Chris Foss' Original Preproduction Painting for the Leviathan Spaceship for Ridley Scott's Alien

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Chris Foss' Original Preproduction Painting for the Leviathan Spaceship for Ridley Scott's Alien

This painting was commissioned for the developmental work on the groundbreaking Alien film in 1977, and it shows the Leviathan in its full glory. The first artist hired on Alien was Ron Cobb. Coupled with Cobb was English artist, Chris Foss, who Dan O’Bannon had come to know during their tenure together on Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune. Though Dune would never come to fruition under Jodorowsky, the experience in France influenced O’Bannon’s approach to designing Alien. Jodorowsky had gathered together Chris Foss, Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud, and HR Giger to design his film, and the eclectic team would be later reunited by O’Bannon to design his grungy sci-fi horror movie. When Ridley Scott took over the directorial duties, Cobb and Foss were shipped to England to continue their work. Around this point in time, HR Giger was drawing up the film’s alien, and Moebius was commissioned by Scott to design the film’s space suits, which would be brought into reality by John Mollo. After many months of scribbling and painting spaceships, the production was no closer to settling what the ship and refinery embedded together would actually look like. Due to script rewrites, it also changed names, from Snark to Leviathan before the name Nostromo was settled on. Ron Cobb on Chris Foss "Creating spacecraft exteriors came easily to Foss. His mind and imagination seemed to embody the entire history of the industrial revolution. He could conjure up endless spacecraft designs suggesting submarines, diesel locomotives, Mayan interceptors, Mississippi river boats, jumbo space arks, but best of all (ask Dan) were his trademark aero-spacecraft-textures like panels, cowlings, antennae, bulging fuel tanks, vents, graphics etc. As the months passed, along with two or three temporary directors, Chris began to have problems caused by his spectacular creativity. No one in a position to make a decision seemed to be able to make up their mind and/or choose one of his designs. I think Chris was turning out spacecraft designs the decision makers found too original." Chris Foss on the Nostromo design “Finally what happened was that the bloke who had to make the [Nostromo] model completely lost his rag, scooped up a load of paper -they had a room full of smashed-up bits of helicopter and all-sorts- and he just bodged something together. So the actual spaceship in the film hadn’t anything to do with all the days, weeks, months of work that we’d all done. It’s as simple as that.”