 which is a small film that you've done, independent film you've done. Yes. With Ridley Scott. Sure. You are the co-screenwriter? Yeah. A gentleman by the name of John Spates wrote the first draft of the screenplay, several first drafts. He worked on the movie for about a year and then I came in after him, so we didn't ever work simultaneously. You kind of took what he had and That's right, exactly. Brought it to another place. Yes, I mean that's, I mean, I'm not a fan of the movie, but yes, I mean that's the process out here. Right. John went, I was just, I was still working on the last season of Lost while he was writing on Prometheus and then he went on to do Bigger and Better Things and then I came in on Prometheus and normally there's a whole chain of screenwriters, so I'm proud that it's just John and I. Right, this is actually a small process. Yeah, Cowboys and Aliens, which is the only other movie I have a writing credit on. I think there's nine credited writers. Does that bother you? That there's nine credited writers? Yeah. If it had been a better movie, had it just been your name on it? No, it would have been a better movie if I had been nowhere near it. Really? I just think. I mean, because I would feel if anybody tampered with anything than I did, I would always feel like whatever the end result is gonna be somehow bastardized, a bastardized version of my version. Yeah, but I'm, easier said than done, because I'm tampering with, you know, when I came into that movie, it was between the fourth and the fifth season of Lost, so I worked on it for two and a half months and injected some ideas and did a draft of the script that was built on the foundation of other drafts, and then there was considerable writing done after I left, which is just, it's weird. It's sort of the equivalent of like, going to the sperm bank and saying like, maybe this will be used in a kid in combination with a bunch of others. You can't really do it in combination. You don't have fundamental authorship. It's worse than that in a way, because at least with the kid, you know it's at least one of them. Right, the good news was I got to meet and work with Favreau, John Favreau on that. The draft that I wrote with Alex Kurtzman and Bob Orsi got John on board, and then I started hanging out with him for maybe a month before I had to go back onto Lost, and he's a great, cool guy, and I loved that collaboration. He seems like a guy who is incredibly powerful and rich and famous, but whenever I've seen him speak anywhere, he seems like a regular dude who's a very nice guy. Is that true, or is he a huge ass? No, he's not a huge ass at all. He's one of us. I mean, he's, when I first came out to LA in 94, Swingers was like the big thing, and essentially he and his friends, Vince Vaughn, the most prominent amongst them, were sort of living the Hollywood existence that my friends and I were, except they were much better looking and having much more success with women, but that's what that movie was about, and so I completely and totally idolized John Favreau and the idea that he was also a writer and a director and started putting more time and attention into that part of his career than the acting part of his career, I thought was commendable, and then he's into all the same stuff that we are as fanboys, you know, he just gets. He's nerdy, he's a nerdy guy. He's nerdy. And it comes across in his movies. I mean, they seem like they have the touch of obsession. No, definitely. Which is a huge component for making these things work. And also, like, tone is everything, and I think I give massive accolades to Joss Whedon for Avengers, and he did an incredible job, but I think that Favreau was the guy with Iron Man that did the first, like, for so, when you see the Avengers, other than the fact that it's awesome and you wanna see it again, you go, like, why did it take so long to figure out to do this? I mean, these characters didn't get invented like 10 years ago. Why did it take them so long? And the answer is, it's so tonally difficult to pull off those movies, and Iron Man was the first one where it's sort of like, I'm gonna take this seriously. I'm never gonna have the characters turn and wink at the camera, but at the same time, it's gonna be super fun to watch. Women are gonna wanna go and see it. I mean, they're legitimately funny movies. Yeah, they're awesome. So I give Favreau huge props for basically kickstarting that whole progression of movies. It's like he kinda took the, and we're still way off topic of my question, but it's like he took, which I don't mind at all. I can't wait to hear it. You understand there's a lot of discerning now. I don't remember what I wanted to talk about at this point. He took comics the way comics used to be, even up until the 80s, when they really got dark in the 80s, but where you could tell a real story and still have fun with it. And there was actually, there was something kind of adventurous and exciting that wasn't dark and heavy and brooding. That wasn't all Batman, basically. And he made a movie that did all the stuff that a great Batman movie should do, where it's action-packed and has serious moments, but is somewhat light in a way that is way more palatable to a broad audience. Yeah, no, definitely. Which is weird because it's actually really nerdy. That kind of tone is kind of a nerdy, weird specialist tone. Yeah, it's completely and totally socially acceptable right now, and actually socially expected to think superhero movies are cool. And we take for granted that 15 years ago, that was not the case. Well, this is a good bridge to talking about your new movie. That while you told me to say that. That's right, I did. You basically said, when in doubt, go with that segue. Just say that and we'll move. So, Prometheus is an R movie. It's not really a broad audience. Well, it's obviously a broad audience, but it's an adult audience. Yes. And I'm curious to know what your thoughts are. I mean, you've got movies like The Avengers that are very much like they're for kids and they're for the kids' parents as well. And this seems like you specifically, Ridley, and you are obviously trying to make something that is for adults. Yeah, I think the first thing that I have to say, and I mean this completely genuinely without an ounce of Hollywood bullshit false modesty, is it's Ridley's movie. John and I, John certainly contributed a tremendous amount of ideas, most of which I built on. And then I came up with some stuff organically to the process. But at the end of the day, my job was sitting across the table from Ridley Scott, asking him a series of questions like he was on 60 Minutes. And then based on his answers to those questions, I then went and generated a screenplay. But that process that I just described to you went over the course of three or four weeks. So I really felt like I just kind of bullied Ridley into dictating the movie to me. Did he tell you what the movie was? And then I got to put my name on it. So the movie, a lot of the ideas are actually the seeds are from Ridley directly. Absolutely, because aside from its relationship to the original Alien, which is a question, iterations of that question are the things that I've been asked about the most. Just wait. I'm looking forward to it. At the end of the day, when you're working with Ridley Scott, who is, people throw the word visionary around a lot, but that's literally what he is by definition. And so he's going to make the movie. He needs to get the movie. And it's not about me coming in and saying, hey, Ridley, I've got this great idea. Do you want to direct it? It's about him saying, I want to direct a movie in this universe. Here's what I want it to be about. Here are the ideas that excite me. Here are the thematics that I'm interested in. And here are the character traits that I want to demonstrate. And it's not to reduce the process of screenwriting, but I feel like in film, which is much different than what I did in TV, it is a little bit like Mad Libs, where my job is essentially Ridley saying adjective, noun, euphemism. And that's how the movie was made, really. And that explains. I'm sure he'll be excited to hear that you describe the movie making process as Mad Libs. But I do feel like I have great pride in my own lack of authorship in the movie. And I feel like if the movie is a huge success, it's all because of Ridley Scott. And if the movie is not a success, it's because I wasn't able to execute his vision successfully. And that's the feeling that I have. So let's talk about the connection between Aliens or Alien or that universe. Because there seems to be some, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like people who are talking about the movie, who are involved with the movie, have gone, not out of their way, but have made a point to say, look, this isn't a sequel to Alien or Aliens or Alien 3 or Alien Resurrection or Alien versus Predator or Alien versus Predator 2. You're saying this is a different movie. But it's not a sequel. It's a