't want to admit
that. The twist was kind of like what M. Night Shyamalan did with THE
VILLAGE (2004).
What do you feel was
the reason Vincent did not ultimately end up directing ALIEN 3?
THE
NAVIGATOR took him two years to shoot, on weekends with friends.
Sometimes they wouldn't shoot for a month. Fox wanted this movie done
immediately. They wanted him to do it to a certain release date.
They always thought he'd work quicker, and he always thought that
when they saw how good it was going to be they would give him more
time. By the time Vincent got to England it was clear that Fox were
not going to do that. The main thing is that Vincent wanted it to be
perfect and Fox wanted it just 'done'. The truth is also that Vincent
did not have the sensitivity to make ALIEN 3. If you look at WHAT
DREAMS MAY COME (1998) and MAP OF THE HUMAN HEART (1992), they're the
kinds of films he wants to make. What happens in my business is like
with Jonathan Liebesman and DARKNESS FALLS (2003). Jonathan didn't
want to make that movie at all. He didn't like horror movies at all.
He wanted to make dramas. But your agent tells you ''Look if you
direct a big studio movie then the next movie you can do what you
want.''
His
ALIEN 3 would have been a really great, quirky film, more quirky than
ALIEN RESURRECTION (1997), if he had been given the chance to do it. He had
some great kills in it, which were disgusting. He didn't have the
sensitivity to work in the studio system at that time. He was living
in New Zealand with Maoris, where they kept the meat hanging over the
table, and as you ate, maggots would drop off the meat. You'd brush
them off and keep eating. Then he's at the Four Seasons or the
Mansion in Sunset Boulevard and they're throwing money at him. That's
not the best way to enter the film business.
Have you been in
contact with Vincent since the film?
I
haven't seen him since then and I miss him. He was a really nice guy.
We had a great collaboration. I wrote some great drafts working with
him.
How many of your
ideas found their way into the Fincher version?
It's
the same idea, basically. Fincher's movie is my script but set in a
Luddite prison instead of a monastery. I have not seen the film since
1992, but the idea of the big furnace at the end that Ripley jumps
into was very important to me. So was the idea that the alien came
out of a dog and was a quadped. The only reason that the alien was
bipedal in the first movie is because it's hatching in humans. It's
this creature that can go into any planet and be the best opponent
for the inhabitants.
Was it Fincher's
idea to kill off Newt and Hicks?
No,
that was in our script. Originally the idea was to bring back Newt
but the reality was that the character would be too young. In one of
my drafts, she and Hicks are killed on the ship. When Ripley finds
Newt's body, it has a chestburster hole in it. So the alien that came
onto the planet came from Newt. Bishop was still alive, but only the
upper half of his body. The monks made him a pair of wooden legs.
Fincher
went to England and he asked ''What's the budget?'' They said ''It's
$40m.'' He said ''Well, that's good for 45 minutes.'' They thought he
was kidding. He was extrapolating the budget based on his Madonna
'Metropolis' video ('Express Yourself'). He went to England and shot
the film, and when they put it together it was like 50 minutes long.
They then shot an additional 30 or 40 minutes at Fox in LA. The
original shoot in England did not produce the amount of footage they
needed. The interesting thing is that ALIEN 3 could've ended
Fincher's career but he was an infinitely better director than that.
What was your
interaction with Sigourney Weaver?
It
was one of those things that Sigourney wanted her character to die in
the movie. They had people writing scripts for years after ALIENS (1986), but every time they showed the scripts to Sigourney, she'd say no. I met with her and she had just had a baby. She was
nursing her baby in the meetings. She said ''Look, I wanna die
because I have beaten this thing in two other movies and it's
ridiculous.'' When we went to Fox with the draft where she dies at
the end, they were like, ''This is impossible.'' So I changed the
ending so I had this one monk, John, giving her CPR and taking the
alien baby out of her. He died, and she lived. After they fired
Vincent, I asked Fincher what they were going to do and he said ''I'm
going to shave her head and I'm going to kill her.'' They all said
''Well, that's genius.'' I thought ''Well, they've cut off the only
thing that makes her look like a woman and they've killed her, which
was a source of huge fights with the previous director.'' It's like
when they made the GODZILLA remake at Sony and they fired Jan De Bont
because he wanted to go over $120m. They hired Roland Emmerich and
they ended up spending $140m.
