Director Ridley Scott Aiming For “Hard R” With Alien: Covenant

“I think I’m going to do a pretty hard R,” director Ridley Scott said of the Prometheus sequel, Alien: Covenant, after The Martian won the Golden Globe for Best Comedy on Sunday night.

Scott and his crew are currently prepping Alien: Covenant at Fox Studios Australia (Sydney) and he plans to begin filming it in two months. While every film in the Alien franchise except for one (Paul W.S. Anderson’s Alien vs. Predator) have been Rated R, Scott plans to ratchet up the scares for the next one. And he thinks he can go even further than the chestbursting scene from the original 1979 film, which is still considered to be one of the scariest movie moments of all time.

“I always remember walking down the edge in Saint Louis when we were previewing [Alien],” Scott told reporters during the Golden Globes backstage interview (transcribed by CS). “I couldn’t sit through the film one more time. I walked down the edge into the kitchen scene when John Hurt started to bring up his breakfast. That moment, I realized how pretty scary the film was… I felt a sense of responsibility that I had gone too far because it was extreme. I’m going to try and do that again this year, but much worse.”

Synopsis: Ridley Scott returns to the universe he created in Alien with Alien: Covenant, the second chapter in a prequel trilogy that began with Prometheus — and connects directly to Scott’s 1979 seminal work of science fiction. Bound for a remote planet on the far side of the galaxy, the crew of the colony ship Covenant discovers what they think is an uncharted paradise, but is actually a dark, dangerous world — whose sole inhabitant is the “synthetic” David (Michael Fassbender), survivor of the doomed Prometheus expedition.

Alien Covenant to be released Oct. 6, 2017. It also stars Katherine Waterston (Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them).