Giger set on Alien, did you feel any extra pressure to set the bar even higher for Aliens?
SM: To be frank, no. ‘Raising the bar’ is what I do each time I’m engaged by a client, whether it’s a manufacturing corporation or a movie production company. I’m never really concerned about competing with others, even in professional fields that I’ve never worked in before. I’ve always managed to come up on top. AXP: Were you at all surprised Giger wasn’t back for Aliens? SM: No. Giger is who he is; enigmatic, quirky, weird. The fact that he wasn’t on ALIENS had nothing to do with me. Besides, his designs were owned by the studio, not by him anyway. That’s why Cameron could take the liberty of designing the queen ALIEN based on the same morphological scheme as Giger’s ALIEN, which, in turn, was a variation on his extensive exploration of the penis, a kind of fixation of his. AXP: Apart from Cameron’s script, how did you visualize your designs? SM: I imagined that the SULACO was essentially a heavily armed cargo ship, outfitted to transport material, men, equipment between earth orbit
