Must be nice to be an actor and be able to just pick up the phone and get A-list talent on your podcast. Michael Biehn recently gave James Cameron a call, and the result was a nearly two-hour interview.
They talked about projects they worked on together, like The Terminator and The Abyss.
Then the talk turned to Aliens, and the fate of Beihn’s character for the next sequel, Alien 3. Here, Cameron was incredibly blunt. As reported at Dark Horizons, Cameron spoke directly about the decision to kill off Newt and Hicks during the opening titles:
“I thought that was the stupidest fucking thing. So, you build a lot of goodwill around the characters of you know, Hicks, Newt and Bishop, and then the first thing they do in the next film is kill them all off, right?
Really smart guys, you know, and replace them with a bunch of fucking convicts that you hate, and want to see die. Really clever. Now, I’m a big fan of Fincher and his work and all that. And that was his first feature film, and he was getting vectored around by a lot of other voices and all that. So, I give him a free pass on that one… I like I like David Fitcher, by the way. He my kind of ornery.”
Cameron also gave his view on other Alien projects. He said he liked Alien: Earth, calling it “pretty good”. He said he liked parts of Alien: Romulus, particularly the zero-G acid scene. He said Prometheus looked fantastic, but doesn’t work logically, and that Alien: Covenant is:
“…not a film I would have made”.
When asked if he would ever return, he said:
“You couldn’t pay me enough money to go back to that franchise there. It’s sort of almost become fan-driven.”
Cameron also confirmed that he knows nothing about Neil Blomkamp’s scrapped movie, which would have been a direct sequel to Cameron’s Aliens and ignored Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection.
