3am Eternal (Live at the S.S.L.) – The K.L.F.
( The Ancients of Mu Mu )
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Alien 3 – Paranoia In Pinewood part 2
The six stages of Film Production : as seen carved into the wall in Pinewood, Studio Five, by someone presumably better-versed in the industry than I :
- Wild enthusiasm
- Disillusionment
- Panic
- Search For The Guilty
- Punish The Innocent
- Reward The Non-Involved
The above quote from the diary I kept in 1991 while filming Alien 3 in Pinewood Studios. I released it into the atmosphere as My Pop Life #171 – Praying For Time. I think it’s time for part 2, don’t you?
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Production still
Things settled down a little after the heart-thumping and deeply paranoid first month recorded in the previous episode. No one was sacked. I don’t think. No one was re-cast. There was a terrible accident one day when Sigourney’s make-up lady Linda was standing in a doorway on set – one of those science fiction doorways with a sliding panel which goes up and down with a swish. It was a wooden contraption with a weighted pulley which failed, and it came down suddenly onto her face, right onto her nose. I wasn’t there but it was a nasty accident and she was rushed to hospital. Shook everyone up. We never saw Linda again. Later I learned that she didn’t want to claim the medical expenses from the company, but having had a facial reconstruction and various operations I think that she eventually did settle. Dangerous places, film sets.
The cast of Alien 3 with David Fincher on set, 1991
My relationship with Sigourney had subsided into a kind of sulk, and although she would make the odd remark, the earlier fire and brimstone had calmed down a bit. Not that we’d made up at all. Sadly we weren’t friends. I’d confided in other cast members – Niall Buggy thought I was completely bonkers “What are you talking about Ralph, she’s lovely!” Pete Postlethwaite and Phil Davis felt the same way. Dhobi Oparei too. I was happy that they were enjoying working with her, but just as I started feeling cornered, there was Charles Dance asking me how it was all going as we waited for a set-up. I think I was tentative at first but eventually told him what had been going on. He confessed that he’d had the same kind of experience. “Is that how you’re going to say it?” and all of the paranoia about how clean he looked, other competitive nonsense. I felt relieved that I wasn’t going totally mad. It was only people she had scenes with where the behaviour occurred. Wait – was Charles Dutton also having this relationship with her? No. He was a friend already and he was not the enemy. Charlie and I have been firm friends ever since.
Charles Dance as Clemens
One day on set Sigourney and I had a scene on a balcony, after the fire. Men had died. The Alien was trapped, locked in a loading bay. Dutton and his men were praying below us. The scene wasn’t going well. “Is that how you’re going to stand?” “You’re not doing that line properly” Horrible. But I just about stood my ground and weedily fought my corner and we got it at around 8.00pm and wrapped for the day. Fincher pulled me aside. “Dude. She vampired that scene. Don’t worry I can cut around what you did, we got it. But you’re letting her get to you.” I think I said that I was trying to stand my ground. “If you ever need to leave the set, take five minutes, regain your centre, just say it OK? I got your back.” It was another welcome acknowledgement that I wasn’t paranoid. I went home, cuddled my lady and gritted my teeth for the long haul. I had to try and protect my performance at the end of the day, that was what mattered.
the balcony scene is in the “director’s cut” on the DVD
As the weeks progressed, all of the actors were called in every day, in case we were needed. First thing – put through ‘the works’ – costume and make-up – and then sat in our dressing rooms to await the call, often all day. I often went into the next-door dressing room occupied by the Prison Governor, my boss the legend Brian Glover, who’d memorably played the gym teacher in Ken Loach‘s heartbreaking film Kes. Brian was from Barnsley and did the voice overs for Tetley Tea Bags : ‘Tetley. Make tea bags. Make Tea.‘
Brian Glover as Andrews
Brian regaled me with stories from his days as a professional wrestler, fighting on the circuit with Giant Haystacks, Big Daddy and Mick McManus. ‘There’s money in ugly Ralph‘ he would announce, his squashed ear a keepsake of his years playing rugby. Every 45 minutes the lovely 2nd AD Marcia Gay would knock and pop her head around the door – ‘Gentlemen. You won’t be required for the next 45 minutes. Just relax‘. This became alarmingly irritating until one day Brian swivelled his giant head in her direction and asked ‘Is the money the same?‘ Marcia was puzzled. ‘Yes‘ she said. ‘Well Fook Off Then!‘ shouted Brian. Rude and fucking funny. I would work with Brian once more five years later, on John Godber’s rugby sevens comedy Up ‘N’ Under in Cardiff.