prequel, if anything. But you're not even calling it that. Well, I mean, I take exception to the fact that it's called a prequel. And I know a lot of this sounds a lot like that you have to get on slightly defensive terrain. But for me, just as a fanboy, when I hear the word prequel, that doesn't get me excited. And the reason that it doesn't get me excited isn't because I have a negative association with prequels. We have to think, let's contextualize that word. The first time that I heard that word in any sort of public or social setting was in reference to the fact that George was going to do the first three Star Wars movies. And I was enormously excited about that. That aside, once you actually see what a prequel is, a prequel is, by definition, a march towards the inevitable. So while we know that the guy is going to get the girl or there's going to be a happy ending, there's certain story beats that you hit, the idea of saying, I'm now just going to watch this young boy turn into Darth Vader. You're leading me into the story that I already know. There's certain things that I know can't happen, like nothing's going to happen to Obi-Wan, because it's a prequel. And then I went and saw the Thing prequel. And I love John Carpenter's The Thing. And I was really excited about it. But then when it ended, spoiler alert, the Thing ends with a dog that has the Thing inside it, running across the frozen tundra as it's being chased by a helicopter that's shooting at it. And when I saw that, there was a small degree of satisfaction in terms of, oh, this is where the other movie began. And on the heels of that, a tremendous amount of disappointment and going, then why did I just watch this movie? It was just sort of, you just wrote the prologue for me. And I felt that it was really important that Prometheus was not positioned as a prologue to Alien, that in fact, if Prometheus were successful and there was a sequel to it, the sequel to Prometheus would not be Alien. I also felt like Alien is as close to a perfect movie as it gets. And I was very reluctant to engage in a conversation that would somehow diminish Alien. That if you saw, if for some reason, Prometheus didn't succeed creatively, that when you went and watched Alien again, you'd be like, this movie is now diminished. The taste would be soured in some way. Yeah, why bet that? So all that by way of saying that if you, my hope is, that if you see Prometheus and you watch Alien again, there will be certain things that were mysteries before about Alien that you have more clarity on. But the mysteries that made Alien great are still mysteries. And I've had a certain degree of success and failure in mystery resolution. I feel some mysteries are just much more engaging than their resolution. And I don't want to answer those. It's like, ooh, where is Amelia Earhart? She's rotting somewhere on the bottom of the ocean. You're saying that's the? Probably, unless she was abducted by aliens or she's living somewhere in France and has discovered the Fountain of Youth. But the reality is the answer to these mysteries are usually less compelling than whatever our imagination transposes onto them. And so I do think that we succeeded in, if there's a sequel to Prometheus, it's not about the things that Alien is about, which is eggs and face huggers and chest bursters and xenomorphs. Like that not only Alien, but then aliens, they need to go and live off on that tangent. Prometheus is launching, it's servicing that tangent. It's saying, here's an explanation. You'll understand the context of maybe where some of those things came from. But it's much more interested in going off in its own direction. And were there a sequel to Prometheus, it probably wouldn't need to trade in any of those ideas. So let's just get nerdy for a second. I'm going to get real specific. As opposed to what I've been for the last 20 minutes? Well, you're speaking very broadly about you're kind of setting the stage for this. But here's my impression based on the trailers. And it's funny because I actually could not, I haven't seen Alien for years. Probably not since I was a teenager, or like really young, like 13. And it was on television, we had this debate on the podcast and we were talking, I was like, how does it start? Because I couldn't remember. And it was on television, I watched it, and I remembered, I saw a bunch of stuff, I was like, oh yes, now it all makes sense. So Prometheus clearly is not about Sigourney Weaver's character. Correct. It's clearly not about, I mean, I think from just what I see in the trailer, it's not about people fighting the alien creatures. That doesn't seem to be, at least that's not a hint of what I've seen. Yes, uh-huh. But it does seem to be taking place in or on or around the beginning of Alien, or Alien full stop, which is this large, there's this large alien craft they stumble upon. I mean, that seems to be in Prometheus. So there is some connective tissue there, right? I mean, there are places that are shared, I guess is what I'm asking. Yes, but not, I think that, again, I'm not trying to be overly cryptic, but if I answer all these questions, I think that we cross that line from, let me just say, there was a two minute trailer out there that people were like, I can't wait to see this movie, and then there was a three minute international trailer. And that one extra minute of material is the line that you cross where people start to say, you told me too much. Right, and I agree, I think the three minute trailer gave away a lot of stuff. So my desire to not tell you what is the relationship between my hope is, and again, this is frustrating to some, but it's the space in which I live, which is the reason to me that I loved Inception was after Inception was over, there was stuff for me to fight about and discuss with my friends as to what it meant, what happened, what was a dream, what wasn't a dream, like all those things that the movie left in some sort of ambiguous space. And I know ambiguity is a very scary word, especially when you apply it to the context of the television that I've done. However, I will continue to embrace ambiguity because I find it really interesting and I have a tremendous amount of faith in the intelligence of the audience. Most of them are much smarter than I am, and I will have an intention, but the idea of not spelling it out entirely, I will tell you right now that this movie, even when you go and see it, there is space to debate what the relationship between this movie and Alien is. We are not connecting the dots for you. We are giving you the requisite information to have an impassioned discussion about it. You will know a hell of a lot more than you did before, but it's not like this movie ends with a derelict spacecraft full of eggs crash landing on LV-426, which is the derelict spacecraft that the Nostromo happens upon at the beginning of Alien. That's inevitability and it's not interesting. Right, so, but with ambiguity, the danger there is, and by the way, I'm not trying to get you to tell me what happens in the movie. I guess my question was, they're in the same universe, because there's been a debate with people that this is in a completely separate universe. They share the universe. Absolutely, and I don't wanna segue into the viral of the movie, but I will say, like, when Ridley and I, and I'm sure he and John, and a couple of guys worth mentioning, Michael Ellenberg, who was sort of Ridley's right-hand guy at Scott Free when I came on there and an executive producer in the movie, and then a guy, Steve Asbell, who was an executive at 20th Century Fox, who was like the hugest, like, alien compendium of information, incredibly impassioned, creative guy. Those guys are worth mentioning. Very early on, we started saying, this is the question that is not gonna go away. Is it a prequel? What is it? So is there a way that we can start generating content other than just the trailer, to start, as opposed to Ridley Scott in interviews, or me in interviews, saying, here is the movie's relationship to Alien, where we can begin to message to the people who care about that stuff, and the people who care are the people who are fans of the original, the nerds, the fanboys, if we're gonna typecast. So that was the birth of the Wayland idea. Now, Wayland was a character in John Spade's draft. He is a character that appears in Prometheus in a different way than he did originally, but I said Wayland becomes the universal bridge, because we all know the name of the company in Alien is Wayland-Yutani. They are the company that basically, that the Nostromo works for, and they're a conglomerate that's into terraforming, amongst other things, and so if we say Wayland is in our movie, and we give the audience some context for who he is, and then they'll know that they're happening in the same universe, and can we shoot a cool piece of material that's not gonna be in our movie, it's not a trailer, it's not a scene that you see three months before the movie comes out, it just exists