Paul Reiser Says James Cameron Operates on a "Whole Other Level"

Paul Reiser originally played Carter Burke in Aliens back in 1986, and now he's returning to the character in a unique way. Marvel's Aliens: What If...? is a new comic Reiser worked on with his son Leon, Adam F. Goldberg (The Goldbergs), Brian Volk-Weiss (The Toys That Made Us), and Hans Rodionoff (Marvel's Damage Control). The five-issue Aliens limited series is similar to Marvel's What If...? stories, and one of the questions asked is, "What If... Carter Burke Had Lived?." The issue imagines a version of James Cameron's Aliens that sees Reiser's character surviving the Xenomorph invasion of LV-426. While chatting with ComicBook.com about the comic, Reiser reflected on working with Cameron on the beloved sequel. 

"Yeah. Well, I was so new," Reiser recalled. "It was almost 40 years ago. So I was so thrilled to be cast and to be in what I knew was going to be a huge ass hit, because Jim Cameron had already done Terminator, and I saw how great he is, and the script was so great, and as a huge fan of Sigourney Weaver. And I thought, my goal was, 'Don't stink up the movie. Just when you're on-screen, if it doesn't come to a gliding halt, that's a victory.' So he was... Talk about evil versus misunderstood. Jim Cameron just plays at a whole other level than most people. He's so visionary, and so specific, he not only knows what he wants he knows how to do it."

"If the technology doesn't exist, he'll invent it, whether it's for The Abyss, or whether it's cameras, or whether it's for Titanic." he continued. "That's a certain type of brilliant brain. So to me, anytime he was reportedly bumping heads, it was mostly because we shot in London, there was a British crew, and it's a different temperament. And he was this young, brash 29-year-old American, Canadian actually. So I think if he had shot here, none of those would've happened. None of those little flare-ups. But it was never ego. It was always because, in my mind, that he knew what he needed. He knew what he had to get done in a day, and he just had his foot down on the pedal."

"And you can't argue with that," Reiser added. "And by the way, this film has stood the test of time in a way that I never would've realized. I knew it was going to be a hit, and it certainly was a hit, but it wasn't until I did a Comic-Con a few years back, five years ago, that I realized, that I discovered the grip of this movie. The breadth. There's a whole subculture of Aliens world fans that astounded me. So I just was like, 'Well, that was fun to be in a big hit movie that people remember.' It's like, no, it's more than that. It's a sub-culture."

 Aliens: What If...? is out now.