Earth building
Production designer Andy Nicholson takes DQ inside his work on sci-fi horror Alien: Earth, revealing the secrets of building spaceship USCSS Maginot and the numerous sets required for a series that takes its aesthetic cues from 1979 feature Alien.
If the first few minutes of Alien: Earth echo the tone, atmosphere and style of the film that inspired it, 1979’s seminal sci-fi horror Alien, that’s exactly what production designer Andy Nicholson was hoping for.
The FX, Hulu and Disney+ series opens aboard the USCSS Maginot, where familiar-looking cryosleep chambers open to reveal the slumbering crew within, leading them to reacquaint themselves with each other over a breakfast of cigarettes and coffee.
It’s a sequence that immediately sets the scene for the show, revealing the easy camaraderie between the space explorers on board a ship that looks at once both futuristic and old fashioned – a perfect riff on its source material and the look of Alien’s USCSS Nostromo, which notably hosted Sigourney Weaver’s warrant officer Ellen Ripley.
“I hope [viewers will] enjoy it and find it as exciting as I did the first time I watched the opening sequence to Alien,” Nicholson tells DQ. “That ‘Morning Coffee’ sequence when Ripley wakes up from cryosleep, I watched it on TV when everybody had gone to bed – I was about 15 – and I’d never seen anything like it. It draws you in and it’s a fantastic, almost unmatched opening sequence to a movie, because it just tells you everything without saying very much at all. It’s spooky and it’s engaging. I hope we’ve managed to achieve some of that with the Maginot design.”
Alien: Earth is set in the year 2120, two years before the original film and a time when the world is governed by five mega corporations: Prodigy, Weyland-Yutani, Lynch, Dynamic and Threshold. It’s also a world where cyborgs (humans with biological and artificial parts) and synthetics (humanoid robots with artificial intelligence) exist alongside humans.
Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), the wunderkind founder and CEO of Prodigy, unlocks a new technological advancement to create ‘hybrids’ by transplanting the human consciousnesses of terminally ill children into humanoid robots. The first hybrid prototype, Wendy (Sydney Chandler), marks a new dawn in the race for immortality.
But when a mysterious deep-space research vessel owned by Weyland-Yutani – the Maginot – crash-lands in Prodigy City, Wendy and the other hybrids discover numerous life forms on board more terrifying than anyone could have imagined.
Nicholson is no stranger to operating in space, having previously worked as the production designer on Apple TV+ series Constellation and feature film Gravity. He’s also taken up the role on films such as Captain Marvel, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and Assassin’s Creed.
Joining Alien: Earth, he was particularly interested in partnering with creator, writer and director Noah Hawley (Fargo) and being able to work in the world of the show, which was filmed on location and at studios in Bangkok.
“The design of the Nostromo and Alien was a benchmark in science fiction and space design. No one had ever seen anything like that before,” he says. “It was hugely detailed and engaging. In the first three scripts, there were specific rooms in the Maginot that were obviously very similar to the Nostromo – it’s a sister ship in the fleet. In our first conversation, I mostly talked with Noah about casting of the Lost Boys [Wendy and the other hybrids, who each take names from Peter Pan] and how difficult it would be for the grown-up actors to play teenagers who are actually kids.
“But then very quickly I asked him a couple of specific questions about the Maginot because it was so much like the Nostromo to read. I said, ‘Is the idea that it’s the sister ship in the fleet, and it’s a similar kind of period of time?’ He said yes, so once I knew that, it became about research based on the original film Alien, looking at the movie over and over again, studying the scenes, looking at the sets and where we needed to use details and commonalities from Alien, from the Nostromo. There were some rooms that were very similar; the majority of them were different for different reasons – different layouts, different requirements for the scene.”
While external shots of the Maginot were created with CGI, a small section of the colossal ship was built for scenes where rescue crews – and the hybrids – first encounter the crash site.
“We built that in an empty shopping mall in Bangkok, within a central five-storey atrium,” Nicholson reveals. “That was all built for real, because then you can have the water falling down. You can have a lot of stuff that saves you having to do it in set extensions, so we can save the set extension and visual effects money for the creatures.
“All of the other Prodigy interiors were built at three different studios in Bangkok on between 15 and 20 stages.”
When it comes to the scale of the build required by Alien: Earth, Nicholson has worked on some comparable movies. Yet while a film script might be 120 pages, Alien: Earth comprises eight episodes of approximately 60 pages each.
With almost every setting constructed, save for the few exterior street scenes and additional location work, it meant the designer needed a suitable team to support his ambitions for the series. He would take daily calls with his lead concept artist, who in turn worked with their team to deliver artwork ranging from interiors to weapons and vehicles.
Those pictures would then be rendered into 2D and 3D images that would be passed on to the visual effects department so they could undertake tests to examine whether, for example, the prototype airships could actually fly. Then interior and exterior designs would move to the art department, where Nicholson had a number of art directors and set designers who would break down those plans for the construction team. “Then you have to physically knock nails into wood,” he says.
In Bangkok, “I had a set-dressing department and three different construction departments, one building at each studio. So there were a lot of people, and a lot of drawings, because there was so much to generate.”
While the Maginot could take its lead from the Nostromo, the action in Alien never actually shifts to Earth. Its sequel, 1986 action horror Aliens, only briefly shows Earth from the vantage point of an orbiting space station. This meant Nicholson had lots of freedom to create the corporate world of Prodigy, where a large amount of the grounded story takes place. Even then, however, he would always be drawn back to the original Alien and the designs of sets and props led by production designer Michael Seymour.
“Knowing what he had used as a reference, we looked at the inside of late-70s and early 80s French and Italian cars, Citroens, Peugeot and Fiats,” Nicholson says. “Citroens had a central spoke steering wheel and very rudimentary digital displays. There were also French and Italian furniture designers that had a vision of the future that didn’t really go any further than then. It was futuristic style that went out of favour in the late 80s and through the 90s, so we took that as our guide for the aesthetic.
“It gave you something that was true to the way the artists in 1979 had thought of the future and respected what that was, saying, ‘Well, this is our future too.’” His task was “to make it different but also to give it a look that didn’t feel too jarring from the original movie, because that was our source reference.” Nicholson and his team even hired some authentic 1970s and 1980s furniture, and replicated it, to use in multiple spaces.
One of his favourite parts of the show, meanwhile, was creating the computer tablets that were “everywhere” in the script but couldn’t resemble anything contemporary, like an iPad. “The thing that was nearest the tablet in about 1993 was a Sony Watchman, which is still a cathode ray tube projecting on an angled screen. But, in this world, what if they could be bigger, so we could use it for what’s needed in the script, but keep the same aesthetic of the angled screen, the black and white, and the lower-pixel resolution?” he says. “We never went to 1080 [pixels/HD resolution] or anything like that. They’re always traditional 640 [pixels] because that was what they were.”
That made it a challenge for the graphics team, which had to create user interfaces across numerous screens in Prodigy and on board the Maginot in the same style. Nicholson hopes the rest of the show’s design also feels true to the original film.
“We spent an awful lot of time caring about that and thinking about that, and coming up with a completely new look,” he says. “It’s been called retro-futurism, but it was a new thing. This world hasn’t been seen before.”
Production design was also key to instilling a sense of dread in the series. With numerous alien species on board the Maginot and subsequently brought back to the Prodigy base, the layout of the sets was key to later episodes once security systems created to keep the aliens secure start to fail.
“We went to great lengths to carry on the theme of corridors and places you can’t see round the corner of,” he laughs. “There are no dead ends in this show. There’s always somewhere something could be coming from.”
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