How many drafts did
you write with Vincent?
I
wrote like ten drafts with Vincent. Fincher was hired to direct our
script but make it his own. When Vincent was fired, the art
department was building his sets, but Fincher wanted the sets to look
like he wanted. They were going to start shooting in less than a
month. Fincher came in to try and put his own brand on the same
story. In my drafts we had monks, and in the film they're priests. I
mean, basically, they're the same. The reveal in our script was that
the monks were all political refugees and political prisoners. I
guess they figured that since they had a script where they were in a
penal colony before, they's change it to prisoners. They had people
writing scripts for years after ALIENS (1986), but every time they showed
the scripts to Sigourney, she'd say no. Twohy's script had an actual
prison. I think because they had bought his script they could just
use the aspect of it that was a penal colony. The way the penal
colony was run in the film is exactly the way it was run when it was
a monastery in my script.
Why was another
writer brought in?
Entirely
because of the back and forth, I turned to Fox and said ''I can't do
this anymore'' and they brought in another guy for a month, who was gone after that. Then I went back on it, and worked on it for
about another year and a half. I read this one article that said I
wrote one draft and then another guy came in. That didn't happen.
When I got ALIEN 3 I was at my office at Paramount and I had just
made a new friend, Larry Ferguson, who wrote HIGHLANDER (1986) and
BEVERLY HILLS COP II (1987). When I told him I was going to write
ALIEN 3 he said ''Don't do it! That's gonna be a crappy job!'' When
they replaced me, they hired him! He went to England and he didn't
even finish a draft. They got rid of him, and Walter Hill and David
Giler really finished the script. Ironically, because he was the first writer to work with Fincher, the Writers Guild considered that the film started with him, even though he was working off a script that I wrote. So I didn't get any credit on the movie, even though 60-70% of the narrative is still mine. What happened was that I was getting ready to go to England. I was still the writer, even though Fincher had flown to England to try and get Robert Bolt, who eventually told him ''I'm not going to do ALIEN 3!'' I was getting ready to go but then I found out that they had hired Larry Ferguson and that he was going. I was still writing at this time. When I heard this, I quit. That was my stupidity because if I had finished the next draft, I would have written the first draft for Fincher and would've gotten a credit. I was so freaked out that he had replaced me without telling me. I could have ended my career right there. Luckily I didn't. That's the kind of fuck-up you don't usually walk away from. Walter and I had a bad relationship after that for like twenty years. I felt so betrayed because he also knew. I remember that Walter had an ALIEN pinball machine in his office. It had been made without getting the rights to the movie, so they had to stop making them and give Fox all the machines that they had made. I would sit in his office for hours after everyone had gone home and play the pinball machine to avoid the evening traffic.
I talk to Walter every now and again. He just did a film for Stallone. We're going to revitalise some low-budget scripts we wrote in the past. But he was my mentor, and it will never be the same.
So how would you
describe your ALIEN 3 experience in a nutshell?
ALIEN
3 was like the best or the worst thing that I ever did because I
loved the ALIEN films (I'm surrounded by the monsters in my office)
and I really wanted to do that movie, but at the same time it was a
total fuck-up on the film and I got fucked over pretty big time.
Until I found out Larry Ferguson was going to go to England, writing
on ALIEN 3 was a ball.
What are some of
your happiest memories of working on the film?
We
had a birthday party for Vincent in my crappy condo in Chatsworth. We
had them make an ALIEN cake for him. That was a cool experience. It
was cool to have meetings with Sigourney Weaver while she was
breastfeeding her baby! One of the things that I did on that film was
that I convinced Walter to hire Amalgamated Dynamics, who had just
left Stan Winston, to do the film. They were the guys who had done
ALIEN and had opened up their own company. It was good because they
were friends of mine. They gave me a fibreglass cast of the glove
puppet from ALIEN as a present, and later on an actual puppet, which
was just for me. There wasn't another one like it. And working with
Vincent ... We were trying to do the Monty Python version of ALIEN.
It was pretty extreme, pretty funny. Vincent was talking about
getting John Cleese, Michael Palin and all those guys to play the
parts of the Luddites. Specific characters were meant to be comic
relief.
What effect did
working on ALIEN 3 have on your career?
It
didn't have a positive effect because the film wasn't well-received.
