‘Alien: Earth’ Creator Noah Hawley Talks Monsters and TV Magic

The creative force behind the hit television shows Legion and Fargo, Noah Hawley has ability to translate beloved films and characters into immersive, episodic tales. His latest and most ambitious gambit to date, Alien: Earth, premieres tonight on FX and streaming via Hulu at 8 p.m. EST. As adept as Hawley is at writing for the screen and weaving spellbinding narratives, perhaps his most impressive talent is taking risks. Alien: Earth thrives because it possesses all of the dread, action, and cultural commentary of the film franchise while imagining its iconic monster in an entirely new world. We talked with Hawley about his work on the sci-fi thriller series ahead of tonight’s premiere.

How do you walk the tightrope of capturing a property’s essence without just rehashing it?

I think I’m able to bend the material to fit into the stories that I’m looking to tell. And I wouldn’t take them on if there wasn’t a connection. Those first two Alien films are two of the greatest films ever made. There’s a lot there thematically that is under-explored in subsequent iterations. You always have this questionably evil AI. And you have this idea about humanity trapped between the monsters of our past and the monsters that we’ve created in the future. That’s such a pivotal idea in that first movie. AI, when I started writing was an inevitability that hadn’t occurred yet, and by the time the show comes out is not only writing our kids’ term papers, but we’re really concerned about the threat to our autonomy. So, it is a timeless story, Alien, and it can be adapted to the moment that we’re in.

As you say, Alien has always dealt with specific themes: corporate power, the marginalization of humanity, motherhood, artificial intelligence. Is there one of those themes that resonates the most with you?

Well, I think the biggest one is this moment in Cameron’s film where Sigourney Weaver says to Paul Riser, “I don’t know which species is worse. At least they don’t f*ck each other over for a percentage.” If humanity is trapped between the monsters of our past and the monsters of our future, why are we doing so much work to destroy ourselves? It becomes a question of, well, what is humanity and is it worth saving? If you have only a couple of good people and everyone else is some version of bad, maybe we should just let them eat us. I like this idea of exploring this third option, which is transhuman, human minds and synthetic bodies as a reasonable thought for how we might transcend our current state.

In the show, the Lost Boys are sort of figuring out morality, and they have a childlike understanding of the world. The Xenomorph has similarly always had a simplistic view of the world that seems almost childlike, or at least black and white. Is there a parallel there?

Yeah, the Xenomorph is not a moral actor. You could say it’s evil, but I don’t think that. It’s just an animal. Is a shark evil? And kids see the world in a different way. I think that’s what makes it interesting—this moment where everyone thinks that we’ve left the food chain, but there’s a reason that when we describe a corporation, we say “top of the food chain,” right? There is this parallel of power where at the very end of the day, it doesn’t matter how rich you are, how smart you are or whatever, you can be eaten the same as anybody else.

What was the biggest obstacle you faced making this series?

I came in with this—on some level—crazy story, this Peter Pan story that I was going to infuse into this larger Alien lore. Because I knew that an Alien movie is a two-hour survival story, and that’s not television. Television is 10 or 30 or 50 hours in which you have to invest in characters who don’t die. So, the show has to really be about something. I see the show in my head very early, and then I have to get everybody on the bus to go and make that show. I’m constantly going, no, no, no. Get back on the bus. The budget and the locations and the logistics of getting us from point A, which is the idea, to point B, which is you’re watching the show I saw in my head. That’s the hardest part to me.

You’ve been at this a long time, but was there something you learned or added to your tool belt from working on Alien: Earth?

I was very invested in the idea that I was making something big. And by big, I mean both in scale, but also in accessibility and appeal to a large audience. Fargo is very much an accessible story of decency versus evil, but it is a Cohen tone of voice, and that’s not for everybody. Here, I was invested in—without compromising the story—making sure that the points of access for people were as big as I could make them. A lot of that had to do with tone. To make it a bigger story, you needed to bring a little Spielberg into it, for lack of a better analogy. If it was all horror, then you were going to keep people out. But when I got in the editing room, and I was like, oh, that’s too much tonally—now we’ve got to keep that dread, that sense that something terrible is about to happen, which is not the Spielberg tone of voice.

Episode 5 jumps back in time. Did you consider having it be the first episode or was it always going to be a flashback?

I wanted it to be in the middle because I think we had enough information in the beginning to understand this is a ship that’s full of dangerous things, that it’s going to crash. And Morrow emerges from it and becomes this kind of agent of chaos and destruction and darkness. He feels like the villain in a lot of ways. I always like to undermine that idea for an audience. Like, okay, villain, but everyone isn’t only one thing.

That episode also kind of stands alone as a narrative. Was it structured to be that way?

I was really attracted to the idea that even though we weren’t making an Alien movie… it would be fun to make an Alien movie. So, I wrote this episode for myself to direct that was the story of why the ship crashed. What was fun about it was adding the sabotage mystery element to it and the confluence of all the creatures. It’s a lot of moving pieces on a collision course. It does something that the back half of Cameron’s movie did so well. She finds Newt and the Queen and the eggs and the elevator, but here’s the queen on the elevator. It’s just thrilling. And my hope was that the last ten minutes of episode 5, because these are new creatures, there’s so many things happening, that you hit a moment where you’re like, I do not know what is going to happen next. The stakes are so high, and things are moving so fast, and I was able to make something truly thrilling was my hope.

Was a moment that you really geeked out on while working on the show? Where you were just really excited to be working with this property?

I had this idea when I was prepping to shoot the first hour. I was planning on this moment where Morrow is in the communication room and we see the Xenomorph for the first time. The head of the creature is this crazy elongated thing. So, I had this image in my head where the head enters frame, and it’s going, and it’s going, and it just keeps going. And that reminded me of the opening of Star Wars where that little ship flies by, and then that big ship just keeps going and going. We basically had to redesign the hallway to allow me to get that shot. And when we were shooting it in that moment, seeing that head just keep coming through like a submarine almost, and then the face turn to camera—I mean, that felt like worth the price of admission.

After binging the whole season, I had Alien dreams for a couple nights. Did you have Alien dreams while you were working on this show?

[Laughs] I don’t remember having dreams while I was working on the show about the creatures. I had zombie dreams before Comic-Con. That’s a lot of people. But I don’t think I had Alien dreams while I was making it.

I guess it’s a little different when you’ve seen how the sausage is made.

Yeah, I mounted a xenomorph head to a camera dolly and rolled it down a hall. So, I just picture the smile on the camera operator’s face as he was riding what was the coolest rig he’d ever been on.

Do you alter your media intake for inspiration when you’re working on a project?

There were a couple of contemporary space and monster movies that I looked at. I thought Life had a really unsettling creature that they designed in that movie. And I looked at that as a way to access the feelings I was hoping to evoke in an audience of the discovery process of the life cycle of that creature. And the same with the Russian film Sputnik, which I thought was really, really good, and a creature that was really original. You get that deep revulsion that’s in your body.

You’ve become such a master of working with existing intellectual properties. Is there something else that you’re side-eyeing that you would love to work on?

Not that comes to mind. Every one of these franchises is a feeling. Star Wars is a feeling. Star Trek is a feeling. The Matrix is a feeling. And they’re all great. They’re IP for a reason. This last Jurassic, I got that feeling again in certain places. But [when I take on a project] there’s something there I feel like I have to say. How can the IP be a kind of Trojan horse that allows me to tell the stories I’m looking to tell? And it’s something I’m really proud of. I have this career in many ways that comes from existing IP, but I’m known as an original storyteller. That’s not easy to get away with.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.