Question: Question about the Director's Cut of the film. The scene where Brett is looking for Jones has been altered slightly - when he looks up at where the water is dripping from, you can actually see the Alien hanging motionlessly from one of the chains. Has Ridley Scott given an explanation as to why he added this new dynamic to the scene? It's easy enough to speculate why, but a link to an 'official' explanation would be appreciated.
Question: Who did the demonic voice that told the priest blessing the house to get out?
Answer: George Lutz.
How was it accomplished?
Question: According to Werner Herzog, the rats that appear in the film behaved better than Klaus Kinski during the shoot. Is this true?
Answer: True, though the rats comment was deliberate hyperbole. Kinski suffered from mental illness much of his life. He was often volatile, erratic, disruptive, and sometimes violent on movie sets. Kinski and Herzog had a long professional collaboration but also a friendship pre-dating Herzog's directing career. Otherwise, though Herzog admired Kinski's talent, he probably would never have tolerated working with him; he is the only director who worked with him more than once. Herzog did a documentary about Kinski after his death, which included footage of his on-set rants. Clips are on YouTube.
Moreover, Herzog was initially reluctant to hire Kinski in Fitzcarraldo movie because he was afraid that Kinski would go "totally bonkers" if trapped in the Amazon for any length of time, and his fears proved to be well-founded.
To correct a slight factual error in the answer: Director Alfred Vohrer worked on more movies with Kinski than Herzog did.
Question: How was the underwater shark attack scene done? Things I want to know are : How come the shark didn't attack the actor? And how did all the make up stay on the actor UNDERWATER? Does anyone (also) know how long filming this scene took?
Chosen answer: After the original zombie extra fell ill, the shark handler was made up to play the underwater zombie. The shark was tame, or at least enough to not attack the handler. The makeup would have been latex/oil based, so it would not have been affected by the water. I remember from the commentary that the filming took 1 or 2 days.
Question: At the beginning, Jill tells the police that she believes the caller is watching her through the windows. Since he calls her, how is this possible since cell phones did not exist at the time this movie came out?
Answer: Sorry, editing my answer because I misunderstood the question. The caller is using a different phone line in the same house. It's possible to have multiple different landlines/phone-numbers in the same building. However, Jill doesn't realise this and probably assumes he's watching her from a different house using binoculars or something similar.
Answer: According to the commentary on the DVD, Ridley didn't add this scene to the original cinematic release because he thought it revealed the true horror of the Alien too soon in the film. The scene is quite early in the film and he thought revealing the fully matured Alien at that time would reduce the viewer's fear.
I had watched Alien several times before I noticed the Alien hanging there.At this point the Audience have no idea what the Alien looks like, they're looking at pieces of science fiction equipment put in by the production crew that they can't relate to, so for all they know the Alien could just be a piece of kit hanging there.