In Prometheus (2012), director Ridley Scott began laying the foundation for the science fiction world depicted in his horror classic Alien (1979). Now Scott’s space epic continues in Alien: Covenant, the second film in the Alien prequel series, co-written by Oscar-nominated screenwriter John Logan.

Alien Covenant takes place between the events of Prometheus and the original Alien film. It follows the crew of the colonial spaceship Covenant, who receive a transmission from a thought-to-be undiscovered planet. But on landing, the crew become stalked by the precursors to the infamous creatures from the Alien movies.

The first screenplay for the film that would become Alien: Covenant was written by Dante Harper. Ridley Scott then brought on Logan to rewrite the script.

John Logan

Logan began his career as a playwright while attending Northwestern University in Chicago. His early writing credits included the television movie RKO 281 about the production of Citizen Kane, which was produced by Ridley Scott.

After Logan’s feature film breakthrough, Any Given Sunday (1999), Scott and Logan worked together again when Logan was one of the many writers who worked on the screenplay for Gladiator (2000) – which brought Logan his first Oscar nomination.

Since that time, Logan’s writing credits have included The Last Samurai (2003), The Aviator (2004), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), Rango (2011), Hugo (2011), Skyfall (2012), and Spectre (2015). Logan is also the creator of the 2014-2016 television series Penny Dreadful.

Logan’s films are marked by his focus on character, even in big-budget blockbusters like Skyfall. He has worked with some of Hollywood’s most significant filmmakers, and his movies have grossed over $4 billion worldwide, making Logan one of the most successful screenwriters of the twenty-first century.

Creative Screenwriting spoke to Logan about writing a story that bridged the gap between the modern Prometheus and the classic Alien, bringing the fear back to the franchise, the joy of writing scenes featuring two characters played by Michael Fassbender, and what his background as a playwright taught him about writing screenplays.

Amy Seimetz as Faris in Alien: Covenant. Credit: Mark Rogers – TM & © 2016 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

First, can you talk about how you got involved with Alien: Covenant? You were one of the writers on Gladiator, so you had worked with Ridley Scott before.

Gladiator was such a great experience, and over the years Ridley and I kept trying to find something else to work on. But nothing was quite right.

He was in the midst of doing the sequel to Prometheus, and he asked me how I felt about Alien. And he asked me to come on board because I love the Alien franchise, especially the original movie. There was already a fantastic script by Dante Harper. So  I came in and worked on it for the last year and a half and through production.

You’ve no stranger to franchise films, having written Star Trek and James Bond movies. What’s the biggest challenge with finding something new in a project that is part of a long-running franchise?

You have to be true to those parts of the story or those characters that excite or move you. Every writer will approach a story with a particular viewpoint. If you hand a James Bond novel to Eric Roth you’ll get one screenplay, to Bill Condon you’ll get another, and to me you’ll get a different one. There are different things that speak to an individual writer.

With Alien: Covenant, I just really wanted to write something that had the feel of the original Alien, because seeing that movie was one of the great events of my youth. It was so overpowering in terms of what it communicated to me and its implications, that when I started talking to Ridley about what became Alien: Covenant, I said, “You know, that was a hell of a scary movie.”

I wanted to write a horror movie because the Grand Guignol elements of Alien are so profound. We tried to recapture that with Alien: Covenant, while also trying to pay homage to the deeper implications of Prometheus. In terms of tone, pace, and how we chose to play this particular symphony, we wanted to create a really frightening movie.

Michael Fassbender in Alien: Covenant. Credit: Mark Rogers – TM & © 2016 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

Speaking of the original Alien, Ripley is one of the great movie heroes of all time, and Daniels fills a similar role in Alien: Covenant. What makes Daniels different from Ripley to you?

One of the great things to celebrate about this franchise is that it was promoting female heroes long before it was popular. The Alien franchise has always embraced the idea of strong feminist iconography and heroism. Obviously that was something Prometheus did with Shaw, and that we’re delighted to do with Daniels.