completely and totally on its own, that we'll begin to sort of message that to the people that care, and we think it's important to do that, and really completely and totally agreed, and that was the birth of what evolved into this Peter Wayland TED Talk, that we unveiled to TED, and then went viral, that Guy Pearce, who plays Wayland in the movie, agreed to do, and I think that it's hard to watch that in any context, and then make the argument that these don't occupy the same timeline. What's interesting about the original Alien is, you can watch that movie and be like, I'm curious as to what's the story with that space jockey in this derelict ship, but that isn't important, the movie isn't telling you that that's important, the movie is telling you that the thing that just jumped out of the egg on that ship and is now stuck to John Hurt's face, that's important, that's what you're supposed to worry about now, and then the sequel and so on and so forth, but the idea that Prometheus now enters into a more, and maybe this is why Ridley and those guys sought me out in the first place, into the movie is asking very specific questions, the characters are saying, we want answers to these questions, some of the answers they get, some of the answers they extrapolate, but then something happens that leads the resolution of the questions is secondary to their own survival. I think all of this stuff is already endemic. People don't wanna see Prometheus like a bunch of people sitting around a table pondering the meaning of life, they wanna see what happens when you open Pandora's box, that's fundamental sci-fi storytelling, the scientist wants to make giant tomatoes to feed the world, and the next thing you know there's enormous ants and spiders crawling through Albuquerque eating people, and it's that idea of there's a line, we shouldn't cross the line, we all know we shouldn't cross it, we shouldn't fly too close to the sun, we shouldn't steal fire from the gods, we do it anyway, we can't help ourselves, we're humans, and then we pay the consequences. That's sci-fi 101, that's the story that Ridley wanted to tell, that's why I loved Blade Runner, it's why I loved Alien, and it's like almost every Alien movie is essentially about an iteration of the same theme, which is no matter what these things do to us, the company keeps feeling there's a way to monetize all of it. You know, it's like, all right, well you think we would've learned our lesson after the second time. We got it, oh, you know the last one didn't end well. Yeah, exactly. Really, this is gonna be it. It is odd, you would think, for such a smart group of people, they would just go, you know what? But that's us, I mean, we can't help ourselves, and we wanna, everyone says, like, oh my god, like, when people are in a scary, you know, in a house, and they hear a noise in the attic, and then they're like, we should go check that out, you just moan to yourself, like, ugh. But if they just left the house, like, what's that movie? Right, but in real life, you would, I mean, would you go investigate the sound? I guess maybe you would. I'll tell you what I would do. I've done that. I would call the police, that's what I do. Just immediately? Depends on the sound. I mean, if it's just like a little, like a squeak or something, you're not gonna call the police. No, I will go and check it out if it's a squeak. What kind of sound would it have to be to get you to call the police? Let me ask you a question. Like, is the house, like, have people been murdered in the house before? Yeah, you bought the house, you got a summer home for your family, and you found out when you guys were moving in that a family had been murdered there. Right, and then I hear a noise in the attic. You hear a noise that sounds like a person moaning. Yeah, I do not go and check that out. You'd call the police? Right, well, I send my wife, or, you know, she's just. That's nice. I'm sure your wife would be so happy. Can you go see what the screaming sound is? Right, yeah. That's really wonderful. I probably don't do anything, you know? I probably just like to say, that's a really scary noise. Like, we should just stay down here. And flip the house. Right. For profit. Sure, absolutely. You bet. And try not to disclose. You mentioned it. Don't mention the murder. I think we're grandfathered in. We weren't murdered. Yeah, you were there for a whole couple of days. Right, exactly. Prometheus viral stuff. Yes. First off, what is your level of involvement in the viral things, like the David video, and you've got a new one, a new viral video that's. Yeah, that just kind of just came out. The viral stuff, that stuff that we did on Lost all the time, I'm really into viral stuff for other movies. I did not invent viral by any stretch of the imagination, but it's always been something that I've really been interested in. One of the failings, I think, sometimes of viral content is that it doesn't feature the actors from the movie. So it's just like, it's kind of like just for the nerds. So it's like put together the trailer for the movie or whatever. And I love doing that stuff. But I'm essentially like, for something to really be interesting and compelling, it should have the same production value of the movie. And for that, you need the resources. So it's like, who's going to have the balls to say to Michael Fassbender, can we take you for a day and do this cool idea that we had? But Ridley, there are so many great things about him. But he and Tony run this company, RSA, which is essentially their commercial production house. So they have all these brilliant young commercial directors who are enormously innovative individuals used to basically just kind of conceptualizing and figuring out on their own laptops how to make content. And so we had that resource at our disposal. And so Michael Ellenberg and I essentially started saying like, the first idea I had was I was just really into TED Talks. And I was like, we should do a TED Talk with Wayland. And it'll be, if we can talk Guy into it, we don't have to do a full 18 minute TED Talk. But we can talk about some of the themes of the movie. But it'll be like in the future. Like we'll set it in like 2023. And like we just have to ask TED if they let us use their branding. Otherwise, it'll be like a Fred Talk. And it'll feel like cheap and disingenuous. And I know this guy, Tom Riley, who is this very plugged in, super tech savvy, very cool geek at TED who, when I went to the conference, was sort of like my conduit in there. I called him up and was like, would you guys be open to letting us use the TED branding? And he said, I'll do you one better. What if you showed it at TED? What if you unveiled it at TED? And you could use even the TED website to show this thing. And so everybody got super excited about that when we pitched it to Ridley. And then he essentially, I wrote the TED Talk. And then his son, Luke, Ridley's son Luke, directed Guy through the TED Talk and then produced that entire thing through RSA. And then I said, the other idea that we had was we should do a commercial for David, the Android. I was like, there's commercials for iPhones. This is before Siri came along. I was like, there's a commercial for an iPad or an iPhone. Wouldn't a robot have a commercial? And what would that look like? And so this guy, Johnny Hardstaff, that's his real name. You know what his porn name is? Glenn Frankfurt. It's completely innocuous. No, his name's Johnny Hardstaff. Of course, it would have to be. He basically took that idea, the David idea, and ran with it. And I wrote some dialogue for that. But a lot of the visual ideas were totally Johnny's and were produced by those guys. And then the first piece of viral was Ridley wanted Numi Rapace to basically be the star of the movie. And she had done Girl with Dragon Tattoo and was already doing the Sherlock Holmes sequel. But I think Fox just wanted to see her on film, to do a screen test with her. And so I wrote this transmission that she makes to Wayland in an effort to try to convince him to fund her crazy mission so that it would just be a monologue for her. Because there weren't really any monologues in the movie. And so we gave that to Numi, and then she did it. And it was super, Ridley didn't shoot, it wasn't just Numi Rapace on video, he filmed it. She was in costume. And there was incredibly high production value. It was like, this should go on the DVD. And it was like, screw the DVD. This should be a piece of viral. If I saw this on my laptop, on YouTube, I would find it enormously compelling. I'd want to go see that movie. And so that was the genesis for that idea. So in Fox marketing, I have to say, it's easy to blow smoke because essentially they're my bosses. But all the people over there from Bumble Ward and Catherine Colbert and Nathan Marcy have all so embraced the viral idea. They completely understood what it was. And so the idea of using that to bolster the more traditional trailers. Because there was this period where nobody