After several weeks and eight episodes in total, Alien: Earth is coming to a close. Noah Hawley's science-fiction horror series effectively told a bold and wholly original story within the larger Alien universe, and served up more than its fair share of boundary-pushing extraterrestrial carnage while doing so. Shortly before the finale, "The Real Monsters," aired, I got the chance to speak with a few members of the crew who put Alien: Earth together, including the Lead Prosthetics Supervisor and Designer, Steve Painter.
If you don't know him by name, you absolutely know him by craft. Steve Painter is a bona fide legend within the industry, having worked on everything from Hellbound: Hellraiser II to Game of Thrones and beyond. He brings an immense level of talent to the screen in Alien: Earth, and I was immensely interested in picking his brain about the various challenges and triumphs of his work. He was incredibly generous with his time and even indulged me a Hellboy II question, for which I am forever grateful.
Will Jones for Winter is Coming: Hello Steve! It’s a pleasure to get to talk to you. First and foremost, I wanted to ask you about stepping into the Alien franchise. It’s obviously such an iconic and storied franchise, when you first got the offer was there any kind of trepidation or was it more something you were invigorated by?
Painter: Bit of both. Yeah, I was intimidated, but I was also incredibly excited for the challenge. Obviously, it’s an iconic franchise, but to be a part of it was just an honor to me. I feel privileged.
WiC: Your work is incredible on Alien: Earth, but you’re obviously no stranger to the horror genre. You kind of got your start there and then have gone on to larger projects like Game of Thrones since. Was it a real joy to get to come back to some of those genre roots in such a palpable way here?
Painter: Absolutely, yeah. I was 13 when the first Alien came out. It’s one of the reasons I do what I do now, that and Star Wars. It was an inspiration, like an electric bolt, and I went ‘this is what I want to do.’ Forty years later, here I am, I’m working on an Alien project. I sometimes have to pinch myself; we actually did it.
WiC: I would love to talk to you a little bit about the way that your prosthetics and the way that the gore in the series really pushes the envelope in terms of what is acceptable on television. Because this isn’t just a streaming series; this is on FX, and some of the gore, such as the evisceration of Tootles’ face in Episode 6, “The Fly” is really striking.
Painter: Yeah. Whatever project I do, I try and push the boundaries anyway, even if it gets curtailed. I approached it like, ‘I’m going to turn it to eleven,’ and see what we can get away with. With the Tootles sequence, a lot of that was down to Kit [Young, who plays Tootles], his acting was incredible. When we took over the process and had his body go through the actual dissolve at the bottom of the cage… it was a huge process, and it was fun to do. With that sort of sequence, delivering to the fans, that’s what we’re all about.
WiC: There is digital technology now that wasn’t readily available to filmmakers like Ridley Scott back in ’79. I found Alien: Earth to strike this really great balance between practical and digital. Could you talk a little bit about working with the digital effects teams and making that such a seamless process?
Painter: Yeah, we were in discussions all the time. Jeff and James, who are the onset supervisors for the VFX on the show, they were my go-to people to sort of say, ‘Can you help me?’ And then they would come to me and go, ‘Can you help us?’ Because I don’t think people understand, there were real practical creations made for all the aliens. Then we’d do a VFX scan and move them around. It would have been terribly technically hard for us to do some of what they were asking for in the script.
It was a great relationship on this show. We were helping each other, talking about things all the time; on the best way to approach it to give the maximum visual payoff. From my point of view, it was a dream job to work with those guys.
WiC: With Xenomorph itself, which is such an iconic design, and so much of it being practical in this, when it came to that creature, were you looking towards the original films for inspiration or focused more on new inspirations?
Painter: I’ve got to give credit here to Weta, because the Xeno was their baby. We were all there on set, so if they needed my help to overcome something, I would step in, but it was their baby. Also, the stunt team. My hats off to Rob Inch, the stunt coordinator, because what he came up with for that Xeno to do on the day, real, with camera? It was incredible to watch. The wire work that went on and the tricks of the trade with camera work and Cameron [Brown, the stunt performer], just incredible to watch live on-set.
WiC: I know there’s nothing official about a season 2 as of yet, and I’m not aiming to get any scoops out of you or anything like that. But considering that you’ve now spent a large amount of time in the Alien universe, I’d love to hear where you’d like to see the franchise go next.
