Excerpts from The Visualists Featurette

Ridley Scott: I said (to the studio) I have to do a storyboard movie. So with great excitement and glee, I storyboard the movie, which actually took me 3 1/2 weeks, I worked day and night. Went back, and the budget doubled, which shows you the power of a well thought storyboard because we went from 4.2 (million in budget) to 8.4 or something like that.

They suddenly saw a way to do the film, which was not doing a bunch of sets that looked like painted cardboard boxes with a dodgy man in a rubber suit running around as the beast.

But in fact I put a statement into it . . . I don't like the word, but I had a vision of what to do with the space craft and what to do with the space suit. I was fully influenced at that moment mostly by 2001 and Star Wars, I thought that first Star Wars was formidable, but that was a fairy story. I was going to do the Texas Chainsaw Massacre of Science Fiction.

I think Texas is one of the most formidable . . . if you are going to do a horror movie, there it is. I always felt it was a pretty straight forward action thriller, the old dark house basically. We are going watch them each get taken out by this terrible beast. The thing that really worried me the most of all because I figured I could get all the environment right, all the costumes right, and get the casting right. But who was this beast, what was the beast going to be. And that's when we started talking to Giger.

David Giler: Walter (Hill) was originally going to do it (direct). But he decided he didn't have the temperament for special effects. We needed to have a director that was going give it some kind of real . . . other than traditional science fiction look. Whoever directed this movie was not going to quit on a monster until he has it . . . that you can believe it. That it will look right. And I thought this was the single most important thing you could have for this movie. Ron Cobb was going to do the monster and he had some drawings. Ron's a real talented guy and ended up doing a lot of the ship, but his monster was not too hot.

Various images from The Visualists Featurette