was talking about Prometheus. Is it a prequel? What is it? And then very quickly, we just flooded everybody with all this material. So then the conversation became about, well, what is this? What does this mean? How does this fit into the overall puzzle of the movie? And the way that they doled it out and however they doled it out created a zeitgeist where there was no zeitgeist. There was only curiosity bordering on frustration. Because it's that thing of, you've got to give me something. And I think the viral became an answer to, all right, this is the something that we're giving you. What's really interesting about it, too, is that it creates this graph. It somehow makes the film so much larger. It broadens that universe of the movie. Suddenly, it feels like it's got gravity that it didn't have before because there are artifacts from that universe that have. It's kind of clear the day of the commercial is not going to appear in the movie. You wouldn't just have that in the middle of the film. But it gives the idea of this universe so much more weight to have these little artifacts that live outside of the film itself, which I think is really fascinating. It's something that we now have a medium where you can do the film for theaters. But we've got this amazing, fluid, flexible medium of the web that allows you to show the masses, these other little pieces that flesh out in some way that the universe that you're trying to create for the big screen. And I think that people are so hungry for any additional content because it creates this feeling of being in the know, being a super fan of something. You have sort of a stock and trade. So you're able to say, hey, did you see the David video? And other people are like, no. And you're like, oh, I'll send you the link. And then that suddenly makes you a purveyor of content. You're on the inside. And I think it's like, again, to go back to what Marvel did at the end of Iron Man by just dropping in that reference to the Avengers and having Nick Fury pitch that Avengers initiative. And that became the first piece of viral, for lack of a better word, that led us down the road to Avengers. But suddenly what started happening is for any Marvel movie, the entire audience would just sit there through all of the credits just to have the experience of watching 90 seconds more of content. And it's like, did you need to do this, Joss Whedon? You did not. You're giving this to me, this gift. You've already got my $14. And you're not only going to give me one post-credit scenes, but now if I sit through the entire movie, there's yet another one. And thank you. Any kind of sort of, it's a premium is what it is. Because as opposed to looking at viral as marketing to get you to see the next one, which by the way, that's what the Tony Stark Nick Fury scene at the end of Iron Man is. It's viral marketing. They're essentially saying, go buy a ticket for the Avengers. If you didn't know what's coming. You and I knew what the Avengers were before we saw Iron Man, but my wife didn't. She was like, what's Avengers? And I was like, oh boy. Just wait. Yeah, do you have like two hours? Let's start with the Infinity Gauntlet. Yeah. I mean, that is interesting to think that, well, actually, I think a viral is purely for the internet. But it's interesting to think about it as something that now is we're like putting Easter eggs in movies because they're essentially Easter eggs in some way, right? Because fanboy culture has bled so much into the mainstream that people are looking for it. Like you said, people are looking for these little clues. Viral is Sacha Baron Cohen showing up at the Academy Awards and spilling ashes on Ryan Seacrest. And it becomes web content because you heard that it happened. But when it first happened, it was live theater. It was that idea of a shill being in the audience. So viral, by definition, is any form of content that gets you more excited for the product that it's steering you towards. Right. Is Prometheus an action movie? And before you answer, I want to set this up a little bit. It seems like modern day science fiction cannot exist without it having an action component. And if you look at a movie like 2001, I would not classify it's not an action movie. Correct. It's something else. Yes. So is Prometheus an action movie? Or is it something else? I couldn't describe it as an action movie any more than I would describe Inception as an action movie. But there's a lot of explosions and people shooting guns. And that entire final set piece in Inception that takes place at the Snow Fortress is actually an action set piece. It just doesn't feel like an action movie. So I wouldn't describe it that way. I think not that I'm putting Prometheus and Inception in terms of they're the same movie. I'm just answering your question in that way with saying, first and foremost, I think it's a sci-fi movie. And I think that it's safe to say Prometheus is as much an action movie as Alien is a horror movie, which is it trades on those genre elements. Obviously, just from the trailer, you've seen there's much more of an action fuse on Prometheus than I think Alien. But I would say Aliens is an action movie. And Prometheus is much more, it feels a lot more like Alien than Aliens to me in terms of its storytelling. I think it takes its time. And it's not just about getting to the next set piece. That being said, once that fuse gets lit, there is a fair amount of scope and sizzle to it. And really, really wanted to do that stuff. I think one of the things that I've been hearing, both again in the recurring theme of this interview, you take the good with the bad is, the good side, it's like this feels a lot like the original Alien. Because there's motifs in the original Alien. There's an android you're not entirely sure you trust. There's people in cryo sleep. There's a female lead. There's clearly something happening to these people that is reminiscent of those ideas. There's creeping around through dark corridors with flashlights. So people go, this feels a lot like Alien. And then there's other people who are saying, this feels a lot like Alien. So it's just more of the same. And look, that's what you're up against when you are courting that fan base. And I'll take it every day of the week. That's the price of doing business. Because I'm just as critical of other content. And I would rather have people say to me for the rest of my career, you screwed up a Ridley Scott movie than not say that to me. Because I'm like, hey, I got to be involved in a Ridley Scott movie. I got to screw up a Ridley Scott movie. Not only did I screw up a Ridley Scott movie, I screwed up the first Ridley Scott sci-fi movie in 30 years. If that's not going to go on your headstone, then what should? I don't know.
 which is a small film that you've done,
 independent film you've done.
 Yes.
 With Ridley Scott.
 Sure.
 You are the co-screenwriter?
 Yeah.
 A gentleman by the name of John Spates
 wrote the first draft of the screenplay,
 several first drafts.
 He worked on the movie for about a year
 and then I came in after him,
 so we didn't ever work simultaneously.
 You kind of took what he had and
 That's right, exactly.
 Brought it to another place.
 Yes, I mean that's,
 I mean, I'm not a fan of the movie,
 but yes, I mean that's the process out here.
 Right.
 John went, I was just,
 I was still working on the last season of Lost
 while he was writing on Prometheus
 and then he went on to do Bigger and Better Things
 and then I came in on Prometheus
 and normally there's a whole chain of screenwriters,
 so I'm proud that it's just John and I.
 Right, this is actually a small process.
 Yeah, Cowboys and Aliens,
 which is the only other movie I have a writing credit on.
 I think there's nine credited writers.
 Does that bother you?
 That there's nine credited writers?
 Yeah.
 If it had been a better movie,
 had it just been your name on it?
 No, it would have been a better movie
 if I had been nowhere near it.
 Really?
 I just think.
 I mean, because I would feel if anybody tampered
 with anything than I did,
 I would always feel like whatever the end result
 is gonna be somehow bastardized,
 a bastardized version of my version.
 Yeah, but I'm,
 easier said than done,
 because I'm tampering with,
 you know,
 when I came into that movie,
 it was between the fourth and the fifth season of Lost,
 so I worked on it for two and a half months
 and injected some ideas and did a draft of the script
 that was built on the foundation of other drafts,
 and then there was considerable writing done after I left,
 which is just, it's weird.
 It's sort of the equivalent of like,
 going to the sperm bank and saying like,
 maybe this will be used in a kid
 in combination with a bunch of others.
 You can't really do it in combination.
 You don't have fundamental authorship.
 It's worse than that in a way,
 because at least with the kid,
 you know it's at least one of them.
 Right, the good news was I got to meet
 and work with Favreau, John Favreau on that.
