Alien: Earth showrunner had "a conversation" with Dune director Denis Villeneuve about the sci-fi horror series: "The guy's a master, one of the greats"

Alien: Earth showrunner Noah Hawley reveals he sought out advice from one of the biggest names in Hollywood when he was making the new sci-fi horror shows: Dune director Denis Villeneuve.

"I ended up having a conversation with Denis Villeneuve because his movies, I've never seen anyone better at showing me that something is big," Hawley says in the new issue of SFX magazine, which features Alien: Earth on the cover and hits newsstands on Wednesday, July 16.

"That feeling of being dwarfed by the size of a ship or a sandworm… One of the things that was really important to me to convey was a sense of scale. I wasn’t looking for trade secrets because I also feel it’s about intimacy as well. You have to have the two, the big and the small. That’s what’s really important to me in this show and I think we’ve achieved it."

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"It’s a pretty good one, right?" Hawley adds of the name drop. "Why lie? The guy’s a master, one of the greats. It’s all about story at the end of the day, the moment that it’s style over substance you’re in trouble. That’s clear from his work and from our conversation and clear

to me as well, of how to mix practical effects with the visual effects. I come from a model of doing more with less, I pride myself on making things that look like they cost twice what I actually had. Some of that is just vision and execution. But you also have to know where to spend the money to make things feel big."

Alien: Earth is the first installment of the iconic franchise to be set on our own planet rather than in space. Set two years before the events of 1979's Alien, Ridley Scott's movie that started it all, the show follows Wendy (Sydney Chandler), a synthetic who volunteers to retrieve the mysterious cargo from an intergalactic vessel after it crashlands on Earth.

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Alien: Earth releases on Hulu in the US on August 12 and Disney Plus in the UK on August 13. Read more in the latest issue of SFX magazine, which will be available from Wednesday, July 16. Here's the Alien: Earth cover you need to be looking out for on newsstands below...