Fincher on the camera with Alex Thomson alongside him who had taken over as DP when Jordan Cronenweth was too ill to continue
There were eventually four units running at the same time – 1st Unit with David Fincher directing and another legend Chris Carreras as 1st AD. The eye of any storm, the 1st AD basically runs the set, oversees all of the departments and keeps a keen eye on who is slowing the unit down. The 1st AD is basically making the film. Chris had an amazingly calm temperament but I saw him biting his tongue a couple of times. Years later in 1999 I would contact him and ask him to 1st AD my film New Year’s Day, which he very graciously agreed to do. Without him it wouldn’t have got made. I was going to create a link there to the blog where I talk about the film that I wrote and which actually got made. So scarred am I from this experience that 220 blog posts later I haven’t even started to think about discussing it. Watch this space ! [OK I finally layed down my burden and wrote about the pre-production nightmare of NYD in 1996 in – My Pop Life #226 Exit Music (For A Film) and My Pop Life #227 Paranoid Android]
Paul McGann as Golic
Meanwhile back in Pinewood, the other 3 units which might or might not need actors for any given day were : 2nd Unit with Martin Brierly directing (and Nick Heckstall-Smith assisting, whom I would also work with later), Action Unit doing Alien Stuff and other SFX, and a Fire Unit which set fire to things and put them out while stunt guys ran around with flames on their clothes. We were all required, at one point or another, on all of these units. But there were interminable days when nothing happened. Backgammon became institutionalised, with American actors Chris Fields and particularly Holt McCallany relieving us of our wages on a regular basis with ruthless use of the doubling dice. I soon saw the error of this form of time-wasting, likewise poker and other competitive pursuits.
Paul Brennan, Pete Postlethwaite, Leon Herbert
One day when it was clear once again that nothing was going to happen a group of us decided to wander around the studio lot and see what else was going on. Like a bunch of escaped prisoners escorted by a correction facility officer. That was me. I can’t remember precisely who was in that gang but I think Peter Guinness, Paul Brennan, Clive Mantle and Danny Webb certainly were. Maybe Niall Buggy and Vincenzo Nicoli too. We went into one of the bigger studio buildings (Alien 3 had the majority but some were still available for hire) –
Charles Dutton as Dillon
– and there was a giant pyramid structure with lights on frames around it and people with cloaks wandering about. We’d asked permission to visit of course, and the producers knew who we were, what we were doing there. The band was The K.L.F. and they were shooting a video for their single 3am Eternal which had been at Number 1 in the charts that January. A video it turned out, for the US market. We watched a take with smoke and lights, bleeps and heavy metal guitar chords, acid house beats and rap, capes and cloaks. It was all a bit mental, but terribly exciting. Then they took a break.
We wandered into the next studio through a heavy connecting door. And there was Kylie Minogue, dressed for the Shocked video. We were all introduced and I became suddenly aware of a tiny elfin Australian blonde woman being dwarfed by half a dozen dirty shaven-headed prisoners from outer space. She shook everyone’s hand then gently wandered away and asked one of her people if they could ask us politely to leave. Which we did. Poor love.
Kylie Minogue is Shocked at the power of love in 1991
There’s a curious link here because Bill Drummond, (who with Jimmy Cauty is The K.L.F.) had worked as an A&R man for WEA (now Warners) in London in the mid-80s and had apparently spent half a million pounds on a band called Brilliant who never quite took off. Stock Aitken & Waterman were writers & producers for Brilliant, and Jimmy Cauty was in the band along with Martin Glover aka Youth from Killing Joke. And Stock Aitken & Waterman were now writing and producing for Kylie, along with a vast stable of acts including Donna Summer, Mel & Kim and Jason Donovan. Kylie & Jason had starred together in Aussie soap Neighbours, and to continue the odd waltz between the 2 acts, the K.L.F. had made a single called ‘Kylie Said To Jason‘ which was a hilarious rip-off of ‘Left To My Own Devices‘ by The Pet Shop Boys. Confused Yet ??
Bill Drummond & Jimmy Cauty
I didn’t make any of these connections at the time. I was listening to George Michael, Public Enemy, The Breeders. Catching up with Bob Marley and Miles Davis. Discovering Wagner – again. Looming on the horizon was Massive Attack. The K.L.F. seemed to me a little like The Tubes, one of my favourite bands to be sure, or the Bonzo Dog Band (see My Pop Life #77), formed by musicians who wanted to lampoon the music and the industry and anything else they could gather into their fiendish net. Like “everything was in quotes”. I mean who sang along with the phrase “Ancients of MuMu” without a silly grin on their face?