 The draft that I wrote with Alex Kurtzman and Bob Orsi
 got John on board,
 and then I started hanging out with him
 for maybe a month before I had to go back onto Lost,
 and he's a great, cool guy,
 and I loved that collaboration.
 He seems like a guy who is incredibly powerful
 and rich and famous,
 but whenever I've seen him speak anywhere,
 he seems like a regular dude who's a very nice guy.
 Is that true, or is he a huge ass?
 No, he's not a huge ass at all.
 He's one of us.
 I mean, he's, when I first came out to LA in 94,
 Swingers was like the big thing,
 and essentially he and his friends,
 Vince Vaughn, the most prominent amongst them,
 were sort of living the Hollywood existence
 that my friends and I were,
 except they were much better looking
 and having much more success with women,
 but that's what that movie was about,
 and so I completely and totally idolized John Favreau
 and the idea that he was also a writer and a director
 and started putting more time and attention
 into that part of his career
 than the acting part of his career,
 I thought was commendable,
 and then he's into all the same stuff that we are
 as fanboys, you know, he just gets.
 He's nerdy, he's a nerdy guy.
 He's nerdy.
 And it comes across in his movies.
 I mean, they seem like they have the touch of obsession.
 No, definitely.
 Which is a huge component for making these things work.
 And also, like, tone is everything,
 and I think I give massive accolades
 to Joss Whedon for Avengers,
 and he did an incredible job,
 but I think that Favreau was the guy with Iron Man
 that did the first, like, for so,
 when you see the Avengers,
 other than the fact that it's awesome
 and you wanna see it again,
 you go, like, why did it take so long to figure out
 to do this?
 I mean, these characters didn't get invented
 like 10 years ago.
 Why did it take them so long?
 And the answer is, it's so tonally difficult
 to pull off those movies,
 and Iron Man was the first one where it's sort of like,
 I'm gonna take this seriously.
 I'm never gonna have the characters turn
 and wink at the camera,
 but at the same time, it's gonna be super fun to watch.
 Women are gonna wanna go and see it.
 I mean, they're legitimately funny movies.
 Yeah, they're awesome.
 So I give Favreau huge props for basically kickstarting
 that whole progression of movies.
 It's like he kinda took the,
 and we're still way off topic of my question,
 but it's like he took, which I don't mind at all.
 I can't wait to hear it.
 You understand there's a lot of discerning now.
 I don't remember what I wanted to talk about at this point.
 He took comics the way comics used to be,
 even up until the 80s,
 when they really got dark in the 80s,
 but where you could tell a real story
 and still have fun with it.
 And there was actually,
 there was something kind of adventurous and exciting
 that wasn't dark and heavy and brooding.
 That wasn't all Batman, basically.
 And he made a movie that did all the stuff
 that a great Batman movie should do,
 where it's action-packed and has serious moments,
 but is somewhat light in a way
 that is way more palatable to a broad audience.
 Yeah, no, definitely.
 Which is weird because it's actually really nerdy.
 That kind of tone is kind of a nerdy, weird specialist tone.
 Yeah, it's completely and totally
 socially acceptable right now,
 and actually socially expected
 to think superhero movies are cool.
 And we take for granted that 15 years ago,
 that was not the case.
 Well, this is a good bridge to talking about your new movie.
 That while you told me to say that.
 That's right, I did.
 You basically said, when in doubt, go with that segue.
 Just say that and we'll move.
 So, Prometheus is an R movie.
 It's not really a broad audience.
 Well, it's obviously a broad audience,
 but it's an adult audience.
 Yes.
 And I'm curious to know what your thoughts are.
 I mean, you've got movies like The Avengers
 that are very much like they're for kids
 and they're for the kids' parents as well.
 And this seems like you specifically, Ridley,
 and you are obviously trying to make something
 that is for adults.
 Yeah, I think the first thing that I have to say,
 and I mean this completely genuinely
 without an ounce of Hollywood bullshit false modesty,
 is it's Ridley's movie.
 John and I, John certainly contributed
 a tremendous amount of ideas, most of which I built on.
 And then I came up with some stuff organically
 to the process.
 But at the end of the day, my job
 was sitting across the table from Ridley Scott,
 asking him a series of questions like he was on 60 Minutes.
 And then based on his answers to those questions,
 I then went and generated a screenplay.
 But that process that I just described to you
 went over the course of three or four weeks.
 So I really felt like I just kind of bullied
 Ridley into dictating the movie to me.
 Did he tell you what the movie was?
 And then I got to put my name on it.
 So the movie, a lot of the ideas are actually the seeds
 are from Ridley directly.
 Absolutely, because aside from its relationship
 to the original Alien, which is a question, iterations
 of that question are the things that I've been asked about the
 most.
 Just wait.
 I'm looking forward to it.
 At the end of the day, when you're
 working with Ridley Scott, who is,
 people throw the word visionary around a lot,
 but that's literally what he is by definition.
 And so he's going to make the movie.
 He needs to get the movie.
 And it's not about me coming in and saying, hey, Ridley,
 I've got this great idea.
 Do you want to direct it?
 It's about him saying, I want to direct a movie
 in this universe.
 Here's what I want it to be about.
 Here are the ideas that excite me.
 Here are the thematics that I'm interested in.
 And here are the character traits
 that I want to demonstrate.
 And it's not to reduce the process of screenwriting,
 but I feel like in film, which is much different than what I
 did in TV, it is a little bit like Mad Libs, where
 my job is essentially Ridley saying adjective, noun,
 euphemism.
 And that's how the movie was made, really.
 And that explains.
 I'm sure he'll be excited to hear
 that you describe the movie making process as Mad Libs.
 But I do feel like I have great pride
 in my own lack of authorship in the movie.
 And I feel like if the movie is a huge success,
 it's all because of Ridley Scott.
 And if the movie is not a success,
 it's because I wasn't able to execute his vision successfully.
 And that's the feeling that I have.
 So let's talk about the connection between Aliens
 or Alien or that universe.
 Because there seems to be some, and correct me if I'm wrong,
 but I feel like people who are talking about the movie, who
 are involved with the movie, have gone,
 not out of their way, but have made a point to say, look,
 this isn't a sequel to Alien or Aliens or Alien 3 or Alien
 Resurrection or Alien versus Predator
 or Alien versus Predator 2.
 You're saying this is a different movie.
 But it's not a sequel.
 It's a prequel, if anything.
 But you're not even calling it that.
 Well, I mean, I take exception to the fact
 that it's called a prequel.
 And I know a lot of this sounds a lot like that you have to get
 on slightly defensive terrain.
 But for me, just as a fanboy, when I hear the word prequel,
 that doesn't get me excited.
 And the reason that it doesn't get me excited
 isn't because I have a negative association with prequels.
 We have to think, let's contextualize that word.
 The first time that I heard that word in any sort of public
 or social setting was in reference to the fact
 that George was going to do the first three Star Wars movies.
 And I was enormously excited about that.
 That aside, once you actually see what a prequel is,
 a prequel is, by definition, a march towards the inevitable.
 So while we know that the guy is going to get the girl
 or there's going to be a happy ending,
 there's certain story beats that you hit, the idea of saying,
 I'm now just going to watch this young boy turn
 into Darth Vader.
 You're leading me into the story that I already know.
 There's certain things that I know can't happen,
 like nothing's going to happen to Obi-Wan,
 because it's a prequel.
