ALIEN: EARTH Production Designer Andy Nicholson Updates Old Futures

Nerdist: You’ve worked on big franchises before, like Jurassic World and the MCU. But for this show, you’re recreating a well-established aesthetic that’s over 45 years old. But among the old, there’s a lot of new. What was this like for you as a designer and as an Alien fan? 

Andy Nicholson: Well, as a designer, you’re responsible for collaborating with the director on what I like to say is “everything behind the actors.” So you know, whatever that is, whether it’s choosing a location or, in this case, the sets. And so, this show was a perfect opportunity for me to do something that’s very fun, which was building something from reference. Just to give you an example, say you’re designing a World War II movie set on a flying fortress. You learn that plane, you design everything about it. So, I had that as a job, and then I also had to expand the world, bring the franchise to Earth. When I designed the show, we weren’t really sure how far in the future it was going to be. It was between 100 and 150 years in the future. We were never precise.

So in talking to Noah Hawley, there were a few props in Aliens I took inspiration from, in the spaceship that Sigourney Weaver’s on, which were great because they were early ’80s furniture design lamps, and a few things like that. And there’s a great pool of futuristic-looking furniture. Things like car interiors from the late ’70s, early ’80s, before everything ultimately got designed by computer. And even things like the Sony Walkman, that sort of great flat Sony Walkman, which had the screen and the angle, those kinds of things started in that era.

It’s futuristic stuff, which was their vision of the future then, and it’s kind of worked for what our vision of the future should be. It felt like it would work with where we were in the franchise timeline, and also, it was something that I hadn’t seen done before. I know this term, retrofuturism, is now common. We never really said that when we were doing it. It was working from what those filmmakers thought the future would be like when they made [Alien]. So let’s take what they thought it should be, and let’s expand that. That was kind of our kickoff point for that. From those few props in that spaceship, to the whole inside of all of the furniture in Neverland.

The 22nd-century design of this show mixes the old and new. How did you decide which things in this era remained retro, and which ones had to change it up?

Nicholson: Some things were script-led changes. Obviously, the MU-TH-UR room has to have the impact room in the floor layout. And some of them were logistic-led, like a bunch of rooms joined together that weren’t the same as the Nostromo. So there was the layout of the bridge that was the same, but where it went on the ship was different. Things like that. The cryo chamber is a lot bigger because it’s a ship with more crew. The story needed there to be a rotation of people who went through cryo and then managed the ship. Different than the Nostromo, where there’s just one small cryo chamber.

There were more scenes needing to happen in there in Episode 5, so it’s scene-led changes. When you’re doing anything like this, you research. And there were things that you had to keep the same, like the original design of the Nostromo. The aesthetic there was “Let’s look at some late ’70s fast food restaurants and that plastic look of all the seating.” This is what they’ve done for all of their ships, so that’s what the interior of ours is. And [the Maginot] is a sister ship in the same fleet/similar time period, so it should have the same stuff. And then, to be honest, you just get geeky about it.

We feel like there was something about that late ‘70s sci-fi look that just doesn’t date. I feel like Alien: Earth and Andor and both proof of that. What do you think they were tapping into back then that you’ve been able to emulate so well?

Nicholson: I don’t know, I think it was all purposefully futuristic. They were using unusual shapes. They were at the very end of the drawn design before computers. And that made a difference in the line form. A lot of the early concept artists were engineers who also did art of spacecraft, spaceships, and stuff like that, through the ’70s and early ’80s. And it was kind of following from that sort of lead. It was before all the spaceships you’ve seen were designed on computers. I mean, the Andor and Star Wars world is a different aesthetic. But they both come from spaceships made out of a whole bunch of model kit parts stuck back together. So you do that, to such an extent that the first thing they did was computer model bits of plane kits to use on the spaceship.

We had an established aesthetic for the Maginot that was quite good. Mainly because it’s a combination of the Sulaco from Aliens and the Nostromo from Alien. The interior is mostly a Nostromo reference. Because in the script, there were rooms like the MU-TH-UR room, the cryo chamber, and the bridge. And if you go to a plane cockpit from a Boeing to an Airbus, they each have very similar things. And then you get to be a geeky fan, and find things that absolutely have to be the same. When you look back at the movies, there are some things you can hardly see because it’s very dark, and you’re trying to figure out. “What the hell is that thing they used there?” and then use it. Because it’s just fun for the fans. I mean, you know, at that stage, we all turn into geeks.

Alien: Earth releases new episodes on FX and FX on Hulu every Thursday.