20th Century Fox
In Hollywood’s eyes, before James Cameron became a household name for directing things like “The Terminator,” “Titanic,” and “Avatar,” he was just another guy who had worked for low-budget producer Roger Corman and directed the little-seen stinker “Piranha II: The Spawning.” Few people were paying much attention to Cameron at that point, but apparently, one industry veteran who had his eye on the up-and-coming filmmaker was legendary director Steven Spielberg.
During a tribute to Spielberg that took place at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles back in 2011, directors Michael Apted, J.J. Abrams, and James Cameron interviewed Spielberg in front of a sold-out crowd, and Cameron shared a story about a note Spielberg gave on Cameron’s idea for what would become the 1986 sci-fi action classic “Aliens.”
“I tried to get you started, you know,” Spielberg told Cameron on stage, recalling that he offered Cameron the opportunity to direct an episode of Spielberg’s anthology series “Amazing Stories” — an opportunity Cameron turned down. “I recognized talent!” Spielberg said with a laugh.
“That’s right,” Cameron remembered excitedly. “We met, and I was just about to go do ‘Aliens’ — or I was writing ‘Aliens’ — and we were talking about ‘Amazing Stories,’ and you said, ‘Oh, I know what to do! I know what to do! Because in the first ‘Alien,’ the alien was bad, so in this one, have the alien be misunderstood, and the humans are trying to kill it, and it’s running around the ship.'”
“Thank goodness you didn’t do that,” Spielberg quipped.
Steven Spielberg’s Xenomorph suggestion would’ve drastically changed the franchise
20th Century Fox
While some of the “Alien” franchise films have since explored the origins of the Xenomorphs, part of the reason the creatures are so effective is because they’re never given personalities like what Spielberg suggested to Cameron. If, in the second film, audiences were asked to empathize with a Xenomorph and view the humans as the explicit villains of the story, it would have drastically altered the core fundamentals of this franchise: People visiting an abandoned area, only to discover organic killing machines are waiting for them.
Shifting the perspective to the Xenomorphs’ POV would have simply changed the DNA of what these films really are — and while that story could have worked, it potentially would have closed off future opportunities to return to that formula that’s worked so well. (Once the metaphorical genie — in this case, a Xenomorph as a protagonist — has been let out of the bottle, you can’t easily put it back.)
Interestingly, J.J. Abrams (who, remember, was on this stage with Spielberg and Cameron in 2011) actually did execute a version of this idea in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” with the character of Finn, a stormtrooper who gains a conscience. And for me, it did make me think twice every time a stormtrooper was indiscriminately laser-blasted to death — hey, there could be real characters under those masks!
And not that James Cameron of all people needs anyone to blow more smoke up his ass, but I simply must acknowledge how ballsy a move it was to turn down an offer to direct an episode of an anthology series spearheaded by the biggest director on the planet when the only directing credit he had to his name was “Piranha II.” At the point when Cameron cranked out his treatment for “Aliens,” he was co-writing the script for “Rambo: First Blood Part II” with Sylvester Stallone and was waiting for Arnold Schwarzenegger to finish “Conan the Destroyer” so Cameron could direct him in “The Terminator,” but none of those projects had actually come out yet. Talk about betting on yourself.
In any case, you can watch the full Spielberg interview below: