Noah Hawley Hopes To Start Filming Alien Series Next Spring

FX is developing an Alien show for Hulu with Legion creator Noah Hawley, and Hawley says he’s looking to begin shooting next year. Hawley spoke with Vanity Fair for a new interview and discussed the in-development series, which he confirmed will not involve Sigourney Weaver’s character of Ellen Ripley and said he’s hoping to start production next spring.

Hawley told the site that he is a bg fan of the franchise, noting that the first three films in the series are “great monster movies, but they’re not just monster movies. They’re about humanity trapped between our primordial, parasitic past and our artificial intelligence future—and they’re both trying to kill us. Here you have human beings and they can’t go forward and they can’t go back. So I find that really interesting.”

FX announced in December that the series in the works with Hawley developing and executive producing, with franchise creator Ridley Scott also executive producing. Plot details have been scared up to now, other than that it would be set on Earth.

“It’s not a Ripley story,” he said. “She’s one of the great characters of all time, and I think the story has been told pretty perfectly, and I don’t want to mess with it. It’s a story that’s set on Earth also. The alien stories are always trapped… Trapped in a prison, trapped in a space ship. I thought it would be interesting to open it up a little bit so that the stakes of “What happens if you can’t contain it?” are more immediate.”

He continued, “On some level it’s also a story about inequality. You know, one of the things that I love about the first movie is how ’70s a movie it is, and how it’s really this blue collar space-trucker world in which Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton are basically Waiting for Godot. They’re like Samuel Beckett characters, ordered to go to a place by a faceless nameless corporation. The second movie is such an ’80s movie, but it’s still about grunts. Paul Reiser is middle management at best. So, it is the story of the people you send to do the dirty work.”