 And then I went and saw the Thing prequel.
 And I love John Carpenter's The Thing.
 And I was really excited about it.
 But then when it ended, spoiler alert,
 the Thing ends with a dog that has the Thing inside it,
 running across the frozen tundra as it's being chased
 by a helicopter that's shooting at it.
 And when I saw that, there was a small degree of satisfaction
 in terms of, oh, this is where the other movie began.
 And on the heels of that, a tremendous amount
 of disappointment and going, then
 why did I just watch this movie?
 It was just sort of, you just wrote the prologue for me.
 And I felt that it was really important
 that Prometheus was not positioned as a prologue
 to Alien, that in fact, if Prometheus were successful
 and there was a sequel to it, the sequel to Prometheus
 would not be Alien.
 I also felt like Alien is as close to a perfect movie
 as it gets.
 And I was very reluctant to engage
 in a conversation that would somehow diminish Alien.
 That if you saw, if for some reason,
 Prometheus didn't succeed creatively,
 that when you went and watched Alien again,
 you'd be like, this movie is now diminished.
 The taste would be soured in some way.
 Yeah, why bet that?
 So all that by way of saying that if you, my hope is,
 that if you see Prometheus and you watch Alien again,
 there will be certain things that were mysteries before
 about Alien that you have more clarity on.
 But the mysteries that made Alien great are still mysteries.
 And I've had a certain degree of success and failure
 in mystery resolution.
 I feel some mysteries are just much more engaging
 than their resolution.
 And I don't want to answer those.
 It's like, ooh, where is Amelia Earhart?
 She's rotting somewhere on the bottom of the ocean.
 You're saying that's the?
 Probably, unless she was abducted by aliens
 or she's living somewhere in France
 and has discovered the Fountain of Youth.
 But the reality is the answer to these mysteries
 are usually less compelling than whatever our imagination
 transposes onto them.
 And so I do think that we succeeded in,
 if there's a sequel to Prometheus,
 it's not about the things that Alien is about,
 which is eggs and face huggers and chest bursters
 and xenomorphs.
 Like that not only Alien, but then aliens,
 they need to go and live off on that tangent.
 Prometheus is launching, it's servicing that tangent.
 It's saying, here's an explanation.
 You'll understand the context of maybe where
 some of those things came from.
 But it's much more interested in going off
 in its own direction.
 And were there a sequel to Prometheus,
 it probably wouldn't need to trade in any of those ideas.
 So let's just get nerdy for a second.
 I'm going to get real specific.
 As opposed to what I've been for the last 20 minutes?
 Well, you're speaking very broadly about you're
 kind of setting the stage for this.
 But here's my impression based on the trailers.
 And it's funny because I actually could not,
 I haven't seen Alien for years.
 Probably not since I was a teenager,
 or like really young, like 13.
 And it was on television, we had this debate on the podcast
 and we were talking, I was like, how does it start?
 Because I couldn't remember.
 And it was on television, I watched it,
 and I remembered, I saw a bunch of stuff,
 I was like, oh yes, now it all makes sense.
 So Prometheus clearly is not about
 Sigourney Weaver's character.
 Correct.
 It's clearly not about, I mean, I think from just what
 I see in the trailer, it's not about people fighting
 the alien creatures.
 That doesn't seem to be, at least that's not a hint
 of what I've seen.
 Yes, uh-huh.
 But it does seem to be taking place in or on or around
 the beginning of Alien, or Alien full stop,
 which is this large, there's this large alien craft
 they stumble upon.
 I mean, that seems to be in Prometheus.
 So there is some connective tissue there, right?
 I mean, there are places that are shared,
 I guess is what I'm asking.
 Yes, but not, I think that, again,
 I'm not trying to be overly cryptic,
 but if I answer all these questions,
 I think that we cross that line from,
 let me just say, there was a two minute trailer out there
 that people were like, I can't wait to see this movie,
 and then there was a three minute international trailer.
 And that one extra minute of material
 is the line that you cross where people start to say,
 you told me too much.
 Right, and I agree, I think the three minute trailer
 gave away a lot of stuff.
 So my desire to not tell you what is the relationship
 between my hope is, and again, this is frustrating to some,
 but it's the space in which I live,
 which is the reason to me that I loved Inception
 was after Inception was over,
 there was stuff for me to fight about
 and discuss with my friends as to what it meant,
 what happened, what was a dream, what wasn't a dream,
 like all those things that the movie left
 in some sort of ambiguous space.
 And I know ambiguity is a very scary word,
 especially when you apply it to the context
 of the television that I've done.
 However, I will continue to embrace ambiguity
 because I find it really interesting
 and I have a tremendous amount of faith
 in the intelligence of the audience.
 Most of them are much smarter than I am,
 and I will have an intention,
 but the idea of not spelling it out entirely,
 I will tell you right now that this movie,
 even when you go and see it,
 there is space to debate what the relationship
 between this movie and Alien is.
 We are not connecting the dots for you.
 We are giving you the requisite information
 to have an impassioned discussion about it.
 You will know a hell of a lot more than you did before,
 but it's not like this movie ends
 with a derelict spacecraft full of eggs
 crash landing on LV-426,
 which is the derelict spacecraft
 that the Nostromo happens upon at the beginning of Alien.
 That's inevitability and it's not interesting.
 Right, so, but with ambiguity, the danger there is,
 and by the way, I'm not trying to get you
 to tell me what happens in the movie.
 I guess my question was, they're in the same universe,
 because there's been a debate with people
 that this is in a completely separate universe.
 They share the universe.
 Absolutely, and I don't wanna segue
 into the viral of the movie,
 but I will say, like, when Ridley and I,
 and I'm sure he and John,
 and a couple of guys worth mentioning,
 Michael Ellenberg, who was sort of
 Ridley's right-hand guy at Scott Free
 when I came on there and an executive producer in the movie,
 and then a guy, Steve Asbell,
 who was an executive at 20th Century Fox,
 who was like the hugest, like, alien compendium
 of information, incredibly impassioned, creative guy.
 Those guys are worth mentioning.
 Very early on, we started saying,
 this is the question that is not gonna go away.
 Is it a prequel?
 What is it?
 So is there a way that we can start generating content
 other than just the trailer,
 to start, as opposed to Ridley Scott in interviews,
 or me in interviews, saying,
 here is the movie's relationship to Alien,
 where we can begin to message
 to the people who care about that stuff,
 and the people who care are the people
 who are fans of the original, the nerds, the fanboys,
 if we're gonna typecast.
 So that was the birth of the Wayland idea.
 Now, Wayland was a character in John Spade's draft.
 He is a character that appears in Prometheus
 in a different way than he did originally,
 but I said Wayland becomes the universal bridge,
 because we all know the name of the company
 in Alien is Wayland-Yutani.
 They are the company that basically,
 that the Nostromo works for,
 and they're a conglomerate that's into terraforming,
 amongst other things,
 and so if we say Wayland is in our movie,
 and we give the audience some context for who he is,
 and then they'll know that they're happening
 in the same universe,
 and can we shoot a cool piece of material
 that's not gonna be in our movie,
 it's not a trailer,
 it's not a scene that you see three months
 before the movie comes out,
 it just exists completely and totally on its own,
 that we'll begin to sort of message that
 to the people that care,
 and we think it's important to do that,
 and really completely and totally agreed,
 and that was the birth of what evolved
 into this Peter Wayland TED Talk,
 that we unveiled to TED,
 and then went viral,
 that Guy Pearce, who plays Wayland in the movie,
 agreed to do,
 and I think that it's hard to watch that in any context,
 and then make the argument that these
 don't occupy the same timeline.