But Daniels is her own unique beast. One of the major differences between Alien: Covenant and all the other movies in the cycle is that the people on this ship are not soldiers or mercenaries – they’re colonists going to found a new world. One of the reasons why I named the ship Covenant is because when the Pilgrims came to America on the Mayflower they signed a covenant – a social pact.

This crew has a very unique bond because it’s made up of couples – romantic couples, married couples, gay couples, straight couples – so already they’re invested in this shared social mission.

Within the first fifteen seconds of her experience in this movie, Daniels loses her husband. So she’s dealing with catastrophic loss from her first moment of the movie. She’s set on a very shaky emotional foundation, and one of the joys for me in developing the character with Ridley and Katherine Waterston was finding the way in which she steps up to her heroism.

Katherine Waterston as Daniels in Alien: Covenant. Credit: Mark Rogers – TM & © 2016 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

Another pair of characters I want to ask you about are the androids David and Walter. The characters are very similar on the surface, and are even played by the same actor, but have radically different motivations. In your mind, what makes them different?

For me, the selfish joy of writing this movie was writing the David and Walter scenes, because we have two highly interesting characters who have so many connections. It was very exciting to play with the doppelganger myth because it is so prevalent in literature and fiction.

The differences between them are profound. David was Peter Weyland’s first successful android creation, and indeed Alien: Covenant begins with the birth of David. Someday when someone puts all the Alien movies in chronological order, the very first thing you will see is the awakening of David. He was a very well-formed android, and Peter Weyland instilled him with curiosity, creativity, and eccentricities, which are all so aptly demonstrated in Prometheus. We continue that in Alien: Covenant.

What we posit is that David made people uneasy because he was a little too human, and a little too ambitious. We want our slaves to behave like slaves and machines to act like machines. So future iterations of the model were less interesting – they tried to make them less idiosyncratic, with less sense of achievement.

Thus we have Walter, who seems like a scaled-down version of David. David’s great temptation to him is, “Be more than your programming. You could be as exalted as you choose to be. You have the elements of free will and choice.”

That’s the great provocation that David sort of tosses in Walter’s face.

It was fantastically entertaining writing those scenes, and knowing that I was writing both of them for Michael Fassbender made it more delicious for me.

Michael Fassbender in Alien: Covenant. Credit: Mark Rogers. – TM & © 2016 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

There’s a Victor Frankenstein aspect to the film, and you’ve worked with the Frankenstein characters before in Penny Dreadful.

One of the things that Ridley and I talked about when we started writing this movie was that we wanted it to be the origin story of the Alien monster itself. The great mystery that surrounds that perfect organism is so tantalizing. We thought that to begin to get into that story would be very interesting.

Gradually, the tropes of Victor Frankenstein came into it. What is it to create life? What is your responsibility to that life? What is your sense of satisfaction when that life satisfies you? What is your sense of disappointment when it disappoints you?

Certainly, all the time I spent with Mary Shelley while working on Penny Dreadful was very useful in examining those tropes.

And you also mention Mary Shelley’s husband with his poem “Ozymandias.”

Yes, of course! I take wicked satisfaction that this is the only major Hollywood movie where a plot point actually revolves around who wrote the poem “Ozymandias.” [Laughs]

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert…Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Talking about the philosophical issues that make this series so interesting, in the film Oram remarks that he isn’t fully trusted by the other colonists because he trusts faith over science. Can you talk about that aspect of his character?

This picks up on a very strong seed from Prometheus. To me, Prometheus is a deeply philosophical movie asking essential questions: Where do we come from? Who created us? These are also theological and spiritual questions.

Also, I believe that is the great challenge of the original Alien. This is a life form that evolved in some way. It’s a symbiotic life form, but it’s not. It’s sort of a crab monster, but it’s not. It’s neither male nor female, and it’s neither mechanical nor biological. It’s some weird combination of all of these. If you look at the original Alien, to me the big question to ask is, “What is life?”

Prometheus picks up that seed, but in Alien: Covenant we wanted to be much more direct about it and make the spiritual element about religion and believing in God.

It is not too hard to believe that even in the present day, much less the future, a man of faith would be less respected in the world of science. It just gave great motivation for Oram’s character as he moves through the story, and it also puts him in conflict with the ultra-scientific and realistic David, which is what we wanted.

