James Cameron Once Replaced Ridley Scott As The Director Of Alien Sequel Leaving Him Hurt, The Blade Runner Filmmaker Reflecting On His Feelings Recalls: “I Was Pissed…”

1979’s Alien, directed by Ridley Scott, is still considered to be one of the best-executed sci-fi/horror movies to date. However, when the iconic movie was renewed for a sequel, James Cameron took over the directorship from Ridley and went ahead to make Aliens (the sequel) in 1986. This had hurt Scott’s feelings and made him immensely pissed, as he mentioned in a recent interview. Scroll ahead to find out!

The Alien movie revolved around Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley and a crew of the Nostromo who try to take down an alien known as Xenomorph as it gets loose in a spaceship. While in the sequel, the Titanic director followed Scott’s story with lots of aliens in it. When Cameron called him to let him know about the shift in the directorship, it left Scott baffled as at that time, he was recovering from Blade Runner’s disastrous box office effect.

In an interview with Deadline, Ridley Scott opened up about how, upon receiving James Cameron’s phone call, he was hurt knowing he would be directing Alien’s sequel. He said, “Well, Jim is about that, the way he designs, his whole process is The Ride. As I learned somebody else was doing this, I actually had been trying to develop something. When Jim called me up and said, listen … he was very nice but he said, this is tough, your beast is so unique. It’s hard to make him as frightening again, now familiar ground. So he said, I’m going in a more action, army kind of way. I said, okay. And that’s the first time I actually thought, welcome to Hollywood.”