Ridley Scott teases future of Alien franchise after Covenant

Ridley Scott is a busy man these days. He’s currently racing to finish reshoots on All the Money in the World (read all about that drama right here) in time to make its Dec. 22 release date; he’s starting prep for his next film, adapted from the Don Winslow novel, The Cartel; and he has roughly a billion projects in various stages of production. But the Alien franchise — the 1979 film that put the legendary director on the map — is never that far from his mind.

“We are [going to make another], we are,” Scott told EW from the set of All the Money in the World. “I think what we have to do is gradually drift away from the alien stuff.” Say what? Scott’s Alien: Covenant, which came out earlier this year, felt like a return to some legit old-school scares but failed to set the domestic box office ablaze (though, combined with international sales, it ended with north of $240 million in ticket revenue). “People say, ‘You need more alien, you need more face pulling, need more chest bursting,’ so I put a lot of that in Covenant and it fitted nicely. But I think if you go again you need to start finding another solution that’s more interesting. I think AI is becoming much more dangerous and therefore more interesting.”

It’s true that Covenant‘s best moments tended to include Michael Fassbender, who was doing double duty as good-or-bad androids David and Walter. (We could go on here about how Fassbender should probably be in the Oscar race for this “fingering” recorder scene alone but have been advised against it.)

“Fassbender was an AI,” continues Scott. “Ian Holm [from Alien] was an AI; Roy Batty [from Blade Runner] was an AI; so was Rachael [from Blade Runner].”

Scott brings up a Facebook experiment from last summer to prove his point. “They put two AIs together and they were communing. It already invented a f—ing language! And they couldn’t decipher what the language was so they had to switch them off. What was said and where’s it gone? They could have already implemented something we don’t know.”

Uh, we’re scared already.