“no one can hear you scream”

New Alien TV Series Will Be Class Warfare With Xenomorphs

Showrunner Noah Hawley explains what you need to know about his upcoming FX show and his latest novel, Anthem.
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From left, PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy; 20th Century Fox/Everett Collection.

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Eat the rich? That’s not a bad premise for a new iteration of Alien—but most of the time, the series about hyper-predatory extraterrestrials has focused on working-class heroes. Ridley Scott’s 1979 original focused on cosmic merchant marines who discover wreckage with deadly cargo aboard, while James Cameron’s 1986 sequel, Aliens, was about actual Marines whose rescue mission turns into an operation to capture the fiends.

Whether it’s David Fincher’s prison colony in the third film, or the mercenaries of 1997’s fourth movie from director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, it’s always the workers and the underclass facing the acidic wrath of the creatures. Maybe there’s a capitalism metaphor inherent in the series.

Now a new FX TV series based on the franchise is in the works from Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley—who says it’s about time for the facehuggers and xenomorphs to sink their claws into the white-collar executives who have been responsible for sending so many employees to their doom. 

In a conversation about the symbolism of season four of Fargo, Hawley also offered an update on the Alien series, as well as his new novel, Anthem. The show, however, will have to wait a little while, since the crush of new productions after the pandemic has consumed all of Hollywood’s resources. How appropriate.

Vanity Fair: What’s next for you? Is there a season five in the works for Fargo?

Noah Hawley: Yeah, I think so. I don’t have it yet. I have pieces that will have to survive. They’re not connected. I think it would be good to create an ending, and deliberately come to something, knowing it’s the last one and see how one might wrap up this anthology. What’s next for me, it looks like, is [an] Alien series for FX, taking on that franchise and those amazing films by Ridley Scott and James Cameron and David Fincher. Those 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.

Where are you in that process?

I’ve written a couple of scripts, the first two scripts, and we’re looking to make them next spring. When you get to something with this level of visual effects, there’s a lot of preparation that has to go into it. What’s been really illuminating is to see that the entire film industry had to take a year off and they are now trying to jam two years of production into one year. So it’s very hard to look on the planet earth and see where you might make something in the next six months. Everyone is racing to make up for lost time. So, I figure let that bubble burst a little bit and we’ll do it right. 

Is there anything else you can share about it? Is it part of the Ripley story, or will it be original characters in a different time and place?

It’s not a Ripley story. 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. 

Deadly things that can’t be contained and the whole world at risk? Sounds relevant to the past year.

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.

How does that relate to your series?

In mine, you’re also going to see the people who are sending them. So you will see what happens when the inequality we’re struggling with now isn’t resolved. If we as a society can’t figure out how to prop each other up and spread the wealth, then what’s going to happen to us? There’s that great Sigourney Weaver line to Paul Reiser where she says, “I don’t know which species is worse. At least they don’t fuck each other over for a percentage.”

There’s a tornado sequence in season four of Fargo that feels like a Wizard of Oz homage. You also have a new novel called Anthem coming in January, about a warped reality where characters are on a quest to find a person known as “The Wizard.” Are you on an Oz kick in your creative life?

[Laughs.] No, it’s a, it’s a very different wizard. I think the inspiration is closer to wizards in a Gandalf sense. The book really came from my struggle about how to raise my own children. The Good Father was a worst case scenario from when my first child was born. In the last few years, I’ve wrestled with this question of  what are the skills that a child has to learn to navigate a world in which people can’t even agree about what reality is? It focuses on young adults who go on this quest through America, and there are witches and wizards and trolls and all the stuff that you find in fantasy novels. 

But it’s still the real world?

Our world has fractured, and all those characters exist. I could tell you that they’re not real, but the whole point is that there are Americans who believe that angels are walking among us, you know? There’s been a huge resurgence of the UFO conversation, and part of the trauma that some people felt in these last couple of elections is that we’d shifted into somebody else’s reality. In 2020, there was a sense that the shift has gone the other way, and now all the people who were living in Trump’s America realized they were actually now living in a different America. How does the mind process that, you know?

What is the genre or style of the book? Is it magical realism? Or is it about perception and distortion?

I thought a lot about Kurt Vonnegut when I was writing this book. He somehow managed to create these amazingly noble works of moral clarity out of pulpy mashups of genres and humor. And yet the books were so humane. We’re always telling our children when they ask us about the world, “It’s complicated,” right? And our kids know that is not true. It’s very simple. The planet is heating up because of the things we do to the planet. So stop doing those things. The moral simplicity he delivered was so artfully done in those books, you know, that’s, I thought, okay, how can I do that in the modern moment. My job, as a writer is to try to recreate the world as I see it around me. What happens when the world around me is crazy?

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