Although Giger is universally renowned as the artist behind the creatures from the Alien franchise, he made his first foray into the film world long before he met director Ridley Scott.
In 1967 Giger met the writer Sergius Golowin and the film maker Fredi Murer and he took part in a film competition, making a documentary about his paintings. In 1968 Murer asked him to make the models for Swiss Made, a short film that was approximately 30 minutes long. It was Giger’s first experience of creating monstrous extra-terrestrial creatures for the motion picture industry.
Giger’s exhibitions in the first half of the 1970s were often accompanied by short documentaries made in collaboration with his friend J.J. Wittmer. For example, take Giger’s Necronomicon from1975, part of which was filmed during a collective exhibition in a gallery that Tobler had recently opened.
Alejandro Jodorowsky was already known in the film world for pictures such as El Topo (1970) andThe Holy Mountain (1973). When he decided to make the first film version of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune, he managed to get big names such as Mick Jagger, Orson Welles and Salvador Dalí on board. The latter showed H.R. Giger’s drawings to Jodorowsky and he was entranced by them. During a meeting in Paris, the director told Giger that he absolutely had to have his “sick art” to portray the Harkonnens, who play a key part in the plot.
Giger designed Giedi Prime, the Harkonnen planet, but Jodorowsky never made the film in the end. The special effects on Dune were supposed to be supervised by Dan O’Bannon, who not long afterwards would write the screenplay for a seminal science fiction film: Alien. Giger and O’Bannon forged a friendship based on their admiration for each other.
In autumn 1977 Giger published Necronomicon, the first real compendium of his works, in numerous languages. He sent a copy to O’Bannon and he in turn showed it to Ridley Scott, who had been attached as the director. There was no doubt in Scott’s mind: the visual designs for the Alien world had to be created by Giger. In February 1978 Giger signed a deal with the film studio 20th Century Fox. He made around 30 airbrushed images, which already showed all of the core features of the different stages in the monster’s development, as well as the planet and alien spaceship sets. The rest is history.
H.R. Giger astonished the entire world with his savage creature, known as the Xenomorph. It set the benchmark for contemporary visuals in both science fiction and horror. In 1980 Giger’s undisputed talent was officially recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, when he won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.
H.R. Giger’s relationship with the film industry continued in the following years, but the projects on which he worked never got off the ground. This was the case with The Tourist for Universal, for which he actually produced 70 designs, as well as The Mirror for 20th Century Fox, and also the adaptation of Michael Ende’s children’s book Momo for Rialto Film.
Giger was involving in the making of Poltergeist II in 1985, although his contribution was limited to around 20 pictures, ideas and tips. The film was a big box office hit, but Giger was never satisfied with it because he did not think that his vision had been brought to life properly.
Even though 1990 began with yet another shelved project – Ridley Scott’s The Train – it was a very fulfilling year for Giger because he worked on Alien III. In the 1990s, he would also work as a designer on the science fiction film Species (1995), which was directed by R. Donaldson and written by D. Feldman. Hans Ruedi designed both an extra-terrestrial beauty and a ghost train.
Giger was a versatile artist who was capable of doing everything from graphic design to illustration and from sculpture to interior design and painting. His influence on the film world reaches far beyond Alien: directors like Cronenberg and Lynch have found endless inspiration in his imaginative, terrifying world, with its dark, menacing, aggressive and disturbing aesthetics.
In an interview in the September 1979 issue of “Starlog” magazine, the Swiss artist gave the following answer to the question “What is H.R. Giger’s future? Will he work on another film?”:
“You know, many people think cinema is a third-class art form. Dalí worked mainly for the theatre, for opera and ballet. He did that dream sequence in Spellbound (1945) for Hitchcock, but little else for cinema. But I don’t think this is so. Cinema is today. We have to change the thinking of these old-fashioned people.”