 What's interesting about the original Alien is,
 you can watch that movie and be like,
 I'm curious as to what's the story with that space jockey
 in this derelict ship,
 but that isn't important,
 the movie isn't telling you that that's important,
 the movie is telling you that the thing
 that just jumped out of the egg on that ship
 and is now stuck to John Hurt's face,
 that's important,
 that's what you're supposed to worry about now,
 and then the sequel and so on and so forth,
 but the idea that Prometheus now enters
 into a more,
 and maybe this is why Ridley and those guys
 sought me out in the first place,
 into the movie is asking very specific questions,
 the characters are saying,
 we want answers to these questions,
 some of the answers they get,
 some of the answers they extrapolate,
 but then something happens that leads
 the resolution of the questions
 is secondary to their own survival.
 I think all of this stuff is already endemic.
 People don't wanna see Prometheus
 like a bunch of people sitting around a table
 pondering the meaning of life,
 they wanna see what happens when you open Pandora's box,
 that's fundamental sci-fi storytelling,
 the scientist wants to make giant tomatoes
 to feed the world,
 and the next thing you know there's enormous ants
 and spiders crawling through Albuquerque eating people,
 and it's that idea of there's a line,
 we shouldn't cross the line,
 we all know we shouldn't cross it,
 we shouldn't fly too close to the sun,
 we shouldn't steal fire from the gods,
 we do it anyway, we can't help ourselves, we're humans,
 and then we pay the consequences.
 That's sci-fi 101,
 that's the story that Ridley wanted to tell,
 that's why I loved Blade Runner,
 it's why I loved Alien,
 and it's like almost every Alien movie
 is essentially about an iteration of the same theme,
 which is no matter what these things do to us,
 the company keeps feeling there's a way to monetize all of it.
 You know, it's like, all right,
 well you think we would've learned our lesson
 after the second time.
 We got it, oh, you know the last one didn't end well.
 Yeah, exactly.
 Really, this is gonna be it.
 It is odd, you would think,
 for such a smart group of people,
 they would just go, you know what?
 But that's us, I mean, we can't help ourselves,
 and we wanna, everyone says, like, oh my god,
 like, when people are in a scary, you know, in a house,
 and they hear a noise in the attic,
 and then they're like, we should go check that out,
 you just moan to yourself, like, ugh.
 But if they just left the house, like, what's that movie?
 Right, but in real life, you would,
 I mean, would you go investigate the sound?
 I guess maybe you would.
 I'll tell you what I would do.
 I've done that.
 I would call the police, that's what I do.
 Just immediately?
 Depends on the sound.
 I mean, if it's just like a little,
 like a squeak or something,
 you're not gonna call the police.
 No, I will go and check it out if it's a squeak.
 What kind of sound would it have to be
 to get you to call the police?
 Let me ask you a question.
 Like, is the house, like, have people been murdered
 in the house before?
 Yeah, you bought the house, you got a summer home
 for your family, and you found out
 when you guys were moving in
 that a family had been murdered there.
 Right, and then I hear a noise in the attic.
 You hear a noise that sounds like a person moaning.
 Yeah, I do not go and check that out.
 You'd call the police?
 Right, well, I send my wife, or, you know, she's just.
 That's nice.
 I'm sure your wife would be so happy.
 Can you go see what the screaming sound is?
 Right, yeah.
 That's really wonderful.
 I probably don't do anything, you know?
 I probably just like to say,
 that's a really scary noise.
 Like, we should just stay down here.
 And flip the house.
 Right.
 For profit.
 Sure, absolutely.
 You bet.
 And try not to disclose.
 You mentioned it.
 Don't mention the murder.
 I think we're grandfathered in.
 We weren't murdered.
 Yeah, you were there for a whole couple of days.
 Right, exactly.
 Prometheus viral stuff.
 Yes.
 First off, what is your level of involvement
 in the viral things, like the David video,
 and you've got a new one, a new viral video that's.
 Yeah, that just kind of just came out.
 The viral stuff, that stuff that we did on Lost all the time,
 I'm really into viral stuff for other movies.
 I did not invent viral by any stretch of the imagination,
 but it's always been something that I've really
 been interested in.
 One of the failings, I think, sometimes of viral content
 is that it doesn't feature the actors from the movie.
 So it's just like, it's kind of like just for the nerds.
 So it's like put together the trailer for the movie
 or whatever.
 And I love doing that stuff.
 But I'm essentially like, for something
 to really be interesting and compelling,
 it should have the same production value of the movie.
 And for that, you need the resources.
 So it's like, who's going to have the balls to say
 to Michael Fassbender, can we take you
 for a day and do this cool idea that we had?
 But Ridley, there are so many great things about him.
 But he and Tony run this company, RSA,
 which is essentially their commercial production house.
 So they have all these brilliant young commercial directors
 who are enormously innovative individuals used to basically
 just kind of conceptualizing and figuring out
 on their own laptops how to make content.
 And so we had that resource at our disposal.
 And so Michael Ellenberg and I essentially
 started saying like, the first idea I had
 was I was just really into TED Talks.
 And I was like, we should do a TED Talk with Wayland.
 And it'll be, if we can talk Guy into it,
 we don't have to do a full 18 minute TED Talk.
 But we can talk about some of the themes of the movie.
 But it'll be like in the future.
 Like we'll set it in like 2023.
 And like we just have to ask TED if they
 let us use their branding.
 Otherwise, it'll be like a Fred Talk.
 And it'll feel like cheap and disingenuous.
 And I know this guy, Tom Riley, who
 is this very plugged in, super tech savvy, very cool geek
 at TED who, when I went to the conference,
 was sort of like my conduit in there.
 I called him up and was like, would you
 guys be open to letting us use the TED branding?
 And he said, I'll do you one better.
 What if you showed it at TED?
 What if you unveiled it at TED?
 And you could use even the TED website to show this thing.
 And so everybody got super excited about that
 when we pitched it to Ridley.
 And then he essentially, I wrote the TED Talk.
 And then his son, Luke, Ridley's son Luke,
 directed Guy through the TED Talk
 and then produced that entire thing through RSA.
 And then I said, the other idea that we had was
 we should do a commercial for David, the Android.
 I was like, there's commercials for iPhones.
 This is before Siri came along.
 I was like, there's a commercial for an iPad or an iPhone.
 Wouldn't a robot have a commercial?
 And what would that look like?
 And so this guy, Johnny Hardstaff, that's his real name.
 You know what his porn name is?
 Glenn Frankfurt.
 It's completely innocuous.
 No, his name's Johnny Hardstaff.
 Of course, it would have to be.
 He basically took that idea, the David idea, and ran with it.
 And I wrote some dialogue for that.
 But a lot of the visual ideas were totally Johnny's
 and were produced by those guys.
 And then the first piece of viral
 was Ridley wanted Numi Rapace to basically
 be the star of the movie.
