How did the Betty evolve from the script stage of Alien Resurrection into the final shape?
We actually didn’t physically design the overall look of the ship. We did bulk out quite a bit of the detail. It went through a series of iterations. The guy who I think really did the bulk of the design work was a gentleman named Bill Boes, who was one of the art directors on the show; he’s now a production designer and designs quite a bit of film. At the start they had some very rough concept sketches, and he ended up building…a lot of the ships in the film were initially realised as three-dimensional maquettes, sculpted out of a kind of blue-foam. It was more a kind of sculptural development technique. I don’t want to talk out of turn; I have a feeling that he worked very closely with Jean-Pierre Jeunet, getting the look, but it may have been more closely with Nigel Phelps, the production designer. We came on the show relatively early. The Betty was still being designed at that point. But what [Boes] ended up doing was he sculpted the bulk of it out of blue foam. It was a relative
