Filmmaker James Cameron recently sat down with actor Michael Biehn for a near two-hour interview on Biehn’s podcast where a bunch of topics came up.
The pair worked together on three of Cameron’s most famous films – “The Terminator,” “Aliens” and “The Abyss”. Biehn played Corporal Hicks in “Aliens,” with his character, along with Carrie Henn’s Newt, killed off just before the start of David Fincher’s “Alien 3”.
During the interview, the topic of “Alien 3” came up, and Cameron didn’t hold back his thoughts on it:
“I thought that was the stupidest f–king thing, so you build a lot of goodwill 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 f–king 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 he’s he’s my kind of ornery.”
Speaking about the greater franchise as a whole, the post-“Aliens” work he holds in highest esteem appears to be the recent “Alien: Earth” series, which he dubs “pretty good”.
With “Alien: Romulus,” he says he likes “parts of it,” highlighting the zero-G acid sequence as one he particularly liked. With “Prometheus,” he said was visually great but “didn’t add up logically”, while “Alien: Covenant” is “not a film I would have made”.
Cameron says he doesn’t know any details about Neil Blomkamp’s scrapped film, and adds that: “You couldn’t pay me enough money to go back to that franchise there. It’s sort of almost become fan-driven.”