 And she had done Girl with Dragon Tattoo
 and was already doing the Sherlock Holmes sequel.
 But I think Fox just wanted to see her on film,
 to do a screen test with her.
 And so I wrote this transmission that she
 makes to Wayland in an effort to try to convince him
 to fund her crazy mission so that it would just
 be a monologue for her.
 Because there weren't really any monologues in the movie.
 And so we gave that to Numi, and then she did it.
 And it was super, Ridley didn't shoot,
 it wasn't just Numi Rapace on video, he filmed it.
 She was in costume.
 And there was incredibly high production value.
 It was like, this should go on the DVD.
 And it was like, screw the DVD.
 This should be a piece of viral.
 If I saw this on my laptop, on YouTube,
 I would find it enormously compelling.
 I'd want to go see that movie.
 And so that was the genesis for that idea.
 So in Fox marketing, I have to say,
 it's easy to blow smoke because essentially they're my bosses.
 But all the people over there from Bumble Ward and Catherine
 Colbert and Nathan Marcy have all
 so embraced the viral idea.
 They completely understood what it was.
 And so the idea of using that to bolster
 the more traditional trailers.
 Because there was this period where nobody was talking
 about Prometheus.
 Is it a prequel?
 What is it?
 And then very quickly, we just flooded everybody
 with all this material.
 So then the conversation became about, well, what is this?
 What does this mean?
 How does this fit into the overall puzzle of the movie?
 And the way that they doled it out and however they doled it
 out created a zeitgeist where there was no zeitgeist.
 There was only curiosity bordering on frustration.
 Because it's that thing of, you've got to give me something.
 And I think the viral became an answer to, all right,
 this is the something that we're giving you.
 What's really interesting about it, too,
 is that it creates this graph.
 It somehow makes the film so much larger.
 It broadens that universe of the movie.
 Suddenly, it feels like it's got gravity
 that it didn't have before because there are artifacts
 from that universe that have.
 It's kind of clear the day of the commercial
 is not going to appear in the movie.
 You wouldn't just have that in the middle of the film.
 But it gives the idea of this universe so much more weight
 to have these little artifacts that live outside of the film
 itself, which I think is really fascinating.
 It's something that we now have a medium where
 you can do the film for theaters.
 But we've got this amazing, fluid, flexible medium
 of the web that allows you to show the masses,
 these other little pieces that flesh out in some way
 that the universe that you're trying to create
 for the big screen.
 And I think that people are so hungry
 for any additional content because it
 creates this feeling of being in the know,
 being a super fan of something.
 You have sort of a stock and trade.
 So you're able to say, hey, did you see the David video?
 And other people are like, no.
 And you're like, oh, I'll send you the link.
 And then that suddenly makes you a purveyor of content.
 You're on the inside.
 And I think it's like, again, to go back
 to what Marvel did at the end of Iron Man
 by just dropping in that reference to the Avengers
 and having Nick Fury pitch that Avengers initiative.
 And that became the first piece of viral,
 for lack of a better word, that led us
 down the road to Avengers.
 But suddenly what started happening
 is for any Marvel movie, the entire audience
 would just sit there through all of the credits
 just to have the experience of watching
 90 seconds more of content.
 And it's like, did you need to do this, Joss Whedon?
 You did not.
 You're giving this to me, this gift.
 You've already got my $14.
 And you're not only going to give me one post-credit scenes,
 but now if I sit through the entire movie,
 there's yet another one.
 And thank you.
 Any kind of sort of, it's a premium is what it is.
 Because as opposed to looking at viral as marketing
 to get you to see the next one, which by the way,
 that's what the Tony Stark Nick Fury scene at the end of Iron
 Man is.
 It's viral marketing.
 They're essentially saying, go buy a ticket for the Avengers.
 If you didn't know what's coming.
 You and I knew what the Avengers were before we saw Iron Man,
 but my wife didn't.
 She was like, what's Avengers?
 And I was like, oh boy.
 Just wait.
 Yeah, do you have like two hours?
 Let's start with the Infinity Gauntlet.
 Yeah.
 I mean, that is interesting to think that, well, actually,
 I think a viral is purely for the internet.
 But it's interesting to think about it as something that now
 is we're like putting Easter eggs in movies
 because they're essentially Easter eggs in some way, right?
 Because fanboy culture has bled so much into the mainstream
 that people are looking for it.
 Like you said, people are looking for these little clues.
 Viral is Sacha Baron Cohen showing up at the Academy Awards
 and spilling ashes on Ryan Seacrest.
 And it becomes web content because you
 heard that it happened.
 But when it first happened, it was live theater.
 It was that idea of a shill being in the audience.
 So viral, by definition, is any form
 of content that gets you more excited for the product
 that it's steering you towards.
 Right.
 Is Prometheus an action movie?
 And before you answer, I want to set this up a little bit.
 It seems like modern day science fiction cannot exist without it
 having an action component.
 And if you look at a movie like 2001,
 I would not classify it's not an action movie.
 Correct.
 It's something else.
 Yes.
 So is Prometheus an action movie?
 Or is it something else?
 I couldn't describe it as an action movie
 any more than I would describe Inception as an action movie.
 But there's a lot of explosions and people shooting guns.
 And that entire final set piece in Inception
 that takes place at the Snow Fortress
 is actually an action set piece.
 It just doesn't feel like an action movie.
 So I wouldn't describe it that way.
 I think not that I'm putting Prometheus and Inception
 in terms of they're the same movie.
 I'm just answering your question in that way
 with saying, first and foremost, I think it's a sci-fi movie.
 And I think that it's safe to say
 Prometheus is as much an action movie as Alien is a horror
 movie, which is it trades on those genre elements.
 Obviously, just from the trailer,
 you've seen there's much more of an action fuse on Prometheus
 than I think Alien.
 But I would say Aliens is an action movie.
 And Prometheus is much more, it feels a lot more like Alien
 than Aliens to me in terms of its storytelling.
 I think it takes its time.
 And it's not just about getting to the next set piece.
 That being said, once that fuse gets lit,
 there is a fair amount of scope and sizzle to it.
 And really, really wanted to do that stuff.
 I think one of the things that I've been hearing,
 both again in the recurring theme of this interview,
 you take the good with the bad is, the good side,
 it's like this feels a lot like the original Alien.
 Because there's motifs in the original Alien.
 There's an android you're not entirely sure you trust.
 There's people in cryo sleep.
 There's a female lead.
 There's clearly something happening
 to these people that is reminiscent of those ideas.
 There's creeping around through dark corridors with flashlights.
 So people go, this feels a lot like Alien.
 And then there's other people who are saying,
 this feels a lot like Alien.
 So it's just more of the same.
 And look, that's what you're up against when
 you are courting that fan base.
 And I'll take it every day of the week.
 That's the price of doing business.
 Because I'm just as critical of other content.
 And I would rather have people say to me
 for the rest of my career, you screwed up a Ridley Scott movie
 than not say that to me.
 Because I'm like, hey, I got to be involved
 in a Ridley Scott movie.
 I got to screw up a Ridley Scott movie.
 Not only did I screw up a Ridley Scott movie,
 I screwed up the first Ridley Scott sci-fi movie in 30 years.
 If that's not going to go on your headstone,
 then what should?
 I don't know.