Painter: I can’t speculate what’s going to happen, but I think what Noah [Hawley, the showrunner] has done with these eight episodes this season, he’s expanded it. It can now go in so many different directions. I think there are backstories to these aliens, not just the Xeno but the other ones as well, I think there are backstories to be told there, possibly. I don’t know, it’s not for me to say… I think just expanding that world, Noah’s pulled it off brilliantly.
WiC: What was it like stepping in and being tasked with creating these new creatures that do have to stand toe-to-toe with the Xenomorph?
Painter: You give it your best shot. It is quite daunting, but it’s also a challenge, and that’s what I love. The challenge was incredible. I’ve got to give credit to other teams like Second Skin, my team, Weta... as a creature department, we were all working together and all helping each other, because it’s such a huge show. That’s the beauty of the show; it was a huge collaboration between departments: stunt department, make-up department, costume department, everyone in production design. It had to be, otherwise it would never work. It all came together and gelled completely.
WiC: To talk a little bit more about fleshing out the world of Earth, what kinds of things did you draw influence from there in terms of fleshing that out?
Painter: Well, obviously it was interesting from a sci-fi point of view. My background is horror films and stuff like that, but to see these creatures in an environment that they’re not used to and taking over. They are dominating any environment they’re put it; jungle elements as well as cityscapes. It’s exciting, it opens up possibilities of where these things can go.
WiC: That scene in episode 7 where you see the Xenomorph take out an entire troop of Marines in broad-daylight comes to mind. That was a real joy to watch.
Painter: And that was very hard. It’s a nice visual seeing the red [of the gore] against the green [of the forest]. I remember thinking that when we were shooting in Thailand, I took a step back and I just looked at the palette of where we were, the colors. It really looked beautiful… A lot of the stuff in Alien: Earth, if you took a step back and took a still photograph of it, it’s a beautiful painting. It is cinematic. Every aspect of the production was cinematic. I’ve done enough movies to know what cinematic means, and they nailed it. Absolutely.
WiC: The structure is keyed into television, as in, it does feel like a wholly satisfying TV-watching experience. But yes, it absolutely does feel like watching an eight-hour Alien movie. That’s how high the quality it.
Painter: I keep calling it a movie, because it did feel like making an eight-hour movie. Can you imagine editing it all together and sitting down for eight hours and watching it? You would. It goes so many different directions.
WiC: So much of the work is so complimentary to one another. For example, after episode 5, I went back and watched the first episode again and got so much more out of it. It’s a cyclical experience, that gets even better on rewatch.
Painter: Absolutely. You miss details that were there in different episodes.
WiC: While we’re on the topic of cinematic, I would like to carve out a moment to talk to you about your experience on Hellboy II: The Golden Army. You did such detailed and immersive work on that film, especially in sequences like the Troll Market set piece. Did that experience contribute to your work on Alien: Earth in any way?
Painter: Everything I’ve done in my whole career does affect how I approach the next project, the next problem. Because that’s what you’re doing: you’re solving problems. That’s what I do. In the script it reads, ‘This guy gets cut in half.’ Okay. It’s just a couple of lines in a script. But I’ve got visualize how that’s going to happen and practically work it out with the actors, the cameras, the set design. So, going back to Hellboy II, Guillermo del Toro, he’s a master storyteller and visually knows exactly what he wants.
I haven’t thought about this before, but you could make a parallel with Noah, who is also a great storyteller who knows exactly what he wants when he sees it. You’ve got to be on it. From that point of view, Hellboy II is a great grounding of what we brought to Alien: Earth. Other projects I’ve done have also affected the work, some of the way films I’ve done, some of the horror films from over the years. Even some of the cuddly stuff I’ve done over the years, I bring elements of it all to the table.
WiC: To close things out, according to my research, your first credit in the industry was Hellbound: Hellraiser II; a fantastic film in which you do incredible work. But I’d love to talk a little bit about the differences between working on something that is such a small-budget like that, and a larger-budgeted affair like Alien: Earth. Are there more similarities than we might think?
Painter: Yeah, there are. It’s all problem-solving. Sometimes the bigger the budget, the harder getting to the final point can be. Whereas if you’ve got a smaller budget, you’re limited so you have to work it out. That, sometimes, is easier than the bigger-budget movies where they want to see test after test. Whereas a low-budget movie will go… if you do anything for a low-budget movie, nine times out of ten, they’ll go ‘Wow, that’s fantastic, let’s shoot it.’ On the bigger budget movies, they’ve got time, they’ve got money, so it can become a more drawn out process in terms of getting what you want. But the low-budget horror films are great fun to do.
Watch Alien: Earth on FX and Hulu.