I'm a good writer, so other people hired me. But it strained my
relationship with both Walter and Fox. It was a weird thing because
it wasn't a success financially. Would it have been better to have
had my name on it and have people say ''Oh, you wrote the bad ALIEN
movie'' or to have people not know that I worked on it? It worked out
in a weird way.
Did you like the
film when you saw it?
I'm
going to be very honest. If there's a problem with any of the films I
worked on and didn't get credit on – DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE
(1995), JUDGE DREDD (1995), ALIEN 3, LAST OF THE MOHICANS, TOMBSTONE (1993) - then I never have fun watching
them. There's no upside to it. If I enjoy them but I got hosed on
them, then there isn't a positive aspect.
Are you a fan of ALIEN
RESURRECTION (1997)?
I
love it because it's THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN (1995) with aliens in
it. Guillermo Del Toro could've directed ALIEN RESURRECTION. It's
like HELLBOY II (2008). ALIEN
RESURRECTION is a very funny movie. It reminds me of the second
RIDDICK movie (THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK, 2004).
How was your
experience working on ALIEN VS. PREDATOR (2004)?
I
did the story for ALIEN VS. PREDATOR but they fired the director. I
didn't hear anything about it and then I heard he was going his own
way. Then when I saw the trailer I saw it was my story and various
other people were credited. There were lawsuits and lawsuits. They
took my original outline and they blew it up on cards at meetings,
but I didn't get any credit on that. I grew up loving monsters. I
came to California and I'm told I can work on horror and SF. I get
completely fucked over but when I do an action movie, I get credited.
The irony is that I never watch action movies. I'd never have gone
seen ANOTHER 48 HRS. if I hadn't written it. I'd rather watch ALIEN.
When Walter, Gordon,
David and I sat around for two years working on ALIEN 3 we talked
about all kinds of concepts, including AVP. I do like Rodriguez's
PREDATORS (2010). I do enjoy the idea, which I put in my treatment,
that Predators had brought humans to this planet tens of thousands of
years ago to populate what was basically their game preserve. When
one of the Aliens is dying in my treatment it is revealed that
they're the ones who brought the dinosaurs here so they could hunt
them. The Predators find that the Aliens are uncontrollable. Billions
of years later in London they are digging a subway station and they
find a spaceship. In it you see that the Aliens took apes and pushed
their evolution into human.
How did you feel
about PROMETHEUS (2012)?
I've
just been writing a movie about The Chariots of the Gods by Erik Von
Daniken, and a lot of the concepts in PROMETHEUS are taken from it. I
found the film frustrating because it was similar to what happened
with the prequel to THE THING (2011) – some of it was
prequel, and some of it was a remake. It was like a 'premake'. The
script for PROMETHEUS is nowhere near as smart as the script for
ALIEN or even ALIENS. If you're going to have someone get lost on a
ship, it shouldn't be the guy whose job it is to navigate the ship.
If you're going to have him get lost with a guy who's a botanist,
that guy shouldn't want to pet an alien. Everything in the first film
is flawless in its logic. But in PROMETHEUS, characters only do
things because the writers want them to do them. Their actions make
no sense at all. It seemed like the writers were working narratively
backwards. ''We need an alien on the ship. Let's get it on there.'' I
loved the way they shot it but there wasn't a single surprise in the
movie.
How tough do you
have to be to be a Hollywood screenwriter?
You
have to have the skin of a rhinoceros, and simultaneously a giant ego
and no ego at all. I didn't let my experiences destroy me but I was
hurting for like a year, because here's my hero, Walter, who founded
me, discovered me, and I did one film for him, and on the second one
I got hosed. I was very upset. You can't control whether you get
credit or not. I just wrote HOSTEL: PART III (2011). They weren't
going to make that movie until they read my draft. You would think
that would give me a leg up, but the Writers Guild determines who
gets credit. It's such an arcane system. I rewrote the movie
TOMBSTONE. When the trailers came out it had me and the original
writer credited. When he saw this, the original writer said he would
sue the studio if I got credited as a writer, and so they gave me a
producer credit instead. Now I always ask the studio to hire me as a
producer as well as a writer so I know if people look at the credits
they can see I worked on the movie.
I spoke to John by phone on 24th July 2012.
RIP John Fasano 1961-2014.
Thanks to Edie King Fasano.
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