Billy Crudup as Oram in Alien: Covenant. Credit: Mark Rogers – TM & © 2016 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

You seem to have done a little of everything in film – animated films, like Sinbad and Rango, musicals like Sweeney Todd, Shakespeare with Coriolanus. Is there something you haven’t had the chance to do yet as a screenwriter that you want to do?

To me, it’s always about who you are working with, and if the story is exciting. It’s not so much a question of what I haven’t done, it’s a question of people I would love to work with or areas that I would love to explore as a writer.

Everyone always says that they would like to write a Western, and I wrote Rango, which sort of satisfies the Western bug.

Working on Sweeney Todd excited me about musicals. So I think if I could do anything right now, I’d say I would love to do another screen musical. I’m working on a few stage musicals now, and there’s something so quixotic and so alchemic about the combination of drama, words, and music that I find exciting.

Thank goodness that with movies like La La Land, suddenly people are going to see movie musicals again. If you asked me which I would like to do, all my life I wanted to do a screen version of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies.

Your background is in playwriting. How did that prepare you for a career as a screenwriter?

I think it was elemental to my success as a screenwriter, because being a dramatist teaches you the basics. You have to start with Aristotle’s Poetics, you have to do Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekov, Pinter, and Sondheim. Once you have a sense of basics of what drama is, you can be a screenwriter.

It’s going the other way that’s difficult. If you just went straight to writing screenplays, you might write a few good screenplays but you’re not going to build a career as a dramatist. You have to care about the film’s dramatic structure, which is character, conflict, setting, and elocution. I think all those things that playwrights have to learn are elements of good screenplays as well.

Otherwise the danger is that you write something that’s facile, or something that’s good enough, but it’s not really solid to the roots as it needs to be. Playwriting gave me the roots and soil of drama.

Jessica Chastain as Virgilia and Vanessa Redgrave as Volumnia in Coriolanus.
Photo by Larry D. Horricks – © 2011 The Weinstein Company. All rights reserved.

What is it that inspires you to write?

Great characters. I am in awe of writers who can have people sitting in a diner and talking, and make it fascinating and dramatic. I don’t have that gift. I’m pulled toward very large – some would say operatic or grandiose – characters or expressions. But that’s what I do, that’s what entertains me, and that’s what I find exciting.

I’m always drawn toward the large scope of a character, or an idea that is some way intriguing and beyond my reach. Writing things that I know that are purely from my experience would be uninteresting. I have to aspire toward something pretty magnificent to give my heart to a play, a movie, or a TV series.

In your career you’ve worked with many superstar directors – Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, Tim Burton, Sam Mendes, and in theater Michael Grandage…Is there any commonality you’ve noticed among them from working as a screenwriter on their films?

They make me up my game. They’re all better tennis players than I am.

What I love about working with great directors, whether it’s on stage or on screen, is how they challenge me and make me a better writer.

When you’re successful and you have a body of work behind you, you get to a point when people don’t challenge you as much as they should. Getting in with people who can say, “Do better,” is a great thing. That’s exactly what I seek.

Alien: Covenant is in theaters today.

Featured image: Alien: Covenant. Credit: Mark Rogers – TM & © 2016 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

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Whether you know her from House, Joan of Arcadia, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants or even Django Unchained, actress Amber Tamblyn has likely stolen a scene or two in some of your favorite films and shows.

But Tamblyn has now moved behind the camera to write and direct her first film, Paint It Black. The Los Angeles native fell in love with the story when her friend Amy Poehler (Parks and Rec, Inside Out) recommended the book by Janet Fitch (author of White Oleander).

Paint It Black takes place in the aftermath of a suicide. When Michael (Rhys Wakefield) takes his own life, his punk rock girlfriend (Alia Shawkat) and wealthy alcoholic mother (Janet McTeer) discover they need one another in a twisted way as they try to deal with the loss.

Creative Screenwriting spoke with Tamblyn about poetic language in film, writing about grief, and the importance of asking for advice.

