A corridor built out of scrapped aircraft parts, dim, damp-looking, and somewhere off to the side the crew's lunch going cold on a trestle table because the lights took longer than anyone said they would. That's Shepperton, 1978, and the thing that's always stayed with me is that the script for Alien didn't say what sex any of them were. All seven parts, written flat, to be cast as they fell. Ripley could have been anyone.
Cut to: she's cast late, nearly last, a stage actress from New York with one proper film credit behind her, born there in 1949. And then the picture comes out in 1979 and audiences in my old house sat forward at the same moment every single night, which you can hear from the box — the seats stop creaking. There's a red-carpet photo of her years on, hands on hips in a one-shouldered red gown, perfectly at ease with the men in tuxedos lined up behind the rope.
Giger was out at Shepperton himself for a lot of that, airbrushing the corridors by hand and laying on bone-coloured latex over bits of real and cast bone, which is why the walls read as damp. Close to a plasterer's job, done by a man with a compressor.
Jerry Goldsmith wrote a warmer main title for that one than the one you hear, Constance — lyrical, a little aching — and the studio and Ridley recut it, dropping most of the gentle writing and tracking in older material. Listen for how little the music comforts you anywhere in that picture. It wasn't for want of him offering.