There are two men alive who know what it feels like to be James Cameron’s hands.
Not metaphorically. Literally. In 1985, month after month and into 1986, on D Stage at Pinewood Studios and later at Acton Gas Works, Malcolm Weaver and I were suspended from a crane inside the Queen Alien — one of us on each side of the Queen, our bodies forming the negative space around which Stan Winston and his team had spent weeks sculpting the most terrifying creature ever put on film. James Cameron stood below us with a two-way communication system running directly into our ears, directing our movements in real time as the cameras rolled.
We were performing. We were the armature. The Queen moved because we moved. When she reached, we reached. When she threatened, we threatened. Cameron’s voice told us where to take her next. Our feet paddled the tail as two grips lashed the end of it with a whip. Our neck muscles moved the whole head side to side. But our arms were the fighting arms of the Queen.
Forty years later, we got together for a a Comic Con picture, and this is the film we made.
The tests came first. Before Stan Winston’s team could build anything, they needed to know what human bodies first covered in plastic, might do inside a mechanical suit of that scale and complexity. Malcolm and I were hung from rigging on the Process Stage at Pinewood, and James asked us to move in ways that a creature of that size and weight would move — not human movement, not animal movement, but something Cameron had in his head that neither of us had a reference point for. That we couldn’t see, but only feel. There the creature was designed. It was carved in the plaster shop where my other now long time buddy Steve Norrington worked.
Cameron was specific. The Queen is not angry in the way a predator is angry. She is certain. She has already won. The movement had to carry that. We laid eggs and we fought the humans. Cameron would talk to us through the earpiece, adjusting, correcting, building the physical vocabulary of the historic creature one gesture at a time. By the time Stan Winston’s team began the serious sculpting work, they had something to sculpt around: not just our body shapes as a negative mould, but the movement grammar of a creature that didn’t exist yet. And four puppeteers pulling levers to operate the KY Jelly dripping jaw.
Stan and his team were extraordinary. Weeks of work, fitting and refitting, building the Queen’s upper body around the space our bodies occupied. It couldn’t be any smaller, nor could it be any bigger. It was us. They engineered a system of controls that would lift, drop, drive us forward and let us two human beings inside become a creature. Something genuinely inhuman. The weight was considerable, our vision almost zero for the whole day. The heat was significant. None of that is in the film. What is in the film is what Cameron was trying to achieve — and what it felt like, from the inside, when it worked.
Malcolm and I have stayed in touch across the forty years since Aliens. We were the only two people who shared this particular experience — being chosen by James Cameron, being talked through a performance by one of the most visually precise directors in the history of the medium, and spending weeks as the living skeleton inside one of cinema’s great creatures.
I can be interviewed about a dozen different movies, or the classic Emmerdale airplane crash, or any of my books… just like Strictly Human. But there is always a point when they ask … ‘so what about Aliens?’
I was talking to Rick Bontkowski at Amp’d Up 211 about my double amputee hero, Dwight Ritter who was to become the first man to be robotised, in my thriller Strictly Human, and yes, he asked me about it. I have never told the full story in one place, and each time I go back down memory lane I remember something new. This film is that story.
The full Aliens video is on
The full Amp’d Up 211 interview is on = https://ampup211.com/episode/what-makes-us-human-stuart-st-paul
Hey, subscribe here as we reveal more about fifty years in high end film and entertainment. Learning from the likes of James Cameron and Ridley Scott is more than a college coarse in film making, it is a crafting. I went on to win Best Director at Breckenridge, and numerous other awards … and I can thank these educational sections in my career. I always say Aliens was my last movie as a stunt performer … which is kind off true. It was a punctuation mark in my life and a very lucky career.
This is how films are actually built — not the mythology, but the craft, the problem-solving, the strange intimacy of a director’s voice in your ear whilst you are suspended from a crane in the dark.
They result in books like
Strictly Human is on Amazon = https://amzn.to/4wmwQOf
Landfill is serialised here
Stuart and Steve Norrington here.
The Three Movie Fugitives Above Rock Band Queen’s Touring Gear
There’s a piece of film history sitting above a warehouse full of Queen’s touring equipment that almost nobody knows about. In the early nineties, three young filmmakers shared an office while Fugitive Films figured out which project to make next. Philip Ridley, whose work we’d already made in the two movies
And here is the fun in having such a heritage, when you meets the fans, the ones that know far more than I have forgotten and they leave you with memories you never had. I met a real Aliens fan who drew me as she saw me as I spoke on stage, and yes, it was the Aliens. Thank you Lynsey.