Janet McTeer as Meredith in Paint it Black. Image courtesy of Imagination Worldwide. Credit: Brian Rigney Hubbard.

This film is your directorial debut. What made you want to tell this story?

Amber Tamblyn. Photo: Ron Phillips © 2009 Main Street Film Company LLC

I read the novel and I was really blown away by author Janet Fitch’s ability to capture the way women feel. It’s so rare that you get to see a movie about the multidimensional aspects of a woman’s grief. Usually, it just shows ladies crying.

I wanted to make a movie that shows how grief affects people. But also how it affects their heart and their brain, not just their language or life experience.

I wanted us to really feel this from a more visceral, animalistic place. The book had a lot of that, and so much of it was about the narrative inside of women’s heads. So I thought if I could make a movie like that, it would be very unique and different.

How important was it to use these two characters, which are so different from one another?

The book is about grief, but it’s also about a class structure and the way people live in Los Angeles—both rich people in Hollywood Hills and the young punks who live on Sunset Boulevard. That’s the reality of Los Angeles, and I was born and raised there so I understand that very well.

In the book, that also played very well with their obsessions and what they need from each other, especially with what Josie’s character needs from Meredith. I think it was important to reflect that in the movie. It wasn’t just about the grief but also about how people live in different class systems.

Alia Shawkat as Josie and Janet McTeer as Meredith in Paint it Black.
Image courtesy of Imagination Worldwide. Credit: Brian Rigney Hubbard.

When did you originally read the book, and how long did it take to get this film made as a first-time writer-director?

I read the book in 2006 I believe. Janet Fitch was not originally interested in having her book adapted. As far as she knew, I was just some random actress trying to get the rights to make a movie out of her book, which could be terrifying.

But I was very persistent, and expressed how I wanted to make it, and the poetic vision that I felt like I had, plus I said how I thought the movie would be different. Also I’m a third-generation from Los Angeles, so I expressed to her that I really understood where the characters were coming from. I told her that I understood the underworld of Los Angeles.

So that took about two years, and then we wrote the script. In totality, it’s been about ten years in the making, so I’ve had a lot of time to sit to think about the type of movie I wanted to make, which was something slightly arch and slightly fantastical, within the world of movies like The Hunger or Sunset Boulevard.

I wasn’t interested in making a gritty indie. I wanted something that felt tonally larger-than-life, as emotions can feel.

A lot of directors who shoot in Los Angeles create films that are a love letter to LA. Were there certain aspects of the city you felt like you had to include in the film?

Yes! There’s a shot of a sign called “Happy Foot, Sad Foot,” which has been on Sunset Boulevard since I was a kid, for as long as I can remember.

It’s just this weird, rotating sign of a foot with a happy face on it, and then on the other side it’s a foot with a sad face on it. So when it rotates you see a happy foot and a sad foot. So when we were rolling B roll, I said to Brian Hubbard, my DP, “When we drive by, you have to get happy foot, sad foot.” If you’re from LA or if you’ve lived there, you know about it—it’s been there forever.

Happy Foot Sad Foot sign, LA. Image courtesy of www.awalkerinla.com

You’re also a published poet. I noticed some symbolism in the film, for example with the pool or the piano. Was there any particular object or event that really stood out for you in the book, and how did you include that in the movie?

A great example of putting poetic language in the film would be within the sequence of shots with Alia Shawkat (Josie) lying in bed with Rhys Wakefield (Michael).

You see it in different points in the film when they’re lying together. Once she pulls a leaf out of his hair, and then there’s another time where she’s lying there along and the leaf is on the pillow. There’s a time when they’re kissing and she pulls his mother’s ring out of his mouth, and another time when Michael’s been replaced by Janet.

We did that in a series of takes, and I just called out different ideas. We would hand her a ring and say, “Now kiss him and take this out of his mouth.” Or, “Let’s get Janet McTeer in here and Janet will lay next to Alia.”

I didn’t know where those shots were going to go, but I knew that they could mean something at the end of the day. I think the poetic part of my brain really kicked in and helped support me as a director.

It’s a very stylish film. What were some of your cinematic influences beyond Sunset Boulevard and The Hunger?

