Ridley Scott Explains Why ‘Alien: Covenant’ Xenomorphs Are CGI

Director Ridley Scott explains why he chose to utilize CGI Xenomorphs for Alien: Covenant instead of using practical effects.

Alien Covenant Xenomorph Hallway
While H. R. Giger and Carlo Rambaldi’s original Xenomorph costume has been praised for its lifelike qualities, Ridley Scott reveals that he opted to take the digital route when revisiting the monsters for the first time in nearly 40 years with Alien: Covenant. Scott explained the reasons behind making one of his most famous antagonists CGI this time around.

In an interview with Yahoo! Movies, Scott claimed that he chose to use CGI for the Xenomorphs in order to allow for a greater range of motion. But even though the Xenomorphs we see in the movie are all CGI, that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a man in a suit on set:

“Digitally, I thought I could do a lot more than just having a guy running around in a rubber suit which is all I had way back when, which worked pretty well actually. Throughout the whole shooting [of Covenant], the guy will walk around with the head on and he becomes the pattern of the performance, the digital performance, so we’ve always got an actor inside there doing his thing.”

So there are elements of practical effects in Alien: Covenant; it’s just that they’re vastly different to what they were nearly forty years ago. It’s good to know that they had a kind of stand-in for these iconic monsters on the set, as this can be actors almost always give off a better performance when they know what they’re looking at instead of being told that they’re running from something that will be added in post-production.

Alien: Covenant arrives on May 19, 2017. The movie’s cast includes Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Guy Pearce, Danny McBride, Demián Bichir, Carmen Ejogo, Amy Seimetz, Jussie Smollett, Callie Hernandez, Nathaniel Dean, Alexander England, Benjamin Rigby, and James Franco.

Source: Yahoo! Movies