And of course we were still recovering from the smiley-face rave culture moment from which the K.L.F. appeared to have emerged. In fact they were rather more like a situationist art project that wanted to burn the whole thing down. Anarchists. Their career was inspired partly by the theatre show The Illuminatus Trilogy, written and directed by mad genius Ken Campbell in Liverpool where Bill had been the set designer. He walked out one day to buy a sandwich and never came back. He formed a band called The Justified Ancients of MuMu with Jimmy Cauty and released a single in 1987. After two albums and a legal dispute with ABBA they became The Timelords with a big novelty hit Doctoring The Tardis, and then The JAMS (Justified Ancients of MuMu) with the single What Time Is Love which got re-issued a number of times from 1988 onward, then The K.L.F. Their brilliant warped career peaked a year later in 1992 at the BRIT Awards when Drummond machine-gunned the audience of music industry execs from the stage, and a dead sheep was left at the door of the afterparty with the message “I died for you – bon appetit” attached. A few months later in May 1992 The K.L.F. announced that they had quit the music business and deleted their entire back catalogue. Other stunts followed such as the infamous burning of a million pounds, the Soup Line, the 17 Choir and other innovative ideas. Apparently Bill Drummond lived just down the hill from me when I was in Brighton but I never met him, I don’t think.
Niall Buggy as Eric, Danny Webb as Morse
Back on the Alien3 set a few days later it was Valentine’s Day. I had been sent a card and an AD delivered it to me as we relaxed between shots. It was of course from Jenny my beloved. It lifted my heart. We were not married at that point. And I could swear Sigourney was looking over my shoulder to see who it was from. Hahaha. Fincher was shooting a lot of footage. “I’m doing long pans & tracks so they can’t cut into my footage” he explained one day. He was wrong incidentally. They cut long and deep. But it meant that when we had a group scene we could open a book on how many takes it would be. Anything under five was unpopular. Over twelve was possible, common even. I think we did a tenner per set-up. Someone wrote the names down and the number they’d chosen. Often no one would win because we went up to Take 17 and no one wanted to put ten of your earth pounds on that.
Here’s an idea…
In fact Sigourney and I had one of our scenes discussing telling the company there was an Alien on the planet, and me – playing a fella who wanted to go home to his wife & kids, rather than perish in some millennial cult group suicide, Aaron ’85’ – I suggested a plan. Ripley’s response was tentatively ‘yes maybe‘. We did a couple of wide shots, then into my single. Can’t remember how many takes it was – probably around seven or eight. Then turned round onto Sigourney. David didn’t like her tone, which suggested that Ripley thought Aaron was a dick. He didn’t think that was right at that point in the story. So. One more. Turn over. Sound Speed. Scene 178 take 17. Mark it. And….Action! Blah blah blah. Cut. Same result. He’s not your enemy. Take 22. Don’t sneer. Take 29. You think it’s a good idea. Take 34. By which time we were all so exhausted and dizzy from the repetition that Sigourney said the line in a kind of dazed acquiescence and Fincher had the take he wanted.
About a year later in Los Angeles, after the re-shoots, I had two days of ADR in a West LA studio on Olympic Boulevard. David remembered the scene well, 34 takes. He’d never done ADR before though – Automated Dialogue Replacement – where you can change the inflexion, emphasis, tone, shade and meaning of a line just by using your voice and matching the lip movements on screen in front of you precisely. Sometimes you need to change a name, a word, a group of words. Movie magic. Some actors hate it, I made friends with the process very early on after I had to voice the whole of my performance as Danny in Withnail & I for the US market. The test screenings had indicated that audience members couldn’t understand what he was saying. Who could? I did that job at Twickenham Studios in 1987 where the engineer consoled me having to re-do my entire performance at the same speed except more intelligibly by telling me that Michael Caine had done Alfie and Bob Hoskins had also done The Long Good Friday for America. Entire performances. And yet we were expected to understand Stallone’s mumbles or Pacino’s. Hey that’s what it means to be an outlying part of The Empire right? I can’t remember if I’ve ever seen the US version of Withnail & I but I suspect it would be a bad idea. But having said that the experience toughened me up for future sessions. Especially the Alien 3 session which was two long days. The reason for that was simply the amount of atmospheric smoke and steam in the design of the film which was very noisy to produce. Often back in the day on big movies the Sound Department knew that they were recording a guide track only, to be completed and polished in ADR. So here we were down on W. Olympic and David says – if I’d known about ADR in Pinewood I would never have done 34 takes just for a vocal inflection…
It’s hard to recall now in 2019 how difficult that experience was. Jenny can remember quite clearly how I would come home every day, full of doubt, full of worry and anguish, just because I was trying to do my best work. What a fantastic opportunity for me, but you know I was running fast just to stand still. I remember a visual image I used to produce while trying to explain it to friends, as a learning curve which came from my chest, maybe from my heart, out and up then looped back over my head and down and stabbed me in the back. I wondered if, at some point, whether the fact that we were making a horror film in space meant that we had to have a horrible experience in space. I called Richard E. Grant one day who was shooting Hudson Hawk in Italy – another picnic – and he asked me how much I was getting. I told him. He said
“well – that’s the amount of shit you have to eat then.”
I could almost understand why Bill Drummond had formed The K.L.F.
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