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If you haven't heard, episode 5 of Alien: Earth is a banger. Director by show creator Noah Hawley, and titled "In Space, No one…" the episode flashes back to the doomed voyage of the USCSS Maginot, revealing how (most of) the crew were slaughtered by our old pal the Xenomorph, and a menagerie of extraterrestrial nasties, as well as providing crucial new backstory for Morrow (Babou Ceesay).
Consciously evoking the iconic 'haunted house in space' of Ridley Scott's seminal sci-fi horror Alien, the Maginot is a stunning time capsule from the past. Conceived and built by Alien: Earth production designer Andy Nicholson and his team on soundstages in Thailand (where the bulk of the show was shot), the Maginot looked so authentic that Scott had just two words upon seeing pictures from the set: "Fuck me."
Was the Maginot always intended to evoke the Nostromo?
Andy Nicholson: There were very specific rooms called out in the script, which were mirrors of the rooms on the Nostromo. It called out the mess, [it] called out the bridge, and it called out the MUTHUR computer room. And talking with Noah [Hawley] about that initially, it hadn't quite been decided where it was going to be in the canon. It was talked about being a Yutani ship, a sister ship [to the Nostromo] that was part of the Yutani fleet. So it should have rooms in common, much like if you go into two different airplane cockpits. They're functionally and aesthetically extremely similar.
The attention to detail is extraordinary; it almost looks like the Nostromo set was kept in stasis for 45 years…
AN: We cared about what we were doing. I'd grown up in the industry working with people who were art directors and supervising art directors and set designers on [Alien]. At the time, all of it was drawn on paper; it was before computers. So one of the nicest things that happened was that Disney Archives, after me asking 'Have you got any of the original drawings?" they found the original blueprints [of the Nostromo]. I've got a lovely digital copy of all the original drawings from Alien, which is fantastic. We were only ever able to use them by the time we'd already built everything, and I think we used them for some of the details in the mess hall, which we were just trying to figure out from the stills.
I mean, they looked at 1970s fast food restaurants, like Wimpy interiors and things like that, for some of the aesthetic overlays for the mess hall and some of the patterning and some of the way the cushions are all plastic. We wanted to include that aesthetic because it was an important part of what we're doing with the show.
Alien: Earth's striking exteriors were shot in Thailand. Did you build the Maginot interiors on soundstages there as well?
AN: Yes. It was crazy. We were building in three studios on up to 20 stages at one point, because the whole of Neverland was built. Interiors of Prodigy City were built. The inside of the crash site was built. And then there was all of the Maginot interiors as well. Many, many sets on many different stages, all shooting at the same time. We had the luxury of having all of our sets standing, so you could run between different things. The mechanical corridor led into the corridor where the zoo lab was, and that led into a destroyed corridor. So you can have those composite sets in one space, which makes it more fluid when you're shooting.
What details should people look out for in the Maginot set?
AN: There was definitely a certain amount of geeking out with all the details, I could go on forever. But I mean nice details, like all of the mechanical corridors the dressing on the walls are these plastic forklift palettes that were used on Star Wars. Then they were used on Outlander. Alien was the third or fourth film to use them. A hire company bought 1000s of these crates, and they are great because you can look through them and they were already semi-painted. Some of the paint's coming off. You can see the red plastic underneath it. You can't buy those anymore, and they're collectors items. And the reason I knew exactly how big they were was because there's auction sites where you had measurements of them. So we recreated all that stuff, and that kind of approach to the details with the Maginot.
Were there any modifications you needed to make to the original designs for the Maginot?
AN: Our mess hall is completely different to the mess hall in Alien. It's got the central table, but the rest of it's a completely different shape. When things didn't work for us, we changed them. The MUTHUR comms room is much bigger in the Maginot because of the impact room that Morrow has to go into. You change, probably, how you build it for filming, but the rest of it, you try and get the details as right as possible, because it matters.
The interiors, it's all about the dressing and the bits you can get from junkyards and stuff like that. And there are no drawings for that. That's all about attention to detail, studying something over and over again, and me walking and going "That's not right." Driving people insane with being too focused on tiny details. Because I know you'll see the cushion of a chair behind someone's head, and if it's not the right shape, you'll notice.
What are the biggest challenges with sets as detailed as the Maginot?
AN: What makes building sets expensive is detail. And there's an awful lot of detailing in all of those sets. I've done cockpits before, and they're always, per square meter, very expensive things to build because there's just so much in them. When you're dealing with a set that's as complicated as that… it had ceilings that raised and lowered a little bit for different shots, and it had areas that had to come out for the camera to come in. So that was all complicated, as well as the different levels. And even the corridors, they're straight runs. But one of the ideas which we used, also, in Neverland was you should never really be able to see the end of a corridor. If it's an end, it's a door, or it's a curved corridor where you can't quite see around the corner, or there's a junction or something. So there could always be something coming from somewhere that you can't quite see yet.
Did the process of building the Maginot give you a newfound appreciation for what the original team achieved on Alien in 1979?
AN: At the very end of episode five, there's a credit for the original designer and the original art directors and set dresser, out of respect for what they came up with at the time. I'm using it as reference, much as I would the inside of a Second World War plane. It was not just to copy what they're doing; it was out of respect for the incredible benchmark of film design that that interior was.
Alien: Earth streams weekly on Hulu in the US and on Disney Plus in the UK. Never miss an episode with our Alien: Earth release schedule, or if you appreciate the finer details, check out our weekly, geeky round-up of Alien: Earth easter eggs.