I really love the films of Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries). Even though they’re not tonally the same, I think he wrote women in an incredible, complicated way.

He really made complex women the protagonists in his films. I love anyone who has a real specific style, a visual style like a Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, or Jane Campion (The Piano, Bright Star).

Bibi Andersson as Sara and Victor Sjöström as Dr. Isak Borg in Wild Strawberries © 1957 – Janus Films

As an actress both in film and television, you’ve worked with directors such as Quentin Tarantino. What are some of the things you learned on set that you used to direct this film?

Well, this is going to sound so boring, but time management.

I feel like the quicker and tighter I would run a ship on set, the more time there would be not only for the actors to do their part and get extra takes, but also for the crew to do their job, to make sure everything was lit the way they wanted it to be, things like that. That had always been a frustration for me on sets, where I would see people just sort of messing around and wasting time.

I just wanted to make sure we moved swiftly and quickly, so extra time could allow for the actors to have more takes. That stuff really adds up and matters at the end of the day. Those shots that we were able to get would normally be the types of shots you would cut because you had lost or ran out of time. I knew things like that would be important in the editing room, so I made sure there was time for stuff like that.

Rhys Wakefield as Michael in Paint it Black. Image courtesy of Imagination Worldwide. Credit: Brian Rigney Hubbard.

What did you find to be the most difficult step in the writing process?

I don’t think there was anything really difficult, to be honest. I went through the book and I wrote out in a linear order what happened.

I just wrote the book out in a very straight-forward way: “Josie walks out of her house and goes to a funeral. At the funeral, she’s attacked by Meredith. Later, she meets Michael’s Father.”

So I made myself a template of what the book looks like, and then I went through and started to carve stuff away. “What is the real story here? This isn’t a story about a man who kills himself, it’s about the two women. So maybe I need to get rid of the boy in it, even though it’s about his memory.”

There were a lot of drafts of the script, but there wasn’t anything particularly difficult, per se.

What are you working on now?

There are a couple things I’m working, but I haven’t started writing yet. I’ve just started thinking. They’re just sort of seeds. That’s how Paint It Black started. It started as a small seed or idea that I couldn’t get out of my head. That’s also how poems happen.

Alia Shawkat as Josie in Paint it Black. Image courtesy of Imagination Worldwide. Credit: Brian Rigney Hubbard.

So you spend a lot of time outlining or carrying the story with you?

Yes, I do. I think about things a lot. I’m slow to the process in that way, but that’s good for me.

It used to be something where I thought something was wrong with me. I had friends who were putting out a book every single year, or doing a movie or TV show every five seconds, and I would go, “Why can’t I do that?”

But I’ve come to realize that I move very slowly, but I move intentionally. There’s nothing about my slowness that’s not intentional. Everything is me thinking and processing and absorbing information, in order to create something that I hope will be profound.

Do you have any advice for writers or new filmmakers?

I feel like people don’t go for the throat quick enough. A great poem starts with a great line, and you have to grab your audience quick. For me, those are the types of movies, or books, or poems, that are the best. Some people love a slow build but I don’t. I like to get in there quick. I like to get to the meat of what needs to be said.

I also think it’s really hard for people to kill their darlings. People get a little too precious with the work that they love, and they don’t consider what the work is that the audience might love.

If I think about anything, I think about that. People need to be able to kill what doesn’t work.

And also ask for advice. With this movie, I did maybe fifteen test screenings. I wasn’t precious with it. Ask for help. Ask for people’s points of view. Ask for opinions from people that aren’t in our business. Ask poets. Ask veterinarians. Ask Hillary Clinton. Ask people and see what they think of the work.

To find tone you have to do that, and sometimes that means killing the thing you love the most. I know I always do that with poems. I send them to other poets. Oftentimes they’ll go, “Cut all of this. I know you think this is great, but it’s not.” And you go, “Damn it. I know you’re right…”

Paint it Black is in theaters from Friday 19th May.

Featured image: Alia Shawkat as Josie in Paint it Black. Image courtesy of Imagination Worldwide. Credit: Brian Rigney Hubbard.

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